4 ms·

Eh, more incorrect, probably. With earthquakes you at least have stress accumulating over time, even if the stress is not necessarily accumulating or being rel

Eh, more incorrect, probably. With earthquakes you at least have stress accumulating over time, even if the stress is not necessarily accumulating or being released at a constant rate. A zoonotic spillover is pure repeated throws of the dice, no accumulated pressure.

jiggawatts 3y ago
Not quite true: zoonotic crossover events become more likely as more animals are brought together. Large-scale wet markets or bushmeat markets increase the chances because there are more rolls of the dice.
- michaelmrose 3y ago
  Are most zoonotic crossovers more than one step or are most misadventures NONHUMAN => HUMAN? Either way if market activity doesn't change year on year then rate of dice rolls don't change on that front. However there is no reason to believe that such misadventures take place in a single generation and immediately produce a viable and successful agent. Producing something that spreads to humans but not will will none the less produce many orders of magnitude more useful and numerous dice rolls. Such actions may not be immediately obvious even if they were fatal. People after all get sick and die all the time. I doubt we have enough data to meaningfully forecast risk.
  - saalweachter 3y ago
    I mean, we, a random assortment of software engineers on HN, almost certainly lack the data and expertise to forecast the risk of a pandemic. My own self-critique above was more that, even if you could accurately deduce that there is a 1.54e-12 chance per person-year of a person encountering a novel disease that can spread as a global pandemic, you can't then schedule the next one for 450 billion people-years later, when the probability exceeds 50%, because it's a random occurrence and there's nothing stopping it from happening after ten or a trillion throws of the dice. But I'll still stand by the logic of my original back of the envelope number; insomuch as the risk is proportional to the population, we should expect the next global pandemic twice as fast as the last one, and I think there's a good chance many of us will be alive to see it (as opposed to the gap between the Spanish Flu and COVID-19, where the survivors of the first were infants for the last and centenarians for this one).

jiggawatts 3y ago

Not quite true: zoonotic crossover events become more likely as more animals are brought together. Large-scale wet markets or bushmeat markets increase the chances because there are more rolls of the dice.

michaelmrose 3y ago
Are most zoonotic crossovers more than one step or are most misadventures NONHUMAN => HUMAN? Either way if market activity doesn't change year on year then rate of dice rolls don't change on that front. However there is no reason to believe that such misadventures take place in a single generation and immediately produce a viable and successful agent. Producing something that spreads to humans but not will will none the less produce many orders of magnitude more useful and numerous dice rolls. Such actions may not be immediately obvious even if they were fatal. People after all get sick and die all the time. I doubt we have enough data to meaningfully forecast risk.
- saalweachter 3y ago
  I mean, we, a random assortment of software engineers on HN, almost certainly lack the data and expertise to forecast the risk of a pandemic. My own self-critique above was more that, even if you could accurately deduce that there is a 1.54e-12 chance per person-year of a person encountering a novel disease that can spread as a global pandemic, you can't then schedule the next one for 450 billion people-years later, when the probability exceeds 50%, because it's a random occurrence and there's nothing stopping it from happening after ten or a trillion throws of the dice. But I'll still stand by the logic of my original back of the envelope number; insomuch as the risk is proportional to the population, we should expect the next global pandemic twice as fast as the last one, and I think there's a good chance many of us will be alive to see it (as opposed to the gap between the Spanish Flu and COVID-19, where the survivors of the first were infants for the last and centenarians for this one).