On Board Ship by C. P. Cavafy

On Board Ship

by C. P. Cavafy

It’s like him, of course,

this little pencil portrait.

 

Hurriedly sketched, on the ship’s deck,

the afternoon magical,

the Ionian Sea around us.

 

It’s like him. But I remember him as better looking.

He was sensitive almost to the point of illness,

and this highlighted his expression.

He appears to me better looking

now that my soul brings him back, out of Time.

 

Out of Time. All these things are from very long ago—

the sketch, the ship, the afternoon.

I love those last two lines.  So many thing increasingly seem out of time, from very long ago . . . the sketch, the ship, the afternoon, and so much more unmentioned.  

A logic without accuracy

From The Drunkard's Walk: How Randomness Rules Our Lives by Leonard Mlodinow.  

A few years ago a man won the Spanish national lottery with a ticket that ended in the number 48. Proud of his “accomplishment,” he revealed the theory that brought him the riches. “I dreamed of the number 7 for seven straight nights,” he said, “and 7 times 7 is 48.”1 Those of us with a better command of our multiplication tables might chuckle at the man’s error, but we all create our own view of the world and then employ it to filter and process our perceptions, extracting meaning from the ocean of data that washes over us in daily life. And we often make errors that, though less obvious, are just as significant as his.

 

Monkey pox messaging - 99.897% wrong. Virtually an inverse of Six Sigma quality

Remember back a few months ago we had a brief shining moment when public health experts thought they might have a second chance to redeem themselves after the Covid-19 fiasco with the delightfully named threat of Monkey Pox?   As it turned out, this was not highly contagious, not particularly dangerous, and was highly concentrated in the LGBT community.  It just could not be dressed up as a second Covid coming.

But not before pretty much the same cast of characters made the same mistakes again with declarative statements long on bombast and fear-mongering and short on facts.  But the great American public, having seen this show once, was not taken in a second time.  There was a heavy dose of skepticism and mockery because the quackery was so obvious.

El Gato Malo comes across a small study which reminds us of the nonsense.  From the monkey-business of "online experts" by El Gato Malo.  The subheading is watch as the credentialed class makes a fool of itself on twitter.

The original study is Analysis of tweets discussing the risk of Mpox among children and young people

in school (May-Oct 2022): Public health experts on Twitter consistently exaggerated risks and infrequently reported accurate information by Benjamin Knudsen, Tracy Beth Høeg, and Vinay Prasad.  

 

It is not a huge study with significant rigor but it does supply evidence consistent with impressions at the time.  From El Gato Malo:

remember the monkey pox “epidemic” and all the zika/dengue/ebola gonna come and get you vibes about how it was going to rampage through schools (despite never doing so before) instead of just being an idiosyncratic series of outbreaks almost entirely confined to a few groups of highly promiscuous fellows having male to male sex with large numbers of partners?

it was quite the thing there for a minute before it disappeared from view like so many other flashes in the pan when it failed to live up to billing and refused to spread in schools or really anywhere else. at all. and this is what actually makes this look like a good topic to assess expert opinion with.

so they authors searched twitter for content on monkeypox and schools, because claiming it would spread there was basically a true/false test with obvious accuracy.

From the study:

Results: 262 tweets were identified. 215/262 (82%) were inaccurate and 215/215 (100%) of these exaggerated risks. 47/262 (18%) tweets were accurate. There were 163 (87%) unique authors of inaccurate tweets and 25 (13%) of accurate tweets. Among health care professionals, 86% (95/111) of tweets were inaccurate. Only health reporters, (23/41) 56% of tweets, were more likely to provide accurate information, however this was driven by one reporter. Multiplying accuracy by followers andretweets, Twitter users were approximately 974x more likely to encounter inaccurate than accurate information.

Conclusion: Credentialed Twitter users were 4.6 times more likely to tweet inaccurate than accurate messages. We also demonstrated how incorrect tweets can be quickly amplified by retweets and popular accounts. In the case of Mpox in children and young people, incorrect information exaggerated the risks 100% of the time. 

From El Gato Malo:

Inaccurate claims were 4.6X more frequent that accurate ones and when adjusted for follower count this led to 974X more exposure for false claims.

let that one sink in. if you grabbed a tweet on schools and monkeypox from “an expert” at random on a follower weighted basis, it had a 99.897% chance of being wrong.

truly, the mind boggles. it’s all static no signal. it’s so incredibly wrong and always in the direction of “exaggerating and overblowing risk” that a simple heuristic of “do the opposite of wh

Lots more good material and commentary in his post.

It does leave us with three clear issues.

Nobody should be censoring anything.  When the "experts" are this wrong, this frequently, we need open communication to rectify the inaccurate messaging.

There is a strong tendency towards propaganda from self-interested parties and the State.

There is no negative consequence to the media/academia/state minions when they propagate inaccurate signal and seek to censor accurate data messaging.

We'll have to get around to these issues sooner or later.  

A slow city recovery

This piece is really just a dunking on San Francisco.  From A San Francisco Journalist Wanted to Debunk Horror Stories About Her City. She Got Kinda Sidetracked by the Truth by Rick Moran.

What I found interesting was this quote, I think from the original author, Elizabeth Weil.

The doom-loopy vision laid out for downtown SF was not pretty: Workers don’t return, offices remain empty, restaurants shutter, transit agencies go bankrupt, tax bases plummet, public services disappear. According to research from the University of Toronto, cell-phone activity in downtown SF is 32 percent of pre-pandemic levels. That number is 75 percent in New York.

Using cell-phone activity as a proxy for population density and commercial activity in a central city area is a clever idea.  Not a perfect substitute for direct population density information but also reliably obtainable.  

Going to the original research by University of Toronto, you get this wonderful graphic.  

Interesting points all up and down the graph.

California has a reputation for high taxes, excess regulations and poor services.  It also bought into the Covid lockdowns more rigorously than most states and also flirted more seriously with the concept of defunding the police and decarcerating criminals.  It has also seen a hemorrhaging of residents to other states over the past few years.  Not a state you would expect to find significant recovery.  

But you do, just not where one might expect.  San Francisco aren't in the recovery flock but Bakersfield, Fresno and San Diego are in the top ten and doing well with 118%, 115%, and 93% respectively.

But in the big cities, of Los Angeles, Oakland, and San Francisco, things aren't looking to good for the cities or residents with 62%, 47%, and 32% respectively.  

My city, Atlanta, is only 49% recovered.  Government has been ineffective, policing abysmal, we flirted with Defunding, and people have stayed away from downtown.  Possibly permanently.

The Covid panic ended early in the South, at least a year ago now.  It ended at the Federal level just this past month or two.  So why people not returned to downtowns?  A combination, presumably, of better and cheaper lifestyles by working at least partly from home, and concerns about physical security in a depoliced environment.  The stories coming out of New York City certainly do not allay those fears.  

We'll see how corporations and enterprises end up accommodating the employees whetted appetite for work from home.  Maybe more will return to the office but that is not especially obvious yet.

My suspicion is that the decline in policing in combination with a general decline in government services in combination will as many or more away from the downtowns.

We shall see but I am surprised how low the response has been so far in terms of resuming normal levels of downtown city activities.   

We knew from the beginning

Well that's interesting.   Chiefly because the conclusion was reached so early but also because was suppressed from the public conversation.  From Leaked Pentagon Report Forensically Dismantled Fauci-Led Natural Origin Study by Hans Mahncke. 

Researchers at the Department of Defense wrote a devastating takedown of the Proximal Origin study, which was used by Dr. Anthony Fauci as proof that the COVID-19 virus had come from nature. 

The takedown, dated May 26, 2020, was written in the form of a working paper called “Critical analysis of Andersen et al. The proximal origin of SARS-CoV-2.” It was authored by Commander Jean-Paul Chretien, a Navy doctor working at the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, and Dr. Robert Cutlip, a research scientist at the Defense Intelligence Agency. The paper came to light on May 15, when it was leaked to the public via virus origins search group DRASTIC (Decentralized Radical Autonomous Search Team Investigating COVID-19). 

The working paper forensically dismantles the natural origin case made in Proximal Origin and concludes, “The arguments that Andersen et al. use to support a natural-origin scenario for SARS-CoV-2 are based not on scientific analysis, but on unwarranted assumptions.”

The existence of this internal Pentagon paper is crucial, as it proves that government officials were well aware in the early months of the pandemic that there was no evidence in support of a natural origin of the COVID-19 virus. Additionally, given the crushing discrediting of Proximal Origin, Pentagon officials would also have been aware of Fauci’s efforts to seed a false narrative about the origin of COVID-19. 

Proximal Origin was initially conceived by Fauci during a secret teleconference held on Feb. 1, 2020. The ostensible purpose of the teleconference was to deflect attention from a possible lab origin of COVID-19 and to shift the focus to a natural origin theory. Fauci directed a number of scientists, led by Kristian Andersen of Scripps Research and Robert Garry of Tulane Medical School, to pen a study that could be used to discredit the lab leak theory. Despite being directly involved in the inception of the paper, as well as in shaping its arguments, Fauci’s role was concealed from the public. Fauci later bestowed Andersen and Garry with lavish taxpayer-funded grants.

The defects in Proximal Origin were immediately noticed by reviewers at science journal Nature. This fact only became known late last year from emails obtained via the Freedom of Information Act by independent journalist Jimmy Tobias. However, with the help of Jeremy Farrar, who now is the chief scientist of the World Health Organization and who had helped Fauci shape the natural origin narrative, Proximal Origin was accepted for publication in Nature Medicine on March 17, 2020. It boldly concluded that no “laboratory-based scenario is plausible.”

Weather isn't climate in the months which have "r" in them

From Walter Russell Mead in his essay Mad Meat Making Scientist Proves Climate Doomsayers Wrong.

But record cold temperatures and snowfalls so heavy that I have to dodge falling icicles descending abruptly from the ivy-covered halls of Bard College aren't the cause of my current skepticism about the alarmist predictions on climate change.

We are now in the season when the media tells us over and over again that "weather is not climate" and that the natural variations in the temperature do not, repeat not, affect the credibility of climate change. I actually believe this, although in just a few months the fiddlehead ferns will be poking up through the forest floor and the media will be back to reporting each and every hot spell as conclusive proof that climate change is already here.

My totally unscientific conclusion based on close study of the media: weather isn't climate in the months which have "r" in them. The rest of the year, it is.

A lantern on the stern

Coleridge, Specimens of the Table Talk of S.T.Coleridge

If men could learn from history, what lessons it might teach us! But passion and party blind our eyes, and light which experience gives is a lantern on the stern, which shines only on the waves behind us.