Category Archives: Web Article Review

sirens on emergency vehicles: “more harm than good”?

I knew it – all those sirens on ambulances and fire trucks tearing around town might not be improving outcomes. They are bad for our hearing (especially for the people working on the trucks) and might startle drivers into making mistakes or sudden unpredictable moves. Sure, the idea is that if you are having a heart attack or stroke the second count. But according to this article at least, the data just don’t support the idea that those sirens are getting the paramedics to you faster.

Americans love our sirens. When I lived in Singapore for a couple years, one thing I noticed was that police, fire trucks (which were often more like vans), and ambulances didn’t use sirens much. Now, Singapore tore down most of its historic buildings (which you could argue is sad), which means its buildings are mostly very modern standardized high rises. I think that is one reason they don’t need the big fire trucks. Their streets are wide and well maintained (this is not great for pedestrians or people on bicycles). They also do congestion pricing on a major scale so they just don’t have the traffic we have (I support this, but you could argue it is inequitable because the rich can afford to drive while everyone else takes public transportation. The public transportation is very good and reliable however.) Sirens aside, I found Singapore awful in terms of urban noise pollution and wore ear plugs much of the time I was there. The noise didn’t seem to bother most of the locals or people from nearby countries.

tongue eating parasites

In Charlie Stross’s Laundry Files books, there are horrifying demon parasites from alternate dimensions that can eat your tongue (and, um…other body parts – why spoil it?) and live in your mouth, while turning you into a sort of zombie. A horrifying idea, but these books are fun, tongue-in-cheek (oops…) highly entertaining and recommended (by me). Anyway, it looks like he got the idea from an IRL horrifying parasite that is about a third of an inch long and can indeed eat your tongue and live in your mouth – if you are a fish. Gross.

Did productivity triple during the pandemic?

I’m hearing claims that “productivity tripled during the pandemic”, and maybe this is the computer and internet and mobile chickens finally coming home to roost and deliver on the promises made way back in the 1990s. Maybe there is some truth to this, but it seems much more likely that the denominator contracted suddenly (hours worked) than that the numerator suddenly expanded.

Here’s one graph I have seen referenced.

What could be going on here? Well I don’t know, you should consult the experts. But of course I can speculate:

  • Lower-productivity (economic output measured in dollars per hour worked, not in the worker’s sense of satisfaction, sanity, or self-worth) jobs suddenly disappeared, and higher-productivity ones (reverse caveats above) were left, so average productivity went up.
  • I’ve heard it suggested tat workers who still had jobs suddenly had no commuting time, so they worked some extra hours, and got more done but didn’t necessarily report the extra hours worked to their employers. I might buy this as a marginal, short-lived effect. Maybe a few young go-getters did this, but certainly not us middle-aged parents who suddenly had small children bouncing off the walls 24-7.
  • I will buy the idea that workers were more productivity with the new software (Microsoft Teams, Zoom, etc.) than they would have been in the same situation with software and communication options available a few years ago. I’m not sure I buy into the idea that they were more productive at home with these tools than they would have been in the office.
  • Maybe there was a sort of mania of productivity for the work-from-home set at the start of the pandemic, for 2-3 months or so. Then it crashed back to earth, which you can sort of infer from the limited number of data points here.

So no, the data are interesting but I am going to say the singularity did not occur last year. I think there may have been a bump in average productivity per (remaining) worker when some workers just disappeared from the economy, which is not a net positive, and I think there may have been a short-term mania among work-from-home professionals that is now feeding into our widespread burnout situation a year and a half or so down the line, and that is not a long-term positive. I do think the rapid/non-voluntary adoption of new software and communication tools on a massive scale probably gave a bump to technological progress, which might pay longer-term dividends.

The pandemic also gave a sudden boost to biotechnology, which may ultimately end disease as we know it, create unimaginably horrible weapons that kill us all, or both.

Drug violence and the Netherlands

A lot of the violence in the U.S. and around the U.S. border if fueled by the drug trade. With drugs illegal, there is just so much money to be made that it is worthwhile for organized crime to form, heavily arm itself and take large risks to move those drugs and make that money. South of the border, organized crime is so heavily armed it is able to intimidate the authorities. North of the border, law enforcement has become militarized and heavily armed in response. This results in a balance of power but also one of the world’s most violent countries that is also prosperous and supposedly peaceful.

That’s my view of the U.S. But is it happening elsewhere. Yes, according to Der Spiegel, in the Netherlands. This might seem surprising, because the Netherlands is known for decriminalizing soft drugs (cannabis, hashish – wait, isn’t that just a kind of cannabis? – and now apparently synthetic drugs like ecstacy.) What is left though is hard drugs, specifically cocaine. Cocaine smuggling and trading is leading to similar violence to what we see in the U.S., although on a much smaller scale. If I read the article correctly, they have around 20 drug related murders per year. That is 20 too many, but it also happens in a month in any sizable U.S. city, so there is no comparison.

I think the U.S. should legalize, regulate, and tax soft drugs right away. We should get a health care system that provides physical and mental health care to people with drug problems. But what to do about the hard drugs? I don’t know, but I still think the violence may be more evil than the drug-related social problems. Just take the market away from the criminals first and then go from there.

gain-of-function research

According to Vanity Fair, a lab in New York collaborated with the Wuhan Institute of Virology to “enhance a bat coronavirus to become potentially more infectious to humans”. I personally don’t care about the “lab leak hypothesis” at this point. It is clear that this type of research is common now and probably happening all over the world. It needs to be tightly monitored and controlled or we may be in for a bleak future.

what’s new with fish?

Our World in Data has a sprawling and data-dense article on everything to do with fish, fisheries, and aquaculture. It’s well worth digging into if you have five or six hours, but I could stare at the pictures alone for an hour if I actually had that kind of time.

Here were a few highlights for me:

  • Some species are really in trouble, sharks in particular, but on balance the overfishing situation has improved significantly over the past decade or two. When looked at by weight, about 80% of fishing is sustainable, and when looked at by individual fisheries (which vary in size), about 2/3 is sustainable. Tuna, in particular, is pretty well managed these days.
  • They dug into a particular paper which the media summarized as “the oceans will be empty by 2048”, explain why that didn’t even make sense as a summary of what the authors intended at the time, and then explain why this conclusion no longer holds with better data on fish stocks as opposed to just fish catch.
  • Fish catch has largely stabilized over the past few decades while aquaculture has boomed. Aquaculture has become much more efficient – some wild fish are still used to feed animals, but this has declined and animal feed has become more plant-based. Also, environmentally-motivated not-quite-total vegetarians should feel pretty good about eating farmed mussels, clams, and oysters.
  • The most damaging forms of fishing, such as bottom trawling, have declined, although they are still in wide use in developing countries.

Fish are the classic example often used to teach stocks and flows – they illustrate how time lags and feedback loops can lead to counterintuitive results if you are just eyeballing the trend in one particular flow, rather than gaining an understanding of the underlying system structure and how that explains its behavior. This is one reason why the simplistic science communication we have had during the Covid crisis has been ineffective, in my view. Unfortunately, data (sometimes called “facts”, but that assumes we can accurately measure the state of the world, which we never can with 100% uncertainty) doesn’t just transform itself into good policy and good decisions. The media seems to create this expectation in people, and then I think they are disappointed and confused when the story seems to change and evolve from day to day. At some point, they conclude that a made-up opinion is as likely to be accurate as the garbled message coming from the scientists/or and policymakers. And then of course, some cynical people exploit this disillusionment for their own cynical purposes.

“Disease X”

Are you worried that nobody is prepared for the next big pandemic? Have no fear, there is a group preparing to “advise the WHO on developing a framework to define comprehensive studies” about that. And after that, the WHO is going to be “developing policies and enhancing preparedness” about it. I am sure this will not take very long!

It seems like the UN and the WHO should be the organization to lead this effort globally, and creating new bodies in parallel would be redundant and counter-productive. But the UN approach did not seem to work very well this last time around. There are also the intertwined risks of natural pandemics, biological warfare and biological terrorism that need to be dealt with, and the WHO does not seem to be the agency to deal with these as existential threats. It seems to be more about representing the world’s under-represented people and countries at the table where these things are discussed.

In the U.S., our existing agencies (CDC, customs, FEMA, etc.) did not deal with this threat effectively. Again, nobody wants to just make new redundant agencies, and nobody wants to just turn the thing over to the military industrial complex. But it seems like we need to do something. Maybe this is why Obama created the “white house office of pandemic whatever” to try to coordinate or at least understand all this. Not a new parallel agency, but a new layer of oversight or at least a watchdog. The government grows this way, and the new growth may be healthy, but we never prune out the dead underbrush.

the (thing everybody calls the) Nobel Prize in economics

This year’s Nobel prize for economics, which we are supposed to call the “Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences”, is for a method of identifying natural experiments in data. The importance of this is to get over the “correlation is not causation” hump and actually be able to make some statements about causation. In my very simplistic understanding, you would find at least two data sets where at least two variables are correlated in one but not the other, and the state of the system they represent is roughly the same except for one other variable. Then you can infer that other variable had some role in causing the correlation or lack thereof. This is how you design an experiment of course, but in this case you are looking in existing data sets for cases where this occurred “naturally”.

That’s my simplistic understanding. Let’s look at how Nature describes it.

In 1994, Angrist and Imbens developed a mathematical formalization for extracting reliable information about causation from natural experiments, even if their ‘design’ is limited and compromised by unknown circumstances such as incomplete compliance by participants3. Their approach showed which causal conclusions could and could not be supported in a given situation.

Nature

It seems like this would have applications well beyond economics and social science. For example, ecology, and environmental science in general, where there are just so many variables and complex interactions that setting up randomized controlled experiments in daunting. (Although it can be done – in ecological microcosms, for example). It must have evil applications too of course, from advertising to politics.

The Metaverse (what is it?)

This supposedly influential article from January 2020 (remember that innocent time?) is called The Metaverse: What it is… But at the end, you are still not quite sure what it is. It will involve references to Snow Crash and Ready Player One, obviously. It will be the successor to the current internet. It will be interoperable between platforms and technologies, and it will be always on and always accessible. It will not be a “virtual world”. Okay, I have to admit that is exactly what I thought it would be.

There are a couple things I can imagine coming in the near future. One is much better video conferencing using avatars with facial expressions and eye contact. Those of us who have participated in the last year and a half of mostly remote work have learned that video conferencing has come a long, long way, but this is a key next step to make it more engaging and realistic. I still think augmented reality has to be a big deal (see Rainbow’s End). This will project an additional layer of information/content onto the real world, which I personally am looking forward to although I can imagine it becoming addictive and making the un-augmented real world seem dull and ultimately be neglected (see Rainbow’s End). We just need the right sort of unobtrusive glasses or visor to make it work in the short term.

People will be able to live much farther off the (physical) grid if that is what they want to do, and real-world cities might suffer as a result. On the other hand, real-world cities might become even more interesting than they are now. Cities are information and experience-rich, after all.

who goes Nazi?

This is a 1941 article in Harpers, and be warned parts of it don’t read as politically correct today.

Kind, good, happy, gentlemanly, secure people never go Nazi. They may be the gentle philosopher whose name is in the Blue Book, or Bill from City College to whom democracy gave a chance to design airplanes—you’ll never make Nazis out of them. But the frustrated and humiliated intellectual, the rich and scared speculator, the spoiled son, the labor tyrant, the fellow who has achieved success by smelling out the wind of success—they would all go Nazi in a crisis.

Believe me, nice people don’t go Nazi. Their race, color, creed, or social condition is not the criterion. It is something in them.

Those who haven’t anything in them to tell them what they like and what they don’t—whether it is breeding, or happiness, or wisdom, or a code, however old-fashioned or however modern, go Nazi. It’s an amusing game. Try it at the next big party you go to.

Harpers, 1941

What’s interesting to me is the idea that members of the American upper class having garden parties at the time seemed to contemplate the possibility of America itself “going Nazi”. And it is the whims of a very small group of upper class people who seem to get to decide whether the rest of us in the vast masses “go Nazi” or not.