PhD in math. MIRI Summer Fellow in 2016. Worked as a professor for a while, now I run my family’s business.
NormanPerlmutter(Norman Perlmutter)
Karma: 99
This is a fascinating essay that made me think of some of my personal experiences with having my boundaries violated in a new light. Thank you.
You pointed out that just asking for consent can be costly. I think an important social/communication/culture technology to consider is how to make consent requests less costly and/or less frequently necessary, while still allowing a strong social norm around consent.. For instance, having meta-discussions about consent with your friends or meta-rules about consent in your social group or community, that are organized in such a way that asking for consent is seen as easy. Giving close friends broad consent to a wide range of acts, and occasionally checking in on that over time. Etc.
I have not used microcovid much because I am not confident in its predictions and modeling assumptions, or I don’t feel they are clearly enough defined to make the tool useful. The change that would be valuable to me (which I have difficultly operationalizing) would be if Microcovid were improved such that I could be much more confident in its modeling assumptions and could use it without having to try to make lots of guesses about which scenarios are well modeled. Maybe it would be sufficient just to explain which types of assumptions make for robust modeling outcomes (maybe this is already somewhere in the documentation). Otherwise, I will continue not to use it.
I think that in general maybe Microvid works well in low-risk situations but breaks down in high-risk situations.
Prior to the recent Omicron surge and post-vaccination, I tended to estimate my covid risks by looking at reported covid case rates in my area, and assuming that as a fully vaccinated person, my risk of getting covid was likely lower than the average person in my area (Ohio), many of whom are not vaccinated, even if I went to restaurants and bars at about the same rate as I did in 2019.
Some examples of my confusion about microcovid’s modeling assumptions . . .
Looking at the risk profiles for hypothetical other people, for fully vaccinated people in my state (Ohio):
Average person in your area: 11,000 microcovids
Has 4 close contacts whose risk profile you don’t know, in an otherwise closed pod: 6,400
Has 10 close contacts whose risk profile you don’t know, in an otherwise closed pod: 19,000What is the definition of a close contact here? Does this mean somebody who they live with or something like that or just somebody who they regularly hang out with closer than 6 feet? It seems to me that the average person in my area (the mean-risk person since this mean is largely determined by the riskiest people, maybe not the median-risk person) has more or less gone back to normal and would have more than 10 close contacts if you’re counting the people they live with, work with, or hang out with regularly. Or at least closer to 10 close contacts than 4.
Microcovid currently predicts that a fully mRNA-vaccinated person with a cloth mask who spends 8 hours in a bar acquires 380,000 microCovids (38% chance of getting covid), assuming that the average person in the bar went to a bar within the last 10 days. (reduced to 240,000 if the average person within 15 feet 10+ feet away rather than 6+ which seems more likely. But why doesn’t the model care at all about people 20 feet away?) (As a side note, the default assumption was that most of the people in the bar had the risk of “an average person in your area” which doesn’t seem right for a typical bar.)
And furthermore, the risk after 8 hours is equal to the risk after 4 hours, huh? I’d think that in 8 hours more people would be coming in and out, you’d be exposed to more possible infected people.
If this assumption were correct, then over the next week we’d see basically all the bartenders and bar workers here in Ohio getting covid simultaneously. (Or does it just max out at 4 hours so that the covid risk of working at a bar for a week is the same as for 4 hours? That just doesn’t make sense.) Even if half or so of these cases were asymptomatic, it would probably be enough that many of the bars would shut down. Seems unlikely, but I guess we could see if it happens.
Likely one of the missing parameters here is the protection from recent infection. I could imagine that the majority of bar workers who haven’t had covid in the last 3 months will get it over the next month or so, which wouldn’t be enough to shut down many bars.
A one-night stand with somebody who has covid (modeled as kissing for 10 hours) my risk is only 100,000 microcovids. It seems bizarre to me that this risk would be about 1⁄2 to 1⁄4 the risk of going to a bar for 2 hours with 15 random people who had been in bars in the last 10 days. Maybe my intuitions are just way off. I suppose at the bar there could be multiple people near me with covid, and one of them might be much more infectious than the average person with covid. But I would think that all of them together wouldn’t transmit as many viral particles to me as a single person with covid who I am kissing for 10 hours.
I think the points about non-obvious costs are very important to consider and nicely evaluated. Nonetheless, I think your conclusions are a bit too strong. It’s possible that I’m being too conservative and not giving adequate weight to the obvious and non-obvious costs of continued restrictions.
I think that in light of the risks of long covid from mild infections (small sample size but I haven’t seen a larger study contradicting it) and the ongoing risk of vaccine-resistant mutations, saying that young healthy people are protected from overall risk by a factor of 1000x through vaccination is overly optimistic. I’d say that a 100x reduction harm might be a reasonable estimate. This thread by Ruby which you linked to as well has lots of good analysis of vaccine efficacy for healthy young people. If I am interpreting the note at the top correctly, due to the risks of vaccine resistance, he has adjusted his harm reduction estimate from vaccination downward to 10x-100x reduction, from his initial estimate of 100x-1000x reduction. He also mentions long covid in his caveats towards the bottom. It’s not clear to me why you are still saying 1000x in spite of these factors, and I’d be very interested in understanding how and why your assessment differs from Ruby’s in this regard.
It’s also worth considering the possibility of a tipping point. If we hold off a few months longer on full reopening, we might get enough hesitant people and people under age 16 vaccinated to avoid the rise of a highly vaccine-resistant strain in the US.
Furthermore, there’s a big difference between returning mostly to normal and fully to normal. It’s possible that the most extreme potential superspreader events (examples: an indoor rock concert with thousands of people pressed shoulder to shoulder and yelling over the music; a large group indoor choir singing event; a crowded bar indoor bar in Manhattan; Burning Man) are much more risky with regard to covid spread than all the other stuff combined. And at the same time these sorts of crowded and touchy-feely mass gatherings are a very important part of the human experience, and disallowing them has significant costs.
I am now more than 2 weeks past my second Pfizer shot. Considering the factors above, I am not planning to return completely to my 2019 way of life right now, but I am moving substantially in that direction while monitoring covid prevalence, vaccination rates, and new variants for the next month or more.
My current lifestyle that I’ve experimented with for the last several days includes eating indoors at restaurants (but being mindful of how long I spend at indoor restaurants and how often I go); hugging and hanging out indoors unmasked in small groups with some consenting friends and family who are at least one of young/healthy, vaccinated, or have recovered from covid in the past. I’m probably interested in attending large events outdoors such as concerts so long as people are mostly masked and are not crammed shoulder-to-shoulder. And also small indoor parties with an adequate combination of social distancing, ventilation, and vaccine coverage.
But so far I’m avoiding such activities as going to especially crowded restaurants/bars where I would be spending a lot of time within three feet of many unmasked people, riding on a crowded subway at rush hour, attending crowded indoor concerts, attending large indoor conventions, playing Spin the Bottle, or getting anywhere near other people who are sick and who I assign a substantial probability of having covid. I think those types of activities I will continue to wait on as I monitor the prevalence of covid and spread of variants.
I think that for the next few months, we should maintain legal restrictions on very large gatherings such as the potential superspreader type events that I discuss near the top of this post, either forbidding these sorts of gatherings or requiring most or all attendees to be masked or vaccinated or test negative. Setting guidelines that we will return further to normal once enough people are vaccinated, or allowing vaccinated people different privileges from unvaccinated, may coerce people to get vaccinated, to the benefit society. This will give us a chance at actually hitting something resembling herd immunity through vaccination and preventing a new vaccine-resistant strain from spreading while the overall vaccination rate is lower. I agree that it’s problematic to have unenforced regulations. I think the optimal solution to this, both with covid and other unrelated areas of law (though it’s much easier said than done) is to reduce the number of regulations and more strenuously enforce the most critical regulations.
Seems to be of great practical significance to me. If there’s a decent chance that I could return completely to unlimited degrees of interpersonal close contact and have only a 1⁄20 − 1⁄100 chance of getting symptomatic Covid with unlimited amounts of exposure, even if I would get covid many times over while unvaccinated, I’d be quite tempted to do it. If returning to that level of exposure would mean that I’d almost inevitably get Covid eventually, I’d be much more likely to play it safe for at least a few months more and see where things go with infection rates and new variants.
I just downloaded MS Edge so that I could use Bing AI and ask it to find me a Brazillian hammock more than 6 feet wide. After repeated questioning, it kept giving me hammocks less than 6 feet wide (but more than 6 feet long). Even after I pointed out its error explicitly it kept making the same error and finally Bing gave up and told me it couldn’t help. Like it would list two possibilities for me, state the length and width of each, and the width was less than 6 feet in each case.
Given all the amazing stuff we’ve seen out of AI lately, I’m kind of amazed it wasn’t more successful. I’m guessing they don’t make Brazillian hammocks in that size. (not sure why, as they make Mayan hammocks much wider than that, but anyway . . . )
Is this a blind spot for Bing? Or does Microsoft prefer for it to turn up bad results rather than say that no such thing exists?
Since nobody has called it . . . I spotted the (intentional?) linguistic joke in one of the section headers. The Hebrew word that sounds like Llama means “why.”
Could you provide more details on getting Paxlovid? My understanding was that it was only authorized for people with certain health conditions.
Anecdotal, but similar—when I used to play in chess tournaments, I had a sense that I performed better and made fewer errors when I had more sleep, to the point of aiming for 9 or so hours of sleep the night before a tournament.
I just quickly browsed this post. Based on the overall topic, you might also be interested in these inconsistency results in infinitary utiliatarianism written by my PhD advisor (a set theorist) and his wife (a philosopher).
Healthdata.org (the University of Washington team) released a new projection January 8, projecting that cases in the US (actual cases, not reported cases) peaked January 6. Had you seen this already when you wrote this post, and if not, does it impact your projection of a January 19 peak for the US?
(Edit: added hyperlink)
If I understand correctly, Zvi’s idea is that vaccine protection against infection has likely gone down, but vaccine protection against severe infection has held nearly constant, so that the vast majority of additional infections among vaccinated people will be non-severe.
How does take-out increase serving and cleanup costs? In my experience, take-out drastically reduces cleanup cost vs cooking. You don’t need to clean the baking dish or pan, and those are often hard to clean, whereas plates can just be thrown in the dishwasher, or you can even eat out of the disposable container provided by the restaurant and not have to wash any plates.
One point that is being glossed over in this essay is that teaching is a difficult skill that is not as strongly correlated with comprehensive expert knowledge of the content than one might think. I say this as someone who worked as a teacher for 6 years.
Part of the process of developing expertise in a field of study is “chunking.” The expert mind sees lots of complex things together as a single chunk (which can be unpacked if necessary) whereas the beginner sees the individual pieces. This chunking helps experts to interact with other experts and to apply the material to solve complex problems. But it can actually hinder teaching beginners especially if the expert is not a skilled teacher or has not taught that subject material before. The expert might easily give an overview of the topic, but has to unchunk the knowledge before explaining it to the beginner in detail.
Good teaching requires many interpersonal, and pedagogical skills that are not at all needed for the original learning of the material.
I’m confused by your use of “no longer” above. I don’t believe we have ever lived in such a world., even before covid. We live in such a world to less of an extent now than we did before. Covid is one more thing that sometimes doesn’t turn out ok in the end. But there are many other such thing, including many other diseases.
I just found out that electric erasers are a thing. (Similar to an electric toothbrush, but an eraser.) I have ordered a high-end electric eraser, going to see whether it helps me to do better using my current paper and pencil setup.
I’m not familiar with them and am curious to learn more. My main concern would be whether they allow for fine-scale writing and erasing, since I am writing in small print with lines close together and erasing line by line. Is there a particular brand that you would recommend?
How is that different from what CraigMichael said? Attending that sort of event is a type of risk compensation.
Hmm, suppose an adult had urinary problems and wetted their bed regularly. Which category would you say that fits into? Or somebody whose parents had named them something that they didn’t like and they changed their name and didn’t want others to know their original given name due to aesthetic preferences and social implications of character traits related to that name?
There would be some social harm in sharing this either of these, but would it necessarily be adversarial? Even if others were aligned with the person with the secret, they couldn’t help but look at them a bit different knowing the secret.
In this case, sharing it with people who don’t know her and will likely never encounter her will do minimal harm, so you might suggest that as an exception to the secret keeping.
This is a bad analogy. A DUI or speeding could be a one-time thing. Not getting vaccinated is a continuous decision. All you have to do to reverse it is make the right choice once (or twice if you get Moderna or Pfizer).
Also, drunk driving and speeding are not contagious. A drunk driver can hurt or kill anybody they crash into, but that doesn’t make those people go on to become drunk drivers as well.