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July 22, 2023

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One of the things that struck me that day was the number of couples I saw where one person was wearing a mask (even outdoors) and the other wasn’t. I wondered how the conversations went in those households.

My sense is that there never was, and still isn't, a clear understanding of the fact that masks aren't intended to protect the wearer, but rather those around them. So I would suspect that the households involved have agreement that the person wearing the mask needs extra protection. Even though they aren't getting it that way.

In short, it probably doesn't reflect disagreement within the household. Just misunderstanding of what masks are for.

In short, it probably doesn't reflect disagreement within the household. Just misunderstanding of what masks are for.

We have the disagreement right here in our ObWi household. It's not an either/or; masks serve both purposes. See here or here or here or ... lots of other places.

Didn't somebody here recently quote this Pritzker advice? In any case, I thought this piece from today's Observer might amuse, about the 5 ways to spot an idiot:

So how do you spot an idiot? Well, says Pritzker, it’s not always easy. “I wish there was a foolproof way to spot idiots, but counterintuitively, some idiots are very smart. They can dazzle you with words and misdirection. They can get promoted above you at work,” Pritzker said. “They can even get elected president.”

That said, there are some major signs to watch out for. The best way to spot an idiot is to “look for the person who is cruel”, Pritzker says. “When someone’s path through this world is marked with acts of cruelty, they have failed the first test of an advanced society. They never forced their animal brain to evolve past its first instinct … Over my many years in politics and business, I have found one thing to be universally true – the kindest person in the room is often the smartest.”

That is very good advice. But it’s a shame, I think, that Pritzker didn’t elaborate further. I think we could all do with a bit more of a comprehensive guide, don’t you? So I’ve helpfully put together the beginnings of one. Behold, five golden rules for spotting an idiot.

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2023/jul/23/how-to-spot-idiots-jb-pritzker-northwestern-speech

So I would suspect that the households involved have agreement that the person wearing the mask needs extra protection. Even though they aren't getting it that way.

Couldn’t it just as easily be the wearer doing it to protect the non-wearer under your assumption that that’s how it works?

The "five golden rules" article is mostly to the point, except for:

Over the past decade, the world has worshipped at the altar of Stem
I suggest a sixth sign of idiocy - an antipathy to science and mathematics.

There might be some antipathy to science and mathematics in that framing, but I do think she is right to disagree with that particular Bankman-Fried statement, and I am sympathetic to what I think is her underlying argument, however muddled her framing of it might be.

Most of the students in my writing courses want to work in a STEM field and most of them especially value the dense, technical, concrete presentation of the scientific journal. It just sounds so smart and impartial and they want to write similar things so that they can sound impressive as well. The basic idea that they have is to overwhelm the reader's objections with hard data that proves their own point of view. And the gold standard they have for that is to find quantitative evidence from a peer reviewed journal to use as the centerpiece for every argument.

They don't get this idea out of nowhere. I hear this sort of opinion expressed a lot from STEM researchers and administrators alike.

The strategy is to limit uncertainty and eliminate any questions the reader might have, leaving them with only one choice.

But I always want them to start by listening and asking questions and spending time trying to understand what makes the issues messy in the first place. I want them to consider both the quantitative and the qualitative, the objective and the subjective, and try to find the approach that best integrates them all.

The answer they are looking for is almost always going to look more like a book and less like a six paragraph post. The extra words and time are not wasted.

I hear this sort of opinion expressed a lot from STEM researchers and administrators alike.

The strategy is to limit uncertainty and eliminate any questions the reader might have, leaving them with only one choice.

That represents a serious misunderstanding (or flat out ignorance) of what actually happens in STEM. In science, there are always questions. And in engineering, there is always uncertainty. Science is all about looking for answers in order to uncover new questions. As for engineering, the core question tends to be something like: "How close is 'close enough'?" Not absolute accuracy; just an approximation which will get the job done.** As for technology (i.e. computers), nobody who has ever looked at someone else's code is under the illusion that there was only once choice. Or that anything like the best choice was taken. (I don't know enough about math to say for sure. But I'd be surprised if there is total unquestioned certainty there either.)

STEM may look from the outside like it's all certainty and absolute answers. But, in my experience, it simply isn't. The goal might be to get there. Eventually. But it is, at best, a faint (and ever-receding) glimmer beyond the horizon.

** For how from perfect "good enough" is, consider how long the gadgets in your kitchen typically last. Vs how long various Martian landers, not to mention the Voyagers, have kept going under far more adverse conditions.

wj - I agree. However, the article writer did not attack STEM, but rather the public's conviction that STEM is the path to progress and that pursuit of art or philosophy is frivolous and unproductive. She's not attacking the method, but rather the perception of the method.

And from where I sit, a whole lot of people fundamentally misunderstand how science works, including a lot of STEM graduates and even a lot of successful, careerist STEM researchers.

(And just to forestall any overreading in the other direction, there are a whole lot of careerist Humanities researchers I know whose books, while they could not be reduced to six paragraphs, don't produce much of qualitative value with the pages that they do fill, either.)

Science is all about looking for answers in order to uncover new questions.

"Science is the belief in the ignorance of experts." —Richard Feynman

nous, I take your point. Fortunately, I think I'm seeing signs that we are moving away from the conviction that STEM is the be all and end all. The idea that it was important, and we were ignoring it, had some validity at the time. I'd call it a necessary course correction. But, as so often, we over-corrected.

We see the same phenomena with higher education. Making a college education available** to everyone who wants one and can benefit from it is, IMHO, a good thing. But the idea that college is the one and only path to economic success, to happiness in life, etc. is divorced from reality. What's really sad is that we are stepping back from the over-enthusiasm with having ever gotten the basic available problem addressed.

** Without incurring massive debt!

Lifted from an Anne Laurie post at BJ:

President Joe Biden will establish a national monument honoring Emmett Till and his mother, a White House official says. Emmett Till is the Black teenager who was tortured and killed in 1955 after being accused of whistling at a white woman in Mississippi.

Emmett Till, for the record.

President Joe Biden will establish a national monument honoring Emmett Till and his mother, a White House official says.

Any newspaper covering this will be banned from schools in Florida. Likewise any books listing our national monuments which include mention of this one.

wj: yep.

as so often, we over-corrected

I disagree. See, for example, RFK Jr's Covid and vaccine disinformation - a lawyer, with no scientific background, promulgates nonsense, and far too many people believe him.

I say that it's impossible to evaluate most evidence without some understanding of science and statistics. Anyone decrying STEM to justify their own ignorance says more about themselves than about STEM.

The enthusiasm for STEM I was referring to was at the university level. Certainly everybody ought to learn the basics. But there are lots of careers outside STEM, good paying, satisfying, valuable careers -- and for a while we seemed to lose track of that. Which is the point I was attempting to make.

See, for example, RFK Jr's Covid and vaccine disinformation - a lawyer, with no scientific background, promulgates nonsense, and far too many people believe him.

I say that it's impossible to evaluate most evidence without some understanding of science and statistics. Anyone decrying STEM to justify their own ignorance says more about themselves than about STEM.

Our major failings where disinformation and crankery flourish have somewhat to do with a lack of understanding of science and statistics, but I think it has even more to do with a complete lack of understanding of what actual scientific research looks like, coupled with a lack of good scientific outreach and generally poor reading comprehension.

The people who fall for pseudoscience don't fall for it because they attempt to work through the data and math and go wrong there, they fall for it because people like RFK misrepresent the findings, and the people who follow him don't have the patience, the access, or the critical reading skills to verify anything. And they don't have any personal connection to research or any personal networks that include researchers, so they fall into paranoid fantasies about the motives of the actual scientists involved in the research.

Even assuming that they were capable of learning more science and more statistics, I don't think that would eliminate the poor media literacy skills.

We need to do a better job of integrating science with communication and working on interdisciplinarity. Science needs better communicators - people capable of both the scientific understanding and the rhetorical know-how to communicate what that science means, and why and how that knowledge was produced.

I don't think that STEM is overemphasized so much as that it is too isolated and overspecialized. It needs to become more public-facing and more socially engaged.

I'm hoping that my copy of Michael Mann's The New Climate War arrives soon. It seems like he's aiming it towards what I am talking about, and I'm keen to learn more, and to try to convince my STEMmy students that they need to give outreach much higher priority than it currently has in scientific circles.

a lack of understanding of science and statistics

I have a collection of examples from news articles and opinion pieces, not of lack of understanding of statistics, but lack of understanding of the most basic arithmetic. I'm not at home right now so I can't offer examples, but we have a long way to go, and the problem is made worse by the non-stop news cycle, where there's no time for thought or copy editing or anything but whipping out some slick sound bite conclusions. And then, going back to the point the rest of you are making, the audience has no ability to evaluate the shoddy nonsense they're presented with -- even if it's NOT conspiracy theories and deliberate misinformation.

If you asked me— a random epidemiologist— four years ago the biggest lesson learned during a pandemic, I would have never guessed my answer today: Scientific communication. Not only the need but the how and what.

That’s because I was never trained in it. Many (if not all?) public health practitioners are not. It isn’t a core competency in our field, which became painstakingly apparent during our biggest test. It lost decades of trust.

From here. You can sign up and get her daily (?) offerings -- they're very good. I actually read most of them, unlike what I was doing with Heather Cox Richardson's daily pieces. Not that I didn't like Richardson, just that it was all too much on top of the news itself.

And as an afterthought, I'm kind of staggered at the fact that communication isn't a core competency of public health education. Wow!

One of my close friends is a public health professor. She works hard to try to teach her students to communicate, and she is well read and a good writer, but she has no training in a lot of writing pedagogy. She makes up for that by talking a lot to people who do have training in communication pedagogy (she's actually become quit practiced at it). Not all of her colleagues do that. And given the growth of Writing in the Discipline approaches to undergraduate writing requirements, that means that most of the people teaching the STEM writing classes are STEM professors with very little training in how to teach effective communication, who mostly just try to pass on what they do.

A lot of this actually comes down to budgetary practices more than anything else. Doing Writing in the Disciplines keeps the budget for the required upper division writing programs inside the department, where the core faculty get to choose who teaches the writing courses and what sorts of things get taught. That usually gets farmed out to either a new associate professor, or an advanced graduate student, who can be pushed to teach large sections to keep the cost down and leave more room in the budget for other things that boost grant revenue and institutional prestige. Writing courses should ideally have fewer than 20 students per faculty member, but that gets expensive and eats into the budget for hiring another specialist, so the numbers often rise close to 50 students and the reading and commenting gets passed to the TA's (who were just in a class like this a couple years prior and who have no training in writing pedagogy).

Writing gets a low priority because few of the people teaching in the STEM fields know enough about the subject to make effective decisions for their programs, and the administration doesn't care because no one sends their kid to a university for STEM based on the strength of their writing program.

Most people dislike dealing with stochastic processes. Most people dislike dealing with complex systems. Most people really dislike constructing and analyzing large formal models of complex stochastic systems.

I hold out little hope that more than a relative handful of people can be (or at least, are willing to suffer through being) trained in those disciplines. I have mixed feelings about exposing people at a "toy" level.

I'm kind of staggered at the fact that communication isn't a core competency of public health education. Wow!

Amen. Although I wouldn't be amazed to discover that it isn't considered a core competency in medicine generally. Even though it obviously should be.

Most people dislike dealing with complex systems.

I'm not so sure about that. Provided the complex system is in a field that they are interested in for other reasons.

There are few things in daily life more complex that an automobile. Or even just an internal combustion engine (with add-ons). Yet generations of teenage kids have been interested enough to dig into those complexities. And get quite good at understanding how the various parts not only fit together but how they interact and influence each other's performance.

My take, which may be influenced by where I am, is that the problem isn't communicating complex ideas, I think we (humans) have always been pretty shite at that, it's that we (humans) have become so convinced that we are right that we can't accept correction.

There is a group in the current generation of kids who are more than happy to figure out the complexities of cars, it's just that it isn't dealing with the engine, it is ECU tuning
https://www.makeuseof.com/what-is-ecu-tune-how-does-it-work/

A large number of other areas could be discussed, Sabermetrics, RPG, cosplay, yada yada. Just because we don't partake of them doesn't mean that
-they aren't complex and
-they don't require any effort to learn

However, we've reached a point where it is an affront to admit that we are wrong about almost anything. It's not the complexity, it is the toxic individualism.

However, we've reached a point where it is an affront to admit that we are wrong about almost anything. It's not the complexity, it is the toxic individualism.

Full circle back to the people who said "I'm doing my own research" about covid. I agree that toxic individualism plays a role, but I think another factor is that human life collectively is now resting on a bunch of mind-bogglingly complex systems, each of which a very few people understand, but all of which no one person understands.

That leads me to another phenomenon, the people who know something about one complex system or topic and therefore think they understand all the complex systems or topics. The OceanGate guy being the (dead) poster child for this at the moment.

But that's different from ordinary people who are just going about their day, without really having a clue about the complexities their (our) lives rest on. Supply chains. The internet. Mobile phones. Prescription drug manufacturing. Etc. etc. etc.....

The "people who know something about one complex system or topic and therefore think they understand all the complex systems or topics."

Is made *much* worse by the availability of Wikipedia. Ten minutes browsing some articles, and they're "instant experts", ready to argue with all comers, especially *actual* experts that have spent decades working in a particular area.

That used to be just a handful of loons that were nutso about some niche topic; but then some topics became "political", and the number of loons increased exponentially.

* See also RFK Jr.

One side effect of my earning a Ph.D. was the recognition of how much goes into gaining expertise, and a measure of respect for, and willingness to listen to, experts in other fields. It made me realize how much there is out there that I *don't* know.

The people who fall for pseudoscience don't fall for it because they attempt to work through the data and math and go wrong there, they fall for it because people like RFK misrepresent the findings, and the people who follow him don't have the patience, the access, or the critical reading skills to verify anything

...the people who said "I'm doing my own research"...

Yes, it's true that very few people are ever going to have the skills to evaluate a particular scientific paper properly. But one can have the awareness to recognise that one needs help to do one's own research, and that it shouldn't come from a lawyer.

We shouldn't try to make everyone into a STEM professional. But we should try to teach everyone what science is.

Meanwhile, journalists should refrain from asides knocking STEM education.

What Pro Bono said. But I should add, as someone who jokes (but not entirely) about being innumerate, that I am very much in the category of someone who has the awareness I need help, and I have science types that I shamelessly tap (as the US expression has it) for that help.

I did once say, many years ago, to the disbelief of one of the most highly educated people I know (mainly in the humanities) that I thought science, and physics in particular, was the most important area of study to understand how the world works. I still think it, and statistics, are pretty vital, but I have come round to the view so persuasively expressed by nous here, and in other places too, about how to render its tools less niche, and more available to the many:

We need to do a better job of integrating science with communication and working on interdisciplinarity. Science needs better communicators - people capable of both the scientific understanding and the rhetorical know-how to communicate what that science means, and why and how that knowledge was produced.

I don't think that STEM is overemphasized so much as that it is too isolated and overspecialized. It needs to become more public-facing and more socially engaged.

To me, "do your own research" means finding an alternative to the "official" story, which is the consensus of a large majority of the experts. That is, find any rando with a youtube video that exposes whatever conspiracy you prefer so you can call all the people who even tentatively take the word of experts sheep or, better yet, "sheeple." Then you're special, because you're smarter than all the suckers out there.

I do, however, recall falling momentarily for the "Stanford study" (it was no such thing) about how many people (lots more than thought) really had COVID, suggesting that it wasn't nearly as deadly as reported. But it turned out to be two doctors running an urgent care who based their conclusion on the percentage of people who tested positive after seeking a test at their urgent care. Now there's a representative sample!

Plenty of other people continued to run with it even after the flaws became apparent until they forgot about it and moved on to the next pile of horseshit that caught on. And so it goes....

Open thread, so: this is from an interview in today's Times with Grayson Perry, recently knighted (and probably the UK's least snobbish artist, and most famous transvestite). I've never been all that keen on most of his art (although it's very good on class), but I think he's one of our most interesting art and cultural critics.

The show is called Smash Hits. A potter’s joke. Perry is serious, but funny with it. “I’m fascinated by this tension around seriousness because, you know, increasingly, if I’m an activist about anything, it’s about humour. And the art world seems to think the opposite of serious is humorous. But that’s not true. The opposite of seriousness is triviality. Humour is not a trivial thing. It’s a hugely profound part of being human. And I think it’s a red flag when part of the culture can’t laugh at itself.”

I think this is absolutely true.

For anybody who isn't bothered by the paywall:

https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/grayson-perry-theres-a-delusion-that-good-politics-is-good-art-ngstk9h9f

Speaking of Stanford...

Although in fairness to Stanford, the study hsh mentions (if I'm remembering the correct one) had nothing actually to do with Stanford as an institution, it was just that one or more of the people who signed off on it were associated with Stanford.

the study hsh mentions (if I'm remembering the correct one) had nothing actually to do with Stanford as an institution

It sounds as though you do remember the correct one, Janie. That was the case as I recall, thus my scare quotes and parenthetical. The notion that it was a Stanford study in any meaningful way was part of the ruse.

hsh -- yes, I didn't mean to imply that you didn't realize that. (Rule against double negatives be damned!)

There were several that got traction in those early months that just didn't pass the straight face test -- another one was some big data guy's large model based on Sweden (IIRC), which was letting covid run rampant on the theory that getting to herd immunity fast was the best way to handle it.

I may be garbling this ... my point is just how plausible-sounding nonsense can be, especially when the "conclusion" matches one's own predilections and prejudices.

That a "big data guy" who doesn't know a damned thing about public health, infectious diseases, etc., can make valid conclusions about covid just from numbers is a perfect example of what we were talking about above -- e.g. Snarky's 10:29 commment from last night.

Snarky -> Snarki -- sorry, fingers do what they want sometimes.

Snarki by name,
Snarky by nature!

Even when scientists become better communicators, they still rarely are a match for professional BSers with no sense of shame. And the Gish galop is only an entrance level skill these days.

The phenomenon was already known to Cicero who noticed that professional orators are (or at least seem) more competent at talking about complex specialized themes than the actual experts. Some conclusions he drew from that have merit, others are imo quite off-the-mark or overshot.
For him a perfect orator would have to possess actual knowledge on all important topics and the experts would either have to learn oratory or get in contact with a professional orator (in modern terms: hire a communications expert/consultant).
But imo he vastly overestimated the capability of orators by sometimes turning his first argument on its head: if you can talk well about something, you automatically ARE an expert in it. Which in essence means that oratory is the primary skill and professional knowledge only secondary.
Although he quotes the famous anecdote about a Greek philospher holding a theroretical lecture on all things military in front of Hannibal (i.e. a 100% civilian trying to teach the basics of military tactics to a military genius), he applies the lesson only to purely theoretical orators trying to teach the art of oratory to experieneced practitioners (i.e. not as a lesson on acquiring expert knowledge outside oratory first before talking about a topic requiring it).

These days the old adage that a fool can ask more than 10 wise can answer has led to the conclusion that it is more lucrative to be the fool then because the audience consists of even greater fools (that are easy to separate from their money).

I don't think that STEM is overemphasized so much as that it is too isolated and overspecialized. It needs to become more public-facing and more socially engaged.

Can you give some examples of what you mean by "public-facing" and "socially engaged"?


FWIW, if the concern is that STEM people have limited written communication skills, I have broad anecdotal evidence that huge swaths of supposedly highly educated, under-40's have marginal writing skills. Houston is at least representative if not over-representative in terms of numbers of lawyers. The universal complaint of law firm owners and managers is that younger people cannot write and have a marginal work ethic (a correlation?). This observation applies from elite law school grads on down, many of whom have liberal arts and not STEM backgrounds.

Taking this a step further, regardless of one's views of lawyers in general, law schools (overall) attract academically higher performing students, both STEM and non-STEM. Across the board, even these high performers have poor writing skills.

A question a lot of employers have today is why aren't college and law school grads better writers? Another question is: why don't they know more? It's astonishing that the things I learned in HS come as a total surprise to people with 16-20 years of education.

To me, "do your own research" means finding an alternative to the "official" story, which is the consensus of a large majority of the experts.

In hindsight, do you think the "large majority of experts" should have paid more attention to the Great Barrington Declaration?

Can anybody give me an opinion on anything by Samuel R Delany? There is a books recommendation piece in the WaPo which sounds interesting, but a quick skim of Amazon leaves me uncertain. Almost all the speculative fiction recommendations I have had from ObWi over the years have been good.

In hindsight, do you think the "large majority of experts" should have paid more attention to the Great Barrington Declaration?

I haven't a clue.

After reading a bit about it, I can only wonder why you would ask that particular question. As far as hindsight goes, since we now know highly effective vaccines were developed very quickly, I'd say letting COVID go mostly unchecked to achieve herd immunity via infection would have been unwise.

As far as hindsight goes, since we now know highly effective vaccines were developed very quickly, I'd say letting COVID go mostly unchecked to achieve herd immunity via infection would have been unwise.

Ok, what "we know" or "what we now know" often turns on one's narrative of choice. The GBD was in counterpoint to the prevailing wisdom of the day (and therefore Coded Red) and was denigrated by the "experts" who were coded Blue. In hindsight, depending on one's narrative, the GBD people had useful observations at the time or they were idiots. The fact is, the GBD was adopted by thousands of medical professionals. I've read it and it is at least as authoritative--in my opinion--as the official view from Fauci et al.

My point is that experts disagree all the time and there is nothing in the world wrong with digging deeper or doing one's own research or what have you.

Many here at ObWi have very definite views on gender that have "expert" support but neither the views here nor the supporting experts are the majority view here or pretty much anywhere else.

To the larger point here, non-STEM people can understand much about STEM and, with some degree of effort and curiosity, acquire a measure of informed insight. But, STEM is hard work. Much harder than studying history or law or many of the softer social sciences (I exclude economics and psychology and maybe one or two others I've overlooked). STEM people have to work harder, their professions are much more practical and productive than history, poli sci, etc. and they deserve better pay.

Can you give some examples of what you mean by "public-facing" and "socially engaged"?

Cosmos, The Immortal Lives of Henrietta Lacks, Feynman's Six Easy Pieces, Science, Society, and the Search for Life in the Universe.

But moreso than these books, I'm talking about professional emphasis on what gets classified as "outreach" on your typical NSF grant, and more emphasis on trying to explain to the public what one's research means and how it is done. Big Science is too cloistered, and the work they do is too focused on generating profitable IP for their institutions and corporate partners. It needs to be reconnected to the general public. That might mean investing more in grants and asking specifically for programs and centers to include outreach, and the training of scientist/educators, in their projects.

As for why young people cannot write, I have said it before - it's too much emphasis on standardized testing. Test prep has crowded out all of the space that used to be given over to reading and writing more broadly - the sort of integrative work that shapes larger understanding. Students' lesson plans are so focused on creating clear outcomes and measurable results that the students have no idea what to do when not given directions about what to look at and how to write.

Learning to write well involves a sense of play and exploration. Standardized testing pedagogy has scheduled away all of that exploration and has turned the play towards more scripted ends. And we've trained 20+ years of teachers to see their jobs in these terms as well.

My point is that experts disagree all the time and there is nothing in the world wrong with digging deeper or doing one's own research or what have you.

Okay. But that's not what the people who, of late, bandy that expression about with gusto have in mind. It's finding any jackass with a theory they like and believing that over what most experts (tentatively) agree on. It's a term of art for the QAnon set.

The fact is, the GBD was adopted by thousands of medical professionals.

Ah, yes. There it is. Take these two excerpts from Wikipedia for what they're worth and with however many grains of salt you like, but also be aware that I've dug into this hobby horse of yours as much as I'm willing to.

While the authors' website claims that over 14,000 scientists, 40,000 medical practitioners, and more than 800,000 members of the public signed the declaration,[44][45] this list—which anyone could sign online and which required merely clicking a checkbox to claim the status of "scientist"—contains some evidently-fake names, including: "Mr Banana Rama", "Harold Shipman", and "Prof Cominic Dummings".[46][47][48] More than 100 psychotherapists, numerous homeopaths, physiotherapists, massage therapists, and other non-relevant people were found to be signatories, including a performer of Khoomei—a Mongolian style of overtone singing—described as a "therapeutic sound practitioner".[47] An article in The Independent reported that the false signatures put claims about the breadth of support in doubt.[48] Bhattacharya responded by saying that the authors "did not have the resources to audit each signature," and that people had "abused our trust" by adding fake names.[48]

(...)

Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, the Director-General of the World Health Organization, warned against the idea of letting the virus spread in order to achieve herd immunity at a 12 October 2020 press briefing, calling the notion "unethical". He said: "Herd immunity is a concept used for vaccination, in which a population can be protected from a certain virus if a threshold of vaccination is reached … Herd immunity is achieved by protecting people from a virus, not by exposing them to it."[11][14] Tedros said that trying to achieve herd immunity by letting the virus spread unchecked would be "scientifically and ethically problematic", especially given that the long-term effects of the disease are still not fully understood.[11][14] He said that though "there has been some discussion recently about the concept of reaching so-called 'herd immunity' by letting the virus spread", "never in the history of public health has herd immunity been used as a strategy for responding to an outbreak, let alone a pandemic."[11][14][49]

We don't know what the further course of the pandemic would have been had the GBD's recommendations been followed.

We do know that immunity acquired from infections is not as strong as the GBD hoped.

We do know that there were only two months between the GBD and the start of vaccine rollout, so that the declaration's alarm at the prospect of keeping lockdown measures in place until a vaccine became available seems misplaced.

We do know that restrictions introduced to limit Covid transmission were damaging.

We do not know how effective the GBD's proposal for "Focussed Protection" could or would have been.

Overall, and with the benefit of hindsight, I would have done some things differently if it had been up to me, but I would not have followed the advice of the GBD.

However, many of the policy questions were political or logistical, not scientific - how much harm are you willing to do to the young and healthy in order to save how many lives among the old and vulnerable? How many sick people can hospitals cope with? Given that we know only a distribution of outcomes, how much risk are you willing to take that reality is not at the bad end of the distribution?

there is nothing in the world wrong with digging deeper or doing one's own research or what have you.

As hsh implies, it all depends which sources you trust while "digging deeper" or doing your own research. There are ways to evaluate the
trustworthiness of sources, partly by their academic qualifications, previous publications, lack of conflicts of interest (I'm thinking for example of Andrew Wakefield and the famous anti-MMR and autism scandal), and the opinions/consensus of similarly expert sources. Sometimes (often), non-experts have to be particularly careful and thorough in choosing the sources they rely on (see Joe Rogan and Ivermectin, for example). And, FWIW, and as alluded to by Snarki upthread, it is often unwise to rely too much on info gathered on Wikipedia (which I frequently consult) when discussing anything with someone who is actually well-read on a subject.

A lot of what hsh and GftNC are talking about here gets glossed by my students as checking for bias and objectivity, but many people are quite good at simulating objectivity and performing a lack of bias.

What's lacking in many people's method of "going deeper" is a serious attempt to start from a position of understanding (which requires due diligence with the hermeneutic circle before stepping in to argue anything). I remember, vividly, hearing this from a professor of biblical hermeneutics when I was 18 and it has stuck with me my whole life: "If you go into a text with the idea that you already know the truth, then you are not actually engaging in a search for truth. Actual searches for truth require the reader to be open to being changed by what they read."

One should not mistake this openness with credulity, but you have to have some epistemological skin in the game or you are just confirming your own biases.

A lot of what hsh and GftNC are talking about here gets glossed by my students as checking for bias and objectivity

In my case, I think only the "conflict of interest" aspect relates to bias and objectivity. Checking the qualifications of a source relates more to standing. So, in the Nicholas Taleb - Mary Beard row, for example, Mary Beard had standing as a distinguished classicist and expert on the period to give an opinion on racial diversity in the Roman Empire, while Nicholas Taleb, whatever his qualifications as a statistician etc, did not.

https://iai.tv/articles/beard-nassem-taleb-twitter-feud-and-dangers-of-scientism-auid-868

And, serendipitously, the piece also refers to scientism, which we have been discussing, if obliquely:

Scientism is defined as the belief that the assumptions, methods of research, etc., of the natural sciences are the only ways to gather valuable knowledge or to answer meaningful questions. Everything else, to paraphrase Taleb, is bullshit.

No worries, GftNC, I mentioned how my students thought of those topics in order to show what sort of sense of media literacy was being passed on to people in the US in high school as a sort of benchmark for somewhere in the middle of the bell curve. They are generally in the top few percentiles of their HS class, and while they are less well read and less experienced than the older public, they are also (on balance) less willfully hobbyhorsical than a lot of the older people I know who fall to woo, quackery, conspiracy, and pseudoscience.

Which is to say, I don't think that the average person is particularly nuanced in how they think about media literacy and that's before people start playing upon their fears, confirmation biases, and lack of time and access for serious research.

I knew Taleb slightly before he was famous. It's fair to say that celebrity hasn't made him any more tolerant.

Taleb was inexcusably rude in the twitter exchange with Beard, but right on the fact that Aethiopes do seem to have been very few in Roman Britain. Beard was, I suppose deliberately, and consistent with Roman attitudes, declining to assign the same importance to skin colour.

It was Taleb's fault that they were talking past each other rather than having a conversation. But I don't see that that has anything to do with the merits of scientism, however defined.

anti-MMR and autism scandal

I've noted this before, the anti-MMR was, I think, spawned by a perfectly decent observation, that autism symptoms seemed similar to mercury poisoning symptoms. This they was linked to vaccination regimes as an explanation for autism. This allowed people who were against vaccinations to lean into that.

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6122668/

I'm sure some of them were sincere in their beliefs, but others simply used it as a opportunity to leverage opposition.

A journalistic investigation also revealed that there was a conflict of interest with regard to Wakefield’s publication because he had received funding from litigants against vaccine manufacturers, which he obviously did not disclose to either his co-workers nor medical authorities

It's interesting that the anti-MMR movement provided a foundation for anti COVID vaccines. An excerpt

Online anti-vaccination authors use numerous tactics to further their agendas. These tactics include, but are not limited to, skewing science, shifting hypotheses, censoring opposition, attacking critics, claiming to be “pro-safe vaccines”, and not “anti-vaccine”, claiming that vaccines are toxic or unnatural, and more [42]. Not only are these tactics deceitful and dishonest, they are also effective on many parents. A study that evaluated how effectively users assessed the accuracy of medical information about vaccines online concluded that 59% of student participants thought retrieved sites were entirely accurate; however, out of the 40 sites they were given, only 18 were actually accurate, while 22 were inaccurate. These sites were not evidence-based and argued vaccines were inherently dangerous without any merit-based argument. More than half of participants (53%) left the exercise with significant misconceptions about vaccines [43]. Research has also shown that viewing an anti-vaccine website for merely 5 - 10 minutes increased perceptions of vaccination risks and decreased perceptions of the risks of vaccine omission, compared to visiting a control site [44]. The study also found that the anti-vaccine sentiments obtained from viewing the websites still persisted five months later, causing the children of these parents to obtain fewer vaccinations than recommended [45]. The role of the online access to false anti-vaccination information just cannot be understated in examining the rise and spread of the anti-vaccination movement.

As lj says, the MMR scare in the USA pointed to the use of thiomersal, an organomercury preservative, in the vaccine. But the scare inspired by Wakefield in the UK was different: his theory was that live virus in the vaccine was causing colitis which was linked in some way to autism.

I confess that I "did my own research" before my son was giving the MMR vaccine in 2003. As I recall, my view was that Wakefield's stuff was unconvincing but perhaps there was something there. My late wife, a medical doctor, told me that the scare was utter tosh. I reasoned that she was better informed than I, and cared just as much. So I shut up about it.

Pro Bono, thanks for that. I didn't realize that Wakefield had a whole other theory. A quick wikipedia dive
He was a surgeon on the liver transplant programme at the Royal Free Hospital in London and became senior lecturer and honorary consultant in experimental gastroenterology at the Royal Free and University College School of Medicine. He resigned from his positions there in 2001, "by mutual agreement", then moved to the United States. In 2004, Wakefield co-founded and began working at the Thoughtful House research center (now renamed Johnson Center for Child Health and Development) in Austin, Texas, serving as executive director there until February 2010, when he resigned in the wake of findings against him by the British General Medical Council.

It underlines how these things can be very protean, with the justifications for opposing shifting to take advantage of changed circumstances.

No doctor or scientist I knew took Wakefield seriously, so I agitated very heavily (and I am happy to say successfully) for my beloved goddaughter to have the MMR, while her mother was wavering. Meanwhile, I read that doctors are worried about a possible measles epidemic, because of an insufficiently vaccinated population.

"It underlines how these things can be very protean, with the justifications for opposing shifting to take advantage of changed circumstances."

So, like the malaria protozoa, but for memes?

And yes, my attitude is generally "the 'meme' meme is a dangerous meme: kill it with fire."

Oh, poor Sinead O'Connor. How sad. RIP at last.

Thanks, GftNC. I was just coming here to post that news. I didn't pay particular attention to Sinead, but for a time I was deeply immersed in Irish music and carrying my fiddle over to visit my Irish girlfriend several times a year. And somehow, today, Sinead seems to me to be the very embodiment of Ireland and all my memories.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Tgwtl-s0CNI

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=keWnPZOd2cw

Very sad to hear of her passing.

That debut album of hers still gives me chills. She put so much into that voice of hers, unfiltered and unfeigned.

She was so brave in her outspokenness about so many things. And, I find myself hesitating before I say this, but surely it is permissible now to say that she was astonishingly beautiful, which is only appropriate if she was for a while the embodiment of Ireland in all its contradictions.

This song more than any (Troy, off of the debut) transfixes me with its incredible presence and power:

https://youtu.be/mRm2xWVHwdA

I had never heard that, nous. Not that that's so surprising, her music was not what I was most familiar with about her. But that is really something. And its reference to the Yeats poem No Second Troy (which I always found electrifying, even before many years ago I met an old lady who told me that when a girl she had seen the dead body of Maud Gonne, the great unrequited love of Yeats's life, about whom he wrote this poem as so many others) was an extra frisson for me.

Why should I blame her that she filled my days
With misery, or that she would of late
Have taught to ignorant men most violent ways,
Or hurled the little streets upon the great,
Had they but courage equal to desire?
What could have made her peaceful with a mind
That nobleness made simple as a fire,
With beauty like a tightened bow, a kind
That is not natural in an age like this,
Being high and solitary and most stern?
Why, what could she have done, being what she is?
Was there another Troy for her to burn?

surely it is permissible now to say that she was astonishingly beautiful, which is only appropriate if she was for a while the embodiment of Ireland in all its contradictions

I'll sign on to this.

My first visit to Ireland was in 1979 (long before the girlfriend). I stayed with a high school friend who had married an Irishman, and at one point we had reason to visit a priest's residence to get a baptismal certificate. The housekeeper came to the door, the very embodiment of a particular and familiar archetype ... and the whole episode made me feel that Ireland was still in some dark age in relation to the church compared to the US. (Though that might have been more due to my own defining rejection of Catholicism in the late sixties and early seventies, I'm not sure.)

Ireland got its game on and legalized divorce, abortion, and same-sex marriage (the latter a little before we did in the US, and by referendum). They broke the power the church had wielded over the people, and sláinte to them for that. (And praise to Sinead, as you say, for standing up to the evil out loud.)

I'm sure I've posted all of these here before, but what the heck.

Lake Isle of Innisfree.

Following up on the second of the three young readers in the previous link, some background Ireland and the Choctaw. (I happen to be rereading Nuala O'Faolain's novel "My Dream of You," which includes as a novel within a novel a fictionalized version of a true (love?) story set in the time of the so-called famine. About which I won't get myself started.)

Lovely short film about coming in to Ireland as a (soon to be former) stranger.

Someone on BJ quoted the following from a NYT piece from a couple of years ago:

O’Connor is happy being on her own, with her garden and her Mayfair cigarettes and her iPads and her “imaginary boyfriend,” Taye Diggs, to keep her company via episodes of “Murder in the First.” “I haven’t been terribly successful at being a girlfriend or wife,” she said. “I’m a bit of a handful, let’s face it.”

That is so Irish -- I can hear several people I knew over there saying it, cigarette in hand, just like the picture that heads that article.... (I was astonished when Ireland banned smoking in public places, including the pubs. I don't know how many of the people I knew then still smoke, since I don't know them anymore. Sad to say.)

Ireland got its game on and legalized divorce, abortion, and same-sex marriage (the latter a little before we did in the US, and by referendum). They broke the power the church had wielded over the people, and sláinte to them for that.

Had to go off for a little while, so I haven't followed the subsequent links yet, but I just wanted to say that seeing Ireland cast off the dead black hand of the church, with all its repressive patriarchal power, and embrace rights for women and gay people, has been one of the few really cheering developments around a world which seemed mainly to be going in the opposite direction. And Sinead O'Connor was definitely a face of the rejection of the church, and not just when she tore up the picture of the pope on SNL.

(I was receiving treatment from an Irish nurse a couple of years ago, and when I asked her if she had been "home to vote" (i.e. to repeal the 8th amendment, thus legalising abortion), and she told me she had, with some of her fellow
- including male - nurses, we both started crying. It was a rare time of joy and transformation.)

Janie, thanks for those links. Seeing that young boy again, reading the Lake Isle so fluently, and being reminded of the Choctaw-Ireland connection, was lovely. And that short film was rather lovely too.

I love Ireland, and often the Irish too, although I haven't been back for some years. Maybe one of these days.

Maybe one of these days.

I've been saying that for twenty-nine years, though when what's her name and I broke up I was distraught at thinking that I might only get over there once every year or so instead of every few months.

I don't expect ever to go back at this point. Sometimes that seems okay, sometimes not so much.

Between Sinead and The Waterboys, 1987 - 88 was probably the high water mark for WB Yeats in popular music:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DDkK4VrmFQQ

Thanks for that link, nous. I haven't listened to the Waterboys for a long time, it's nice to be reminded.

"When was the high water mark for WB Yeats in popular music" would be a great trivia question, lol. ;-)

I remember "Nothing Compares 2 U" - which is actually a cover version of a Prince song - being on very heavy rotation in 1990 to the point were everyone got a bit fed up with it (just like "Tom's Diner"). But it was a very good song and of course it was a very interesting year.

I also bought "Am I Not Your Girl?" two years later, an album with cover versions of (jazz) standards which I played over and over.

She seems to never have gotten over her childhood traumata which is very sad and makes one think.

The recent doc "Nothing Compares" seems to be very good:

https://www.rottentomatoes.com/m/nothing_compares

Btw, has anyone watched "Oppenheimer". I did last night and despite an impressive cast and some great moments, I found it pretty underwhelming, mainly because it fails to bring us any closer to the character and botches the treatment of the ethical questions.

I loved that Waterboys album, which I was unaware of at the time but which a friend turned me on to a mere 15 or so years ago. I still play it often - most of what I listen to is old faves. I read that that Yeats track was very difficult to record, because the old guy reading it (who I think is very eminent in some field or other) couldn't read while the music and the beat were going on, no matter how many times they tried, so in the end they had to record him alone and put the music on later.

Still hoping for an opinion on Samuel R Delany, BTW, in case people just missed that. nous, your recommendations are normally ace, and the same applies to many here ...

I remember "Nothing Compares 2 U" - which is actually a cover version of a Prince song - being on very heavy rotation in 1990...

A friend of mine who was a punk and metal drummer was asked at that time by a neighbor if he could play that song and responded with a shrug, "Uh, I guess so." So they went to the basement to give it a go.

Afterward, my drummer friend said, "It's really hard to keep time playing that slow (sic)!"

Oh my god, so beautiful in every way:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mWIaP0NnEOQ

For what it's worth:

Bard on Delany

It's been quite a few decades since I've read any of Delany's books. I remember very little. I would likely remember a bit more if I were to reread the books. I remember his books being very different from the run-of-the-mill space operas.

Thank you for taking the trouble, Charles, but I have to admit that I only really trust opinions from people I have reason to believe have good (or at least similar to my) taste, and Bard does not fit that definition! But, as I say, thank you anyway.

I read Babel-17 maybe 50 years ago. The plot is constructed around an exaggerated Sapir-Whorf hypothesis which made it too fantastic for my taste - I never read anything else by Delany. But the novel was well written so perhaps I should have done.

It's hard for me to know what to recommend from Delany's many books because so very much depends on the reader's patience and expectations. I think most Delany admirers would say that Dhalgren is his most accomplished work, but it's also very much the sort of thing that might provoke the same sort of reaction that Joyce produces in wj - and for many of the same reasons.

His earlier works (Babel- 17 and The Einstein Intersection) are *a bit* more straightforward in narrative structure without being any less conceptually sophisticated. Still not simple narratives, though. Delany is always audacious and ambitious in his ideas. He's provocative more in the manner of Joanna Russ than Ursula Le Guin, willing to let the reader hang up on the difficult bits.

Nova also gets a lot of mentions as one of his great works, and it strikes me as being somewhere in the middle. It's deeply intertextual and full of metanarrative, but has more of a narrative through-line than Dhalgren - more Moby Dick than Ulysses.

No matter what, though, you are going to get a lot of mythological structures, Jungian archetypes, and metanarrative reflections on the interrelation of language and reality. The stories are also deeply queer in a way that highlights the overlap between queer and speculative literature. It's that deep alterity that makes his writing feel closer in spirit to Russ than to Le Guin.

His writing is often beautiful. He reminds me of James Baldwin if Baldwin were writing mythology under the influence of psychedelics.

Don't know if this helps much at all, but there's nothing about Delany that isn't challenging.

I started Dhalgren, went back to it a couple of times but never finished it. It was an interesting but challenging slog.

Ha, now we're talking. I had to look up the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, and was immediately interested, so I reckon I'll try with Babel - 17. Also, since Abebooks continues to save me from bankruptcy with books which have been out for a while, I lose very little (£3.71!) if I really can't get on with it.

Thank you all.

I read Dhalgren as part of my exam lists for grad school - maybe Nova as well, though it's all a bit of a blur. So many books to cram through in such a short amount of time.

Read Gravity's Rainbow and The Naked Lunch around the same time. So much reading, so little narrative thread to hold on to.

Hmm...did I read Nova or Nova Express...or did I read both and they just blurred into one big conceptual stew?

Open thread... Yesterday I had the 6- and 9-year-old granddaughters for the whole day. One of the things we did was spend two hours in my neighborhood park. They attracted other kids because they had a grandfather who was able and willing to spin the merry-go-round in the upper-80s heat and play silly games with it. (Merry-go-round looks like this, about 15-foot diameter at the bottom.) At some point I looked around and found that I had seven little girls, ages about five to ten, and none of the mommies were anywhere in sight.

I don't think any of the little girls realized that some of the spinning activities were balance and footwork drills.

Sounds fun, Michael. Brings back memories of playground equipment from long ago, and less long ago ... but I'm about 35 years out of date at this point. Maybe I'll get re-educated when the grandchild gets a few years older. Bet those moms will always be happy to see you coming..... :-)

At some point I looked around and found that I had seven little girls, ages about five to ten, and none of the mommies were anywhere in sight.

Seven little girls and one adult male. In some jurisdictions that might get you arrested. And their mothers. Fortunately, a number of states are passing laws to prevent parents from being arrested for child neglect and engagement if they're not present watching their kids every second when the kids are out in public. One calculation says that for a kid in the US to have even odds of being kidnaped by a stranger, they would have to play by themselves for 750,000 years.

Fear (and paranoia) have been pushed on an industrial scale in so many areas, that people have apparently lost the ability to do realistic threat assessment. Or never learned it.

The stuff we routinely did as grammer school kids, e.g. ride our bikes 5 miles to town to the library on our own, seem inconceivable to today's parents. Who, in my observation, cannot imagine letting their child walk three blocks to school without an escort. Sad.

In many places, parents who are inclined to allow their kids out in public unsupervised run the risk of having their lives turned upside down by busybodies, police, and child protective services.

novakant: Btw, has anyone watched "Oppenheimer". ... I found it pretty underwhelming, mainly because it fails to bring us any closer to the character and botches the treatment of the ethical questions.

I have not seen any movie less than 5 years old for a couple of decades now. Inspired by the hoopla, however, I binge watched the 1980s BBC miniseries last weekend, on YouTube. Sam Waterston as Oppenheimer, David Suchet as Teller. Lots of focus on the ethical issues in the last couple of episodes.

Wasn't it also BBC who made the Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy miniseries with Alec Guinness as Smiley long ago? Loved it; hated the recent-ish Hollywood version.

--TP

Tony P: It was indeed the BBC. That series was a masterpiece, I must now have watched it at least 4 or 5 times.

Tony P, in case you didn't know, they also made a follow-up series with Guinness as Smiley, called Smiley's People. It was not as good, but had many incidental pleasures, and the only cast change was someone else as Peter Guillem.

I get Ruth Reichl's newsletter with my foodie hat on, but this one has a fascinating piece from 1978 on Frank Oppenheimer, Robert Oppenheimer's brother, and his wonderful sounding museum The Exploratorium. Next time I am in San Francisco, I will certainly try to go to its modern incarnation, although I bet it will be a lot less fun.

https://ruthreichl.substack.com/p/and-now-for-something-a-little-bit?utm_source=substack&utm_medium=email

The Exploratorium is indeed a local gem.

For anyone interested in Oppenheimer, the great, Oscar nominated documentary "The Day After Trinity"

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Day_After_Trinity

is available for free on the Criterion Channel until August (if you're not in the US/Canada you need to use some trickery to watch it)

https://www.criterionchannel.com/

It's really good and I think Nolan could have saved himself and us a lot of time.

https://www.nytimes.com/2023/07/27/movies/day-after-trinity-oppenheimer-documentary.html

Delany: in retrospect I believe Triton was a major influence on me in my youth, but I've been afraid to go back and reread it to confirm.

STEM and communication: despite working at one of the (allegedly) top software organisations in the world it's a constant struggle to get experienced engineers to approach their jobs the way that quoted Bible Studies encouraged. Design in a spirit of inquiry, not thinking you already know the solution. Give alternatives serious consideration.

I usually lose.

Ohio, hallelujah!

(I'm thinking along the lines of Mississippi, Goddamn)

The abortion issue does seem to be accelerating the GOP death spiral. Not that, between Trump and DeSantis, it showed any signs of losing momentum.

RIP Robbie Robertson.

Damn, damn, damn.

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