Back when I was an undergrad, I used to imagine that Philip K. Dick was some sort of gigantic, unattractive robot with an unusually heavy Brooklyn accent who liked to puff out his chest and wear tweedy-uniform designer clothes and had a little impishness and an inability to sit still and was very oblivious to how young women saw him as “weird” or was “creepy”
it was revealed today that a man named “wonderboy came in second in the voting for the most famous person in the world to die at their own funeral, and he was entitled to 1/7 of what maria had going for her, which had to be 6,474,000 dollars worth of super beans;”
Today’s misread: “so many reasons to slime” (for “so many reasons to smile”)
He described the scene as “the death of Antonin Dvorak,” and the need for modern novelists to “represent this man’s point of view,” and the fact that Gurdjieff thought it was the duty of painters to capture not only the event of human suffering, but also the spirit of the deceased. He defined what a painter was and what it was he wanted his followers to achieve.“We have to find new ideas for those who did not survive this hell, new views, new compositions, new tones, new compositions, new techniques, and then these new souls must be redeemed. We must find in every painting the spirit of the deceased. Every painting must contain the essence of the deceased.”
[…]
He concluded: “Then we must send our painters away from the city – let the dark, sick and yearning, those who refuse to believe in the power of man again, let them have no one to console them, no one to be satisfied with their kindling, no one to tell them what they want to hear. And the last thing they will see is the sun, the city, the churches, the miniatures, the encyclopedic-looking church, which only gives an illusion to the refined and the languid, but never to the besotted.”
[…]
Ibn Not Al-Hindawi, Dictionnaire Philosophique, 1610
He felt that his challenge was a war of annihilation, a universal and endless conflict against darkness and inhumanity. It had been with the same difficulty that he had tried to forge human civilization from the wilderness, with the same depth of despair, work, and sacrifice, that he had passed the same nights, too, since the first dawn, that his only wife and children – a son and a daughter, a devoted and faithful wife, his dear, faithful V; then, during the nights of his deepest suffering, he had committed the greatest sacrifices, and at last he had succeeded; they had had to leave their family home and follow his inspirations to a distance. And now, in his solitude, after the greatest depths of helplessness and horror, after the cruellest pains, and the desolation of his life, he was hardly longer a man; his wife and children were gone, and he was left alone.
It was still a cold winter afternoon, there was no sign of the whirling storm that was gathering about the Danube, and he had not been for days, and the horror of the prison-house and the columns of his people, had not yet taken possession of him. Dumouriez now, in his death agony, said to himself:
“If only I have to return to the water, the million-year prison of my forehead, again.”
He had already made up his mind; he would not see the end. He had felt on the crest of the abyss that this earth was an abyss, that this evil and debased age, under a hopeless chaos of ignorance and despotism, was but one vast coming together of the lost atoms, the birds of the air and the dumb beasts of the earth, those of the sun and the senses. But now he was reminded of the Will. His Will was directed toward the stars, toward the conscious and the unconscious, the living and those who could be made dead. The Will had never been against the stars, but toward the core of the burning atom, and with their beautiful, freewheeling movements and their overfed wisdom-feasts; he had never been against his first wife and
“Flattening the Curve” is a deadly delusion →
[EDIT: hello SSC readers! This is a post I wrote quickly and with the expectation that the reader would fill in some of the unstated consequences of my argument. So it’s less clear than I’d like. My comment here should hopefully clarify things somewhat.]
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[EDIT2: people seem really interested in my critique of the Gaussian curve specifically.
To be clear, Bach’s use of a Gaussian is not the core problem here, it’s just a symptom of the core problem.
The core problem is that his curves do not come from a model of how disease is acquired, transmitted, etc. Instead they are a convenient functional form fitted to some parameters, with Bach making the call about which parameters should change – and how much – across different hypothetical scenarios.
Having a model is crucial when comparing one scenario to another, because it “keeps your accounting honest”: if you change one thing, everything causally downstream from that thing should also change.
Without a model, it’s possible to “forget” and not update a value after you change one of the inputs to that value.
That is what Bach does here: He assumes the number of total cases over the course of the epidemic will stay the same, whether or not we do what he calls “mild mitigation measures.” But the estimate he uses for this total – like most if not all such estimates out there – was computed directly from a specific value of the replication rate of the disease. Yet, all of the “mild mitigation measures” on the table right now would lower the replication rate of the disease – that’s what “slowing it down” means – and thus would lower the total.
I am not saying this necessarily means Bach is wrong, either in his pessimism about the degree to which slowing measures can decrease hospital overloading, or in his preference for containment over mitigation. What I am saying is this: Bach does not provide a valid argument for his conclusions.
His conclusions could be right. Since I wrote this, he has updated his post with a link to the recent paper from Imperial College London, whose authors are relatively pessimistic on mitigation.
I had seen this study yesterday, because an acquaintance in public health research linked it to me along with this other recent paper from the EPIcx lab in France, which is more optimistic on mitigation. My acquaintance commented that the former seemed too pessimistic in its modeling assumptions and the latter too optimistic. I am not an epidemiologist, but I get the impression that the research community has not converged to any clear conclusion here, and that the range of plausible assumptions is wide enough to drive a wide range of projected outcomes. In any case, both these papers provide arguments that would justify their conclusions if their premises were true – something Bach does not do.]
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I’ve seen this medium post going around, so I’ll repost here what I wrote about it in a Facebook comment.
This article simply does not make sense. Here are some of its flaws:
- It assumes the time course of the epidemic will have a Gaussian functional form. This is not what exponential growth looks like, even approximately. Exponential growth is y ~ e^x, while a Gaussian’s tail grows like y ~ e^(-x^2), with a slower onset – the famous “light tails” of the normal distribution – and a narrow, sudden peak. I don’t know why you’d model something that infamously looks like y ~ e^x as though it were y ~ e^(-x^2), even as an approximation, and the author provides no justification.
- Relative to a form that actually grows exponentially, most of the mass of a Gaussian is concentrated right around the peak. So the top of the peak is higher, to compensate for the mass that’s absent from the light tails. Since his conclusions depend entirely on how high the peak goes, the Gaussian assumption is doing a lot of work.
- No citation is provided for 40%-to-70% figure, just the names and affiliations of two researchers. As far as I can tell, the figure comes from Marc Lipsitch (I can’t find anything linking it to Christian Drosten). Lipsitch derived this estimate originally in mid-February using some back-of-the-envelope math using R0, and has since revised it downward as lower R0 estimates have emerged – see here for details.
- In that Lipsitch thread, he starts out by saying “Simple math models with oversimple assumptions would predict far more than that given the R0 estimates in the 2-3 range (80-90%),” and goes on to justify a somewhat lower number.
The “simple math” he refers to here would be something like the SIR model, a textbook model under which the fraction S_inf of people never infected during an epidemic obeys the equation R_0 * (S_inf - 1) - ln(S_inf) = 0. (Cf. page 6 of this.)
Indeed, with R_0=2 we get S_inf=0.2 (80% infected), and with R_0=3 we get S_inf=0.06 (94% infected). So I’m pretty sure Lipsitch’s estimate takes the SIR model as a point of departure, and goes on to postulate some extra factors driving the number down.
But the SIR model, like any textbook model of an epidemic, produces solutions with actual exponential growth, not Gaussians! There is no justification for taking a number like this and finding a Gaussian that matches it. If you believe the assumptions behind the number, you don’t actually believe in the Gaussian; if you believe in the Gaussian (for some reason), you ought to ignore the number and compute your own, under whatever non-standard assumptions you used to derive the Gaussian.
- What’s more, he doesn’t say how his plotted Gaussian curves were derived from his other numbers. Apparently he used the 40%-70% figure together with a point estimate of how long people spend in the ICU. How do these numbers lead to the curves he plotted? What does ICU duration determine about the parameters of a Gaussian? Ordinarily we’d have some (simplified) dynamic model like SIR with a natural place for such a number, and the curve would be a solution to the model. Here we appear to have a curve with no dynamics, somehow estimated from dynamical facts like ICU duration.
- Marc Lipsitch, on his twitter, is still pushing for social distancing and retweeting those “flatten the curve” infographics. I suppose it’s conceivable that he doesn’t recognize the implications of his own estimate. But that is a strong claim and requries a careful argument.
I don’t know if Lipsitch has read this article, but if he has, I imagine he experienced that special kind of discomfort that happens when someone takes a few of your words out of context and uses them to argue against your actual position, citing your own reputation and credibility as though it were a point against you.
Reblogging this again, since I’ve added a bunch of clarifications and extensions at the top after it was linked on SSC today.
Having found that Gnomon by Nick Harkaway was the best book I read last year, I decided to try his other stuff. I just read The Gone-Away World, his first novel, and… it is also excellent. On purely technical merits, Gnomon is probably better (he did have ten years more experience as a writer at that point), but The Gone-Away World is more of a book that I feel it would be possible to have interesting conversations about, so it would be great if some of you would also go read it now.
I haven’t read anything else by Harkaway (yet) but I highly recommend The Gone-Away World.
This is a book that feels like a movie. It’s a post-apocalyptic martial arts comedy.
It has ninjas and anti-capitalism and nonlinear narration and a big showdown, it goes into the most delightful digressions about tupperware and sheep, and is a wonderful potpourri of explosions and mimes and last-minute rescues. It’s just so pleasant and satisfying to read that one would think it must therefore be shallow, but it’s decidedly not. It has a kafkaesque vibe about it, and explores all sorts of philosophical … stuff.One of the first homework I got in first semester Philosophy was writing four pages about philosophical themes in a book or movie, and I did seven on the ontological stuff in The Gone-Away World (even though there’s so, so much more themes in there).
It’s one of the first I tagged for tagcat.org, which I’m shamelessly plugging here because if it were public yet I could just link the book’s tag page and would not need to say any more.
It’s a difficult book to describe, especially without ruining the important spoilers, because for at least the first two-thirds of the book, you keep having, “Oh, so it’s this kind of book” moments, one after another.
Overall, it’s sort of like if Forrest Gump were written by Terry Pratchett and directed by whoever had the upper hand at any given moment in a wrestling match between Quentin Tarantino and Christopher Nolan.
I was only semi-seriously considering it before, but if I’m going to be trapped at home for an extended period, I may actually try my hand at translating Мир, который пошел вон.
The real problem is how to convey the nuance of names like “Bone Brisket” and “Gonzo” without extensive footnotes.
I’m also not even starting until I’ve decided how to deal with the word “pencilneck”. “Совок” doesn’t work, I think.
The Gone-Away World is great! I actually like it much more than Gnomon, which I found disappointing by the end.
More of my Harkaway opinions, on Goodreads:
(via ghostpalmtechnique)
“We even advocate eliminating the hallway, and no longer even making a restroom sequestered space of a corridor, but making it a porous extension of the corridor, which actually gives us more space,” he says.
Oh shit, I forgot to mention, here are all the ways the show makes you feel
Be not a doormat.
Be not a chump.
Be not a pathetic lower life form.
Be not an emotionless robot.
Be an emotion.
Be human.
Be a brain.
Be a pulsating, frothing, pounding, churning, churning being with impeccable timing.
Be not a mind.
Be not a compartmentalized, specific, easily suicidally mangled version of the mind.
Be a bouncing ball, free to bounce back and forth as it will.
Be a tangle of sinew, a jumble of thought, a tapestry of feeling.
Be a profound, thunderous symphony, one of the most piercing clarinets ever composed.
Be a stable, solid vessel, built to withstand both the waters of the Atlantic and the gushing torrents of spring.
Be not a thing.
The open, waving sky.
The furry, fractal, ever-changing of fur.
The land, the trees.
The ocean, the tides.
The wind, the whirlwind.
The rain, the heavy, threatening, but not untethered, gentle waves.
The rain, in whorls of flame, swallowing the gales of summer.
Be human.
Be not a shadow, not a keep, not a house.
Be not a thing.
Be not a location, be not a map, not a word, not a sentence, not a new idea, not a belief, not a thing.
A heartbeat, two steps, three steps, four steps, five steps, six steps, seven steps, eight steps, nine steps, ten steps, eleven steps, twelve steps.
A ringing, pulsating, gushing, churning pulse.
A creek of blood, a flood, a raging torrent.
Be not a long, empty gallery.
Be not a skull, not a jagged, detached piece.
Be not a memory, a thought, a thing, not a thing.
Be not a document, be not a word, be not a thought, a pulse, a flurry, a voice, a prowling, tenacious predator, not an organ or a muscle, not a bone or a cell, not a pair of eyes or a nose or a tongue or a brain or a heartbeat.
“You’re not your body,” the operators said.
“You’re not your memories,” the consciousness said.
“You’re not your thoughts,” the [REDACTED] said.
“You’re not your feelings, either.”
“No, you’re not,” the butterflies in my stomach said.
I was confused.
I was thirsty.
I was hungry.
My muscles were very tense.
I was tired.
I had been awake for about four hours.
My vision was blurry.
My head felt very full.
I was starving.
A woman with long dark hair spoke in a whispery voice, and she was saying some sort of mantra.
“I am all that I am.”
“All that I am.”
“I am a name in the alphabet.”
“I am nothing more than a name.”
“I have nothing to say.”
“I have nothing to say.
the northern caves
The Northern Caves Chapter 11, 1310 words, on the NMPH network
more 11: BASIC
01:07: ADDRESS DROP
01:11: ROLLOVER
01:18: LABORATORY
01:24: EXPLAINED GOOD
01:27: FOES
01:34: AMBIANCE
01:37: NUCLEAR DEGREE
01:42: MEETINGS
01:48: GO-TO
01:51: TOLERATION
01:57: SCIENTIFIC STUDIES
02:01: AMBIENCE
02:05: BLACK AND TAN
02:08: DREAM DISCUSSION
02:11: FUNERAL DRAMA
02:18: MEETING
02:21: PARTY CLOUDS
02:26: PARTY CLOUDS
02:29: REFRACTIONS
02:34: PRESENTATION
REAL MEN
The inner sanctum of the Academia. The children are all gathered at the head of the round table. It is 8:30.
“Morning,” said the teacher, shortly.
“What are you doing here?” one of the children asked.
“Ah, my children, we are about to go through the course of a very important exercise. Now, for the last time, it is necessary for us to instruct you that you are very young. Your entire lives, you will receive in your physical bodies an experience far too incredible to describe. No man, nor god, nor devil could have brought you here for this. We are talking about a series of firsts, for you.”
“Are there any who do not believe me,” said the little boy.
“You are talking to a boy,” said the teacher, in a half-sadistic tone of voice. “He is the one who will be the subject of my lecture. You believe him, or you would not come here today. You will all receive a profound delusion, and you will all believe in it. At this very moment you are feeling the stimulation which will soon provide you with the first experiences of impressions which will change the course of your lives, of which all your enemies will regret the consequences. You are merely on the point of swallowing a little lump of sugar when you receive a shock of pure curiosity. If you cannot help but feel curious about the innermost recesses of your body, you are already far from understanding the faculties of the mind. Now, if you hear my words, you will be quite ready to receive my visitors, even if you have not believed in your muscles, in your sight, in your hands, in your voice, in your bones, in your eyes, in your nose, in your ears.”
There was a pause. The children were looking at one another, at the same time their eyes were having a kind of guileless reflection, wondering what the stranger had said to mean by such words. Then one of them said: “But, father, what if, sir, I have a tendency to doubt such things? I always do, and I remember, sometimes, to doubt them. What would you do with me if I were to doubt the whole presentation?”
“Very well,” said the little man. “I must be the one that keeps going on, father. You must make your children remember to have faith in the things they are told. I am certainly