Interview With Hannah Fry on the Mathematics of Pandemics

I had an awful lot to say about this! See the comments on YouTube:


My comments:
19:55 that R_0 of 2.5, ... This is based on some sample, but without knowing what that is, never mind the statistics of the populations it is drawn from, I can't see that the figure could have any significance at all. This is because there is such a wide variety of social situations in which people around the world live. The R_0 is not an attribute of the virus! Consider Mexico, for example, which includes DF, which is the largest conurbation on the face of the earth. There, people are gathering in front of government buildings to protest! See https://logicafterthought.blogspot.com/2020/04/un-secretary-general-guterres-thinks.html
25:52 Your risk of dying from the coronavirus is about the same as your risk of dying in the next year (if there were no coronavirus, obviously.) So the coronavirus is _as_ dangerous as the sum of _all_ the other threats to your life in the next year? 😀 But seriously, what proportion of those threats involve being hospitalised in a country like England and potentially being exposed to a lethal antibiotic-resistant 'superbug'? This is what victims of serious road traffic accidents are exposed to, along with fatal errors made in the operation of IV dosage meters, which, it has been said, kill as many people every year as die in road accidents. See https://logicafterthought.blogspot.com/2020/02/more-from-cambridge.html
36:43 On decisions for the good of the many: this brilliant film explains the difference between AI and humanity: https://youtu.be/0KtrQJcKeyk See also https://logicafterthought.blogspot.com/2020/03/coronavirus-war-against-humanity.html https://logicafterthought.blogspot.com/2020/03/jade-giving-example-of-how-bad-idea-can.html especially the discussion of the repugnant conclusion.
40:10 We need more than just the data on the spread and extent of infection, we need accurate statistics on the mortality. A human being is a complex system, and death is always a complex of distinguishable causes. But the statistics don't tell us very much at all about that complex. See https://youtu.be/p_AyuhbnPOI and https://logicafterthought.blogspot.com/2020/03/jade-giving-example-of-how-bad-idea-can.html

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Stefan Molyneux on Resource Based Economy

Image
This is an interesting discussion. What most people don't realise is that capitalism as we practice it now wastes 99.9% of the human and material resources we currently use. Once you realise that, the problems raised by the idea of gift or resource-based economies become much more tractable. At  10 minutes 30 seconds  the discussion turns to the way we treat our family and friends differently. We don't charge our nearest and dearest. At this point Molyneux brings in Neo-Darwinian evolution to explain why there is this difference between the way we treat our kith and kin to the way we treat everybody else. I guess he will go on to argue that this is because we evolved to be like this, otherwise we would not have survived. He will presumably say that this is human nature and because it is genetically determined, nothing we can do short of a programme of eugenics and euthenasia will change that. Well, ... you know what my answer to that will be, ... something along the lines:
Read more

Sabine Hossenfelder - Lost in Math

Image
Sabine's book,  Lost in Math published in 2018. See  Rebecca Smethurst on the Crisis in Cosmology . Here's an interview on the subject of the book: At 16 minutes 27 seconds on aesthetics in a theory. I think you should worry first and foremost about whether or not it works, otherwise you are not doing empirical science. At 19 minutes 19 seconds on whether there would be better ways to advance physics other than by building the next generation of super high-energy particle collider. This is similar to military spending and it's really just an artefact of Keynesian monetary theory: that you can create 'wealth' by employing men to dig holes in the road and fill them up again. Of course you are not creating real wealth, you are destroying it and creating fake money. The upshot is that the better ways of spending much, much less money on encouraging sound scientific teaching and research are not of any interest, because they don't employ nearly so ma
Read more

Nikola Tesla and the End of The World

Image
At  1 minute 21 seconds  the building in the background, in Trafalgar Square , as she says "There is a story in our family that my great grandfather worked with Nikola Tesla, ..." is ... ... what? Hint: it is near to a statue of George Washington, a replica donated by the  Commonwealth of Virginia in 1921 .  See  War Crimes . Watch all four episodes of  Nikola Tesla and the End of The World  and then watch this: And on the meaning of the word sovereignty see: On the Mason-Dixon Line, the "boundary of slavery" in the American colonies, it might be insightful to compare the  Britannica  and  Wikipedia  entries and see where they differ. Then, especially if you're my daughter, see  On Feminist Genealogy . Then see this documentary about Mark Knopfler and what motivates his music. There's a nice bit at  17 minutes  about where songs come from, and what happens to their origin, and the role of Town Planners like my father, in this process, part
Read more