posted on September 08, 2020 10:13 PM by
u/status_maximizer
52
u/Epistaxis83 pointsat 1599609224.000000
Socrates: Well, what do you think are the odds that I’ve got the
plague right now?
Glaucon: Uh, one in a thousand?
Fairfax County, Virginia, where Caplan teaches, actually reports a
case rate of 1
in 60 today
Socrates: Reasonable enough; I’m asymptomatic after all.
But due to the US’s failure of testing and containment, the true case
number may be higher than reported because of asymptomatic carriers, who
are almost certainly the majority of overall cases, and who are
still contagious
Socrates: By now, however, this plague is already well-advanced.
You’re highly unlikely to make it noticeably worse. Indeed, by this
point the average person infects less than one extra person.
That number depends on social behavior, e.g. how well people are
complying with the absolute least they could do like wearing a mask
late EDIT 2: See also this new
review reporting that a mask may reduce the severity of symptoms
even if you do catch the ’rona, which I don’t see in Caplan’s numbers
anywhere - even though they analogize it to an (unfortunate,
unintentional) version of old-fashioned variolation, which fellow
sociopath-who-thinks-he-invented-math Robin Hanson was unironically proposing to do on purpose
back in March
In the UIUC campus, where all students staff and faculty are required to get tested twice a week, something like 2~3% of undergrads are covid positive.
Caplan makes several mistakes, but I'd go over this more carefully:
>Fairfax County, Virginia, where Caplan teaches, actually reports a case rate of 1 in 60 today
For risk assessment, we care about active cases, not historical cases; in the past week it looks like ~100 new confirmed cases per day per 100,000 in Fairfax county (maybe even a bit less). If we assume a ratio of confirmed-to-true cases of 1:5, then the chance of a person being newly infected in Fairfax is around 1 in 200. If people are asymptomatic-but-infectious for 2 days, and if Socrates is asymptomatic, his chances of being infectious are around 1 in 100. So far, Caplan is off by a factor of 10, but to be fair his math works in other locations (e.g. where I am).
>>Socrates: By now, however, this plague is already well-advanced. You’re highly unlikely to make it noticeably worse. Indeed, by this point the average person infects less than one extra person.
This is actually the biggest howler there. If the R_t is, say, 0.9, then the average person infects 0.9 extra people... but then those 0.9 extra people infect an additional 0.81 extra people, who infect an additional 0.9^3 extra people, who infect an additional 0.9^4 extra people, and so on. This converges to infecting 1/(1-R_t) people when all is said and done; if R_t is 0.9, that means 10 extra people, not 0.9 extra people.
Indeed, it seems reasonably likely to me that if you're relatively young in a relatively COVID-free location, wearing a mask in 1-on-1 conversations is not necessarily worth it *from the point of view of your risk alone*. It's still socially irresponsible not to wear a mask, because in most places R_t is high, and the negative externality of 1 infection amounts to 10 additional infections if R_t=0.9, not all of whom will be young people. You cannot use the 1 in 2000 figure for those 10 extra people and must instead use the overall IFR, something like 1 in 200. Since Caplan was off by a factor of 10 in estimating the number of extra infections you cause, and *also* off by a factor of 10 in the fatality rate he implicitly used for those extra infections, he's actually off by a factor of 100 here. Combining that with the Fairfax numbers and it's plausible Caplan is off by a factor of 1000, at least in Fairfax.
The review is rather unconvincing (all it has for hard evidence is some hamster study) - I looked into those animal studies back when it was still propping up and found that they pretty much waterboard mice with flu, as a mouse model of severe influenza in humans, with [further findings that survival rate was made far worse by simply increasing the volume of water, without increasing the viral dose](https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/23467492/). Note that the amounts they used would correspond to waterboarding if scaled up to human size (researchers noted distress following administration of sterile saline in those amounts), and that mice don't catch flu from their owners.
I think it is a common qualitative thinking fallacy - the difference between snorting some flu water and being waterboarded with flu water has little to do with wearing or not wearing masks, but after abstracting it as a dose dependence, and dealing with unfamiliar hard to visualize units of microliters, applied to a small mouse with its tiny airways, it is easy to get confused, even if one commonly uses metric units.
So you get some hamster study with dose dependence, where the hamsters are literally chocking on the infected water with some ungodly doses (because they don't even get sick otherwise), and who knows what it can say about dose dependence for some far larger animals (humans) being exposed to far smaller "large" or far far smaller "small" doses. The dominant effect of wearing masks so far is simply that you don't get sick, period.
[This other review to the same effect](https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s11606-020-06067-8) cites some data from actual humans, though of course that's only epidemiological case studies, e.g. on the cruise ship that wore masks 81% of infections were asymptomatic while it was only 18% on the one that didn't.
The point is it's at least a plausible hypothesis, and you can weigh it by some made-up confidence probability if you want to be a good Bayesian, but that's not what Caplan did.
Doesn't hold up if you actually follow the cites though.
Here's the masked ship:
https://thorax.bmj.com/content/75/8/693
0.8% infection fatality rate, well within the range of estimates of infection fatality rate based on Diamond Princess data.
Sounds like just an artifact due to change in the testing methodology that happened alongside mask wearing.
The "asymptomatic" by the way is a completely meaningless category to compare across two different anythings. You got to look at some well defined outcome like say death. edit: basically a much greater fraction of "symptomatic" cases died. Who knows maybe mask wearing makes people less likely to complain about symptoms. Probably still just an artifact though.
Serious answer: by assuming a constant prior probability of
infection, Caplan demonstrates his failure to understand the concept of
a health care intervention
Sneer answer: sorry, after enduring your condescending inanities, I
now place extremely high utility on not being your friend
Caplan's entire ideology is contingent on interventions either being unnecessary or impossible. To concede the necessity of state action would be at odds with his long publication history as a prominent libertarian. GMU is legit a Koch madrasa.
you, an unenlightened rube: I have a letter from the ADA saying you
may not throw me out of this Trader Joe’s for failing to wear a
mask
me, a Socrates-level genius: I have a perfect knowledge of
statistics, epidemiology, SARS-CoV-2, and the personal health of
everyone in this Trader Joe’s, and thus I can say for a fact that the
risk brought on with me failing to wear a mask is less than the risks
voluntarily assumed by everyone here in their normal everyday life, and
therefore it is logically necessary that they voluntarily assume this
risk as well
Another thing they never count — the risk of Covid vs a mask. The mask causes nothing, literally nothing, in people who are of reasonably good health. Even in somewhat bad health, masks don’t hurt anyone. So the risk is for all practical purposes zero for people healthy enough to leave the house, and so even if the Covid risk was 1/2000 it’s still greater than that mask risk.
It is all pretty annoying tbh, as there is a valid thing to say in
regards to the covid measures. (But it is very local). Some governments
are doing more (or want to do more) than they are legally allowed to do
to fight the covid. And this crisis is being used to give the
governments more power which they will not get rid off after the crisis
is over. (a nice example of this was all the anti-terrorism laws after
9/11, which was said, will only be used to fight terrorism, 20 years
later, protesting is terrorism).
But bringing this point up is so fucking hard because people are
crazy and going ‘masks are plan to make boys into a girls!’, or ‘To
protest against the gov, im going to infect your grandmother!’ or
[incoherent rant about nanotech and Bill Gates].
Hi, and welcome to SneerClub!
It ruins the sneer to explain it too much, but if you read the comments in this thread, I think you'll see material criticisms of Caplan's post that are compatible with the idea that some instances of unmasked inter-household socializing might be justified.
Fairfax County, Virginia, where Caplan teaches, actually reports a case rate of 1 in 60 today
But due to the US’s failure of testing and containment, the true case number may be higher than reported because of asymptomatic carriers, who are almost certainly the majority of overall cases, and who are still contagious
That number depends on social behavior, e.g. how well people are complying with the absolute least they could do like wearing a mask
EDIT: But it’s worth mentioning that Caplan actually isn’t the first person to think of applying mathematics to the study of disease spread; that’s an obscure practice called epidemiology. Here’s an example he might have missed because it’s a peer-reviewed journal article instead of a blog post with made-up numbers.
late EDIT 2: See also this new review reporting that a mask may reduce the severity of symptoms even if you do catch the ’rona, which I don’t see in Caplan’s numbers anywhere - even though they analogize it to an (unfortunate, unintentional) version of old-fashioned variolation, which fellow sociopath-who-thinks-he-invented-math Robin Hanson was unironically proposing to do on purpose back in March
What compels these guys to write 10,000 words when 500 would be just as error prone?
Serious answer: by assuming a constant prior probability of infection, Caplan demonstrates his failure to understand the concept of a health care intervention
Sneer answer: sorry, after enduring your condescending inanities, I now place extremely high utility on not being your friend
This pandemic has done a great job at unmasking wannabe intellectuals as complete fucking morons.
Those numbers are way off. The risk of being hospitalized is a lot higher, and the risks of even a mild illness are not fully known.
“I don’t know how to tell you that you should care about other people”
lol risks stack
you, an unenlightened rube: I have a letter from the ADA saying you may not throw me out of this Trader Joe’s for failing to wear a mask
me, a Socrates-level genius: I have a perfect knowledge of statistics, epidemiology, SARS-CoV-2, and the personal health of everyone in this Trader Joe’s, and thus I can say for a fact that the risk brought on with me failing to wear a mask is less than the risks voluntarily assumed by everyone here in their normal everyday life, and therefore it is logically necessary that they voluntarily assume this risk as well
TIL, Socrates was an insufferable asshole.
It is all pretty annoying tbh, as there is a valid thing to say in regards to the covid measures. (But it is very local). Some governments are doing more (or want to do more) than they are legally allowed to do to fight the covid. And this crisis is being used to give the governments more power which they will not get rid off after the crisis is over. (a nice example of this was all the anti-terrorism laws after 9/11, which was said, will only be used to fight terrorism, 20 years later, protesting is terrorism).
But bringing this point up is so fucking hard because people are crazy and going ‘masks are plan to make boys into a girls!’, or ‘To protest against the gov, im going to infect your grandmother!’ or [incoherent rant about nanotech and Bill Gates].
Sorry /rant, wear a mask.
[deleted]
No he’s not. Just last week in a blog post he wrote that he wears both a mask and gloves when he goes grocery shopping.