It is interesting to read this for the first time while far enough in the future to know how some things turned out using The Power Of Retrospection to associate things that were potentially relevant but not yet obviously so...
This was written on August 11, 2020 (emphasis not in original)...
How will we greet the COVID-19 vaccine, when it arrives hopefully in the next year or two? Will people “ring bells, honk horns, blow whistles, fire salutes, drink toasts, hug children, and forgive enemies”? Will they “name schools, streets, hospitals, and newborn infants” after the creator?
At the same time this was written, Operation Warp Speed was just a few months away from success, and on nearly the same day it was written, companies proximate to OWS were being suedfor announcing things of questionable truth in proximity to increases in biotech stocks and the sale of such stocks by executives.
In November, three months and eight days after the above was written, Pfizer announced 95% efficacy … to zero parades.
Most of the talk was about the forward-looking process where a centralized government bureaucracy that shouldn’t even exist would (or would not) give “authoritarian permission” that allowed people to give “personal permission” to potentially health-promoting medical treatments.
The actual celebrations that did occur within days of Pfizer’s announcement… happened before the announcement. The topic of the spontaneous outpouring of happiness was that Trump lost the election to whoever it was that had been decided by insiders to be the one to go head-to-head against Trump.
However, personally if someone really deserves a ticker tape parade, I’d vote even harder for Katalin Kariko whose work mostly preceded the writing of the OP by years.
There would be some embarrassment here too, however, because she doesn’t have tenure, having been pushed out of the high prestige success track of academia early in her career, and then persisting via protective friendshipswith the sort who exercise the Kolmogorov option before eventually moving to the private sector and succeeding mostly in spite of how broken the US’s central institutions are, not because of their effectiveness.
I find myself able to explain most of the gears and mechanisms that explain each of these little isolated and seemingly confused tragedies using various sociological microtheories whose central fact is “assume by default that local and half-blind machiavellian self interest explains almost everything that almost everyone is doing”.
What I don’t see is a coherent overarching vision of a sensibly functioning society. It is almost like nearly no one thinks that the credit assignment problem is super important to get right, in order to have a good society? Or something?
I can’t easily find raw data on baby names for 2021 (it being only 24 days since 2021 ended) but one source that has numbers says this about the newly popular names:
This year’s fastest-rising baby girl names were Raya (up 53 percent), Alora (up 32 percent) and Ariya (up 27 percent); while Onyx (up 44 percent), Koda (up 38 percent), and Finnegan (up 35 percent) saw the biggest jumps on the boys’ side.
No Katalin. No Moncef. Maybe 2022 will be a good year for these names? One can always hope :-)
The standing ovation at Wimbledon stands out to me as hopeful… like maybe someone with influence over the PA system at a big sporting event had a coherent theory of optimistic credit assignment and managed to use it to let a hopeful crowd show respect for good actions in a relatively selfless way?
I found the video and it is interesting how they announced numerous people and things, like various categories of NHS employees, and then some random social media fundraising stunt was the the “final name” they announced (like in an “end on a good note” motion?)…
But the first in the list of honored people were “leaders who have developed the anti-covid vaccines”. The scientists themselves were never named and maybe that was them… or maybe not? Then the audience seemed to want to cheer for the creation of the vaccine and that was all they were going to get, so that’s what they just wouldn’t stop clapping about, they just kept clapping and clapping and then standing up and clapping some more for the thing that was as maximally decisive and meaningful as they were going to get from the PA system. Smart audience <3
Googling and searching more, it looks like the biggest name there (though never mentioned by name) was a scientist/entrepreneur who was “knighted” in 2021 as Dame Sarah Katherine Gilbert.
Highlights of her life: lots of academic career stuff in the 1990s. In 1998 she gave birth to triplets who were raised by her househusband. All three are currently studying biochemistry in college, so he seems to have done a good job as a parent. She founded Vaccitech in 2016. She heard about a pneumonia cluster in Wuhan on Jan 1, 2020 and had the vaccine candidate for it designed within two weeks. As wikipedia notes:
As of January 2022 more than 2.5 billion doses of the vaccine have been released to more than 170 countries worldwide.
I must say, Katalin Karikó′s Wikipedia list of awards and honors is almost farcical. There’s a section for 5 items in “1975-2020”, of which three were in 2020; and then in 2021 there are suddenly 41 items, plus already 8 in 2022.
It is interesting to read this for the first time while far enough in the future to know how some things turned out using The Power Of Retrospection to associate things that were potentially relevant but not yet obviously so...
This was written on August 11, 2020 (emphasis not in original)...
At the same time this was written, Operation Warp Speed was just a few months away from success, and on nearly the same day it was written, companies proximate to OWS were being sued for announcing things of questionable truth in proximity to increases in biotech stocks and the sale of such stocks by executives.
In November, three months and eight days after the above was written, Pfizer announced 95% efficacy … to zero parades.
Most of the talk was about the forward-looking process where a centralized government bureaucracy that shouldn’t even exist would (or would not) give “authoritarian permission” that allowed people to give “personal permission” to potentially health-promoting medical treatments.
The actual celebrations that did occur within days of Pfizer’s announcement… happened before the announcement. The topic of the spontaneous outpouring of happiness was that Trump lost the election to whoever it was that had been decided by insiders to be the one to go head-to-head against Trump.
In the meantime, the leader of the overall vaccine project that produced the success was Moncef Slaoui. Instead of a ticker tape parade he helped a bit with the presidential transition and then resigned while maintaining various studiously polite silences (though his words from 1 month after the OP was written and 3 months before the resignation are still visible).
However, personally if someone really deserves a ticker tape parade, I’d vote even harder for Katalin Kariko whose work mostly preceded the writing of the OP by years.
There would be some embarrassment here too, however, because she doesn’t have tenure, having been pushed out of the high prestige success track of academia early in her career, and then persisting via protective friendships with the sort who exercise the Kolmogorov option before eventually moving to the private sector and succeeding mostly in spite of how broken the US’s central institutions are, not because of their effectiveness.
In the meantime, here in Jan 2022, as I write this and google for evidence of parades, the ones I mostly find are against the vaccines.
I find myself able to explain most of the gears and mechanisms that explain each of these little isolated and seemingly confused tragedies using various sociological microtheories whose central fact is “assume by default that local and half-blind machiavellian self interest explains almost everything that almost everyone is doing”.
What I don’t see is a coherent overarching vision of a sensibly functioning society. It is almost like nearly no one thinks that the credit assignment problem is super important to get right, in order to have a good society? Or something?
I can’t easily find raw data on baby names for 2021 (it being only 24 days since 2021 ended) but one source that has numbers says this about the newly popular names:
No Katalin. No Moncef. Maybe 2022 will be a good year for these names? One can always hope :-)
I collected a few examples of honors/awards here:
BioNTech founders Türeci & Şahin received the Order of Merit, Germany’s highest honor
Various media profiles of folks like Karikó
Professor who helped design the Astra-Zeneca vaccine got a spontaneous standing ovation at Wimbledon
Karikó & Weissman awarded 2022 Breakthrough Prize
Doesn’t feel like as much as Salk got.
The standing ovation at Wimbledon stands out to me as hopeful… like maybe someone with influence over the PA system at a big sporting event had a coherent theory of optimistic credit assignment and managed to use it to let a hopeful crowd show respect for good actions in a relatively selfless way?
I found the video and it is interesting how they announced numerous people and things, like various categories of NHS employees, and then some random social media fundraising stunt was the the “final name” they announced (like in an “end on a good note” motion?)…
But the first in the list of honored people were “leaders who have developed the anti-covid vaccines”. The scientists themselves were never named and maybe that was them… or maybe not? Then the audience seemed to want to cheer for the creation of the vaccine and that was all they were going to get, so that’s what they just wouldn’t stop clapping about, they just kept clapping and clapping and then standing up and clapping some more for the thing that was as maximally decisive and meaningful as they were going to get from the PA system. Smart audience <3
Googling and searching more, it looks like the biggest name there (though never mentioned by name) was a scientist/entrepreneur who was “knighted” in 2021 as Dame Sarah Katherine Gilbert.
Highlights of her life: lots of academic career stuff in the 1990s. In 1998 she gave birth to triplets who were raised by her househusband. All three are currently studying biochemistry in college, so he seems to have done a good job as a parent. She founded Vaccitech in 2016. She heard about a pneumonia cluster in Wuhan on Jan 1, 2020 and had the vaccine candidate for it designed within two weeks. As wikipedia notes:
Well played :-)
I must say, Katalin Karikó′s Wikipedia list of awards and honors is almost farcical. There’s a section for 5 items in “1975-2020”, of which three were in 2020; and then in 2021 there are suddenly 41 items, plus already 8 in 2022.