[ExI] bikers again and smallpox

Thu Sep 10 00:46:40 UTC 2020

Mike this is really good stuff.

At some point we need to have this writer crowd address the comparison between the half million rally attendees vs any half million randomly-selected Americans, then ask how we shall distribute the enormous savings.  Shall we give the attendees checks for 26k?

If your colleague suggests “we” pay people to not come to the rally, I didn’t come to the rally this year.  If he is eager to pay me my 26k, I am eager to post him my address.

At some point the epidemiologists must explain a stunning observation: the bikers keep not dying.  At some point their covid death rate should return to the “normal” 1.3 a day, once they are again susceptible to catching it at home and sufficient time has passed that the disease has had time to progress to its lethal conclusion since the end of the rally.  This of course would still not be the fault of the rally.  

Epidemiologists have a lotta splainin to do.  I don’t hear a lotta splainin from that particular community, which is why the economist and politician communities are stepping up and offering their own splainin.  Being not professionals in that science, the economists and politician community doesn’t worry much if their splainin is absurd and misleading, so long as it serves their ends.

The beauty of this data set is that it is the first one I know of that has zero politics in it: there is not one thing any politician could have done to stop it, not one damn thing.  Two Native tribes made a half-hearted attempt, but soon realized just setting up a bikers-go-home sign wouldn’t do it: home for a lot of bikers was on the other side of that reservation and they had not enough fuel in their small tanks or water in their canteens to backtrack across the desert to the previous oasis.  They couldn’t really road-block: the trucks carrying the tribes’ groceries and the tribes’ fuel was aboard those trucks in line behind a few thousand bikers.  So… on they came.  No one could stop them, even in theory.

It is said that laughter is the best medicine.  This is poetry of course, but sad people often have depressed immunity, so it stands to reason that in happy people it should work the other way to some extent.  It is nearly impossible to attend a motorcycle rally with a straight face.  I don’t think it can be done: you see hilarious absurdity everywhere you look.  A blind man would bust out laughing at the sound of the silliness of a biker rally.  Perhaps hilarity somehow temporarily pumped their immune systems?  I have been to Star Trek conventions, the rallies are even sillier than those (which is saying a lot.)  I suffer aching sides from laughing at the goofiness.  If you haven’t seen one, I recommend it: those are really good attitude adjusters.  You can go and see even if you don’t have a bike or a costume.  If I see you there, I won’t tell what you did.  

spike

From: extropy-chat <extropy-chat-bounces at lists.extropy.org> On Behalf Of Mike Dougherty via extropy-chat
Sent: Wednesday, September 9, 2020 4:21 PM
To: ExI chat list <extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org>
Cc: Mike Dougherty <msd001 at gmail.com>
Subject: Re: [ExI] bikers again and smallpox

Last Friday, I mentioned this conversation to someone I work with.  He followed up with this link today:

https://www.usnews.com/news/national-news/articles/2020-09-08/sturgis-motorcycle-rally-may-have-caused-over-250-000-coronavirus-cases-report  

I replied to him as follow:

I don't really know how to properly model the numbers being thrown around.  I think that's the interesting conversation.  How 400,000 people can lead to 250,000 cases would suggest >60% infection rate.  That there is only one death attributed to either 250k cases or 400k attendees makes coronavirus … not worth the hype.  Cell phone tracking as an authoritative source of truth - based on what other reliability studies can that be trusted?  Yeah, ok, so I'm reaching… but it feels like all of it is reaching.  If Sturgis event is 8/7 - 8/16 but cases are reported from 8/2 to 9/2 … there's considerable "slop" in what is being counted.  A 7-12% increase in cases for counties with rally attendees compared to without, but then reporting Meade county as 6 to 7 per 1000 is a rate of not 6 or 7 percent, but 0.6 or 0.7 percent.  So that mixture in unit of measure is either numerical incompetence (the default assumption with benefit of the doubt) or it's intentionally obfuscating facts to push a narrative.  Throw in that "It also found that the rally generated $12.2 billion in public health costs" (the one doing the finding is not obvious, the rally itself is vilified with an unambiguous direct-action verb "generated".  The last bit of that sentence admits those numbers are based on "statistical cost of a COVID-19 case" (but the superfluous clauses of a sentence are typically ignored or not remembered)  Again you could call me on reading too much into the careful construction(s) here, but the next sentence then proposes that amount would have been enough "to pay each rally goer $26,000 to not attend" - that's a point that completely displaces the critical thinking needed to process the previous sentence with a sensational thought about getting paid… meanwhile we can't seem to agree that giving the stay-at-home more than $1200 every few months.  So we "lost" $26k/person for 400k Sturgis attendees, but we can't afford the bribe to stay home (UBI triggers people over the socialist support it provides, but if you call it a bribe or allowance with the requirement to stay home… then it's not exactly "unconditional" income… but it serves the same purpose of a social safety measure)  The last paragraph even states "… is an overestimate of the externality cost … we nonetheless conclude … this event was substantial"  - without comparisons to health cases of past Sturgis events or similar conditions/size events, it's so easy to "conclude" whatever-the-hell-you-want.  The disclosure sentences are obscured with bamboozling and gobbledegook, while the narrative-supporting takeaways use simple words and shorter sentences.  

Maybe the author wasn't a genius wordsmith constructing a devastatingly convincing article.  Maybe it's human nature to tell a tale in a way that carries a meme from brain to brain.  Maybe writers have spent their whole careers serving the spread of memes.  The best writers are self-aware and can see their bias/memeplex, and still write a fair article.  The rest simply toss enough words together to meet the deadline for article submission.  So in the flurry of content-creation, the default narrative is strengthened by all those who repeat the same signal.

To come all the way back around to my initial point:  I don't know how to think about it.  The friend I quoted skipped Sturgis and observed that it was a non-political rally, so would have a very different population than the now-common political rabble-rousing.  His observance was that Sturgis should have had many more _deaths_ associated to it, but that there might be something about the nature of that event that mitigated deaths in a significant way.  Later email exchanges seems to have landed on the Sturgis attendees spend more time in the sun while on long rides (like those necessary to get 400k bikers to Sturgis) and the endogenous buildup of vitamin D3 has prophylactic effects.  Perhaps having lower overall stress selects for those with lower inflammation and therefore less existing vascular damage (I suspect those bikers could be considered privileged to have bikes as hobby/toys and can afford their relaxation in ways that … less-privileged and more at-risk populations cannot)  There might even be some value in a boomer population with the diet of convenience store hotdogs and afternoon coffee … whether it's direct, or because they're already on medications that control blood pressure, cholesterol, anti-coags, etc.

On Tue, Sep 8, 2020 at 8:51 PM Keith Henson via extropy-chat <extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org <mailto:extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org> > wrote:

The 10-day Sturgis Motorcycle Rally in South Dakota in August, which
drew more than 400,000 people, has now been linked to more than
250,000 coronavirus cases, according to a study by the IZA Institute
of Labor Economics.   The event will cost an estimated $12.2 billion
in health-care costs, they wrote.

https://www.marketwatch.com/story/sturgis-motorcycle-rally-in-south-dakota-in-august-linked-to-more-than-250000-coronavirus-cases-study-finds-2020-09-08

Keith

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