Category Archives: COVID

COVID, Medicine, Tweetstorms

COVID Insanity and Religion

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Originally posted as a Twitter thread on February 20, 2021

Covid rules, beliefs, and passions are a 21st century religion, with orthodoxy, heretics, and apologists.

Religion once incorporated “all answers to the unknown.” Why does the sun rise? Where did we come from? What is right and wrong? What happens when we die?

Then came science, which is about falsifiable, testable, reproducible hypotheses. “I like the color blue” isn’t falsifiable/testable, nor are questions of morality. “The earth rotates due to preservation of angular momentum” is. So is “the earth is flat” (it was falsified).

“You can’t sit on a park bench” or “You can’t eat inside unless it’s at an airport” isn’t science without *setting and testing a hypothesis.* It’s an insult to science. Some follow these rules blindly. Some fight them blindly. Some make them blindly. It’s religion.

America is a land of many religions and levels of observance. It’s remarkable how these psychographic traits manifest in terms of calls for enforcement (“he’s not wearing a mask over his nose! Call the cops!”), calls for denial (“Bill Gates vaccine mind control”) etc

What I find fascinating is how many secular people have embraced orthodox Covid religion, whereas how many very religious people have wholly rejected it. What is the reason?

Conformists and skeptics are but two types — there are also those who craft the laws, those who hypocritically violate while endorsing them, those who pretend to believe out of fear, etc. All this has tons of past precedent through our millennia of experience with religion…

My biggest concern is that when “science” is thrown around without being science, it casts doubt on other things that emerge as part of the actual scientific method. Throw in probability and it gets even worse/easier for people to throw out anything coming from “science”

There ARE a lot of fake claims out there. Vaccines and autism. 5G and cancer. Those on the side of actual science should be offended — and fight hard! — against the bastardization of the term science and “Covid Religion”…because we are heading towards “boy who cried wolf”

COVID, Education, Medicine, Tweetstorms

Why I don’t believe in conspiracy theories

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Originally posted as a Twitter thread on January 19, 2021

Why I don’t believe in conspiracy theories, summarized in a Ben Franklin quote:
“Three can keep a secret, if two of them are dead.”

When talking about large scale hiding of ANYTHING + the auditability of electronic records + human stupidity, natural path is exposure

It’s why there are not aliens stored in Area 51, it’s why the election wasn’t stolen, and it’s why the idea that Florida is wholesale fabricating numbers is nuts. Occam’s Razor and Ben Franklin.

But a counterpoint to this is: can you trust “consensus but unfalsifiable” conclusions? I’m increasing a No. No experiments, not replicable, but social stigma and no funding to oppose:

https://www.nature.com/articles/s41562-018-0399-z

Incentives matter, too.

COVID, Economics, Real Estate, Tweetstorms

High Salaries and Expensive Real Estate

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Originally posted as a Twitter thread on December 02, 2020

Are high salaries the *cause* or *effect* of expensive housing? In NIMBY-prone areas (hello SF!) where supply is artificially constrained, companies anchored to the geography need to pay a high enough wage to attract talent, which then anchors rent/mortgage payments

Prediction: the current remote-work salary adjustment concept, the Marxian “from each according to his abilities, to each according to his location,” will not last. Why pay people more simply because they choose to live in a more expensive area? Pay them more if they are good!

So looking at lower-cost areas, and paying a discount to prevailing SF wages to get to “parity,” is a crutch of sorts to get to a more sensible end-state: pay a prevailing wage to get the talent. And then let’s see what happens to housing prices…

Home prices will always be based on supply and demand, of course – WFH doesn’t change economics. But “desired location to live” is going to drive that more than “high wage employers” — where those wages could conceptually plummet given increase in supply (global worker pool)

COVID, Tweetstorms

School Closures and Idiocy

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Originally posted as a Twitter thread on November 18, 2020

The absurdity of closing ALL SCHOOLS based on the positivity rate of a (presumably selection-biased sick?) less than 1% sample of the population should offend anyone who understands what a fraction is

NYC had 66K tests out of an 8M population. If you only test sick people, you will get a high positivity rate! If you over-test healthy people, you could make Ebola seem pleasant based on its “low positivity rate”
Positivity rate is garbage

AI, COVID, Education, Tweetstorms

Remote Education

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Originally posted as a Twitter thread on July 30, 2020

There’s an opportunity to turn remote education from a weakness to a strength — from a badly rendered “sage on a stage” (constant in education for 100s of years, but *worse* online!) to individualized instruction. To see why, let’s take a trip to 1984 — not Orwell, but Bloom

Prof Benjamin Bloom wrote a seminal work in 1984 showing that individualized instruction lifted outcomes by 2 standard deviations — outperforming 98% of regular students:
http://web.mit.edu/5.95/www/readings/bloom-two-sigma.pdf
But he remarked, it was “too costly for most societies to bear on a large scale”

But the Internet has solved this problem, conceptually! What we need(ed) was a forcing function to abandon the status quo, which Bloom showed is demonstrably worse than individualized tutoring. We potentially have that in Covid, which has incredibly made the status quo *worse*

Homeschooling was “weird” and “dangerous” (https://news.harvard.edu/gazette/story/2020/05/law-school-professor-says-there-may-be-a-dark-side-of-homeschooling/) but now parents get to see (Zoom-spying!) how ineffective the “status quo” is — and speaking as a parent who knows the Bloom data and the traditional/dumb homeschooling stigma, I now care only about the data

Schools have (had?!?) one big thing going for them — kids learn how to socialize, to get along with other people, to deal with adversity, unfairness — side note, but this (school!) graduation speech by Justice Roberts is the best ever: https://time.com/4845150/chief-justice-john-roberts-commencement-speech-transcript/

But Zoom school has none of this. It’s worse in every way than what was already a proven-to-be-suboptimal model for education!

I hope some forward thinking schools will try to go on remote education offense, whereas most are just going on “how do I turn this thing on?” defense.

I encourage everyone to read the Bloom paper. We now have the means (so many great tutoring platforms for a fraction of the cost of private school). We have the motive. And with Covid, we have the opportunity. Fin.

COVID, Real Estate, Startups, Tweetstorms

WFH Productivity: Temporary or Permanent?

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Originally posted as a Twitter thread on May 21, 2020

Two ways of thinking about WFH productivity:

”It’s temporary”: there is NOTHING else to do, people stuck in homes, kids cannot be shipped off to school or daycare, therefore MORE work gets done + people always accessible…but upon opening, people will start playing hooky

“It’s permanent”: the tools for WFH are great (think Slack/Zoom), meeting length gets collapsed to the core substance (1 hr -> 30 mins etc), less travel/commute, accountability via more trackability…

For small companies, “it’s permanent” could have a seismic change on their financials given real estate costs as a % of revenues. But IMHO jury still out on productivity gains/losses given unique nature of this forcible SAH (stay at home!), not just WFH, experiment

And clarifying the first point, parents whose kids are stuck at home cannot go to the beach / play hooky because they need to watch the kids 🙂 Versus normal times when they could.