Author Archives: rdmyers75@hotmail.com

some new Covid-related numbers

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Here are some new numbers, because I like numbers.

  • The CDC is citing the 100 cases per 100,000 population per day number as the threshold for “high transmission”. Here in Pennsylvania, our health department has been citing this number for when school should go all virtual. But the CDC says elementary schools should be having hybrid (reduced attendance) school right now. Here in Philadelphia our public school children have not been given this chance at any time since March 2020, and it is uncertain whether it will happen before the end of the school year in June. (I’m writing on Sunday, February 14).
  • New data on effectiveness of masks: something like 70-100%, and these studies cited were mostly in public or job settings, not medical settings.

another way to look at slipping U.S. life expectancy

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Just in case we need another metric to believe that the U.S. is slipping behind its peers, there is this new study from Lancet, summarized in a Quartz article:

…if the US had a life expectancy equal to the average of countries of comparable wealth (in the study, the group is identified as G7 countries: Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, UK, and US), its population would be nearly half a million more.

It’s not a new phenomenon. The US has trailed the rest of the advanced world in life expectancy since the 1980s, and it’s now 3.4 years shorter than the average of other G7 countries in 2018, the last year for which international data is available. On average, in 2018, people in G7 countries had a life expectancy of 81.9 years, while in the US (prior to Covid-19) it was 78.5 years. In 2018 in Japan, the G7 country with the highest life expectancy, it was 84.2 years.

Quartz

Note that the average we are comparing the U.S. to presumably includes the U.S., so the gap between the U.S. and its peers would be even slightly worse if we were just comparing the U.S. to the average of its peers. Japanese people are living 5-6 years longer than us, on average. This is before Covid-19, of course. Checking Our World in Data, Japan has a reported death rate from Covid-19 of about 55 per million population, and the U.S. of about 1,500 per million population! (I don’t use exclamation points lightly on this blog.)

what a global pandemic/bioweapon surveillance regime could look like

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It’s pretty clear that the world needs some kind of surveillance or inspection regime to monitor both biological weapons and natural disease outbreaks. This Wired article goes into some of the possibilities.

  • The WHO is an obvious possibility, but requires full cooperation of member states so this limits what it can do, even if it were well funded.
  • Something like the International Atomic Energy Agency is a possibility. It would have to be established by a treaty and would have the ability to swoop in and inspect advanced biological labs (these are called “biosafety level 4” or BSL-4) on short notice.
  • There is an existing treaty called the Biological Weapons Convention which might have the authority to create this body, but the article says it is somewhat ineffective and a new treaty wouldn’t need to have as many parties, just starting with the major players and letting others sign on over time.
  • Another model is the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons, which is similar to IAEA.
  • The UN Security Council would also have the authority to establish a new inspection body, kind of like it did for Iraq in the 1990s (which turned out great… and this is the problem, the UN lost a lot of its previous credibility in that debacle.)

The BSL-4 labs are proliferating around the world according to the article, and this seems like a scary situation to me.

My modest proposal would be to fund the WHO fully right away and have it investigate natural disease outbreaks with member state cooperation. Then have the Security Council establish the heavy-duty biological weapons inspection program with the heavies right away. Like it or not, we also need surveillance to find the hidden labs or even just people messing around with dangerous stuff in their garages and basements. This will be much easier for the little guy to do than, say, getting your hands on some enriched uranium or Novachok.

This is an existential risk – we may not get many chances to make mistakes and learn from them. The risk will keep increasing and under any kind of moral or responsible government framework it has to be dealt with right away.

why inequality leads to crime and violence

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In a rational choice model, cheating and stealing can become rational when people have less to lose from not cheating and stealing than they risk by cheating and stealing. And if they don’t trust one another, they are even more likely to cheat and steal. The more unequal a society is, the more likely people will fall below the threshold where they judge they have nothing to lose, and the less trust there will be between and within social classes.

 If your current resources are above the threshold, then, under the assumptions we make, it is not worth stealing. Instead, you should cooperate as long as you judge that the others around you are likely to do so too, and just work alone otherwise. If your resources are around or below the threshold, however, then, under our assumptions, you should pretty much always steal. Even if it makes you worse off on average.

This is a pretty remarkable result: why would it be so? The important thing to appreciate is that with our threshold, we have introduced a sharp non-linearity in the fitness function, or utility function, that is assumed to be driving decisions. Once you fall down below that threshold, your prospects are really dramatically worse, and you need to get back up immediately. This makes stealing a worthwhile risk. If it happens to succeed, it’s the only action with a big enough quick win to leap you back over the threshold in one bound. If, as is likely, it fails, you are scarcely worse off in the long run: your prospects were dire anyway, and they can’t get much direr. So the riskiness of stealing – it sometimes you gives you a big positive outcome and sometimes a big negative one – becomes a thing you should seek rather than avoid…

So if making sentences tougher does not solve the problems of crime in high-inequality populations, according to the model, is there anything that does? Well, yes: and readers of this blog may not be surprised to hear me mention it. Redistribution. If people who are facing desperation can expect their fortunes to improve by other means, such as redistributive action, then they don’t need to employ such desperate means as stealing. They will get back up there anyway. Our model shows that a shuffling of resources so that the worst off are lifted up and the top end is brought down can dramatically reduce stealing, and hence increase trust. (In an early version of this work, we simulated the effects of a scenario we named ‘Corbyn victory’: remember then?).

Daniel Nettle

Well, you can redistribute, or there are other options. The highest social classes could maintain the social order through sheer force. Or they could try to achieve the same ends through ideology and propaganda that convince the lower classes the social order is natural or desirable, or they can try to use ideology and propaganda to divide the lower classes and turn them on each other. The guy on the second rung from the bottom may very well be willing to kick the guy on the bottom rung in the teeth to keep him from climbing, and thank the people higher up for the opportunity even while they are shitting on his head. Which of these options sounds good to you probably depends on which rung of the ladder you happen to be standing on, and the rung you happen to be standing on is probably within a couple rungs of the one you were born on, in most cases.

more on mRNA technology for vaccines and beyond

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There are several interesting nuggets in this MIT Technology Review article:

  • A lot of the technology was developed by the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia (which I have mixed feelings about – it’s essentially a giant evil greedy corporation in most ways, but it does provide a lot of jobs locally – much like any giant inefficient Soviety industry, and obviously it created this technology for greedy purposes which now has the potential to save hundreds of millions of lives while making a few greedy people extraordinarily rich.)
  • The technology essentially gets your body to make its own medicine, “turning a human body into a bioreactor”. However, doesn’t work well (so far) for medicines that need to be taken repeatedly, which is most medicines except vaccines. So vaccines are the most obvious candidate for now. Combining it with gene editing technology holds the promise of permanent protection against disease, even handed down the generations, but there are also some scary risks here.
  • It may work for herpes, malaria, flu, sickle cell anemia, cancer and HIV. For flu and coronavirus, there is a possibility of “universal vaccines” that would protect against thousands of strains with a single shot.
  • The vaccine was designed within 48 hours of the scientists receiving its DNA sequence, and ready for animal trials in less than six weeks. (This is exciting, because it suggests the possibility of responding to new threats quickly in the future, whether natural or manmade.)
  • “vaccine programs for emerging threats like Zika or Ebola, where outbreaks come and go, would deliver a -66% return on average.” (sounds like an obvious, clear textbook market failure to me and an obvious moral requirement for government to step in)
  • The researchers are advocating for the government to create “megafactories” for producing mRNA that could be leased to companies in normal times, but taken over by the government to pump out vaccines quickly in times of crisis. They liken this to how governments “governments spend billions on nuclear weapons they hope to never use”. (They have this one wrong – it’s trillions! And if we need a military reason to do this, we need this to protect against biowarfare and bioterrorism in addition to naturally arising pandemics. It’s an existential threat and like I said, an absolute moral imperative for government to make this happen.)
  • The article also mentions an experimental gene therapy cure for blindness. Exciting but costs about a million dollars right now for two eyes.

Microsoft’s Cylon chat bot

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Microsoft has filed a patent for code that can suck in a (living or dead I suppose) person’s online history and configure a chatbot to act something like them. Of course, just because they filed a patent doesn’t mean they plan widespread commercialization of the idea, just that they had an idea and don’t want others to be able to profit from the idea (which I would bet somebody else had first but didn’t file the patent…) At its most innocuous, this would not be too much different than looking up famous quotes of a famous person (let’s say Abraham Lincoln) on a particular topic, except it could apply to anyone.

This, of course, is the exact plot of Battlestar Gallactica, at least the 2004-2008 series I am most familiar with. And that was an awesome series that won over many people (my significant other included) who did not consider themselves fans of science fiction. Somewhat similar to the way Game of Thrones won over people who considered themselves too serious for fantasy. So check it out if you haven’t.

New Start extended for five years

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Joe Biden and Vladimir Putin have just done a very good thing in extending the New Start treaty for five years.

The treaty, signed in 2010 by the US president Barack Obama and Dmitry Medvedev, who was president of Russia at the time, limits each country to no more than 1,550 deployed nuclear warheads and 700 deployed missiles and bombers, and envisages sweeping on-site inspections to verify compliance.

The Guardian

The numbers seem somewhat underwhelming to me (as in, a modest reduction in an enormous nuclear arsenal), but the important thing is the willingness to cooperate to reduce risk, and the message that sends to the rest of the world. The world has gone from believing a nuclear free world might be possible, to trying to avoid proliferation while modestly reducing what nuclear-armed countries already have, to trying to slow the rate of proliferation while “modernizing” or increasing what nuclear-armed countries already have, to teetering on the brink of an all-out arms race. Now we have gone back to the “maintain what we have”, which is still incredibly cynical, but the trend has turned back in the right direction. Accidents, proliferation, unstable nuclear-armed states (I’m talking to you Pakistan), and terrorism are all still very frightening, and there is no margin for error even with one relatively small event one time. The ocean liner captain has seen the iceberg, let up on the steam, and turned the wheel an inch to the left. Is it in time to avoid collision?

dogs domesticated themselves

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I had heard that dogs may have been domesticated as a food animal at some point, which is a somewhat dark tale for the modern dog lover. This Independent article says new evidence tells a different story. First, Siberian wolves started sniffing around garbage in human settlements during the ice age. Then, they settled in. Although it might seem like humans would feel threatened by wolves in their midst, they may actually have helped defend the human settlements against other animals, including other wolves. (You can imagine there might have been a few misunderstandings early on where hungry wolves ate people and vice versa.) And then, because they are so smart, a specific pack of wolves would pass behaviors down from generation to generation, and in just a few generations you would have a population with distinct behavior and over time even a distinct appearance. At some point, humans did start training and breeding them to perform specific tasks, like pulling sleds.

GPS vulnerable

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In the category of things I didn’t know I was supposed to be worried about, the New York Times says GPS satellites are vulnerable, and they are being messed with by state and non-state actors.

More than 10,000 incidents of GPS interference have been linked to China and Russia in the past five years. Ship captains have reported GPS errors showing them 20-120 miles inland when they were actually sailing off the coast of Russia in the Black Sea. Also well documented are ships suddenly disappearing from navigation screens while maneuvering in the Port of Shanghai. After GPS disruptions at Tel Aviv’s Ben Gurion Airport in 2019, Israeli officials pointed to Syria, where Russia has been involved in the nation’s long-running civil war. And last summer, the United States Space Command accused Russia of testing antisatellite weaponry.

New York Times

GPS is an example of a military technology that has spilled over to enormous worldwide civilian benefit. But it is fragile apparently. The U.S. is actively working (but behind schedule) on a backup system, and this article says many other countries have already implemented backup systems working on towers located on the ground rather than satellites.

more on Oumuamua

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The media and mainstream scientific consensus seem to have dismissed the extraterrestrial object Oumuamua that passed the Earth last year as a natural object. (But according to this article, we should think of it more as our solar system passing the object. It turns out we are not the center of the universe!) Not so fast, says Avi Loeb, “one of the world’s foremost astronomers“. He says “the most rational, conservative explanation is that ‘Oumuamua was produced by an alien civilisation.”

Warning: This is a potential brain-exploding article if you choose to take it seriously and think about it too hard. He says the reason this is the first time we have seen an object of this type might be that we didn’t have the technology to look. Now we have the technology, we are actively looking, and the technology is continuing to improve quickly. He says we “we should assume that we will see another object once every three or four years” with existing technology, and possibly once a month with near-future (a few months or years from now) technology. This would imply “that there are plenty of them, a quadrillion of them, inside the Oort cloud. Inside the solar system.”

He has been talking about the likelihood of alien life for awhile:

In a 2014 paper, he described the likelihood that rocky planets with liquid water provided the chemistry to support life when the universe was as little as ten million years old. In the 13.8 billion years since that time, billions of galaxies – each home to billions of Earth-like planets – have formed. To say that life, intelligence and civilisation have emerged only once in such an expanse of time and space is, he argues, a radical view.

New Statesman

He has a new book on this subject called Extraterrestrial: The First Sign of Intelligent Life Beyond Earth.

And I can’t help saying it: The Truth is Out There, my friends. (Remember when a TV show about a simple vaccine distribution conspiracy linked to aliens was considered quaint entertainment? That ancient civilization and culture was called 1990s USA and will no doubt be the subject of many anthropological studies when the alien scientists land.)