[FRIAM] off-label technologies, exaptatiion and exponential technological growth.
Steve Smith
sasmyth at swcp.com
Sun Aug 8 10:28:20 EDT 2021
Eric -
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.
Frank -
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.
All -
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.
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).
I use cynicism as a (poor) substitute for proper skepticism. It reduces
false-positives but boosts false-negatives methinks.
- Steve
...
> 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
> <mailto: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/
> <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
> <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
> <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
>> <mailto: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
>> <mailto: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
>>> <mailto: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
>>>
>>> - .... . -..-. . -. -.. -..-. .. ... -..-. .... . .-. .
>>> FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv
>>> Zoom Fridays 9:30a-12p Mtn GMT-6 bit.ly/virtualfriam
>>> <https://linkprotect.cudasvc.com/url?a=http%3a%2f%2fbit.ly%2fvirtualfriam&c=E,1,ToX9SHL_B1Ax8AfT6DsuRDrH1GeA3821EoHrJDVxgsrKpUyNiuUv0WVOJqCZ-U4wflyTf-g7UdCZb7l7yM5hBHx0lTJD1fG_Wq6B_k3vFpy8Jw,,&typo=1>
>>> un/subscribe
>>> http://redfish.com/mailman/listinfo/friam_redfish.com
>>> <https://linkprotect.cudasvc.com/url?a=http%3a%2f%2fredfish.com%2fmailman%2flistinfo%2ffriam_redfish.com&c=E,1,0BDfdnUIr69GQTWqjHdPTRPgDXNJ9daZqONk6gU5WLyx3rGtZ9_NA7Yu91odYRJnCM66Fh_AyRPOVW1lPgRpgCXBd7GBqyVLWnouCBFM&typo=1>
>>> FRIAM-COMIC http://friam-comic.blogspot.com/
>>> <https://linkprotect.cudasvc.com/url?a=http%3a%2f%2ffriam-comic.blogspot.com%2f&c=E,1,hZAtZ-SOsCEsB5OOSrCfWKhtzkc1rItlal1EH668JK84oGXr8J1p0tquCt-uYhvQb3C4Ne57gwScJrtLp_uOO-bwpXcx4JSE6yL6YLz5&typo=1>
>>> archives: http://friam.471366.n2.nabble.com/
>>> <http://friam.471366.n2.nabble.com/>
>> - .... . -..-. . -. -.. -..-. .. ... -..-. .... . .-. .
>> FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv
>> Zoom Fridays 9:30a-12p Mtn GMT-6 bit.ly/virtualfriam
>> <https://linkprotect.cudasvc.com/url?a=http%3a%2f%2fbit.ly%2fvirtualfriam&c=E,1,M1rKUWWDn5gTdqF_hDnTW3p9JfyzZwmmMeg5qbU9GmjJbEpkmMlgAG80ywQlLKRL-DBPbau9Tf32yRJxvLSud_2-bo_TYEI8KgnOd3bFyR0I&typo=1>
>> un/subscribe
>> http://redfish.com/mailman/listinfo/friam_redfish.com
>> <https://linkprotect.cudasvc.com/url?a=http%3a%2f%2fredfish.com%2fmailman%2flistinfo%2ffriam_redfish.com&c=E,1,-fb-DH50jElEQU7kuALRVNTE58o-LZswpSoVG6U3AY3G8sOGQAz1vUmNbVMUx0Ss4cF5N-Jm366iOkDupQTuJBMeLNvED3dsGkSRB14F6EJM3VNpMBno1gyT56U,&typo=1>
>> FRIAM-COMIC http://friam-comic.blogspot.com/
>> <https://linkprotect.cudasvc.com/url?a=http%3a%2f%2ffriam-comic.blogspot.com%2f&c=E,1,_tpgwFNH5aZH9tqHKPmxgJJ0cL3oKCTAStfkBcbTLJxnVgUIz-JZ_EmDAdP1AOHjYvnmrWumoSqWNwzTfb_4vqO3WWviRr2kEOJMP8Ypi7R-wbi0PiH80kmz&typo=1>
>> archives: http://friam.471366.n2.nabble.com/
>> <http://friam.471366.n2.nabble.com/>
>>
>> - .... . -..-. . -. -.. -..-. .. ... -..-. .... . .-. .
>> FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv
>> Zoom Fridays 9:30a-12p Mtn GMT-6 bit.ly/virtualfriam
>> <http://bit.ly/virtualfriam>
>> un/subscribe
>> https://linkprotect.cudasvc.com/url?a=http%3a%2f%2fredfish.com%2fmailman%2flistinfo%2ffriam_redfish.com&c=E,1,6nqVZWGHP0j-TMe4XMD9O2nHcxuEfXM-PuQP9ch6llP2SpjT6tGWx6gKTeCZL1nVUY0O8vPztWZXtHjY9ESUjqtCSsWPosMim81TSwSR32sk7fe4&typo=1
>> <https://linkprotect.cudasvc.com/url?a=http%3a%2f%2fredfish.com%2fmailman%2flistinfo%2ffriam_redfish.com&c=E,1,6nqVZWGHP0j-TMe4XMD9O2nHcxuEfXM-PuQP9ch6llP2SpjT6tGWx6gKTeCZL1nVUY0O8vPztWZXtHjY9ESUjqtCSsWPosMim81TSwSR32sk7fe4&typo=1>
>> FRIAM-COMIC
>> https://linkprotect.cudasvc.com/url?a=http%3a%2f%2ffriam-comic.blogspot.com%2f&c=E,1,ros1hCGo0SjFEDu2q1m-xqJtruPoFAzubnUl_1K-8CbgHRIxF7zqWElWmThueDiZrmkIgtemPDzn5ulAIMEsfJsAM7MGkTFFfVilIRPjkYEFUMc,&typo=1
>> <https://linkprotect.cudasvc.com/url?a=http%3a%2f%2ffriam-comic.blogspot.com%2f&c=E,1,ros1hCGo0SjFEDu2q1m-xqJtruPoFAzubnUl_1K-8CbgHRIxF7zqWElWmThueDiZrmkIgtemPDzn5ulAIMEsfJsAM7MGkTFFfVilIRPjkYEFUMc,&typo=1>
>> archives: http://friam.471366.n2.nabble.com/
>> <http://friam.471366.n2.nabble.com/>
>
> - .... . -..-. . -. -.. -..-. .. ... -..-. .... . .-. .
> FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv
> Zoom Fridays 9:30a-12p Mtn GMT-6 bit.ly/virtualfriam
> <http://bit.ly/virtualfriam>
> un/subscribe http://redfish.com/mailman/listinfo/friam_redfish.com
> <http://redfish.com/mailman/listinfo/friam_redfish.com>
> FRIAM-COMIC http://friam-comic.blogspot.com/
> <http://friam-comic.blogspot.com/>
> archives: http://friam.471366.n2.nabble.com/
> <http://friam.471366.n2.nabble.com/>
>
>
> - .... . -..-. . -. -.. -..-. .. ... -..-. .... . .-. .
> FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv
> Zoom Fridays 9:30a-12p Mtn GMT-6 bit.ly/virtualfriam
> un/subscribe http://redfish.com/mailman/listinfo/friam_redfish.com
> FRIAM-COMIC http://friam-comic.blogspot.com/
> archives: http://friam.471366.n2.nabble.com/
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://redfish.com/pipermail/friam_redfish.com/attachments/20210808/7f7dfedf/attachment.html>
More information about the Friam
mailing list