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

Tue Aug 10 19:43:23 EDT 2021

I am sure it is just dieseling at this point, but I was pleased to see the following article:
https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2021/08/10/us/covid-breakthrough-infections-vaccines.html <https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2021/08/10/us/covid-breakthrough-infections-vaccines.html>
(I usually get to these things late; y’all probably have read it already)

In reading the first table, on hospitalization and death fractions by vax/unvax, I was thinking “okay, now since we have vaccinated fractions by date, we could do a covariance plot, and of course could then do more involved multiple regressions on dummy variables as we could find them.”  (No pun meant on “dummy variable”, though I am unable to miss it myself.  Things like measures of hospital performance, coverage of masking rules or other public health measures, population density and gathering density, etc.  Some of these to be proxies for fraction exposed, which is hard to get at.)

But then that is just where the article goes.  It’s funny how a pair made of a careful writer and a lazy reader can be an unhelpful combination.  The text leading to the second table says "people who were not fully vaccinated were hospitalized with Covid-19 at least five times more often than fully vaccinated people, according to the analysis, and they died at least eight times more often.”  I remember the nice passage in John Paulos’s book “Innumeracy”, where (to make some point, which I now forget), he comments on why a sign over the highway “Entering New York, Population at least 6” is not particularly informative, though quite true.

Look then at the distribution of multipliers in the table.  For the “at least five times” column, the first six entries, alphabetically, are 75x, 17x, 47x, 68x, 22, 148x, 161x, and likewise for the “eight times” column. Ahh, if the American Public would only tolerate being shown a histogram giving the whole distribution at a glance….  Of course, if I were not lazy, I could find and download the data and make my own histogram.

But, credit to those authors.  Within the bounds of what is permitted to them, this is a useful data digest.

Eric

> On Aug 8, 2021, at 10:32 PM, Frank Wimberly <wimberly3 at gmail.com> wrote:
> 
> 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://linkprotect.cudasvc.com/url?a=https%3a%2f%2fourfiniteworld.com%2f2021%2f08%2f05%2fcovid-19-vaccines-dont-really-work-as-hoped%2f&c=E,1,PFWQCC2T8jYI-mHBLyeBP_i-WNReHBWNoy9tKr28x0BcEWDm162UkTG3O4nzCkIL9Leag2ib0iZck0UQvN9v86sW4_0xLs4vmbNe9eBNe5HDPjmTZA,,&typo=1>
> 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.
>>> 
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