[FRIAM] the end of the pandemic

Mon May 11 17:44:46 EDT 2020

Let’s compare the consequences of different leadership styles:

   https://www.economy.com/south-korea/unemployment-rate

   https://www.economy.com/united-states/unemployment-rate

From: Friam <friam-bounces at redfish.com> on behalf of David Eric Smith <desmith at santafe.edu>
Reply-To: The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group <friam at redfish.com>
Date: Monday, May 11, 2020 at 2:31 PM
To: The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group <friam at redfish.com>
Subject: Re: [FRIAM] the end of the pandemic

Replying to the Snoke post, and only to a specific part of it:

Why bother to put a bunch of text into refuting logical fallacies in screeds that were never about deduction in the first place?

Here is the republican version.

BOASTING:  We have dismembered the government!
FEINED OUTRAGE:  The government doesn’t do anything useful for us!
ERGO:  Dismember the government!

As Marcus rightly said: don’t analyze; execute plans against these individuals.

The logical fallacy below?  (Apart from the one Marcus already pointed out, that to compare a 3-month 1-cause death rate after mitigation to yearly all-cause, as the argument for no mitigation, is obvious bullshit that doesn’t even try to hide.). There was an article in the Atlantic sometime recently, that the 50-100 million dead from the Spanish flu left a significant mark within some parts of culture but the lives of a great many people.  That was before fast transportation.

Whether a shutdown of a couple of months induces the collapse of an economy is not an inevitability, which the below pretends it is, but rather an outcome of quite clear choices.  Choices in what the economy was before, and choices of what you do during the quick transient period.  If you shut down quick and hard, backstop the _relations_ that keep people employed, implement test and trace and public health accepting that this will be a noticeable fraction of GDP going forward, and build new protocols understanding that work will not “go back” but will require a new compensating context, then this becomes a sharp and expensive setback.  But the high-cost and high-latency steps of matching people to jobs on vast scale is not paid, because you don’t throw all that away.  Likewise you choose a public redistribution over having debt crises in hundreds of millions of private contracts, all open to extortion because the debtors are alone and unorganized, etc.

It wasn’t the market drop of 1929 that caused the depression.  The 1-day drop in 1987 was larger, I believe I one knew and now think I recall.  It was how the economy had been structured before, plus the non-responses or poor responses of the Hoover administration, that turned a financial hitch into the entry to a decadal depression.

I was going to write a post a few days ago about how economists love to borrow metaphors from biology.  This would be a good time to look at the abstraction of group selection, and maybe help it along a little.  Countries that weren’t too sick at the beginning, and made a competent effort in the response, will have a few months sharp setback to deal with, and a year or more of considerable but not fatal costs.  They should have months of head start in building back some degree of function, ahead of the countries that are working toward a depression and can be in this situation for a year or more (supposing there is a vaccine that soon).  Maybe much longer than that if they create an economic collapse that is self-perpetuating even after public-health remedies become technically available.

NZ and Australia are looking at 2-country air travel if they think they can sanitize it enough.  Air travel, to the extent that it resumes, should be added one-country-at-a-time to a club of those who can implement and follow a public health protocol that the current members accept, which includes keeping the case numbers of eligible travelers sufficiently low.  Countries that are too corrupt or too incompetent to be admitted should be shut out.  They wanted to be pariahs; help ensure that they are pariahs.  It’s called sanctions.  Leverage the advantage countries can gain from having chosen to do the right thing, as an investment in keeping their ideas alive and allowing better ideas to recolonize the wreckage of the places that burned themselves out.

It’s not just generalities and international steps either.  There are specific things that one can look for ways to do.  I am on a different list with a lot of farmers, and local agriculture is under demand it has not seen ever in modern times, while the centralized western/southern-states meatpackers both can’t get people to work, and have no infrastructure for storage and distribution to make emergency workarounds.  So the players who used to be in coercive power are wobbly enough that we should try to tip them over.  Instead of using public money to bail out a system that worked poorly before and can’t work at all now — and that will be a bad waste of public money because it is not built out correctly — we can look for opportunities both individual and political to try to get organized support into relocalizing ag.  The farmers are on board and eager to go.  One briefly could get the public’s attention, because they aren’t doing much else.  That alone is not enough, but when the power was entrenched and well-defended, we didn’t even have this much.

I am not against Snokes's complaints that the predators are using this as a distraction to steal more.  That seems correct and urgent.  There is no reason it could not be mated to a more rounded picture of the other part.  Probably he writes that way because he is trying to get a single local decision made _now_, in a context that he doesn’t have a way to change.  But I wish he would accept so much language from a framing that is inherently false.

Eric

On May 12, 2020, at 3:07 AM, Frank Wimberly <wimberly3 at gmail.com<mailto:wimberly3 at gmail.com>> wrote:

My high school best friend Jim Snoke posted this on Facebook.  He is also an anthropologist, like Dave.  He says he finished his dissertation at UC Davis but his defense never happened because his major adviser moved to another university.  (?). He has gotten involved in a major way with Native American causes and got about 40,000 signatures on a petition to save Chaco National Monument from fracking damage.  He still lives in CA so he asked me to deliver it to the Governor's Office personally.  I tried but they didn't really want that much paper.  They said to tell him to email a digital file with the signatures.  They took it seriously.

Compare the arguments of the two anthropologists:

The death rate in the United States, without considering the Covid-19 outbreak – and decades before it was even a twinkle in the eyes of America – stood at roughly 8.7 per 1000 people per year.  That translates into a death rate of 0.0087.  There are roughly 330 million people in the United States this year, and that translates into the following figure:  2,871,000.  Two million, eight hundred and seventy-one thousand people die EVERY YEAR IN THE UNITED STATES of “natural” and “unnatural “ causes.  Keep that figure in mind when those in power, and those in the media, scare the shit out of people with their dire “predictions” about the rising infection and death rates.  At the present time, our already fragile economy is going to be ruined beyond all recovery – quite likely forever – and the draconian measures to “fight the virus” will have succeeded in destroying the lives of almost half of our total population in the name of a “pandemic” that is taking less than a tenth of 1 percent of the population.  My point is that NO ONE in the United States goes berserk over the FACT that 2,871,000 people die – in this country alone – every year.  We don’t forfeit our economy and our way of life over these equally-tragic deaths.  But let it be an epidemic, and we DO forfeit our economy and our way of life – and the “epidemic” will NEVER, NEVER, NEVER reach the truly-epidemic proportions that constitute the NATURAL and UNNATURAL, ONGOING DEATH RATE IN THE UNITED STATES.  OMG!!! 270,000 people have died from the pandemic !!!!!  Yes, it is horrible – but what about the 2,871,000 people that die every year regardless of the pandemic???  10 times the death rate of the “pandemic” -- every single, Goddamned year.  Where is the outrage??  Where is the concern??  Are we actually so scared shitless that we are willing to lose our ENTIRE ECONOMY, OUR JOBS, OUR INCOMES???  Has anybody thought this through??  We have flunked, outright, many many tests as a population over the past 100 years.  Those of you who insist on arguing that:  “THIS IS DIFFERENT – IT IS AN INFECTIOUS DISEASE THAT WE HAD NO CONTROL OVER, AND IT MIGHT HAVE KILLED US” need to keep in mind that although there are now more than 30,000,000 unemployed – and soon to be upwards of 50,000,000 – someone stands to gain from all this.  Trump is using the distraction of the pandemic to go after fracking leases in our National Parks, large businesses are profiting from the “bailout” by looting the U.S. Treasury, Shell Oil and others are cutting down the rainforest in Brazil at a rate that is 50% higher this year than ever before, and capitalism in general is nailing the coffin shut on control of the World’s economies.  Once again, we humans are failing the test, and this time the “F” we get will be "F"orever.
---
Frank C. Wimberly
140 Calle Ojo Feliz,
Santa Fe, NM 87505

505 670-9918
Santa Fe, NM

On Mon, May 11, 2020, 11:45 AM <thompnickson2 at gmail.com<mailto:thompnickson2 at gmail.com>> wrote:
Gary,

FOOD before FRIAM!  Definitely.  But if you do bet back before noon Mountain, sign on; we are often still going at it, even that late.

Nick

Nicholas Thompson
Emeritus Professor of Ethology and Psychology
Clark University
ThompNickSon2 at gmail.com<mailto:ThompNickSon2 at gmail.com>
https://wordpress.clarku.edu/nthompson/

From: Friam <friam-bounces at redfish.com<mailto:friam-bounces at redfish.com>> On Behalf Of Gary Schiltz
Sent: Monday, May 11, 2020 11:13 AM
To: The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group <friam at redfish.com<mailto:friam at redfish.com>>
Subject: Re: [FRIAM] the end of the pandemic

I definitely will try to make it to some FRIAM Zooms. Unfortunately, Friday is the one day a week I am permitted to go out on the roads with my car here in Ecuador due to the pandemic pandemonium, and I have to drive to get to the only supermarket that is open within 50 miles, and it closes at 1:00 pm.

On Mon, May 11, 2020 at 11:51 AM <thompnickson2 at gmail.com<mailto:thompnickson2 at gmail.com>> wrote:
Gary,

If you join the FRIAM ZOOM … perhaps come a bit late … you will get a chance to meet Glen.  NOTHIN’ he says ain’t for nothin’.  It starts at 9 am Mountain; you should get an invite automatically, sometime thursday.  If not, let me know.

Nick

Nicholas Thompson
Emeritus Professor of Ethology and Psychology
Clark University
ThompNickSon2 at gmail.com<mailto:ThompNickSon2 at gmail.com>
https://wordpress.clarku.edu/nthompson/

From: Friam <friam-bounces at redfish.com<mailto:friam-bounces at redfish.com>> On Behalf Of Gary Schiltz
Sent: Monday, May 11, 2020 10:09 AM
To: The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group <friam at redfish.com<mailto:friam at redfish.com>>
Subject: Re: [FRIAM] the end of the pandemic

I'm supposed to be a geek, but I don't understand "Tempus Dictum's Discord" - sounds like some mathematical proof from the ancient Greeks. Google search shows a company called Tempus Dictum, and there appears to be some software called Discord, either or both of which may or may not be associated with Glen and reminders. I feel so behind times and technologically challenged. :-).  Channeling Nick, I supposer. [no offense intended, Nick]

On Mon, May 11, 2020 at 10:28 AM uǝlƃ ☣ <gepropella at gmail.com<mailto:gepropella at gmail.com>> wrote:
Among the many reasons email is obsolete is the ability of other tools to "pin" a post so that it's easily found later on. In principle, the Mailman list page could do this. But it's comparatively awkward. Piling more into the footer can play the same role, but since few posters clean up their posts (e.g. deleting the repeated footer), such piling makes sifting through contributions awkward, as well.

Anyway, I'd like to "pin" this post somewhere. I think it's fantastic to make such explicit predictions, similar to those experiment sites where you have to submit your design for review, then conduct the experiment, then submit your results:

https://blogs.plos.org/everyone/2020/04/06/filling-in-the-scientific-record-the-importance-of-negative-and-null-results/

And it follows nicely with the (painfully slow) admission that knowledge comes through failure, not success: https://blogs.plos.org/everyone/2020/04/06/filling-in-the-scientific-record-the-importance-of-negative-and-null-results/

For now, I'll simply install a reminder in Tempus Dictum's Discord to come back and look at Dave's prediction in late June.

On 5/11/20 7:42 AM, Prof David West wrote:
> The COVID-19 pandemic will end, at least in the US, by mid-June, 2020.
>
> This assertion is premised on making a distinction between the biological and the perceptual.
>
> The virus is not going away, a vaccine may or may not be found and made widely available, and treatments that reduce severity and death rate may or may not be soon at hand. Hot spots will continue to flare. Model-based prognostications will be confirmed.  And none of this will matter.
>
> A radical shift in perception from "we're all going to die" to "I have next to zero chance of severe illness or death" is reaching a tipping point and a catastrophic (mathematical sense of the word) change from one to the other is imminent.
>
> "Science" will quickly confirm (justify / rationalize) this shift  — after all, my individual risk is 150,000 / 300,000,000 or "pretty damned small."
>
> Politicians will quickly cave to this new perceptual reality and socio-economic restrictions will collapse.
>
> The percentage of the population that wear masks (just one example of a behavioral phenomenon) will roughly equal the number that fastidiously fasten their seat belts; but this and similar behaviors will mitigate the the infection/death rate.
>
> Covid will be PERCEIVED to be no worse than the flu, the death rate will become "acceptable," and the current media "hysteria" will fade away.
>
> There will be a segment of the populace — mostly the affluent elderly and individuals who have acquired money/influence/notoriety the past few months — who will argue against these changes but their objections will be quickly countered with, "why should I suffer all kinds of consequences — ones you do not share — to cater to your fears or your ego?"
>
> None of the above should be interpreted as anything except a simple observation / prediction.

--
☣ uǝlƃ

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