(some of this is linked in the previous “summaries of research” post)
https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/why-its-so-freaking-hard-to-make-a-good-covid-19-model/
Testing tracking: https://covidtracking.com/data/
Economic tradeoffs: https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/what-should-the-government-spend-to-save-a-life/
https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2020/03/26/us/coronavirus-testing-states.html
In the morning of 4/1:
– The FiveThirtyEight article Lib posted on why it’s so hard to model C-19 is really fantastic (although probably not of practical interest). They’ve been doing some good journalism in their science and health section, including weekly surveys of infectious disease experts to try to get a sense of the C-19 outlook.
– NYT data journalism is continuing to kick ass, with a good piece from 3/26 on how each state is doing on per-capita testing (covidtracking is also trying to track tests per state), along with their various updating charts like their daily tracker of C-19 deaths per state and country. I wish they had a centralized table of contents of their C-19 datavis work.
– A few updates and better organization for my bookmarks, and I’m starting to stick stuff I read that I think is good on my blog; that’ll probably be a lot more stuff than my bookmarks.
In the afternoon:
– I’ve been trying to get some sense of what the tradeoff in human wellbeing is for different C-19 strategies. Here’s a starting place, at least: if we treat a human life as worth about 10 million dollars (which is the standard figure researchers arrive at in terms of eg what we’re willing to pay for a safer car, or the premium that dangerous jobs command) we in the US should be willing to spend about 20 trillion dollars on this (if that gets us from a bad outcome of 2 million US deaths to a “good” outcome of about 100k deaths). It’s not clear what the cost of our planned response is on top of the $2 trillion we’ve officially spent (you have to take into account the uncertain effects of economic slowdown, failed businesses, lost jobs etc), but at least one analysis (which I haven’t yet read) suggests that we still come out comfortably ahead using the strategy we’re using. Hoping to try to read that paper at some point, but fivethirtyeight does a good job taking at least a basic look at it. Obviously it’s uncomfortable to think about tradeoffs between human life and money, but in practice we’re all doing it all the time even if we don’t talk about it…
– I found a source for better info on how we’re doing on tests (StatNews). tl;dr: we’re theoretically now in a position to do 100k tests per day (we’ve only done a total of 160k to date, so I’m a bit skeptical that we’re at that capacity in practice). That may be enough? “A recent report from the American Enterprise Institute co-authored by former FDA Commissioner Scott Gottlieb puts the number of tests needed at 750,000 tests per week.” But there must be a ton of assumptions built into that number, and StatNews doesn’t seem to feel too clear on whether we’ll have enough. I’d still like to find comparable info for ventilators and masks/PPE.
Over the past two decades, as conservatives and liberals have drifted ever farther from each other, an influential body of literature has attempted to psychologize the partisan divide — to identify conservative and liberal personality types, right-wing or left-wing minds or brains, and to vindicate the claim of the noted political scientists Gilbert and Sullivan, That every boy and every gal / That’s born into the world alive. / Is either a little Liberal / Or else a little Conservative.
In its crudest form this literature just amounts to liberal self-congratulation, with survey questions and regression analyses deployed to “prove” with “science” that liberals are broad-minded freethinkers and conservatives are cramped authoritarians. But there have been more sophisticated and sympathetic efforts, too, like the influential work of New York University’s Jonathan Haidt on the “moral foundations” of politics: Haidt argues that conservatives actually have more diverse moral intuitions than liberals, encompassing categories like purity and loyalty as well as care and fairness, and that the right-wing mind therefore sometimes understands the left-wing mind better than vice versa.
Both the crude and sophisticated efforts tended to agree, though, that the supposed conservative mind is more attuned to external threat and internal contamination, more inclined to support authority and hierarchy, and fear subversion and dissent. And so the political responses to the pandemic have put these psychological theories to a very interesting test.
Source: Opinion | The Coronavirus and the Conservative Mind – The New York Times
I’m planning to start using this as a repository of interesting stuff I read re: the COVID-19 crisis, basically just so I can keep track of it (I’ve also got some curated bookmarks, but that’s only really important stuff; this is more general. I may go back and delete it all once this is all over; we’ll see.
A floating parade dedicated to painter Hieronymus Bosch (previously) honors the artist’s fascination with the fantastical and absurd in an annual event that embodies his philosophy and aesthetic. The 2019 occurrence of the Bosch Parade included a musical performance played on a partially submerged piano…
Meredith Patterson 😍
Sadly, though, [a particular article by another author] still falls short of truly bridging the conceptual gap between nerds and “weird nerds.” Speaking as a lifelong member of the weird-nerd contingent, it’s truly surreal that this distinction exists at all. I’m slightly older than Nate Silver and about a decade younger than Paul Graham, so it wouldn’t surprise me if either or both find it just as puzzling. There was no cultural concept of cool nerds, or even not-cool-but-not-that-weird nerds, when we were growing up, or even when we were entering the workforce.
That’s no longer true. My younger colleague @puellavulnerata observes that for a long time, there were only weird nerds, but when our traditional pursuits (programming, electrical engineering, computer games, &c) became a route to career stability, nerdiness and its surface-level signifiers got culturally co-opted by trend-chasers who jumped on the style but never picked up on the underlying substance that differentiates weird nerds from the culture that still shuns them. That doesn’t make them “fake geeks,” boy, girl, or otherwise — you can adopt geek interests without taking on the entire weird-nerd package — but it’s still an important distinction. Indeed, the notion of “cool nerds” serves to erase the very existence of weird nerds, to the extent that many people who aren’t weird nerds themselves only seem to remember we exist when we commit some faux pas by their standards.
[…]
Don’t get me wrong, I’m thrilled to bits that every day the power to translate pure thought into actions that ripple across the world merely by the virtue of being phrased correctly draws nearer and nearer to the hands of every person alive. I’m even more delighted that every day more and more people, some very similar to me and others very different, join the chorus of Those Who Speak With Machines. But I fear for my people, the “weird nerds,” and I think I have good reason to. Brain-computer interfaces are coming, and what will happen to the weird nerds when we can no longer disguise our weirdness with silence?
I think they’re being overoptimistic in imagining that this is a Trump-only problem rather than the new business as usual, but overall they do a good job laying out the danger of current campaign techniques.
The Billion-Dollar Disinformation Campaign to Reelect the President
The world is awash in bullshit. Politicians are unconstrained by facts. Science is conducted by press release. Higher education rewards bullshit over analytic thought. Startup culture elevates bullshit to high art. Advertisers wink conspiratorially and invite us to join them in seeing through all the bullshit — and take advantage of our lowered guard to bombard us with bullshit of the second order. The majority of administrative activity, whether in private business or the public sphere, seems to be little more than a sophisticated exercise in the combinatorial reassembly of bullshit.
We’re sick of it. It’s time to do something, and as educators, one constructive thing we know how to do is to teach people. So, the aim of this course is to help students navigate the bullshit-rich modern environment by identifying bullshit, seeing through it, and combating it with effective analysis and argument.
https://callingbullshit.org/
This is entirely fascinating, and a direct refutation of the argument that without unhappiness and suffering we wouldn’t experience true happiness. I wish for everyone to have the kind of experience that she has, and hopefully someday self-modification will get us there.
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2020/01/13/a-world-without-pain
We like to think that what doesn’t kill us makes us stronger, or more resilient, or . . . something. Deeper. Wiser. Enlarged. There is “glory in our sufferings,” the Bible promises. “Suffering produces perseverance; perseverance, character; and character, hope.” In this equation, no pain is too great to be good. “The darker the night, the brighter the stars,” Dostoyevsky wrote. “The deeper the grief, the closer is God!” We atheists get in on the action by insisting that the agony of loss elucidates the worth of love. The hours spent staring into the dark, looping around our own personal grand prix of anxieties, are not a waste of time but a fundamental expression of our humanity. And so on. To be a person is to suffer.
But what if our worst feelings are just vestigial garbage? Hypervigilance and pricking fear were useful when survival depended on evading lions; they are not particularly productive when the predators are Alzheimer’s and cancer. Other excruciating feelings, like consuming sadness and aching regret, may never have had a function in the evolutionary sense. But religion, art, literature, and Oprah have convinced us that they are valuable—the bitter kick that enhances life’s intermittent sweetness. Pain is what makes joy, gratitude, mercy, hilarity, and empathy so precious. Unless it isn’t.
…
Because of a combination of genetic quirks, Cameron’s negative emotional range is limited to the kinds of bearable suffering one sees in a Nora Ephron movie. If someone tells Cameron a sad story, she cries—“easily! Oh, I’m such a softie.” When she reads about the latest transgression by Boris Johnson or Donald Trump, she feels righteous indignation. “But then you just go to a protest march, don’t you? And that’s all you can do.” When something bad happens, Cameron’s brain immediately searches for a way to ameliorate the situation, but it does not dwell on unhappiness. She inadvertently follows the creed of the Stoics (and of every twelve-step recovery program): Accept the things you cannot change.
