[FRIAM] off-label technologies, exaptatiion and exponential technological growth.

Sun Aug 8 09:32:37 EDT 2021

Eric,

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.

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.

Again, i appreciate the time you spent on this.

Frank

---
Frank C. Wimberly
140 Calle Ojo Feliz,
Santa Fe, NM 87505

505 670-9918
Santa Fe, NM

On Sun, Aug 8, 2021, 2:26 AM David Eric Smith <desmith at santafe.edu> wrote:

> Hi Frank,
>
> Only because Marcus responded….
>
> This article
>
> https://ourfiniteworld.com/2021/08/05/covid-19-vaccines-dont-really-work-as-hoped/
> Isn’t a good start.
>
> I didn’t read the whole thing, so I will confine my remarks to the title
> and second paragraph, relative to the reported data.
>
> 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.)
>
> 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.
>
> 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.
>
> 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.
>
> 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.
>
> 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?
>
> 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.
>
> How much drama does any of this warrant?
>
> 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.
>
> 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.
>
> So really?  Is the title “the vaccines don’t work as believed on the delta
> variant” warranted?
>
> 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.
>
> 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.
>
> 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:
> https://www.nytimes.com/2021/08/04/opinion/cdc-covid-guidelines.html
>
> The Crooked guys also did a nice interview with Ashish Jha from Brown,
> here:
> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SddFBebSk-c
> 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.
>
> 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.
>
> —
>
> 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.
>
> Eric
>
>
>
>
>
>
> On Aug 8, 2021, at 6:16 AM, Frank Wimberly <wimberly3 at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> 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".
>
> ---
> Frank C. Wimberly
> 140 Calle Ojo Feliz,
> Santa Fe, NM 87505
>
> 505 670-9918
> Santa Fe, NM
>
> On Sat, Aug 7, 2021, 1:28 PM Marcus Daniels <marcus at snoutfarm.com> wrote:
>
>> No need for victims when there are (pandemic) volunteers.
>>
>> On Aug 7, 2021, at 11:43 AM, Steve Smith <sasmyth at swcp.com> wrote:
>>
>>  Marcus -
>>
>> 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?
>>
>>
>> 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.
>>
>> I like the fairy tale Spike Jonze wove on this topic with HER
>> <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Her_(film)>, and in particular the
>> virtual Alan Watts <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alan_Watts>
>> 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.
>>
>> 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".
>>
>> 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.
>>
>> - Sieve
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