Did you catch it ?

[PeterNSteinmetz]

Since you are a scientist, I would expect you to at least skim a publicly available manuscript to verify the content before quoting a headline from the Telegraph, or any general news source.

Jeff, I am sorry if it caused a mis-perception of the contents of the article and have modified my post to correct it. Thank you again for correcting my error. In general I do verify the content before quoting an article or making a major point based on the contents. In this case, I was simply trying to post the article for the interest of the group and did not perform adequate checking and was mostly trying to simply provide something rather than a raw link. Would you have been happier if I had simply linked to the Telegraph story? I guess then people would have assumed it was just a Telegraph story rather than a pre-print of a scientific article. I agree with you that a greater degree of care is needed by those of us who are professional scientists.

In any case, yes, I do not think most people distinguish carefully enough between what the government does coercively and what is perhaps the result of voluntary action. I imagine the reporter at the Telegraph is one such individual who just introduced the notion of lockdowns being involved into their headline.

In the specific instance of Covid-19, for example, I imagine most people are unaware that the majority of social distancing that occurred was apparently voluntary prior to government lockdowns, which followed a few weeks later in most states after the mobility data has a sharp downturn. Many people I have discussed this with just assume that the slowing of the rate of growth of cases which has occurred was the result of the coercive lockdowns in cases where it occurred.

 

[PeterNSteinmetz]

"I imagine most people are unaware that the majority of social distancing that occurred was apparently voluntary prior to government lockdowns".

It is his statement, above, that is contradictory. He is implying people aren't aware of their own actions.

I don’t have an actual survey on this so this is anecdotal observations. However I don’t think it is necessarily contradictory.

It could simultaneously be true that people think they were social distancing but that most other people were not, correct?

This would be generally consistent with tending to view oneself as more virtuous than others.

There might also be an element of forgetfulness in what I hear now about social distancing from people and what happened some 8 weeks ago. People may simply not remember the sequencing of when they started social distancing and when the coercive lockdown orders were enforced.

 

[PeterNSteinmetz]

Disagree. A greater degree of care is should be expected of everyone. What a scientist does in their personal life should have no impact on their professional career. And that works both ways. What you do for a job doesn't have to have any impact on the validity of your opinions as an individual unless you yourself make such a claim. IOW if you don't want to exercise a greater degree of care, you don't have to. Just don't claim that you know what you're talking about because you're a scientist and you'll be fine. OTOH if you are going to hang your hat on 'I'm right because I'm a scientist' then yeah, you'd better have your game tight and in a line 100% of the time or your credibility will quickly come into question. In my opinion anyway.

I think this hits on an important distinction. IIRC, this subject arose previously in this thread when a poster attempted to make an argument from authority combined with a number of attacks on the speaker. I said essentially -- well, all right, if you are going to do that, then since you are writing under a pseudonym, who are you and what are your credentials? I agree that if one does not make an argument from authority, then one's credentials should not matter in terms of the argument.

Avoiding such issues is why I always try to avoid both fallacies, the appeal to authority and the ad hominem, when discussing things on public fora. More important here because we often don't really know the people we are discussing with and lack the normal social cues which are present in personal conversation. In my view, makes for more informative, polite, and enjoyable discussions.

I most certainly also agree that everyone posting about significant matters such as Covid-19 should try and be careful about sources, and particularly when citing them to support a specific point of argument, actually read and understand them first.

I do understand there is a further issue here when someone is employed professionally and the employer explicitly or implicitly effectively bans the employee from certain types of public speech. Then the ability to post anonymously is an important safeguard of free discourse. Those of us in the academic world have somewhat greater freedom in this regard, though less so in the biomedical sciences. Of course we pay for that freedom in terms of salaries and other benefits.

Re-reading this, I was just trying to figure out, do we actually see mostly eye-to-eye on these points? ;-)

 

[PeterNSteinmetz]

At this point, I'd be happy if they just stopped making so many wrong decisions.

Rich

This would be more easily achieved if they would just obey the idea of not using coercion to make people do things they don’t otherwise want to do unless you have clear evidence that what the people are doing is either harming others or imminently about to do so.

Stop coercing people based on guesses and theories and hopes.

 

[PeterNSteinmetz]

Lmao. This is funny.

Tim

Sent from my HD1907 using Tapatalk

Well, one can always dream.

"All men dream, but not equally. Those who dream by night in the dusty recesses of their minds, wake in the day to find that it was vanity: but the dreamers of the day are dangerous men, for they may act on their dreams with open eyes, to make them possible." T. E. Lawrence - aka Lawrence of Arabia.

 

[PeterNSteinmetz]

...
The right thing to do at that point would have been to shut down and disinfect MTA (the conduit), and quarantine the people (the vectors) in all of the counties served by MTA. It was the one instance of authoritarian coercion that actually would have made sense.

...
In the end, I don't disagree with you at all about the folly of imposing coercive measures that lack clear scientific evidence of efficacy. But I'm equally disgusted by failure to impose extreme measures for which there does exist evidence, such as quarantining areas where a virus is known to be endemic; and in the specific case of New York, the abject irresponsibility of imposing measures that anyone who even knew what a virus was should also have known would kill people.

Rich

Nice analysis of a bunch of problems with the response in NY. And I think it raises a few issues to think about from a liberty perspective:

The broadest one is how dangerous does an illness have to be in order to qualify coercion being used to control it as essentially self-defense or defense of others? How much risk of significant harm to others does a person of unknown Covid-19 immunologic status have to represent to justify using coercion against them -- either quarantine or a forced vaccination? I am actually discussing this in the context of forced vaccination at a talk this evening with a bunch of libertarians and it is an important theoretical issue for them. In the case of self defense with firearms we understand the defense standard fairly well -- how does that translate to an infectious disease situation like the present?

Another issue is whether one should regard New York's governments shutting down the public transportation which they own as a form of coercion? That strikes me as less coercive than many measures which have been taken. Certainly the original enforcement of the monopoly and use of tax dollars to pay for public transportation is coercive -- but what about then suspending normal operations of a system constructed and run by those means?

Finally I think there is an interesting argument here for the free market in transportation. NYC used to have a variety of privately owned systems. If that were still the case one of the advantages in this situation might be that the different owners would then be free to make their own decisions about closures based on the liability stemming from continued operation in the face of a pandemic. Some might have closed earlier than the government chose to, others later, we don't know. It might have spread the blow out and softened the edges even if not earlier decisions on average. I think this is just a specific form of Adam Smith's argument for the invisible hand of the market arising from the actions of a multitude of actors.

 

[PeterNSteinmetz]

All laws are backed by the possibility of enFORCEment, i.e. coercion. The fact that some individuals are not likely to violate certain laws does not alter the basic principle behind all laws.

To me, the repetitive and selective harping on coercion comes across as an emotionally-loaded argument.

The reason to emphasize the coercive nature of laws is that many people forget that coercion is being used when laws are passed, and with the possibility of up to lethal force being used to enforce them.

In this case, if you pass a law saying people have to close their businesses when the Governor says so due to a virus, it is important to note that means a SWAT team might be used to enforce the order, or people be held down by LEOs and beat over it. Best to be willing to do that if you pass the law.

And then if generally people don’t want that sort of force to be used and the laws not be enforced even when they are passed, that provides a selective enforcement regime which has at least two negative consequences - it erodes respect for laws and increases the power of LEOs and prosecutors since they now effectively control who had to obey them.

So I think those who are unwilling to face the coercion and possible violence of laws are trying to hide something and avoid responsibility for the laws they advocate for. Many people try to do this. And putting it explicitly out there is one way to persuade.

 

[PeterNSteinmetz]

Rd is a measure of the rate of growth of deaths, analogous to Rt for cases. Dashed vertical gray lines show the date of the lockdown in a state if a coercive lockdown was used. The question -- do you think coercive lockdowns slowed the rate of Covid-19 deaths?

Data source: covidtracking.com. Calculation of Rd starts when a state has 0.3 deaths/million people.

 

[PeterNSteinmetz]

It would be more interesting if you add movement based on cell phone data.
There have been some pretty interesting analysis based on relative cell phone mobility. e.g. The first month Georgia re-opened saw a minor increase in cell phone mobility, hence even though Georgia was "open" no one was going out.

Tim

Yes that is a good idea. Indeed one of my collaborators on this paper is working on that.

 

[PeterNSteinmetz]

I think it's a mistake to assume that changes in a public-health organization's guidance is evidence of something wrong. This is a new disease, with unusual characteristics. As new evidence comes in, scientists SHOULD change their thinking, and reflect that in their public statements. If they didn't, it would be propaganda, not science.

Unpacking the New WHO Controversy Over Asymptomatic COVID-19 Transmission

I think the flip-flopping is a sign that the evidence here is not particularly strong one way or another. Of course people like more certain answers, especially with high consequence problems, but sometimes that is not the way the world is.

My own view is that without high confidence evidence, it is best not to coerce other people to do things they don’t freely choose to do - in other words - err of the side of freedom.

That is of course not what many Governors chose to do.

 

[PeterNSteinmetz]

I think it's a mistake to assume that changes in a public-health organization's guidance is evidence of something wrong. This is a new disease, with unusual characteristics. As new evidence comes in, scientists SHOULD change their thinking, and reflect that in their public statements. If they didn't, it would be propaganda, not science.

Unpacking the New WHO Controversy Over Asymptomatic COVID-19 Transmission

I agree in one sense that scientists changing their minds based on new evidence is a good, not a bad, sign.

The function of public health organizations however is perhaps to be a bit more conservative and not be flip-flopping so much. I think the WHO and Fauci and the CDC to a lesser extent have have damaged their credibility in the public’s eye by having issued guidance for strong measures early on in the Covid-19 crisis based on little data and a feeling of urgency. Their job is not necessarily to be on the bleeding edge of scientific controversies.

 

[PeterNSteinmetz]

Study from England based on empirical measurement suggesting coercive lockdowns not needed - https://arxiv.org/pdf/2005.02090.pdf

 

[PeterNSteinmetz]

I am no math expert, but that seems like finding a model to meet preconceived concepts.
Also, when you look up the author, he has a series of papers about how the data is so bad you cannot model COVID-19.
Last point, has the paper been peer reviewed yet?

No, not peer-reviewed, it's on a pre-print server.

I believe that in this paper he derives an estimate from the data. It appears there are two primary items that enter into this aside from the death data themselves. The assumed infection to death interval distribution, which he takes from other datasets, and a smoothing penalty. I don't believe he adjusted either to optimize a particular result.

But I will likely read this paper in detail by early next week.