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<p>Eric -</p>
<p>I really appreciate your careful analysis of the class of error
such "expose's" offer us (starting with the exposer). This one
was reminiscent of the ones Glen often offers us so aptly. <br>
</p>
<p>Frank -</p>
<p>I appreciate your naive question, knowing you have some
sophisticated life experience, analytical skills, and mathematical
grounding. Many of us ask these questions on this channel from
time to time, while others just ask them in the privacy of our
heads, or at most households.</p>
<p>All -</p>
<p>When Frank first offered this article, and more specifically,
asking about the credibility of the author, I took a whack at
sorting out where she was coming from, where she was going (try
humming the Cotton Eye Joe song while asking that question). I
had an immediate reaction to her "actuarial" credentials (and how
loud she wears them on her sleeve). I don't have a rhyme for
actuaries that matches the tired one about Lawyers (pronounced
"Liaars") but an equally tired "Lies, damn lies, and Statistics"
comes to mind. <br>
</p>
<p>Failing to penetrate Tverberg's logic beyond the superficial
rhetorical devices she uses, all I could really achieve was to
interpret the "emotional content" which seemed to be a
superposition of stridency and self-assuredness. It was
reminiscent (and I impute too much I am sure) of the several
conspiracy theorists (to the bone) I've known. They (and their
ascribed sources) all had the same quality of asserting with
absolute confidence things which I may have had my own (contrary)
confidences about. It is fascinating how well confidence can be
entraining, thus the phrase "Con(fidence) (wo)Man". My
ConSpiracy friends are all somewhat lame at propogating their
conspiracies, but often *their* mentors/ConVincers are quite slick
and if I saw/heard them without the forewarning of being
recommended by a loony nutcase, I might well be taken in to some
degree. I probably *am* taken in often (e.g. my preferred
"lamestream media" talking heads, complementary to those on the
Faux News spectrum). <br>
</p>
<p>I use cynicism as a (poor) substitute for proper skepticism. It
reduces false-positives but boosts false-negatives methinks.</p>
<p>- Steve<br>
</p>
<p>... <br>
</p>
<blockquote type="cite"
cite="mid:CAA5dAfoRGY+v57Y5P+wtPcomV7s+qa=_B7ed4fBV=-sQOggkCw@mail.gmail.com">
<meta http-equiv="content-type" content="text/html; charset=UTF-8">
<div dir="auto">Eric,
<div dir="auto"><br>
</div>
<div dir="auto">Thanks very much for this! I was asked about it
by some humanities friends in Pittsburgh who were alarmed.
They thought I was qualified to evaluate her claims. You are
more so. The benefits of Friam are clear.</div>
<div dir="auto"><br>
</div>
<div dir="auto">Tangentially, I was recruited by an
insurance company to be an actuary when I was a grad student
in math based on my GRE scores. The salary promises made me
curious enough to investigate. I was deeply into the theorems
of measure theory, complex analysis, algebra, etc., which I
liked and what I gleaned from a brief investigation of
actuarial science didn't excite me. They urged me to visit
them in Hartford anyway. I'm glad I didn't go.</div>
<div dir="auto"><br>
</div>
<div dir="auto">Again, i appreciate the time you spent on this.</div>
<div dir="auto"><br>
</div>
<div dir="auto">Frank</div>
<div dir="auto"><br>
</div>
<div dir="auto"><br>
</div>
<div dir="auto"><br>
</div>
<div dir="auto"><br>
<br>
<div data-smartmail="gmail_signature" dir="auto">---<br>
Frank C. Wimberly<br>
140 Calle Ojo Feliz, <br>
Santa Fe, NM 87505<br>
<br>
505 670-9918<br>
Santa Fe, NM</div>
</div>
</div>
<br>
<div class="gmail_quote">
<div dir="ltr" class="gmail_attr">On Sun, Aug 8, 2021, 2:26 AM
David Eric Smith <<a href="mailto:desmith@santafe.edu"
moz-do-not-send="true">desmith@santafe.edu</a>> wrote:<br>
</div>
<blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin:0 0 0
.8ex;border-left:1px #ccc solid;padding-left:1ex">
<div style="word-wrap:break-word;line-break:after-white-space">Hi
Frank,
<div><br>
</div>
<div>Only because Marcus responded….</div>
<div><br>
</div>
<div>This article</div>
<div><a
href="https://ourfiniteworld.com/2021/08/05/covid-19-vaccines-dont-really-work-as-hoped/"
target="_blank" rel="noreferrer" moz-do-not-send="true">https://ourfiniteworld.com/2021/08/05/covid-19-vaccines-dont-really-work-as-hoped/</a></div>
<div>Isn’t a good start.</div>
<div><br>
</div>
<div>I didn’t read the whole thing, so I will confine my
remarks to the title and second paragraph, relative to the
reported data.</div>
<div><br>
</div>
<div>74% of people in the P-town outbreak had been
vaccinated. What does that tell us? Very nearly
nothing. This is the like the textbook question given to
any undergrad in statistics. (And remember: “She’s an
actuary!” — be ready to take her word for things.)</div>
<div><br>
</div>
<div>There were, if I remember the number, 60k visitors to
P-town. How many of them were vaccinated? Don’t have
numbers on that. Suppose 99.67% of them were, for the
sake of making a point. 800 cases (rounded out). 600
among the vaccinated. Suppose everyone in P-town was
exposed (also not reported, I have no idea how many
were). At that rate, the number of infections among the
vaccinated would be 1%. Sounds well within the range of a
vaccine that tests as 94% effective against infection. </div>
<div><br>
</div>
<div>Suppose that only the state average of 64% were
vaccinated and everyone was exposed. Then the fraction
infected becomes 1.5%. Since P-town is a destination for
the educated and rich, and known as a gay-friendly place
so probably lefter than Mass as a whole, I would be very
surprised if the vax fraction of the visitors were not
above the state average. Not least because they were
going to a party.</div>
<div><br>
</div>
<div>How many were unvaccinated among the 60k? Again, not
reported, presumably not something one is even allowed to
ask about, and so probably impossible to know with
precision and not easy to estimate. But again to make a
point, suppose the number of unvaccinated was 200 ppl.
Infections among the unvaxsed: 200. Wow! That would be
100% infectivity among the unvaccinated. </div>
<div><br>
</div>
<div>Suppose the fraction actually vaxxed was 50/50 and
everybody was exposed. Well, then, the vaccines were
terrible; increased your chance of being infected by 50%.
But of course that would require that the unvaxsed were
also only catching delta at <2%, which is improbable.
So presumably, if we knew the other numbers, we could
guess at about what fraction of people actually had
exposure.</div>
<div><br>
</div>
<div>But then to use that, we need the correlation between
degree of exposure and vaccination status, and who the
hell knows even what the sign of that number would be?</div>
<div><br>
</div>
<div>MY POINT (sorry to be so ugly all the time): we can
find any interpretation you like, from completely anodyne
to totally absurd, from within feasible ranges of other
variables on which we have little or no information. </div>
<div><br>
</div>
<div>How much drama does any of this warrant?</div>
<div><br>
</div>
<div>Well, we were told that, what, 5 people landed in the
hospital? Out of 60k visitors plus locals. Of whom 3 had
preexisting problem conditions. No reports on whether the
ones with problem conditions were vaxxed. Even in that
tiny sample, we know nothing about correlation information
that would change the direction of its implications
qualitatively, from moving 1 or 2 people between
categories.</div>
<div><br>
</div>
<div>One final thing: those positive cases are outcomes of
tests. I don’t recall seeing anything on how many were
symptomatic. Could be all of them, but in many of these
cohorts that use any contact tracing, it is fewer. That’s
PCR in the nose or throat. </div>
<div><br>
</div>
<div>So really? Is the title “the vaccines don’t work as
believed on the delta variant” warranted?</div>
<div><br>
</div>
<div>Speaking in slightly fuller sentences, what did we
“expect” from experience with vaccines up to now? The
vaccines enable the learning phase of immunity to be done
and stored, so that one may or may not have antibodies in
any given quantity (variable across people and probably
usually degrades with time; six month numbers being given
a a guess at a time frame, with considerable imprecision),
but one does have whatever genetic memory there is to
activate antibody-producing cells quickly. That has been
reported for about 1/2 year in dribs and drabs, and the
variance in the results gives us an idea of roughly how
much uncertainty we should have.</div>
<div><br>
</div>
<div>So virus establishes a beachhead in the nose and
throat, and rather than taking a week and a half to figure
out an immune response, during which time it makes you
much sicker, you knock it out (for most of those who do
get sick) in a few days. All this seems to me well within
the range of things that have been publicly reported.</div>
<div><br>
</div>
<div>Zaynap Tufecki had a nice piece in the NYT a few days
ago, something like CDC should stop confusing the public.
It sounds like a dramatic title, but the content is good
and sensible, and I think she mentioned part of this as
well. Let me look:</div>
<div><a
href="https://www.nytimes.com/2021/08/04/opinion/cdc-covid-guidelines.html"
target="_blank" rel="noreferrer" moz-do-not-send="true">https://www.nytimes.com/2021/08/04/opinion/cdc-covid-guidelines.html</a></div>
<div><br>
</div>
<div>The Crooked guys also did a nice interview with Ashish
Jha from Brown, here:</div>
<div><a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SddFBebSk-c"
target="_blank" rel="noreferrer" moz-do-not-send="true">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SddFBebSk-c</a></div>
<div>where, in addition to being asked interesting questions
and given time to give coherent answers, he was able to
relax a bit and talk as if from thought instead of from
script.</div>
<div><br>
</div>
<div>So it strikes me that, so far, we are getting small
updates to how viral attacks and immunity are relating,
and a little info on distributions. None of it seems very
surprising, and the early estimates are still closer than
we have any right to hope for, given a new disease in the
period of rapid change. The fact that you can get high
PCR titers in the nose of a vaccinated person is useful to
know, perhaps not predicted per se, but not bizarre
either.</div>
<div><br>
</div>
<div>—</div>
<div><br>
</div>
<div>I have thought, throughout the attention to these
topics during the past year and a half, that we swim in
viruses all the time. We catch a cold once every few
years, and suppose that is because our exposure Is
intermittent. But I’ll bet what is going on with the
ambient virosphere looks much more like this business we
are seeing with COVID than we would ever have guessed,
with the important exception that we are all naive to
COVID, and not to all the other stuff. I have wished
there were time and manpower to use this unprecedented
effort at measurement, to revamp our mental pictures and
epidemiological models of how ambient viruses are moving
around. It may be that a lot of this is already known,
and I am just ignorant of it (that would be my first
assumption), but I can’t imagine all this measurement
doesn’t have _something_ of a general nature that we could
learn from.</div>
<div><br>
</div>
<div>Eric</div>
<div><br>
</div>
<div><br>
</div>
<div><br>
</div>
<div><br>
</div>
<div><br>
<div><br>
<blockquote type="cite">
<div>On Aug 8, 2021, at 6:16 AM, Frank Wimberly <<a
href="mailto:wimberly3@gmail.com" target="_blank"
rel="noreferrer" moz-do-not-send="true">wimberly3@gmail.com</a>>
wrote:</div>
<br>
<div>
<div dir="auto">Gail Tverberg: does anyone have an
opinion about her? Based on her career as an
actuary she writes various blog posts and articles
warning of imminent disasters related to Covid,
oil prices, etc. When I search for commentaries
about her I find almost nothing except items that
she has written. She is associated with "Our
Finite World".<br>
<br>
<div data-smartmail="gmail_signature">---<br>
Frank C. Wimberly<br>
140 Calle Ojo Feliz, <br>
Santa Fe, NM 87505<br>
<br>
505 670-9918<br>
Santa Fe, NM</div>
</div>
<br>
<div class="gmail_quote">
<div dir="ltr" class="gmail_attr">On Sat, Aug 7,
2021, 1:28 PM Marcus Daniels <<a
href="mailto:marcus@snoutfarm.com"
target="_blank" rel="noreferrer"
moz-do-not-send="true">marcus@snoutfarm.com</a>>
wrote:<br>
</div>
<blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin:0 0
0 .8ex;border-left:1px #ccc
solid;padding-left:1ex">
<div dir="auto">
No need for victims when there are (pandemic)
volunteers. <br>
<div dir="ltr"><br>
<blockquote type="cite">On Aug 7, 2021, at
11:43 AM, Steve Smith <<a
href="mailto:sasmyth@swcp.com"
rel="noreferrer noreferrer"
target="_blank" moz-do-not-send="true">sasmyth@swcp.com</a>>
wrote:<br>
<br>
</blockquote>
</div>
<blockquote type="cite">
<div dir="ltr"> Marcus -<br>
<blockquote type="cite">
<div>
<p class="MsoNormal">The pushback on
everything from low wattage lighting
to mask mandates leaves me thinking
that there is really only one thing
that motivates certain people: That
they can do whatever the hell they
want and, crucially, that other
people cannot. A living wage
infringes on that ranking and so
must be terrible. What if there
were physical space for everyone,
food for everyone, and many optional
ways to invest one’s time? What if
one didn’t need a wage at all? What
if you had to decide for yourself
what was worth doing? Heck, what if
one (some post-human) didn’t even
need food and didn’t need to
reproduce?</p>
</div>
</blockquote>
<p><br>
</p>
<p>Sounds Utopian... erh... Dystopian...
no... UTOPIAN! Uhm... I just hope
posthumans collectively find the rest of
us boring enough to leave alone and
interesting enough to not need to
extinct us. Homo Neanderthalenses had
a long run (~.4My?) before Homo Sapiens
Sapiens found our way into their
territory and apparently ran over them
with our aggressive adaptivity (over a
period of tens of thousands of years).
I suspect *some* trans/post humans will
also have a somewhat more virulent (or
at least very short time-constant)
adaptivity indistinguishable (to us)
from extermination-class aggression.</p>
<p>I like the fairy tale Spike Jonze wove
on this topic with <a
href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Her_(film)"
rel="noreferrer noreferrer"
target="_blank" moz-do-not-send="true">
HER</a>, and in particular the virtual
<a
href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alan_Watts"
rel="noreferrer noreferrer"
target="_blank" moz-do-not-send="true">
Alan Watts</a> conception. But I
highly doubt we might be so lucky.
More likely some version of "the Borg"
or "Cylons" or "Replicators" or (passive
aggressive) "Humanoids" (minus the
gratuitous anthropomorphism). To us,
it will probably look more like a "grey
goo" scenario. Or perhaps more aptly
hyperspectral rainbow-goo.</p>
<p>At the current rate of
change/acceleration/jerk in technosocial
change I may even live to see the whites
of the eyes of the hypersonic train
headlights I mistook for "light at the
end of the tunnel".</p>
<p>I'm going to go now to get my
telescoping (drywall stilts) runner's
legs fit in place of the organic ones I
grew (and then abused/neglected) over
the past 65 years. I'm holding out
for AR corneal transplants for a few
more months, I think it will be worth
the long wait for the upgraded features
and the new neural lace interface specs.</p>
<p>- Sieve<br>
</p>
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