[ExI] next county

Mon Aug 3 20:07:56 UTC 2020

> On Behalf Of William Flynn Wallace via extropy-chat
Subject: Re: [ExI] next county

Spike, I certainly did not mean to trivialize your interest in the data.  I do have a concern that your time will be wasted.  Who is going to listen to you?  These things are way over our heads:  White House, CDC, some others.

bill w

No worries BillW, this is a particular interest to me.  Those two you named, White House and CDC are irrelevant to the decisions that matter to me: the decisions made in Sacramento are the ones that impact me directly.

We are facing a huge revolution in something I am closely connected to: our local public school.  The Super just told us yesterday that the shutdown study from home paradigm will apply to the entire first semester, so there will be no return to the classroom before Jingle Bells.  Sounds like for the second semester students will have a choice between learn at home and part time classroom.

Regarding use of my time, my study of the quality of the covid dataset is trivial compared to what I will likely soon be investing in the other activities impacted by that data.  To do this most effectively I need a pretty good picture of the virus-scape.  I now don’t feel I have one.

Now we have open calls for public school parents and volunteers to help at-risk students in particular but they will also accept volunteers to help the most promising students.  This becomes even more interesting if what I am hearing is true (not saying that it is (and it sounds dubious or exaggerated)): the teachers’ union says its members will refuse to return to the classroom unless yakkity yak and bla bla, with a bunch of stuff the school board and the county cannot do for them.  It includes defunding police, expanded public this and that, sheesh, a pile of stuff the Super will hafta tell them to take to the governor who will also tell them no, because he doesn’t have the budget for any of it.

So what if they carry out their threat and a bunch of them refuse to come to school?  For the first time, we are in a position to just adios amigo about half of them.  We can come up with work-arounds.  A Zoom conference works just as well with 100 students as it does with 30.

spike

On Mon, Aug 3, 2020 at 12:46 PM spike jones via extropy-chat <extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org <mailto:extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org> > wrote:

> On Behalf Of William Flynn Wallace via extropy-chat
Subject: Re: [ExI] next county

>…Spike, is this just a little hobby, or are there serious uses to you for these data?  bill w

Little hobby?  Indeed sir?  We are seeing a case where junky data is being collected, where their own sites clearly tell us the data is junky and uncertain, the data is being handed up to state level sites where the caveats have disappeared, then the states make decisions based on junky data whether children can go to school next week and whether businesses live or die.  This isn’t some little hobby.  This is alarming as hell.

I see a clear mechanism whereby covid deaths can be overcounted (by the site’s clear admission), then I compare new cases per day to the (possibly overcounted) covid death rate a coupla weeks later and notice a huge disconnect between what we are told is the mortality rate advertised and the one we get by dividing the number of cases the sites are calling covid deaths by the number of covid new cases and I am getting numbers around half a percent.

BillW, this is not a hobby, nor is it political.  Big life and death decisions are being made on the basis of junky data which any amateur can see contains a huge anomaly: the covid death rate looks like around half a percent, which isn’t all that different from other flus we have seen before, and yet this time we are closing businesses resulting in their failure.

If nothing else this is vindicating Belgium.  They kept telling us that comparing covid numbers by nation is meaningless because they were being counted differently.  Belgium looks like the hardest-hit nation in the world, or in the top 3.  But kept telling us they were counting suspected cases, people who died with covid as having died of covid, that their data wasn’t directly comparable to other countries.  Now I suspect they were telling the truth all along.

Big decisions are being made based on junky data with a clear anomaly (the mortality rate) and the caveats on the data disappear as it rises.  

Note there is no political content anywhere in any of that breezy commentary.  This is all about data.

BillW, ja, I do have a serious use for this data, for I too make decisions based on it.  I mighta caught covid back in December but I still haven’t tested because I don’t want to go anywhere near that hospital in case it wasn’t that.  MIghta been a different viral pneumonia, in which case I wouldn’t be immune from what I might catch at the hospital.  I had a close extended contact with someone who had recently returned from China when I got sick.

Meanwhile… businesses are dying.  If businesses die, we die.

spike

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