logjammin

Thanks for posting this. As someone in public health research, I really appreciate being able to get as close as possible to empirical findings about corona. It helps me deal both rationally and emotionally with the crisis. Obviously "it's just a preprint", but this is great to have -- leagues better than a watered-down and panicked-up version from cross-eyed cable news hosts.

I've found that the major scientific and biomedical research journals - the BMJ, the Lancet, the NEJM, JAMA, Science, Nature - collectively have some of the best stuff on coronavirus out there. It's not as fast as the news, but it's a hell of a lot more rigorous.

"it's well beyond containment IMHO"

This depends on how you're defining containment. Grounding aircraft may not decrease the current case count, you're right, but it may help not adding to it, or adding as much, or as fast. Because of this, it may still be worth doing.

The notion that we're going to abandon containment measures in favor of mitigation, which I've seen in many places (not in your comment though of course), is wrong. We're going to be doing both.

Really? Which supplements?

What evidence can you point to of this "hiding"?

Lack of adequate testing is a factor, I Grant you, and a big one -- but clusters are discovered late because it now appears that people can shed virus when they're not symptomatic.

Hell yeah! Cool to be able to share that eureka moment with others who know the area. Spread the word.

I spent a lot of time in Vermont many years ago. I'd been there a little while, blissfully unaware, before someone told me "yeah, they banned billboards here in the sixties - you didn't notice?" I hadn't consciously noticed, no, but I'd spent my time there until that comment driving around stunned at how beautiful the place was. Now I knew the reason for that (well, partial reason - billboards or not, it's a pretty part of the world, especially in summer and fall).

I've thought a lot about that billboard ban ever since, and I'm convinced it enabled a measure of calm in me.

I'm not sure how much I buy the study talked about in the OP's article - spurious correlation strikes me as a possibility - but the intuition about advertising is spot-on, I think. It'd cool if our societies had more ad-free spaces.

This makes a sort of sense, but only if you know little about the drugs in question - antipsychotic drugs, formerly known as neuroleptics - which do not target nor act on any demonstrated pathology, lesion, or abnormality. What the drugs do do, as much in dementia as in psychosis, is "make it so [you] can't think", as Walter L. tells us. To the extent that anyone, with any diagnosis, is helped because of these compounds, it's because of their extreme tranquilizing effects on both the mind and visible behavior.

You're right that the ethics of the whole thing aren't clear. But a fair discussion of the ethics of cautiously using these drugs for dementia in willing participants - much less rampant, off-label uses in contexts for which there's no empirical evidence of their effectiveness (no FDA indication for any of these drugs for any dementia) - would include an honest conversation about the historical uses of prescribed psychotropics, and of political and economic power in the mental health professions and medicine more generally. Such a historical look would show that stories like this one are far from an abnormality, and that coercion, to greater or lesser degrees, is the norm. Some proportion of people taking these drugs (for any reason) undoubtedly do so of their own volition, and some of these may even derive a benefit from them. I have no objection to this. But vast numbers of people have no such luck, and are forced to take these drugs for some reason or another.

Many of these people are difficult: they're old and agitated and their dementia's getting worse, or perhaps they're yelling to themselves in the street, half-naked, rambling incoherently and looking fairly menacing, etc. What do the rest of us want with difficult people? We want'em out of our way (in a nursing home, say) and we want'em nice and calm. The drugs in this article do exactly that. No one with enough time in the mental health professions, or in geriatrics, is under any illusions about this.

"They want docile" is exactly right. So any discussion about the ethics involved here should also ask: "what are the ethics of coercing people to calm down with drugs?"

Agreed. I'm much more comfortable with "this is my take on this subject, and here's how I'm a bit biased, but I'll try anyway to be as objective as I can as well" than "this is the way things are"-style proclamations.

Are holding people to (moral, ethical) account and looking at problems from a systems perspective mutually exclusive?

These are systems problems, I fully agree, but they aren't only systems problems. The systems in question are people. They have minds, personalities, and agency. Eliding this - sorry for saying so - makes phrases like "whatever process created the flawed product [...]" sound absurd, borderline callous.

I hate to resort to what by now is a web forum trope, but would you look the MAX victims' families in the eye and say, word for word, what you wrote above: "No, 'they' shouldn't" be held to account? Come on dude.

"Apparently the only design of the MCAS system the FAA saw was limited to a 0.6 degree deflection [of the stabilizer] at high speeds and only single deflection only. And that was changed and ... it is still unclear how that could happen ... it was changed to multiple activations, even at high speed, and each activation could move the stabilizer as much as 2.5 degrees, and there was no limit to how often it could activate." (~28min; emphasis added)

For me, in a crisis with a lot of burning questions, one I haven't seen raised much is: who changed the MCAS behavior after the FAA "saw" the first version? Someone decided this should happen, and someone implemented it (perhaps the same person). Forget the C-suite for a moment; someone in middle management made this call. Shouldn't they answer for it?

Not sure why this is greyed out, but I appreciated your comment. Is Forest School a thing beyond where you live, do you know?

As a big fan of their Nexus line of mobile phones, I concur. They weren't perfect, but they were solid, stock Android devices at a reasonable cost.

Then they ditched them all of a sudden, and now we have premium-priced Pixels that fall well short of the competition.

You're right about this, of course, but ESPN has stuff of this quality on a pretty darn slow drip given the talent they have and the even greater talent they could afford if they decided to make quality investigative / long form stuff a real priority.

I suspect the fact that they do it at all is that it's some enlightened manager's little feifdom that they protect and that it'll be gone as soon as that person finds another gig or retires. I doubt that dyed-in-the-wool corporate types are in love with these operations, as sad as it is.

I've owned a number of OnePlus phones - 3 or 4 at this point - and am tapping this post out on a new OP7 Pro. I really like the hardware, and no device has ever felt poorly made or unfinished, nor have they broken down on me. OS updates are relatively fast for a non-Google manufacturer, too, though they could be faster. The price has been creeping up as the rest of the market gets more premium, but even this new flagship phone is significantly cheaper than an equivalent iPhone.

I'm resigned to OP beaming everything I do to PLA military intelligence or whatever, but frankly I don't do much on my phone anyway besides surf and YouTube.

Customer service has been great whenever I've needed it, which hasn't been much.

This is a really good case for quantitative finance, and it's also really clear, so thanks for both. Consider my perspective changed for the better.

There's still a bit of dissonance in this for me, but it's abstract and strays a bit what you're saying, so don't feel a need to respond: I think, for example, about the friends and acquaintances I have in finance who I've often heard lament about the lack of meaning, utility, and social value in their work despite the good pay. They're smart men and women, every single one, so I'm sure they know they case you're making - so what gives? (This is clearly more a question for them than for you.)

I also wonder idly what proportion of the explosion in the finance industry since the 1970's is taken up by the sorts of plainly beneficial and useful efforts you describe, and what proportion is simply craven, greedy bullshit. Clearly the latter is more salient in the cultural and moral imagination, in no small part because of the Madoffs and the Beskys and the Milkens of the world, not to mention everyone involved in the 08 crisis. That the former isn't as salient makes me think, like, how many Jack Bogles are there for every Gordon Gekko? I know a ton of Gekkos - I went to college with them! - but few Bogles.

Thanks for this. What you say about proportion of compensation makes a sort of sense, but I don't have the chops or the knowledge of the field to evaluate it. The 'easy to measure' thing is definitely insightful and useful to me as I think about it. Money does have that clarity to it.

The "hacking a casino" thing I'll defend, though: to the extent that getting better at gambling games and finance both can involve prediction, probabilities, data collection, and the like, I don't see how the analogy fails on anything but its crudeness, which I'll happily grant (while also saying I was going for a chuckle with it). I didn't mean to imply that getting good at either is something to be embarrassed about, only that it feels a little ... maybe "small", next to other concerns. I think that superlatively intelligent people do have god-given opportunities the rest of us don't have, and that while they're free to do as they please, the rest of us sometimes hope they'll use them wisely (and, selfishly in this case, to our benefit in some small way).

I'll also say that I meant "hack" in the older, more optimistic 1970's way, like "figure out what makes it tick and do cool things with it" instead of the more sinister modern sense. I don't attribute any malice or ill intent to Simons/RenTec, at least not without evidence.

I guess I could reinterpret/update my comment in light of what you've said to now say that "whatever value these men and women are creating inside this secretive firm, there's a strong case to be made that it's not the most urgent or needed kind these days".

I'm curious and sincerely so, though, when I ask: what actual value does quantitative finance create?

This is really interesting, and what I'm about to say makes me feel more bleeding-heart than I feel I am most days, but there's something deeply melancholy about the fact that this collection of the best intelligence our species has to offer, working together to achieve something utterly unheard of - so unheard of that many other smart people think there's something criminal going on - is exerting its collective effort to - when you put it in plain English - hack a casino.

We're hurtling at an accelerating rate to ecological ruin, with millions (hundreds of millions?) of deaths a plausible outcome in the next 100 years, not to mention a fall in the standard of living for basically everyone, and our best and brightest are doing the Manhattan Project of cash.

As a stupid person, I can't do much other than shrug - hell, I can't even say I wouldn't do the same as these brain-genius PhDs if I had their capabilities. But it still kinda sucks, is all.

_Wage war. Die trying._

Yes. That's ultimately why the Cataluña thing is a paper tiger issue: Catalans are too rich and too soft to really break away.

I'm not saying they're not allowed to have grievances, nor that they don't have any legitimate ones, but these people live extremely comfortable lives in a highly (_highly_) autonomous part of a relaxed, modern, Western nation. The independence stuff is mostly posturing. There's a good saying in Spain about this these days, roughly translating to "Catalans don't want to secede; they want to be secessionists."

It's cosplay revolution, and the rest of Spain has a good case for losing its patience with it. They want to break away, but no, sorry, the rest of the country is not allowed to have a say in the matter? Some Catalans (a minority, everyone seems to forget!) want their own country, but they also want it to be handed to them voluntarily by their "oppressor" in Madrid? They want to commit crimes but they expect not to be sent to jail?

At this point I'd almost be grateful for a Catalan Lenin of some sort; at least then we'd know there's an adult in the room.

I know zero about engineering (or even ethics, heh) but this comment seems plausible and well-reasoned enough to not be anonymously greyed out, which seems a bit tattle-tale-y , to be honest.

Not to mention child sexual abuse scandals in these communities in the NYC area.

Edit: hadn't seen an earlier poster's comment on this, my bad.

Edit 2: it's worth mentioning that the fraud/welfare issue is a massive political hot-button topic in Israel: many Israelis resent having to pay taxes to support hasidim who in many cases don't contribute to society: they don't serve in the army, they don't work, they don't go to university, but they have lots of children and get welfare for them and themselves. Current electoral brouhaha over there is at least partly driven by related issues and the overall religious-secular divide. It's fascinating reading!

It's bizarre. What's with the name? The bits don't fit together. Sounds like a low-rent acting school. If it's an an academy, can I take classes?

And it's ... The Blink-182 guy?

Edit: mostly unrelated: we're all taking issue with a book review. Gopnik's forming his own opinions here, sure, and we can take issue with them, but, like, has anyone actually evaluated the claims the authors are making? I'm guessing the Cambridge historian has more to back up his arguments than Gopnik (or any of us, for that matter) has, right?

Reading through the ~60 comments in this thread, I'm surprised that such a large number of HN readers appear so eager to dispute Gopnik's assertion that spying is probably not all it's cracked up to be. (Which is only half of his entire take: that, while spying isn't all it's cracked up to be, it's still probably somewhat necessary.) Not only is it not clear how many HN people are intelligence professionals, making a lot of the judgment here pretty speculative -- it points to a weird lack of civic, uh, maybe spirit is the right word: presented with some evidence indicating that the cloak-and-dagger people we permit to run wild in the shadows may not be all that competent, the response isn't "well how could we verify this?" but an odd faith that a hole into which we as a country throw piles upon piles of money without getting anything in return is actually running really smoothly, it's just that we the public aren't allowed to know about it because we haven't been given the access. It sorta bugs me: we allowed spies to run around in the first place; who's giving who access here?

A common response to the article is a sort of "publication bias" argument, that "well, we only seem to hear about espionage failures because the successes are likely to be kept under wraps." But I think this gives these people (intelligence professionals) a bit too much credit -- and looks weirdly obsequious for a such a garrulous, contrarian, and high-IQ group of people as HN. The intelligence community knows the arguments Gopnik's making (well, reviewing and making) well; they've been around for ages, as he states in the article. If there truly were reams of intelligence successes for every failure behind the curtain, you'd think the Caseys and Angletons of the world would be into some kind of decades post-facto program evaluation. Why not take the CIA's every move in, say, the decade 1946-1956 and tally the wins and losses? Surely this stuff could be declassified, right?

"No one will ever know all the times we've done our job well.. but every mistake will get us fd up the ass."* This may have been told to the poster sincerely, but man, I can't for the life of me come up with a better cover story for incompetence or sloth. I wish I could tell my higher-ups and funding sources something like that when they come asking if I've done anything well with their money lately. "Sorry, ma'am, that's classified." What a world.

Didn't SwissAir 111 crash because of faulty in-flight entertainment systems? I think there's precedent for lower-rung stuff having unexpected and outsized impact in aviation.

Example of investigators whose work has suffered for fear of being labeled a heretic?

You don't think you're mixing up "heritable" with "genetic" here? In my family, liking the Yankees is highly heritable across generations, but my grandfather would've laughed in your face if you claimed it was genetic.

In the same way that a good caricature or satire exaggerates to some degree while capturing something true, I think this comment probably ascribes a bit more arrogance to the average HN comment than is actually there, but I laughed anyway because you phrased it really well and in some cases you're actually spot-on.

I think that "where a basic knowledge of computers allows one to opine about everything from politics to sex to optimal routing options for oil pipelines" maybe captures our entire historical era. Nice work and a hearty lol

This is terrific and I can't wait to try it. Thanks!

Point taken! Thx for input!

It's a weird fetishization, isn't it? I think that's a really good point. Dovetails with political movements that idealize(d) the working man/class, as if poor people couldn't be as flawed and human as the rest of us.

It's pretty bold to be talking about cities and mental health when about five minutes in a small town will vividly show you the backstabbing, gossipy, popularity contest bullshit that comes with "closely knit communities" of all types. Like someone said, it's all a big trade-off. Human beings can go thoroughly nuts anywhere they lay their heads.