Charles R. Twardy

I was reviewing this old interview with Australia’s Paul Monk, covering Coronavirus, China, conspiracy theories, reckoning, and risk to Pax Americana, as they looked to him in late April.

If nothing else, listen to him open by quoting Thucydides.

tl;dr Monk reviews key plagues from Athens to now, discusses the situation in April, and assesses three different China-did-it theories, and closes by arguing that the West must reckon with China, and it’s behavior during COV-2 has been a wake-up call.

I’ve had the pleasure to work briefly with Paul on argument mapping and critical thinking, and this is a good example of weighing plausibility and evidence.

It’s probably better to listen or read the interview, but here’s my summary of key points.

Plagues

I’ve summarized Paul’s summary in a table, filling in numbers from Wikipedia or Ancient.edu (example). It seems the Roman plagues are hard to estimate because they lasted so long.

Conspiracy Theories

Monk does a nice job separating and assessing the China theories for the origin of SARS-COV-2. As of April, but it seems a solid assessment.

First, there’s the utterly mad theories: 5G and control chips. The China theories aren’t like that. That’s key.

1. Unrestricted War: deliberate leak. This gains plausibility from the 1997 book Unrestricted War by two Chinese colonels who suggested this possibility. So, it’s a viable theory - and important to note it was sensible for people to draw the connection. So, two avenues of assessment:

   a. Sanity Check: Why would the Party agree, given grave risks? (a) How could they guarantee they could control it in China? (b) How could they be confident the outside world wouldn’t figure out whodunnit and “there would be hell to pay”? (c) To control in China you’d have to shut down the economy. Why? When you’re trying to dominate economically? Okay, so it would be hugely risky.

   b. Evidence: None. [In the meantime we learned a bit more about how sus' they were acting, but Monk was pretty clear on that already. And their actions are pretty likely on the other China theories too. OK, what about biology? A Taiwanese dissident published a paper saying it was a deliberate release … but her claims for that fell apart. Her publishing circumstances were also dodgy. -And as I try to remind people, evidence is a ratio: to count for this theory, it has to be more likely on this theory than on its contenders. -ed]

   c. Meta Evidence: some serious right-wing analysts looked at and dismissed this claim. You’d expect them to jump on it if they could. The intelligence communities in AU, NZ, CA, UK, and US all concluded this looks unlikely. Again, being their key job, you’d expect them to jump on it if they could - at least confidentially. But there’s no evidence in leaks or actions that this is considered remotely plausible.

2. Unintentional Escape A - It came from Wuhan or another lab, but the usual sort of leak. (Hi, I live in Reston. Ebola anyone?) In this variant, the party simply doesn’t know how it got out, takes awhile to figure it out, and when they do realize “Wow, this is serious”, they say so. If the Party had a history of acting responsibly, this might be more plausible. It doesn’t.

3. Unintentional Escape: B - As before, but once it leaks they think, “This looks bad” and conduct a propaganda campaign to suppress & whitewash. Evidence: they’re definitely conducting a propaganda campaign, including failed attempts to bully Australia and the rest of the WHO into not investigating.

Reckoning

Yes trading with China helped them prosper. Yes, that was good for us too. Yes, it’s middle class grew, and wanted more liberty. No, the Communist Party did not become more tractable. There was a glimmer of hope, and it was quashed.

Monk says it’s time to get consensus of Western & African countries, and tell China, “This cannot work. It can’t work for us and because it can’t work for us, you’re going to realize it cannot work for you. …there’s no other choice."

Risk of Nationalism

1918 and WWI led to the Great Depression, which ushered in reactionary politics around the world: Germany, Japan, Italy, El Salvador. We’re seeing signs now, and that threatens the Pax American that made possible “the greatest expansion in average human wellbeing across the planet … over the last [30-70] years ever in history.” To the extent that other countries follow China to say “Our interests are paramount … then we’re back in the 1930s.”

Silver Linings

Paul thinks people have become more reflective, and the pandemic has highlighted the need for global solutions and clear thinking. I suspect it’s just Paul.

He has a nice analogy to The Martian though.

A touching, real conversation on faith, death, grief, culture wars, the Christmas season, comparative immigration, and briefly, Thatcher on climate. Underneath, kinship.

api.substack.com

I’m not a fan of the XKCD “free speech” strip. I think it fails the reflexivity test. Lazy screenshot here.

On the other hand, Munroe usually does his homework. Is there a clearer discussion?

Another great piece at Fantastic Anachronism: Are Experts Real.

I hadn’t heard about N=59. 😱

…if the N=59 crew are making such ridiculous errors in their own papers, they obviously don’t have the ability to judge other people’s…

In Slack and Zoom were distracting…, John Lacy notes:

• We found that asynchronous communication methods, such as Slack and email, were being treated as synchronous communication methods. …we had created an always-on distraction…
• We found that remote work led to more meetings, not fewer.

The set new rules:

• Async means same-day or next-morning.
• Need faster? Text. [Or, y’know, phone. Remember phones? -ed]
• Block out Maker hours. They used 150-min in AM, and 90-min in PM.

Sitting at a desk all day, it’s easy to start feeling like a brainless polyp

Walking as as superpower.. HTT the ReadUp community.

Richard Hanania:

A remarkably high percentage of bad economic takes can be attributed to people being unable to realize the world is not zero-sum.

In a discussion with @Somensi about excess deaths, I was puzzled by an apparent discrepancy between two sources that have both been reliable, insofar as I can tell:

• The covidtracking.com weekly data on cases, hospitalizations, and covid-attributed deaths.
• The laggy but solid CDC excess deaths counts/estimates.

Puzzle: December Covid vs Excess Deaths

The basic question from mid-December was how to reconcile this and this:

With this:

(Screenshots are from mid-Dec.)

In short, by early December it was clear that covidtracking.com had started diverging wildly from the CDC excess death counts. Two basic theories:

• covid-tracking was correct - CDC counts would catch up in a month or so.
• covid-tracking was wrong - this was an attribution blip.

There’s a lot of noise on the thread, but @Somensi, who I don’t know, was also looking at data, and citing a good source. Doomsters like me have been using CDC excess data since April as evidence that the pandemic was real and could not be simple relabeling of flu deaths. Here the same source is cited to say the December spike couldn’t be real.

People on both sides who knew the CDC data understood it had a lag of 4 weeks or so – because it relies on actual death certificates completing all their procedural checks and getting filed. In 2016 it took 10 weeks for 80% of certificates to get filed. CDC now claims it gets to 60% in ~10 days. (There are plenty of people who don’t get the lag – it seems even to have tripped up JHU’s Dr. Briand, at least in her headline claim that there were no excess deaths in 2020.)

Problem: covidtracking is the most thoroughly-vetted weekly data source in the US. They’ve tracked the CDC excess deaths (after lag) the rest of the year. And reliably, their cases –predict–> hospitalizations 4 weeks later –predict–> deaths a few weeks later. The December death spike followed that pattern. Plausibly, CDC was just lagging.

Problem: CDC 4 weeks back should be pretty good, and it looked nothing like April. As my correspondent said, CDC data “would have to be lagging by an unprecedented amount."

Resolved

It’s obvious once you see it.

That death spike (swoop?) at the end is super fast. If you hover over the attributed deaths chart from covid-tracking, you find that the Nov. 14 cases are exactly in line with their July numbers, about half their April numbers. And in line with the mid-Nov. CDC numbers. The steep rise is mostly in the last 4 weeks.

Corroboration

As of Dec. 23, we can look at how the CDC data has changed. Data should be pretty complete through Nov. 21. We see that Nov. 14 is now about 1,000 higher than before (and than the July peak), and Nov. 21 about 2,000 higher than that.

Not a swoop yet, but basically on par with the covidtracking chart week-for-week. Here that is again from today, highlighting Nov. 21. (The bold line is the 7-day moving average, a far better comparison than the daily total.)

Forecast

We should definitely expect the CDC excess deaths count for December to reach April levels.

Concentrate

An essay by Grand Master Jonathan Rowan, courtesy of Readup.

But, most of all, I miss the experience of concentration.

“next to of course god america i

love you land of the pilgrims’ and so forth oh

say can you see by the dawn’s early my

country ’tis of centuries come and go

and are no more. what of it we should worry

in every language even deafanddumb

thy sons acclaim your glorious name by gorry

by jingo by gee by gosh by gum

why talk of beauty what could be more beaut-

iful than these heroic happy dead

who rushed like lions to the roaring slaughter

they did not stop to think they died instead

then shall the voice of liberty be mute?”

He spoke. And drank rapidly a glass of water

e.e. cummings – Next to of course god america i | Genius

HTT Tipsy Teetotaler via @ReaderJohn for reminding me of this gem.

Sounds like a fun blog, just shouldn’t be masquerading as a journal.

retractionwatch.com/2020/12/1…

Instead of saying, “I’m a woman and I reject gender roles,” NB ideology says, in effect, “I reject gender roles and therefore I’m not a woman.”

Not my area of expertise, but a fascinating reflection. If sex is only psychological, then “woman" contracts to the 1950s stereotype, and “lesbian” is defined out of existence. Backfire.

Excellent discussion between Sullivan and Yglesias.

Had to grit my teeth through some of Yglesias’ verbal ticks early to mid, but good points throughout. Perhaps esp arguing the counter productive nature of not acknowledging progress on women’s/gay/black rights, or later the dangers of a cult of woke (taking for granted the dangers of the cult of trump).

api.substack.com

Our July paper Are replication rates the same across academic fields? Community forecasts from the DARPA SCORE programme was briefly cited at the end of a recent unpublished manuscript by Tosh et al, including Gelman. We’re source 13:

5.3 Implications for social science research

As noted at the beginning of this article, there has been a crisis in psychology, economics, and other areas of social science, with prominent findings and apparently strong effects that do not appear in attempted replications by outside research groups (e.g., [24, 2, 13]).

Always happy for the shout out, but our paper [13] doesn’t do replications. It just shows what our forecasters generally expected in upcoming replications, and that before looking at the actual study candidates. About 60 of those replications have happened, but have to wait for the Center for Open Science to announce them. In the meantime, Anna Dreber Almenberg has reached out to Gelman’s team.

The unpublished “Gelman” manuscript is:

The piranha problem: Large effects swimming in a small pond by C Tosh, P Greengard, B Goodrich, A Gelman, D Hsu. Abstract:

In some scientific fields, it is common to have certain variables of interest that are of particular importance and for which there are many studies indicating a relationship with a different explanatory variable. In such cases, particularly those where no relationships are known among explanatory variables, it is worth asking under what conditions it is possible for all such claimed effects to exist simultaneously. This paper addresses this question with formal theorems that show, unless the explanatory variables also have sizable effects on each other, it is impossible to have many such large effects.

Phil Tetlock (and no doubt others) have noted informally that something like this must hold.

I look forward to reading this piece on my new Remarkable tablet.

…is so desperate they solicit my “unpublished rhetoric” for the next issue.

I would like to Extol your elegant paper with Title …. It shows your potential and tenacity towards writing intrinsic paper.

Journal welcome Acumen like you to have your unpublished rhetoric and valuable paper on any related topic in …[long list of computer topics including “Debugs”]

Oh,

Glad to receive articles of atleast 1 or 2 pages on the topic of corona.

Because what we really need now is more computer scientists writing about the novel coronavirus.

The errors surpass Google Translate. Is this the Nigerian Prince scam but for academics, where the errors are deliberately left in place to select the audience?

Optimizing Pandas

A clear and compelling example of vectorizing pandas code for 1700x speedup.

Recent climate thread by the always wonderful @KHayhoe, responding to the usual. Good videos too.

threadreaderapp.com/thread/10…

xkcd.com/808/ “Eventually, arguing that thesee things work means arguing that modern capitalism isn’t that ruthlessly profit-focused.”

Reductio… but not for health care. There’s plenty of obvious cost reduction they avoid because profits vary with costs. Misalignment.

I’m not sure “reblog” is a thin in µ.blog, but:

social.ayjay.org/2020/11/0…

Recommendation for Breaking Bread with the Dead.

Ten Thousand xkcd.com/1053/

That said, watching the US President have dozens of these moments as he tried to come up to speed was not the kind of exciting I enjoy.

Sometimes in the evening, I return to do some work. But it’s late and hard to focus. I begin to #concentrate, and discover I have tried to read the internet.

🖊🗓#mbnov

Base Rates

www.smbc-comics.com/comic/ris…

HTT @rplzzz

🗓🖋#mbnov

‘’Once upon a planet dreary / Came a rocket engine cheery / On a flight to test a theory / On Mars’s frigid desert floor!

‘’Did life arise spontaneous / Or … / Seed the globe that now contains us? / Quoth the Lander, ‘Either-or.’ ‘’

~John A. Carroll 1977

This got my attention both because of its current echoes and because he’s right - I’ve forgotten it:

In this “moral panic” of thirty years ago, social workers and, later, prosecutors elicited from children horrific tales of Satan-worship, sexual abuse, and murder — and then, when anyone expressed skepticism, cried “We believe the children!” But every single one of the stories was false. … Moreover — and this is the point that I can’t stop thinking about — *the entire episode has been erased from our cultural memory. *

It pairs well with If Then, his reflection on reading the book of the same name.

When we, day by day and hour by hour, turn a direhose of distortion and misinformation directly into our own faces, we lose the ability to make measured judgments. We lash out against those we perceive to be our enemies and celebrate with an equally unreasonable passion those we deem to be our allies. … But there is another and still simpler problem with our presentism: we have no idea whether we have been through anything like what we are currently going through.

At this point he references his earlier post.

But only then does he begin to engage with If Then, where he points out that the current hope, hype, and fear of algorithms and technorati started 50 years ago with the Simulmatics corporation.

Which we’ve also forgotten.