[FRIAM] lockdowns

Thu Apr 8 01:32:33 EDT 2021

Now we're talking! Other Eric's #4 is the good one to chew on!

The main points/questions are:

   - The job of a *public* health official requires that they not aim their
   comments at really smart people (who will probably make good decisions
   anyway), and instead they must aim their comments at normal schlubs.
   - Would they be justified in saying something patently untrue if that
   will create a net benefit? (For example, if keeping masks available to
   healthcare workers would decrease the spread more than having 10% of the
   population hoard masks, are you justified in publicly stating that people
   won't benefit from buying masks?)
   - If we all agree that the best option is a super-short hyper-accurate
   message, but there isn't time or wits sufficient for that, does it make
   sense to go with a message that is mostly-right and it's short?

I disagree with...

   - the assertion that most (or all) broad strokes will cause harm in this
   particular case (but it is a point I normally agree with). In the starting
   point for this particular case, we know normal human behavior will be
   extremely harmful, and any broad statement we make will be pulling back
   from there. So it is likely that many broad statements by health officials
   were neutral or beneficial (at least regarding pandemic spread).

In relation to talking in broad strokes, I insist that it is possible to
make the points much more honestly, and thereby assuage guilt over saying
them. You could even do so and still make your statements short. But per
the middle point above: Being more honest might well lead to less effective
outcomes.

I would add to one point that complicates all the conclusions we want to
draw from our imagined analyses:

   - When all is said and done, we will have no good data regarding how
   citizen behavior affected infection or death rates. That would have
   required direct behavioral observation. What we will have in abundance data
   on how infection and death rates changed (or didn't change) when various
   things were said.

On Wed, Apr 7, 2021 at 7:14 PM David Eric Smith <desmith at santafe.edu> wrote:

> Attached to no particular entry in this thread, some tiny points that I
> think help clean up around edges of things others have said.
>
> 1. Dave’s point on CA and FL.  I saw a news writeup of the same study he
> mentions.  One of the commenters to that writeup wanted to emphasize that,
> while De Santis was performing for political points with the fascists, and
> more generally just grifting, the city and sometimes local governments were
> trying to impose measures to protect people.  So the actual policies
> somehow wound up as the outcome of a tug-of-war of those two levels of
> action, modulated by personal habits that have considerable variation
> within the population, probably sorted to some degree by districts, and
> likely moreso by age or health brackets.  At the same time, you have the
> Central Valley and Orange County in CA, which would fit comfortably in
> Texas re. people’s attitudes toward rejecting any “public” expectations
> just on principle.  So it is probably true that for climate and population
> density, CA and FL are good to compare.  It could be that, in a full
> analysis of net guidance and adherence to it, the behaviors may have been
> less dissimilar than they look in media reports.  A good analysis of
> cost/benefit of lockdowns must, I guess, come from a regression on the
> suite of what actually happened.  I agree, a good thing to do.
>
> 2. I got a very strong sense of political bullshit from Anders Tegnell
> when I saw his public statement that “There is no reason to issue public
> dicta to Swedes; they are community-minded people who will limit their
> exposure when they get sick.”  about a month after the first reports had
> come out that as much as 47% of cases were asymptomatic, and as much as 74%
> of transmissions were going through the asymptomatic or pre-symptomatic.
> Those numbers were not firm at the time, though the early estimates turned
> out to be surprisingly close for fist estimates of a difficult observable.
> But there was enough at the time for precaution to be sensible.  His manner
> in those statements thus struck me as very willfully disingenuous.  That
> one anectote of course is not nearly enough for an evaluation of a whole
> policy.  I am less optimistic about Sweden now, though, than I would have
> been 10 years ago, from yearly exposure there to the things Swedes are
> actively worried about in the direction of their country (though caveat; my
> sample is academics and their social cousins).  There have been horrendous
> malpractice scandals in the Karolinska institute involving people who have
> influence on public policy, and the almost neo-nazi right wing, while still
> small, is no longer fully fringe.  Money for schools is being more and more
> localized to the tax base, so the rich kommuns like Danderyd really lock in
> intergenerational advantage, while the sparser areas and immigrant-heavy
> districts like Kista get de-supported.  So the forces that are at work in
> the rest of Europe and are hypertrophied in the US are a stress there too.
> It is not hard for me to believe there is some badly-oriented decision
> making, though the full analysis probably is complex and, again, worth
> doing carefully.
>
> 3. Dave’s objection to Nick’s comparison of ND and CT is the point Dave
> put in and Nick didn’t mention, though I expect was aware of.  Background
> population density is at opposite poles in the two.  One expects that
> somehow lockdowns are more harmful and less helpful in low-density
> populations; I wonder to what extent that can be boiled down to policy
> guides.  It looks hard to do with the kind of care that is needed to give
> good guides, and therefore likely to be slow in coming.  It’s a bit like
> NASA missions.  One does very-current science, and gets frustrated with the
> engineers, who are always using things that are at least 15 years old.  But
> trying to get as close as possible to total reliability in extremely
> complicated projects is just slow.
>
> 4. But a thing I find strange, for this list, is what feels like kind of a
> lack of a reflex toward empathy with the actual position the public-health
> officials are in, as humans responsible for doing a certain job.  Most of
> the honest ones are doctors, who have sworn some oath to first do no harm,
> and probably mean that.  If you are a public person, you could say “Well,
> Dave W and Jon Z are smart guys who can do a lot of analysis, so I won’t
> recommend much and they’ll probably come up with good behavioral guidelines
> for themselves.  I just need to make sure they have good information about
> presymptomatic transmission.”  But you don’t get to limit your audience to
> Dave W and Jon Z.  Your audience is the whole country.  Any small poor
> choice of wording can trigger one or another person for some random reason
> to do something self-harmful or other-harmful (swallowing fish-tank cleaner
> would be a gratuitous anecdote).  It’s like the gotcha hazard of speaking
> as a politician, only about things that actually matter.  How do you ever
> say _anything_ under the pressure of that kind of consequence?  I feel like
> that is the decision they live under every day.  If 10% of people buying up
> all the PPE will put our hospital staff at grave risk, do we try to issue
> some statement extreme and categorical enough to get the number of hoarders
> below 10%?  If we say anything with more than 10 words, the ADHD contingent
> will have already lost us.  How many of them are there?  Some people (I
> live with one) have a kind of contempt for egg-heads who make analytical
> arguments; every Real Person knows that Emotion is the motivator you should
> try for, as artists understand.  And how cool that all these actors and
> athletes are using social media to try to do good.  How many are there for
> whom that is the Frame of Reality?
>
> You could say “Well, the only responsible thing for a Good Man would be to
> refuse to go into public service, since broad statements will always be
> harmful and should not be made by anyone.”  But by not taking up such nasty
> choices yourself, do you then contribute to reducing harm or to taking
> care?  The world will go on and do things, with or without your
> engagement.  As I listen to these public health people, I of course
> modulate what I take from them in view of things I think I understand, but
> I am hesitant to blame them for saying things that I would not choose if
> those were only to be tailor-made for me.  And of course, there is much
> they know that I don’t know, and sometimes my modulations are wrong.
>
> I understand that Dave W’s criticisms are higher-dimensional than my
> sketch above.  I think he would say that, far from a few circumspect people
> and lots of people who randomly do foolish, rash, selfish, or otherwise
> detrimental things, most people (especially the rural people) are
> sophisticated and circumspect.  And the public person should balance public
> statements against total risk aversion for the most foolish, to preserve
> trust among the body of the well-intended as well.  I’m not sure I have a
> high a view of the average American as Dave does, but I don’t want to paint
> a straw-man of his position in saying this.  Whatever choice is hard if you
> are being most risk-averse just gets much harder if you are trying to
> balance trust-building with the more thoughtful against hazard reduction
> among the more thoughtless.
>
> Hmm.  Longer than I intended.
>
> Eric
>
>
> On Apr 7, 2021, at 11:24 PM, Eric Charles <eric.phillip.charles at gmail.com>
> wrote:
>
> We will be at least a few years post-mass-vaccination before we will be
> able to really get a handle on what worked and what didn't. As long as
> there are more waves yet to come, we cannot possibly draw firm conclusions
> about which strategies worked and which didn't.
>
> However, tentative evaluations still have value. In that veign, a decent
> New Yorker article just dropped looking at Sweden's response:
> https://www.newyorker.com/news/dispatch/swedens-pandemic-experiment
> <https://www.newyorker.com/news/dispatch/swedens-pandemic-experiment>
> <echarles at american.edu>
>
> One thing that stands out to me in the beginning of the New Yorker article
> is Sweden's early rhetoric arguing that any measures they take be based on
> *evidence*. To the extent that really played into their response, that is
> a *terrible *strategy if you find yourself in the midst of a pandemic.
> This seems like a solid William James Will-To-Believe issue; the choice of
> how to respond was live, unavoidable, and momentous. Doing nothing wasn't
> neutrally "waiting for evidence", it was taking a clear side, and to
> pretend otherwise couldn't be anything other than disingenuous political
> rhetoric.
>
> I have consistently been a fan of Sweden's response as
> a-viable-hypothesis-to-test. It WAS reasonable to hypothesize that a race
> to mass immunity would - over the long haul - result in a better outcome
> for the nation. And, as covered well towards the end of the New Yorker
> piece, it is not clear Sweden screwed up (compared with *averages *of
> countries that chose various stricter lockdowns). If you had pressed the
> pause button at certain points over the last year, it seemed like Sweden
> was horribly wrong (e.g., mid-April). If you had pressed the pause button
> at other points, it seemed like Sweden had achieved its goal (mid-July to
> mid-October averaged only 2 or 3 deaths per day). Until things run their
> course, and we have* a lot* of time to look at the data, we won't know
> for sure. And also, even then, we need to remember that
> when-a-vaccine-would-arrive-and-how-good-it-would-be was an unknown, which
> made any decision to bank on a quick vaccine a big gamble.
>
>
>
>
> On Tue, Apr 6, 2021 at 11:55 PM <thompnickson2 at gmail.com> wrote:
>
>> Hi, Dave,
>>
>> Am I allowed to answer the same email twice?  Well, I guess we'll see.
>>
>> I cannot imagine states more different than north Dakota and
>> Connecticut.  Ct is 48th in size, 4th in density, and was next to two of
>> the early hot spots.  North Dakota is 17th in size, and 49th in density and
>> was late to the party.  ND is first in total cases per population, CT is
>> 24th.  You're trolling me, right?  Omigosh.  I've been pranked.
>>
>> Still, I want to know -- NOT a rhetorical question -- why you WANT to
>> believe that public health measures don't work.
>>
>> Nick
>>
>>
>>
>>
>> Nick Thompson
>> ThompNickSon2 at gmail.com
>> https://wordpress.clarku.edu/nthompson/
>> <https://linkprotect.cudasvc.com/url?a=https%3a%2f%2fwordpress.clarku.edu%2fnthompson%2f&c=E,1,uuAo89xMrZTsW7Fb7rJSmYvQ3tTA571okoXmZcUPnRKGCMjZJRl-sDj8OgYFOW555rM5sCpewXv4iG_oJYXn_QsdeOZBiO2p48gL7Q6C_xrCmqW_&typo=1>
>>
>> -----Original Message-----
>> From: Friam <friam-bounces at redfish.com> On Behalf Of J Dalessandro
>> Sent: Tuesday, April 6, 2021 8:24 PM
>> To: The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group <friam at redfish.com
>> >
>> Subject: Re: [FRIAM] lockdowns
>>
>> Sorry, but my experience in Australia was/is much different.  Lock down
>> and serious penalties greatly reduced community transmitted cases.  Early
>> intervention and penalties was key.
>>
>> //Joe
>>
>>
>> ---
>> j03d at photonmail.com
>>
>>
>> ‐‐‐‐‐‐‐ Original Message ‐‐‐‐‐‐‐
>> On Tuesday, March 16, 2021 8:56 AM, Prof David West <profwest at fastmail.fm>
>> wrote:
>>
>> > the AP published a study that seems to demonstrate lock downs had no
>> effect on Corona spread. South Dakota and Connecticut (small states) had
>> very similar outcomes despite widely variant degree of lock down. So too
>> Florida and California, the latter draconian while the former laissez-faire.
>> >
>> > Of course all the usual caveats applicable to such studies apply.
>> >
>> > I wonder if any country/state would dare to do an honest cost-benefit
>> study?
>> >
>> > davew
>> >
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