Wow that's amazing coverage and will be a great resource someday for seeing how the news and the policy happened over the course of today. Thus far. Excellent work.
> I was almost finished with this post when the WHO decided to go with Omicron instead of Nu (or even Xi) and then I had to go through and replace Nu with Omicron about 25 times. We could have just said ‘the Nu variant’ a lot but the WHO hates both efficiency and fun even more than it hates freedom, it seems. Sad.
No. It’s sensible to. This isn’t a subject to get all edgy and political over. Just avoid any obvious touchy symbols given the symbols are entirely interchangeable.
If there was a letter sharing a name with any current political leader I’m sure they’d do the same.
Care to substantiate that for all of us? I think it's safe to assume you can't. Now think about the effect of posting an oft-repeated but unsubstantiated, controversial meme like this. Did you accomplish something?
Movement towards a goal? (Maybe you just got a feeling of catharsis?) Was it worth the effort & other effects?
I can't speak for "all of us" but the conversation you're encouraging has no value to me, and I'd prefer not having to scroll past it if it's all the same to you.
The entire point of giving variants Greek letters is to use a neutral, easy to use term. It is mostly to avoid naming a worldwide variant after the country where it was first discovered.
Nu is confusing and Xi is not neutral. Omicron is good, and if it has to displace Delta, they should be careful about the name, because it will be repeated a lot.
I'm sure this person means well, and is very intelligent, but I stopped reading at the byline. I went and found what this person's expertise actually is.
Zvi Mowshowitz is a former professional Magic: The Gathering
player who also held a developer intern position at Wizards
of the Coast Magic R&D. He is known for having created
innovative and sometimes game-breaking decks TurboZvi and
My Fires.
Now, there is a balance between credentialism and amateurism. Amateurs can get a lot of things right. They can also get a lot of things wrong, and I at least don't have the meta-expertise to know which is which, especially when there's breaking news.
Do we need informed amateurs? Yes. But the crucial test is still whether they are accepted or promoted by the professionals. Zeynep Tufekci was vocalizing concerns that many professionals had, which is why her criticisms of health policy worked out.
In contrast, I have an extremely nerdy friend who has thinks it's her job to explain things to people, and thus writes deeply researched, well-footnoted blog posts about COVID, which are quite often wrong.
I for one can't tell what sort of person this is. But I also know that I'm not good at tagging facts with epistemic certainty. If I read a thing in a blog post it will probably stick, but I'll forget where I got that. So the simple solution it to not read it.
I think when it comes to writing explainers, it's 2021 and we have a wealth of resources and can wait for the professionals, including scientists who blog part time. I suggest that more people should be like me, and ignore the laypeople, indeed even most of the journalism, at least during the initial stages.
Especially when his conclusion gets into him predicting specific percent chances of things happening… I know he slapped a disclaimer around it, but that still feels more than a bit irresponsible. This really feels like a “wait for the experts” moment.
Edit: I don’t think the parent comment deserved to be flag killed. It’s entirely legitimate to point out that the author is not an epidemiologist or biologist or any other relevant -ist, and that early on you often need the domain experience to sift hype or panic from actual data. This is doubly true given the somewhat sensational tone here (“we’re f**ed”).
The author could be practicing a superforecasting exercise of coming up with probability estimates and grading them at the end of the year to calibrate, but this author doesn't show his work as to where these estimates come from.
For example:
> In hindsight the 70% prediction was somewhat overconfident, and a prediction of about 45% would have been better
That's a huge post-hoc adjustment, what factors were important? Just because a p70 event does not occur does not mean that it did not warrant a p70 at the time.
The whole article is a ln unreasonably self confident assemblance of either obvious/common sense points or facts grabbed together by other sources (most twitter) with some witty comments.
Not worth reading, except for the tweets embedded.
(On credentials, it looks to me like you ended up with his credentials specifically in the context of game design? He's also worked as a trader, which is some practice at turning unclear information coming out in real time into good concrete predictions.)
I think you should continue doing what works for you, but I would ask you to consider carefully recommending your remedy to others. The explainers you're mentioning kick down a lot of doors, whether their conclusions are correct or incorrect. They collect a lot of sourced information in one place, and widen the channels between everyone and information when they do blog. You said yourself this person's blog posts were well footnoted. That is an incredibly valuable, dying practice on the internet. Consider for a moment the people that are experts. Consider the grad student working elbow to elbow next to the doctorate researcher, who are not on a corporate or government payroll and do not have the resources and trappings that come with such positions. The infohazards you rightfully avoid as being wrong and repeating misinformation comes at a high cost to you, are worthless to these people. They're researchers. Their job is being wrong, many times, as quickly as possible, until they can finally be right about something. What they want is that wealth of information. And frankly, it's dwindling. We don't have the wealth of information in 2021 that we had in 2016. The rigor you'd see on an average wikipedia page is missing. News articles, including those quoting experts, allow their authors more leeway than ever to post their own opinions and interpret news, regardless the news source. It's becoming incredibly difficult to find all the facts in one place. I am absolutely not going to downplay the harm that misinformation does and I applaud you for taking intelligent steps to avoid spreading it. As an individual your policy, not reading something you're likely to repeat, is laudable. There's just room for both you and your explainer friend on this internet of ours, isn't there? And room for a diversity of approaches toward using our time online, I say. What's important is that we all care very much about the truth, and I am optimistic where that is concerned.
More than just HOT AIR, this guy has no credentials. More importantly, not a single mention of Pfizer's new drug combo PAXLOVID™ found 89% effective against coronaviruses, US alone has pre-ordered 10 million doses. I predict all forms of Covid will be beat in the US, but those countries who fail to get in on the Pfizer deal will be loosers. Vaccines will be updated to be effective against this new variant as well as scientists will strike against new portions of the virus genome that appear to be more stable.
> ... but the WHO hates both efficiency and fun even more than it hates freedom, it seems. Sad
Can someone clarify this part for me please? I find it incredibly hard to trust an author who starts a supposedly serious article with such sensationalist bullshit.
The complaint is over the name, your placement of the ellipses is really unfortunate as the snipped portion of the sentence answers your question. Regarding the tone, I would not read so much into this; if you read a little bit further in the article (you can just ctrl+f and search for who, it doesn't have a lot of occurrences either as WHO or who) you'll find that the author Mowshowitz agrees with the world health organization regarding their recommendation not to restrict travel. It bears mentioning that at least on a literal level, the WHO recommending against a travel restriction is the WHO doing the opposite of hating freedom, so we are forced to conclude that the sentence you chose to highlight was intended to be read tongue-in-cheek.
I feel like we are doing this to ourselves. All the lockdowns are breeding viruses which are stronger and more infectious than ever.
The way viruses normally work is that they evolve to be less deadly over time, and this evolution happens quite quickly. The less deadly strains spread quicker (because carriers aren't walled up in bed), and by the time the deadly strains get to people, they already have partial immunity after catching the less deadly strains.
Anyway, something has clearly changed. Coronaviruses have been around since forever, now we are getting more and more super spreaders appearing, seemingly, out of nowhere. As far as I can tell, the only thing that is different now than in the past that could be causing this is the lockdowns.
>All the lockdowns are breeding viruses which are stronger and more infectious than ever.
Not sure you where you got this from, but this variant came from a region with subpar vaccination rates.
>The way viruses normally work is that they evolve to be less deadly over time, and this evolution happens quite quickly. The less deadly strains spread quicker (because carriers aren't walled up in bed), and by the time the deadly strains get to people, they already have partial immunity after catching the less deadly strains.
Also very incorrect. Delta has a higher hospitalization rates than other variants
Not early, pre-mature. The South African scientists have said it will be weeks before useful analysis is complete. You'll have to web search for the ref, I'm busy, but it shouldn't be difficult.
· Became dominant strain in South Africa in like a week (way faster than Delta). Must be either a superspreader event, much more transmissible, or much more evasive of antibodies.
· No real data on that cause, and no evidence for increased lethality. Will find out in next 1-2 weeks probably. Decent chance this becomes dominant worldwide and US soon, but not clear if that will be a problem or not.
· The one worrying data we know is the variant has a lot more mutations than other variants, which would make it likely to evade vaccine/antibody treatments – but not necessarily the other kinds of treatments.
· WHO not recommending countries to limit travel. Also problematic that vaccines aren't updating for new variants, and good chance FDA will be the bottleneck there.
When I bought My Files from the Dojo by Zvi Mowshowitz as a paperback, little did I know that the same person to detail the power of Galina’s Knight in a formate defined by Flametounge Kabul would advise me on burgeoning matters of epidemiology.
fake BS. the WHO talked about this in July. they are going to use this to explain away the deaths due to the acquired immune deficiency syndrome incurred by the injections.
here is the WHO talking about this "variant" in July:
https://archive.md/fl9rp
At this stage the virus has been found we know almost nothing else yet. And quoting Feigl-Ding is like quoting the exact opposite of a virus denier. Everything he ever sees is evidence that the sky is falling.
Vaccination rate in South Africa is only about 24% of the pop.
Just off the top of my head some of the things that would have caused the even the Alpha variant to spike:
We've just finished local elections i.e standing in long queues for an hour or two and the political rallies just before then.
Its summer and almost the end of the school year so lots of parties. I went to my kid's school carol thing this week. Outdoors but still 200 people all close together without masks. This included the hairdresser/epidemiologist mom who has done the research on why the vaccine is bad. (We have our share of idiots).
All the office parties are getting held now before everyone leaves for holidays or the government locks everyone down for Christmas. Think buffet style queue all using the same serving spoons, no hand sanitizing, questionable hygiene anyway after a few beers.
42 comments
[ 2.9 ms ] story [ 83.3 ms ] thread> I was almost finished with this post when the WHO decided to go with Omicron instead of Nu (or even Xi) and then I had to go through and replace Nu with Omicron about 25 times. We could have just said ‘the Nu variant’ a lot but the WHO hates both efficiency and fun even more than it hates freedom, it seems. Sad.
Pi, Rho, Sigma, Tau, Upsilon, Phi, Chi, Psi, Omega
Right?!?!
If there was a letter sharing a name with any current political leader I’m sure they’d do the same.
Nu is confusing and Xi is not neutral. Omicron is good, and if it has to displace Delta, they should be careful about the name, because it will be repeated a lot.
Do we need informed amateurs? Yes. But the crucial test is still whether they are accepted or promoted by the professionals. Zeynep Tufekci was vocalizing concerns that many professionals had, which is why her criticisms of health policy worked out.
In contrast, I have an extremely nerdy friend who has thinks it's her job to explain things to people, and thus writes deeply researched, well-footnoted blog posts about COVID, which are quite often wrong.
I for one can't tell what sort of person this is. But I also know that I'm not good at tagging facts with epistemic certainty. If I read a thing in a blog post it will probably stick, but I'll forget where I got that. So the simple solution it to not read it.
I think when it comes to writing explainers, it's 2021 and we have a wealth of resources and can wait for the professionals, including scientists who blog part time. I suggest that more people should be like me, and ignore the laypeople, indeed even most of the journalism, at least during the initial stages.
Edit: I don’t think the parent comment deserved to be flag killed. It’s entirely legitimate to point out that the author is not an epidemiologist or biologist or any other relevant -ist, and that early on you often need the domain experience to sift hype or panic from actual data. This is doubly true given the somewhat sensational tone here (“we’re f**ed”).
For example:
> In hindsight the 70% prediction was somewhat overconfident, and a prediction of about 45% would have been better
That's a huge post-hoc adjustment, what factors were important? Just because a p70 event does not occur does not mean that it did not warrant a p70 at the time.
Not worth reading, except for the tweets embedded.
but I would never have read those tweets were it not for the article. Does that make it worth reading?
Look through some of his posts and see how they've held up? https://thezvi.wordpress.com/?s=covid
(On credentials, it looks to me like you ended up with his credentials specifically in the context of game design? He's also worked as a trader, which is some practice at turning unclear information coming out in real time into good concrete predictions.)
Can someone clarify this part for me please? I find it incredibly hard to trust an author who starts a supposedly serious article with such sensationalist bullshit.
Spelling is different in Chinese, of course, which has fuck-all to do with the Greek letter, or how it would be pronounced in English.
People bringing up the Chinese leader pronounced name's English spelling, to confuse it with a Greek letter, are really reaching hard.
The way viruses normally work is that they evolve to be less deadly over time, and this evolution happens quite quickly. The less deadly strains spread quicker (because carriers aren't walled up in bed), and by the time the deadly strains get to people, they already have partial immunity after catching the less deadly strains.
Anyway, something has clearly changed. Coronaviruses have been around since forever, now we are getting more and more super spreaders appearing, seemingly, out of nowhere. As far as I can tell, the only thing that is different now than in the past that could be causing this is the lockdowns.
Not sure you where you got this from, but this variant came from a region with subpar vaccination rates.
>The way viruses normally work is that they evolve to be less deadly over time, and this evolution happens quite quickly. The less deadly strains spread quicker (because carriers aren't walled up in bed), and by the time the deadly strains get to people, they already have partial immunity after catching the less deadly strains.
Also very incorrect. Delta has a higher hospitalization rates than other variants
https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6...
>Not sure you where you got this from, but this variant came from a region with subpar vaccination rates.
I never said anything about vaccinations.
>Delta has a higher hospitalization rates than other variants
yes that's what I said. We are breeding stronger viruses.
· Became dominant strain in South Africa in like a week (way faster than Delta). Must be either a superspreader event, much more transmissible, or much more evasive of antibodies.
· No real data on that cause, and no evidence for increased lethality. Will find out in next 1-2 weeks probably. Decent chance this becomes dominant worldwide and US soon, but not clear if that will be a problem or not.
· The one worrying data we know is the variant has a lot more mutations than other variants, which would make it likely to evade vaccine/antibody treatments – but not necessarily the other kinds of treatments.
· WHO not recommending countries to limit travel. Also problematic that vaccines aren't updating for new variants, and good chance FDA will be the bottleneck there.
At this stage the virus has been found we know almost nothing else yet. And quoting Feigl-Ding is like quoting the exact opposite of a virus denier. Everything he ever sees is evidence that the sky is falling.
Vaccination rate in South Africa is only about 24% of the pop.
Just off the top of my head some of the things that would have caused the even the Alpha variant to spike:
We've just finished local elections i.e standing in long queues for an hour or two and the political rallies just before then.
Its summer and almost the end of the school year so lots of parties. I went to my kid's school carol thing this week. Outdoors but still 200 people all close together without masks. This included the hairdresser/epidemiologist mom who has done the research on why the vaccine is bad. (We have our share of idiots).
All the office parties are getting held now before everyone leaves for holidays or the government locks everyone down for Christmas. Think buffet style queue all using the same serving spoons, no hand sanitizing, questionable hygiene anyway after a few beers.