4 ms·

The experts can stay wrong longer than you can stay alive

65 points by joshuakelly 5y ago

thrower123 5y ago
Right-wing bodybuilders on Twitter are still the best predictive tool since augery and haruspicy went out of style.
mssundaram 5y ago
This article restricts its focus to borders, but I wonder if the author is also extending that to include internal lockdowns, for which there is a great amount of evidence that they're unproductive and destructive - see r/LockdownSkepticism for further reading.
jordan_curve 5y ago
This is a horrible argument. The article itself went through the reasons that the previous common belief was not applicable to this unprecedented pandemic. Yet it concludes, without any evidence, this must have been caused by public health experts being so biased by their personal political convictions that they cannot interpret their scientific findings objectively.
- msandford 5y ago
  There's an appeal to basic logic that goes "if the disease spreads from person to person and persons don't cross borders then the disease can't either." That might be a simplistic model but it's obviously correct upon inspection unless the disease spreads from distant persons which in this case it does not. The reason you might reject the policy implications of said model is that the assumption going in (we can sufficiently restrict border movement) are in your mind impractical or impossible.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- wk_end 5y ago
  Where does it provide "reasons that the previous common belief was not applicable to this unprecedented pandemic"? I've looked over the article twice and can't see what you're referring to. Furthermore, what's the explanation for the (very counter-intuitive, and at least in this case seemingly incorrect) previous common belief in the first place?
- ZeroGravitas 5y ago
  The Vox article about Vietnam that they list the URL of (but don't link?) is far more in depth on the complexities for and against the idea than this blog post. There don't appear to be any easy answers to take from this. https://www.vox.com/22346085/covid-19-vietnam-response-travel-restrictions https://www.vox.com/22346085/covid-19-vietnam-response-trave...
Gravyness 5y ago
Fascinating. To me this just speaks about how humans did not evolve to create large, complex societies of the current scale we have in the world. Its like electing a group of 5 people to represent and speak for the entire world in case an alien civilization comes forth.
zarzavat 5y ago
This reminded me of Chomsky's propaganda model, which observes that the media, politicians and business are all interdependent and it is unlikely that anyone who holds views that are threatening to that order will get very far in their journalistic career.
627467 5y ago
To me, it's obvious there's an "appeal to authority/expertise-theatre" when there's a sense of emergency. That's one of the points of assigning authority. But what the pandemic has showed is all the expertise in the world and all the authority in the world does not provide actual the necessary evidence to back decisions as quickly as the public alarm grows. How many pandemic have been recorded in such detail that produces evidence relevant for current situations? How many lockdowns? I mean: previous pandemics (1918 flu?) did not have to account for high speed means of transportations. Or extreme population densities. Maybe borders were more permeable in the past than they are today, but did people move as fast and in has large quantities as today?
ajkdhcb2 5y ago
You can't trust anyone whose words have political impacts. Not sure why so many people assume good will and make up convoluted reasons for decisions that go against the best wishes of the public. Politicians constantly lie in plain sight. You can't know what sick agendas there are behind the scenes. Experts are threatened and nudged all the time. Remember when they were saying that medical face masks won't be effective against a coronavirus? There is no way they believed that.
burning_hamster 5y ago
> The straightforward lesson to take from this is that international public health experts belong to a social and political class which thinks closing borders is bad for mostly domestic political reasons, and in the absence of external reality checks like a pandemic, people wanting to make a career public health can really only advance by mimicking the beliefs of the senior people who are the gatekeepers for advancement. A statement like this just signals that the author has not been around many scientists in their life. The majority of scientists have a contrarian bias (they have to be, otherwise why would they search for new theories?). Also, being a scientist is not a very effective way to gain personal wealth or status, so people that stay in science beyond a PhD tend to have other priorities and life goals than most people with a similar breadth of options. I have worked at the Robert Koch Institute, the German equivalent for the CDC in the US, and know some of the people that have been advising the government. I can guarantee that being an advisor to the government was the career aspiration of absolutely none of them. However, their research is being funded whether or not there is a pandemic or an epidemic, so these positions grant them exceptional freedom in their pursuits. "Normal" scientists have to spend an extraordinary amount of time to secure funding for their research, much more than you would ever expect to spend advising a government during the rare crisis. So the incentive structure here is really quite straight forward and much less conformist or sinister than the article suggests. The reality is that there are pretty straightforward reasons to believe that restricting border travel has a limited impact *unless* you can suppress travel basically altogether. The absolute key assumption here is that the border is porous and cannot be closed 100%. Clearly, this assumption is incorrect for Australia and New Zealand, which is why (I assume) experts there did argue for border closures (and why I was absolutely furious that the UK, my current home, did not do the same). Specifically, in the wake of the swine flu epidemic, there was an influential computational paper that investigated the question "If you restrict border crossings at the onset of an (influenza) pandemic, i.e. before the disease becomes endemic in your own country, how long can you delay the peak given that you are still allowing some travel for export/import of essential goods?" The math in the paper was a bit more exact but a back of the envelope calculation can convey the key insight: Assume a simple susceptible-infected-recovered (SIR) model, where the increase in infected people is roughly exponential and the doubling time of the number of infected is -- for the sake of argument -- 1 week. If you restrict border traffic by 50%, you delay the peak of the pandemic by 1 week. If you reduce border traffic down to 25%, you delay the peak by 2 weeks, 12.5% -> 3 weeks, 6.25% -> 4 weeks, 3.125% -> 5 weeks, 1.5% -> 6 weeks. So reducing your border traffic by approximately 99% buys you six additional weeks to prepare for the worst. However, in exchange, you have to source basically all materials for this preparation from within your borders, as well as support a somewhat normal life. Even if that were possible, the disruption to your supply chains might mean that the preparations might take much longer than normal, such that six additional weeks might not be sufficient under these circumstances either. Now assume that it takes 3-4 months to reach peak pandemic once the disease has become endemic in your country. Do you suppress all border traffic for an additional 6 weeks? Finally, consider that the doubling time for COVID was actually much shorter (at least initially, i.e. before lockdowns), namely 3 days and not a whole week (https://academic.oup.com/jid/article/222/10/1601/5879762 https://academic.oup.com/jid/article/222/10/1601/5879762). So instead of buying yourself 6 weeks, you are buying yourself 6 * 3 = 18 days. So instead of 3 months to peak, you would have gotten 3.5 months to peak. I am not an expert in logistics but I would assume that a complete disruption of global supply chains would have done more harm than the good that could have come by delaying the peak by 18 days.
noxer 5y ago
How is this not flagged? its on substack AND its critical of "the science" /s

65 points by joshuakelly 5y ago

Right-wing bodybuilders on Twitter are still the best predictive tool since augery and haruspicy went out of style.

This article restricts its focus to borders, but I wonder if the author is also extending that to include internal lockdowns, for which there is a great amount of evidence that they're unproductive and destructive - see r/LockdownSkepticism for further reading.

jordan_curve 5y ago

This is a horrible argument. The article itself went through the reasons that the previous common belief was not applicable to this unprecedented pandemic. Yet it concludes, without any evidence, this must have been caused by public health experts being so biased by their personal political convictions that they cannot interpret their scientific findings objectively.

msandford 5y ago
There's an appeal to basic logic that goes "if the disease spreads from person to person and persons don't cross borders then the disease can't either." That might be a simplistic model but it's obviously correct upon inspection unless the disease spreads from distant persons which in this case it does not. The reason you might reject the policy implications of said model is that the assumption going in (we can sufficiently restrict border movement) are in your mind impractical or impossible.
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
wk_end 5y ago
Where does it provide "reasons that the previous common belief was not applicable to this unprecedented pandemic"? I've looked over the article twice and can't see what you're referring to. Furthermore, what's the explanation for the (very counter-intuitive, and at least in this case seemingly incorrect) previous common belief in the first place?
ZeroGravitas 5y ago
The Vox article about Vietnam that they list the URL of (but don't link?) is far more in depth on the complexities for and against the idea than this blog post. There don't appear to be any easy answers to take from this. https://www.vox.com/22346085/covid-19-vietnam-response-travel-restrictions https://www.vox.com/22346085/covid-19-vietnam-response-trave...

Gravyness 5y ago

Fascinating. To me this just speaks about how humans did not evolve to create large, complex societies of the current scale we have in the world. Its like electing a group of 5 people to represent and speak for the entire world in case an alien civilization comes forth.

zarzavat 5y ago

This reminded me of Chomsky's propaganda model, which observes that the media, politicians and business are all interdependent and it is unlikely that anyone who holds views that are threatening to that order will get very far in their journalistic career.

627467 5y ago

To me, it's obvious there's an "appeal to authority/expertise-theatre" when there's a sense of emergency. That's one of the points of assigning authority. But what the pandemic has showed is all the expertise in the world and all the authority in the world does not provide actual the necessary evidence to back decisions as quickly as the public alarm grows. How many pandemic have been recorded in such detail that produces evidence relevant for current situations? How many lockdowns? I mean: previous pandemics (1918 flu?) did not have to account for high speed means of transportations. Or extreme population densities. Maybe borders were more permeable in the past than they are today, but did people move as fast and in has large quantities as today?

ajkdhcb2 5y ago

You can't trust anyone whose words have political impacts. Not sure why so many people assume good will and make up convoluted reasons for decisions that go against the best wishes of the public. Politicians constantly lie in plain sight. You can't know what sick agendas there are behind the scenes. Experts are threatened and nudged all the time. Remember when they were saying that medical face masks won't be effective against a coronavirus? There is no way they believed that.

burning_hamster 5y ago

> The straightforward lesson to take from this is that international public health experts belong to a social and political class which thinks closing borders is bad for mostly domestic political reasons, and in the absence of external reality checks like a pandemic, people wanting to make a career public health can really only advance by mimicking the beliefs of the senior people who are the gatekeepers for advancement. A statement like this just signals that the author has not been around many scientists in their life. The majority of scientists have a contrarian bias (they have to be, otherwise why would they search for new theories?). Also, being a scientist is not a very effective way to gain personal wealth or status, so people that stay in science beyond a PhD tend to have other priorities and life goals than most people with a similar breadth of options. I have worked at the Robert Koch Institute, the German equivalent for the CDC in the US, and know some of the people that have been advising the government. I can guarantee that being an advisor to the government was the career aspiration of absolutely none of them. However, their research is being funded whether or not there is a pandemic or an epidemic, so these positions grant them exceptional freedom in their pursuits. "Normal" scientists have to spend an extraordinary amount of time to secure funding for their research, much more than you would ever expect to spend advising a government during the rare crisis. So the incentive structure here is really quite straight forward and much less conformist or sinister than the article suggests. The reality is that there are pretty straightforward reasons to believe that restricting border travel has a limited impact *unless* you can suppress travel basically altogether. The absolute key assumption here is that the border is porous and cannot be closed 100%. Clearly, this assumption is incorrect for Australia and New Zealand, which is why (I assume) experts there did argue for border closures (and why I was absolutely furious that the UK, my current home, did not do the same). Specifically, in the wake of the swine flu epidemic, there was an influential computational paper that investigated the question "If you restrict border crossings at the onset of an (influenza) pandemic, i.e. before the disease becomes endemic in your own country, how long can you delay the peak given that you are still allowing some travel for export/import of essential goods?" The math in the paper was a bit more exact but a back of the envelope calculation can convey the key insight: Assume a simple susceptible-infected-recovered (SIR) model, where the increase in infected people is roughly exponential and the doubling time of the number of infected is -- for the sake of argument -- 1 week. If you restrict border traffic by 50%, you delay the peak of the pandemic by 1 week. If you reduce border traffic down to 25%, you delay the peak by 2 weeks, 12.5% -> 3 weeks, 6.25% -> 4 weeks, 3.125% -> 5 weeks, 1.5% -> 6 weeks. So reducing your border traffic by approximately 99% buys you six additional weeks to prepare for the worst. However, in exchange, you have to source basically all materials for this preparation from within your borders, as well as support a somewhat normal life. Even if that were possible, the disruption to your supply chains might mean that the preparations might take much longer than normal, such that six additional weeks might not be sufficient under these circumstances either. Now assume that it takes 3-4 months to reach peak pandemic once the disease has become endemic in your country. Do you suppress all border traffic for an additional 6 weeks? Finally, consider that the doubling time for COVID was actually much shorter (at least initially, i.e. before lockdowns), namely 3 days and not a whole week (https://academic.oup.com/jid/article/222/10/1601/5879762 https://academic.oup.com/jid/article/222/10/1601/5879762). So instead of buying yourself 6 weeks, you are buying yourself 6 * 3 = 18 days. So instead of 3 months to peak, you would have gotten 3.5 months to peak. I am not an expert in logistics but I would assume that a complete disruption of global supply chains would have done more harm than the good that could have come by delaying the peak by 18 days.

noxer 5y ago

How is this not flagged? its on substack AND its critical of "the science" /s