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lockdowns

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Prof David West

lockdowns

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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gepr

Re: lockdowns

Both Bhattacharya and Ioannidis have been vocal in opposing lockdowns, even to the extent of lobbying for herd immunity. That they *confirmed* their political biases is not news. It would be interesting to see if they preregistered their hypotheses and analysis methods.

On 3/15/21 2:56 PM, Prof David West 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?

--
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thompnickson2

Re: lockdowns

Dave, and all,

One of the central ideas of the original (French, 19 century) positivism is the idea that some phenomena (like crime) are very stable at the aggregate level, even though high unpredictable at the individual level. (i.e., we are much better at predicting how many murders there will be in Paris this year than we are at predicting who will murder whom.) (I say this with all the confidence of an Old Fart who is losing his memory but not his confidence in his memory.) Now, I have been trying to work out a theory concerning the relation between lockdowns and fear based on my assumption that the statistical relation between fear and transmission is precise, but the relation between lockdowns and transmission and lockdowns and fear is wooly. I am assuming that there is a delayed feedback relation between fear and transmission such that when transmission is down, fear goes down and then transmission rises and then fear rises, resulting in the wild oscillations characteristic of delayed feedback systems. Ok, so let's start with the assumption that if we were able to abstract this delayed feedback cycle from the data, would there be any variance left to attribute to lockdowns and other forms of public policy. I am not entirely sure what the effect of lockdowns is on fear. I can imagine that lockdowns actually reduce fear in some people. Seeing that others are careful, I am a little less careful, etc. But I can also imagine that lockdowns increase compliance is some other people, whose social anxiety is stronger than their viral anxiety. Could these two effects more or less cancel one another out? Or could their effect be to enhance the oscillation in the basic delayed feedback system, since public policy has characteristically been a follower, not a leader, of fear.

But Dave, as often, I detect in you a desire that lockdowns be nugatory. What is the basis for that desire?

Nick

Nick Thompson

[hidden email]

https://wordpress.clarku.edu/nthompson/

-----Original Message-----
From: Friam <[hidden email]> On Behalf Of u?l? ???
Sent: Monday, March 15, 2021 4:19 PM
To: [hidden email]
Subject: Re: [FRIAM] lockdowns

On 3/15/21 2:56 PM, Prof David West wrote:

> 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?

↙↙↙ uǝlƃ

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Gillian Densmore

Re: lockdowns

via Warner Archive on GIPHY

On Tue, Apr 6, 2021 at 12:55 PM <[hidden email]> wrote:

Dave, and all,

One of the central ideas of the original (French, 19 century) positivism is the idea that some phenomena (like crime) are very stable at the aggregate level, even though high unpredictable at the individual level. (i.e., we are much better at predicting how many murders there will be in Paris this year than we are at predicting who will murder whom.) (I say this with all the confidence of an Old Fart who is losing his memory but not his confidence in his memory.) Now, I have been trying to work out a theory concerning the relation between lockdowns and fear based on my assumption that the statistical relation between fear and transmission is precise, but the relation between lockdowns and transmission and lockdowns and fear is wooly. I am assuming that there is a delayed feedback relation between fear and transmission such that when transmission is down, fear goes down and then transmission rises and then fear rises, resulting in the wild oscillations characteristic of delayed feedback systems. Ok, so let's start with the assumption that if we were able to abstract this delayed feedback cycle from the data, would there be any variance left to attribute to lockdowns and other forms of public policy. I am not entirely sure what the effect of lockdowns is on fear. I can imagine that lockdowns actually reduce fear in some people. Seeing that others are careful, I am a little less careful, etc. But I can also imagine that lockdowns increase compliance is some other people, whose social anxiety is stronger than their viral anxiety. Could these two effects more or less cancel one another out? Or could their effect be to enhance the oscillation in the basic delayed feedback system, since public policy has characteristically been a follower, not a leader, of fear.

But Dave, as often, I detect in you a desire that lockdowns be nugatory. What is the basis for that desire?

Nick

Nick Thompson
[hidden email]
https://wordpress.clarku.edu/nthompson/

-----Original Message-----
From: Friam <[hidden email]> On Behalf Of u?l? ???
Sent: Monday, March 15, 2021 4:19 PM
To: [hidden email]
Subject: Re: [FRIAM] lockdowns

Both Bhattacharya and Ioannidis have been vocal in opposing lockdowns, even to the extent of lobbying for herd immunity. That they *confirmed* their political biases is not news. It would be interesting to see if they preregistered their hypotheses and analysis methods.

On 3/15/21 2:56 PM, Prof David West 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?

--
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J Dalessandro

Re: lockdowns

In reply to this post by Prof David West

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

---
[hidden email]

‐‐‐‐‐‐‐ Original Message ‐‐‐‐‐‐‐
On Tuesday, March 16, 2021 8:56 AM, Prof David West <[hidden email]> 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
>
> - .... . -..-. . -. -.. -..-. .. ... -..-. .... . .-. .
> 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/
>

thompnickson2

Re: lockdowns

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
[hidden email]
https://wordpress.clarku.edu/nthompson/

-----Original Message-----
From: Friam <[hidden email]> On Behalf Of J Dalessandro
Sent: Tuesday, April 6, 2021 8:24 PM
To: The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group <[hidden email]>
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

---
[hidden email]

‐‐‐‐‐‐‐ Original Message ‐‐‐‐‐‐‐
On Tuesday, March 16, 2021 8:56 AM, Prof David West <[hidden email]> wrote:

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Eric Charles-2

Re: lockdowns

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

[hidden email]

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 <[hidden email]> 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
[hidden email]
https://wordpress.clarku.edu/nthompson/

-----Original Message-----
From: Friam <[hidden email]> On Behalf Of J Dalessandro
Sent: Tuesday, April 6, 2021 8:24 PM
To: The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group <[hidden email]>
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

---
[hidden email]

‐‐‐‐‐‐‐ Original Message ‐‐‐‐‐‐‐
On Tuesday, March 16, 2021 8:56 AM, Prof David West <[hidden email]> 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
>
> - .... . -..-. . -. -.. -..-. .. ... -..-. .... . .-. .
> FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv
> Zoom Fridays 9:30a-12p Mtn GMT-6 bit.ly/virtualfriam
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> FRIAM-COMIC http://friam-comic.blogspot.com/
> archives: http://friam.471366.n2.nabble.com/
>

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Steve Smith

Re: lockdowns

EricC, et al-

I really appreciate your elaborate analysis of this (general) phenomenon. I suspect this last year, the myriad governmental (and NGO) responses around the world will provide a *wealth* of data for Forensic Epidmiologists.

Not picking on DaveW particularly, I found it incredibly specious this year every time someone (probably including myself) made an ad-hoc comparison between an apple, a pear, and an orangatan and tried to draw some specific conclusion from it. It always felt like clutching for confirmation bias, maybe most painfully when I caught myself doing it.

Like your own perspective on Sweden's response, I *wanted* to believe that a lightly populated, very socially coherent, somewhat geographically isolated could modulate R0 through distributed, personal decision-making with top-down/centralized "advice" and "reporting". So I cherry picked from samples and perspectives that *appeared to be working* while the naysayers were gleefully doing the same thing in an opposite sense. I *want* (still) to believe that

I would claim the same for RedState BlueState players in the very same game. I *wanted* to believe that Sturgis was the stupidest thing anyone could do (from a public-health perspective) and that the whole state of South Dakota (and near environs) would collapse into a Zombie Apocalypse within a few weeks, and then as any strong-positive correlations came up, I jumped up and down and shouted "See, See, See!" (in my own head while shaking my tiny fist at my Large and Tiny Screens). Same for a million other examples (various COVID-denying/downplaying/overplaying examples with various positive/negative feedback samples).

NickT -

I appreciate your calling this out as "why do you *want* to believe X?". I can't remember what the questionaire was that some of us took to yield this SnarkChart, but I think there is a correlation. I actually think this is the wrong basis space (axes) but the Authoritarian/Anarchist axis seems relevant. I don't know what Left/Right imply here (Collective vs Individual Good?).

On 4/7/21 8:24 AM, Eric Charles 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

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 <[hidden email]> 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
[hidden email]
https://wordpress.clarku.edu/nthompson/

-----Original Message-----
From: Friam <[hidden email]> On Behalf Of J Dalessandro
Sent: Tuesday, April 6, 2021 8:24 PM
To: The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group <[hidden email]>
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

---
[hidden email]

‐‐‐‐‐‐‐ Original Message ‐‐‐‐‐‐‐
On Tuesday, March 16, 2021 8:56 AM, Prof David West <[hidden email]> 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
>
> - .... . -..-. . -. -.. -..-. .. ... -..-. .... . .-. .
> FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv
> Zoom Fridays 9:30a-12p Mtn GMT-6 bit.ly/virtualfriam
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> FRIAM-COMIC http://friam-comic.blogspot.com/
> archives: http://friam.471366.n2.nabble.com/
>

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Prof David West

Re: lockdowns

In reply to this post by thompnickson2

Nick,

First and and with strong emphasis: I do NOT "want to believe that public health measures don't work." Never said so, never implied so.

The public health measures, and in particular the lock downs, taken in response to COVID were guesswork — informed guesses perhaps, but still guesses. The rhetoric to the contrary — "we will do what the science tells us" — were nonsense if the utterers actually believed what they were saying, and intentional — "for your own good" — falsehoods if not.

Which brings us to the "fear" issue you raised. The only way, so the politicians seem to believe, to mobilize the masses to do something that they would not normally want to do is to terrorize them.

I am completely skeptical that any "scientific" public health measures will result from this pandemic. Too much political CYA, too little real data for real scientists to work with, too many variables.

Perhaps, my personal actions are the foundation for your assertion about my public health beliefs. I did the best job I could to determine my personal risk in my personal context and based my actions accordingly. I took into account what the "experts had to say," but critically and with, what counts for me, some common sense.

I was not trolling or pranking you; merely repeating a study reported in the mainstream media. Glen suggested that the authors of that study were biased to the conclusions because they had argued against lock downs before. May be true, I don't know. Whether they "controlled" for the variables you noted and whether or not what they had to say was accurate at a particular point in time but not later. Don't know.

Why did you pick CN and ND and ignore CA and FL?

davew

[BTW: If you are 49th in population density, why do you need hard lock downs? it would seem that social distancing is a given in some very real sense. Maybe all those bikers at Sturgis went home via ND and dropped the virus off on the way and that is why they were late to the party.]

On Tue, Apr 6, 2021, at 9:48 PM, [hidden email] 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

> [hidden email]

> https://wordpress.clarku.edu/nthompson/

> -----Original Message-----

> From: Friam <[hidden email]> On Behalf Of J Dalessandro

> Sent: Tuesday, April 6, 2021 8:24 PM

> To: The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group <[hidden email]>

> 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

> ---

> [hidden email]

> ‐‐‐‐‐‐‐ Original Message ‐‐‐‐‐‐‐

> On Tuesday, March 16, 2021 8:56 AM, Prof David West

> <[hidden email]> 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

> >

> > - .... . -..-. . -. -.. -..-. .. ... -..-. .... . .-. .

> > 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/

> >

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Marcus G. Daniels

Re: lockdowns

There was Redfield’s claim on CNN that the U.S. got hit hard because Americans are fat (as well as stupid). That actually has the ring of truth.

From: Friam <[hidden email]> On Behalf Of Prof David West
Sent: Wednesday, April 7, 2021 11:13 AM
To: [hidden email]
Subject: Re: [FRIAM] lockdowns

Nick,

First and and with strong emphasis: I do NOT "want to believe that public health measures don't work." Never said so, never implied so.

Which brings us to the "fear" issue you raised. The only way, so the politicians seem to believe, to mobilize the masses to do something that they would not normally want to do is to terrorize them.

Why did you pick CN and ND and ignore CA and FL?

davew

On Tue, Apr 6, 2021, at 9:48 PM, [hidden email] 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

> [hidden email]

> https://wordpress.clarku.edu/nthompson/

> -----Original Message-----

> From: Friam <[hidden email]> On Behalf Of J Dalessandro

> Sent: Tuesday, April 6, 2021 8:24 PM

> To: The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group <[hidden email]>

> 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

> ---

> [hidden email]

> ‐‐‐‐‐‐‐ Original Message ‐‐‐‐‐‐‐

> On Tuesday, March 16, 2021 8:56 AM, Prof David West

> <[hidden email]> wrote:

> >

> > 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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> >

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thompnickson2

Re: lockdowns

In reply to this post by Steve Smith

Steve,

Please don’t over interpret. I was not calling anybody out. I was asking a question. I “want” it to be the case that concerted community action can be effective and that “law” plays a role is such actions. I surmise that others “want” something else to be true, but I don’t know what that is. It’s a feeling I get from many members of this list, Dave, EricC, Glen, Marcus, even your honored self. Notice that in this case Dave and I are both exploring the possibility that public health campaigns have less effect than the are supposed to. But while such revelations make me uneasy, they seem to cause Dave a jolt of pleasure. Now I am just reading a new note from Dave on the other screen that suggests that I totally misunderstand him, so perhaps I should leave off this, and look at that.

I think I am not truly a complexity fan because if I were, I would see that we never have enough information to control out fate as a community. The foreseen consequences dwarf the foreseen ones. But doesn’t also follow the cannot control our fates as individuals, also? And that leads to sophomoric despair, which I also deplore. So, you see, my conversation with Dave is not really about covid, but about life led in uncertainty.

Nick

Nick Thompson

[hidden email]

https://wordpress.clarku.edu/nthompson/

From: Friam <[hidden email]> On Behalf Of Steve Smith
Sent: Wednesday, April 7, 2021 10:48 AM
To: [hidden email]
Subject: Re: [FRIAM] lockdowns

EricC, et al-

NickT -

On 4/7/21 8:24 AM, Eric Charles 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

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 <[hidden email]> 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
[hidden email]
https://wordpress.clarku.edu/nthompson/

-----Original Message-----
From: Friam <[hidden email]> On Behalf Of J Dalessandro
Sent: Tuesday, April 6, 2021 8:24 PM
To: The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group <[hidden email]>
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

---
[hidden email]

‐‐‐‐‐‐‐ Original Message ‐‐‐‐‐‐‐
On Tuesday, March 16, 2021 8:56 AM, Prof David West <[hidden email]> 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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>

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gepr

Re: lockdowns

Weird. "What I want" is different from "what I want to be true". I can answer the former, but not the latter. For example, I want to have less fat around my torso. But I can't say anything about whether I want it to be true *that* I have less fat around my torso.

In the context of public health ... what I want is for the public to be healthier ... e.g. less fat. (FWIW, I don't care that much about people dying ... of any particular condition from covid to guns ... but I do care that while they're alive, they be healthier. So I care more about the long-term impacts of covid infection than I do dying from covid infection.) When you ask a question like "what do you want to be true about public health", I get confused.

On 4/7/21 12:14 PM, [hidden email] wrote:
> Please don’t over interpret. I was not calling anybody out. I was asking a question. I “want” it to be the case that concerted community action can be effective and that “law” plays a role is such actions. I surmise that others “want” something else to be true, but I don’t know what that is. It’s a feeling I get from many members of this list, Dave, EricC, Glen, Marcus, even your honored self. Notice that in this case Dave and I are both exploring the possibility that public health campaigns have less effect than the are supposed to. But while such revelations make me uneasy, they seem to cause Dave a jolt of pleasure. Now I am just reading a new note from Dave on the other screen that suggests that I totally misunderstand him, so perhaps I should leave off this, and look at that.
>
>
>
> I think I am not truly a complexity fan because if I were, I would see that we never have enough information to control out fate as a community. The foreseen consequences dwarf the foreseen ones. But doesn’t also follow the cannot control our fates as individuals, also? And that leads to sophomoric despair, which I also deplore. So, you see, my conversation with Dave is not really about covid, but about life led in uncertainty.
>

> Still, I want to know -- NOT a rhetorical question -- why you WANT to believe that public health measures don't work.

--
↙↙↙ uǝlƃ

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jon zingale

Re: lockdowns

Oh, let me comprehend the ways.

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jon zingale

Re: lockdowns

In reply to this post by Prof David West

"""
I did the best job I could to determine my personal risk in my personal context and based my actions accordingly. I took into account what the "experts had to say," but critically and with, what counts for me, some common sense.
"""

Same, and perhaps similarly, I found the public health guidelines to be impoverished, crude, and generally inadequate for my needs. For the little data that was out there, even less was being digested and interpreted (CYA?). I found a need to reason about data directly and so wrote a couple of bots to organize data that I hoped would be relevant to me. I would watch individuals in public spaces and theorize about their behavior relative to my hypotheses. Occasionally, I would need to sidestep individuals that would tell me it was all a hoax or others telling me to abandon my way in the world in favor of *believing the science*. Knowing that I need more for a healthy life than to not simply catch covid, I attempt to find low-risk opportunities to meet my needs. It has been exceedingly difficult, though so far so good.

A significant difficulty has come in the form of social repression, and not simply locking down. Rather instead, inhibition toward reasoning about the effects of the virus (and *all* its entailments) relative to rational individual action. I longed for a mean free path calculator. I didn't want to suspend thinking coherently about the consequences of my interactions, simply because I needed to visit a store or because a friend was in need. Personally, I don't feel that there is anything to blame. In theory, a plan was needed and many were executed. Each execution fighting to do what it was brought into this world to do, occasionally acting to leave other plans stillborn where they quickened.

Sent from the Friam mailing list archive at Nabble.com.

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J Dalessandro

Re: lockdowns

In reply to this post by Eric Charles-2

I think we have enough data points to make some initial observations. I lived through two lockdowns in Australia- and it worked. You can track the cases of community transmission over time before, during, and post lockdown. The figures are posted for public consumption.

https://www.dhhs.vic.gov.au/coronavirus

On Thu, Apr 8, 2021 at 00:24, Eric Charles <[hidden email]> 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
[hidden email]

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 <[hidden email]> 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
[hidden email]
https://wordpress.clarku.edu/nthompson/

-----Original Message-----
From: Friam <[hidden email]> On Behalf Of J Dalessandro
Sent: Tuesday, April 6, 2021 8:24 PM
To: The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group <[hidden email]>
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

---
[hidden email]

‐‐‐‐‐‐‐ Original Message ‐‐‐‐‐‐‐
On Tuesday, March 16, 2021 8:56 AM, Prof David West <[hidden email]> 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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> archives: http://friam.471366.n2.nabble.com/
>

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David Eric Smith

Re: lockdowns

In reply to this post by Eric Charles-2

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 <[hidden email]> 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
[hidden email]

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 <[hidden email]> 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
[hidden email]
https://wordpress.clarku.edu/nthompson/

-----Original Message-----
From: Friam <[hidden email]> On Behalf Of J Dalessandro
Sent: Tuesday, April 6, 2021 8:24 PM
To: The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group <[hidden email]>
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

---
[hidden email]

‐‐‐‐‐‐‐ Original Message ‐‐‐‐‐‐‐
On Tuesday, March 16, 2021 8:56 AM, Prof David West <[hidden email]> 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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Marcus G. Daniels

Re: lockdowns

Eric writes:

< 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. >

Ha! The government and public officials have been terrorizing people? What I remember, and still see, is a set of doctors and epidemiologists that day after day say more or less the same things. It’s boring and obvious, and probably for them too. Yet people come up with wacky theories that they are part of conspiracy to destroy their sandwich shops and taverns. Pfft. Whatever. After I a while I have started to wish they were that dark. Yes, if you are out in the desolate plains of Tecolote New Mexico, by all means do whatever you want. It isn’t hundreds of federal agents (or even one) will be suddenly bearing down on you if you don’t wear a mask. If you don’t mind, just stay where you are. That works for everybody.

Marcus

Eric Charles-2

Re: lockdowns

In reply to this post by David Eric Smith

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 <[hidden email]> 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 <[hidden email]> 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
[hidden email]

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 <[hidden email]> 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
[hidden email]
https://wordpress.clarku.edu/nthompson/

-----Original Message-----
From: Friam <[hidden email]> On Behalf Of J Dalessandro
Sent: Tuesday, April 6, 2021 8:24 PM
To: The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group <[hidden email]>
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

---
[hidden email]

‐‐‐‐‐‐‐ Original Message ‐‐‐‐‐‐‐
On Tuesday, March 16, 2021 8:56 AM, Prof David West <[hidden email]> 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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>

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gepr

Re: lockdowns

In reply to this post by jon zingale

I mean ... [sigh] ... if we take these meta-statements seriously, we can imagine someone promoting an attribute to a property ... something like reification. The setup of a proposition {P} and a meta-proposition like {P is True} is too loaded. It would be easier to take something like {Apple} and {Apple is Green}. Green is a humble attribute, unlike the aggressive True. Promoting Green from an attribute to a property is more acceptable because of that humility. A contrarian can in good faith say, no apples are red. Or a color-blind person can say, no apples are gray#7. Or whatever.

But when some arrogant snot runs around saying {P is True}, we don't even know where to begin. There is no common ground from which to start. At the very least, those who want to claim things like {P is True} could be generous and relax it a bit to {P is Consistent with L}, where L is some language. Then maybe we could say {P is True}_L or something.

I know L is inferable from the subject line, the context of Dave's OP, etc. But man, it's a lot of work to do that inferring and the subsequent error correction in straw-steel-etc effigification.

On 4/7/21 1:08 PM, jon zingale wrote:
> Oh, let me comprehend the ways.

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uǝʃƃ ⊥ glen

Steve Smith

Effigification

uǝlƃ ↙↙↙ wrote:
> ... it's a lot of work to do that inferring and the subsequent error correction in straw-steel-etc effigification

Damn, that is a great well packed phrase with a word *I* might have
conjured in the absence of any better one!

I knew right away (I think) what you meant by "effigification" but when
I went looking for a precedent for it, I couldn't find any.   Could this
be a true neologism? With a little luck it might find it's way into the
OED in an edition or two.   Like we can "verbize any noun", can we
"nounificate any verb"? In this case, however it seems we are
verbifying a nounificated verb? (effigy->effigify->effigification)

But (mildly?)_ obscured (to me) is whether you consider the
straw<->steel man continuum to in fact be *effigies*?

My connotation of "effigy" includes the business implied by "to burn in
effigy" which in fact *does* apply well to the more flammable end of the
spectrum (i.e. straw), but I don't know if you intend that aspect.
Straw-Steel men *are* models, and perhaps caricatures in some sense.

I'm not deliberately splitting hairs to undermine your argument, but
rather to understand more better what all might be implied by your use
of the straw-steel idiom.   I'm late to the party, having only recently
(months) let go of my archaic mapping which was roughly opposite
yours... in that "straw-good because it is designed to be discardable or
an armature to plaster over into a more elaborate model" vs "steel-bad
because it likely represents premature binding".

- Steve

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