Reposted from Dr. Judith Curry’s Climate Etc.
Posted on April 14, 2020 by curryja
by Judith Curry
On the importance of expertise from other fields for COVD19 and climate change.
This post is motivated by a tweet from Steve McIntyre, with comment from Ken Rice:
Here is the link to Annan’s post Dumb and Dumber, its actually quite good. The money quote:
“All these people exhorting amateurs to “stay in their lane” and not muddy the waters by providing analyses and articles about the COVID-19 pandemic would have an easier job of it if it wasn’t for the supposed experts churning out dross on an industrial scale.”
McIntyre responds:
Epistemic trespassing
Shortly after spotting this twitter exchange, I spotted a link to a new paper entitled (tweeted by Oxford Philosophy) entitled Epistemic Trespassing. Excerpts:
“Epistemic trespassers are thinkers who have competence or expertise to make good judgments in one field, but move to another field where they lack competence—and pass judgment nevertheless. We should doubt that trespassers are reliable judges in fields where they are outsiders.” In other words, stay in your lane.
“Trespassing is a significant problem in an age of expertise and punditry, but it’s not new. In Plato’s Apology, Socrates tells us he tracked down citizens in Athens who had reputations for being skilled. He met politicians, poets, and craftsmen and tested their mettle. As Socrates says, he ‘found those who had the highest reputation were nearly the most deficient’ . Socrates diagnosed the problem: because these men had been so successful in their particular crafts, each one ‘thought himself very wise in most important pursuits, and this error of theirs overshadowed the wisdom they had’ . Puffed up by their achievements in one domain, the successful Athenians trespassed on matters about which they were ignorant.”
“First, trespassing is a widespread problem that crops up especially in the practice of interdisciplinary research, as opposed to what we might call ‘single-discipline’ research. Second, reflecting on trespassing should lead us to have greater intellectual modesty, in the sense that we will have good reason to be far less confident we have the right answers to many important questions.”
“Epistemic trespassing of the sort I’ve noted is easy to recognize. Experts drift over a highly-visible boundary line and into a domain where they lack either the relevant evidence or the skills to interpret the evidence well. But they keep talking nonetheless. Experts on a public stage are cast in the role of the ‘public intellectual’ or ‘celebrity academic’. They may find trespassing all but impossible to resist. Microphones are switched on, TV cameras zoom in, and ‘sound bites’ come forth, coaxed out of the commentators by journalists. So what do you have to say about philosophy, Neil deGrasse Tyson? And what about arguments for the existence of God, Professor Dawkins? I don’t think trespassing is exclusively a problem for scholars in the limelight, however, and one of my goals here is to explain why ordinary researchers often risk trespassing, too.”
“But first we must understand what the epistemological problem with trespassing is. There is not only one problem. Consider three types of problematic trespassing cases, where two different fields share a particular question:
- (a) Experts in one field lack another field’s evidence and skills;
- (b) Experts in one field lack evidence from another field but have its skills;
- (c) Experts in one field have evidence from another field but lack its skills.
“I will examine three strategies to justify acts of trespassing and thereby preserve rational confidence in trespassers’ answers to hybridized questions. Again, we are assuming some trespassers are experts in one field but encroach on another field.
- (D1) I am trespassing on another field, but that field does not feature any relevant evidence or skills that bear on my view about p;
- (D2) I am trespassing on another field, but my own field’s evidence conclusively establishes that p is true;
- (D3) I am trespassing on another field, but my own field’s skills successfully ‘transfer’ to the other field.”
“I suspect we must trespass to answer most important questions. Perhaps this means we should never trespass alone. Instead, we must rely on the expertise of others. What we need, to extend the trespassing metaphor, is an ‘easement’ or ‘right of way’ for travel beyond our fields’ boundaries. The right of safe passage could be secured by our collaboration with cross-field experts. Imagine your colleague is a representative source of evidence, skills, and potential criticism from another field. Even if you don’t have direct knowledge of that field, if your colleague tests out your answer to a hybridized question and tells you it sounds right to her, then your view is appar- ently more reasonable than it would have been otherwise. Trespassers may gain reasonable beliefs by engaging in certain kinds of discussion with cross-field colleagues.”
While this paper raises some interesting issues, its main goal seems to be protecting the turf of academic subfields.
COVID19 and climate change
Complex issues such as COVID19 and climate change, with massive policy implications, introduce a whole host of additional issues related to epistemic trespassing. I’ve written many blog posts on expertise [link].
Here is a pet peeve of mine: many academics who label themselves as ‘climate scientists’, even though their degrees might be in economics, biology, whatever, have no compunction about speaking publicly, and responding to reporters’ queries, on climate topics well outside their expertise. They use their status as ‘climate scientist’ to expound on aspects of climate science, economics, policy, whatever, that they know next to nothing about.
The flip side of this coin is the dismissal by academics of the likes of Steve McIntyre, who has brought much needed expertise in statistics and data probity to the field of paleoclimate.
Moving on to COVID19, the problems with COVID19 projections were summarized in a number of posts in the most recent CoV Discussion Thread:
- Don’t believe the COVID models – that’s not what they’ for [link]
- Mathematical models to characterize early epidemic growth: A review. [link]
- On the predictability of infectious disease outbreaks [link]
- Dramatic reduction in COVID disaster projections [link]
- America’s most influential COV model just revised its estimates downward – but not all models agree [link]
- How can COVID models get it so wrong? [link]
James Annan has another good blog post: Model calibration, nowcasting and operational prediction of the COVID19 pandemic
“Turns out that calibrating a simple model with observational data is much the same whether it’s paleoclimate or epidemics. The maths and the methods are much the same. In fact this one is a particularly easy one as the model is embarrassingly linear (once you take the logarithm of the time series).”
“The basic concept is to use the model to invert the time series of reported deaths back through the time series of underlying infections in order to discover the model parameters such as the famous reproductive rate R. It’s actually rather simple and I am still bemused by the fact that none of the experts (in the UK at least) are doing this. I mean what on earth are mathematical epidemiologists actually for, if not this sort of thing? They should have been all over this like a rash. The exponential trend in the data is a key diagnostic of the epidemic and the experts didn’t even bother with the most elementary calibration of this in their predictions that our entire policy is based on. It’s absolutely nuts. It’s as if someone ran a simulation with a climate model and presented the prediction without any basic check on whether it reproduced the recent warming. You’d get laughed out of the room if you tried that at any conference I was attending. By me if no-one else (no, really, I wouldn’t be the only one).”
While I haven’t dug into COVID models at all, with regards to model calibration and nowcasting my experience in weather forecasting is even more relevant here than climate modeling. For operational weather prediction (say for hurricanes), there are several components to calibration of the forecasts. You can calibrate the model inputs and/or the model outputs. You can calibrate the model based on historical forecasts for previous epidemics (compared with observations). You can also calibrate the model based on recent error statistics (in model inputs and/or outputs). The experiences/outcomes of each country impacted by COVID provides data to be used in calibration.
It appears that the weather/climate community has much to offer in terms of COVID modeling. Fortunately, weather and climate scientists haven’t been ‘staying in their lane,’ we’ve seen a number of COVID analyses from this community (including a few at Climate Etc.
Postnormal pandemics
The postnormal science group (Funtowicz, Ravetz, van der Sluijs et al.) have written an article PostNormal Pandemics.
“Despite the truly historic mobilization of science, our knowledge in crucial areas is still swamped by ignorance, especially on the sources of the virus but also on its progress and future outcomes. The expertise employed in COVID-19 policy advice builds on speculative assumptions on the virus itself, and how far it’s possible to control and predict how people behave.
Known unknowns include the real prevalence of the virus in the population; the role of asymptomatic cases in the rapid spread of the virus; the degree to which humans develop immunity; the dominant exposure pathways; the disease’s seasonal behaviour; the time to deliver global availability of an effective vaccine or cure; and the nonlinear response of individuals and collectives to the social distancing interventions in the complex system of communities interconnected across multiple scales, with many tipping points, and hysteresis loops (implying that society may not be able to rebound to the state it was in before the coronavirus interventions took place). These deep uncertainties make quantitative predictions speculative and unreliable.
Instead, following a pattern well known to PNS practitioners, predictions which purportedly “jarred the U.S. and the U.K. to action” can only be obtained by mathematical models that produce crisp numbers, even though these numbers have been obtained at the cost of artificially compressing the associated uncertainty. “There is no number-answer to your question,” explodes an angry medical expert to the politician trying to force a number out of him.
It would be much more effective to run our societies under the assumption that our resources should not be allocated according to a strategy of prediction and control.
More data (even ‘reliable data’) and better predictive models cannot resolve the ‘distribution of sacrifice’ which involves, among other things, the arbitration of dilemmas that appear at every scale. This cannot be delivered by artificial intelligence, algorithms and models alone. We need to pursue an adaptability based on preserving diversity and flexible management.”
Discover more from Watts Up With That?
Subscribe to get the latest posts sent to your email.
I’m not sure.
Greta Thunberg.
Area of expertise – Truanting.
Area of trespass – Climate Change.
I’ll go one better…
Models.
Area of expertise – miniature replicas of ships, buildings, cartoon characters.
Area of trespass – global warming; climate change; death numbers from Wuhan virus.
To err is human, but to make a real mess you need a computer.
Goodness sake, do you have a clue? If not mathematical models of these things, what? Wishful thinking? Nostradamus? I’m not saying any particular models is right, but I am saying there’s no other way to make predictions.
And just because the word ‘model’ has these two senses doesn’t mean one of the senses is invalid, any more than the fact that ‘dog’ has a sense referring to an animal, and a sense referring to a latch on a ship’s door or hatch, means that one of these senses is invalid.
What’s the saying? Paraphrasing: “All models are wrong, but some are useful.”
All models are wrong, but some models are wronger than others….
Jeff
I think the “stay in your lane” presentation is at risk of redefining hubris.
“While this paper raises some interesting issues, its main goal seems to be protecting the turf of academic subfields.”
Yes, that much is obvious, because there is a social contract in the sciences that sates my expertise is so unique no others may comment upon it provided I bow to the same angle. To each his own.
When others point out errors, I claim special understanding that overcomes what they think are errors. It is a form of polytheistic gnosticism determining truth by acclamation.
It also confuses schooling with education, paper with skills, and specialists with polymaths.
My grandfather used to say, “We’ll have to wait and see.”
Had we done that, the world might not now be approaching a global recession.
Just sayin’.
There’s wisdom in waiting for the truth to reveal itself over time. Then there’s foot-dragging and incompetence. For the amount of money U.S. invested in WHO, you’d think they would be able to get some eyes on the scene of a disease outbreak in a week or two. The first reported case of the virus was November 18. It took WHO “experts” until January 20 to get to the site according to their own timeline.
https://www.who.int/news-room/detail/08-04-2020-who-timeline—covid-19
Two months is a lot of waiting.
“There’s wisdom in waiting for the truth to reveal itself over time. ”
Which pretty good for an individual
“Then there’s foot-dragging and incompetence.”
That is any government or any group of people.
And particularly when talking about the vast US government of local, state, federal. AND the system of checks and balances.
Waiting at all, is not the option- and why the US has a President.
Luckily it’s said that Trump is a germophobe, which was particularly useful feature.
That he doesn’t trust China {but why, should anyone} another plus.
But I don’t think Trump even fully understood the unreliability of WHO, or Trump didn’t in first sniff, of something possibly amiss with China, and knowing WHO could be mass murderers, could have caused Trump to shutdown air travel a week ahead of when he did {which when he actually did, caused people to claim he a racist which included the WHO- and WHO rather being relieved, that there was an adult making the obvious choice, acted as child with tantrum}.
Crispin in Waterloo writes: “I think the “stay in your lane” presentation is at risk of redefining hubris.”
Not just hubris, but in fact “specialization” is a means to keep the masses – well dumb! Wisdom and the resulting power comes from being a generalist.
Those in power recognized this eons ago, and declared or promoted the idea we should all specialize. And because all these sub groups of short and narrow focus do not have a decent grasp of either the whole, or other critical factors – they can never “upset the apple cart” of a faulty or flawed system or process. (and hence never overthrow the leaders who promoted this over specialization)
Only the generalist with wide and deep understanding of many or all disciplines can truly be wise.
read this essay on the topic:
https://www.brainpickings.org/2013/03/08/buckminster-fuller-synergetics/
Fuller’s quote:
“We are in an age that assumes the narrowing trends of specialization to be logical, natural, and desirable. Consequently, society expects all earnestly responsible communication to be crisply brief. Advancing science has now discovered that all the known cases of biological extinction have been caused by overspecialization, whose concentration of only selected genes sacrifices general adaptability. Thus the specialist’s brief for pinpointing brevity is dubious. In the meantime, humanity has been deprived of comprehensive understanding. Specialization has bred feelings of isolation, futility, and confusion in individuals. It has also resulted in the individual’s leaving responsibility for thinking and social action to others. Specialization breeds biases that ultimately aggregate as international and ideological discord, which in turn leads to war.”
Fuller’s point is without challenge in the fact that we know that overspecialization of a species in the genetic sense, leads to extinction. The same applies to intellectual “knowledge”!
Climate models are inaccurate because there is no accurate climate physics model as their foundation.
Even less is known about covid19.
So the covid19 models are just personal opinions.
No science background is needed to report what has happened, and what questions need to be answered.
So-called experts are too reluctant to say “l don’t know”.
If we define the function epidemiologist as providing the information that minimizes the cost of a given epidemic, we should not ecpect, or even tolerate intellectual honesty from epidemiologists.
A plausible (to the general public) model that overstates the danger the society is facing will cause individuals to “invest” in more inoculation avoidance than would be the case if the public was told the truth. The extra caution causes a drop on R0.
The goal here is not accuracy. The goal is getting to R0<1
The penalty of refusing epistemic trespassing, is to be trapped in the dogmatic orthodoxy of the existing elite. Do not imagine that the elite is a meritocracy.
The very term of trespass one of territorial defence not open scientific discourse.
This is may patch , stay out !
“The flip side of this coin is the dismissal by academics of the likes of Steve McIntyre, who has brought much needed expertise in statistics and data probity to the field of paleoclimate.”
Exactly. And that is an all-important “flip side”. Epistemic trespassing is really just each one of chipping in with opinions and thoughts about the myriad of things happening in our human world. I wish people were all alive and open to wondering about everything – rather than drowsily and animal-like accepting life and its happenings as just what has to happen. And meekly accepting so-called experts’ words for everything.
The value or otherwise of your many varying opinions should be judged by their content : Do they make sense? Does it seem you are right? Is it proven? In previous times logic and philosophy were studies in their own right. There’s a case for again making these mandatory subjects at schools and universities – I think they used to be naturally taught everywhere (??).
Opinions by celebrities are of interest only because they are uttered by them – only fools will believe them because of that. But alas – many of us are fools.
IPCC/UNFCCC/UN
Areas of expertise: appeasement, graft, propaganda
Areas of trespass: climate science, economics, politics, free markets
They use “sexual abuse” as the polite form of rape. UN Peacekeeping forces give ISIS a run for their money when it comes to rape.
Both are equal incapable of holding their ground under fire. A lot of what the UN peace keeping force has done in the past amounts to genocide. If you create a “safe” zone and when thousands flow into it, fleeing when the killer show up is not morally acceptable option. But for the UN there “safe” zones a how the UN allows the bad guys to not have to chase everyone down, No just let them collect into the safe zone when time is right move in for the kill but make sure you give the UN time to bug out, that way you save amino for the slaughter.
And that was the last anyone ever saw of Charlie.
A still warm pile of ashes was found on his front porch, but police deny this, as well as a 30m tall Swedish girl with glowing eyes and pig tails, have anything to do with his disappearance.
A sad day and a sad mystery.
Press F to pay respects.
Axiom: All men are created equal. Corollary: All men’s opinions are equal.
All men are created equal, naked, squalling, and stupid. After that it’s dog-eat-dog competition (paean to Ayn Rand), and the Devil has taken the hindermost and marked them as His own.
I note in the paper Epistemic Trespassing the call out of particular culpable trespassers of mine, Dawkins and Tyson. I didn’t seen David Suzuki, Michio Kacu or Carl Sagan, but they belong.
It’s complicated.
In some domains that’s true. After decades of studying expert predictions, Philip Tetlock proved, to the extent that nobody has taken him down, that expert predictions about political events, the stock market, the economy, etc., are no more accurate than those that would be generated by a dart-throwing monkey. link
The psychiatrist’s secretary is often better at predicting what a patient will do than the psychiatrist is.
On the other hand, although I have expertise in electronics, I will always defer to my buddy the control system expert on matters pertaining to control systems.
So, there are two kinds of experts. One type is called an expert because of their education. The other is called an expert because of their demonstrated performance. The problem is that they are both called experts.
Then there are the experts in the mushy middle. Scientists may have taken a statistics course and they may have covered more statistics in their research methods course but scientific papers are rife with statistical faux pas. The result is that we see Monckton’s control systems expert debunking Hansen’s kindergarten feedback analysis and M&M debunking Mann’s treemometers.
When folks within a silo use stuff from outside the silo it’s perfectly justified for someone from a different silo to point out that they’re doing it wrong.
On the other hand, when some uneducated bozo criticizes an economist, she might actually be right. It’s unhelpful though. The economist might be able to provide you with some insight whereas a dart-throwing chimp never will. Just don’t bet the farm based on the economist’s predictions.
I doubt the devil is that foolish. Far better do a Faustian deal with those at the top.
Interesting to see snippet of Dr Faux-cri pretending the only uncertainty preventing him from answering was not knowing how we would respond.
Like climate it is a complex non linear system of which we have little understanding. Again we are expecting to be able to extrapolate way outside the domain of the calibrations data. With exponentials this just does not work.
Here’s my personal trespass and I see Italy settling to a weekly oscillation around constant new cases in about a week. That is without the effects of limited relaxation which will hit in about 10 days time.
the mathematical curve is an approximate fix of a simplistic model to give an idea of what unperturbed epidemics look like. That is for comparison of form and to show the break point 10 days after shutdown. so don’t start saying I’m extrapolating an exponential 😉
I am suggesting a short term extrapolation of the trend towards the line of constant new cases ( I;m not saying it will asymptote there, it will cross it even under continued shutdown, nowhere in the West has hit peak COVID, we simply traded for a smaller , later peak). We can later look for evidence of any increase due to relaxing confinement knowing the system has a delay of about 10 days.
Dawkins is NOT “trespassing” when he discusses the god hypothesis. Religious dogma is not a discipline with evidence and special skills upon which trespass is even possible. Bad example.
Wow, way to trespass.
You gotta forgive them though.
Grant A.
Dawkins doesn’t get to define the God hypothesis, though he is welcome to define his own god hypothesis. As is plainly evident from his writings, his materialistic interpretation of the world is self-trapping. Once blind to to the higher nature of the human existence, he erects and knocks down straw gods. So what?
Was he an expert in religious study, which he is not, he might have standing to comment upon it. Religious dogma is not religion, and doesn’t come close to Revelation. He thinks they are the same thing because he defines them as such. The reason he thinks they are, is because he is trespassing in terra ignotum.
Denying the existence of some sort of supreme being that controls (somehow) how the world works is not the same as denying that humans can have very meaningful experiences, sometimes alone and sometimes in groups. Marganita Lasky wrote a book (Ecstasy) about peak experiences back in the 70’s. The point she makes is that these experiences have deep meaning and significance for a person’s life, independent of whether they were interpreted as religious or not.
The ‘god botherers’ and a lot of others are looking for these experiences – we all are and it is part of what makes us human. Another human characteristic is to interpret such experiences within the framework of culture. All this does not need a GOD, and claiming there is more to religion than ‘dogma’ does not make a God nescessary.
So why do we have philosophy departments?
Please excuse my manners while I make a correction to your comment.
Dog-eat-dog, meh…happens every day.
Anti-dog-eat-dog, that’s a big idea!
Dog eat dog is not big deal.
Dogs and cats living together? PANIC!
Oreskes.
The so called experts have been wrong.
First Fauci was wrong to assume a zoonotic virus has low r0
Second the models vastly overstated deaths, likely because they mis judged the number of those infected that had no symptoms so were not tested.
OTOH, the reported statistics probably underestimate deaths, because people who die at home before they could get to a hospital are not counted. For example, there is statistical evidence per Ren’s comment below that actual deaths in the UK and Italy may be significantly more than the reported totals. Probably true in the US as well. The virus was active in the US long before testing began, so there were probably numerous deaths from it that went unrecorded in December-February.
https://www.wsj.com/articles/coronavirus-death-toll-in-europe-likely-far-higher-than-first-reported-11586896486
The part of the article dealing with the UK shows known Covid-19 deaths, total current deaths, and historical total current deaths.
You can’t compare cases against deaths, but it’s probably fair to compare deaths vs. hospitalizations, both of which are reasonably well tracked, and the hospitalization rate can be estimated from the Diamond Princess data and the early Chinese data, to the extent it can be trusted.
“OTOH, the reported statistics probably underestimate deaths,”
Covid 19 does not kill the otherwise immortal. The virus causes death to occur earlier than it otherwise would have. No rational accounting of the harm done by a premature death would treat the premature death of an infant and the premature death of one of that infant’s great grandparents as equivalently tragic events. Would our society be more or less disturbed by this pandemic if the median age of the deaths were seven months instead of seventy years?
I don’t think that the issue is entirely one of time. I would be less surprised by the death of a severely ill infant with co-morbidities than I would be about the death of a healthy grandparent.
Your point should be that the elderly are expecting to die by reason of general degeneration of body function, and hence someone with a poor life prognosis might be expected to die from a minor ailment.
But your point about infants raises an interesting question. If the median mortality age were indeed seven months, this would be a disease entirely confined to the very young. In this case we would surely apply maximum levels of protection to maternity and infant wards. But would we lock the whole of society down? Even if adults could act as asymptomatic carriers of the disease?
I doubt it….
First person to come to mind: Paul Krugman
Does he have an area of expertise? I see him comment extensively on economic issues, but given his track record I assume this is not his forte. It must be something else.
Krugman is popular with the Guardian and the NYT only because he tells them what they want to hear. He has negative expertise in economics.
He would have had to have some expertise in the first place. (Yes, yes, /sarc)
Al Gore, although it’s hard to say he’s trespassing into another field of expertise since he had none to begin with.
Thomas Friedman
Krugman is a world-class trade economist. And trade economics is an area where vast numbers of lay people simply fail to understand the basics, and so get it completely wrong.
He gets demolished every week on https://contrakrugman.com/
I thought of all those vocal Hollywood types who played someone who stayed at a Holiday Inn Express last night.
Oddly enough these same “experts” have no qualms with all of the prognostications of amateurs like St. Greta and Leonardo the Lesser or some bouncyhitball player.
See: Dunning-Kruger
Earlier this afternoon I heard or saw that New York had passed 10,000 CoVid-19 deaths.
SAY WHAT!!!????
That must be close to third of all of them! All by its sorry self!! Eh, yep, 33.5%.
CoVid-19 is not only NOT a “global” pandemic it is NOT a national problem!!
So, let’s go look.
The top ten states with the most cases constitute 75.7% of the total cases.
The top ten states with the most deaths constitute 81.1% of total deaths.
Ten states have mortality rates in excess of 4.5%, deaths/cases.
Once again, this is NOT a national problem.
It’s a problem for ten states.
Considering which ones those are it is not exactly a surprise.
Wonder why the lying, fact free, fake news MSM propaganda machine does not consider this worth mention.
You ever wonder why we don’t lockdown New York City and other hot spots and let the rest of the country carry on? This would not be the same as return to before, prudent measures must still be observed,
Over a third of those 10K NYC cases were simply made up.
N.Y.C. Death Toll Soars Past 10,000 in Revised Virus Count
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/04/14/nyregion/new-york-coronavirus-deaths.html?auth=login-email&login=email&smid=tw-nytimes&smtyp=cur
That’s very strange. There is a NYTimes article this morning about South Dakota’s cases soaring out of control because their governor refuses to issue a shutdown of their economy. They’re at 988 cases, 261 recoveries, and 6 deaths – 0.1% of population with and 43:1 recovery to death ratio so far. NYC is at 202,208 cases, 17,089 recoveries, and 10,834 deaths – 2.4% of population with and 1.6:1 recovery to death ratio.
The increased percent of population with makes sense in more densely populated areas, but how can one explain the staggeringly lower recovery to death ratio? I have a feeling you’re right, heart attacks and strokes are now being recorded as very acute cases of Covid.
Suppose someone that doesn’t have covid19 has heart attack goes to hospital and is in ICU.
Now it is well known often these patients die even if they survive for days in ICU. They might die week or two later, or month later while still in ICU.
Now suppose the patient catches covid while in hospital. Then dies few days later. We simply don’t know cause of death then. Could be the initial heart attack or could be the disease. To attribute death to covid would be incorrect.
Last week I listened to a Dr. complaining about the CDC’s guidelines on who should be listed as death by COVID-19. According to the Dr. if someone tests positive or is suspected of having COVID-19 by their symptoms then they are to put on the death certificate that they died of COVID-19 no matter what the actual cause of death. He gave an example of a person is suspected of having COVID-19, isn’t paying attention and steps in front of a bus and is killed. He would be required to put down on the death certificate that cause of death is COVID-19.
That’s more than inflating the numbers if you ask me.
Good numbers add in the “new” out break is primary center around a single plant than has 3700 employees. Those 3700 are about .4% of South Dakota population add in those 3700 will interact with at least four or more people through out their day. So yes that plant will have a fairly large effect on their numbers. Now such a plant in New York would be small plant for that state and its population.
Bet they did NOT test them for the other deadly strains of flu the most people took shot for also. The annul flu is also killing people, or at least the CDC said it would back in october to assure you got the vaccination.
And which of those states have major urban centers with highly concentrated population centers and extensive use of mass transit…which is what the Progressive urban planners have in mind for all of us…?
Look at California (huge LA population, but sprawling relatively low density housing…and the car is King) versus New York (huge NYC and nearby urban population with much higher density in multi-story stacks sharing elevators, escalators and stairwells, trains, buses, subways…all kinds of enclosed breathing space and surfaces to spread contagion…)….and which have Progressive city and/or state leadership that were advocating open borders and allowing large street-camping populations with little or no sanitation, but little mass transit and a lot more sunshine and warmer weather (LA, SF, San Diego). They are(at least for now) still doing significantly better than the NYC megalopolis.
The list of unqualified persons spouting off about “climate” is too long to show here. But talk about a bunch of buffoons- right up there with “don’t listen to fake news” (translation- only listen to me or my buddies). Thanks, but the endless babble from people with just enough knowledge to be dangerous who are telling us what next centuries weather will look like is enough to make me barf.
To compare statistics, you need to compare the number of deaths due to respiratory failure in the first quarter of 2020 with previous years in individual countries. Only such statistics can be reliable.
But that’s not remotely reliable. Death certificates in most Western countries are totally accurate. They represent underlying biases as much as anything. Time and again we here that “this disease” is the biggest killer in the West, but by far the biggest killer is old age. Yes, there’s a final disease that tips the scales, but only because we are old and lots of stuff is not working very well anymore.
That is the massive problem with COVID. Many old people die because of an infection every year, because an infection tips them over the edge. But it could be anything, and if it’s not COVID, it will be flu or a cold or an unknown virus that we never look for because its the old dying.
The simple question with COVID is: are people under 65 dying? No, hardly at all.
Sort of like blaming all earthquakes anywhere remotely close to disposal wells on the wells themselves. Ignore the violation of the 1st Law of thermodynamics, and you might believe that disposal of water causes earthquakes. But if don’t ignore the fact that even the smallest detectable earthquakes release orders of magnitude more energy than that added by water disposal, and you might begin to realize that the actual underlying cause is the natural stresses and strains in the crust.
Just like Covid deaths, the real cause of death 99.9% of the time is that the virus happened to infect someone that already had health complications.
“I suspect we must trespass to answer most important questions. ” Any time you try a question where there does not seem to be an answer you must trespass. Geologists trespassed into biology because it was so important to stratigraphy and vice-versa. Marine laboratories had as an idealistic concept, often ruined by funding and other events, to have representatives from chemistry, physics, biology, and geology. The last two are very dependent on the first two, and many biologists I know trespass, at least in their paper’s conclusions without homework, even into economics, history, politics, and so on. This may explain some of the problems with “acidification” and what is going on in scientific organizations.
The important operation is homework. That requires when looking into new areas and accepting that you are likely to be burned, and admit it when you are wrong, just like with your own expertise. If you look into the pyramid of academic departments, the bottom is composed of specialties beyond reason. And the top is bloated so much it weighs down on the bottom.
The example was given with biochemistry and molecular biology. Ecology and physiology was an older and necessary trespass. Lots of examples of trespassing by biologists into statistics, some areas almost required.
Opinions are like anal orifices, everyone has one.
Corallary: Some people are one.
Reprise – epidemiology is technically “outside my lane”, but the only relevant question is:
“Was my Covid-19 anti-lockdown assessment of ~mid-March correct or not?”
Here in Alberta, it’s looking accurate, and I suggest that it is also correct in most other locations in the world.
The Covid-19 deaths/infections ratio was initially over-estimated by the “experts”, causing the total lockdown and resulting economic disaster.
Regarding expertise, I suggest the best objective measure of one’s competence is one’s predictive track record, and the predictive track record of the global warming alarmists has been consistently wrong for the past ~40 years – every one of their very-scary predictions of runaway global warming and climate catastrophe has FILED TO HAPPEN. Nobody should believe the warmists – about anything
Furthermore, I suggest that “No rational person could be this stupid for this long” – the warmists have a covert agenda. The Green New Deal socialist ravings of the US Democratic Party now make that agenda obvious – it is the end of our Western economic model, to be replaced by the proven failures of the socialist dictatorships. The warmists are utterly incompetent climate scientists – but they are very good at inciting false public hysteria to promote their extremist political objectives – we call that treason.
Back in 2002, we wrote that runaway global warming was a false crisis, and green energy was not green and produced little useful (dispatchable) energy – both those statements are correct-to-date. We also predicted that global cooling would start by 2020-2030, and crop planting has been one-month late across the Great Plains of North America for the past two years, and there was a huge crop failure last year.
Based on my strong predictive track record to date, I’m not outside my lane – I’m keeping it between the lines. 🙂
Regards, Allan
https://wattsupwiththat.com/2020/04/13/coronavirus-the-chinese-virus-lockdowns-that-have-done-their-job/#comment-2965819
Here in Alberta, the Covid-19 lock-down has resulted a debacle.
Most of our deaths are in nursing homes – our policy seems to be “Lockdown the low-risk majority but fail to adequately protect the most vulnerable.”
Doctors are apparently reluctant to prescribe Chloroquine because of inadequate formal clinical tests, but actual clinical experience elsewhere suggests a high degree of success. “Let’s wait until we get formal studies!”
The global data for Covid-19 suggests that deaths/infections will total 0.5% or less – not that scary – but much higher and clearly dangerous for the high-risk group – those over-65 or with serious existing health problems.
“Elective” surgeries were cancelled about mid-March, in order to make space available for the “tsunami” of Covid-19 cases that never happened. Operating rooms are empty and medical facilities and medical teams are severely underutilized. The backlog of surgeries will only be cleared with extraordinary effort by medical teams, and the cooperation of patients who die awaiting surgery – patients who were too impatient…
This may look like 20:20 hindsight, but I called it this way in ~mid-March.
Regards, Allan
https://wattsupwiththat.com/2020/04/10/but-is-the-growth-of-the-pandemic-really-exponential/#comment-2964810
[excerpt]
BAD CALL – END THE LOCKDOWNS ASAP.
https://www.bbc.com/news/health-51674743
“The UK government’s scientific advisers believe that the chances of dying from a coronavirus infection are between 0.5% and 1%.”
I believe this Covid-19 estimated mortality range “between 0.5% and 1%” (deaths/infections) is ~correct for a typical country’s population distribution , and my hunch is “closer to 0.5%” – that is not very scary except if you are in the “high risk” group – over 65 years of age or otherwise high-risk (with other medical problems) – Covid-19 deaths are heavily concentrated in the high-risk group.
I still think my ~mid-March assessment of this situation was the correct one:
“Isolate people over sixty-five and those with poor immune systems and return to business-as-usual for people under sixty-five.
This will allow “herd immunity” to develop much sooner and older people will thus be more protected AND THE ECONOMY WON’T CRASH.
If tests prove positive, use chloroquine and remdesivir or other cheap available drugs ASAP as appropriate.”
With rare exceptions, we have not seen the “tsunami of cases overwhelm our medical systems”, and we have trashed our economies and severely harmed hundreds of millions worldwide who live from paycheck to paycheck. Considering the pro’s and con’s, the full lockdown was a bad call.
Regards, Allan
https://rosebyanyothernameblog.wordpress.com/2020/03/21/end-the-american-lockdown/comment-page-1/#comment-12253
[excerpt- posted 21Mar2020]
This full-lockdown scenario is especially hurting service sector businesses and their minimum-wage employees – young people are telling me they are “financially under the bus”. The young are being destroyed to protect us over-65’s. A far better solution is to get them back to work and let us oldies keep our distance, and get “herd immunity” established ASAP – in months not years. Then we will all be safe again.
I suggest the best objective measure of one’s competence is one’s predictive track record
That is why we should have so much confidence in the WHO and all the medical experts and politicians that fawningly follow the organization.
Allan, you will understand but for the “none so blind” /sarc
One large hospital in Calgary had a grand total of TWO Covid-19 patients today.
So much for the “tsunami of cases”.
Since the doctors and nurses are presently negotiating new contracts, that qualifies as a tsunami
TYPO:
FAILED TO HAPPEN
The level of galactic radiation in Oulu is rising and is already at the same level as in 2009.
But surely we can create models that let us adjust the variables and review the outcomes. Are their too many variables to allow this? Is it beyond the skill of the modelers?
Even if we create models like above, we have to ask how accurately are the results? Are the models useful?
True in 2014, true in 2020…a computer model is not the same as the real thing (“This is not a pipe”):
https://wattsupwiththat.com/2014/06/03/the-artist-as-climate-model-expert/
Spoon. The quote from the Matrix is, “This is not a spoon.”
Actually it’s “there is no spoon”
Courts will usually only list to an ‘expert’ in their given field. Problem is, that expert is usually arguing as a paid shrill for a cause for either side, to a judge that also usually has some preconceived bias, as we all do especially if it is only as a right/left issue. I have had to hire such experts, usually for a court issue, and they could honestly argue either side of the case until the cows come home. Such is the purpose of learning to debate and sometimes practicing arguing both sides of an issue.
An expert can usually argue any position nine ways to Sunday, depending on who/what is paying the best or provides for the best career advancement. Sometimes I prefer the answer from an intelligent non expert in that field, if only to get a non biased opinion since it appears all experts become biased to some degree, usually to group think and peer pressure from academia/journalism as we see in the climate fields.
Earthling2,
You tar the host of technical ‘experts’ that stand between you and defective materials and products. You castigate as ‘paid shrills’ (sic) those who keep you and yours safe. I have been subpoenaed and served as a ‘technical expert’ in a federal trial of a material supplier, because I had identified and unarguably documented improperly processed metals with variable and intermittently unacceptable properties, preventing them from being used to fabricate a variety of commercial aerospace and military flight hardware.
I am neither a ‘paid shrill’ nor a paid shill. I just did the right thing at the right time, to protect people like you. Your Welcome!
I suppose then that you were an expert witness against Roundup? Because that was how we wound up with that decision. Talk about ‘expert’ witnesses. Not that there isn’t a lot of good honest expert witness opinion available, and some cases are more black and white than others and many are real decent people with a lot of expert knowledge. Perhaps you fall in the latter, but if you can’t see a lot of expert witness in the judicial process is just a hired gun for a fee, then I doubt you know much about how the entire court process works, or expert witnesses. I rest my case.
What a sneering and evasive response you provided, Earthling2. I clearly stated I became a technical expert in a metals materials case, because I caught a supplier red handed violating critical material procurement specification requirements, supplying deficient materials for aerospace applications, and putting lives at risk. It was unambiguously and honestly the right thing to do. Further, I was subpoenaed and required to testify, giving me no choice had I wanted to decline! Finally, it had nothing to do with your slippery shist house lawyer style diversion to glyphosate herbicide, aka ‘RoundUp’. How beautifully ironic that is! If that is the extent of your defense, ‘councilor’, your case is lost. You really aren’t an ‘expert’ at logic, reason, and honesty, are you Earthling2?
Perhaps you are an honest person but your global tar brush attack and your flailing, evasive defense of same do not support that conclusion. If you can’t see that, I doubt you can be trusted to provide expert knowledge on anything else. Do you wish to try again? Or, better yet, man-up and offer an honest apology for impugning an honest man?
Don’t take it so personal j mac. I am not attacking you personally and certainly didn’t wake up this morning to pick a fight with you and do sincerely apologize if I offended you personally as per your expert abilities. Life is stressful enough these days without having to fight tooth and nail to make a point. As you point out in your individual case, you were subpoenaed to provide expert witness on someone caught red handed endangering public safety and actually putting lives at stake in the commercial aerospace military industry. That sounds like a clear case of black and white and that is a good case of where an expert opinion can seal the deal quickly with the judge/jury. And Rightly so. Perhaps many lives were saved.
But obviously in countless cases, there are expert opinions on both sides of most cases, and my analysis was only concerning how expert opinion can be utilized to sway a jury or a judge. Obviously, one of the experts must be wrong, or more aptly, on the balance of probabilities, one expert must be much more right than the other as is usually the case. Most things aren’t black and white, but sometimes those with the most money can win a case, just because they can hire so many expert witnesses. Sometimes…
I am an expert in some issues relating to my line of work/businesses, but I too could argue both sides of my expertise. I think at the end of the day, the expert witness has to go with what they personally believe to be the truth, and not just do it for the money which was my point, that many experts do so for both the win and the money. Having been engaged in a few such exercises hiring expert witnesses, one learns that experts from the same discipline can have 100% differing opinions. That is the nature of the business of experts, but some experts are complete frauds. Just consider some of the climate experts that testify in these court cases for the children sponsored actions against big oil. They are ‘experts’ but I wouldn’t call them honest or that intelligent.
Obviously to me, (but I am biased in the Roundup case) the experts that the complainants hired to accuse the Roundup product of causing cancer on a wide scale, is just plain wrong. And even if it was part right, what percentage of good has Roundup done for civilization as compared to what cancers were reportedly caused, if any? The benefits of Roundup are indisputable, although some might take issue with how Monsanto pursued some of their patent issues with small farmers before they sold their patent.
In any event, I unreservedly apologize to you if I inadvertently offended you with your expert capabilities in your specific case.
You did the right thing, councilor! Apology accepted. Case dismissed.
As for glyphosate (RoundUp), the legal cases levied against Monsanto are a travesty of justice, empowered by the World Health Organization’s (WHO) International Agency For Research On Cancer. In 2015 , WHO classified glyphosate as “probably carcinogenic in humans”, supported by several studies of dubious merit. This was in stark contrast to other health organizations and extensive studies that found no cancer risks whatsoever. WHO’s classification opened the door for every ambulance chasing lawyer in the world to bring class action suits….. and they did. Today we find the WHO once again embroiled in suspect behavior. This time, it is support of and running cover for China and their lack of honesty and full disclosure on the Wuhan virus. It seems as if WHO’s support can be bought…
I’ve personally been applying glyphosate since it came on the market back in the 70’s, because of its rapid broad leaf and grass kill and low persistence/fast dissipation. It does not do well on white clover and wild morning glory however, requiring applications of 2,4-D, especially when they are present in lawns or grass sod that you do not wish to damage. As in all such endeavors, ‘Wear your personal protection gear and follow the application directions’.
E2,
Maybe you are correct for some events, but not for all.
I can quote many instances when people have become expert because their future income depends on how good they get. My own pursuit of mineral exploration provides examples. We took a tiny company and turned it into an international success over 30 years, mainly by the adoption and steady improvement of the relevant science.
Maybe the learning we gained has given benefits to many when shared, without being labelled as trespassing.
I do not recall pressures to be biased, to cherry pick (we derided that) and so on to the list of complaints about experts, a list that seems biased because it deals mostly with academia. There are whole worlds of excitement outside academia. Geoff S
The models used in Flight Simulators, Power Plant Simulators, Refineries Simulators, etc. give Computer models a great reputation and instill trust in these Models. Models used in these applications are verified, tested to extremes and in many cases certified by government agencies. They only simulate what they model.
Some here may not be aware of the fact that the Nuclear Power Plant Simulator used by the company that designed TMI-II did NOT include modeling of an unknown leak from the top of the pressurizer or “Solid Pressurizer” operation. That is a pressurizer with no steam bubble at the top. Operators were just mandated to “Never Operate Solid.” The lack of this one small chunk of code and the lack of operator training on at power/accident operations of a NPP in Solid conditions changed the nuclear industry Greatly. To my knowledge, no other significant lapses in NPP Simulators have been discovered in the last 40 years.
How many unknown unknowns are missing from the highly valued/believed Climate Change Models. Would easily bet my entire retirement investment account that more than two equally significant factors are not in their models.
“How many unknown unknowns are missing from the highly valued/believed Climate Change Models. ”
Many, I’m sure. But the bigger problem with the models is the practice of shoe-horning CO2 into every process.
“But the bigger problem with the models is the practice of shoe-horning CO2 into every process.”
Correct – and the even bigger problem is that they have the logic reversed:
Atmospheric CO2 changes lag ocean temperature changes and atmospheric temperature changes at all measured time scales – aka “cart before horse”. The mainstream climate models are drivel.
Well you don’t need a PhD in mathematics to recognize that those affected by unemployment, in just the USA alone, outnumber confirmed cases of SARS-Cov2 worldwide 10:1. The global economic meltdown is just getting underway and it will be much worse than this virus on a societal scale.
But what do I know, I’m not an epistemologist or a sociologist who have certainly claimed responsibility for the impending economic impacts for their recommendations to policy leaders, right?
My grandfather had the biggest car dealership in Toronto. It failed by 1930 in the ‘great depression’. He jumped off the Sunnybrook Bridge, but not until 2 years later, leaving a wife and 3 children. The single most important cause of suicide is economic failure, and the lockdown bankruptcies and unemployment effects will spread themselves over the next few years with increased depression and suicide. Its a hard thing to say, but protecting the most vulnerable by shutting down the economy will, in the long run lead to not having the economic where-with-all to protect the next crop of vulnerables.
My husband and I are in the vulnerable group, and I reckon we need to take our chances.
Total unemployed is over 17 Million. One percent of that is 170,000, and to assume that less than 1 percent commit suicide or shoot their spouse, die of drug overdose or alcohol overdose if we are locked up for another month is absurd. It would be worse. But even just that number is now considered more than the worst case for COVID.
I have been following a professor on LinkedIn named Shuqing. Yang. He has a simple model for every country that works quite well generally. Of course, he is a civil engineering professor with a water resources background, and the model is a hydrology analogue.
On the demand for exact numbers:
In my Navy days a hydraulically actuated disk drive failed spectacularly. Oil spewed internally and dripped onto the floor. An angry lieutenant stormed into the computer room demanding to know why we had taken down the computer without permission. I explained that the disk drive had failed to ask permission to fail, it just did, and that set a succession of failures in motion. He demanded to know how long it would take to fix it.
“Fifteen minutes!”
So 15 minutes later he came to check on progress. How much longer?
“Fifteen minutes!”
This cycle repeated several times. Finally the lieutenant said, “You really have no idea how long this is going to take.”
“That is correct. We will advise when it is repaired.”
In the Army, I always said, there’s nothing more dangerous than a 2nd Lt with a clipboard.
The next most dangerous would be a p!ssed off private 1st class with a frag grenade!
Sounds like an expiditer.
“I need it now, regardless what you committed to provide”.
We should doubt that trespassers are reliable judges in fields where they are outsiders.
assertion from Epistemic Trespassing
Not once does the author, Ballantyne, use the word “logic” or “logical” or “illogical.”
He assumes that “thinkers who have competence or expertise to make good judgments in one field” will always do so in their particular field. This is simply not true. That is why one of the greatest English scientists, Michael Faraday, attributed his success to the influence on him, his thinking and reasoning of both people who were scientists and to outsiders.
I can show Ballantyne various examples of “reliable judges” in a particular field displaying convoluted and contradictory reasoning in their own fields. This is why an intelligent layman can legitimately ask hard questions of both a climate scientist and a virologist. He can discredit them by exposing their flawed reasoning and illogical claims without reproducing their experiments.
Michael in Dublin
You write: “… an intelligent layman can legitimately ask hard questions of both a climate scientist and a virologist. He can discredit them by exposing their flawed reasoning and illogical claims without reproducing their experiments.”
Yes.
True, reasoning based on expertise is by definition non-scientific. Even the word judgement has nothing to do with science. It may have political or legal bearing but no scientific relevance. Most researchers in virology openly state that we know very little about the virus but are learning fast. Everyone who says differently faces the burden of proof. Short,not the epistemic trespassing but “expertism” is the real problem.
“The flip side of this coin is the dismissal by academics of the likes of Steve McIntyre”
Dismissal?? They’ve called him every name in the book, yet none of them can refute his results.
I believe that science was abandoned decades ago in many fields decades ago and replaced with expert opinion.
It is becoming obvious in many fields, especially those influencing government, experts are just plain wrong. They have never been held accountable for results. Public health is a disaster even without this epidemic.
The idea that any of them can predict the future is a joke.
An expert imho is someone that can successfully predict things better than most other people. I don’t care about their education or field. For example the most successful people to ever predict the stock market are a group of computer scientists that have a background in speech recognition. They knew nothing about finance, economics, yet they could predict market better than anyone and made billions of dollars doing so.
“It’s as if someone ran a simulation with a climate model and presented the prediction without any basic check on whether it reproduced the recent warming. ”
CMIP6 springs to my mind…