Open Thread 152

This is the bi-weekly visible open thread (there are also hidden open threads twice a week you can reach through the Open Thread tab on the top of the page). Post about anything you want, but please try to avoid hot-button political and social topics. You can also talk at the SSC subreddit – and also check out the SSC Podcast. Also:

1. There’s an online SSC “meetup” happening next Sunday, April 26, at 10:30 PDT. See here for more details.

2. Berkeley’s rationalist community center, REACH, has also gone online, so their meetings and talks and so on are now open to anyone who’s interested. Learn more at their Facebook page here.

3. You may previously have seen the sidebar ad for Altruisto, a browser app that automatically donates a portion of your online shopping spending to effective charity at no cost to you. They want me to let you know that there’s an updated version available.

4. Thanks to everyone who sent me comments about “A Failure, But Not Of Prediction” (though as always I prefer you post the comments on the blog so other people can see them). An especially common concern was that my dichotomy between “official sources” (wrong) and “random smart people online” (right) was unfair in a few ways. First, because some official sources (like independent expert epidemiologists) got things right early. Second, because many of the smart people online I mentioned didn’t get things right until late February/early March, by which time some of the media was also starting to get things right (see Anonymous Bosch’s complaint here, Scott Aaronson’s response here, and Sarah Constantin’s comment here). I’m sorry I’m not up for the amount of work it would take to respond to these concerns fairly and correct all my inconsistencies here, but there’s some good discussion at the linked comments.

Another frequent topic was nominations of worthy people who deserved public praise for getting things right early. I was trying to avoid having this be a “hall of shame, hall of fame” post, because there are so many people who deserve mention in both that it would inevitably be unfair. I tried to sidestep this entire issue by quoting a previous list someone else had made. But two names that came up a lot were Steve Hsu (see eg January post here, check also the comments) and Curtis Yarvin (February 1st article here). I’m sure I’m still forgetting many great people who deserve recognition.

A third frequent topic was people who said the pandemic was actually easy to predict; some of these people backed this up with proof that they in fact predicted it, and an explanation of the (completely logical) thought processes they used to do that. Again, these people are great and deserve praise. But I don’t consider a few people getting it right proof that it was “easy to predict” in a meaningful way. If predictions regarding some event follow a standard distribution from overly denialist to overly alarmist, then every event that turns out to be alarming will necessarily have some people who correctly predicted it (eg were the right level of alarmed) before the fact. But to do anything useful, we need to be able to identify those people beforehand. So for me, the interesting question is whether there’s some consistent way for a bird’s-eye Outside View observer to predict something before the fact, eg by using certain prediction aggregators or known reliable experts. If you can’t do that, I think it’s fair to call an event “hard to predict” from a social standpoint, even if it was easy for some people, and even if it should have been easy for everyone based on how logical it was.

5. Some people have brought up that my thrive vs. survive theory of the political spectrum does an unusually bad job predicting current events, especially the thing where Democrats mostly want to maintain lockdown and Republicans mostly want to take their chances. I don’t have much to say about this, but I acknowledge it’s true, and you should update your models accordingly.

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1,240 Responses to Open Thread 152

  1. Just a note that there will be a South Bay SSC meetup this Saturday at 2 P.M. Due to the difficulty of people getting to our house and my failure to (yet) reproduce my house in virtual reality, we will meet at the Parthenon on Mozilla Hubs.

    • Le Maistre Chat says:

      Just a note that there will be a South Bay SSC meetup this Saturday at 2 P.M. Due to the difficulty of people getting to our house and my failure to (yet) reproduce

      … did I only imagine Rebecca posting here?

      my house in virtual reality

      Ohhh.

    • I have not succeeded in producing a close copy of our house on Hubs, although I learned a good deal trying. But I have made a functional equivalent, a site with four rooms of differing sizes that people can move among. Since I already announced the meetup at the Parthenon for this Saturday I will hold it there, but if we end up with more than the permitted number, which I think is fifty, the overflow can start a new meetup there. And I will probably use it for the meetup after this one.

      And if anyone wants to try the new site, I am there now and you are welcome to drop in to chat.

      • Someone recently joined me in my new Hubs site. Others are welcome to come and try it out. I have no idea how long the link remains good, but the link for the Parthenon was still up a little while ago.

  2. Le Maistre Chat says:

    Lovecraft review: “The Whisperer in Darkness”
    This novella was originally published in the August, 1931 issue of Weird Tales. The cover went to a Tarzan clone called “Tam, Son of the Tiger” by Otis Adelbert Kline. Not even a naked woman!

    This is the story where Lovecraft’s famous Mi-Go were introduced… sort of. They come from Yuggoth, and Lovecraft had already written a sonnet cycle called “Fungi From Yuggoth”. Lovecraft would allude to them a third and final time in At the Mountains of Madness as competitors of the crinoid Old Ones who caused their decline during the Jurassic.

    Anyway, the story is told in past tense in May 1930 by protagonist Albert Wilmarth, who teaches literature at Miskatonic University and doesn’t want to admit that he’s crazy. In May of 1928, he started getting mail from a Henry Akeley forcefully arguing for the truth of Vermont hill folklore about a pre-human race described as human-size, pinkish, crustacean-like, with a distinct head bearing multitudes of short antennae and “vast pairs of dorsal fins or membraneous wings and several sets of articulated limbs.” From an 1839 monograph collecting folklore from the oldest people in the state, Wilmarth described Puritans calling them familiars of the Devil, Scots-Irish linking them to the malign fairies and “little people” of the bogs and raths, and best of all, native Pennacook saying they’re extraterrestrials “from the Great Bear in the sky, and had mines in our earthly hills whence they took a kind of stone they could not get on any other world. They did not live here… They could not eat the things and animals of earth, but brought their own food from the stars.”
    He tried to tell the credulous these stories must be false, because they’re no different from the fairy delusions of Ireland and Wales, “belief of the Nepalese hill tribes in the dreaded Mi-Go or ‘Abominable Snow-Men'”, etc, which they just tried to turn around on him as the folklore being evidence of the beings’s being real and active in the past.

    This same debate would later play out in real life between UFO believers and skeptics with no acknowledgement of Lovecraft.

    However, in Akeley’s description, the aliens aren’t associated with eerie flying objects, but “being able to live in interstellar space and fly through it on clumsy, powerful wings which have a way of resisting the ether”. Why Lovecraft chose to make it thus, I don’t know: the 1887 Michelson-Morley experiment had discredited outer space being filled with light-bearing aether (and the rapid acceptance of special relatively after 1905 removed the theoretical need for something to propagate light waves), and by 1897 there were already alien sightings in the United States associated with spacecraft.
    Akeley said he found “great black stone with unknown hieroglyphics half worn away which I found in the woods on Round Hill, east of here; and after I took it home everything became different. If they think I suspect too much they will either kill me or take me off the earth to where they come from.” He offered to mail it and a phonograph recording, which Wilmarth accepted in the name of Science, though at the same time Akeley’s claims gave him a stereotypical Lovecraft scholar anxiety attack:

    I found myself faced by names and terms that I had heard elsewhere in the most hideous of connexions—Yuggoth, Great Cthulhu, Tsathoggua, Yog-Sothoth, R’lyeh, Nyarlathotep, Azathoth, Hastur, Yian, Leng, the Lake of Hali, Bethmoora, the Yellow Sign, L’mur-Kathulos, Bran, and the Magnum Innominandum—and was drawn back through nameless aeons and inconceivable dimensions to worlds of elder, outer entity at which the crazed author of the Necronomicon had only guessed in the vaguest way.

    I am almost glad that the letter and record and photographs are gone now—and I wish, for reasons I shall soon make clear, that the new planet beyond Neptune had not been discovered.

    Then came the record, made around 1 AM on “May-Eve—the hideous Sabbat-night of underground European legend”, “near the closed mouth of a cave where the wooded west slope of Dark Mountain rises out of Lee’s Swamp.”

    (A CULTIVATED MALE HUMAN VOICE)

    . . . is the Lord of the Woods, even to . . . and the gifts of the men of Leng . . . so from the wells of night to the gulfs of space, and from the gulfs of space to the wells of night, ever the praises of Great Cthulhu, of Tsathoggua, and of Him Who is not to be Named. Ever Their praises, and abundance to the Black Goat of the Woods. Iä! Shub-Niggurath! The Goat with a Thousand Young!

    (A BUZZING IMITATION OF HUMAN SPEECH)

    Iä! Shub-Niggurath! The Black Goat of the Woods with a Thousand Young!

    (HUMAN VOICE)

    And it has come to pass that the Lord of the Woods, being . . . seven and nine, down the onyx steps . . . (tri)butes to Him in the Gulf, Azathoth, He of Whom Thou hast taught us marv(els) . . . on the wings of night out beyond space, out beyond th . . . to That whereof Yuggoth is the youngest child, rolling alone in black aether at the rim. . . .

    (BUZZING VOICE)

    . . . go out among men and find the ways thereof, that He in the Gulf may know. To Nyarlathotep, Mighty Messenger, must all things be told. And He shall put on the semblance of men, the waxen mask and the robe that hides, and come down from the world of Seven Suns to mock. . . .

    (HUMAN VOICE)

    . . . (Nyarl)athotep, Great Messenger, bringer of strange joy to Yuggoth through the void, Father of the Million Favoured Ones, Stalker among. . . .

    It then transpired that Akeley’s attempt to ship the hieroglyphic stone was intercepted by a person whose eerie description could correspond to a Mi-Go in a mask and trenchcoat just as well as a human agent. Summer vacation dragged on, and on August 15 Wilmarth received a letter from Akeley claiming that three of his dogs had been shot, human and claw prints on the farm, his phone line cut and a tree felled across the safest road to town. We get it already, but Lovecraft gilds the lily with more letters, meant to raise tension but just making Akeley look like a farmer who’s gone violently insane, shooting up his home to the point of accidentally killing one of his own dogs. That said, he does convey that the aliens have strange bodies despite being as fragilely mortal as humans:

    It was dead, of course. One of the dogs had it, and I found it near the kennel this morning. I tried to save it in the woodshed to convince people of the whole thing, but it all evaporated in a few hours. Nothing left. You know, all those things in the rivers were seen only on the first morning after the flood. And here’s the worst. I tried to photograph it for you, but when I developed the film there wasn’t anything visible except the woodshed. What can the thing have been made of?

    Well, Wilmarth finally travels to visit his penpal on Wednesday, September 12 (shouldn’t he be teaching a class by now?), only after receiving a typed, not handwritten, letter in which violent anxiety has been reversed into a message that the aliens are friendly:

    What I had thought morbid and shameful and ignominious is in reality awesome and mind-expanding and even glorious—my previous estimate being merely a phase of man’s eternal tendency to hate and fear and shrink from the utterly different.

    Actually, they have never knowingly harmed men, but have often been cruelly wronged and spied upon by our species. There is a whole secret cult of evil men (a man of your mystical erudition will understand me when I link them with Hastur and the Yellow Sign) devoted to the purpose of tracking them down and injuring them on behalf of monstrous powers from other dimensions. It is against these aggressors—not against normal humanity—that the drastic precautions of the Outer Ones are directed.

    I’ll leave how that first quoted sentence relates to Lovecraft’s attitudes to other human cultures to the reader.
    But let’s backtrack to the phonograph. The aliens seem to be polytheists who believe in Great Cthulhu, Tsathoggua, Shub-Niggurath, Azathoth, his Great Messenger Nyarlathotep and “Him Who is not to be Named.” Note that the source contradicts the subsequent Cthulhu Mythos, where each alien god has one or more “servitor races”. August Derleth assigned the Mi-Go to Hastur. Is there a term for the reading comprehension version of a malapropism?
    As repeatedly requested in the last letter, Wilmarth told no one where he was going and traveled with the phonograph and every photo and letter Akeley sent him… only differing in arriving by train in the closest town around 1 PM rather than the trustworthy letter’s suggested 10 PM. Why yes, this man IS too dumb to live. He’s met at the station by a Mr. Noyes, an urbane man whom Wilmarth nervously felt to have a familiar voice as it politely pumped him for information. Gosh, I wonder where he could have heard his voice before! At the house, Noyes told him Akeley was ready to see him, but he had this asthma attack you know, he can only talk in a whisper and he’ll be clumsy for a couple days with his feet all bandaged…
    OK, so he went to talk with Akeley and found him seated in a darkened room with “rigid, immobile expression and unwinking glassy stare”, a scarf high around his neck and a loose dressing gown too long to see his pants. He asked repeatedly for the return of everything he sent before starting to wax joyfully about Yuggoth, the nearest planet fully populated by this pan-cosmic genus of sapients of which others are but degenerate offshoots… it matters not that the Sun is no brighter than a star out there, for “They have other, subtler senses, and put no windows in their great houses and temples. Light even hurts and hampers and confuses them,” said the totally normal human singing their praises in a darkened room. He went on:

    You know they were here long before the fabulous epoch of Cthulhu was over, and remember all about sunken R’lyeh when it was above the waters. They’ve been inside the earth, too—there are openings which human beings know nothing of—some of them in these very Vermont hills—and great worlds of unknown life down there; blue-litten K’n-yan, red-litten Yoth, and black, lightless N’kai. It’s from N’kai that frightful Tsathoggua came

    The first part of this got contradicted just six months later when Lovecraft wrote AtMoM, while the latter stuff is a reference to “The Mound”, which he had ghostwritten for Zealia Bishop around January 1930.
    Wilmarth got spooked by his host insinuating that tomorrow they’d discuss their voyage to Yuggoth… yes you too, if you choose. “complete human bodies did not indeed make the trip, but that the prodigious surgical, biological, chemical, and mechanical skill of the Outer Ones had found a way to convey human brains” in high-tech jars. The portable brain can be kept alive with liquid nutrients, electrodes reach through and connect with elaborate instruments capable of duplicating the three vital faculties of sight, hearing, and speech, then, on every planet covered by their civilisation, there are mechanical bodies it can be plugged into. His host then showed him shelves with a dozen brain cylinders: “Three humans, six fungoid beings who can’t navigate space corporeally, two beings from Neptune…” Hugh Man Akeley, who was totally normal, invited Wilmarth to plug any into a certain machine to communicate with, but “Don’t bother that fresh, shiny cylinder joined to the two testing instruments—the one with my name on it.” Wilmarth obeyed and the system spoke:

    “Do you realise what it means when I say I have been on thirty-seven different celestial bodies—planets, dark stars, and less definable objects—including eight outside our galaxy and two outside the curved cosmos of space and time? All this has not harmed me in the least. My brain has been removed from my body by fissions so adroit that it would be crude to call the operation surgery. The visiting beings have methods which make these extractions easy and almost normal—and one’s body never ages when the brain is out of it. The brain, I may add, is virtually immortal with its mechanical faculties and a limited nourishment supplied by occasional changes of the preserving fluid.

    Behold, the first uploaded Singularity nerd! Wilmarth though reacted fearfully, internally calling this things normal human beings weren’t meant to know and “blasphemous influences”, yet somehow he took a nap in the guest room before bolting upright and driving away terrified in a stolen old Ford, from Akeley’s garage. A sheriff’s posse found bullet holes, the dogs and livestock all missing with no having bought them, and Akeley vanished with the clothes Wilmarth saw him in discarded. There were no cylinders or other evidence, of course. But Wilmarth insists it was no dream that he was awakened by sounds of extraterrestrials entering the bedroom, while “a kind of obscure paralysis nevertheless kept me inert”. When he regained muscle control, he tried to find Akeley to flee with, but instead his flashlight found in the easy chair metallic clamps attached to… “the face and hands of Henry Wentworth Akeley.”
    Gosh, bet you didn’t see that coming. Seriously though, this story is fascinating in its precociousness. Here published in 1931 are aliens that have been operating on Earth so long that our science-ignorant ancestors identified them as Fair Folk (and yetis), who want to abduct people and do surgery on them. There’s a coverup involving human agents, and they’re in contact with American elites, though here it’s implied to be Lowell Observatory rather than the federal government.
    It’s also an early example of the claim that it’s not viable for human bodies to explore outer space, but by discarding the body with advanced technology your consciousness could explore the visible universe and beyond as an immortal that can plug in to different bodies.
    So this story prefigures by decades a chunk of real-world belief and a chunk of SF, and Lovecraft just kind of tossed it out there as opposed to being something he liked to revisit frequently once created (see Cthulhu, crinoid Old Ones). I’m impressed.

    • johan_larson says:

      The cover went to a Tarzan clone called “Tam, Son of the Tiger” by Otis Adelbert Kline.

      Whatever they were spending their money on, it wasn’t the cover art.

    • eremetic says:

      An Alcubierre drive could be described a bit poetically as “wings (with negative energy density) which have a way of resisting the aether” (general relativity is an aether theory), but if the term had existed and he had used it, you wouldn’t have scoffed at poor Howie’s scientific illiteracy, but rather praised his forward-thinkingness.

      • Le Maistre Chat says:

        I mean, OK, but an Alcubierre drive field attached to a five-foot long sapient being’s body still sounds like magic, while the UFO belief this story seems to prefigure (esp. in its scary “abduction” form) propagates specifically by not looking magical. That Greys don’t look like the Fay is vital to that false belief’s success.

        • Belisaurus Rex says:

          Why couldn’t the Fay have just changed their costumes? Are descriptions of the Fay really that different from descriptions of Greys?

        • eremetic says:

          They’d just need negative-mass wings, nothing wrong with that. Maybe they live in wormholes.

          Greys are absolutely demons/fairies.

    • Leafhopper says:

      Behold, the first uploaded Singularity nerd! Wilmarth though reacted fearfully, internally calling this things normal human beings weren’t meant to know

      I marvel at the point in “Through the Gates of the Silver Key” when “Swami Chandraputra” relates Randolph Carter’s utter horror at his dissolution of self:

      Faced with this realisation, Randolph Carter reeled in the clutch of supreme horror—horror such as had not been hinted even at the climax of that hideous night when two had ventured into an ancient and abhorred necropolis under a waning moon and only one had emerged. No death, no doom, no anguish can arouse the surpassing despair which flows from a loss of identity. Merging with nothingness is peaceful oblivion; but to be aware of existence and yet to know that one is no longer a definite being distinguished from other beings—that one no longer has a self—that is the nameless summit of agony and dread.

      Granted, he gets over it pretty quick, but to think Sam Harris strives to take you beyond the Ultimate Gate with a few taps on your touchscreen!

      • Kaitian says:

        I often wonder about the fears that are described in Lovecraft’s fiction and that of surrounding writers:
        Fear of the cosmos being vast and alien
        Fear of alien biology
        Fear of non human intelligence
        Fear of losing your identity as a proper white dude

        Is it the case that these things were horrifying to people of his time, but we as a civilisation have now gotten over it? As an analogy, consider the obsession with female purity in 19th century fiction, that almost nobody really groks nowadays. It’s not that we have become braver, it’s just that the question is no longer interesting in the same way.

        Or were these fears only ever shared by a handful of neurotic writers? I don’t know enough about the early 20th century to really tell. There were certainly stories that portrayed alien contact in a positive light. But the fact that Lovecraft stories have remained popular for so long, while those others are just curiosities, might mean that many people could (and still can?) identify with their concerns.

        Or am I looking at the stories all wrong? After all, a story about a mixed race Innsmouthian meeting a deep one and saying “hi gramps, how’s your black magic coming along?” wouldn’t be much of a story, certainly not a horror story. So maybe the fragile white dude protagonists are unreliable narrators. We do have the Conan stories as an example where characters are much more accustomed to all kinds of Weird stuff. On the other hand, Lovecraft and his real life opinions are pretty similar to those of his characters.

        • matkoniecz says:

          Fear of non human intelligence (…) but we as a civilisation have now gotten over it?

          points at AI risk people

          Fear of the cosmos being vast and alien

          I would describe this as “we are ignoring it” rather “but we as a civilisation have now gotten over it?”

        • Deiseach says:

          Fear of the cosmos being vast and alien
          Fear of alien biology
          Fear of non human intelligence
          Fear of losing your identity as a proper white dude

          Think of it this way: most of the stories happen where there’s a conflict between the modern, rational, scientific, optimistic world of progress and rationality and “stuff like this is folklore and mythology; maybe a few backwards poor white trash really do believe in monsters in the woods, but we know better”.

          Then it turns out that this stuff is real and really out there and you personally, educated modern scientific person, are being threatened by it.

          And the tools of modern scientific society don’t work – you can’t wish it away by saying “But this is the 20th century!” See the discussion about how do you kill a shoggoth – what if your guns don’t work, and your bombs don’t work? What do you do then? Here is a creature that, by the best of it (take the Mi-Go), is made out of physical material substance like you are, but is from an indescribably ancient civilisation that is so technologically advanced that (to borrow from Arthur C. Clarke) their science is indistinguishable from magic.

          If they want to turn you into a brain in a jar, you have little to no say about it. You can’t fight them, you can’t stop them, you can’t appeal to a shared system of ethics or morality, you’re like the most primitive uncontacted tribesman of your time faced with the full panoply of “gunboat diplomacy” where it’s spears against battleships.

          Or the Dunwich incident, where even though the Federal government succeeded for a time in bombing the reefs and driving off the Deep Ones, they didn’t and couldn’t destroy their strongholds and they are coming back, and their human agents are still in place.

          That’s the best case scenario. The worst case scenario is that your comfortable cosy “science conquers all” world of modernity is a thin veneer of self-deception over the reality of the cold, pitiless forces of the universe which are expressed in/through entities that are either actively malevolent or regard humanity as we’d regard an outbreak of mould – clean it off and take back possession of the Earth for their purposes. We’re not even in the same relationship to them as spear-wielding aborigines to the societies that invented the atomic bomb. And there’s nothing we can do about it because even science can’t help us here, we are so backwards and ignorant by comparison.

          Everything you think you know, everything you have been taught about how the world and the physical laws of the universe work, is wrong. And the real way of things is out there in the darkness with teeth and tentacles to annihilate you body and soul. And you can’t understand it or make friends with it or bargain with it or be incorporated into it as any other than fuel for its ravening hunger. And all that permits us to continue functioning in the world we think we know is the blissful aura of pure ignorance, where we can write off stories of monsters in the woods and the hills as peasant superstition and tragedies as outbreaks of trailer trash degeneracy breaking out as violence:

          The most merciful thing in the world, I think, is the inability of the human mind to correlate all its contents. We live on a placid island of ignorance in the midst of black seas of infinity, and it was not meant that we should voyage far. The sciences, each straining in its own direction, have hitherto harmed us little; but some day the piecing together of dissociated knowledge will open up such terrifying vistas of reality, and of our frightful position therein, that we shall either go mad from the revelation or flee from the deadly light into the peace and safety of a new dark age.

          • John Schilling says:

            The worst case scenario is that your comfortable cosy “science conquers all” world of modernity is…

            Absolutely correct. And since Yuggothian science is more advanced than the Earthly kind, we get conquered and our brains all get schlorped out and put in jars, the end.

            The foundation of Lovecraftian horror isn’t the fear that science is wrong, it’s that science is right. Utterly, absolutely right to the exclusion of all else. Everything that we value is at best a cosmic accident that will likely as not be warped into unbearable perversion or outright extinction by some future stellar alignment or scientific discovery. It’s the horror of e.g. Watt’s “Blindsight”, where consciousness itself is a silly evolutionary defect of no scientific value, soon to be culled from what will henceforth be a universe of P-zombies.

          • Nick says:

            @John Schilling
            Yeah, I think you have the closer interpretation. The problem with the scientific optimism is that the science, in Lovecraft’s view, did not justify the optimism. Quite the opposite. It was the advances of his day that put the cosmic in cosmic horror.

          • mendax says:

            “The sciences, each straining in its own direction, have hitherto harmed us little; but some day the piecing together of dissociated knowledge will open up such terrifying vistas of reality, and of our frightful position therein, that we shall either go mad from the revelation or flee from the deadly light into the peace and safety of a new dark age. ”
            ― H.P. Lovecraft

          • Kaitian says:

            I get what you’re saying, and I agree that this is what Lovecraft finds scary. But I just… don’t? In the 21st century, we know for sure that the universe is big, doesn’t care about us, and has a million ways of screwing us over that we can’t do anything about. The dangerous revelation that Lovecraft feared has happened, and has spread to educated classes everywhere, and life goes on as always. Some people believe we will eventually innovate our way into full control of the cosmos still, but most just don’t worry about it.

            I think Lovecraft is writing from a unique historical perspective, from a time when the scientific project stopped promising that Man would soon conquer all, and started revealing that the world is fundamentally beyond our understanding. But now, five generations have been raised knowing that the universe is spooky and weird, and we’re not terrified of that.

            I think even before the 20th century, it was understood that cosmic forces could wipe you out whenever. After all, scholars during the black death suspected that it was caused by an unfortunate alignment of the planets. So “a larger force might hurt you” was hardly new. But I think in the time from roughly 1850-1950, many people honestly believed that all things can be understood and all problems can be solved, and the cosmic horror of the time must be understood from that perspective.

            But then, why does it still speak to so many people?

          • Belisaurus Rex says:

            Why does it still speak to so many people? Maybe we just like the purple prose. Lovecraft should have gotten a job advertising exotic vacation destinations.

            Cut from Dream Quest of Unknown Kadath:
            “On the following morning the ship-captain led Carter through the onyx streets of Inganok, dark under their twilight sky. The inlaid doors and figured house-fronts, carven balconies and crystal-paned oriels, all gleamed with a sombre and polished loveliness; and now and then a plaza would open out with black pillars, colonnades, and the statues of curious beings both human and fabulous. Some of the vistas down long and unbending streets, or through side alleys and over bulbous domes, spires, and arabesqued roofs, were weird and beautiful beyond words; and nothing was more splendid than the massive height of the great central Temple of the Elder Ones with its sixteen carven sides, its flattened dome, and its lofty pinnacled belfry, overtopping all else, and majestic whatever its foreground. And always to the east, far beyond the city walls and the leagues of pasture land, rose the gaunt grey sides of those topless and impassable peaks across which hideous Leng was said to lie.
            The captain took Carter to the mighty temple, which is set with its walled garden in a great round plaza whence the streets go as spokes from a wheel’s hub. The seven arched gates of that garden, each having over it a carven face like those on the city’s gates, are always open; and the people roam reverently at will down the tiled paths and through the little lanes lined with grotesque termini and the shrines of modest gods. And there are fountains, pools, and basins there to reflect the frequent blaze of the tripods on the high balcony, all of onyx and having in them small luminous fish taken by divers from the lower bowers of ocean. When the deep clang from the temple’s belfry shivers over the garden and the city, and the answer of the horns and viols and voices peals out from the seven lodges by the garden gates, there issue from the seven doors of the temple long columns of masked and hooded priests in black, bearing at arm’s length before them great golden bowls from which a curious steam rises.”

            I think that tourists might like to visit.

          • Deiseach says:

            The foundation of Lovecraftian horror isn’t the fear that science is wrong, it’s that science is right.

            Exactly. Religion is a comforting fairy tale but a very thin blanket that we pull over our heads to hide from the scary thing in the wardrobe, but so is our present (at that date) understanding of science.

            Lovecraft was pitiless about “we’re not sciencing hard enough! we still have the old-fashioned ideas about Man being the pinnacle of evolution and progress being onwards and upwards unstoppable and that the universe is fundamentally understandable by our pitiful little monkey brains, and even worse that we can understand and control the forces of nature!”

            From the short story Hypnos, with a glancing reference to Einstein:

            Of our studies it is impossible to speak, since they held so slight a connexion with anything of the world as living men conceive it. They were of that vaster and more appalling universe of dim entity and consciousness which lies deeper than matter, time, and space, and whose existence we suspect only in certain forms of sleep—those rare dreams beyond dreams which come never to common men, and but once or twice in the lifetime of imaginative men. The cosmos of our waking knowledge, born from such an universe as a bubble is born from the pipe of a jester, touches it only as such a bubble may touch its sardonic source when sucked back by the jester’s whim. Men of learning suspect it little, and ignore it mostly. Wise men have interpreted dreams, and the gods have laughed. One man with Oriental eyes has said that all time and space are relative, and men have laughed. But even that man with Oriental eyes has done no more than suspect.

            For Lovecraft, the more we learn, the more we advance in knowledge, the more we are forced to realise how infinitesimal we are in the scale of the universe and how meaningless our existence is, and the only reason humanity hasn’t succumbed to despair and nihilism is because we’re too stupid to put things together, too sentimental and blinded by notions of ‘meaning’ and ‘good and evil’ and being able to control our own destinies.

          • Deiseach says:

            The dangerous revelation that Lovecraft feared has happened, and has spread to educated classes everywhere, and life goes on as always.

            And we treat it as we treat the knowledge of our own mortality: yeah yeah, some day I’m gonna die, but right now I have to go to work/play this new game/find a girl or boyfriend/enjoy my life.

            We don’t viscerally feel the sense of our own forthcoming and inescapable death, and we as a culture don’t really feel the import of “sure sure, big hostile universe, gonna smoosh us all some day, so what’s the new Netflix show?”

          • Conrad Honcho says:

            For Lovecraft, the more we learn, the more we advance in knowledge, the more we are forced to realise how infinitesimal we are in the scale of the universe and how meaningless our existence is, and the only reason humanity hasn’t succumbed to despair and nihilism is because we’re too stupid to put things together, too sentimental and blinded by notions of ‘meaning’ and ‘good and evil’ and being able to control our own destinies.

            See also the Total Perspective Vortex.

          • Le Maistre Chat says:

            @Deiseach:

            Think of it this way: most of the stories happen where there’s a conflict between the modern, rational, scientific, optimistic world of progress and rationality and “stuff like this is folklore and mythology; maybe a few backwards poor white trash really do believe in monsters in the woods, but we know better”.

            Then it turns out that this stuff is real and really out there and you personally, educated modern scientific person, are being threatened by it.

            This. Science is both an objective thing and a human endeavor, performed by educated elites and psychologically received by the people as a whole. This lets it buttress classism: this attitude that “We believe in science, while the Irish lower classes believe in fairies,” — oops but then the lower classes internalize enough science to say they saw an alien spacecraft on a rural road at night, so now it’s “We know that if extraterrestrials are real, the cosmos is too vast for them to come research here, while white trash get their ideas from science fiction.”
            Well here came HPL, snooty fallen gentry, asking “What if elite belief in science is facile optimism? Imagine the white trash and colored folk knowing something that blasphemes science as we know it, not only forming false beliefs.”

            If they want to turn you into a brain in a jar, you have little to no say about it. You can’t fight them, you can’t stop them, you can’t appeal to a shared system of ethics or morality, you’re like the most primitive uncontacted tribesman of your time faced with the full panoply of “gunboat diplomacy” where it’s spears against battleships.

            This is something the AI risk people sort of get but can’t express logically. They get that by default a superior civilization or singular entity would have goals orthogonal to our flourishing or even existence, but think that they can appeal to utilitarianism as a shared system of morality, at least if humans get to build the superior thing rather than it coming from the stars.
            laughs in Nietzsche

          • Le Maistre Chat says:

            The foundation of Lovecraftian horror isn’t the fear that science is wrong, it’s that science is right. Utterly, absolutely right to the exclusion of all else. Everything that we value is at best a cosmic accident that will likely as not be warped into unbearable perversion or outright extinction by some future stellar alignment or scientific discovery.

            You got it. Any philosophy of science that tries to incorporate science into an optimistic framework, from Herbert Spencer’s evolutionary philosophy on down, is human cognitive bias grasping at straws. There is only science, no morals as we know them. Love thy neighbor so much that thou spendeth nothing on luxuries for self, only mosquito nets for the least of them? Just an ephemeral sentimental superstructure on the amoral objective reality of science. There is no reward for you.

          • Mabuse7 says:

            Did Lovecraft never read Kierkegaard or Dostoevsky? He may have been too early for capital-E Existentialism but it seems like he may have gotten a lot out of the philosophy.

          • Leafhopper says:

            I haven’t seen HPL talk about the early existentialists, but my guess is that Kierkegaard and Dostoevsky’s religious obsessions and ideological fire would’ve left him cold. As horrific as he makes the uncaring cosmos sound in some of his stories, his response to the abyss was a lot… quieter than the existentialist response, if that makes sense.

            Frankly, I cannot conceive how any thoughtful man can really be happy. There is really nothing in the universe to live for, and unless one can dismiss thought and speculation from his mid, he is liable to be engulfed by the very immensity of creation. It is vastly better that he should amuse himself with religion, or any other convenient palliative to reality which comes to hand. … There is much relief from the burden of life to be derived from many sources. To the man of high animal spirits, there is the mere pleasure of being alive; the Joi de vivre, as our Gallick friends term it. To the credulous there is religion and its paradisal dreams. To the moralist, there is a certain satisfaction in right conduct. To the scientist there is the joy in pursuing truth which nearly counteracts the depressing revelations of truth. To the person of cultivated taste, there are the fine arts. To the man of humour, there is the sardonic delight of spying out pretensions and incongruities of life. To the poet there is the ability and privilege to fashion a little Arcadia in his fancy, wherein he may withdraw from the sordid reality of mankind at large. In short, the world abounds with simple delusions which we may call “happiness”, if we be but able to entertain them.

            I imagine he would’ve said “well, for Kierkegaard and Dostoevsky, God is the convenient palliative, for Nietzsche it’s the Overman, for Camus it’s the fight against the absurd, for Sartre it’s, I don’t know, Marxism, but none of that stuff is for me, I prefer my self-education and Yog-Sothothery.”

        • Le Maistre Chat says:

          I often wonder about the fears that are described in Lovecraft’s fiction and that of surrounding writers:
          Fear of the cosmos being vast and alien
          Fear of alien biology
          Fear of non human intelligence
          Fear of losing your identity as a proper white dude

          Is it the case that these things were horrifying to people of his time, but we as a civilisation have now gotten over it?

          Some people in the 21st century have expressed fear and anxiety about the cosmos being more inconveniently vast than optimistic SF and non-fiction futurism led us to believe. Before futurists talked about mind uploading, they talked about being able to take Moon vacations in our flabby human bodies.
          Fear of non-human intelligence and fear of “losing your identity as [racial sneer]” are with us today as fear that AI will obviously be of godlike intelligence but not necessarily a Friendly utilitarian, or being out-competed by Ems, etc.

          As an analogy, consider the obsession with female purity in 19th century fiction, that almost nobody really groks nowadays. It’s not that we have become braver, it’s just that the question is no longer interesting in the same way.

          points at 4chan
          Shakespeare depicted normal male characters as obsessed with female purity too. Maybe hegemonic feminism in the universities where fiction writers are trained just suppressed interest in this among that class?

          There were certainly stories that portrayed alien contact in a positive light. But the fact that Lovecraft stories have remained popular for so long, while those others are just curiosities, might mean that many people could (and still can?) identify with their concerns.

          I mean, prose space opera is just curiosities because it got replaced by Star Trek and Star Wars. Both are too often blandly banal about the differences between human and extraterrestrial psychology. Think of the USS Enterprise boldly going across the vast voids of interstellar space to “two gangster planets and a cowboy world” in the original series, or an original human culture of bumpy foreheads in the later ones.
          (I don’t want to sound like an anti-fan here: it also did some stuff worthy of “Doc” Smith and other prose authors who inspired it, like learning to accept the Gorn or a blind scientist’s love for an alien who was sanity-blasting to look at).

          So maybe the fragile white dude protagonists are unreliable narrators. We do have the Conan stories as an example where characters are much more accustomed to all kinds of Weird stuff.

          Indeed. A Weird Tales scholar-hero works himself up into a panic attack over the intellectual implications of what he’s seeing, while Conan is a homicidal working-class fellow whose reaction to a being like Yag-Kosha (whose people can be seen as functionally equivalent to the Mi-Go, pre-human immigrants to Earth with reference to lost aether wings) is pure empathy. Too much book-learnin’ addles the brain.

          • Deiseach says:

            To be fair, Yag-Kosha is a much more sympathetic character and presented as the victim of human brutality; by comparison, the Mi-Go are sneaky (at best) and actively working to harm the humans.

            I feel Conan’s response to the Mi-Go would not be one of pure empathy, but a yard of cold steel through the gizzard (once he worked out where they kept their gizzards) 🙂

          • John Schilling says:

            Also being fair, Lovecraft has the explorer-scientists of “At the Mountains of Madness” recognizing the Old Ones as fellow explorer-scientists and empathizing with their plight, even as the Old Ones were of a hideously nonhuman appearance and had just ruthlessly killed some of their human colleagues.

          • Deiseach says:

            Lovecraft has the explorer-scientists of “At the Mountains of Madness” recognizing the Old Ones as fellow explorer-scientists and empathizing with their plight

            That part delighted me, particularly as it shows Lovecraft able to rise above his prejudices, at least imaginatively as an author – up to then the Old One have been described as monsters and in terms of repugnance and horror, as unnatural and terribly different, and then it swings right round to “they’re fellow beings with us” – and it probably also ties in with Lovecraft’s Cosmic Horror – faced with the shoggoths and what they have become/who they are sponsored by, we and the Old Ones have much more in common; we are both fellow-beings, fellow-spaients, fellow-organic mortals, menanced by the powers from beyond, that will extirpate us mercilessly and in a hideously Other manner.

            Their science and technology was much more advanced than ours (and even in the racial degeneration still was), but it was on a model recognisable and understandable to us, and both our world-views could not protect or save us when the forces from Outside broke through.

            Poor devils! After all, they were not evil things of their kind. They were the men of another age and another order of being. Nature had played a hellish jest on them—as it will on any others that human madness, callousness, or cruelty may hereafter drag up in that hideously dead or sleeping polar waste—and this was their tragic homecoming.

            They had not been even savages—for what indeed had they done? That awful awakening in the cold of an unknown epoch—perhaps an attack by the furry, frantically barking quadrupeds, and a dazed defence against them and the equally frantic white simians with the queer wrappings and paraphernalia . . . poor Lake, poor Gedney . . . and poor Old Ones! Scientists to the last—what had they done that we would not have done in their place? God, what intelligence and persistence! What a facing of the incredible, just as those carven kinsmen and forbears had faced things only a little less incredible! Radiates, vegetables, monstrosities, star-spawn—whatever they had been, they were men!

            …Of the whereabouts of that less conceivable and less mentionable nightmare—that foetid, unglimpsed mountain of slime-spewing protoplasm whose race had conquered the abyss and sent land pioneers to re-carve and squirm through the burrows of the hills—we could form no guess; and it cost us a genuine pang to leave this probably crippled Old One—perhaps a lone survivor—to the peril of recapture and a nameless fate.

            As an aside, this part of the story is unintentionally (though it’s hard to know with Lovecraft, he does sometimes show evidence of a particular sense of humour) funny as it gives rise to the mental image of the Old Ones in stetsons and spurs with the big iron on (what passes for) their hips:

            Thereafter the sculptures shewed a period in which shoggoths were tamed and broken by armed Old Ones as the wild horses of the American west were tamed by cowboys.

          • John Schilling says:

            as it gives rise to the mental image of the Old Ones in stetsons and spurs with the big iron on (what passes for) their hips:

            And being thrown from a bucking Shoggoth at the Old One Rodeo. I really didn’t need that mental image. No, wait, yes I did. Thank you.

          • Deiseach says:

            And being thrown from a bucking Shoggoth at the Old One Rodeo

            But of course! Plainly there are going to be more and less expert shoggoth tamers, and how else will you judge a fellow crinoid-headed vegetable lifeform’s abilities without a practical demonstration? 🙂

          • Le Maistre Chat says:

            But of course! Plainly there are going to be more and less expert shoggoth tamers, and how else will you judge a fellow crinoid-headed vegetable lifeform’s abilities without a practical demonstration?

            Yeah, how can you not like the crinoid men with images like that? Shame about the science they did on your colleagues and dogs…

      • Le Maistre Chat says:

        Granted, he gets over it pretty quick, but to think Sam Harris strives to take you beyond the Ultimate Gate with a few taps on your touchscreen!

        I’m not sure I grokked that. I understood it as the Swami/Carter is basically bringing up a Religions 101 understanding of Buddhism and Hinduism and calling Nirvana “peaceful oblivion” and therefore an understandable goal, while calling merging with Brahman “the nameless summit of agony and dread.” Which is pretty rich coming from a Swami, but he did seem to get over it pretty quick.

        • Leafhopper says:

          I don’t know enough about Buddhism to know the difference between Nirvana and merging with Brahman, but I interpreted “peaceful oblivion” as cessation of existence and “to know . . . that one no longer has a self” as something akin to the experience of selflessness for which at least some meditation practices aim. I’ve never experienced that, but Sam Harris et al seem to regard it as rather pleasant and calming, ergo my amusement at Lovecraft’s somewhat hysterical interpretation of it.

    • Belisaurus Rex says:

      “So this story prefigures by decades a chunk of real-world belief and a chunk of SF, and Lovecraft just kind of tossed it out there as opposed to being something he liked to revisit frequently once created”

      THEY accidentally let this story slip through, but after it was published THEY told Lovecraft he could never revisit the idea again. If anyone would accidentally stumble into a centuries old conspiracy of humans collaborating with unknown alien intelligences…

      This does bring up a strange tone choice in Lovecraft’s works that I had never been able to identify before. The humans in contact with strange beings are always cultists or loners, but never important politicians or connected people. Compare with A Colder War, where the US and USSR are trying to use Lovecraftian horrors against each other. The closest Lovecraft ever gets to having the hidden magic world intersect with the normal world is in Charles Dexter Ward, where Civil War veterans end up getting entangled with the supernatural.

      Lovecraft makes a conscious effort to keep his horrors hidden in out of the way locations or small towns. I don’t think that this was a product of the times either–in Dracula, Dracula comes to London and most of the horror is the idea that this supernatural being is leaving Transylvania to come terrorize the civilized world. In Lovecraft, as far as I can remember, there is never any fear that some nameless horror will take up residence in NYC (do you count Red Hook?).

      • Kaitian says:

        I think there are two reasons for this: first, many Lovecraft stories are classic adventure tales, where the protagonists visit far off places and discover their secrets. Some others are haunted house stories, which are also conventionally about remote places.

        And secondly, one of Lovecraft’s main themes is that the alien powers don’t care about conventional human affairs. To Cthulhu, there’s really no difference between NYC and Arkham.

        I guess Lovecraft as a person also didn’t much care for politics, and may just not have wanted to write about it. He’s also kind of nosey: In most of the stories, a non human is just minding its own business and certainly not aiming to terrorize anyone. But suddenly some explorer stumbles in and freaks out. And we’re supposed to side with the explorer?

        Although it is somewhat implied that the cultists seeking to attract the great old ones will cause some civilisation ending disaster if they succeed, so it’s not like the capital is completely unaffected.

      • Deiseach says:

        Part of it is the sense of stagnation and degeneracy that Lovecraft uses to give atmosphere to his stories, which doesn’t work so well with modern urban areas full of commerce and crowded streets and the ‘bright lights, big city’ mindset.

        You can do something with urban anomie and the atomised nature of living in such huge impersonal conglomerations of millions of people, and many horror/dark fantasy writers have done such, but that was never Lovecraft’s style. He preferred the idea of the glorious past which has faded and even become a twisted, perverted thing – the descendants of the heroic pre-Revolutionary great families dwindling down to a handful of inbred rustics who clung on to the Puritan legacy of their forefathers only by the night side of the witch crazes and tomes on demonology (how often does he reference Cotton Mather?) and whose link to the historic past is through the survival of cults and dark worship of the Great Old Ones.

        there is never any fear that some nameless horror will take up residence in NYC (do you count Red Hook?).

        Pickman’s Model, with ghouls in the subway:

        There was a study called “Subway Accident”, in which a flock of the vile things were clambering up from some unknown catacomb through a crack in the floor of the Boylston Street subway and attacking a crowd of people on the platform. Another shewed a dance on Copp’s Hill among the tombs with the background of today. Then there were any number of cellar views, with monsters creeping in through holes and rifts in the masonry and grinning as they squatted behind barrels or furnaces and waited for their first victim to descend the stairs.

        One disgusting canvas seemed to depict a vast cross-section of Beacon Hill, with ant-like armies of the mephitic monsters squeezing themselves through burrows that honeycombed the ground. Dances in the modern cemeteries were freely pictured, and another conception somehow shocked me more than all the rest—a scene in an unknown vault, where scores of the beasts crowded about one who held a well-known Boston guide-book and was evidently reading aloud. All were pointing to a certain passage, and every face seemed so distorted with epileptic and reverberant laughter that I almost thought I heard the fiendish echoes. The title of the picture was, “Holmes, Lowell, and Longfellow Lie Buried in Mount Auburn”.

        If we remember that ghouls eat the bodies of the dead, that last passage reads rather queasily.

        Mostly, though, it’s in the back hills and forgotten small towns, where the people have mouldered into a state of arrested development as progress has washed over the land and left their villages high and dry, or in the run-down areas of cities where the older parts have become slums tenanted by the melting-pot of immigrants and the racial and class divides mean that the educated better-off WASP section of society neither knows nor cares what happens in the dirty streets and backalleys where the action of the stories takes place, as in “The Haunter of the Dark” where the part of Providence where the Starry Wisdom church is located is Federal Hill, and it’s become a slum area full of Italian immigrants as the original inhabitants have moved out and upwards to better places and things.

        • Nick says:

          There’s also The Dunwich Horror. Dunwich is a backwater town, but nearby Miskatonic University is not; it’s a major and prestigious university on par with Harvard.

    • HeelBearCub says:

      The cultural critic explanation of when/why we like horror/disaster stories maps so well onto this ongoing SSC exploration of Lovecraft.

      • Nick says:

        You know, I’ve heard a few people lately (e.g. quoted here) say their consumption has tended towards apocalyptic stories with the advent of covid-19 and the quarantine. But mine hasn’t; I’ve been reading the same old stuff. Am I the outlier here, or are they?

        • bullseye says:

          I’ve been binging the Simpsons, and yesterday I saw Cats.

        • Kaitian says:

          I can imagine that a lot of people are interested in disaster and apocalypse stories right now, to compare them with their own experience or just to wallow. Personally I’m on the “same as before” side. I’ve just been watching a lot more operas / shows thanks to the many online options being offered.

      • Belisaurus Rex says:

        I think it is random. Plenty of fiction deals with breakdown of society. Lovecraft does not match well to widespread civilization collapse.

        I talked briefly about Camus’ “The Plague” on here (and read it in the past month for obvious reasons), but it did not seem to resonate with anyone. We read plague stories during a plague almost because of peer pressure, because we think it is what we should be doing, but they are not what we really care about so we soon lose interest and go back to reading other works. Over a longer quarantine (it’s only been a month so far?) I expect interest in plague books and movies to decrease, not increase.

        Edit: That being said, an increase in the amount of new plague-related fiction coming out might skew things.

        • HeelBearCub says:

          That’s not what the cultural critique says about horror/disaster stories though. The claim is that we are interested in these things as a mirror on what we fear today. Thus, horror is an evergreen topic to explore.

          I’m only saying that the SSC hive mind is currently all frightened about the same event, a seemingly undefeatable and indefatigable horror that, though we would like to defeat by conventional means, can really only be dealt with by hiding far away from it, and even then …

          • Le Maistre Chat says:

            I’m only saying that the SSC hive mind is currently all frightened about the same event, a seemingly undefeatable and indefatigable horror that, though we would like to defeat by conventional means, can really only be dealt with by hiding far away from it, and even then …

            “Social distancing” (possibly undiagnosed autism) is pretty much the first biographical detail of HPL’s anyone learns, with the second being “Except that time he married Sonia Greene, moved to NYC, still had few face-to-face friends, and complained about how hard it was to afford groceries when unemployed.”
            I could be doing Clark Ashton Smith reviews instead, but maybe the times biased me.

  3. Scott Alexander says:

    https://www.dana.org/article/go-and-nogo/ mentions a psychometric test called the “choose-a vs. avoid-b task”, meant to study go vs. no-go pathways in the brain. Does anyone know if there’s a publicly available version of this, or a description of exactly how to make one?

    • VoiceOfTheVoid says:

      We found a striking effect of the different dopamine medications on this positive versus negative learning bias, consistent with predictions from our computer model of the learning process. While on placebo, participants performed equally well at choose-A and avoid-B test choices. But when their dopamine levels were increased, they were more successful at choosing the most positive symbol A and less successful at avoiding B. Conversely, lowered dopamine levels were associated with the opposite pattern: worse choose-A performance but more-reliable avoid-B choices. Thus the dopamine medications caused participants to learn more or less from positive versus negative outcomes of their decisions

      Am I missing the part where they actually tell us the size of the effect, or the number of participants, or any quantitative data whatsoever?

    • Lambert says:

      @Scott Alexander

      This sort of thing? doi: 10.1126/science.1102941
      https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5421749/
      doi:10.1037/0882-7974.23.2.392 

      Or this doi: 10.3758/s13415-014-0250-6

  4. Simon says:

    I believe it’s very likely that reusable silicone masks are highly effective at preventing transmission of SARS-CoV-2. Widespread use of these mask could play a large part in reducing effective transmission rates without requiring severe social-distancing measures.
    LessWrong post: The Hammer and the Mask – A call to action

  5. johan_larson says:

    Welcome again to Hollywood. Your producer wants a proposal for a film featuring the US Air Force pest management staff. Square-jawed heroes or lovable lunatics, your choice.

    • Le Maistre Chat says:

      It’s a dark comedy where US Air Force pest control comes to realize that the rodents they’re killing are sapient beings engaged in guerrilla warfare against human hegemony. Due to low USAF physical fitness and combat training standards, they have to call in Army Rangers as the rodents start trouncing them. But if you think about it, weren’t the cute rodents fighting what they saw as human oppressors right?

    • fibio says:

      Die Ratte

      Sergeant John Truman is ex-special forces, demoted to pest control after a black ops mission went badly wrong and he was falsely accused of getting his squad killed. Haunted by ghosts of the past, Truman is obsessed with his job, ensuring that his section is the cleanest post in the US army much to the amusement of his lackadaisical peers. When his former CO visits for an inspection, Truman goes off the reservation to ensure that there is not a single pest remains on base, utilizing all his skills and an alarming amount of heavy weaponry to kill his arch nemesis. The Rat.

      Basically, standard action movie but the enemy is always the same adorable rat that inexplicably survives traps, gunfire, tanks and finally an artillery strike.

    • Leafhopper says:

      James Herbert’s The Rats, but in NYC. Air Force can be connected to the rats’ origin in nuclear test fallout, or something. Played for black comedy.

    • MartMart says:

      Just rewrite naked lunch slightly.

    • toastengineer says:

      Tangentially related, but:

      Minimum Education:
      … GED with 15 college credits, or GED

      What?

      • johan_larson says:

        For enlisted positions, the US Air Force prefers to recruit people who have actual high school diplomas. The GED exam is supposed to be the equivalent of a high school diploma, but isn’t really, so the Air Force is reluctant to accept it. But they sometimes do, particularly for applicants who do very well on the military written tests or have additional qualifications beyond high school (such as successful completion of college-level courses).

        https://www.airforce.com/frequently-asked-questions/academic/can-i-join-the-air-force-with-a-ged

        • bullseye says:

          So, “High school diploma or GED with 15 college credits” would make sense. What it actually says is:
          “High school diploma, GED with 15 college credits, or GED“.

  6. mikk14 says:

    I have written a post on my research on how to evaluate the distance covered by a spreading event on a network: http://www.michelecoscia.com/?p=1759. The one liner version is that I figured out how to generalize the Euclidean distance between two vector in the case your dimensions are not all equal to each other (as in Euclidean space) but they are correlated to each other via a complex pattern. It’s practically a discrete version of the Mahalanobis distance.

    This was research that I actually started years ago, and it just occurred to me that it might be a useful tool to analyze some patterns in how COVID is spreading through the global social and airline network. If someone has good data, they’re very welcome to use my code and/or get in touch.

  7. Le Maistre Chat says:

    More about differences between HP Lovecraft’s fiction and the “Mythos” fandom:
    You’ve read the eponymous “Nyarlethotep”, The Dream Quest of Unknown Kadath, etc. where Ol’ Nyarl appears as a black man who was once a Pharaoh, right? So why is it that if you do an image search for his name, most of the results are a three-legged entity with a tentacle instead of a head? Someone investigated that question. It turns out to be a difficult mystery that involves demonstrably false testimony by the creator of the Call of Cthulhu RPG and a shadowy woman named Lisa Free who appears to argue with herself in the comments sections.

    • Deiseach says:

      So why is it that if you do an image search for his name, most of the results are a three-legged entity with a tentacle instead of a head?

      I have indeed seen some art like that, and wondered, because Nyarlehotep (nearly) always appears in human form.

      So it’s down to game art by person or persons who thought “Yeah, better put Moar Tentacles ‘cos otherwise how will potential players know this is supposed to be Chthulu World?” Just one more example of “the illustrator never read the text but was just given a shortlist of ‘need this included’ to work from”?

      EDIT: I had written the above before reading the article and it looks like I was correct:

      Richard Luong, illustrator for Sandy’s newest Lovecraft game (Cthulhu Wars) remembered the following when asked what inspired his three-legged avatar: “Sandy came to me with a short description of characteristics he wanted to make sure to have: three legs, no face, not too human hands.”

      So yep, illustrator gets given short list of “draw this” without ever reading the source material. And there is nothing in Lovecraft’s “The Thing In The Moonlight” piece to link the tentacle-cone-headed howler with Nyarlahotep, so it looks like a kludging together of the game studio’s various illustrations via Derleth’s version of things, with a cursory reference back to Lovecraft as a figleaf.

    • John Schilling says:

      Wait, it took her that much detective work when any gamer could have just told her, “Call Larry DiTillio and ask him where he got that one”?

      Because, yeah, obviously. Nyarlathotep famously has bignum masks, of which the Black Pharaoh is only one and Lovecraft never really fleshed out the others. But “Masks of Nyarlathotep” needs half a dozen or so in fairly specific detail for storytelling and gameplay. So, pick a few bits of imagery from somewhere in the broader Mythos canon, add whatever it takes to turn it into a concrete description, call that one the “Bloody Tongue”, and throw it on the cover on account of the spectacle.

  8. Mellivora says:

    I have been reading SSC for some time, and it has inspired me to finally start my own blog. I thought some people here might find it interesting, due to its related content.

    https://atlaspragmatica.com/

    One post that might be of specific interest is titled “Rethinking Education”, which is some musings on the viability of homeschooling, inspired by Laszlo Polgar “Raise a Genius”, and HPMOR.

    My latest post is the first in a series that will be a deep dive into Universal Basic Income. I’ll be posting the next one on Wednesday at 18:00 BST (17:00 GMT)

  9. anton says:

    About the thrive survive thing, I guess one problem I can see is that every controversial action has trade-offs so every possible course of action can be rationalized as coming from a thrive or survive mentality. For example one could argue that if republicans see themselves as barely being able to make ends meet then any damage to the economy is an unacceptable existential risk, and so some old-fashioned senicide is just doing-what-you-had-to.

    • TheStoryGirl says:

      I’ll go you one further:

      I think Scott’s survive vs thrive theory actually predicts both rightist concern about the economy and leftist signalling by social distancing warriors.

      From Scott’s essay:

      …My hypothesis is that rightism is what happens when you’re optimizing for surviving an unsafe environment, leftism is what happens when you’re optimized for thriving in a safe environment.

      We’re actually still in a super-safe environment.

      Compared to a civilization-ending zombie apocalypse or even a COVID-1999?

      COVID-19 is an inconvenience.

      Maybe only barely an inconvenience.

      The food supply chain is functionally undisturbed and all water/power/sewer utilities are still functioning, everywhere.

      Moreover, in 2020, the infrastructure provided by the internet has removed almost every serious threat to most (?) middle and upper-class Americans. Most or many can work from home, stay informed (and thus not be left to wonder if they should be literally running for the hills), minimize risk entirely by shopping remotely and having things delivered, stay meaningfully socially connected, and even stave off boredom.

      The kind of social distancing measures advocated by American leftists are only possible due to this vast abundance, and to a lesser extent, faith in the government to provide.

      Meanwhile, rightists whose business models don’t support work from home and/or who have little faith in the government to replace business losses see the lockdown’s impact on the economy as an existential threat to themselves, even greater than COVID-19.

      And most rightists don’t have a platform to talk about it.

      It’s worth remembering that virtually every mainstream article about COVID-19 was authored by a high-status individual who was likely already working from home long before COVID-19. It’s easy to bellow that human lives are so much more important than the economy when one’s own survival doesn’t depend on one’s brick-and-mortar workplace being open and/or the health of the short-to-medium-term economy.

      It’s almost certain that, if facing enough financial peril, the owner of a little dress shop, or the furloughed AMC assistant theater manager, would prefer to take their chances, especially if they live in a region with meager unemployment benefits. But The Atlantic doesn’t publish articles by owners of little dress shops or AMC assistant theater managers.

      Rigorous social distancing is a luxury. Demonstrating one’s ability to comply and advocating for it to continue “as long as it takes” signals socioeconomic status and social consciousness.

      As Scott pointed out, that kind of signalling only occurs in very safe environments.

      Scott’s theory stands.

    • Loriot says:

      The problem is that a theory that predicts everything predicts nothing. The theory is only useful if its predictions come true *as interpreted by someone before the event*. You don’t get to rationalize your predictions to the opposite once you already know the answers.

  10. Aapje says:

    What better to distract from Colvimort than Dutch fixed expressions?

    ‘bakbeest’ = box beast

    Huge thing (usually relative to others of its kind). May refer to an animal that was fattened, by being offered a full feedbox all day.

    ‘bakvis’ = baking fish

    Pubescent girl. Comes from German and first referred to a fish that was too big to be thrown back, but too small to be prepared on its own. So it was baked along with a bunch of other similar fish. German students in the 16th century then adopted this as a joke translation for baccalaureus (bachelor). This then somehow became used for pubescent girls. This meaning appears in a 1775 book by Goethe.

    ‘Een balletje opgooien’ = Throwing up a ball

    Carefully bringing something up, to see if people would accept it. Can be used for a situation like this: I casually suggested to my girlfriend that a threesome might improve our relationship, but her response made clear that she wasn’t be interested.

    ‘Bankroet’ = Bank soot

    Bankrupt. A derivation of the French ‘banqueroute’, which itself derives from the Italian ‘banca rotta,’ which literally means broken bench. This refers to the benches that bankers would sit on while plying their trade. Legend has it that the bench would be broken if the banker was insolvent, although this is likely a myth.

    ‘Het beste beentje voorzetten’ = Putting your best leg forward

    Doing the best you can.

    ‘Belofte maakt schuld’ = Promise makes debt

    Once you make a promise, you have to keep it, no less than if it was a debt.

    ‘Een kat in het nauw maakt rare sprongen’ = A cornered cat makes weird jumps

    If you leave someone no way out, they will make unexpected moves.

    ‘Vertrouwen komt te voet en gaat ter paard’ = Trust comes by foot and leaves by horse

    People lose trust far quicker than they gain it.

    ‘De beste stuurlui staan aan wal’ = The best helmsmen stand ashore

    It’s easy to criticize other people’s work when you’re not the one doing it.

    ‘Beter een goede buur dan een verre vriend’ = Better to have a good neighbor than a far-away friend

    You can expect more help from people near you than those far away.

    • Le Maistre Chat says:

      ‘bakvis’ = baking fish

      Pubescent girl. Comes from German and first referred to a fish that was too big to be thrown back, but too small to be prepared on its own. So it was baked along with a bunch of other similar fish.

      I’ve had about enough of your cannibalism harem anime, mister.

    • Anteros says:

      I’m wondering how many of these expression are in common usage, or at least would be familiar to the majority of the Dutch population. Are any thought of as old-fashioned? Would the average 20 year old in Holland know most of them?

      • Aapje says:

        I only select expressions that are in common use, although some may be considered old-fashioned, but that is a tricky assessment. Youths commonly have their own language, but seem to adopt a more traditional vocabulary as they age, so words don’t necessarily die out when seen as old-fashioned by younger people.

        A substantial percentage of Dutch 20 year old’s has a migrant background. My guess is that a native Dutch 20 year old is going to know 2/3rds or so.

      • Gelaarsd Schaap says:

        25 year old here.

        I recognize all of them. Only the ones about trust on horseback and having a good neighbour I would not have remembered by myself. The rest is very common in my experience, especially de beste stuurlui staan aan wal.

    • The Nybbler says:

      ‘Een balletje opgooien’ = Throwing up a ball

      There’s a few similar expressions in English, such as “sending up a trial balloon” or “running it up the flagpole”. “Putting a finger in the air” (another one not safe to search on Bing) is not quite the same but related in that all have to do with figuring out wind direction.

      ‘Een kat in het nauw maakt rare sprongen’ = A cornered cat makes weird jumps

      In English, it’s rats; the standard advice (whether figurative or literal) is “don’t corner a rat”, because it will attack.

    • bullseye says:

      This then somehow became used for pubescent girls.

      It makes sense to me. They’re both in-between-sized.

  11. viVI_IViv says:

    Some people have brought up that my thrive vs. survive theory of the political spectrum does an unusually bad job predicting current events, especially the thing where Democrats mostly want to maintain lockdown and Republicans mostly want to take their chances.

    Is it just because the lockdown puts pressure on the federal government, which is especially bad for a president seeking reelection in a few months? Never let your deep-seated ideological principles get in the way of partisanship, I guess.

    More charitably, the working class Trumpist base is probably more financially affected by the lockdown than the left-leaning intellectual class who have more secure jobs that can be done from home.

    • DeWitt says:

      More charitably, the working class Trumpist base is probably more financially affected by the lockdown than the left-leaning intellectual class who have more secure jobs that can be done from home.

      I keep seeing this talking point come up, but has anyone quantified it? I have no idea what to believe.

      • keaswaran says:

        The traditional stereotype is that right-wing parties in all countries rely on shopkeepers and petty bourgeois landlords as their base, while left-wing parties rely on civil servants and educated professionals as their base, with the manipulations of the working class depending on how religion, nationality, caste, and other issues break down in the local polity. The shopkeeper/landlord vs civil servant/educated professional really seems to exactly match closed down vs work-from-home.

    • AlesZiegler says:

      I am too lazy to find sources, but I am pretty sure that I had read from multiple angles that Trump voters have higher incomes than Clinton voters, and whole “shift to working class” by Republicans consisted of more working class people voting for Trump in comparison to Romney, not in comparison to Democrats.

      Also Republican voters are older and thus at more risk of dying from COVID, and older people have generally more secure sources of income in a recession than younger people.

      • EchoChaos says:

        I am too lazy to find sources, but I am pretty sure that I had read from multiple angles that Trump voters have higher incomes than Clinton voters

        Almost certainly true. What people usually mean is that white Clinton voters have higher income than white Trump voters, which is also true as Clinton and subsequent Democrats have done better with suburban and urban whites and shed rural and union whites.

      • Aapje says:

        @AlesZiegler

        The 90% of black voters that vote Democrat really pull down the average for them. Also, Democrats have more young voters and young people have smaller incomes. The latter is deceptive, because a low income student is typically not working class.

        • eric23 says:

          That said, Republicans have more elderly voters, who tend to have small incomes but a higher standard of living due to savings. So it balances out.

        • AlesZiegler says:

          Ok, students are not working class, but those who are old enough to vote are obviously extremely vulnerable to adverse economic effects of a lockdown. Entering job market during a massive recession is not easy. And poor black people are affected by recession just as badly as poor white people probably.

          All I am saying is that narrow self interest does not explain why Democrats are more enthusiastic about lockdowns than Republicans. On the contrary, I think that balance of evidence suggests that if positions of parties would be driven by crude interests of theirs voters, Republicans should be more supportive.

          • viVI_IViv says:

            Entering job market during a massive recession is not easy.

            Yes, but they can afford to wait months, even a year or two maybe. Don’t these students often spend a year traveling the world getting drunk/laid/high finding themselves after college, anyway?

            And poor black people are affected by recession just as badly as poor white people probably.

            But regardless of race, the chronically unemployed/unemployable tend to vote Dem if they vote at all. These people don’t have any job to go back to, so they aren’t really affected. If anything, the more the lockdown lasts, the more emergency unemployment benefits they will get.

          • AlesZiegler says:

            Yes, but they can afford to wait months, even a year or two maybe. Don’t these students often spend a year traveling the world getting drunk/laid/high finding themselves after college, anyway?

            Wow, this is some unexpectedly low quality content here. I think it should be obvious to anyone who knows anything about the world that many people after college cannot afford that.

          • viVI_IViv says:

            Wow, this is some unexpectedly low quality content here.

            I have a more big-brain comment above to make up for it 😛

            I think it should be obvious to anyone who knows anything about the world that many people after college cannot afford that.

            It’s not so obvious to me, but I can’t actually find any good statistic on students taking gap years, so I guess I’ll have to retract the claim for now.

      • eric23 says:

        IIRC the strongest correlation is that Trump voters are self-employed. And self-employed people do seem to be hurting more in this economic crisis.

      • keaswaran says:

        Small business owners are Republican. Professionals are Democrats.

    • NostalgiaForInfinity says:

      This was more or less my reasoning: if thrive-survive is relevant to politics, it’s (possibly much) weaker than partisanship and the effect of elite opinion. Trump appears to be anti-lockdowns so his supporters are anti lockdown and his opponents are pro-lockdown.

      I don’t know how well this holds for non-US countries where right wing governments (e.g. the UK) have been more consistent in their pro-lockdown messaging. My impression is still that the most prominent lockdown opponents are right-wing, usually for economic reasons.

      • Matt M says:

        Trump is not anti-lockdown. If he was, he would come out today and say “The federal government recommends ending the lockdowns.” Which he has not.

        Trump is pro him-getting-to-be-the-decider. Which causes him to push back on a lot of people who clearly want to have more draconian lockdowns than he’d like, or want to have them last longer than he prefers. But right now, if it was entirely up to him and nobody else had anything to say about it, he would decide to have lockdowns.

        • albatross11 says:

          Also, I think Trump is pretty keen on not catching the blame for the lockdowns, since they’re actually pretty unpopular and even the people who support them (me included) recognize that they’re an unpleasant and expensive necessity. Since the governors are mostly in charge of deciding when/how to lock down, I think Trump intends to let them also carry the popularity costs for the lockdowns.

        • Edward Scizorhands says:

          But right now, if it was entirely up to him and nobody else had anything to say about it, he would decide to have lockdowns

          How do we know that?

          • Matt M says:

            Because he’s still out there saying “For now we need to have lockdowns?”

            I guess it’s possible he doesn’t really mean that, but for all of his other faults, Trump is usually pretty clear and direct when it comes to telling you what he’s thinking…

          • Conrad Honcho says:

            Because we’re still having lockdowns in places outside of NY and he’s not lambasting them. I’m pretty sure Trump is in favor of the lockdowns. I strongly disagree with him about this.

            ETA: damnit Matt, would you quit doing that?

          • Edward Scizorhands says:

            Because he’s still out there saying “For now we need to have lockdowns?”

            That’s what he’s saying in an environment where his medical advisors, who have much higher public trust than he does, are calling for a continuation of social distancing.

            *EDIT* Wait, is that a direct quote? If not, what’s the best direct quote you can give saying that he supports shutting things down? I found he was “OK” with Nevada’s shutdown but seemed mostly to be tolerating it because he had to. “But you could call that one either way.”

            https://www.usatoday.com/story/travel/2020/04/19/las-vegas-president-trump-ok-coronavirus-shutdown-public-safety/5163162002/

            and he’s not lambasting them.

            https://twitter.com/realDonaldTrump/status/1251169217531056130

            https://www.nbcnews.com/news/world/coronavirus-trump-says-some-governors-have-gone-too-far-lockdown-n1187596

          • Conrad Honcho says:

            Yes, he seems to think a few states have gone too far. He’s not calling for an end to the lockdown in Michigan, but a lessening of it.

          • HeelBearCub says:

            Who knows what he is favor of? It’s all fucking word salad.

            Tweeting #LiberateMichigan while people flagrantly flaunt the lockdown rules doesn’t parse as “Hey, ease up as much as is prudent”.

          • viVI_IViv says:

            I think he understands that the lockdown is unpopular with his base, and he’s probably not a fan of it himself, but then what choice does he have?

            If he calls for a lockdown lift and the governors listen to him then he’s going to have an election on the top of >1M American corpses, other countries imposing travel bans on the US, and so on. Even Senile Joe could win then.
            If the governors tell him to f**k off, then it’s a constitutional crisis. Good luck getting it sorted out while the courts are shut down.
            If Fauci resigns in protest and calls him an idiot, it will be also a yuuuge PR hit.

            I’m perhaps being too uncharitable to Orange Man, he may in fact care about American lives rather than just winning the election.

          • HeelBearCub says:

            but then what choice does he have?

            Do the fucking job?

            Sometimes you have to take the hit. The buck at the very least should stop at his desk.

          • The Nybbler says:

            Can’t we just take it for granted that (pretty much) no one wants millions dead, another Great Depression or a police state?

            No. I figure the police always want a police state. Our attorney general brags on twitter about charging someone with a crime for organizing a protest. And our governor, when asked, says the Bill of Rights is above his pay grade.

            In Venice Beach, California, the government bulldozed sand into a skate park and bragged about it. This is more or less a desire of authoritarians distilled: to figure out what people enjoy, and take it away, all for “your own good” or “the greater good”.

          • John Schilling says:

            The laws we already have (and that police are expected to enforce) are generally broken by people with extensive expertise in evading the police, and also some combination of lawyers, guns, and/or money. It’s not out of the question that the police would enjoy a change of pace in that regard. But that’s probably a second-order effect.

  12. pacificverse says:

    Thrive vs. survive makes perfect sense.

    It’s an old-fashioned cost-benefit analysis: is economic shutdown (and attendant few hundred thousand deaths from poverty, reduced access to hospitals, etc) worth e.g. a few hundred thousand lives saved?

    To a cost-benefit-calculating conservative, the cost-benefit analysis is “fuzzy”, and highly sensitive to the inputs in your disease and economic models (whether the death rate is 0.5%, 2% or 5%, hospital capacity, etc.). Lives are worth a finite number of dollars, as any incremental-cost-effectiveness analysis (a staple of public health anywhere outside the bleeding-heart USA) should clearly demonstrate.

    At this point in time, it is reasonably clear that American, Chinese, Korean, Filipino, Indian, and European lives are worth such a large amount of money, and COVID-19 is so very deadly, that very harsh containment measures are entirely cost-effective. Unfortunately, some chunks of the developing world may not be so lucky; economic productivity is so much lower that an economic shutdown could well “kill more people – i.e. cost more QALY” than letting COVID-19 spread with some mitigation.

    How much economic productivity is necessary to societal survival? How bad a shutdown can the economy take? A conservative would estimate this conservatively, and rate the risk of social disruption and happiness lost from economic shutdown substantially higher than the typical liberal. Hence a predisposition to measured, cost-effective disease responses and an inbuilt knee-jerk distaste at “maximum effort containment” as recommended by the WHO and China, even when it was actually cost-effective (because there’s no obvious cost cap, and the worst-case scenarios back then were flawed). Obviously, if you feed garbage data into your models (and brush off the scary Chinese January data as “those stupid Commies can’t do anything right”), you will get garbage conclusions – such as Boris Johnson’s flawed analysis that mitigation and herd immunity would work adequately.

    But it’s all been mixed up with partisan politics in the United States.

    • matkoniecz says:

      is economic shutdown (and attendant few hundred thousand deaths from poverty, reduced access to hospitals, etc) worth e.g. a few hundred thousand lives saved?

      Is there any evidence that shutdown and direct virus will have death toll on the same order of the magnitude?

      How much economic productivity is necessary to societal survival?

      Depends on what you mean by “societal” and “survival”.

      “maximum effort containment” as recommended by the WHO

      AFAIK this organization for quite long advocated less than maximum effort containment.

      China

      They complained about flight bans. That is not advocating “maximum effort containment”.

      • pacificverse says:

        It doesn’t have to cause deaths of a similar magnitude. A million people losing a day off work, for example, might have the same QALY effect as one death.

        The WHO screamed for maximum containment for day one. Standard epidemiological protocol is that containment is not achieved by travel bans, or restrictions on movement, or screening everyone going in a country. Containment is achieved by aggressive contact tracing and isolation and quarantine of contacts. It was the UK which went for mitigation. The PRC and WHO screamed at Boris Johnson the day he said “herd immunity”. They screamed it long and loud.

        Precisely. Societal. Survival. Different people will read different things into it. Hence a “fuzzy” cost-effectiveness analysis.

        You misread me. At this point, COVID-19 is obviously so bad that even very expensive containment is very cost-effective, even in poverty-ridden India (the ICER for a QALY is tied to a multiple of GDP/cap). The conservatives are using garbage data to get garbage conclusions.

        • matkoniecz says:

          Precisely. Societal. Survival. Different people will read different things into it. Hence a “fuzzy” cost-effectiveness analysis.

          Survival of society is a very low bar. It is likely that 30% death toll would be survivable. For example during WW II Poland lost 17% of population, with part of that being a deliberate attempt to murder key people.

          Latvia, Lithuania lost 10%+. 25% dead in Belarus Soviet republic.

          https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_War_II_casualties

          (to compare – UK deaths were at about 1% of population, USA death at 0.32%)

          It doesn’t have to cause deaths of a similar magnitude. A million people losing a day off work, for example, might have the same QALY effect as one death.

          You explicitly mentioned “hundred thousand deaths from poverty, reduced access to hospitals”, QALY (without deaths) would be on top of that.

          The WHO screamed for maximum containment for day one.

          What you define as day one?

          Standard epidemiological protocol is that containment is not achieved by travel bans, or restrictions on movement, or screening everyone going in a country

          This may be standard epidemiological protocol, but it is not maximum containment.

          Maximum containment is 100% movement restrictions, and screening everyone.

        • Aapje says:

          @pacificverse

          The WHO screamed for maximum containment for day one.

          No, they didn’t. They were participating in the Chinese cover up on day one.

          Standard epidemiological protocol is that containment is not achieved by travel bans, or restrictions on movement, or screening everyone going in a country.

          This is what globalists think is maximum containment…until it stops working, then they suddenly realize that they can actually do more.

          Containment is achieved by aggressive contact tracing and isolation and quarantine of contacts.

          Contact tracing only works if the virus transmits slowly enough and/or the symptoms are evidently quickly and/or you test enough.

          None of that was true for COVID at the off and if we want to do it in the future, we need severe restrictions on people without symptoms to keep transmission low enough for contact tracing to work.

        • Clutzy says:

          TBH, I can’t think of one assertion in this post that I agree with. The WHO did a cover up. C19 is not obviously so bad that containment is cost effective (in fact it appears all government organizations are intentionally not doing randomized testing to determine whether this is true or not). Containment of C19 is probably impossible with contact tracing because of its odd way of dispersing.

    • 2irons says:

      The risk from the virus looked exponential based on the initial models. Now for whatever reason the curves are flattening.

      The risk to the economy is exponential based on a negative spiral – one bankruptcy causes others which cause others…

      We do not know where the tipping point to a Great Depression lies nor how long investors faith in central banks will stretch (their monetary expansion being the main tool to guard against a complete lack of investment demand and a downward spiral of no confidence.)

      The role of government is to ensure stability. The economy presents a greater risk of instability at this point than additional deaths.

    • Matt M says:

      Unfortunately, some chunks of the developing world may not be so lucky; economic productivity is so much lower that an economic shutdown could well “kill more people – i.e. cost more QALY” than letting COVID-19 spread with some mitigation.

      And it’s probably worth pointing out that the global economy is so intertwined… there really isn’t a scenario wherein the entire developed world drastically reduces its consumption, but the developing world can continue all of its production, even if it wants to.

      If the US shuts down, that’s going to severely disrupt the economies of China, India, etc. whether they agree with it and whether that’s good for them or not.

    • eric23 says:

      If coronavirus becomes endemic in (say) India but not in the rest of the world, then no country will let anyone from India into its borders. That might cause more long-term harm to India’s economy than a shutdown of a couple months right now.

      • keaswaran says:

        Won’t they be fine as long as they agree to the testing protocol in the airports? You’re allowed to enter Australia as long as you have agricultural inspection to make sure you don’t bring the next cane toad or rabbit or fox or any of the number of other things that have gone viral there.

        • eric23 says:

          I don’t think the tests are reliable enough for that, particularly if you have just been infected and the virus has not yet built up to significant levels. What would be needed is immediate quarantine for some time after arrival.

      • LesHapablap says:

        The virus will be endemic in the US, there is no way they can eradicate it at this point. So places like NZ and Taiwan will have to isolate themselves from India, the US, the UK, etc.

        This isolation will likely take the form of mandatory 14-day quarantine for all arrivals, like NZ had prior to their lockdown. It’s effectively shutting the borders.

        • albatross11 says:

          If they can do rapid testing, I think the quarantine period can be a lot shorter than 14 days. Especially if they can require that you get a rapid screening before you get on the plane in the US.

          • Edward Scizorhands says:

            14-day quarantine is the baseline, worst-case scenario. There are lots of things you can do short of that. Especially if you are tolerating having a low number of cases.

            A nursing home’s defenses might need to be built for that worst-case scenario. But a country that is willing to tolerate a low number of cases can get by with less. Say, doing a health check at the border, sending off the sample to a test lab that will get results in a day, and in the meantime you require the visitor to have a tracking application on their phone so they can find them if you need to.

            I don’t know the exact right level of cost and risk that’s appropriate for each country, but over time they’ll figure it out. There are lots of variables to tune and lots of possibilities. (For example, the airline could do its own health checks ahead of time, because they don’t want infections spreading on their planes.)

          • HeelBearCub says:

            Especially if you are tolerating having a low number of cases.

            I think the big question is whether this is, in fact, tolerable and/or sustainable.

            Having an actual low number of cases is always “tolerable”, I would guess. But you can’t tolerate a low number of cases if that low number will grow unchecked.

            In the case of SARS-Cov2, the $20T question is “what measures will either reliably keep R0 below 1 or detect all cases in an outbreak and isolate them”.

            And, if you can’t reliably detect them on entry to a country, I have a hard time thinking you will be able to reliably detect them after they have been spread into your populace. So then that amounts to being able to reliably enter a mode that reduces R0 to below, preferably well below, 1 for an extended period.

            Is that doable? Hopefully with more time and knowledge.

          • LesHapablap says:

            albatross,

            Maybe it will be shorter, maybe 7 days, with rapid testing. Long enough that no air travel is commercially viable. But the point is, the US is not getting any special treatment here. India and the US are on the same side of the bright red ‘have virus’ ‘don’t have virus’ line. There is a world of difference between Taiwan/NZ 5 new cases per day, which is probably pretty close to new infections, and the United States’ 26,000 new cases per day, which is probably more like 250,000 new infections. The US would have to go into full lockdown for 12 months in order to reach <100 new infections per day.

            Edward,

            There is absolutely no way that NZ allows anyone entry to roam around after entry with a tracking application. I assume Taiwan and other countries that have almost eradicated is the same. Before the lockdown we required 14-day self isolation of any arrival into NZ. It was a joke: many tourists were not following the rules. Stories were all over the news of new arrivals getting on tour buses coughing all over the place.

            The prime minister has been unequivocal that we are doing everything possible to avoid going back into heavy lockdown once we are out of it. They aren’t taking any chances letting asymptomatic spreaders or air crew wander around town.

            The only way this changes is if NZ decides not to suppress the virus any more based on a world shift in strategy following Sweden. Which is what I am hoping for. The other hope is that NZ forms a bubble with the countries that have effectively eradicated like hopefully Australia. There's a lot of push for that here in NZ.

          • Edward Scizorhands says:

            There are many many many variables that can be tuned when designing a travel restriction. There is a lot of room between a 14-day quarantine and being overrun with cases.

            You need to deliver the tests to a testing station, which will have its own capacity issues. If people want to make air travel happen, then testing facilities will be co-located near airports. You might group passengers together in large groups and test them before they even get on the plane and then again after they get off.

            Is what I proposed the exact right answer? Probably not, but if you think it’s too onerous or too porous we can tune it more. You could require a clean test from a third-party (so it’s not part of the airport crush) within 2 days of getting on the plane, either in addition to or in place of above requirements, depending again on how you want this all to work.

            As long as people want it to work, it will, at some cost of time/money/convenience/privacy.

          • LesHapablap says:

            Edward,

            I realize this is probably not what you mean, but if those looser restrictions are granted to the US, they’ll be granted to Spain and Germany and India. So US is still on the other side of the bright line.

            More to your point: there are technical solutions short of a 14-day quarantine, but the restrictions will stay onerous enough that air travel won’t be commercially viable until NZ gives up its strategy. They might give it up because a treatment becomes available, or Sweden starts to look smart, or a vaccine comes around. Or they might find that a Trans-Tasman bubble suits them just fine.

    • Loriot says:

      This strikes me as strongly post-hoc reasoning. If you asked someone back in December what the “Survive vs Thrive” theory would predict about a massive pandemic, basically everyone would have said it would predict that conservatives would be on the pro-containment side.

      • EchoChaos says:

        Conservatives were the ones back in January favoring cutting off the USA from the rest of the world, so that fits perfectly.

        • Matt M says:

          This. Conservatives were plenty in favor of very harsh measures to prevent foreigners from introducing a foreign disease into the US.

          But they were defeated, such measures weren’t adopted, and the disease became rampant here anyway.

          • NostalgiaForInfinity says:

            Many of the people introducing the virus to the US will have been American tourists visiting China or Europe. You can’t just blame it on “foreigners”.

          • Clutzy says:

            Tourism is seen as a negative in many traditional circles as well.

          • BillyZoom says:

            @NostalgiaForInfinity

            From a New York perspective, it wasn’t tourists returning, it’s people working abroad on business, a significantly greater number of people than tourists.

            A friend in the textiles industry describes is as Wuhan->Milan->New York.

        • HeelBearCub says:

          Yeah, but that’s not actually thrive vs. survive.

          That’s just bog-standard “the other tribe(s) are the source of danger”. See metros worrying about people who hunt.

          • EchoChaos says:

            I think I disagree. When the disease was a mysterious foreign disease, the conservatives were the “survive” camp, wanting to cut off trade rather than get it. That fits perfectly. Foreign trade is a classic “thrive” luxury good.

            Initially, conservatives were just as aggressive about lockdowns in states hit early (e.g. Washington, Ohio, New York, California).

            Then the extent of the danger of the disease was revealed to be mostly to inner cities and substantially lower than the economic impacts of the shutdown, they still wanted to survive, but now were against the shutdowns because that is a larger threat.

            I think without the full timeline you miss some of it by just saying “survive would be lockdowns”.

          • The Nybbler says:

            @EchoChaos

            That’s my take on it as well, as someone who was initially skeptical about the impact of the disease. There were a number of groups (mostly “right”, but not the whole “right”) who were sounding the alarm and pro-extreme-measures when the disease was a scary unknown. Now that some data is in and it’s a scary (but less scary) known, positions have shifted.

        • keaswaran says:

          Notice that as of yesterday, Trump’s position seems to be that we should cut the USA off from the rest of the world (complete ban on all immigration?!) but it’s not a big enough threat to keep people out of shops for another couple weeks.

          • EchoChaos says:

            CULTURE WAR!!!!

            Let’s talk this tomorrow. 🙂

          • Edward Scizorhands says:

            Odds are we are going to get a long series of “updates” and “corrections” to the ban. Or it will be one of those TOTAL BANS that only apply to 5% of people.

          • Clutzy says:

            Odds are we are going to get a long series of “updates” and “corrections” to the ban. Or it will be one of those TOTAL BANS that only apply to 5% of people.

            Well thats the point. Most the people are saying that people will get the virus if we open up before vaccine. But waiting for vaccine is impossible. So when you have available hospital capacity you should be open.

          • Preventing immigration is a bad thing to do, but it isn’t the same thing as cutting the U.S. off from the rest of the world. It still permits foreign trade. It could even still permit foreign travel, tourism, business trips, and the like, although I don’t know how much of that the actual policy Trump is adopting will allow.

        • Dack says:

          If you asked someone back in December what the “Survive vs Thrive” theory would predict about a massive pandemic, basically everyone would have said it would predict that conservatives would be on the pro-containment side.

          Conservatives were the ones back in January favoring cutting off the USA from the rest of the world, so that fits perfectly.

          Cf. Survive conservatives advocating nonintervention when a war is hypothetical vs advocating total war once the war becomes real.

  13. Elliot says:

    I asked this a while ago and got good answers, & I need new questions now more than ever:

    What are your favourite pub quiz questions?

    What makes a pub quiz question fun? I think people should have a good chance of getting it correct, either by knowing or guessing. Or at least, people should feel like they *could’ve* got it and say “damn, of course” when they hear the answer. But does that cover it?

    • matkoniecz says:

      I think people should have a good chance of getting it correct, either by knowing or guessing. Or at least, people should feel like they *could’ve* got it and say “damn, of course” when they hear the answer.

      +1, this describes many questions that I liked. But there are some not really falling into this type.

      ———

      I tried pub quiz and disliked it because more than half of questions were about pop culture.

      Questions that were about specific facts (number of countries in the world, weight of Earth) were better.

      I liked questions where it was necessary to estimate things (how much money is earned by Bill Gates per second).

      It was nice to have some questions about really narrow topics, answerable by people actually involved in a given topic. So question was answerable by just some people, what was nice in groups. For example “O() complexity of quick sort” or an equivalent type of question for entomology/architecture/history/brewing/cooking/mining/computer games.

      This allowed people with entry-level knowledge (but with some knowledge in the topic!) to shine and become an expert in the group.

      It was less “damn, of course” – and more about your friend being knowledgeable in some topic. For bonus point, discussion between two people claiming to know answer was really fun.

      I really liked questions that were not about specific facts. For example “lowest positive integer that will be selected by exactly one group”.

    • Belisaurus Rex says:

      # of capitals named after US presidents

    • Rob K says:

      Coincidentally I was writing questions for a remote trivia night recently, and was thinking a lot about this. I had a mixed crowd of attendees by age, interests, and seriousness about trivia, and wanted as many as possible to have a good time.

      These rules were probably a bit specific to the format of trivia I was using, which involves reading a single question and then giving teams some time to formulate an answer. Harder and more “you know it or you don’t” questions can fit better when teams/people are working their way through a list of questions all at once.

      The rules I set for myself were as follows:
      -Getting things right is more fun, so the get rate on the whole should be somewhat over 50%
      -Guessing between some plausible leads is more fun than being completely at sea. This means that questions where you’re picking from a known, if large, pool of possibilities (US states, countries, whatever) are better than say being asked to name a fictional character or a relatively obscure person you may just not have heard of. Ideally, teams that don’t know the answer right off should have a spirited debate.
      -Too easy is no good, so on easier questions teams should still feel a sense of accomplishment for getting it – do a little mental work to get to the answer.
      -It’s good if people feel like they learned a fun fact, especially if they can work out the answer based on a fun fact they didn’t previously know.

      So e.g. the question cited above as good (“O() complexity of quick sort”) was not one I would have asked.

      The most popular question, based on audience feedback, was this:

      2.4 billion years ago, scientists believe, nearly all existing life on earth went extinct as a result of the accumulation of what gas in earth’s atmosphere?

      (55% got this, with most of those being successful guesses)

      The hardest question I asked, based on get rate, was this:

      The 1920 death of professional baseball player Ray Chapman led to a major league ban on a certain practice. Many players were accused of or punished for violating that ban in the following decades, including Hall of Famer Gaylord Perry, who went so far as to write a book confessing to it. What was that practice?

      29% got this – a few older folks who knew who Gaylord Perry is, and a few who logicked it out. but even many teams that missed had a discussion including the correct answer, and said they enjoyed it.

      • matkoniecz says:

        So e.g. the question cited above as good (“O() complexity of quick sort”) was not one I would have asked.

        Additional context: it was during time when I was studying, nearly all participants were students, large part of them were computer science students. In another context this would be likely ridiculous.

        • The Nybbler says:

          “Complexity of quicksort” is an unladen-swallow kind of question. “Average case or worst case?” “I don’t know…..AAIIIEEEE”

      • zzzzort says:

        Good questions. I’ve always appreciated pub quiz questions with just the right amount of work. Anagrams are too much work, remembering someone’s name is too little work, thinking about has been banned in baseball is just right.

        (Approximate) years tend to be good because there are many different pieces of info to synthesize. I might not know when the pony express ran, but it was definitely before the railroads and telegraph, and definitely after gold was found in california.

      • Elliot says:

        I agree with >50%. I pitched the last quiz too hard because I wanted all the questions to be challenging, but the people doing it felt kinda demoralized and it meant they enjoyed the whole thing less.

    • bullseye says:

      Contestants don’t expect to know all the answers, but they do expect to at least understand the questions. That limits how deep you can get into specialized expert knowledge.

      • Matt M says:

        The best trivia games are the ones where you know some answers, and the ones where you don’t know, you feel like you should know them. Every question should be one that the participants could plausibly know.

        • Nick says:

          That’s why pop culture questions are so common. Ask who the lead is of some popular movie from just a bit too long ago, and you’re going to have a few people who remember quickly and a bunch whose answers are on the tips of their tongues.

        • Procrastinating Prepper says:

          My favourite question in that vein:

          “What animal did the ancient Romans describe as ‘a cross between a camel and a leopard?'”

          Gur nafjre vf n tvenssr. (rot13)

    • Jake R says:

      I’ve always liked “What is the sixth largest lake in the United States?” because it’s weird to be asked about the sixth of something. Probably too easy though.

    • eyeballfrog says:

      I don’t know about favorite, but I know my least favorite: name that tune song and artist. I know I can tune out the entire round because even if I’ve heard the song before I’m unlikely to know both of those pieces of information. And that also means I have nothing to do for that whole round. It’s bad enough that I don’t go to any trivia nights where it’s a regular feature.

  14. EGI says:

    I have written a LW post I would like to signal boost about a possible way to
    eradicate Covid over a couple of months through wide spread use of particle
    filtering masks. The article discusses how and why this should be
    possible, and how to solve the logistical and production demands
    (mostly: use reusable silicone masks in stead of the one way stuff
    currently used). I think spreading this idea might be really high value.

    https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/yKYg6D7HNxLuJDcLS/hammer-and-mask-wide-spread-use-of-reusable-particle

    Here is a tldr version by a friend of mine wrote:
    https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/oHT2WZxFA9CSPMicb/the-hammer-and-the-mask-a-call-to-action

    • Algon33 says:

      Idea seems plausible.

      The filters are the sticking point for me. How often do you need to replace them? Can production of these be ramped up massively? How difficult is forming a seal, typically?

      Scott mentioned N95 masks are troublesome for most healthcare workers, so I’m not optimistic. Remember, even trivial inconveniences are a major problem for adoption.

      • EGI says:

        – Need to replace filters:
        Ultimately filters for these masks should be designed with longevity in mind and then be tested under typical use conditions. My gut feeling based on air filters in other applications (clean rooms, vacuum cleaners, etc.) is that hundreds of hours should easily be possible. Even current commercial filters may last that long. From my post:

        Since these filters are generally designed to be worn for a couple of hours in environments with very high dust load (grinding wood or stone, spray painting etc.) these filters should easily last for days, weeks or even months worn in a relatively clean health care or community setting. While this is generally not recommended in the manufacturers guidelines, as long as the filter remains dry it should be quite safe [18].

        – Production ramp up: Should be easy, since it is one or two injection molding part + the same / similar filter fleece used for filtering face piece (FFP) masks (N95 is one filtering class FFP masks can have)

        – Ease of use, forming a seal: This is pretty simple IF the mask roughly fits your face, like putting on swimming googles / a diving mask. Silicone rubber more easily adapts to your anatomy than fliter fleece and the mask is preformed. Multiple mask bodies to choose from are absolutely neccessary though. With FFP masks most people fail to bend the nose wire correctly and often it is not even possible to adapt it to your specific nose.

        Fun fact: Health care workers are not that more competent than the general public. Why should they be? From https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/10656351/

        Of the 62 healthcare workers observed using a respirator for TB, 40 (65%) did not don the respirator properly.

        . Some other source I don’t remember right now found somewhere in the 70ies for the general public. FFP masks in both cases.

        • MartMart says:

          Apologies for replying without having read the referenced post.
          I think filter longevity may be drastically shorter in a wearable application than it is when installed in some kind of equipment. I don’t doubt that a filter can last hundreds of hours before becoming too clogged up to allow sufficient air flow. When installed in some piece of equipment, that’s really all one has to worry about.
          However, in a wearable application, the filter is constantly being taken off and put back on. Every time, one risks contaminating the clean side. Once the clean side is contaminated, the filter becomes a great deal less useful.

          • EGI says:

            Thanks for this feedback. This is valuable sinch this may be one of the misconceptions that may be holding the concept back.
            1. If you take your mask off in a way / in an environment that gets your filter contaminated enough on the inside to matter for further use, you just got yourself infected, since the dose you’ll breach in (actively) is MUCH larger than what might get deposited randomly on the inside of your mask in all but the most contrived circumstances. And then you will only pick a small fraction of this back up during the next use.
            2. The inside of your filter is protected by a one way valve that can be cleaned with soap or etanol.
            3. Sars-CoV-2 decays quite quickly, so your mask should be OKish the next day even if did not clean it.

          • albatross11 says:

            Also, if you don’t have a one-way valve for exhaling, your mask’s filter media is going to get wet from the moisture in your breath. I think that degrades filter performance.

    • eigenmoon says:

      Wouldn’t the one-way valve prevent the mask from actually protecting others from the wearer’s breath?

      • HeelBearCub says:

        Yeah, that’s a bug, not a feature.

        Very specifically the following sentence should be a big red-flag when dealing with a pandemic spread by exhaled droplets of water:

        Additionally, they are equipped with one-way valves that prevent the filters from being soaked by the wearers’ breath.

        Just wearing a filtering mask isn’t that much protection IF you aren’t also following proper clean protocols. I don’t think the population can reliably follow those protocols.

        Now, I’d love to see some sort of study that compared average droplet distance exhaled from these masks vs. bandannas or other cloth masks.

        One interesting test, put a cloth covering over the silicon mask, and see whether the inside of the mask still stays dry.

        • EGI says:

          No, in this concept it is not a big red flag but I should have written more about it. The air you exhale is a lot messier than the air you inhale and thus much harder on the filters. Thus you want to filter the air going in. But it may be a good idea to cover the exhaust valve with cloth or a surgical mask if you have reason to believe you might have been exposed. See my reply to eigenmoon.

          Just wearing a filtering mask isn’t that much protection IF you aren’t also following proper clean protocols. I don’t think the population can reliably follow those protocols.

          Not sure what you mean with proper clean protocols but yes, you need to disinfect / wash your hands before touching your face and probably wear eye protection. Also you are not shooting for “making infection theoretically impossible”, just for “knocking infection probability down an order of magnitude or two.” This is a huge difference.

          Now, I’d love to see some sort of study that compared average droplet distance exhaled from these masks vs. bandannas or other cloth masks.

          No need to run this, cloth masks would win. If you know/suspect you are infected, wear a surgical mask or cloth.

          One interesting test, put a cloth covering over the silicon mask, and see whether the inside of the mask still stays dry.

          This would not change mask functioning and may be done to protect others. Note however the inside of the mask always gets wet, just the filters stay dry due to the valves protecting them.

          • HeelBearCub says:

            If you know/suspect you are infected, wear a surgical mask or cloth.

            Houston, we have a problem.

            I think you fundamentally misunderstand what you can expect from the broad population.

            In addition, if you suspect you are infected, the advice should be to not go out in public at all.

        • albatross11 says:

          The disposable part of the mask should be covering the outlet valve. Make that have relatively large surface area so you don’t add too much work to breathing. Now your long-term filter medium stays dry and will last a lot longer, and you have a smaller piece that needs to be replaced periodically.

          Imagine a world where everyone wears P100 or N95 masks with outlet valves. This prevents you from inhaling respiratory droplets, which is great. But it doesn’t keep you from spreading the virus around when you’re infected. Your droplets won’t go into my lungs, nose, or mouth, but might make it into my eyes, and will definitely contaminate surfaces and things around you that might spread the virus later. They’ll also get stuck on my clothes and on the outside of my mask, where they can infect me later.

          Imagine a world where everyone wears some kind of magical mask that prevents any outbound droplets but doesn’t protect the wearer at all. (You can kind-of imagine an inverted mask design–the one-way valve draws air in, and the filters work only on the exhale.) In that world, you’re not able to leave respiratory droplets anywhere, and I will never catch the virus from your respiratory droplets short of maybe having you cry on me or spread from stool[1].

          This turns on which routes of infection are the most important. If it’s airborne transmission, then everyone wearing really good filter masks even with outlet valves is still a win. If it’s nearby people getting droplets on their eyes/clothes/hands/food/things they will touch later, then the good filter masks with outlet valves aren’t all that helpful at stopping transmission.

          [1] COVID-19 is often present in patients’ stool, and flushing toilets are great at producing aerosols. Closing the lid is a nice idea, but public toilets never seem to have lids.

          • EGI says:

            The idea was to not have a disposable part and make filters last as long as possible to make it logistically possible that most of the population can wear a mask whenever they are in contact with people from outside their household. But having a cloth / fleece that can be cleaned and reused cover the outlet is certainly a good idea. But I do not think filtering outgoing air without mucking up your filters is technically possible. If it turns out otherwise, great, lets do so.

            They’ll also get stuck on my clothes and on the outside of my mask, where they can infect me later.

            Current understanding is that CoV-2 becomes nonviable when dried out Results form this study, though not in the document: (https://www.land.nrw/sites/default/files/asset/document/zwischenergebnis_covid19_case_study_gangelt_0.pdf).

            Stated it here: https://www.zeit.de/wissen/gesundheit/2020-04/hendrik-streeck-covid-19-heinsberg-symptome-infektionsschutz-massnahmen-studie/seite-2

            They looked at about 100 infected households and sampled surfaces. Found virus RNA everywhere but NO viable virus.

            This makes these concerns mostly moot as long as you wear eye protection and mask as long as you are exposed and disinfect hands before taking the mask off.

          • EGI says:

            Re stool: CoV-2 in stool seems also to be (mostly) inactivated though judgement is still out on this one. Or do you know of a study finding viable virus in stool (infecting cell cultures) as opposed to just having the RT-PCR come back positiv?

          • albatross11 says:

            I know virus in stool was responsible for some spread of the original SARS, thanks to some terribly buggered-up plumbing. I don’t know if SARS2 follows the same pattern, but it wouldn’t be shocking given that diarrhea is a somewhat common symptom.

      • EGI says:

        Yes, this is correct and also the case with the overwhelming majority of FFP masks currently in use in hospitals and so on, since almost all of them have an out going one way valve to reduce exhaling resistance (the rubber thingy in the middle of the mask). They do NOT have an intake valve protecting the filter though.

        This is not a big problem, since after a few days of using your mask you can be pretty sure that you are not infected, thus posing no risk to anyone anyway. If in doubt you could cover the exhale valve with cloth or a surgical mask.

        • HeelBearCub says:

          Yes, this is correct and also the case with the overwhelming majority of FFP masks currently in use in hospitals and so on

          Citation? That does not match my understand of standard health service PPE gear

          • EGI says:

            Look at this standard N 95 mask: https://pksafety.com/3m-n95-disposable-respirator-with-exhalation-valve-8210v-box-10/
            You see the white plastic thingy with the yellow rubber disk beneath? on inhalation the yellow disk is pulled against the valve seat, forming a seal. On exhalation it is pushed away from the valve seat letting air out.
            Not ALL N95 mask have this but at least in Germany where I live most pictures I have seen from hospitals with FFP2 masks (EU N95 equivalent) had these valves. Unfortunately I do not have a statistic about this. There may be local variation.

            Cursory google picture search suggests that this seems to be more of a European thing. Found about 30% exhalation valves searching for “N 95 hospital”

          • HeelBearCub says:

            From 3M:

            Can a respirator with a valve be effective against bioaerosols?
            The purpose of a respirator’s exhalation valve is to reduce the breathing resistance during exhalation; it does not impact a respirator’s ability to provide respiratory protection. The valve is designed to open during exhalation to allow exhaled air to exit the respirator and then close tightly during inhalation, so inhaled air is not permitted to enter the respirator through the valve. Most countries do not permit valves on surgical respirators because wearer-generated droplets, exhaled through the valve, might contaminate a sterile field.While a valve does not change a respirator’s ability to help reduce a wearer’s exposure to bioaerosols, it is not recommended that a person who is exhibiting symptoms of illness wear a valved respirator, because there is a possibility that exhaled particles may leave the respirator via the valve and enter the surrounding environment, potentially contaminating the sterile field. In summary:
            • Healthcare workers may wear valved or unvalved respirators to help reduce their exposure to potentially infectious aerosols.
            • Healthcare workers should wear a surgical respirator (which usually do not have valves) if they require respiratory protection while performing patient care tasks that might generate a high-pressure stream of liquid such as arterial spray or are working in a sterile field.

            The question is, in a pandemic, are health care workers a vector? Empirical evidence says yes.

          • EGI says:

            Sure, don’t use a valved mask when operating on someone, use a surgical mask. US regulations seem to be saner in this regard than EU regulations. I had a dental procedure on Saturday and everyone involved was wearing a valved mask (not properly fitted…) and TV always shows valved masks when showing hospital staff dealing with Covid over here.

            This has little bearing on this topic though, since I am talking about community settings and health care settings outside the operating theater. Also see my reply to albatross.

          • HeelBearCub says:

            @EGI:
            I just think you are underestimating the relative value of “layperson tries to protect themselves via maintaining a sterile field” and “everyone is encouraged to engage in behaviors wherein contagious people don’t spread the virus as readily”.

            In a hospital setting, you may be able to treat a room as “dirty”, meaning that the healthcare providers know that the likelihood of them infecting the patient is already zero (because the patient is already infected). Then it makes more sense to concentrate on protecting the healthcare worker from the sick person. Sterile protocol is much easier to maintain. And any patient who might have the virus would have a mask placed on them, so it would be harder from them to spread.

            But out in the wide world, at a population level, we want everyone to keep their potential viruses to themselves as much as possible. Everyone is presumed to have the virus, because, while we don’t know who has it, we know someone does.

  15. FrankistGeorgist says:

    Inspired by last open thread’s discussion of the republican government clause of the US Constitution… Let’s throw that right out, or at least smudge it to “crowned” republics. Who would be the king of your state? Either someone illustrious enough within the state to found a dynasty, a ceremonial celebrity, or perhaps in a more mystical King in the Mountain role.

    Some are obvious, with California having the courtesy rank of Empire under the Norton dynasty. Pennsylvania having Good King Quaker, William and his descendants. I’m guessing Texas would crown Sam Houston with appropriately Texan headwear. Though Tennessee might have the King already I wouldn’t object to Dolly Parton being declared a living deity and fitting a pharaoh’s crown over that hair in Memphis.

    I imagine Idaho, Washington, and Oregon having a triple-monarchy of House Lewis, Clark, and Charbonneau (to receive a Windsor-esque rebranding to Sacagawea to be more in line with popular will). Idaho might also have given the Syringa Throne to Mullan. Utah would of course pick from among the Mormon pioneers if not the Prophet himself.

    On a smaller scale, I suspect Fiorello LaGuardia is New York City’s Once and Future Mayor, who’ll awaken in some far off era to do something grand and mythical like build a new subway.

  16. TheContinentalOp says:

    Alt-History Question:

    Suppose the Maine blows up in Norfolk instead of Havana Harbor and Spanish-American War is avoided. The US doesn’t annex The Philippines or Guam, and without those two, decides it’s not work claiming Wake Island either.

    Does this change the thinking of the Japanese in WW2? Do they still bomb Pearl Harbor?

    What if the WJB wins the election of 1896, the Anti-Imperialist League is in full-force, and the US doesn’t annex Hawaii? Is there anyway that Japan and the US come to war?

    • EchoChaos says:

      In that situation, the USA probably doesn’t push its foreign policy levers to break the Anglo-Japanese alliance in the 1920s and 30s, so the UK and Imperial Japan split the Asian Pacific peacefully.

      China suffers pretty horribly in this situation, but they suffered pretty horribly in ours after their civil war, so in terms of total human suffering it might be less?

      • Radu Floricica says:

        But Japan doesn’t lose the war, so the military-inclined regime they had still holds power, possibly until now. Not sure how that would turn out.

        • EchoChaos says:

          Not sure how that would turn out.

          No idea. Lots of really nasty regimes have had successor regimes that turned out to be good, but plenty of them have just created massive human misery. No real way to know which way a theoretical Imperial Japan successor would be other than speculation.

    • AlesZiegler says:

      I think that without the need to take Philippines, it is unlikely Japanese would unilateral attack the US.

      They would still attack Britain, though. Probably US would still have joined the war on the side of the British-Soviet alliance and thus would end up in the state of war with Japan.

      • EchoChaos says:

        They would still attack Britain, though.

        Britain and Japan were close allies in WWI, and the US took a lot of time and effort cracking that alliance apart because they were worried about the Japanese in the Pacific. Without that US effort the most likely outcome is that Japan stays as Britain’s bulwark against Communism in the East.

        • AlesZiegler says:

          Anglo-Japanese alliance was primarily against Russia. I question your assessment that Japan was a close ally of Britain in WWI. Yes, they grabbed German colonies, but they refused to sent any troops to Europe.

          I know little about interwar relations between Britain and Japan, but in the 20s, Soviet Union was weak, so presumably alliance made little sense, and then Japan alienated Britain, as well as the whole “liberal camp” (this is not a good term, but I struggle to find another) with the occupation of Manchuria, condemned by the League of Nations. I doubt that either Japan would NOT take Manchuria or that Britain would be ok with it, whatever diplomatic maneuvers US was engaged in.

          Soviet Union and Japan continued to have hostile relations up to undeclared war until 1939, when two things happened – Japanese army was beaten badly at Khalkhin Gol, suggesting that USSR would be tough opponent, and Germany made a neutrality pact with the Soviet Union, so any hope of German help against USSR for Japan was seemingly gone.

          Japanese attacked British, French, and Dutch colonies since they needed to raid their resources after US imposed embargo on them. It could probably be avoided only if British would be willing to sell those resources to Japan, which I doubt would happen under any plausible circumstances, since with USSR and Germany at war, Japanese attack on the Soviets was now very plausible, and Britain would not risk that it will arm the Japanese against its new ally.

          • EchoChaos says:

            Right, without the Pacific pressure, the USA isn’t imposing an embargo on Japan, so shipping from us is a much better source than war, and why would the UK provoke Japan across the world when they’re engaged in a life or death struggle with the Germans?

            Especially since Japan/Russian enmity comes before Operation Barbarossa, when it seems very plausible that the Nazi/Communist alliance will endure, the UK picking Japan for an ally makes plausible sense.

            Sure the liberal world is mad at Japan for Manchuria, but they were also mad at Stalin for Ukraine and generally being Stalin and they still allied with him.

          • AlesZiegler says:

            @EchoChaos

            US imposed an embargo on Japan because it looked like Japan might attack British Empire and or Soviet Union.

            Unless I am misreading you, you suggest that Britain might entagle itself on Japanese side in Japanese-Soviet war. But that would be a stupid move, and I do not see any evidence that British leadership would be that stupid.

            If the Soviet-British alliance holds and if the US still supports it from behind, none of which I think would change with Spanish or whoever ruling over the Phillipines, then I see no way how Japan could get resources it needs from either British Empire or the US peacefuly.

          • EchoChaos says:

            @AlesZiegler

            You are WAY later in the timeline than I am thinking of. Yes, if Japan still allies Germany and Italy, the UK is not going to ally with them, but why would Japan do that if the UK remained their ally into the 20s?

            The Soviet-British alliance wouldn’t happen until Operation Barbarossa in 1941. Until then, most of the West thought that the Soviets and Nazis were allies, since the Soviets had combined with the Nazis in 1939 to partition Poland.

            If the Japanese were allies of the British instead of the Germans, as they would remain without US pressure on the UK to abandon them, then the Japanese battles with the Soviets could very well get the UK to assist them against the threat of a Nazi-Soviet Axis.

          • AlesZiegler says:

            @EchoChaos

            You are WAY later in the timeline than I am thinking of.

            I don’t think I am.

            If the Japanese were allies of the British instead of the Germans, as they would remain without US pressure on the UK to abandon them, then the Japanese battles with the Soviets could very well get the UK to assist them against the threat of a Nazi-Soviet Axis.

            This is precisely “a stupid move” I was referring to as being what British were unlikely to do. Even pre Barbarossa, British were careful not to stumble into the conflict with the USSR. Of course in the case of such a conflict, Barbarossa would have happened much later, since Hitler would be happy to let his enemies destroy themselves for him). Even when Stalin attacked Poland on 17 September 1939, British did not declare war on the Soviet Union, arguably in violation of their pledges to guarantee Polish independence.

          • EchoChaos says:

            @AlesZiegler

            But why would the Japanese be preparing an attack on the British, Dutch and French for resources as a British ally still getting American trade?

            The Japanese attacking the Soviets makes some degree of sense still, but the British would presumably argue against that.

            You seem to be assuming that the US and UK still embargo the Japanese, who aren’t German/Italian allies in this timeline, while engaged in a war in Europe.

            That is a fair point about the British avoiding conflict with the Soviets, though. I concede that.

          • AlesZiegler says:

            @EchoChaos

            Apologies for late response, I´ve been busy with stuff.

            You are correct that if you drop an implausible assumption that Britain would join Japan in a war against the USSR, and assume instead Japanese neutrality with respect to British-German part of the war, your hypothetical becomes much more realistic. Still requires a lot of assumptions though.

    • Dack says:

      Does the US still buy Alaska?

  17. Papillon says:

    I’m about to make a major life decision: drop out and join the military or finish my masters degree in economics. My thinking is as follows:

    -I’m two months behind in my degree and have two big assignments due in two days. I’ve recovered from similar situations before, but this time it’s much worse and I’d lose many yootils in the process.
    -I’ve always enjoyed overcoming physical challenges.
    -I’m somewhat more likely to die in the military than in civillian life, and I’m okay with that.
    -I have basically no real-life friends, and I’d like to make some.
    -I’m not confident in my employment prospects post-graduation; I’d probably end up working for my dad.
    -I’m not confident that economics is worthwhile as a field. (It may be, it may not be, I’m not sure).
    -I intend to homestead at some point in the future, and the military may leave me better prepared for that than office work.

    Is there anything I’m missing? What do you think?

    • Imsoindiethatmyblogdontfit says:

      The sheepskin effect is real. You have invested almost five years of your life into your degree. If you finish, that investment will be worth a lot more. Sit down and do the calculations of how much money your degree is worth, and how much work and unpleasantness it will take to get it. You can always join the military once you are done.

      Let’s say that the sheepskin effect increases your income by 20% if you work in a relevant field (this number is basically garbage, but if it is worth doing, it is worth doing with made-up statistics). Lets say that there’s a 10% chance that you start working in a relevant field (low since you want to join the army instead). Lets say that your expected lifetime income is $1.2 million. Expected value of the degree becomes 1200000*0.2*0.1=$24000. Not an insignificant sum. Redo the math with your own numbers.

      • acymetric says:

        Yeah, joining the military is a fine thing to do, but I would strongly recommend finishing your masters before doing so given that you’ve come so far.

    • Algon33 says:

      The prestige of the course, your expected grade and how much of the course you’ve finished are important factors. Mind telling us?

      • Papillon says:

        -My university is 200-250th ranked
        -If dedicated myself to my work I could feasibly average as high as an A-, but more realistic is somewhere in the B’s
        -I’ve “done” two months of a year-long programme (I haven’t actually “done” anything).

        • Mark V Anderson says:

          Everyone is saying finish your degree, but based on this comment maybe not. If you haven’t actually finished any classes, maybe this is the time to drop out. You can get a masters later. Of course it is also true the other comments that this is basically your panic that wants you to run away to the military are correct. I’d say try to get through semester and see how you feel.

    • Matt M says:

      -I have basically no real-life friends, and I’d like to make some.
      -I intend to homestead at some point in the future, and the military may leave me better prepared for that than office work.

      There are some decent reasons to consider joining the military, but you should strike these two, as the military isn’t really any better positioned than college to help you with either of them.

    • matkoniecz says:

      This tells me that it’s not a good time to be making life-changing decisions! In fact, it’s an extra-bad time for doing any kind of serious thinking.

      +1

      It reminds me about “Fuck studies, become a ninja” parodying such escapism plans during an exam time.

    • johan_larson says:

      It sounds to me like you’ve procrastinated a bit too much, and now face much harder work than you’ve expected. And this prospect has you panicking.

      My recommendation is to absolutely finish the degree. It’s certainly worth a few days or even a few weeks of hard work. A finished degree counts for something; a half-finished one doesn’t.

      Do what you can in the time available, and submit what you can. Think carefully about the penalties for late submission, and consider deliberately submitting late. If profs haven’t been explicit about the penalties, reach out to them and discuss the matter. I expect most profs would rather than a well-done assignment a week late than a slapdash bit of work on time.

      • acymetric says:

        I expect most profs would rather than a well-done assignment a week late than a slapdash bit of work on time.

        It isn’t something I would count on, but this is probably the best time in recent history to get some leniency on due dates from a professor.

        • Aapje says:

          It might be wise to embellish the reason for the extension a bit. Something like: ‘I had a hard time finishing my assignment on time due to worry about my family.’

    • matkoniecz says:

      Absolutely do not drop out just because you have two days to make two big assignments.

      Stop procrastinating on SSC and on escapism plans.

      At least try to make extraordinary shitty assignment or request an extension or check penalty for late ones.

      Throwing out years of work because one is unwilling to work for two days or week is a bad idea.

      (yes, it is easier to say that than to do that)

      • Jon S says:

        +1 to this. Two big assignments (that are possible to complete in under a week?) should not be on your top 10 most important factors list for such a major life decision.

    • David W says:

      I understand the concern about economics being viable as a field of study. However, an economics degree is generally a good ‘generic college’ degree. From an employer’s perspective, even if they don’t need macroeconomic studies, a degree in economics on your resume ought to tell them you are capable of both verbal and quantitative analysis, and (only if you finish) capable of semi-independent work to your boss’ plan. That’s a valuable signal to be able to send, and it can apply to a wide range of potential jobs.

      For that matter, I suspect the military would value a candidate with a degree in economics, even if you’re thinking of a noncommissioned role – again as a ‘generic quantitative’ degree, most likely.

    • CatCube says:

      Echoing @Matt M, you should definitely finish your degree. I was in the military, and I’d recommend that. First off, where you’re at is a bad point at which to blow up your progress so far. Secondly, a master’s is useful in the military, where if you want to start progressing above about major (which you will if you make a career of it) you’ll need a master’s anyway, so you may as well get it now and not have to worry about it later.

    • Incurian says:

      Finish your degree, then join up.

    • eric23 says:

      have two big assignments due in two days

      Get off SSC this moment and work hard for two days and finish those assignments! Then you can think about the army.

    • John Schilling says:

      Is there anything I’m missing? What do you think?

      Your prospects for a rewarding career in the military will probably be enhanced by a completed MS or MA. An economics Masters’ probably isn’t that valuable to the military, but it does signal a bit of extra intelligence and commitment, whereas showing up as a conspicuous recent dropout signals the opposite. You are unfortunately past the part where you can show up saying that your rational life plan was to graduate with a Bachelors’ and then enlist for a term.

    • aristides says:

      Even if you do join the military, you should finish your masters. The sheepskin effect applies to the military as well. You are much more likely to make Captain and higher ranks with a Masters degree. I can’t even think of a Major I know without a Masters degree, and all the Colonel’s I know have PhDs, JDs, or MDs. Finish your Masters if you can.

    • Garrett says:

      > I’m two months behind in my degree and have two big assignments due in two days.

      Pro-tip: Be proactive and reach out to your instructors. Ask if you might get some extra time on the assignments, though don’t point out that you’ve been procrastinating. Either way, get to work and do the best you can. You can always run away to the circus military later.

    • BlackboardBinaryBook says:

      What everyone else said, and also: this seems like a uniquely bad time to sign up for physically taxing conditions living in close quarters with a bunch of other people, all while losing pretty much all control over your life.

  18. thegoodtimeline says:

    Hey everyone. You may remember Scott’s review of Daniel Ingram’s “Mastering The Core Teachings of the Buddha”.

    I’ve just released a longform podcast conversation with him.

    We cover a bunch of stuff: high level jhānas; cultivating joy; belief structures; ontology; 5-MEO DMT; AI alignment; psychopathy; silent experiencers; nature of time; God / highest value; transhumanism.

    Listen here

    Keep well,

    Ryan

    • Viliam says:

      I’ve just released a longform podcast conversation with him.

      Just to make sure, the pronoun “him” refers to Scott, Daniel Ingram, or the Buddha? 😀

  19. MugaSofer says:

    Some people have brought up that my thrive vs. survive theory of the political spectrum does an unusually bad job predicting current events, especially the thing where Democrats mostly want to maintain lockdown and Republicans mostly want to take their chances. I don’t have much to say about this, but I acknowledge it’s true, and you should update your models accordingly.

    I looked into this the other day (I was writing a post on it, forgot to save, and my computer crashed…)

    It’s definitely a real phenomenon, but not as strong as your phrasing suggests; people are mostly on the same page, it’s just that a higher percentage of the Right than the Left aren’t.

    E.g. this Reuters poll:

    In the survey, 81% said the country should continue social distancing initiatives, including ‘shelter at home’ orders, “despite the impact to the economy.” This includes 89% of Democrats and 70% of Republicans.

    Only 19% said they would like to end social distancing as soon as possible “to get the economy going again,” including 11% of Democrats and 30% of Republicans.

    This UK YouGov survey showed a bigger gap between UK parties, but only in whether they thought their government is underreacting, consistently only about a lizardman’s 10% thought they were overreacting

    • acymetric says:

      In the survey, 81% said the country should continue social distancing initiatives, including ‘shelter at home’ orders, “despite the impact to the economy.” This includes 89% of Democrats and 70% of Republicans.

      Only 19% said they would like to end social distancing as soon as possible “to get the economy going again,” including 11% of Democrats and 30% of Republicans.

      The way these questions were phrased heavily biases in favor of “support lock downs”, as most people who want to end the lockdowns still support other social distancing measures. It isn’t really surprising that “End social distancing as soon as possible” didn’t poll very well (and specifically adding “to get the economy going” didn’t help). Get back to me when a poll asks better questions.

      • albatross11 says:

        I see your point, but that’s a universally applicable reply to any polling data ever. The alternative being offered is reported sentiment of red tribe members as seen from some news coverage of protests trying to max out the controversy and outrage and some inferred beliefs based on made-up statistics involving acceptance of mortal risks that provide a nice tale with the right moral.

        Is there better polling data available?

      • Doctor Mist says:

        The way these questions were phrased heavily biases in favor of “support lock downs”

        Wow, no kidding. If you drill down by following the link to the actual questions, you see that not only does it completely conflate “social distancing” and “stay at home”, but the key question reads:

        As you may know, many states and local governments have issued “stay at home” or “shelter in place” orders for their residents as a result of the coronavirus/COVID-19. National leaders have also promoted a policy of social distancing and have given “stay at home” guidance. Recently, some national leaders said they want to see the country back at work before April 12, 2020. Some doctors and public health officials have expressed concern over the country going back to before April 12, 2020, noting that it is too soon, and the coronavirus/COVID-19 will continue to spread rapidly.Which of the following comes closest to your opinion?

        So: “Some people say A. Other people say B, because A is wrong. What do you think?”

    • SamChevre says:

      This was a really exceptionally useless survey. Almost everyone agrees with some amount of social distancing: the question is whether Massachusetts (stay at home strongly recommended, but parks are open for hiking, garden centers and hardware stores are open so people can work on their houses and yards) is reasonable, or whether Michigan (no traveling to property you own if you don’t live there full-time, abortions are essential but carseats aren’t, no selling garden supplies) is appropriate.

    • Beck says:

      Have you seen any more recent polls? That Reuters poll is 3-1/2 weeks old (March 26-27), and I think public opinion may have changed considerably since then.

  20. Bobobob says:

    If anyone needs to kill a few hours, I recommend The Witch and The Lighthouse, both directed by Robert Eggers and streaming on Netflix. They are far from perfect, but Eggers has Total Command of the Frame (TM) skills reminiscent of Kubrick and Villeneuve.

    These are not particularly happy or uplifting movies, so be warned.

    • I’m potentially interested, thanks for the recommendation. 🙂 Can you say something more about what you enjoyed about them?

      • keaswaran says:

        Note that the first one is actually spelled “The VVitch”. My boyfriend made me watch it a while back, and wants to make me watch the other one, despite me not usually liking horror films. The VVitch was really interesting because apparently much of the dialog was lifted from 17th century Massachusetts diaries, and it depicts what happens to a family that is kicked out of the religious community (in the first scene) for some subtle religious difference, and then finds heretical tendencies of a sort in the daughter (while dealing with nature and who-knows-what).

  21. viceni says:

    I think survive vs thrive does a fine job in the current environment. From the point of view of many places outside NYC, SF, and a couple other large metro areas, the existential threat is not COVID-19, but rather a government shutdown that threatens to ruin your economic well-being, upend your ability to take care of your family, and destroy a lifetime of pride in your job. From the perspective of rural areas, it can look like this whole thing was an overhyped media nothingburger (I don’t subscribe to this interpretation, but I’m saying it looks that way when the number of COVID deaths is small compared to the economic damage).

    So in your narrative, make the zombie a government bureaucrat telling you you can’t work instead of a virus. Now the narrative works very well. Leftists see nothing wrong with everyone staying home because things are abundant and the government can provide infinitely for us. The right sees scarcity around every corner and is willing to take a modest risk to defeat it.

    • Oldio says:

      I also wouldn’t write off that thing where the media decides this is a big deal and the crisis of the century and so right wingers automatically write it off as a credible threat.

    • Matt M says:

      +1

      And it’s not just red states. Most of my extended family lives in a solidly blue state. And I don’t know a single person who even has or ever had COVID, let alone had it bad enough to kill (or nearly kill) them. I don’t have numbers on this, but I suspect this is true for most people in the US and almost definitely true for most people in the US ex-NY.

      For most people, the risks of COVID are highly theoretical. And when I say theoretical I don’t mean to imply “there’s a chance COVID doesn’t really exist” or anything like that. I just mean most people can’t really emotionally process a risk that they haven’t personally felt or experienced. At our current numbers, we’ve basically destroyed over 100 jobs for every COVID death. Now maybe that’s an acceptable ratio, and maybe it isn’t – but it will create a society where basically everyone knows multiple people who lost their job because of lockdowns, and nobody who died from COVID.

      And even if you are still working and haven’t had a serious economic setback… to the extent that you’re seeing empty shelves on your grocery store, or that you had to cancel a wedding, or your father had to cancel an “elective” surgery, or you can’t engage in your basic hobbies anymore… all of that is because of lockdowns, not because of COVID.

      • thisheavenlyconjugation says:

        we’ve basically destroyed over 100 jobs for every COVID death

        Source? That sounds like something a politician would say.

          • Matt M says:

            Yeah, so long as you believe lockdown-related unemployment is at least 10M and COVID-related deaths are under 100K, you get to two orders of magnitude easily…

          • matkoniecz says:

            Really useful info would be jobs lost over death averted by economy destruction.

            But obviously it is basically impossible to get that info.

          • thisheavenlyconjugation says:

            Presumably at least some of those people will get their jobs back shortly after the lockdown ends, making their situation quite different to the indefinite loss that I think “destroyed” implies.

            But also, with typical valuations of a life of ~$10 million I think 250 jobs per life seems like a good deal.

          • Matt M says:

            Presumably at least some of those people will get their jobs back shortly after the lockdown ends

            Given that most jurisdictions have not announced specific days at which specific types of activity can resume, and that nearly all initially announced much shorter lockdowns and then extended them, this should come as little comfort…

          • Lambert says:

            How many of these jobs were ‘destroyed’ vs postponed?
            Once this is over, how many employers will re-hire much of their old workforce?

            And are actual deaths a meaningful proxy for averted deaths? It sounds like a comparison that makes sense when dealing with gaussian distributions but pandemics seem like the kind of thing that involve lots of power laws.

          • acymetric says:

            @Lambert

            Well, business will almost certainly still be limited when things do re-open, so best case is probably somewhere between 50% and 75%.

            Of course, best case assumes all businesses re-open, which isn’t very likely, so probably substantially less although I don’t know how to properly estimate that.

            The closed businesses might get replaced with new ones eventually, but how long likely depends on how long it takes banks to loosen lending standards again for potential business starters.

            To really get into the weeds, consider that demand/consumer behavior might be permanently altered (or at at least altered long term on the scale of years) in such a way that some of those jobs are no longer needed after the lock down. Maybe new jobs pop up to replace them, but again I wouldn’t expect that to happen immediately and shifting workers from one industry/type of work to another (that may or may not be in the same location/region) isn’t necessarily a simple transition.

          • John Schilling says:

            But also, with typical valuations of a life of ~$10 million I think 250 jobs per life seems like a good deal.

            That would imply that losing one’s job reduces the value of one’s life by no more than 0.4%, or maybe 0.3 QALY. I’d be hard-pressed to think of a metric where that would be the case. Even neglecting the economic effects, job loss is one of the major causes of lasting depression.

            And, “Oh, those jobs are all going to come back in a few months so nobody is really harmed” is highly wishful thinking on several fronts.

          • Radu Floricica says:

            That’s definitely the wrong metric to use. The more successful the lockdown is, the worse this number looks. The worse the lockdown, the better the number.

          • Matt M says:

            The more successful the lockdown is, the worse this number looks.

            If you define “success” as “minimizing COVID-related deaths” without regard for any other consequence then sure, I guess that would technically be true.

            Of course, if we put on our “AI risk” hat for a second we could also declare that if only we killed off the entire human race in a giant nuclear war, that would also look like a quite successful policy in terms of minimizing COVID-related deaths as well…

            Is the problem we’re having right now that our politicians are behaving too much like Clippy? Focusing on a demand for one specific outcome regardless of all consequences and completely ignoring any and all potentially conflicting values?

          • EchoChaos says:

            @Radu Floricica

            The actually number that matters is jobs lost per life SAVED. This is very difficult to tell, but a good place to look might be Sweden v. Denmark/Norway.

            Sweden’s death rate is approximately 2x those, so it looks as if total deaths saved by putting in a hard lockdown is about halving the death total. This won’t be 100% true, obviously, but is a good rule of thumb.

          • Matt M says:

            Sweden’s death rate is approximately 2x those, so it looks as if total deaths saved by putting in a hard lockdown is about halving the death total.

            Right. And getting back to our jobs lost : lives saved ratio, this means that if you believe not having lockdowns would cause deaths to double, then the approximate amount of “lives saved” is equal to the current amount of “lives lost” so we are, in fact, sacrificing well over 100 jobs for every life saved.

          • Radu Floricica says:

            @EchoChaos

            Yeah, that works. I’d also switch to jobs lost per QALY/DALY, because at least in the health reports here, about half the deaths look like they have few years left and not of high quality.

          • Edward Scizorhands says:

            How much better is Sweden’s economy doing compared to its neighbors?

          • But also, with typical valuations of a life of ~$10 million

            As I think someone pointed out earlier, if the valuation for an average live is $10 million, the valuation for the rest of the life of someone already old should be substantially less.

            Saying that may not be politically popular but it’s hard to see how it can not be true, unless one believes that the first sixty years have negative value.

      • acymetric says:

        I mentioned the same thing in the previous OT. My closest connection to Coronavirus is second hand (I know a person who had contact with someone who tested positive, but the person I know tested negative and did not get the virus).

        or your father had to cancel an “elective” surgery

        Coincidentally, I have a family member that was basically immobilized by some serious back pain about a month ago. They will ultimately likely require surgery (tried several different pain killers with no real success), but it will likely be several months before that is even a remote possibility. Which makes for a pretty miserable several months, and also means a bunch of time with a physical therapist to gain back leg strength after not walking for 3-6 months whenever it is finally able to happen.

        More generally, “elective” procedures probably need to open back up sooner rather than later anyway, or you probably start to see upticks in other preventable deaths in the coming months/years (uncaught heart disease, uncaught cancers, so on and so forth). Maybe not facelifts and tummy tucks, but preventative care, screenings, and things that have significant impact on quality of life.

        • eric23 says:

          Not everyone is as lucky as you. One member of my extended family is in critical condition right now and likely to die. Another was intubated, but has recovered. A friend of a friend of mine, who I once met, has died. These are unconnected cases – the three of them all live(d) in different countries…

          • acymetric says:

            I’m very sorry to hear about your family members, and truly hope that they are able to pull through.

            I’m not suggesting that nobody knows anyone who is sick or has died. We’re at over 40,000 deaths, obviously someone knows all those people. Just pointing out that there are a lot of people (a majority of people in the US, most likely) who don’t which might explain some of the differing opinions on how strong a lockdown should be. Degree of connection to a coronavirus victim is probably very different in the hotspot areas like NY and others than it is in places that still have pretty limited numbers of cases (I live in such a place).

        • Garrett says:

          > More generally, “elective” procedures probably need to open back up sooner rather than later anyway

          The biggest problem is that those require PPE which is what’s currently in short supply.

    • John Schilling says:

      It doesn’t help that the personal Idiosyncrasies of the GOP’s current leader had him wildly broadcasting the “coronavirus is no big deal!” line at a critical time when I’m pretty sure “You all need my Strong Leadership to save you from this Deadly Chinese Plague that the Damn Dirty Globalists have brought to our shores” would have worked better for him.

      But, yes, Red Tribe was thriving along just fine until the lockdowns put a big chunk of them out of work, and would probably still be thriving if there had never been lockdowns. Partly because Red Tribe mostly distant from the great cosmopolitan cities where COVID-19 has been doing most of its spreading. But also because Red Tribe thinks nothing of taking jobs whose career mortality rate is higher than an actual COVID-19 infection. To Red Tribe, a ~1% chance of premature unexpected agonizing death is, meh, part of life and definitely better than being unemployed.

      Now a huge chunk of them are unemployed, and others quite reasonably fear being unemployed in the near future. Their jobs aren’t amenable to telecommuting, and their employers may be out of business when this is over. And their community and family life has been disrupted and diminished. Over a virus that, for most of them, hasn’t seriously sickened anyone they know.

      Red Tribe is not thriving. Red Tribe is trying desperately to survive. But the the thing that Red Tribe is trying to survive, is a bunch of elite liberal reporters they already don’t trust telling them about a disease that seems to mostly affect frightened elite liberals in their cosmopolitan enclaves, and which conspicuously Democratic governors like Newsom and Cuomo and Whitmer have used as an excuse to wholly upend their lives for the indefinite future. Red Tribe, facing what it perceives as a threat to its survival, is turning to its leaders for protection against that threat.

      • Bobobob says:

        That’s an interesting point about red-tribers being more likely to have jobs with a 1 percent mortality rate (military, police, construction, truck drivers, etc.). I think that does a lot to explain the comments I’ve been seeing on social media.

        I would add (speculatively) that blue-collar workers are more likely to have chronic health conditions, smoke at higher rates, and/or are overweight, and so have long since learned to live with the prospect of increased mortality. So a liberal yelling “I don’t want a 1 in 100 chance of dying from Coronavirus!” will very likely rub them the wrong way.

        • Matt M says:

          I’d also guess that red-tribe is probably much more likely to indulge in higher risk hobbies and recreational activities than blue tribe as well. Things like shooting, hunting, motorcycles, auto racing, full contact sports, ATVs, etc. Things where risk of death is real, but minimal (<1%).

          I feel like red tribe people are far more likely to have encountered scenarios in their life that required a thought process that goes something like "This could kill me, but there are things I can do to reduce the likelihood of my getting killed to odds that are pretty darn low," and decide to proceed because the benefits are worth the risk.

          • John Schilling says:

            Yes, and an awful lot of Blue Tribe seems to want to live in a space where all things are either Intolerably Dangerous or Completely Safe and no one ever has to make a cost-benefit analysis where probability of death is a factor or risk is a thing that requires personal mitigation. This isn’t unique to Blue Tribe, but I think it is much more common there.

            COVID-19 is in an ugly place where A: it can’t possibly be spun as Completely Safe, and B: there are things we can do that if we squint and tilt our head just right look like they might make it Completely Safe, but C: really won’t, at least not any time this year. Therefore it is Absolutely Intolerable that we ever stop doing these things, even as we proceed past the point of diminishing returns and into the realm of net harm.

            And they’ll probably flip to Completely Safe prematurely, on the basis of a declining trend, then flop back to Intolerably Dangerous on the rebound.

          • Doctor Mist says:

            Thanks for this, John. I’ve been trying to put my finger on the source of my feeling of dread, and this captures it perfectly.

      • HeelBearCub says:

        To Red Tribe, a ~1% chance of premature unexpected agonizing death is, meh, part of life and definitely better than being unemployed.

        Are there any jobs that currently have a yearly 1% mortality rate? Even Alaskan king crab fisherman mortality rate is less than 1/3 that. The next most dangerous occupation is something like 0.1% fatality rate.

        And, how many people with, say, black or brown lung actually don’t give a shit about it? This seems more like one of those things you don’t care about right up until you get those delayed consequences, at which point you are ticked about being forgotten, invisible, ignored, etc.

        • John Schilling says:

          Are there any jobs that currently have a yearly 1% mortality rate?

          Why is 365.2422 days the relevant timescale? I’d think the mean time between pandemics would be more relevant, in which case yes absolutely. And job-related mortality isn’t uniformly distributed in time; fishermen put to sea in (hopefully imperfect) storms, policemen work overtime during riots and crime waves, etc.

          • HeelBearCub says:

            Because time between pandemics is a useless measure here.

            The reason people don’t care about increased overall premature mortality is the expectation that they will get a lot of “good” years in before they die. The expect they are highly likely to build a nest egg, get married, have 2.1 kids, etc. Dying in 20 years is not the same as dying this year. Everybody dies eventually.

            Whereas people get very well pissed off by big increased short term risk, things like the bean counters increasing profit on Deepwater Horizon.

            So, when the bodies start piling up, the “no biggie” attitude goes away rapidly.

          • acymetric says:

            [sic]They expect they are highly likely to build a nest egg,

            Anyone still expecting that in the next 5 to 10 years?

        • matkoniecz says:

          I interpreted it as “over total time of employment”

        • Oldio says:

          To prime/working age people the death rate is probably less than 1%. IIRC ~1% is the whole population death rate, which includes elderly people, chainsmokers, etc.
          And red tribe is probably, for a variety of reasons(smokes more, higher obesity, poorer, etc) more blase about a shorter life expectancy than blue tribe, and for a variety of reasons(more likely to be part of a church, can’t telecommute, bigger sports fans, etc) more affected by social distancing.
          If you think of it as 1% chance we lose grandma/grandpa/mom/dad/uncle Joe, plus a lower than that but still there chance I die, and a snowballs chance the kids die, it’s a risk calculation that makes a lot more sense.

      • albatross11 says:

        My guess is that a lot of this has to do with the main concentrations of infection now being NYC and surroundings, and to a lesser extent, the West coast. If we get the virus sweeping through red states and sending a substantial number of people to the hospital or the morgue, then it will become a much more pressing and urgent issue for the red tribe.

        • keaswaran says:

          My understanding is that southwest Georgia and southern Louisiana are actually doing far worse than anywhere other than New York.

          https://geodacenter.github.io/covid/map.html

          But of course, these being red tribe places, the media isn’t talking about it (except occasional mentions of New Orleans, that blue dot in the middle), so most of the red tribe isn’t even aware of it.

          • EchoChaos says:

            But of course, these being red tribe places

            No, they’re African-American, which is culturally similar to the red tribe, but notably distinct. Louisiana is even run by a Democrat governor.

            Blacks are getting absolutely ruined by this both for cultural reasons and health reasons.

          • Loriot says:

            I’m sure we’ll hear a lot more about it now that the governor of Georgia has decided to lift the lockdown.

      • DinoNerd says:

        That point about many blue collar jobs being inherently riskier fits my experience. My father was a factory worker. Cousins, neighbours etc. mostly did not work in offices. Their work was both riskier than white collar work, and more likely to involve painful short term physical consequences. And this was normal, not something to be especially upset about.

        I’ve been explaining my own sneaking suspicion that a one time, 1%-ish risk of death isn’t as bad as it’s being painted by me being old enough to have spent a lot of time with people who came of age before antibiotics, whose parents knew that it was unlikely that all their children would survive until adulthood.

        But maybe it’s simpler than that, and it’s my working class upbringing talking.

        Meanwhile I work in an office, and am now comfortably working from home with no expectation of my employer foundering or even having a round of layoffs; they are still paying plenty of people who can’t WFH in current circumstances, never mind those of us who are. And I certainly don’t mind having my risks reduced. But I tend to sympathize with anyone who’s lost their income and would rather go back to work and take their chances with the virus.

      • Clutzy says:

        But, yes, Red Tribe was thriving along just fine until the lockdowns put a big chunk of them out of work, and would probably still be thriving if there had never been lockdowns. Partly because Red Tribe mostly distant from the great cosmopolitan cities where COVID-19 has been doing most of its spreading. But also because Red Tribe thinks nothing of taking jobs whose career mortality rate is higher than an actual COVID-19 infection. To Red Tribe, a ~1% chance of premature unexpected agonizing death is, meh, part of life and definitely better than being unemployed.

        I’ve really never seen a stronger endorsement of red tribe than this.

    • JPNunez says:

      There are 22 millions of unemployment claims in the usa right now. If that’s what it takes for “everyone to know someone who lost their job”, you’d expect to really pay attention at around that same level of deaths.

      That’s a silly threshold of deaths before you change your mind to think the risk is serious.

      Besides, it’s not like those jobs _had_ to be lost. The situation could have been better managed, but America just fucking hates job security. Maybe that’s a good thing! Maybe the recovery will be faster than if the government had done something, maybe not, but keep in mind that this is also part of the government policy.

      • Randy M says:

        Certainly, the impact of death is much more, emotionally and economically vs unemployment. But the latter is non-negligible; so what’s the ratio?
        No one is going to agree, as there is a wide range of reasonable numbers.

        • JPNunez says:

          It’s probably incorrect to compare both; deaths are obviously permanent, but jobs can be recovered. Something more comparable is to check is how long will they remain jobless. 10% of the population without a job for a year would be disastrous, so the better outcome would be to do the biggest effort right now, even if it leads to 20% of the population being unemployed, but have them return to work sooner.

          Obviously the numbers would be the same if 20% is unemployed for 6 months, but I have to wonder what level of disaster would it take to get to that point. Maybe it will just happen because the economy is bad enough in the coming months.

          I think the correct solution is to work out how to make the economy work in these conditions. Train people to run absurd amounts of tests, hire them to clean the offices and public spaces more, tons of monitors for quarantines.

          I assume the covid will be with us for a few years so we may as well transform the economy to work under those conditions. There’s no returning to normalcy. Force capitalism to adapt.

          • HeelBearCub says:

            The proper measure is difference in unemployment numbers.

            How many restaurants are staying in business with an uncontrolled pandemic in full force? In a day and age where people know what the actual disease vectors are?

          • Clutzy says:

            10% of the population without a job for a year would be disastrous,

            If you think that you have to think lockdown was a mistake, because we are probably at or around 50% probability of 10% unemployment in March 2021.

          • Conrad Honcho says:

            I think the lockdown was a mistake.

            I think we need a category system for plagues like we have for hurricanes.

            Hurricanes:
            Cat 1: It’s just some rain, bro.
            Cat 2: Bring in the lawn furniture
            Cat 3: Buy booze. Also water.
            Cat 4: Eh, board up your windows.
            Cat 5: Fly, you fools!

            For plagues, we need
            Cat 1: Literally just the flu, bro.
            Cat 2: Modest spread/mortality. Unlucky people might die, but most everyone else doesn’t need to do much. SARS/H1N1.
            Cat 3: Fast spread/modest mortality. Practice social distancing, old and infirm should isolate. COVID-19.
            Cat 4: Fast spread/high mortality. Young and healthy people at risk. Lockdowns. Spanish Flu.
            Cat 5: Zombie apocalypse.

            Some people thought it was a 1-2, some thought it was a 4. We erred on the side of caution, which is completely understandable, and went with the Cat 4 response. It turns out it’s a Cat 3. So end the lockdowns, but people should voluntarily limit exposure, wear masks and gloves, etc.

          • HeelBearCub says:

            gloves

            Hoo boy.

          • Statismagician says:

            Add the step where everybody learns sterile technique in elementary school and personal stockpiles of PPE are some combination of mandatory/government-provided/tax-deductible, and I’m on board. The issue is that they don’t and aren’t, so saying ‘voluntary social distancing and mask use’ fails due to lowest common denominator compliance ruining things for the rest of us.

          • HeelBearCub says:

            @Conrad Honcho:
            This:

            Add the step where everybody learns sterile technique in elementary school

            That’s the big stumbling block to make gloves particularly useful. Otherwise they are just a big collection vector for stop that you would wash off your hands but now won’t “because you have gloves on”.

            This isn’t something that infects upon skin contact, through small breaks in the skin, or the like. In addition, I’m highly, highly unlikely to infect you via touch, and this isn’t mitigated by you wearing gloves. I’m not saying gloves can’t be useful in some manner, but, I think any usefulness at a population level is likely mitigated by risk compensation.

            That cashier wearing a single pair of gloves for an entire shift? Not so helpful.

            Now, my wife brought home a box of gloves to be prepared for if one of use gets sick and needs care in the house. There you start to be able to engage in proper sterile technique every time you enter/leave the “dirty” room, etc.

          • Conrad Honcho says:

            All right, that makes sense. I was thinking of my wife who wears gloves when she goes into the grocery store and then takes them off when she leaves. But she’s not an idiot, so there we go.

          • albatross11 says:

            The left end of the bell curve will be with us always.

          • albatross11 says:

            Note that food service workers around here have to wear gloves when preparing/handling food. I have no idea if that’s helpful–you do occasionally see someone wearing their gloves while taking out the trash….

          • acymetric says:

            Obviously the numbers would be the same if 20% is unemployed for 6 months,

            It seems pretty likely we’ll be at least at 20% through the end of 2020.

            @albatross11

            Note that food service workers around here have to wear gloves when preparing/handling food. I have no idea if that’s helpful–you do occasionally see someone wearing their gloves while taking out the trash….

            They are supposed to wear gloves while taking out the trash. To prevent getting trash on their hands (also, some of those trash bags have pesticides and other chemicals in/on them to discourage bugs in and around the restaurant). If you see an employee taking the trash out without gloves, you should be mildly concerned.

            The key is that they take those gloves off, wash their hands, and then put on new gloves.

          • HeelBearCub says:

            Note that food service workers around here have to wear gloves when preparing/handling food. I have no idea if that’s helpful–you do occasionally see someone wearing their gloves while taking out the trash….

            As acyemtric said, food service workers wearing gloves is precisely due to the fear of the kinds of things that CAN be spread via touching food. Some of this is hygiene theater, some local health service bureaucracy, some of it is corporate CYA, but there are plenty of disease routes from someone to food to you.

            “Employees must wash hands before returning to work”

          • Mark V Anderson says:

            we are probably at or around 50% probability of 10% unemployment in March 2021.

            I don’t think this is so. And even if so, it probably won’t be exactly the same 10% that aren’t working now, so 10% not out of work for a year.

          • Clutzy says:

            I don’t think this is so. And even if so, it probably won’t be exactly the same 10% that aren’t working now, so 10% not out of work for a year.

            Its true that that 10% wont be all the same people, I didn’t really account for that and its a good point. But BLS has us at about 18% already, probably peaking significantly over 10%. A 10% rebound is hard at any time, but also there are plenty of people speculating we were due for a correction anyways before C19. Its probably gonna be tough to have a real V shaped employment recovery in that sort of environment.

            Also, IDK how significant this number ends up being with regards to the total population, but a lot of the people who are really going to be hurt I don’t think are eligible to claim Unemployment. The sole props and small business owners. IIRC when I was working as a contract attorney you could not apply for it when your contract ends.

          • The Nybbler says:

            There’s always people speculating we’re due for a correction. I agree there won’t be a V-shaped recovery, but it will be for two reasons

            1) Government won’t let the boot off entirely. They’ll keep it on hard enough to ruin many businesses while avoiding blame in the eyes of those who can sneer that if you can’t do business with only 50% of your capacity, you shouldn’t do it at all.

            2) Overly generous unemployment benefits will keep labor markets tight while unemployment remains high.

          • keaswaran says:

            > > 10% of the population without a job for a year would be disastrous,

            > If you think that you have to think lockdown was a mistake

            Not if you think it would be even *more* disastrous to have 0.5% of people dying and 20% having several weeks of being too weak to move around the house.

          • The Nybbler says:

            Not if you think it would be even *more* disastrous to have 0.5% of people dying and 20% having several weeks of being too weak to move around the house.

            And where do you get that 20% from?

  22. baconbits9 says:

    Just wildness in the oil market.

    Futures are simple (allegedly): April’s oil contract stands tomorrow, so if you have bought oil on an April contract then you can request delivery of that oil tomorrow. April oil collapsed last night hitting lows in the $11.30 a barrel range. May oil contracts are currently still in the $22 range (down ~ 12% vs April down about 39%), if you can take delivery of oil, store it and then delivery it in one month then you can achieve a 98% return on your money in one month buy buying an April contract and selling a May contract. If you can hold for 2 months then you can achieve a 121% return at prices right now.

    • matkoniecz says:

      What is the storage cost and transport cost (twice) of oil?

      98% return would be with both being 0.

      • baconbits9 says:

        Its less than $11 a barrel to store and transport oil. We can tell this because the spread between May and June, June and July, July and August etc contracts are all much less than $11 a barrel.

      • Jake says:

        I know nothing about the oil industry, but a quick google search shows that you can buy a used 8400 gallon oil tanker trailer (the kind you see on the highway) for somewhere between $10-40k. At $11 profit per gallon, that’s a whole bunch of $50k bills sitting on the ground if you own a truck that you can drive to go pick up those tanks. There could be laws against how long it can sit in a tanker, or it could go bad…I really don’t know, but it seems obvious to do that, if you have the ability to pull the trailer.

        • Matt M says:

          You almost certainly cannot drive/pull such a trailer without at least a basic CDL, and probably a more fancy one that requires some level of HAZMAT certification (any truck drivers here to help me on this?)

          • SamChevre says:

            You’d need at least 2 CDL endorsements – tank and hazmat.

            But it’s not that hard to just hire a truck driver–which also means you don’t need to buy a truck, just a trailer. My brother is a truck driver–he says $2.50-$2.75 a mile for that set of endorsements.

          • John Schilling says:

            Yeah, around here the standard way for farmers to store the fuel for their irrigation pumps is in a semi trailer blocked up next to the pump, and swapped out for a full one when it runs dry.

            On a larger scale, a significant fraction of the world’s supertankers, and I’d wager a majority at the moment, are being used more as vaguely mobile oil storage depots than as transportation systems. You don’t have the option of detaching the propulsion hardware there, but the economics often still favor “just fill it and park it” over building tank farms.

          • toastengineer says:

            Didn’t a couple people on here say they were investing heavily in companies that do exactly that?

        • baconbits9 says:

          Price update: April Futures are now priced at $8.05 a barrel, May contracts are 22.74, so a 182% profit on the trade.

          • baconbits9 says:

            Updates are completely worthless, last print was under $6 a barrel for April.

          • baconbits9 says:

            $2.50!!!!!

            There was a large bankruptcy over the weekend for a Singapore based oil trading company (fraud related) I wonder who is going to get carried out on this action. I have no idea what the short/long setup is for April deliveries but it seems likely that this action is going to break some bank/fund/firm and they are currently liquidating positions.

            EDIT: Also, my apologies I have been saying April/May when I should have been saying May/June.

        • actinide meta says:

          An oil barrel is 42 gallons. $11 per barrel is $0.26/gal or $2,200 per 8400gal tanker truck. That’s probably still high compared to the *depreciation* on the truck over a month, but I’m not sure it’s worth buying one to do this trade. Also at some point all the existing tanks are already being used for oil storage.

          • baconbits9 says:

            Good catch.

            Since we are talking oil- oil markets appear to be saying that demand will be back to normal* around december 2020. That is when month to month futures prices basically flatten with a similar price per month difference.

            *normal being no longer any large disruptions due to shutdowns/reopenings/shutdowns, not 2019 demand

          • craftman says:

            Also – a single futures contract for oil is a minimum 1,000 bbl (42,000 gallons), so you’d better be able to purchase 5 of those trucks and keep them stored somewhere for a month.

  23. no one special says:

    Tech support issue:

    Something funny with the site stylesheet: when gravatars fail to load*, the image size becomes large enough that they overlap the entire comment, making links in comments unclickable.

    * This is almost certainly because I’m using tracker blockers: either Ghostery (probably) or Firefox’s new “Enhanced Tracking Protection” (which is on by default these days). Feel free to bin this, unless you think there might be people coming by with this sort of extension often enough that you want to take it into consideration.

    • Exa says:

      I also had this issue, and found that it could be solved by using ublock origin (other blockers may also have this functionality, I don’t know) to remove the page element that tries to load the gravatars.

      • Nick says:

        +1. I have Firefox with Enhanced Tracking Protection set to Standard and uBlock Origin and don’t have any issues. I don’t know how ETP behaves on strict, though.

    • I have a different issue, one I mentioned a long time ago. I normally go through unread messages using ~ n (without the space between). Quite often, probably more than one time in ten, instead of going to the next unread message, it takes me to the top.

      Is this a problem other people have, or something special about my setup?

      • Randy M says:

        Are you sure you aren’t clicking anywhere one the screen? This will deselect the text and then start the search function from the top.

        • Nick says:

          Last time David mentioned this I suggested that, but he said it doesn’t seem to help. It’s possible the behavior is browser dependent or that some plugin is messing with it.

      • VoiceOfTheVoid says:

        If you’re willing to try out a change to your flow, might I recommend opting-in to the beta autohide comment widgets? (@Bakkot plz make them official I love them)

        Of course it comes with its own set of annoying quirks and oddities, but probably worth a spin.

      • Mark V Anderson says:

        Yes I have this problem occasionally. I have probably clicked somewhere I shouldn’t, but I have no idea what I did. It’s almost like the system is trying to catch me. When I’m not paying close attention, it jumps to the top. I don’t even know how to do this on purpose. What would cause that?

      • noyann says:

        I have this after posting (but not after editing) a comment.

  24. James Miller says:

    If in-person classes don’t start in the fall, I think that college professors should all help teach online high school classes. Each professor could teach one seminar on a topic of their choosing with a maximum enrollment of, say, 8, so there can be meaningful Zoom discussions. Colleges, especially state schools, should announce they will be doing this as a way to get political support for bailouts.

    • eric23 says:

      Aren’t college professors already teaching college students online, and doing whatever research is possible within hygiene guidelines?

      • James Miller says:

        Yes, and this means we are rapidly improving our ability to teach online. But teaching online makes most of us less socially valuable and so to maintain our salaries we should expect to do more work. If in-person classes don’t start in the fall, lots of colleges will face a financial catastrophe and so colleges should be maximizing their chances of getting government bailouts.

        • albatross11 says:

          Could some universities offer their college level classes (with credit) to a wider range of students, too? I mean, right now, you can get college credit in high school by taking AP classes or by taking classes at a junior college. Why not also add in online classes? There’s no reason at all a bright 15 year old shouldn’t be able to check the boxes needed for graduation from high school with classes that will also give then college credit.

          • James Miller says:

            Yes, and this could be an additional course of revenue for colleges.

          • The one problem with this is that our schooling system, K-12 and college, is heavily dependent on giving tests, since part of what it claims to produce is evidence on how able a student is. If tests matter, there is an incentive to cheat, and cheating is harder to prevent online.

            One solution is to assume that, for the moment, schooling is about learning things not testing. We could imitate what I gather is the Oxford model, where the important testing is at the end, and assume that that will be done in realspace far enough in the future so the pandemic is no longer a serious bar.

            Another alternative is to make all tests oral, using online video, with the teacher photographing the face of the student and at least the potential of later checking it. That’s time expensive for large classes but not unworkably so for small ones. And interaction, online or in realspace, is more important for small classes.

            For large classes, have the T.A.’s do the live testing?

          • VoiceOfTheVoid says:

            The models my professors have been using is “exams are now take-home, download it and submit your answers electronically”. Anti-cheating measures have been either “please don’t cheat, honor system” or “this exam is now explicitly open-book.”

            However, I’ve also heard of classes using a service called ProctorU. Basically, you take the test online and they can see your screen through software and your face through webcam. Also you as the student pay $50 for the privilege of taking your exam, which maybe shouldn’t surprise me when buying your own textbooks is a thing. (Unlike sky-high textbook prices, this fee can’t be avoided via blatant piracy.)

            Of course, while this offers more protection against cheating than a take-home exam, some of my friends have found some fairly clever ways around it.

          • matkoniecz says:

            you take the test online and they can see your screen through software and your face through webcam.

            How it is supposed to protect against anything? Or is going to fail any student who stopped looking directly at screen with that software?

            EDIT: see below, I marked a misleading part

            For example it seems clear that secondary monitor placed behind or entire gallery of notes placed behind monitor would be undetected.

            Sounds like “you pay me 50$ to use honor system”. At that point I would advocate cheating solely to bring down their business model.

          • FLWAB says:

            I’ve used ProctorU and let me tell you: they are as thourough as they can be while still having the test online, and they are frightening to anyone who knows anything about computer security.

            Basically in order to take my test I need to show through the webcam that I was alone in a room with a closed door and that there was nothing in the room that was banned for this test (like notes or paper or a cell phone, etc). I had to pan the camera around the entire room until the proctor was satisfied. Once the test started the webcam had to stay on me and I was not allowed to move out of sight of the camera.

            The scary part (and the part that made it effective) was that I was required to install their proprietary program which took control of my computer completely. It allowed them to see exactly what was going on onscreen but also to have control over the mouse, keyboard, everything. From a security point of view I was really not okay with this: with the level of control they had they could have installed any number of viruses or worms or what have you on my computer. On the other hand, it pretty much guaranteed I couldn’t cheat using the computer. So…it gets the job done, but at the cost of a massive security concern.

          • matkoniecz says:

            OK, with human checking room it makes more sense and makes $50 fee more reasonable and I retract my earlier claims.

            Still, with my twitching and moving I would likely be a false positive.

            And yes, I would use a fresh OS without any personal data and reinstall it immediately after test to get rid of the malware.

          • Lambert says:

            That’s why you sit it in a vm, with the host adding the odd packet full of random bytes into the upload stream.

            And find some provocative way to dress.

    • keaswaran says:

      I’m not sure what useful is accomplished by giving each college professor one high school seminar with 8 students. I’m pretty sure that with these numbers, most high school students still won’t get a seminar, and it’s not clear what the others are getting out of this, given that it’s an additional class for the college professor on top of everything else we’re attempting to teach through moderately ineffective means.

      • James Miller says:

        Yes, the numbers should work so that all high school students (or perhaps all high school seniors) get a seminar. The main benefit to colleges would be to get positive publicity that will help their lobbying efforts. We expect manufactures to retool, if they can, to make masks or ventilators. Colleges should as well be willing to do their part to reduce the social harm of COVID-19 by increasing and somewhat redirecting their efforts.

        • Why are you assuming that the college professors should be teaching high school this way instead of teaching college this way and leaving high school to the high school teachers?

          One advantage to your high school seminar taught by a professor model is that it might generate useful information for college admissions. I have done interviewing of applicants to my alma mater, and I think it produced better information than the paper record. Of the students I have interviewed so far, the one with the strongest paper record was, in my judgement, one of the weakest applicants, and the one outstanding applicant did not have a better paper record than most of the others. So a professor who teaches several such seminars has the opportunity to spot intellectually outstanding students and pass the information on to his school’s admissions people.

          You might even set it up so that the students in a seminar from University X are all ones applying, or at least planning to apply, to X for admission.

          • James Miller says:

            Until in-person classes resume professors are less valuable to society and so if we are going to maintain our salaries with the help of taxpayer bailouts it seems reasonable that we increase our teaching workload.
            Teaching high school classes would likely do more good than teaching extra online college courses. Also, from a practical viewpoint, colleges, I believe, would have an easier time getting bailouts if they offered in this crisis to help teach high school students than if they promised to, say, do more research or teach extra college classes. Teachers’ unions should mind since they would fully expect professors to stop teaching high school classes once the crisis ends.

    • zzzzort says:

      I’m very doubtful of most college professor’s value added as high school teachers. Maybe professors from more teaching focused schools, but I would expect the median R1 professor to be worse than the median high school teacher at teaching high school.

      Also, people to teach intro classes is currently a marginal expense for many universities, met through adjuncts. Reducing instruction/upping teaching loads for tenured faculty and cutting adjunct positions is going to be the lowest hanging fruit for balancing a budget; expanding teaching would work against that.

      • Edward Scizorhands says:

        On average, it’s much harder to teach high school students than college students.

        Sufficiently motivated high school students could benefit, though.

  25. n-alexander says:

    How do we deal with this problem:
    1. suppose I predict a pandemic every time when somebody sneezes. I would have predicted this one. Does that make me one of the smart people? Obviously not. But this is relatively easy to filter out. Or is it?
    2. suppose the probability of COVID19 becoming a pandemic was 1%. So the smart people said it was not going to happen. But it did – after all, the probability was not 0. Are they less smart now?

    Now apply this to policy making. We know what steps were and were not taken. With hind sight we know if it was the right thing to do. But that is very different from how those decisions were made. How well can we judge the decision making that actually went on, when probabilities had not yet collapsed into reality?

    • Gelaarsd Schaap says:

      What do you mean when you say “the probability of X was Y”?

    • Randy M says:

      So the smart people said it was not going to happen. But it did – after all, the probability was not 0. Are they less smart now?

      That depends on if they recommended doing things that would mitigate the damage by 1% or so. Or the 1% of the most cost effective prevention measures.
      I don’t know what those are, but I’m not really competing to be a smart person.

    • eric23 says:

      1. Yes, it’s easy to filter. You made one correct prediction and many incorrect ones.
      2. These people made one incorrect prediction and many correct ones. That is a general recipe for being “smart”.

      • EchoChaos says:

        But I can be “smart” but useless by always predicting “no pandemic” because pandemics are really rare in first world countries, so that’s not terribly valuable.

    • Matt M says:

      Isn’t the answer something like what Scott does in his prediction topics?

      The predictor needs to assign a confidence value to their prediction, and we judge them based on whether or not they’re right 99% of the time for any and all predictions they make with 99% confidence, yes?

      • n-alexander says:

        yes, but in honesty my first two questions are just a lead-in to the policy issue. You can assign weights to your predictions, but that’s rather theoretical. You cannot assign weights to policy – you either do or you don’t. Doing a 50% shutdown because you’re 50% sure that a pandemic will happen makes no sense – you get the worst of both worlds.

        In reality, doing a 50% shutdown may well be just the right thing to do. But not because you’re 50% sure. So it still makes the point I want to make.

        • AKL says:

          You can assign weights to policy. Made up numbers for same of argument.
          100% shutdown means no one can leave their house under any circumstances
          90% shutdown means leaving the house is OK only for critical supply chain workers and only with individual pre-approval of the shutdown czar

          50% shutdown means non-essential business are forced to close
          40% shutdown means people are required to wear masks out of the house
          30% shutdown means people are advised to wear masks out of the house and businesses are advised to close if possible

          10% shutdown means high risk individuals are advised to avoid air travel

          • VoiceOfTheVoid says:

            You can, but the point is you probably shouldn’t in many cases. “50% confident that there will be a catastrophe unless we do a full 100% lockdown” does not imply “we should do a 50% lockdown”.

          • Matt M says:

            Indeed. If the actual situation is such that a 100% lockdown would eradicate the disease, but a 50% lockdown will do no good whatsoever, then implementing a 50% lockdown is terrible policy, regardless of how bad the disease ever was in the first place.

            (Note: This is a large reason why I oppose current lockdown policy)

  26. I’m a “Big Five” hawk, so this is no surprise coming from me… but the “openness to new experiences” theory of left vs. right seems predictive here. Lockdown is something new, and thus, appealing to liberals, and “getting things back to the way they used to be” is conservative.

    • Skeptical Wolf says:

      Would you be willing to talk at greater length about your Big 5 hawkishness and what led to you that opinion?

      I’ve personally become deeply skeptical of Big 5 analyses because my personal experience doesn’t match their predictions well at all. Specifically, the “reliability” and “tidiness” components of conscientiousness that seem to be combined by every big 5 instrument I’ve seen are negatively correlated in my experience (the most personally reliable people I know tend to produce a lot of clutter and the tidiest people I know are near the bottom of my list of people to call in an emergency). Also, I am personally very high in openness (it’s consistently the highest magnitude result when I take a big 5 test) but lean more conservative politically. This does not make me unusual in my experience, big-5 measured openness and political leanings seem to be uncorrelated in my social circles.

      I’m well aware that the plural of “anecdote” is not “data”. Can you point me at something reliable that would indicate that my personally-contradictory experiences should be filed under “small sample size”?

      • Well... says:

        the most personally reliable people I know tend to produce a lot of clutter and the tidiest people I know are near the bottom of my list of people to call in an emergency

        My experience is pretty close to the opposite of this.

        But I am willing to say the Big 5 traits are probably not as good at predicting one’s political persuasion as they are at coherently predicting what the rest of your personality is like given just a few data points about it.

      • FLWAB says:

        Well, how are you defining “reliability”?

        Because I’m a very untidy person, but it’s true: if a friend called me at 2:00 AM needing help I’d almost certainly help him. In that sense I’m a “reliable” person. But it’s also true that if that same friend asks me to, say, take out the trash or fill out a TPS report before Wednesday, or not to forget to lock the front door, there’s a good chance I’m going to flake out and let him down. Getting called in an emergency is easy: “I need help, do the thing right now to help me please.” Straightforward. Remembering everything I have to do this week and mailing the rent check on time is hard. In that sense I am a very unreliable person.

        • Randy M says:

          That’s a good distinction. I’m trying to train my kids that “It’s okay to forget; it’s not okay to forget that you forget.”
          In other words, forgetfulness is a near universal human failing that we have the ability to mitigate with notes, habits, or more technological means. Neglecting to do so is the real sin.

        • Skeptical Wolf says:

          “Reliability” in this context is, I think, more focused on following through on commitments. My observation is that probability of flaking out does not seem to be positively correlated with untidiness. It may be negatively correlated, but I’m much less confident in that idea.

          Stepping outside the realm of personal experience, let’s take look at the wikipedia definition of the trait:

          Conscientiousness is the personality trait of being careful, or diligent. Conscientiousness implies a desire to do a task well, and to take obligations to others seriously. Conscientious people tend to be efficient and organized as opposed to easy-going and disorderly. They exhibit a tendency to show self-discipline, act dutifully, and aim for achievement; they display planned rather than spontaneous behavior; and they are generally dependable. It is manifested in characteristic behaviors such as being neat, and systematic; also including such elements as carefulness, thoroughness, and deliberation (the tendency to think carefully before acting).

          This identifies several characteristics that are all grouped under this label: Carefulness, Planning, Diligence, Tidiness, Punctuality, Dutifulness, Self-Discipline, Deliberation, and Systemicness. My observation is that that correlations among this group of traits seem far too weak to use in the kind of predictions Big 5 tests seem to get used in (for example, hiring decisions) and sometimes are actually negative.

          My working theory is that there is a substantial amount of typical-minding built into the instruments. Someone observed “I keep my desk neat so I can find my notes so I can remember what I’ve told people I’ll do so those things actually get done” and jumped from there to the assumption “people with neat desks are more likely to actually honor their commitments”. But that could also come from personal annoyance at being uncharitably mismeasured.

    • Well... says:

      What seems more accurate to me is that the “left” might be higher in terms of perceiving this situation as a kind of wakeup call: that people should have been following directions from central authorities, that we should have been more heavily subsidizing healthcare and related industries, etc.

  27. dndnrsn says:

    Hello, and welcome to the 27th instalment of my Biblical scholarship effortpost series. So far, of the New Testament, we’ve seen the gospels, four documents from the mid-to-late first century about Jesus (as well as the weird noncanonical one). You will recall Acts, the second volume of Luke, which continues that gospel’s story. Most of the rest of our coverage of the New Testament will focus on one of the stars of Acts, Paul – more specifically, on his letters. From our standpoint, Paul is an extremely important figure: Christianity would not be what it is without him. His letters, the authentic ones at least, are our earliest sources for Christianity (older than any of the gospels; it’s not unheard of for books about the New Testament to begin with his letters, rather than the gospels). This instalment briefly introduces him and considers various issues, before we get into his letters.

    My plan is to look at Paul’s letters one-by-one, starting with the letters that all or almost all scholars think are authentic (actually written by Paul himself), followed by the ones where there is significant dispute, ending with the ones that most scholars believe to be pseudonymous. In each case, we’ll consider the dating of the letters and theories as to their composition (as we’ll see, there are a few cases where some scholars don’t think the letter as we have it is the original form, but rather that some mixing-up has happened) along with the provenance of each letter. We’ll also, where relevant, look at how Paul’s letters line up with Acts.

    While this series has generally focused on Biblical scholarship, we’ll have to get into the weeds of Paul’s theology a bit more, because it is so important for understanding Paul. Especially important is Paul’s relationship to Judaism and his understanding of how the rules of Judaism function in light of his understanding of Christ.

    With that said, we’ll begin next time with 1 Thessalonians, widely considered to be the earliest of Paul’s letters. This also makes it the earliest document in the New Testament, in fact the earliest surviving Christian document.

    (Sorry it’s been so long since the last one; I’ve been busy, but now I likely have a bit more free time, at least for a few weeks. If anyone wants to generally discuss the Gospels, this would also be the place.)

    • Two McMillion says:

      How do scholars decide that some letters were probably written by Paul versus probably not? The obvious choice is to compare the letters to some other document which we know was written by Paul, but as far as I’m aware we don’t have such a thing.

      • dndnrsn says:

        Internal context, comparison of language used, and textual history, mostly. I’ll go into detail on each letter. 1st Thessalonians ought to give a good coverage of how scholars tend to approach this.

    • S_J says:

      As an aside: when I was a child, I noticed that some translations of the Bible gave titles like “The First letter of Paul the Apostle to the Thessalonian Church” above the first page of the letter…which helped me figure out why “1 Thessalonians” was typically read out loud as “First Thessalonians”. Similar comments apply to most other sections of the Bible with number-prefixes.

      Somewhere along the way, when reading through the Bible as young teen, I noticed that some of these letters have multiple names at the beginning. Like the First letter to the Thessalonian church, which opens with Paul, Silvanus, and Timothy, to the church of the Thessalonians…

      Is this related to scholarly commentary about the order the letters were written in? Did the early letters tend to have this kind of group-authorship, or does this help link the letter with a particular time-frame in the travels of Paul the Apostle?

    • Error says:

      Is there an index or blog of these somewhere? I know someone who would be interested.

      • dndnrsn says:

        I did a summing-up post when I finished up the Hebrew Bible here and I’m gonna do one when I’m done the New Testament.

  28. drunkfish says:

    I totally disagree with the suggestion that this situation debunks thrive/survive. The idea that we can shut down our entire economy to save some lives would be absolutely ridiculous if we weren’t an incredibly rich society and confident in our economy’s robustness. Shutting down the economy *requires* a thrive mindset, because it requires believing we’re able to take a huge economic hit without the shutdowns being net-negative.

    My mental model of thrive/survive isn’t that the left always thinks things are peachy and the right always thinks things are terrible. It’s that the left thinks we have a lot of flexibility in how we run society, so we can make high-cost decisions if they have benefits, and the right thinks society is only barely propped up, so any high cost decisions are likely to make things fall apart. I think that model actually does quite a good job of predicting current dynamics.

    • FLWAB says:

      I agree 100%! Thrivers think that we can afford to stay in lockdown as long as we need to. Survivors think that we can’t afford to keep this up much longer. Thrivers think making stuff is easy, and wealth just comes naturally (thus the only concern is the proper distribution). Survivors think that making stuff is hard, and are afraid that the longer people are out of work the worse that damage is going to be.

      The Thriver thinks that our societal bank account is flush with cash, so we can afford to stop working for six months. The Survivor thinks that our societal bank account is always at risk of being overdrawn, and is terrified that we won’t have rent money if this keeps up.

      • Aapje says:

        I’m completely amazed at how many letters and columns there are in my center-left newspaper that see this pandemic as a chance to spend way more money on various things (salaries of low-productive employees, pensions, environmentalism, etc) or set up regulations/laws that harm the economy.

        These people don’t seem to understand that we are going to be poorer due to this, rather than richer.

        • Garrett says:

          People of other political viewpoints read the same publications and start to conclude that the left is more interested in the opportunities for control it provides rather than actually addressing the pandemic.

          • albatross11 says:

            There is a vast genre of ideologues basically taking every crisis and urgent issue, including COVID-19, and explaining why this latest crisis just proves that all the stuff they wanted to do before is urgent and must be done right away.

          • Matt M says:

            This article may be relevant.

            When a lot of people start acting like we shouldn’t even try to restore society back to how it was before all of this started, my “they are using this for political gain” senses start going crazy.

            This is not unrelated to my “I’m skeptical of climate change because all of the proposed solutions are things the left has always wanted all along anyway” argument I’ve made here countless times.

          • This is not unrelated to my “I’m skeptical of climate change because all of the proposed solutions are things the left has always wanted all along anyway” argument I’ve made here countless times.

            What struck me about this long ago was that it doesn’t seem to occur to people arguing the risks of climate change that if they explicitly say “and by the way, all these things that you have to do in order to prevent a climate catastrophe just happen to be things we think you should be doing anyway,” that might make others less willing to take their arguments seriously.

    • Loriot says:

      This strikes me as post-hoc reasoning. If you asked someone back in December what the “Survive vs Thrive” theory would predict about a massive pandemic, basically everyone would have said it would predict that conservatives would be on the pro-containment side. If you know the answers, you can find them in the tea leaves, but that doesn’t mean the tea leaves were actually predictive.

      • Clutzy says:

        I think thats only true if you use the vague term containment. When you go a little more accurate with your description it flips. Who thinks, “state mandated closure of school, small business, and church” patterns onto right wing? 2/3 of that is basically what a right winger parodies the left as.

      • John Schilling says:

        If you asked someone back in December what the “pro-containment side” was actually pro-ing, nobody would have envisioned quarantining every healthy but economically “nonessential” American in their homes for months at a time.

        What we have now is to normal “pro-contaiment” pandemic politics what mass orgies of unprotected sex would be to “pro-life” abortion politics. I, for one, would not be the least bit surprised if conservatives and liberals flip-flopped on the whole “pro-life” thing if it were suddenly redefined as mass orgies of unprotected sex, notwithstanding that the mass orgies would create more life.

      • drunkfish says:

        Yeah I broadly agree with the other replies to you, I think you’re right that in December, if you asked “do you think thrivers or survivors are more likely to fight to contain a pandemic”, you’d probably get the answer “survivors, basically by definition.”

        If you changed it to, “do you think thrivers or survivers would accept a possibly unprecedented economic downturn in order to save about 1% of the population, most of them old people”, you’d get the opposite answer. In December people just didn’t have a good sense of 1) how serious coronavirus would be and 2) what containment really meant.

        • Loriot says:

          IMO, the judgement about the relative costs and benefits of various lockdown strategies is largely politics-driven rationalization, so I think this is a circular argument.

          • drunkfish says:

            That’s fair in detail I guess, and maybe I have partisan blinders on and this isn’t true, but it seems like there isn’t a ton of room for disagreement on: The scale of the economic downturn we’re causing and the (rough) number of deaths we’d face if we didn’t shut down. My impression is the main disagreement is just about whether the shutdowns are worth it or not, and that seems to map pretty well to thrive/survive if you figure survivors think our economy is delicate and thrivers think it’s robust.

  29. edmundgennings says:

    To give another defense of the thrive vs survive theory in this context.
    Having roughly .6% of the under 60 population die in a year of infectious disease and low life expectancy for the elderly are not good things. But they are not an existential threat. We know this because the West had that happen ever single year in the late nineteenth century which due to urbanization and globalization probably represented the high water mark of death by infectious diseases but was much closer to the historical norm than we are. Not only did this not cripple these societies, they were able to make unprecedented progress while having these problems. Having one year where we resemble our own societies in the late nineteenth century is not a threat to survival. In some sense, having a high life expectancy is a luxury not a necessity. (Obviously it is a very nice thing to have)

    On the other hand, world wide lockdowns of this sort seem literally unprecedented. There have been plenty of quarantines etc but shutting down society is not something that we know that we can do. This is clearly a dangerous and extreme treatment that will be necessary for a lengthy and unknown amount of time in order to get the benefit of it.
    Herd immunity is the tried and true if unpleasant survive approach; lockdowns are the untested dangerous but with the possibility of a much better outcome thrive approach.

    • albatross11 says:

      I think there were comparable shutdowns in many cities in response to the 1918 flu.

      • Statismagician says:

        Correct – see e.g. here for an okayish treatment of the sort of natural experiment it was much easier to get in those halcyon days of relatively decentralized policymaking; St. Louis and Philadelphia handled the 1918 flu very differently.

      • edmundgennings says:

        St Louis seems like the most extreme and from what I can find it “merely” closed stores and public assembly places for two months. High school tennis games continued with out fans in the stands. Is there anywhere in the US where highschool sports are still competing in person? From what I can find, the most extreme response to 1918 might be roughly equivalent to the most mild response to covid.

        • Statismagician says:

          It was a more risk-tolerant age, but I’d be surprised to learn that there was a real chance of catching just about anything from playing tennis outside of highly contrived scenarios.

          It’s important to separate the actually-prevents-infection parts of coronavirus response from the signals-preventing-infection parts; I think St. Louis’ response to the 1918 flu is probably similar in usefulness to the most extreme coronavirus lockdowns, just without the latter bits.

          • Matt M says:

            but I’d be surprised to learn that there was a real chance of catching just about anything from playing tennis outside of highly contrived scenarios.

            and yet, Tennis playing, at virtually every possible level, is currently banned in most places

          • salvorhardin says:

            Indeed. One of the things I like about the Swedish approach is that they appear to have applied cost-benefit calculations based on reasonable guesstimates of how likely different kinds of activities are to be transmission vectors, along with their social benefit. So for instance, the risk of allowing outdoor sports seems relatively low from what we know so far, and it keeps people fit and sane which is enough benefit to justify the low (even though nonzero and highly uncertain) risk. Similarly, daycares/preschools/elementary schools have at most moderate guesstimate-risk of being major transmission vectors (some plausible reasons to think they might be, some other plausible reasons to think they might not) and there’s enormous benefit to society from keeping them open, so they stay open.

          • EchoChaos says:

            If you had predicted in 2019 that all the conservatives would be yelling for the USA to be more like Sweden and all the liberals for us to be more like Singapore, you’d have been institutionalized.

          • Statismagician says:

            @Matt M

            Yes, Minister is always relevant: “Almost all government policy is wrong, but frightfully well-carried out.”

          • noyann says:

            When you think of tennis, do you imagine two lone figures on a large court? Do you not think of the handshake after the match (with two people still breathing hard and likely talking)? Showers and locker rooms? The socializing before/after the matches?

          • albatross11 says:

            Matt M:

            I live in suburban Maryland, in an extremely blue-tribe area. The tennis court close to my house sees a fair bit of use, including by me and my kids. I have not seen any indication yet that anyone wants us to stop. I think this is very much driven by local authorities. And the truth is that the quality of local authorities’ decisionmaking is extremely uneven across the country. I wonder how many places there were where churches did drive-in Easter services and the police chief/mayor thought “nice way to solve the problem.” We will probably never hear of any such places–that’s not the kind of news that gets clicks.

          • Statismagician says:

            @noyann

            I think all of that continuing on unchanged from normal, in a situation where we’re playing tennis in an empty stadium because all the spectators are quarantined, is a highly contrived scenario.

          • Matt M says:

            Yeah, excuse me for not believing that the reason we need to ban people from playing Tennis, from the world’s top players all the way down to your local YMCA, is that people might shake hands when the match is over…

          • HeelBearCub says:

            I wonder how many places there were where churches did drive-in Easter services and the police chief/mayor thought “nice way to solve the problem.”

            How many places were there where drive-in services caused the local mayor to say “Egads, a non-socially distanced gathering!”?

          • Theodoric says:

            @HeelBearCub
            The mayor of Louisville, KY for one.

          • Eltargrim says:

            @HBC

            It caused a stir in Nova Scotia.

          • albatross11 says:

            Yeah, when you combine:

            a. High variance in local government competence.

            b. Media who live on the most outrageous story of the day.

            c. Lots and lots of different local governments.

            you can reliably get stories of basically whatever kind of government ineptitude or corruption or overreaction or awfulness your editor wants to get clicks. This is a hugely distorting filter on what the world actually looks like.

        • craftman says:

          http://chm.med.umich.edu/research/1918-influenza-escape-communities/gunnison/

          It’s a small, mountian town but Gunnison, CO was basically completed closed-off and enforced a 2-day quarantine of anyone arriving by rail. They had zero cases during the second wave of influenza.

          Wouldn’t it be great if a 2-day quarantine were sufficient? We’d be over this by now for sure.

    • HeelBearCub says:

      Remember “thrive vs. survive” is supposed to explain enmity against gay people as well. Lots of commentary was generated about how gay sex was inherently riskier, etc. Not really buying this retconning of the meaning of “thrive vs. survive”.

      • eyeballfrog says:

        I thought the explanation for that was that survival requires children, which gay sex doesn’t produce.

        • HeelBearCub says:

          A) That was by no means the only argument against.
          B) Most objections wouldn’t extend to, “You must father children or society will shun you”. See, you know, priests. Many conservatives would in fact say it’s fine to be gay, just not act on it.

          • Skeptic says:

            How did AIDS factor into that?

            Not old enough to remember.

          • HeelBearCub says:

            How did AIDS factor into early 20th century conservative attitudes about gay people? Not at all.

            Plus AIDS is far less of a risk than a pandemic.

            Again, thrive/survive is supposed to be explanatory in advance, not “just so”.

    • keaswaran says:

      This goes both ways. Economic shutdowns producing a 50% drop in economic output leave us at an economic level comparable to the mid-20th century (in the slowly growing developed world) or comparable to the turn of the 21st century (in the quickly growing developing world). Whereas a global pandemic that spreads through the world population in just a few months is literally unprecedented in human history.

      The way I’ve been thinking about it is that with growing economic prosperity around the world, we’ve passed some point where the cost of losing a percentage of the population is high enough that taking an economic hit for everyone to prevent this loss of life is now worth it, particularly with new technological opportunities for mitigating some of the costs of these measures. It’s somewhat like when urban areas in California and Japan passed the point where the best preparation for earthquakes is to build low and reached the point where the best preparation for earthquakes is to build tall but seismically stable.

      • Randy M says:

        the cost of losing a percentage of the population is high enough

        Not to be cold, but it very much depends on which percentage. Do those likely to be lost have a positive economic value? Sure, there are the elder employees with incomparable experience, but what is the ratio of them to the retirees on public assistance?

        • Matt M says:

          Indeed. At the risk of sounding overly cruel, a disease that mostly kills people who are old and/or have pre-existing health issues could quite easily be an economic benefit to the nation (even if it remains a psychic or emotional harm).

          Yes, I love my 90-year-old grandfather who is currently battling cancer for a second time. But as much as I love him, it’s a bit of a stretch for me to somehow argue that society as a whole is better off in any way if he lives for another five years…

        • Nancy Lebovitz says:

          Are there any numbers for the economic costs to social networks from losing people?

        • keaswaran says:

          You seem to be assuming that “economic value” has something to do with “work compensated on the market”. I take “economic value” to be “whatever it is that people reveal a willingness to pay for”. It’s clear that continued life has a great deal of economic value for most people (the actively suicidal are one of the few counterexamples). Probably life in great sickness at the end of life is of quite a bit lower economic value than life in health among the young. But nearly all people dying have lives of positive economic value (including all those retirees on public assistance – their positive economic value is *why* they are on public assistance in the first place). And there definitely are a number of younger and healthier people in this list as well (and would be a lot more if a lot more people were getting infected simultaneously).

          And of course, to properly calculate the full cost of allowing the disease to run its course, we have to count not just the deaths, but the weeks of suffering experienced even by “mild” cases. (The value of these losses is much less than the value of years of life lost, but the vast number of people that will experience these symptoms might mean that it’s important to include in the calculations as well.)

          • I take “economic value” to be “whatever it is that people reveal a willingness to pay for”.

            But nearly all people dying have lives of positive economic value (including all those retirees on public assistance – their positive economic value is *why* they are on public assistance in the first place).

            I agree with the first half of this. But the fact that A is willing to make B pay $X for something is not evidence that that something is worth $X to either A or B. So I don’t think you can take government expenditure on something as a measure of its value, which I think you are doing.

            Suppose the value to me of keeping myself alive is $800/month and the cost to other people of keeping me alive is $1000/month. Further suppose that the particular political system we are under weights my desires substantially more heavily than those of the average taxpayer, for public choice sorts of reasons — for a simple example, suppose people like me are much more likely to vote than average — with the result that the government is willing to pay the $1000/month required to keep me alive. My economic value is negative, but your argument implies it is positive.

      • edmundgennings says:

        In terms of measured GDP, yes we are still higher. In terms of actual wellbeing and underlying fundamentals, we are worse off. We as consumers are experiencing huge drops in selection, quality, and availability.
        Further the non economic impacts are the big question. I am a relative technophile, but electronic interaction does not fully replace in person interaction for most people. And we are sending most people into a very nice form of quasi solitary -small group confinement with the internet for an indefinite period.

      • The Nybbler says:

        Whereas a global pandemic that spreads through the world population in just a few months is literally unprecedented in human history.

        It most certainly is not. Swine flu (2009), Hong Kong flu (1968), Asian flu (1957-1958), and of course Spanish Flu (1918 — there were several waves over 2 years, but the first wave spread in that short period). All but swine flu appear likely to be more deadly than COVID-19

      • baconbits9 says:

        Economic shutdowns producing a 50% drop in economic output leave us at an economic level comparable to the mid-20th century (in the slowly growing developed world) or comparable to the turn of the 21st century (in the quickly growing developing world). Whereas a global pandemic that spreads through the world population in just a few months is literally unprecedented in human history.

        This is a compositional fallacy. You don’t get to go back and live your 2001 lifestyle with a 50% drop in GDP, unless you assume you are a survivor. Europe recovered from the 1929-1945 period reasonably well unless you count the zero GDP growth experienced by everyone who died during the war.

        • keaswaran says:

          Yes. My point was that the same is true on the other side. Adding COVID-19 to the current population doesn’t produce the same thing as the general level of health people experienced 50 years ago, even if the aggregate numbers are the same, any more than putting shelter-in-place orders produce anything like the general level of economics people experienced 50 years ago, even if the aggregate numbers are the same.

      • Whereas a global pandemic that spreads through the world population in just a few months is literally unprecedented in human history.

        As someone else already pointed out, the death rates to be expected from such a pandemic represent roughly the normal pattern for the developed world in the 19th century. Most other times and places were worse.

        • keaswaran says:

          My point is that just looking at the death numbers is no more helpful than just looking at the economic numbers. If you’re going to just go by the numbers, the economic numbers to be expected from a year of the shelter-in-place orders represent roughly the normal pattern for the developed world in the 20th century. Most other times and places were worse.

          We need to understand the full impacts in better detail to evaluate these things in any way that doesn’t just show us that the economic impacts of the shutdown are far less than the mortality impacts of the unchecked disease.

    • On the other hand, world wide lockdowns of this sort seem literally unprecedented. There have been plenty of quarantines etc but shutting down society is not something that we know that we can do.

      In the same way we aren’t sure whether it’ll work to paint all the buildings blue: it’s never been done before. I see no reason to expect any black swans here. We know people can go without their iPhones, their vacations to Florida, and their double-decker obesity sandwiches. As to the social isolation, people still have phones, they still have video-chat. I doubt there will be any widespread pickle-ree-ing over it.

      • John Schilling says:

        I think you are very, very wrong about the extent to which phones and video-chat can substitute for FTF human contact in maintaining the mental health of a diverse human population.

        • keaswaran says:

          It absolutely can’t substitute for the long run. But it provides something for the short run that is far better than what we would have had if we had attempted this even in 2003 for SARS.

      • Matt M says:

        We know people can go without their iPhones, their vacations to Florida, and their double-decker obesity sandwiches.

        The first and third aren’t among the things people are having to go without.

        What we’re actually depriving people of is the practice of their religion, their means of obtaining an income, close friend and family bonding, basic nutritional staples at grocery stores, and seemingly over half of what doctors and hospitals normally do.

        But you can still order a new Iphone. And you can still get the new FF7 remake. And you can still stream Tiger King. And you can still get a triple whopper with cheese.

        The notion that this current environment is only causing people to give up luxuries so they can still obtain the necessities is absurd. In many cases, the opposite is happening. We’re told that it’s fine to require us to sacrifice basic human needs because after all, we still have our luxuries!

        • Randy M says:

          What we’re actually depriving people of is the practice of their religion, their means of obtaining an income, close friend and family bonding, basic nutritional staples at grocery stores, and seemingly over half of what doctors and hospitals normally do.

          But you can still order a new Iphone. And you can still get the new FF7 remake. And you can still stream Tiger King. And you can still get a triple whopper with cheese.

          In other, glib and technically incorrect words, the lockdowns move us in the direction of, what’s the phrase?, luxury space communism?

        • At least in my area the meat shortages are over, not sure about tp. Once you’re through the period of adjustment, making society poorer will lead people to give up luxuries and keep buying necessities. The unemployed and small business owners aren’t going to be buying IPhones right now.

          seemingly over half of what doctors and hospitals normally do.

          By global standards a lot of that can be counted as luxury consumption. Other countries go without it. See https://www.cato-unbound.org/2007/09/10/robin-hanson/cut-medicine-half

          • Matt M says:

            By global standards a lot of that can be counted as luxury consumption.

            Indeed. This has been a real eye-opener IMO.

            This little experiment should end up producing a whole lot of great material for libertarians who want to argue for a more free market approach to health care.

            Also has the potential to backfire on the people who are trying to attribute every single death to COVID. If we live through a period of time where normal “health care” consumption declines by a significant percentage, and health outcomes (ex COVID) stay basically the same, what does that say about everything we were spending all those health care resources on?

          • The Nybbler says:

            This is also why I’m skeptical of the “millions more die if hospitals overloaded” thing. I think in normal times we admit a lot of people to the hospital who would most likely do fine without; being about to admit 100 people when only 5-10 (who we don’t know in advance) actually need hospital care is a luxury.

          • Nancy Lebovitz says:

            It’s going to be complicated: People with treatable conditions like appendicitis are avoiding hospitals for fear of the virus, and becoming much sicker.

            There will be a number of categories. There are people who will get better on their own, people who will die or take a lot of damage if they don’t get medical care, and people are are worse off as a result of going to a hospital. I think I’m missing a category.

            The effects won’t be simple to sort out.

          • Christophe Biocca says:

            Once you’re through the period of adjustment, making society poorer will lead people to give up luxuries and keep buying necessities. The unemployed and small business owners aren’t going to be buying IPhones right now.

            You’re thinking with a lump GDP model:

            – The lockdowns cut back on economic activity.
            – This decreased GDP by X%.
            – Therefore consumption will fall by Y% (depending on how much we also cut back on investment), which will come out of the lowest net marginal benefit goods (aka. luxuries).

            But that’s confusing the symptom with the cause. The government did not mandate a X% drop in GDP and let people figure out the least-harmful way to achieve that. It imposed production quotas of 0 on a variety of activities (some of which show up in GDP, some of which don’t), based on how much they contribute to infection spread. People do not necessarily get to substitute luxuries for necessities if the necessities are flat-out illegal or impossible to get.

            To take an extreme example, if the government response to COVID had been to ban growing/importing food and nothing else, that’s only a ~5% drop in GDP, followed by mass starvation as people’s fridges, cans, and wallpaper paste run out.

            The lockdown policies currently in place are obviously not that destructive, but every shuttered industry is a bet that we can make do with stockpiled production or do without entirely until it can be restarted.

        • Nancy Lebovitz says:

          The other thing which concerns me is, beyond the good things that people aren’t getting, there are huge losses because potential good things aren’t able to happen. There are relationships, inventions, and businesses which are prevented because of lack of travel, personal contact, capital, and probably other resources.

          One thing that concerns me about the current situation is that normally people do a lot to help each other in hard times, but now, while some help is feasible, a lot is more difficult or impossible..

          • keaswaran says:

            I think it will cause a lot more re-evaluation of various practices when economic activity resumes. People are constantly saying we can skip traffic and escape the cities, thanks to the internet, but now we’ll see just which things do work that way, and which things really don’t. Some in-person activities will be cut back long term, while others will rebound and be higher than ever.

          • Matt M says:

            My impression is that the work from home equilibrium will largely stay the same on net, only the arguments will have switched.

            It used to be “I’d love to work from home but my employer won’t let me.” But nearly all of my colleagues (even the ones with large commutes) keep saying “I can’t wait to get back to the office” while management says “I can’t believe this is working so well!”

            Maybe after COVID, employers will pressure people to WFH to save money on office space costs, but employees will demand office space as a perk of the job?

          • acymetric says:

            Maybe after COVID, employers will pressure people to WFH to save money on office space costs, but employees will demand office space as a perk of the job?

            I would damn near be willing to take a (small) pay cut if it meant I could work from home permanently.

          • Randy M says:

            I would damn near be willing to take a (small) pay cut if it meant I could work from home permanently.

            This reads as “I value working from home at $0.”

          • baconbits9 says:

            I think the long term issues will be more significant than short term. My wife is having WFH function well, especially with her longest tenured employees. She knows them and their skill sets well, but I don’t think (and neither does she) that it would translate to new hires at all. In an office setting it is much easier to identify why an employee isn’t doing great, are they not putting in the hours, or are they easily distracted or are they not being trained properly. She feels like it takes 3-6 months to get a good read on if they are going to make it or not, that would probably double at least in a permanent WFH environment.

          • acymetric says:

            This reads as “I value working from home at $0.”

            Maybe we have different definitions of the word “small”? I wouldn’t give up 25% of my salary for it, but I would give up a single-digit (i.e. “small”) percentage*. Did you mis-read the comment?

            *Really what I would prefer to give up in exchange for WFH is some vacation time rather than pay (not at a 1:1 ratio, obviously if I wanted that I would just use the vacation time).

          • baconbits9 says:

            @ acymetric-

            What is your commute like?

          • acymetric says:

            @baconbits9

            In addition to making it harder to evaluate new employees, it probably makes it hard for newer/younger/less experienced employees to fully catch on. I definitely would have struggled at my current job (with 0 experience in the field at the time) if I was working from home starting day 1.

          • acymetric says:

            @baconbits9

            Commented before I saw your question. Normally 20-30 minutes, although I moved further away temporarily and it bumped up to about an hour and a half each way (I’ll move back around November, assuming coronavirus related stuff doesn’t prevent that move).

          • Randy M says:

            Did you mis-read the comment?

            No, you stated emphatically that you were “near” willing to give up a “small” amount of pay.
            I guess that doesn’t preclude being actually willing to give up a “tiny” amount, but it doesn’t really signal a strong economic preference.

            edit: I’m sorry, this line of inquiry is needlessly pedantic and nit-picky when really your were just trying to provide counter evidence to Matt’s impression of employee attitudes.

          • baconbits9 says:

            So what % of your salary is worth 40 – 60 mins a day + commuting costs?

          • acymetric says:

            Like I said, some single-digit percentage. Probably not more than 2-3%.

            Commuting costs for me are basically 0 even for the longer commute, so the time saved is more significant there.

            That said, the main reason I like working from home though isn’t the commute time, but just that I enjoy being home during the day even if I’m still working just as much (or, realistically, a little bit more) as I would if I were in the office.

          • johan_larson says:

            How much has productivity dropped at companies that switched white-collar work from in the office to work from home? This sort of work is famously hard to measure, but there are typically productivity-adjacent metrics. For computer programmers, it’s not that hard to measure the number of code check-ins or the number of lines of code checked in.

            Offhand, I expect such statistics are down. People get less done at home than in the office. Pressed for a number, I would guess 15%. Anyone have real data?

          • Matt M says:

            How much has productivity dropped at companies that switched white-collar work from in the office to work from home?

            According to my employer and my fiance’s employer, productivity is flat to up.

            Of course they could just be saying that, because it’s good for morale.

          • Clutzy says:

            Ours is slightly down due to server load and remote desktops causing enough lag that it effects speed.

          • @Matt M

            But nearly all of my colleagues (even the ones with large commutes) keep saying “I can’t wait to get back to the office”

            How much of this is due to the kids being at home too? That’s the main complaint I hear.

        • BlackboardBinaryBook says:

          On the flip side, there may be more human flourishing along lines of strengthened familial relationships and time spent creating/homesteading. My neighborhood positively resounds with the laughter of children and whirring of power tools. The hardware stores are packed. And I’m reasonably certain most of my roommates have never eaten this well.

          I know this is likely wishful thinking combined with my own bubble, but I’m trying to focus on the silver linings.

          • acymetric says:

            I know this is likely wishful thinking combined with my own bubble, but I’m trying to focus on the silver linings.

            I’m in the same boat as you (lost 14 pounds so far, running 15 miles per week and walking another 50 or so, same whirring of power tools and loads of mulch being spread every where, etc).

            On the other hand, if I were still living in my 1 bedroom apartment instead of with my parents in their suburban home my experience would likely be quite different. Some people are definitely benefiting (at least in some ways) from the current arrangement, but others have it quite a bit worse.

  30. Two McMillion says:

    So last night I watched the 2020 version of The Invisible Man. It’s a good film, albiet one that likes its social justice. There is one thing that bothered me about the ending, though (rot13):

    Gur raqvat urnivyl vzcyvrf gung Prpvyvn xvyyrq Nqevna juvyr jrnevat gur vaivfvoyr fhvg, zbivat uvf nez gb znxr vg ybbx yvxr ur fynfurq uvf bja guebng. Gur ceboyrz jvgu guvf vf gung vg’f pbzcyrgryl vzcbffvoyr. Erzrzore gung ng gur ortvaavat bs gur svyz, Nqevna fznfurf n pne jvaqbj jvgu uvf svfg. Guvf vf ab fznyy srng. Pne jvaqbjf ner zhpu fgebatre gura beqvanel jvaqbjf. Gur boivbhf pbapyhfvba vf gung Nqevna vf irel, irel fgebat. Naq jr’er fhccbfrq gb oryvrir gung n jbzna jub ur fhccbfrqyl culfvpnyyl nohfrq jnf noyr gb znavchyngr uvf nez ntnvafg uvf jvyy gb znxr uvz fyvg uvf bja guebng? Abguvat va gur svyz vaqvpngrf gung Prpvyvn vf cnegvphyneyl nguyrgvp. Shegure, vs, nf Prpvyvn pynvzf, Nqevna jnf pbagebyyvat ure jvgu gur vaivfvoyr fhvg, Nqevna bhtug gb unir orra njner gung gur vaivfvoyr fhvg jnf zvffvat, naq, shegure, gung Prpvyvn yvxryl unq bar. Vg’f abg yvxr ur unq uhaqerqf; ur pregnvayl jbhyq unir abgvprq vs bar jnf zvffvat. Va gung pnfr ur jbhyq unir pregnvayl sbhtug onpx ntnvafg uvf vaivfvoyr nggnpxre- naq tvira ubj fgebat ur nccneragyl vf, ur jbhyq unir unq n tbbq punapr bs jvaavat.

    Gur snpg gung Prpvyvn pbhyq abg unir orra gur bar gung xvyyrq Nqevna sbeprf hf gb vagrecerg gur erfg bs gur zbivr va n pbzcyrgryl qvssrerag yvtug. Vs Prpvyvn qvqa’g xvyy Nqevna, gura jub qvq? Vg zhfg or fbzrbar jrnevat gur vaivfvoyr fhvg. Gbz vf gur boivbhf pnaqvqngr, ohg Gbz vf va cevfba.

    N frpbaq nethzrag ntnvafg Nqevna’f thvyg vf gur snpg gung, vs Nqevna jnf gur vaivfvoyr zna, uvf orunivbe nsgre Prpvyvn gbbx gur vaivfvoyr fhvg sebz uvf ubhfr znxrf ab frafr. Vs Prpvyvn vf pbeerpg, Nqevna’f cyna jbhyq pbzcyrgryl haeniry vs gur rkvfgrapr bs gur vaivfvoyr fhvg jnf erirnyrq gb gur choyvp. Ur zhfg xabj gung gur fhvg jnf zvffvat. Jul jnfa’g erpbirevat vg uvf gbc cevbevgl? Lrg gur vaivfvoyr zna va gur frpbaq unys bs gur svyz npgf nf vs ur unf ab xabjyrqtr gung Prpvyvn unf na vaivfvoyr fhvg. Jul? Gur fvzcyrfg rkcynangvba vf gung gur vaivfvoyr zna npghnyyl vf hanjner gung fur unf bar.

    Frireny fprarf fhttrfg gung gurer vf zber guna bar crefba jvgu na vaivfvoyr fhvg. Va cnegvphyne, gur fprarf jurer Prpvyvn syrrf na vaivfvoyr zna ng gur ubfcvgny (orsber tbvat gb Wnzrf’ ubhfr) naq gur bar jurer fur syrrf Wnzrf’ ubhfr gb tb gb Nqevna’f. Va obgu bs gurfr fprarf, Prpvyvn ehaf sebz na vaivfvoyr zna, trgf va n pne, naq qevirf qverpgyl gb nabgure cynpr. Lrg va obgu pnfrf gur vaivfvoyr zna, jub yrsg sebz gur fnzr cynpr, trgf gurer orsber ure. Ubj vf guvf cbffvoyr? Gur boivbhf fbyhgvba vf gung gurer ner gjb vaivfvoyr zra. Gbz vf bar. Jub vf gur bgure?

    Erpnyy gung qhevat gur rcvybthr Wnzrf gryyf Prpvyvn gung Gbz jnf sbhaq jrnevat “Fbzrguvat” naq gung jvgarffrf ng gur ubfcvgny fnj “Fbzrguvat”. Guvf vf rkgerzryl vzcbegnag. Vg zrnaf gung gur cbyvpr qb abg xabj jung gur vaivfvoyr fhvg qbrf be jung vg vf sbe- nyy gurl xabj vf gung fbzrbar jnf jrnevat vg ng gur fprar bs n pevzr. Cerfhznoyl gur qnzntr gb gur fhvg pnhfrq jura Prpvyvn fubg Gbz ng Wnzrf’ ubhfr zrnaf vg ab ybatre shapgvbaf, naq Gbz unf abg rkcynvarq gur fhvg (be creuncf ur vf qrnq- gur zbivr vf hapyrne). Ubj vf guvf cbffvoyr? Jul unira’g gur cbyvpr svtherq bhg jung gur fhvg qbrf? Vg frrzf fbzrbar be fbzrguvat unf ceriragrq gurz sebz pbzcyrgvat gur vairfgvtngvba. Gurer ner frireny cbffvovyvgvrf, ohg gur HF Srqreny Tbireazrag frrzf yvxr gur orfg pnaqvqngr. Nqevna’f erfrnepu vagb vaivfvovyvgl frrzf yvxr gur fbeg bs guvat gurl jbhyq or vaibyirq va. Onfrq ba guvf, vg vf uvtuyl yvxryl gung gur bgure vaivfvoyr zna vf na ryvgr HF Tbireazrag bcrengvir. Abgr gung gur vaivfvoyr zna va Prpvyvn’f xvgpura jnf pncnoyr bs cvpxvat ure hc ol gur arpx- n srng gung jbhyq unir erdhverq terng hccre obql fgeratgu. Fhpu n crefba jbhyq pbaprvinoyl unir orra noyr gb sbepr Nqevna gb fyvg uvf bja guebng va gur svany fprar. Na vaivfvoyr zna jnf nyfb noyr gb svtug naq fhoqhr arneyl n qbmra frphevgl thneqf ng gur ubfcvgny- tenagrq, jvgu gur nqinagntr bs vaivfvovyvgl, ohg fgvyy ab rnfl srng, naq gurer vf ab ernfba jul Gbz (jub vf n ynjlre, erzrzore) jbhyq unir orra noyr gb chyy vg bss. Guhf, Nqevna jnf nyzbfg pregnvayl abg xvyyrq ol Prpvyvn, ohg jnf gur gnetrg bs na ryvgr cebsrffvbany nffnffvangvba, yvxryl ol n HF tbireazrag bcrengvir.

    Guvf zrnaf gung Nqevna’f fgbel nobhg orvat gvrq hc ol uvf oebgure Gbz vf cebonoyl gehr, naq uvf pynvz gb or n ivpgvz vf yvxrjvfr gehr nf jryy. Jr xabj sebz Gbz’f fgngrzragf gung ur bsgra sryg birefunqbjrq ol Nqevna, naq guvf frrzf gb unir orra gur bccbeghavgl ur gbbx gb gel naq gevhzcu bire uvf oebgure. Gur HF tbireazrag tbg vaibyirq orpnhfr, bs pbhefr, lbh’er tbvat gb ybbx vagb vg jura bar bs lbhe erfrnepuref jbexvat ba n tebhaqoernxvat cebwrpg fhqqrayl pbzzvgf fhvpvqr. Zbfg yvxryl gur tbireazrag qvq abg xabj rknpgyl ubj znal fhvgf Nqevna unq pbzcyrgrq, juvpu vf jul Prpvyvn’f gursg bs bar jrag haabgvprq (vg jnf, nsgre nyy, vaivfvoyr jura fur sbhaq vg, naq gur tbireazrag zvtug abg xabj gur pbqr gb bcra Nqevna’f fnsr).

    Ohg vs Nqevna vf n ivpgvz, gura gur zbivr vf ab ybatre nobhg na nohfrq jbzna fgehttyvat gb trg gur jbeyq gb oryvrir ure. Vg’f vafgrnq n zbivr nobhg n jbzna jub guvaxf gur jbeyq eribyirf nebhaq ure ceboyrzf jura gurer ner zhpu ynetre sbeprf va cynl, naq jub vf fb jenccrq hc va ure bja vagrecergngvba bs riragf gung fur ershfrf gb oryvrir nal bgure vagrecergngvba. Vs guvf vf n zbivr sbe gur #ZrGbb ren, vg’f cebonoyl abg dhvgr gur fbeg bs zbivr Havirefny vagraqrq gb znxr.

    Thanks for coming to my TEDtalk.

    • bullseye says:

      I haven’t seen the movie myself, but the guys at Red Letter Media got the impression that gur fhvg tenagf fhcre-fgeratgu nf jryy nf vaivfvovyvgl.

      • Two McMillion says:

        Possible, but vs gur fhvg qbrf tvir fhcre-fgeratgu, Gbz qbrfa’g frrz gb or znxvat zhpu hfr bs vg va gur svany pbasebagngvba jvgu uvz ng Wnzrf’ ubhfr.

    • Ninety-Three says:

      This is not a complaint about the movie on its own merits, but it bothers me that the original Invisible Man story was about something specific (turning invisible makes a man become increasingly isolated from society, leading to him mistreating his fellow man), and they turned that into a movie about an entirely different specific thing (domestic abuse and incidentally there’s an invisible suit). It’d be like making a Batman movie where instead of punching criminals, he’s a lawyer: I’m sure you can make a fine movie about a Gotham lawyer, but it doesn’t seem like Batman. Typically the answer to the “why did they do it?” question is brand recognition, but are they really gaining that much from referencing a story most people haven’t read from the 19th century?

      • baconbits9 says:

        Related: If you wanted to make a movie with different/more liberal sensibilities why not adapt the other Invisible Man?

      • Two McMillion says:

        I can’t say I disagree. I personally thought that the movie would have been more effective (or at least more surprising) if the working theory for the mysterious events in the first half was, “Adrian has come back from the dead” and we only realized we were in a sci-fi movie when we see the suit later.

      • ltowel says:

        Wasn’t this originally supposed to be part of the shared “Dark Universe” with that bad new Tom Cruise Mummy movie? If you’re trying to build a shared universe and realize it’s a terrible idea midway through pre-production, you might already have a concept built around an invisible man(which you think could be a good movie), so it’s probably hard to talk yourself out of calling it The Invisible Man – I bet it’s got a higher Q-score then whatever other tittle you come up with.

        • FLWAB says:

          No, it’s made by a completely different studio. The Mummy was Universal Studios, The Invisible Man is Blumhouse. Blumhouse is famous for making tons of horror movies on the cheap and counting on one out of every ten to be a hit. So far it works as a strategy: Invisible Man had a budget of around $10 million and has made something over $100 million.

          • Douglas Knight says:

            The Dark Universe seems to have been canceled and this film claims never to have been involved with it, but … Blumhouse is basically part of Universal and he did get IP from them for this movie. If they wanted unity and centralized control, they wouldn’t have involved him, but it’s not clear what they were ever going to do and I don’t think it’s that implausible that he would have done crossovers with them.

  31. Erl137 says:

    I don’t think Yarvin gets credit for correct prediction here. I admit to only skimming his article, but I saw no particular predictions about the likelihood of pandemic, merely intense stumping for existing policy preferences in the context of an exciting new news item. (Feel free to update me with quotes from the article if I missed something.)

    Imagine the current universe of animal welfare advocates. There are farmers, who believe we should raise cows, kill them, and eat them. There are vegetarians, who believe we should raise cows, milk them, and let them die humanely. There are animal rights activists, who believe we should free cows. There are animal-focused EAs, who believe we should replace farm animals with non-sentient food sources. etc.

    Now add the miso-Cowists, who believe that we should kill a bunch of cows and let them rot. Why? They hate cows, man.

    Most of the time the miso-Cowists just look like huge, irrational assholes. But sometimes there’s a case of Mad Cow Disease. Maybe the initial case is unclear, but there are suggestive news reports. Then the miso-Cowists write long screeds saying, “hey, I heard a guy got sick after eating a burger. As per my previous suggestion, we should kill every cow and let it rot in the fields.” Sometimes the government doesn’t respond quickly; then there are more cases of Mad Cow. When the government gets around to responding, its policy playbook includes the miso-Cow plank: it kills a whole lot of cows and lets them rot.

    Does this count as a “successful prediction” of a Mad Cow Outbreak? Should we extend greater credence to prominent miso-Cowists as sage prophets?

    Probably not.

    But it depends! If miso-Cowism is merely an overexcited Bovine Spongiform Encephalitis resistance group, we might change our opinion of them to, “hey, these people are right about the exact one thing they do care about, and we should be more responsive to initial reports that suggest Mad Cow.” If miso-Cowism is motivated by a completely different ontology—e.g., Two Legs Good, Four Legs Bad—then I think we’re justified in chalking this up to a stopped clock being right at 6:47 precisely.

    • Radu Floricica says:

      It’s a _really_ long article, and I got bored myself. But the relevant parts are there – he’s uncanningly spot on with a bunch of things.

      In October 2019, epidemiologists at Johns Hopkins ran an exercise, “Event 201,” which modeled a coronavirus pandemic. It went completely wild in the Third World and killed 65 million people. Every virus is different, of course. The model virus was more lethal than this one—maybe not 10x more lethal. A coronavirus is basically a cold. The “novel coronavirus” is a cold that gets into your lungs and causes pneumonia, which kills old or sick people. It seems to hit children more lightly, which may be good or bad. Any parent knows the sniffly toddler is a biological weapon.

      China, as an autocratic total state, may have the world’s highest state capacity for disease control. The Chinese government was able to contain SARS because SARS patients aren’t infectious until they have a fever. The government covered the country with fever-checking stations—and it won. China’s latest numbers are distinctly subexponential; epic lockdowns are hard to sustain, but must have a huge impact on viral replication; its scientists may not be quite as good at making vaccines as ours, but paperwork will not get in their way; China has a chance. Coronaviruses prefer winter—spring is coming. They mutate fast—this one could decay into a harmless cold which is also a live viral vaccine, immunizing us against its evil cousin. Nature has a chance. God, as Bismarck said, takes care of fools, drunks and the United States. God always has a chance.

      But as another statesman said, the purpose of government is to provide against preventable evils. What if God has had enough? What if nature is a bitch? What if China has no chance? We could be lucky! Let’s hope we get lucky. But—right now (January 30), the world’s top epidemiologists and virologists seem to concur that we will need to be lucky. And in these professional, social and intellectual circles, the penalties for showboating alarmism are dire. If this turns out to be so—and we may not know for sure until it’s too late—the USG could save millions of lives, American and foreign, right now, by suspending 1492 and disconnecting our planet’s two great hemispheres.
      Epidemiologically, at least. The obvious solution to an emerging pandemic killer cold is cutting off flights to China, then all air travel across the Pacific, then across the Atlantic—depending on the virus’s progress, and maintained donec sciam quid agatur.

      Slower quarantine facilities can get trapped people home. Obvious thinking, of course, is sometimes wrong. It cannot be described as scientific thinking—and here is the problem. Indeed the Western public-health community tends to feel that naive isolation measures, popular both among their old European ancestors and their present Chinese competitors, are barbaric, inept and wrong—like treating cancer with bloodletting. They are even well aware that, to the uneducated, they sound like the mayor in Jaws.

      No, our public-health experts have not been corrupted by the travel and hospitality industry. They say what they think because what they think is the latest science. It may not be good and true; it is as good and true as it gets. And they have a stack of papers as tall as you to prove it. This dialectic is so thick, you could cut it with a knife. As in any really fresh dialectic, both sides are obviously right. An unexpected context of decision Western leaders have to listen to the best scientists—that’s how our process works. They don’t have to listen to the West’s best scientists. They could listen to China’s best scientists. But this would introduce its own well-known source of political distortion. Or they could listen to Hong Kong‘s best scientists—who are somewhat outside both Western and Chinese distortion fields. Bureaucratically this still doesn’t really work. Intellectually, let’s try it and see how it goes.

      Ready to spend half an hour watching TV? Do you know that TV trope where the scientists, having run the numbers, come out to tell the world that—the world is doomed? Here is that press conference, IRL—January 27, 2020. Watch the whole thing. The West’s best epidemiologists consider this Hong Kong team peers. They have the most hands-on experience in the area, having dealt with both SARS and bird flu. They are relatively immune to ideological pressure from both the West and China. Their message is not that the coronavirus will become a pandemic—just that they do not know what would keep it from becoming a pandemic. As Dr. Leung puts it:
      There is already self-sustaining transmission in quite a number of Chinese cities. Because we have at least four city clusters around the country that have extensive links with the rest of the world’s airports, then the chance of seeding sufficient numbers in overseas cities such that they would generate their own epidemics, is not trivial.

      Dr. Leung says: if asymptomatic patients do not shed much virus, as in SARS, “we might have a fighting chance.” Considerable evidence of asymptomatic transmission has since appeared. (The experts are still guessing, but the virus seems to have a large “iceberg” of mild but contagious infections.) As for his policy recommendations, Dr. Leung thinks the internal Chinese quarantine is too late. For the rest of the world, his recommendation is simple if not specific. “Substantial, draconian measures limiting population mobility,” says Dr. Leung, Hong Kong’s top guy, both a virologist and a virus-fighter, “should be taken immediately.” Hong Kong has no ocean borders, but has since taken Dr. Leung’s prescription. We like to remember Athens because of Pericles, not Draco. But only one of them died in a plague.

      Our interconnected, globalized world On the same day, January 27, the NYT published an op-ed on the same subject, by a leading American public-health expert. Dr. Markel—a trained pediatrician—has studied both science and history; he can certainly turn a phrase. His timing is so good that he has a book to sell: Quarantine. Quarantines and other isolation policies, we learn, are bad. Don’t miss the part of the op-ed where he tells you that his historical research says quarantines work, but are bad anyway. And Dr. Markel’s policy prescription is the opposite of Dr. Leung’s: “Incremental restrictions, enforced transparently, tend to work far better than draconian measures, particularly at enlisting the public’s cooperation, which is especially important for properly handling outbreaks in our interconnected, globalized world.”

      Dr. Markel is no more a political scientist than a virologist. But he does know the lingo, doesn’t he? This virus mainly seems to kill old people. So this is the kind of thinking standing between the boomers we love, and drowning in their own fluids. To keep up with the Hong Kong consensus, get your plague news not from the Washington Post, but the South China Morning Post. When Dr. Leung turns optimistic, you can chillax. If he dies, stock up on ammo. Anything that sounds like Dr. Markel can be ignored.

  32. Nevertaken says:

    Two of the ingredients of hard to predict from a social standpoint, but easy from a logical standpoint, seems to me to be: one; events that happen on a frequency scale of 60 – 100 years or so – that scale is frequent enough that most people will live through one of them, but infrequent enough that most people will not live through two of them; and two that reaction requires some social risk. When the evidence mounts that one of them is beginning to happen, we should not logically discount it as some remote possibility. But at the same time, because it’s outside of (almost) everyone’s experience, there is a natural tendency to discount the possibility; and because, for a pandemic, the reaction is to say we should all behave like hoarding, socially distanced preppers, there is social pressure to not follow the logic. We had no business discounting the possibility of a pandemic to the extent most of us did. The domain experts had been telling us for years that it’s a ‘when not if’ question. When China shut down Wuhan (a city of 5 million + people) on January 23, and then in the week or so after that when it was apparent that it had not been contained in Wuhan, that should have been it. But for many of us it wasn’t.

    • Kaitian says:

      It wasn’t obvious that it was going to become a global problem. The Wuhan lockdown was seen by many people as a Chinese overreaction to compensate for their failure to contain SARS 20 years ago. And the Ebola scare of 2014-15 probably left many people with a strong impression that diseases spreading in dirty third world cities won’t become a problem in western countries. Most people here didn’t start worrying until the disease exploded in Italy, seven hours from here by car.

      There is no need to behave like a hoarding prepper. If the government had tried a “containment” strategy, you wouldn’t have had to change your life at all (unless you became a known contact of a patient). Now that it has become a “flatten the curve” strategy, normal infection prevention measures seem enough to keep most people healthy. There’s no need to retreat to a bunker with 200 cans of beans and a shotgun.

      • AlesZiegler says:

        +1.

        The Wuhan lockdown was seen by many people as a Chinese overreaction to compensate for their failure to contain SARS 20 years ago. And the Ebola scare of 2014-15 probably left many people with a strong impression that diseases spreading in dirty third world cities won’t become a problem in western countries. Most people here didn’t start worrying until the disease exploded in Italy, seven hours from here by car.

        Exactly, this describes my own reaction uncanily well. I am not proud of it, of course.

      • Nevertaken says:

        It wasn’t just the shutting down of Wuhan though: it was the fact that shutting down Wuhan didn’t succeed in containing it. If there is an overreaction that doesn’t work, that should be pretty clear evidence that the thing is for real.

  33. sidereal says:

    I don’t really see the need to update regarding survive/thrive. Protecting vulnerable people from a particularly bad virus by shutting down society is something you can only afford to do if your society has plenty of slack in it, but we do!

    On the other hand, disease happens and old people die from it, that’s how it’s always worked. And since things can quickly fall apart (because they are barely hanging on by a thread) we might just have to take our chances.

    • pterofractal says:

      Yes. Without sounding insane (I’m not, I promise!) I’m curious how many people will die from unemployment, homelessness, and related factors, as compared to those that might die from COVID19. I don’t know if there have been any projections, but we might need to perform a cost-benefit analysis here. Of course it would be lovely if we could ensure that people don’t lose their jobs, leading to unemployment and death, but I’m unsure (yet hopeful!) that we can do so in our current political climate.

      • Radu Floricica says:

        You’d need to also subtract lives protected due to this crisis. I remember a couple of months ago I calculated that if we’re under 2000 deaths in Bucharest and the pollution stays at these low levels for a year, we’re in the black. So far we have 35 dead 😀 The numbers pass a quick sanity check – it rounds to about one in 1-2 thousand dead due to pollution in a year (out of something like 30 dead of any causes) (we were the top polluted large city in Europe 3 months ago, and easily comparable to industrialized China).

        • Kaitian says:

          Your calculation assumes that everyone who dies of pollution in a year dies of the pollution that happened that year. I think most people who are said to die of pollution die from damage accumulated by many years of living in a polluted area. So keeping low pollution for a year would prevent some deaths of pollution, but certainly not all or even most pollution deaths of that year.

          But your reasoning is still valid. Since people are mostly staying home, they’re not doing a lot of the stuff that usually kills people. I bet traffic accidents have gone down a lot, probably fights and binge drinking as well.

          On the other hand, I do think that covid deaths plus quarantine related deaths (domestic violence, suicide, people being afraid to go to the hospital for non covid problems, etc) will probably outnumber the saved lives by a lot, and mortality this year will be higher than in other years.

          Now, if the lockdown stays in place for a long time (years?) and people get used to this low resource lifestyle, we might end up in the plus on lives saved. But I don’t expect that to happen.

          • Radu Floricica says:

            Oh, I have absolutely no expectations of precision from my “model”. At the very best it can give a very ballpark figure. And yes, people definitely don’t die that year – lives saved now are actually saved many years down the road, when they (don’t) die of heart attack or respiratory illnesses or cancer. Or, like a worrying amount of studies suggest lately, (don’t) suffer from dementia.

          • HeelBearCub says:

            I’m pretty sure pollution like fine particulates do kill this year. I’m not sure, but I imagine a huge number of deaths we ascribe to “pollution” are actually delayed, relatively speaking, until pollution resumes. That’s probably true for even the incremental stuff.

            Sure, something like cancer risk doesn’t quite follow this, but smokers dramatically reduce near term cancer risk just by quitting smoking for a relatively short period of time, IIRC.

            Yeah, pollution effects lag, but I don’t think they lag quite as much as you think, especially air pollution. Now air pollution that turns into ground pollution is different.

          • Kaitian says:

            @HeelBearCub

            Some of the pollution deaths are definitely immediate / short term. E.g. someone having an asthma attack next to a busy street, or an elderly person with pneumonia who might just have survived if he had access to clean air.
            But most pollution deaths are certainly delayed / statistical, and I don’t know how much a one year break in pollution will matter (assuming the pollution returns after). Afaik the cancer risk for smokers only goes back near that of non smokers after 10 years.

            I don’t doubt that even the statistical and delayed pollution deaths will go down a bit thanks to the lockdown. But I don’t think the difference will be equivalent to a whole year’s pollution deaths.

      • Chalid says:

        Mortality rates fall during recessions, actually. The effect is pretty strong.

        • keaswaran says:

          But presumably morbidity and mortality due to alcoholism and domestic abuse rise when people are cooped up. And pollution and car crashes go down. But fatalities per car crash go up as speeds increase. There’s a lot of effects on both sides here, so that you can’t just take one linear association and project it through.

    • Matt M says:

      you can only afford to do if your society has plenty of slack in it, but we do!

      I think this is very much up for debate.

      Consider: The US federal government was, before all this started, up to its eyeballs in debt. State/local governments have to balance their budget, but many are underfunding basic services and have a massive crisis on the horizon with unfunded liabilities (which isn’t technically debt, but looks and smells and quacks like it). All but the largest corporations have no more than a month or so worth of cash on hand to weather a “no business anymore” storm. The average household lives paycheck to paycheck and cannot meet an emergency expense of $400. Millions of American households have negative net worth.

      Where is this “slack” of which you speak?

      I suspect the answer is something like “We have a lot of luxuries we could live without” which is true, but as I address elsewhere, the problem is we cannot just quickly and suddenly convert Netflix into bread, gasoline, meat, or anything else. Yes, if we completely and totally re-organized society over the long haul we could give up a lot of luxuries and produce more necessities, but that simply is not feasible in anything approximating the short term.

      • Logan says:

        I think that comment was meant as a description of the “leftist” perspective, not a real claim.

        For example, I’ve seen many leftists claim that we can afford the federal spending necessary to weather this, especially if we tax the wealthy more. Maybe we’re not doing those things, but we could if conservatives weren’t so unnecessarily stingy. At least that’s a thing I’ve heard said.

        My conservative brain agrees with you that we really can’t weather this, but I’ve always had a survive perspective more than a thrive perspective, so that’s to be expected.

      • No need to produce more necessities. Just produce the same amount of necessities.

      • John Schilling says:

        Where is this “slack” of which you speak?

        The slack is in the United States Government’s AAA credit rating, or AA+ if you go with S&P. This is an enormously valuable thing for the United States to have, which gives us quite a bit of flexibility for dealing with things like surprise pandemics.

        There is the little problem that nobody knows what the actual credit limit is, except in hindsight. So, finite but immeasurable slack.

    • bsrk says:

      I agree with this, with the caveat that it would be nice to get more precise about this. So, I suggest a modification of what is correctly right wing, correctly left wing, right wing bias, left wing bias.

      Correctly right wing: To be able to see the drawbacks of an action.
      Correctly left wing: To be able to see the advantages of an action.

      Right wing excess/bias/overreaction: Being unable to see the advantages of an action.
      Left wing excess/bias/overreaction: Being unable to see the drawbacks of an action.

      Putting the possible hypothesized actions in detail, we get:

      Case 1: Impose a Quarantine: Extreme right wing: It will be a disaster with no upside! Extreme Left wing: It’ll fix everything with no downside!
      Case 2: Lift a Quarantine: Extreme right wing: It will be a disaster with no upside! Extreme Left wing: It’ll fix everything with no downside!
      Case 3: Impose a Travel Ban: Extreme right wing: It will be a disaster with no upside! Extreme Left wing: It’ll fix everything with no downside!
      Case 4: Lift a Travel Ban: Extreme right wing: It will be a disaster with no upside! Extreme Left wing: It’ll fix everything with no downside!

      • Ant says:

        A part of the greens are reactionary leftist. Those are more than able to see the drawbacks of an action.

    • Alyosha says:

      Agreed.

      Assume that the worst-case scenario for letting the virus run its course, with absolutely no government-enforced mitigation efforts, is that 10% of the population dies (FWIW I consider this a very high estimate). This is bad. REALLY bad. Probably worst-thing-since-the-black-plague bad. But it is not an existential threat to our way of life.

      Forcibly shutting down most all voluntary activity, on the otherhand, is an existential threat to our way of life. You can’t seriously argue otherwise–you can only argue about how long we can go before the damage becomes more than we can fix.

      I think it makes perfect sense that the “survive” crowd is more worried about the existential threat, and the “thrive” crowd is willing to risk our way of life (because they see the risk as small) to save lives on the margins.

      Relatedly, I notice that the people most in favor of perpetuating lockdowns (e.g. politicians, billionaires, journos, celebrities) are the ones who are mostly suffering little to no personal consequences from them, and thus almost certainly underestimating the risks inherent to them.

      • albatross11 says:

        But nobody has actually proposed shutting down all life. Grocery stores, liquor stores, gas stations, convenience stores, pharmacies, restaurants offering take-out or delivery, public utilities, farms, meat packing plants, etc., are all continuing to function and nobody proposes shutting them down.

        The shutdowns have an economic cost, as well as a harder-to-estimate (but quite possibly more important) impact on peoples’ mental health and sense of well-being. But they’re not remotely shutting down the whole economy, so that’s the wrong comparison to make.

      • keaswaran says:

        What do you mean by “an existential threat to our way of life”? Is my way of life changed far more radically by working from home/collecting unemployment while watching a lot of Netflix, or by continuing to do my regular job while lots of people are dying around me? Both are massive changes to our way of life. Especially since the “let it burn” process presumably has one week where a substantial fraction of the population is simultaneously too sick to go to work, so we effectively have the desertedness of the current shutdown (for a briefer period), *plus* the sickness.

        • Alyosha says:

          How long do you think businesses can stay shut down and not go under? How many rent checks can landlords miss before they can’t make their mortgage? How many missed mortgage payments before the banks start to go under?

          The government can avert disaster in the very short term by throwing money at these problems, as they are, but it won’t be long before they become unmanageable.

          The domino effect of millions being out of work for an extended period is an existential threat to our fragile financial system. Nobody knows how long we can keep this up and still reasonably hope to recover.

          To be clear, I’m not saying we should abandon all measures and go back to business as usual right now, but I am very concerned that so few people are even willing to acknowledge that we’re playing with fire (or worse, they don’t even realize it).

          • Conrad Honcho says:

            but I am very concerned that so few people are even willing to acknowledge that we’re playing with fire (or worse, they don’t even realize it).

            Yes, I read the “A Failure, But Not of Prediction” essay and comments, and a common observation was that people who predicted it didn’t necessarily act on it, or freak out. Something like a failure of imagination, so some rumination about how to figure out whether or not to freak out at the next catastrophe.

            The next catastrophe is in 1-2 months if these lockdowns don’t end. You just need to notice that 20 million people are out of work. That’s a depression. We should definitely be freaking out about this, and I encourage everyone to panic. I know I am.

          • meh says:

            But even with no central lockdown, it will not be business as usual. We are not going back to the before economy, it will be a new open economy. Who knows how people will react, what business will still have demand? What higher infection rates will yield. Either way we are playing fire. Yes, we should acknowledge this, and try to make the tradeoffs. But it is fire potential in either direction.

          • Matt M says:

            But even with no central lockdown, it will not be business as usual.

            This is highly theoretical.

            With a few notable exceptions (pro sports, concerts, cruise ships) I think it’s entirely possible that a disease which kills 1-in-1000 people (the huge majority of which are elderly or already very sick) will not alter consumer behavior in a meaningful way.

            Once enough time has passed such that the average person is able to appreciate how bad the disease actually is (as compared to today, when people are basing their behaviors on how bad the self-proclaimed experts are assuring them the disease might be), it’s entirely possible most people would choose to go back to life 95% as normal (as in, most people don’t attend pro sporting events or go on cruises very frequently at all anyway).

            I’d also like to point out that if the government itself actually believed this, they wouldn’t be issuing lockdown orders at all. They disagree with your assessment of the likelihood of widespread voluntary behavior alteration.

          • keaswaran says:

            “it’s entirely possible that a disease which kills 1-in-1000 people (the huge majority of which are elderly or already very sick) will not alter consumer behavior in a meaningful way”

            Are you talking about swine flu? Because it doesn’t sound like you’re talking about covid-19. But maybe I’ll assume you’re only talking about young and healthy people, who do seem to have a mortality rate close to 1/1000.

            And a lot of people might reasonable fear not just being one of the 1/1000 of healthy young people that die from it, but rather being in the 1/50 young people that end up in the ICU from it, or being in the 1/3 young people that spend a week or two unable to walk across the house because of shortness of breath.

          • Matt M says:

            Are you talking about swine flu? Because it doesn’t sound like you’re talking about covid-19. But maybe I’ll assume you’re only talking about young and healthy people, who do seem to have a mortality rate close to 1/1000.

            I’m talking about the current overall population fatality rate, which seems to be somewhere around 0.1% (not the case fatality rate).

          • Loriot says:

            But even with no central lockdown, it will not be business as usual.

            Well it sounds like we’re about to run this experiment anyway. The governor of Georgia has called for movie theaters it reopen, but it sounds like at least in the short term, the theaters are going to stay closed anyway because the economics don’t make sense when everyone’s too scared to go to the movies and nothing good’s coming out for the forseeable future.

          • meh says:

            @Matt M

            This is highly theoretical.

            Nope. Did you go to any businesses in the weeks before the official lock downs? Everywhere I went was at most 25% of normal. Places were voluntarily shutting down because nobody was going.

            Your idea that everyone will be super fine with returning to normal seems to be the more highly theoretical idea.

          • ana53294 says:

            @meh

            Sure, in the first few weeks, fewer people will go. But as this thing gets dragged for months, I doubt that the places that are willing to open will get reduced customers unless they are forced to apply some kind of social distancing measures.

            There is a lot of pent-up demand for restaurants, pubs, churches, car repair shops, etc. The only reasons why they may have issues is supply issues (which is an issue in Spain for many things).

          • Matt M says:

            Nope. Did you go to any businesses in the weeks before the official lock downs? Everywhere I went was at most 25% of normal.

            I don’t know where you live, but here in suburban Texas, if I go out today, everything that hasn’t been closed by government decree looks to be ~80% full, at least.

          • John Schilling says:

            The restaurant I went to a few days before lockdown looked to be close to normal; this was in Southern California but a mostly Red Tribe part thereof.

          • baconbits9 says:

            If half of all businesses are closed then only seeing the open ones 80% full is pretty damning.

          • Matt M says:

            If half of all businesses are closed then only seeing the open ones 80% full is pretty damning.

            Nonsense. Businesses aren’t equally interchangeable like that. The fact that I can’t legally get a haircut anywhere makes me no more or less likely to go to Home Depot.

            But the fact that 80% of Home Depot customers are willing to keep going there suggests a similar proportion would probably go get haircuts, if they were allowed to do so.

          • baconbits9 says:

            Not nonsense. They don’t have to be perfectly interchangeable. If I can’t get a haircut I have an hour more and $20 more. If Home Depot traffic is down 20% with massively reduced competition then when other places reopen HD is likely to be emptier and they (perhaps after a short burst) will also be below normal traffic.

          • The Nybbler says:

            Nope. Did you go to any businesses in the weeks before the official lock downs? Everywhere I went was at most 25% of normal.

            I work in NYC and live in NJ. While NJ Transit ridership seemed down on March 9 (lockdowns started March 17), it wasn’t down to 25% (nor was it down the week before), and there were still people crowding in front of Broadway theatres. I went out to dinner in NJ that week, and crowds were normal.

          • meh says:

            if I go out today, everything that hasn’t been closed by government decree looks to be ~80% full, at least.

            Unless the government randomly picked what to close, I’m not sure what I can imply from this.

          • Matt M says:

            baconbits,

            I don’t think there’s an economist on Earth who could claim that a hair salon and Home Depot are “competitors” in any meaningful sense. If you want to get into the “people who don’t get haircuts have more money now” then fine, but you also have to account for something like “what would Home Depot foot traffic look like in a world where quarterly annualized GDP growth is -30%?” I think if you control for all the different economic effects, the fact that Home Depot is still mostly full can be treated as strong evidence that a whole lot of people would still go about their normal lives in the absence of state decrees requiring they shelter in place.

            meh,

            I don’t think it was literally random. Literally random might actually be better. I think it was based on cronyism (anything that generates tax revenue for the state, liquor, weed, lottery tickets, were all declared essential) and paternalism (things people enjoy were banned as frivolous luxuries, even if they could be useful like gardening, or knitting, parks and beaches were closed even if social distancing could be maintained, etc.)

          • NostalgiaForInfinity says:

            @Matt M

            It is not theoretical.

            https://www.statista.com/statistics/1104991/coronavirus-restaurant-visitation-impact-united-kingdom-uk/

            UK ordered restaurants to close on the 20th March, by which point business was already down 80% year on year. They had advised people to avoid them on the 16th, but business had been 20% down for a week before then.
            My work had already switched the vast majority of staff to working from home the week by the 13th.

            I have seen similar stats for somewhere in the US on twitter, but don’t have them to hand.

          • albatross11 says:

            This discussion makes me think there’s a huge amount of local variation in when people started taking the virus seriously. The last time I went out to eat (with my wife, at a restaurant in the middle of a lot of tech-heavy employers, about a week before the schools shut down here) the place was very sparsely populated, and the servers were seating people with empty tables between all parties.

            This leads to the suspicion that a lot of the variation in how quickly things spread may be due to that kind of variation in when people started altering their behavior in response to the virus.

          • baconbits9 says:

            I don’t think there’s an economist on Earth who could claim that a hair salon and Home Depot are “competitors” in any meaningful sense.

            In an ordinary economy they won’t compete ‘in a meaningful sense’ because the economy should be near equilibrium. Closing every hair salon for a day would probably not make a meaningful impact on HD’s bottom line, closing every hair salon and every bar and most restaurants and parks etc, etc, etc for weeks to months is a very different situation. Saying ‘hair salon vs HD is just being obtuse’ its clearly ‘almost nothing to do vs the few places that are open and few opportunities that there are’.

          • meh says:

            @Matt M

            I think our localities are behaving very differently. Where I am, gardening and parks are considered essential. I did not voluntarily isolate much, and the “frivolous” businesses I was visiting were at barely 25% of normal.

            Anyway, my point is that 80% of normal doesn’t mean much if only ‘essential’ business is open (though it seems like your locality has a loose definition of essential). If you told me there was a 1 in ten thousand chance of being shot in the face every time I went out, I would still take that chance occasionally at the supermarket or pharmacy, but I would probably not ever again go to the gym, get a haircut, watch a movie, etc.

            And the 1 in ten thousand is arbitrary, not a claim on the virus. I’m just saying some places are more resistant to losing traffic than others; so the observable traffic at the still open businesses will not necessarily be the same for the closed ones.

          • meh says:

            @NostalgiaForInfinity
            Thanks for the cold hard data.
            By me some places were voluntarily closing in the days leading up to the mandated one.

      • xq says:

        Relatedly, I notice that the people most in favor of perpetuating lockdowns (e.g. politicians, billionaires, journos, celebrities) are the ones who are mostly suffering little to no personal consequences from them, and thus almost certainly underestimating the risks inherent to them.
        My impression is the opposite; e.g. there were some fairly small anti-lockdown protests that a number of politicians have supported (Trump tweeted support) and the media has given generally favorable coverage, while polls show broad public support (>85%) for lockdown policies. I think politicians, journalists and billionaires are more skeptical of lockdown than the public, at least right now.

        • acymetric says:

          and the media has given generally favorable coverage

          Can I ask what media sources you generally tune in to?

  34. Lambert says:

    I suppose once the initial lockdowns loosen, the level of lockdown to enforce becomes a sort of control theory problem.
    There’s a bunch of different things you can enforce (masks, shutting down non-essential businesses etc) which will have an effect on R. By low-hanging-fruit reasoning, there will be diminishing marginal returns on each added bit of disruption
    .
    Once infection rates have fallen, you want to keep R just below 1. This prevents further spikes without excessive disruption.
    The hard part is that right now, there are not enough tests to measure the infection rate properly. It takes around 2 weeks for interventions to have a definite noticeable effect (on the death rate)*. Imagine trying to stay below the speed limit but your speedo only shows how fast you were going two minutes ago.

    You have to be quite conservative in loosening restrictions, lest R climb above 1 without you noticing.
    From the perspective of both diminishing marginal returns and predictability, you want to keep the restrictions in place fairly constant, rather than wildly spinging between complete lockdown and normality.

    If I had to end this comment with some kind of solid conclusion, it would be that thorough testing is vital in the medium term.

    *I’m looking at you, ‘the hospitals aren’t overwhelmed yet’ people. ‘Once the hosptials are overwhelmed’ is a fortnight too late.

    • The Nybbler says:

      *I’m looking at you, ‘the hospitals aren’t overwhelmed yet’ people. ‘Once the hosptials are overwhelmed’ is a fortnight too late.

      The hospitals are not only not overwhelmed, but in NYC hospital visits and admissions peaked (at “some but not all hospitals overwhelmed for a short period”) about three weeks ago.

      • Matt M says:

        In most of the country, the hospitals aren’t even whelmed.

        The average American nurse is currently more likely to be laid off due to a lack of need of her services than to be emergency re-deployed to a special-purpose COVID wing.

        • Randy M says:

          I should have been more aware of this, as I drive by a hospital every day, but it’s still surprising.

          • HeelBearCub says:

            Healthcare is one of the hardest hit sectors, employment wise.

            But that doesn’t mean hospitals can’t become overloaded.

            It’s the perfect storm. They’ve tried to hire some nurses or bring some in from other areas and departments, but they don’t always have the same training, and a lot don’t want to stay. Who can blame them? The whole ER is this virus. We’re wearing one disposable gown for our entire shift. We’ve had sit-ins here over staffing issues before, and the demands of this virus made it so much worse. We went from having 14 nurses on at night to sometimes having 10 or less. Eventually, all of us hit that point: “Enough is enough. We’re not clocking in until you bring more support. Do something.”

    • Conrad Honcho says:

      The hospitals aren’t even whelmed.

      Edit: Ninj’erd, so just call this a +1 to Nybbler and Matt M.

      • Matt M says:

        You can take credit, because I definitely didn’t come up with that phrasing, and may be stealing it from you in an earlier OT.

    • Radu Floricica says:

      I love simple models (or I hate complex models?) but in this case “keeping R0 unde 1” is way too simplistic. At the very least you need to consider different locations and age groups. For older/sicker you want to go as low as possible, for kids you don’t really mind a positive R. And you want to lift restrictions based on local conditions, and the corresponding Rs for each age group in each location. I.e. if a town has an elderly R0 of .99, you still want to shut things down, hard. But if the elderly R is .2 and the kids are running around asymptomatic… slap on some masks and let’s grab a beer.

      And I’m probably missing other relevant variables as well.

      • Lambert says:

        Yeah, this was totally just an oversimplified model.

        Not sure you’d want R>1 even in kids or limited geographical areas.
        You’d risk creating a reservoir where it’s endemic and kicking off a bunch of smaller outbreaks elsewhere.

      • demost says:

        I agree that the model is very simplistic, but I think your alternative misses the point of spread vs. non-spread in an important way. Let’s say that within children the R is 2. Then that means that among the 74m children in the US, you will have 50% of them infected in short time. (Really, really short, that is what exponential growth is about.) With 30m infected children around, even if only 10% of them infect a person at risk (like, elderly; and smokers; and people with hypertension… Really, the risk group is LARGE), then you have 3m infected people in the risk group. It does not help you in the slightest that the R-value among elderly is 0.2. They don’t spread the virus, but that’s not required for catastrophy.

        There have been people thinking about whether you can separate the risk group as you suggested, and the answer is clear and simple: No, you can’t, it’s too many.

        But I do agree that it is not just a single R. There ARE different subgroups of the population, different local regions etc. The next best approximation is to think about it not as a single exponential function, but actually as the sum of different exponentials, each with their own exponent. This also helps understanding some of the dynamics of an epidemic: When the epidemic rises (R>1), then it rises as fast as the fastest of the exponentials, because that dominates everything else. On the other hand, when the epidemics dies out (R<1) then it dies out as slowly as the slowest of the exponentials. That is why the decline phase is generally slower than the incline phase.

        And yes, that is still simplistic. In fact, if you take locality into account then it is quite possible that an infection grows polynomially. That is something that you will never see in any model that operates with R-values. But still, I find the model with R a quite useful one.

  35. Randy M says:

    At the risk of conjuring poorly replicating social studies, anyone have thoughts on how the constant wearing of masks changes society, beyond the other effects of the lockdown?
    Maybe it creates a feeling of solidarity. Or maybe it makes strangers seem like sources of infection. Maybe arguments are more frequent, without as much expression possible. Maybe people feel more anonymous, and public behavior is more anti-social.
    Or maybe it doesn’t catch on enough to matter, of course.

    • Milo Minderbinder says:

      I think it varies by locale. I live in San Diego and have been in LA during the lockdown. Mask usage is very high in both places, and shopkeepers/passersby definitely seem off-put if you aren’t wearing one. Friends in rural New Hampshire and North Carolina have reported the opposite, with low compliance rates and mask-wearers being viewed as potential infection vectors.

      For the most part, people are probably looking around and following local norms. High-compliance areas look on masks positively, low-compliance the opposite.

      • Tarpitz says:

        Here in Oxford (England), mask wearers are a fairly small but visible minority – perhaps 10-20%, highest over-representation among East Asians, significant over-representation among South Asians (by far Oxford’s largest minority group). I don’t get the impression that anyone not wearing a mask thinks ill of them; I have no idea what they think of the rest of us. Public behaviour in general feels pretty pro-social and considerate regardless of the mask status of anyone involved, but then, well, it’s Oxford. I suppose I did see one man who appeared to be working on building a Prosecco hoard early in the lockdown period. I also haven’t been to Blackbird Lees (the one really crappy suburb) – maybe it is or was uglier there.

    • Well... says:

      It’s an interesting question. For example…

      – Fear of germs and disease is quite tied up with our behaviors around race and foreigners. A facemask might keep the wearer safe or keep others safe from the wearer, but one way or another it creates a big association between the wearer and Fear of Disease. Could this make “racism” or “xenophobia” (scare quotes in reference to the massive complexity of these terms) worse? Or could it have an alleviating effect if everybody’s wearing them?

      – A more specific version of the above: It seems like many non-Asian Americans used to associate the wearing of facemasks in particular with East Asians and East Asian immigrants. Now that we all are wearing them, what is left of that association? What impact will the association have on our future perceptions of different races/ethnicities?

      – Will we get accustomed to not seeing all of people’s faces when we’re out and about, but still trusting them during all those little microinteractions?

      – How will the masked perceive the unmasked, and vice versa? Will a mask or no-mask become symbolic of lots of other big important things? (If it hasn’t already.)

      • Randy M says:

        – Will we get accustomed to not seeing all of people’s faces when we’re out and about, but still trusting them during all those little microinteractions?

        Yeah, this is the kind of thing I’m worried about. It’s just disconcerting to see people veiled. Obviously some societies have adapted to it, but Western culture incorporates a lot of body language into social interaction. A disarming smile, etc.
        Heck, nearly all my action figures with masks are bad guys.

        – How will the masked perceive the unmasked, and vice versa? Will a mask or no-mask become symbolic of lots of other big important things? (If it hasn’t already.)

        And here I thought we were done with “Shirts vs Skins” in middle school.

        • The Pachyderminator says:

          It’s still possible to walk down the street with a mask and no shirt, and thereby signal whatever you were going to signal by going shirtless just as effectively.

          Heck, you don’t have to stop with the shirt. There’ll never be a better time to post nude photos online with your face covered.

      • keaswaran says:

        > Will we get accustomed to not seeing all of people’s faces when we’re out and about, but still trusting them during all those little microinteractions?

        We already have this in the form of windshields. The average American interacts with hundreds or thousands of people a day without seeing any of their faces. They are usually angry at all of them. It’ll be interesting to see how this translates to seeing all of the person but the face, rather than just seeing the metal carapace.

        (Incidentally, I’ve suspected there’s some intrinsic similarity between the way suburban Americans treat an automobile and the way conservative muslims treat a hijab – if someone’s out in public without being in their covering, you feel simultaneously slightly sorry for them and disgusted at them, even though it’s fine when you’re indoors among close personal contacts.)

        • Well... says:

          I was trying to think of analogous situations, but I don’t think windshields is one of them. On the road I’m mostly interacting with other people as cars, rather than as people obscured by windshields. If I get close enough to pick out the details of the driver, then my pattern-finding pretty much does its best to ignore the windshield/side windows. Compare with facemasks, where the mask is quite front-and-center.

          • keaswaran says:

            But I think it’s notable that people interacting with cars stereotypically do so in extremely rage-filled and uncharitable ways! It would be surprising to me if interacting with obvious humans in masks is more extreme than that!

          • Well... says:

            On the road you are interacting with other people as cars, and you are also acting as a car. With facemasks, you are interacting with people as people, they just happen to be kind of hidden behind a big “hey remember there’s a scary virus going around” symbol. You are also aware of your own hiddenness behind that same symbol, but you are also interacting as a person. Surely this explains the relative non-severity of our facemasked interactions to those of our interactions on the road.*

            *Although it’s worth mentioning that the vast majority of interactions on the road are amicable. I think they just escalate a lot faster if there’s a bad actor or a misunderstanding.

          • John Schilling says:

            With facemasks, you are interacting with people as people, they just happen to be kind of hidden behind a big “hey remember there’s a scary virus going around” symbol.

            A person who cannot smile, or frown or grimace or the like? A person with only half a face? Is your lizard brain going to recognize a thing with only half a face as fully human?

            That’s a serious question. One thing secret police forces around the world have learned is that it’s easier to get your unfortunately still human secret policemen to horrifically mistreat their prisoners if you first put a hood over the victim and take away their face. Also common practice for executioners and firing squads, for the same reason. And, on the flip side, Hollywood has learned that if you want the audience to empathize with an alien or a robot, it almost has to have a face. So do check in with your lizard brain before answering.

            It is far from obvious that the dominant social effect of ubiquitous masks is going to be “hey remember there’s a scary virus going around”, with no dehumanization of the half-faced humanoids we are all going to be dealing with all the time in this brave new world.

          • b_jonas says:

            @John Schilling: You’re probably right, there is certainly some instinctive dehumanizing effect. But I think it’s unfair to compare a mask to a full hood. A mask covers less.

            I guess if the masks are kept in the long term, we’ll have to invent ones that are more form-fitting to the nose and the skin on the sides of the nose, and patterns of paint and texture of the mask that make the face look more expressive.

          • John Schilling says:

            I’m not sure having half your face stuck in the uncanny valley wouldn’t be worse than being half-faceless.

          • Matt M says:

            I don’t know much about this topic, but aren’t the eyes the most “humanizing” part of the face.

            When I see a masked person, I don’t really see inhuman or even uncanny valley. Yes, having their mouth covered makes nonverbal communication somewhat more difficult and certain facial expressions are harder to communicate.

            But if you can see someone’s eyes, you know you are dealing with a human.

          • b_jonas says:

            @Matt M: the eyes and eyebrows are the most important, but the nose and the part of the cheeks close to the nose are also pretty important. The mouth matters very little to make them more human, as we know by experience because people with a huge beard and moustache covering their mouth doesn’t make them seem less human. The biggest effect of not seeing the mouth is that it’s sometimes harder to understand their speech.

          • John Schilling says:

            Smiles and the like also seem to matter a fair bit; whether that’s mouth or lips or cheeks it’s all part of the mask zone.

          • albatross11 says:

            But we know there are a lot of societies where going masked in public during flu season is totally normal, and they don’t seem to fall apart via lizard-brain misfirings. That makes a pretty strong case that we can manage the same thing.

          • EchoChaos says:

            @John Schilling

            Yeah, smiles are specifically something that I’ve noticed missing in people who are wearing masks. It definitely makes things feel a bit less personal to me as a smiler.

          • Edward Scizorhands says:

            Is there any useful mask where people can see me smiling?

          • albatross11 says:

            There are clear plastic air helmets that provide you with filtered air from a battery-powered air pump you carry around. That would probably protect you but not those around you, though.

            One interesting cultural comment here: Foreigners (especially Eastern Europeans) often comment on how, when they first come to the US, they find it weird and a bit creepy how everyone smiles all the time. Smiling as a way to diffuse social tension and convey good intentions and such may be a much bigger deal in US culture than in other places.

    • A number of people, myself among them, have worried about the reduction in privacy due to facial recognition software. I wonder to what extent that problem is reduced if many people are wearing face masks.

      • Well... says:

        Bruce Schneier’s written a whole bunch worrying about privacy and security in general during this ordeal, but in particular he also shared a story about a company claiming it can perform facial recognition on people wearing face masks:

        The company now says its masked facial recognition program has reached 95 percent accuracy in lab tests, and even claims that it is more accurate in real life, where its cameras take multiple photos of a person if the first attempt to identify them fails.

      • Viliam says:

        Unfortunately, face masks also reduce recognition by humans.

        In my neighborhood, there was an increase of theft, recently. Because even if people notice “a man wearing a mask” doing something suspicious, if he can run away, they don’t have much of a good description. Also, fewer people on the streets mean smaller chance to be caught, and smaller chance to call someone for help.

        If the criminals keep adapting, I wonder how much crime we are going to see.

        And of course, it will be interesting how the rest of the society will react. Maybe instead of xenophobia, it will simply be a strong distrust of anyone who is not a neighbor I recognize.

        (Possibly even an opposite of xenophobia, because a person of different color will feel “less anonymous”. The saying “all [insert group] look the same to me” now applies to everyone’s own ethnic group, too.)

        • Well... says:

          With more people home all day, the opportunities for theft (from homes anyway) goes down. Also, in my part of town it seems like people are out on their front porches and stuff more, not less. Maybe a function of the weather more than anything.

          • Matt M says:

            With more people home all day, the opportunities for theft (from homes anyway) goes down.

            Unless criminals feel sufficiently desperate that they just substitute robbing empty houses with robbing occupied houses.

            There’s a pretty common theory in pro-gun circles that the UK experiences more “hot” burglaries than the US because American criminals are afraid of being shot by the occupants. And hot burglaries are far more dangerous and traumatizing for the victims than cold ones are…

          • acymetric says:

            Aren’t there things that could be robbed other than homes? Also, some homes are long-term empty now as people are holed up somewhere else (with family, etc) and some people are still leaving the house to work.

          • Well... says:

            I think it’s pretty commonly accepted that burglars prefer an empty house. Less chance of getting shot, yes, but also less chance of being detected, identified, having the incident reported, having something go wrong, etc. A burglar wants to get in and get out as fast and smoothly as possible, regardless of whether guns are legal in that locale.

            I would guess that in the preference hierarchy of crimes to commit, “rob an empty house” is not directly above “rob an occupied house”; there are probably many alternative crimes a would-be burglar would consider before resorting to a home invasion.

            I’ve also heard that when criminals do knowingly b&e an occupied house, it’s usually because they’re there with worse intentions than just to steal. So home invaders are probably largely not the same set of criminals as burglars.

        • Matt M says:

          Maybe more jurisdictions should adopt the brilliant policies of Houston mayor Sylvester Turner, and politely ask the criminals to stop committing crimes until COVID is over.

    • AlesZiegler says:

      I live in Prague, where mask wearing is mandatory for all outside activities, except getting a beer at a takeout window (or other drinks, but really, it is all about beer), prohibition on which was deemed untenable and quickly relaxed, and for solitary physical exercise on public playgrounds. This mandatory mask wearing is in place for about a month.

      Overall, I am still impressed by how effectively it destroys social life here, although people are gradually getting used to it and thus learning how to engage in social activities that might spread our friend the novel coronavirus even under such limitations.

      Masks are uncomfortable, which limits your desire to be outside and meet with people. Even better, they are even more uncomfortable when weather is pleasantly warm, although from personal experience level of discomfort with homemade cloth mask is nontrivial even when temperatures are below 10 degrees Celsius.

      Paradoxically, surgical masks are far more comfortable and thus better for outdoor activities tham homemade masks, which might reduce their effectiveness as anticoronavirus measure compared to homemade variant. Most people you see on the streets here are still wearing homemade masks, but something like third have surgical ones, which started to filter down to pharmacies which sell them for reasonable prices after government bought a ton of them in China.

      You see groups of people socializing around takeout windows, but to do that, you need to take your mask off, which is a thing that is not seen as responsible, and it seems to me that people in those groups skew heavily towards, not to put too fine a point on it, “low class drunkards”, and it appears that “responsible adults” are mostly staying away from them.

      Czech active detected cases are on plateau for a week, so lockdown measures are presumably effective. Slight relaxation with opening of some nonessential businesses started yesterday.

  36. Bobobob says:

    So hey, oil just plunged to a little over $1 a barrel. Are we depressed yet?

    • baconbits9 says:

      $0.23

      Really good chance of going negative today.

      • Bobobob says:

        Does this number have an actual, real-life meaning, or is it some kind of artifact? Could someone pull up a tanker to an oil facility and literally take on a million barrels for less than a million dollars?

        • baconbits9 says:

          As far as I know it is a real life price that oil producers are getting for their products.

          • Bobobob says:

            If people have spare empty oil tankers lying around, wouldn’t it make sense to load up to the gills at 23 cents a barrel, spend a few leisurely months cruising up and down the Pacific Ocean, then sell at a huge profit when the price of oil rebounds?

            (This is coming from someone who has no idea how the international oil tanker industry works)

          • EchoChaos says:

            @Bobobob

            Yes, it would. But nobody has spare empty oil tankers, because all the existing oil tankers are actually doing that already, which is why the price is dropping negative.

          • baconbits9 says:

            Yes, it would. But nobody has spare empty oil tankers, because all the existing oil tankers are actually doing that already, which is why the price is dropping negative.

            Kind of right, kind of wrong. The idea is correct in theory but the price action today is very different from what you (or I) should expect from such a situation. I think this has a lot to do with the bankruptcy of Hin Leong Trading yesterday.

          • Greg says:

            The contracts are for delivery to Cushing, Oklahoma. Supertankers will not help.

            This is a Dis-uSA thing. World (Brent) prices are still positive, but world storage (including usable supertankers) may well be full by the end of May.

        • Joshua Hedlund says:

          It’s a temporary artifact of being the last day for this cycle’s monthly contract pricing + no one in the market wanting to take on any more of the oil being delivered today. (Or something like that… I just read economists on twitter.) The next month’s contract price (which will start being reported on tomorrow) is in the ~$20 range.

          • baconbits9 says:

            There is still oil being offered at this price, so its not an ‘artifact’, actual contracts are being signed at this price which is

            NEGATIVE $40 a barrel.

            These numbers are likely an artifact of some kind, but there are real world implications. Someone is going bankrupt.

        • baconbits9 says:

          -$1.66

          Negative -1.66 a barrel. If you had that hypothetical empty tanker you could float away with a full hull of oil and $1,660,000.

          • Bobobob says:

            The world must have at least a few decommissioned and empty oil tankers. If 10,000 readers of SSC chipped in $1,000 apiece, would that be enough to buy one? $10,000 apiece? Would this be worthwhile from a profit perspective? (I don’t actually propose doing this, but it seems like a good armchair exercise.)

          • baconbits9 says:

            You couldn’t actually get them to the place and time you need to fulfill the contracts quickly enough.

          • Bobobob says:

            You couldn’t actually get them to the place and time you need to fulfill the contracts quickly enough.

            What if the same thing happens, with the same (artifactually or not) negative price, at the same time next month, assuming that the world lockdown continues until then? If you started getting your act together now, could you have an empty tanker in place to take advantage of the situation?

          • baconbits9 says:

            If the same thing happens next month I don’t think you will be able to count on the money you get paid being worth anything….

          • Bobobob says:

            Right, the money will probably be worthless, but not the oil after the world economy recovers.

          • John Schilling says:

            The world must have at least a few decommissioned and empty oil tankers.

            Rusted-out ones with holes in all the tanks, yes. A few that are tied up in legal arguments so tangled it would take absurd sums of money to pay off enough lawyers to have any confidence “your” tanker won’t be seized with its contents. Probably some North Korean ones, but I repeat myself.

            Practically usable tankers sitting idle, no, there is no requirement that even one such thing exists anywhere on Earth. That particular sidewalk is in fact monitored very closely for stray $20 bills, and you aren’t even in the first ten thousand people to think of this clever scheme.

          • Edward Scizorhands says:

            What stops them from destroying the oil instead of selling it for negative dollars?

          • Bobobob says:

            OK, then, I guess I won’t be having that conversation with my wife. “Guess what, hon, I just mortgaged the house to buy a one-five hundredth share in a decommissioned North Korean oil tanker!”

          • Conrad Honcho says:

            Maybe destroying oil is more expensive than paying someone else to cart it away and use/sell/destroy it themselves?

          • baconbits9 says:

            What stops them from destroying the oil instead of selling it for negative dollars?

            I don’t know exactly, but it is probably a combination of

            1. Very little oil actually got sold at this price
            2. Destroying the oil would take time to do, they probably haven’t installed an emergency ‘if oil falls below $0 open this pump and burn the oil’ spigot.

          • Randy M says:

            “Destroying the oil would take time to do”
            Invisible caveat of “without losing much more than that amount of money in collateral damage.”
            Oil is famous and infamous for it’s ease of destruction.

          • Chalid says:

            I’d expect that destroying the oil is not something the government will allow you to just do, especially not in a populated area, for generally sound environmental and safety reasons. It’s nasty stuff.

          • Lambert says:

            Crude is really dangerous stuff.
            It’s toxic and carcinogenic and flammable and viscous and sulphurous….

            Can’t just Kuwait yourself.

            And the infrastructure’s not designed to be switched off and on again. (Getting it running again costs more than paying people to take your oil away)

      • EchoChaos says:

        And we are… negative!

    • Well... says:

      Bobobob’s question has me wondering:

      To what degree is the strength of Islamic terrorist organizations* negatively correlated with the strength of OPEC’s member countries’ economies?

      If the degree is high, then how much would you predict it increases the odds of a major Islamic terrorist attack on a Western country in the next, say, 12-36 months?

      (I don’t think this is CW as conventionally defined here, right?)

      *Presumably these organizations can still recruit, share information, and plan attacks even while abiding by social distancing and shelter-in-place requirements.

      • baconbits9 says:

        My gut would say that if you are such an organization that significant weakness would motivate you to becoming a regional power in the near term, not to try to launch an overseas attack.

    • Statismagician says:

      This is production that can’t be/would be really hard to shut off, after storage is full, because consumer demand is at some low percentage of normal, right? Just checking my understanding.

    • broblawsky says:

      Is this a violation of the efficient market hypothesis?

      • John V says:

        It depends on what you mean. Is it a violation of the efficient market hypothesis that oil sells negative? Not really. If you bought front month CL futures today, you will have to accept physical delivery of oil in Oklahoma very shortly. It is currently extremely expensive to store or transport oil there.

        Is it a violation of the efficient market hypothesis that oil front month futures were trading at $19 on Friday at close? Probably. But really most of the big players already rolled their futures or were holding their positions for physical settlement. So what was remaining was an relatively illiquid market filled with speculators. If there was a shock in the opposite direction, going short without having the physical oil to deliver could be nearly as risky as going long without having the storage to accept the physical oil. It’s roughly the same mechanism, shock causes speculators to rush for the exits which causes cascading margin calls. So while shorting was probably a great play in hindsight, there is at least some explanation of why people may not have wanted to risk it.

    • What has struck me about stories on the oil price decline over the past month or two is that they all seem to take it as a bad thing. Oil is something we consume. Having it cheaper is a good thing for everyone but the producers.

      • matkoniecz says:

        Sudden crash may be unhealthy with producers crashing (what may result in undersupply in future harming everyone) and crash for oil replacements.

        • Matt M says:

          Are producers crashing though?

          Despite these crazy price movements today, Exxon stock is down only 4%. The market certainly is acting like this is just some weird number that doesn’t mean much. If it legitimately believed “For the forseeable future, it won’t be worth it to take oil out of the ground, even if you could do so for free,” all the large IOCs would be crashing proportionally, wouldn’t they?

          • Anonymous Bosch says:

            The market certainly is acting like this is just some weird number that doesn’t mean much.

            The market has been acting that way about a lot of numbers for a long time now.

          • Greg says:

            Exxon is diversified geographically – it has relatively little exposure to US production. It’s second, third and fourth tier producers doing the fracking who will be driven out by this.

            Edit to add:

            And, as above, this is is a Dis-uSA thing, oil for delivery to Cushing, OK.

            The world (Brent) price is still positive.

          • Edward Scizorhands says:

            The world is still going to want oil in a year. Exxon will have business.

            It was mostly around $70 this year, and is now around $40. They haven’t escaped unscathed.

          • matkoniecz says:

            Major oil companies like Exxon Mobil and Chevron have their own storage facilities and refineries but hundreds of smaller producers rely on pipeline companies to transport their production, and to storage tanks in Cushing to hold onto it.

            https://www.nytimes.com/2020/04/20/business/stock-market-live-trading-coronavirus.html

            It sounds like Exxon will be paid to receive oil from smaller producers.

          • rumham says:

            Are producers crashing though?

            Yes. Bankruptcy is coming for many in the next few weeks. The actual producers anyway, as the big guys rarely run their own rigs.

          • Matt M says:

            Yes. Bankruptcy is coming for many in the next few weeks.

            If this is so certain, why isn’t their stock at-or-near zero today?

            And yes, I understand that many have seen their stock price fall dramatically over the last month or so. But yesterday, specifically, “crude oil” was down basically infinity percent, but most oil-related companies were down 2-5%.

          • matkoniecz says:

            If this is so certain, why isn’t their stock at-or-near zero today?

            Maybe they expect bailout (done in way that will not impact owners at all) and transferring all losses to a general public?

            Also, it may be unclear which ones will go bankrupt.

            Also, either rumham or stock market or both may be wrong.

      • John Schilling says:

        The United States of America is a producer and net exporter of oil. On average, a decline in oil price is bad for the US. A modest, slow decline would be a very slight bad because only barely a net exporter, but a sharp unexpected decline throws an uncertainty premium on both sides of the equation – the producers are not well prepared to endure the revenue shortfall, and the consumers are not well prepared to exploit the opportunities afforded by cheap oil.

        • HeelBearCub says:

          What John said.

          But, not only this, but the price of oil is falling as a direct result of the loss of demand. The future price of oil is also a marker of where the market thinks demand will be in the future.

          That signal is decidedly negative in nature. Even if it only corresponds with what we already know, the fact that the oil traders are backing this up with monetary bets is a kind of confirmation of that negative news.

          • Randy M says:

            Wonder how much of this is related to airlines. Planes are still flying but this can’t continue long with one person every third row.

          • HeelBearCub says:

            @Randy M:
            I doubt that is markedly so, other than as a part of the overall lack of demand.

            The aviation industry represents 7.8% of final oil consumption worldwide, while maritime shipping accounts for 6.7%. Consumption by the aviation industry is growing the most rapidly – in fact, up until the early 1980s, it was responsible for less energy use than shipping. Both figures pale in comparison to road transportation (passenger cars and freight vehicles), which represents 49.3% of global final consumption.

          • Randy M says:

            Right, thanks.

          • Viliam says:

            Planes are still flying but this can’t continue long with one person every third row.

            With negative oil prices, airlines could actually make a lot of money flying empty planes. They just need to burn a lot of oil inefficiently!

            Disclaimer: I am not an economist. Follow my advice at your own risk.

        • FLWAB says:

          It’s certainly bad for the State of Alaska. Alaska has no income or sales tax, and relies almost entirely on “mineral taxes”, of which the vast majority is from oil. When oil price and production falls, the budget disappears. Alaska has spent the last six years fighting over how to balance the budget after oil dropped from $100 a barrel to $50, and in the process has used up all of the State’s savings. Things were starting to look a little better and now this. At this rate they’re going to have to pass taxes on residents or else start depleting the Permanent Fund.

        • The United States of America is a producer and net exporter of oil. On average, a decline in oil price is bad for the US.

          No. Imagine oil could be produced for free through magic. America would lose out on some export income, but it would free up a lot of resources currently used to produce oil to produce other products, some of which could be exported.

          • Randy M says:

            It depends on the reason, though. If oil is cheap because there’s plummeting demand because, say, a significant portion of the population is under house arrest, that’s bad. If oil is cheap because demand drops after we develop cold fusion, that’s great.

      • baconbits9 says:

        What has struck me about stories on the oil price decline over the past month or two is that they all seem to take it as a bad thing. Oil is something we consume. Having it cheaper is a good thing for everyone but the producers

        Today’s story isn’t about oil prices being lower, its about a commodity market failing during a time of crisis. How bad it gets remains to be seen but a 300% price decline in oil in 12 hours is not a normal situation and more likely reflects the destruction of the value of capital than it does a net gain by consumers through lower prices.

        • Matt M says:

          Indeed.

          If you go to your local gas station today and expect that they’re going to pay you to fill up your tank, you’re going to be quite disappointed…

      • keaswaran says:

        I’ve noticed a similar weirdness about coverage of housing prices.

        Under usual coverage, it’s bad when oil prices go up and good when they theoretically go down. But now that they are actually going down, they’re finding all the bad.

        Similarly, under usual coverage, it’s good when housing prices go up and bad when they theoretically go down. But there’s all sorts of good to find around “affordability” when housing gets cheap, even if homeowners lose value in their stakes.

        • zardoz says:

          It’s true. They’ll find a way to give anything a negative spin. If it’s a sunny day, they’ll complain about the lack of rain. If it rains, they’ll complain about how bad the weather is.

    • Tenacious D says:

      With negative oil prices, could someone drill an injection well in the vicinity of a hub and sell carbon credits for putting it back into the ground?

      • Edward Scizorhands says:

        If we could just put it back in the ground, wouldn’t oil producers do that?

      • FLWAB says:

        You could, assuming you already had a well built and ready to accept oil next week and the infrastructure in place to move the oil from it’s delivery spots to your well.

  37. pacificverse says:

    Dear god… if SlateStarCodex readers believe the bullcrap media narrative that the WHO and China downplayed the outbreak in any way, Sino-American relations are doomed.

    There was no cover-up beyond a four-day delay at around Christmas, well within margins of error of skittish officials thinking that doctors were seeing things in the middle of flu season. The COVID outbreak was front page news in East Asia by Jan 1st, and experts from all over the world were in Wuhan by the first week of January. Everything was done with the maximum of speed, transparency, and professionalism humanly possible. That is indisputable to anyone who has been watching the outbreak since day one.

    The WHO followed standard outbreak control protocol, and advocated for maximum effort containment achieved by contact tracing and quarantine (prior to COVID, the WHO never ever used travel bans as a means of disease control. Not during the height of the SARS outbreak, not during Ebola, never). Following the Wuhan lockdown, caseloads in China outside Wuhan were in the mid-thousands. An export rate of several cases per foreign country per day was expected to be controllable by standard contact tracing and quarantine. Milan and Seattle lost containment by very narrow margins of one or two leakers.

    Some nations (herd immunity) decided to go for mitigation, and the WHO and China shouted at them loudly and angrily. Nations that failed to implement contact tracing properly, or whose contact tracing programs failed (Italy), created huge caseloads which swamped contact tracing elsewhere, including the United States.

    China bears not one iota of responsibility. It made a maximum effort, and held up its end of the bargain.

    The Yellow Press played a major role in inciting the Spanish-American War (Remember the Maine?). Chinese public opinion (relevant to its leaders or not) will not tolerate talk of reparations, not without extreme resentment. Too many bad memories from the Opium Wars. If the American body politic is so foolish to go through with this lunacy, there is a substantial risk of China taking a hard right turn into xenophobic fascist territory. Of course, all of these unpleasant outcomes are acceptable to the American body politic, what with American strategic supremacy and everything…. right of might, right?

    • HeelBearCub says:

      FYI, SSC readers != SSC commenters. The commenters skew substantially compared to the readership.

      And the commenters are doing the standard “this information confirms my pre-existing biases so I will believe it” and/or “this is something I can pick up as a club and beat my outgroup over the head with” thing that us descended from ape sentient beings are prone to.

      • Anteros says:

        Well, I’ll agree with that as I see it both in other commenters as well as myself.

        Is there an obvious way in which commenters skew compared to readers?

        • Conrad Honcho says:

          The commentariat skews to the right of the readership.

          • HeelBearCub says:

            Not just right.

            Skew is anti-feminist, libertarian and right. Any/all of those.

          • Conrad Honcho says:

            Of the readership? Proportionally? There’s so few libertarians, anywhere with a libertarian skews proportionally libertarian.

          • Anteros says:

            I guess I’ve noticed the right skew, and the presence of actual libertarians, but not really any anti-feminism.

          • HeelBearCub says:

            I don’t know what the latest survey said, but the readership survey has typically, IIRC, showed that people who read the blog are much more “urbane Democrats” than anything else. I would say that they are self describing as sorta “standard blue-tribe”.

            Indeed, when I first pointed out that the commentariat skewed the way I am describing, Scott said “No. No. Look at these survey results!” I think more recently someone analyzed the survey results as impacted by self-reported comment frequency and found substantial skew. But I can’t remember the particulars.

          • Randy M says:

            but not really any anti-feminism.

            Has feminism made waves recently? I guess metoo is basically feminism, and the Kavanough accusations were tangled up with that too.

            But I think feminism in the wild has become slightly less mainstream (basically there’s understanding that we’ve long since moved past the “women are people too” part of the agenda) and slightly less relevant (probably in part due to a split brought about by trans rights), thus not talked about as much here.

            But if you look back at older posts, SSC, due to posts that pushed back against over broad feminist claims, and that argued in favor of less socially adroit nerds not being deserving of scorn, got a decent amount of discussion about feminism, with much less than mainstream levels of preference for the ideology.

            TLDR, I am agreeing with HBC.

          • Greg says:

            US Democrats are much more right-wing than normal people most everywhere in the world.

          • EchoChaos says:

            @Greg

            True on fiscal issues, very false on social issues.

            Nowhere else in the world is due date abortion considered a mainstream opinion, for example.

          • HeelBearCub says:

            @Anteros:
            How long have you been frequenting this blog? There is a long and illustrious history of anti “SJW” rhetoric, from Scott himself even.

          • Nick says:

            @HeelBearCub
            Anteros appears to have started commenting on Christmas last year.

          • Matt M says:

            Even on fiscal issues I’m not convinced it’s true.

            There are plenty of developed countries with lower and/or more regressive taxation policies than the US who aren’t considered radical right-wing and/or libertarian states.

          • Matt M says:

            The SSC comments section is “anti-feminism” to the extent that it has a non-zero amount of people on it willing to question some of the core premises of feminism, yes.

            Because most places don’t have that.

          • salvorhardin says:

            Greg, I think your contention was true twenty years ago but is much less true now. The Democratic Party of Clinton’s era included no really important left-wing faction by e.g. European meanings of left-wing; but Bernie Sanders, AOC, etc would be recognized as leftists anywhere.

            The US and European right wings have also moved closer to each other, with nationalism in the ascendancy and fiscal conservatism on the decline in both.

          • HeelBearCub says:

            @Nick:
            He said he was “unlurking”, so I’m curious how long he had been reading the comments.

          • eh says:

            I think it’s remarkably culturally blue, considering that it’s skewed politically red. I also think that the skew towards generalised ideological weirdness (libertarian, rationalist, communist, utopian, Singapore-is-pretty-great-ist, or otherwise) is much more striking than the skew to the right. Although I don’t have stats for it, subjectively it feels like you’re more likely to find someone on the nominal right who approves of late-term abortion or a UBI/NIT here than in the general population.

          • HeelBearCub says:

            @eh:

            Given the set A of all beliefs, and the set C of generally common beliefs, SSC ~ A – C.

          • meh says:

            Given the set A of all beliefs, and the set C of generally common beliefs, SSC ~ A – C.

            And this is actively cultivated much of the time.

          • Deiseach says:

            Skew is anti-feminist, libertarian and right. Any/all of those.

            Okay, I’ll cop to the “anti-feminist” despite being female myself, given that “not rah-rah for abortion = anti-feminist horrible misogynist sexist” in the current political climate – including in my own country, before anyone thinks I’m fighting culture wars abroad.

            That definition of “anti-feminist” does not bother me one whit, nor any of the “if you’re not on board with this laundry list of social liberalisation, you are A Bad Person”. Yes I am a bad person, but it’s not my opinions on divorce that made me such. Ditto with being on the right.

            As an aside, I am seeing “centrist” being used as A Dirty Word (ironically, in fandom discussions of a fictional character from a magical fantasy history novel/TV show), and my impressions are that this is coming from the left-ish side (anything from ‘vaguely on the left of the mainstream Democratic party’ to ‘full-blown progressive in every manner’). Centrism is bad because – well, I’m not entirely sure why it’s bad, apart from “not alone does it not sufficiently demonise the Right – who as we all know, are all Alt-Rite Nazi Fascists – but it is insufficiently enthusiastic for the Left – who as we all know think, do, say and believe the Only Feasible Moral Ethical Correct Things”. Being a centrist means you refuse to Stand Up and Do The Right Thing and other such wickedness.

            Libertarian, though? How very dare you! 😀

      • EchoChaos says:

        this information confirms my pre-existing biases so I will believe it

        I believe this, but only because I already was biased to.

        (Have we done that joke before?)

      • Ouroborobot says:

        Irony level: over 9000

        • HeelBearCub says:

          Sick burn, bruh.

          • Ouroborobot says:

            You are correct, and I should not have posted this. I do, however, think there is a bit of a stench attached to a comment that seems to malign the other commenters and imply one is above their mortal failings, while arguably demonstrating that to be untrue. I should have simply said this instead rather than be snarky about it.

          • HeelBearCub says:

            I meant literally all humans, me included.

            In the Douglas Adams, some of us thought coming down from the trees was a big mistake, sense.

          • Ouroborobot says:

            If I misread your tone, then I apologize.

          • HeelBearCub says:

            No worries, no real apology needed, but apology readily accepted.

      • Erusian says:

        For those of you who do lean more left wing… is supporting China a left wing stance? My impression is that both the left and right have issues with China, they just disagree on what issues to prioritize and how to best handle the situation.

        • EchoChaos says:

          Obligatory I am very much not a lefty.

          My impression of the commentariat is that “conventional lefties” are fairly anti-China, but not as harshly as righties, but that the very hard left are pro-China, either because they still espouse a version of Communism or because they aren’t aligned with the USA.

        • HeelBearCub says:

          “Supporting” China isn’t left-wing stance. Caring about Chinese people might be more left-wing.

          It’s really something that cuts across the political divide in a not very partisan manner. It’s used in a partisan manner, but not in an ideologically consistent way. (e.g. Think about Obama saying China was the big current threat in 2012, and how that was treated in 2017)

          • Erusian says:

            Sure, but that’s not what this comment is. It’s not concerned about Asian-American racism, it’s about how the Chinese government did nothing wrong.

          • HeelBearCub says:

            @Erusian:
            ?

            Where are you getting “racism” from?

            The caring about Chinese people? That’s not about racism, it’s about one world, kumbaya, love and happiness. I mean I guess you could stretch it there, but that wasn’t my meaning at all. I was talking about literal people in China, as opposed to US citizens of any ethnic derivation.

            Think about Obama saying China was the big current threat in 2012, and how that was treated in 2017

            Obama identified China as a threat for a number of reasons, but none of them had anything to do with anti-Asian bias, or lack thereof. Some of them had to do specifically with the authoritarian nature of China.

          • Erusian says:

            I suppose I presumed you meant American Chinese people, partly because I know several left wingers very concerned with atmospheres of xenophobia and the like.

        • Statismagician says:

          I don’t know what I count as, but I think the left dislikes China on human rights grounds and the right dislikes China on security/economic grounds. Whether or not you ‘support China’ depends on specific topic and context, not party.

          • HeelBearCub says:

            the right dislikes China on security/economic grounds

            I don’t think this is correct.

            There are anti-interventionist, anti-globalist, isolationists on both sides of the political spectrum.

            The “pro-business” types in the Republican party have no issues with China providing cheap labor for American capital’s profit.

            The globalist/international engagement types in the Democratic party see economic growth in China as a net positive, with some negative externalities imposed on parts of the US economy.

            etc.

          • Statismagician says:

            Modify to ‘among those on the left/right who dislike China,’ then?

          • HeelBearCub says:

            @Statismagician:
            Even that doesn’t seem right.

          • Statismagician says:

            Huh. All right, disregard.

          • FLWAB says:

            I hear a lot of human rights criticism of China from the right. However it is specifically from Christians and Christian organizations and the main concern is the lack of true freedom of religion in China. Churches across the country hear stories from Chinese pastors and missionaries detailing crackdowns on house churches, the difficulty of getting Bibles (last I checked you needed an “official” Bible printed by a state organization or else it is illegal to own, and the state entity that prints it deliberately prints far less than demand and gives priority for distribution to State registered churches, which are required to submit to various de-fanging restrictions. That may have changed in recent years, I’m not sure). So if your average Christian evangelical has heard anything about modern China they’ve probably heard about human rights abuses that specifically target Chinese Christians.