Tag: CoVid19

Numbing Numbers

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On Epidemic, Ronald Klain talked about how long a shutdown may last.
“I’m asked this question when I’m on TV all the time, what’s the date, what’s the date? But this discussion about the date is the wrong discussion, the question is, what are the preconditions that we need to have in place before we can reopen large swaths of economic activity?”
That’s a harder question. The CoVid19 situation is like a Sudoku board with very few numbers filled in. If that’s a nine this might be a four which makes that a two—shit that can’t work. There are so many interchangeable parts it’s easier to ask, ‘what’s the date?’ To get away from ‘what’s the date’ questions we can add one more small step, asking why. ‘Why’ gets us to answer. For example, why is social distancing six feet? Is this a case like a power law where the bulk of the results come from one source? For example, when researchers looked at what size particles passed through what size fabrics, “0.02 micron Bacteriophage MS2 particles (5 times smaller than the coronavirus)“, a surgical mask stopped 89% of the particles, a vacuum bag 86%, and a cotton blend t-shirt stopped 70%. Not bad. But when they doubled up, masks improved to stopping 89% and shirts to 71%. Small relative increases. Is social distancing like that? Six feet is like wearing a mask made from a cotton shirt? Maybe not. The gas cloud research rather than aerosol or droplet research—the six feet origin work was done in the 1930’s—hints that viruses could travel twenty-seven feet in the air. It’s hard to not recommend something other than ‘when we hear numbers we should ask why‘ but there’s so much ambiguity that’s all we can say with confidence. As for dealing with the here and now, here’s how to gamble with the coronavirus.

Gambling with CoVid19

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Bias warning, My wife and I can work from home, my kids kinda like homeschool (but really miss their friends) and I wiped down the groceries in the garage. 

It’s always helpful to ask, has someone faced my situation before? The answer is often yes. Rory Sutherland thrives at this.

On recent podcasts from Deep Dive (#249) and Wharton Moneyball (April 1, 2020) there were two very good steps to understanding anything with uncertainty.

Wharton Moneyball takes its name from Michael Lewis’s Moneyball. That book shed light on using advanced statistics to find other ways to win baseball games, that walking to first after a full count was actually better than hitting a single to first on the first pitched ball. Moneyball thinking has extended to new areas like basketball, movies, and Jeopardy.

On Wharton Moneyball, Adi Wyner spoke with Alan Salzberg who mentioned that he’s starting looking at CoVid19 deaths rather than cases. The former takes longer to materialize in number form but is better than the former which is mostly a product of testing. It’s trading a sampling error for a time lag.

“It was what we would generally call ‘garbage data’. A confirmed case  might me it was confirmed because someone came to the hospital and was already sick.” Alan Salzberg

Ok, good so far.

We need good data (walks instead of hits) but then Alan goes too far. The virus is mostly airborne and mostly won’t bother someone if it lands on a surface someone might touch and then finds a path into their body. That’s a lot of ifs. “Is that enough,” Salzberg wonders, “It stays for a little while, but in my mind I don’t think that should be a worry. I think you should wash your hands, and I’ve been doing that and I try not to touch my face a lot. But I think being ridiculously uptight about it is kind of crazy.”

Ok, that’s fine if we had better data.

But we don’t. Instead of six feet we might heed caution and stand at least twenty-seven feet apart. What’s the R0? How long is someone infected and asymptotic?

Ok, those are good questions.

There’s a lot of unknowns here and on Deep Dive, Matt (@PlusEVAnalytics) talked through what we can do when there are so many unknowns.

Think of Tom Brady’s 2020 over-under passing line of 4,256 passing yards, or 266 yards per game. His last four years totaled; 4057, 4355, 4577, and 3554. But with Tampa Bay he’s got better receivers. And he wants to prove to everyone that he’s still got it! And he wants to do it without Belichick!! Yeah!!!

But how much do those things count for? Like how much we know about CoVid19, we don’t know. Matt gives us a guide though. Do the things we don’t know make one outcome more likely? With age, ambiguity, competition, injury and so on, the unknown makes the under much more likely.

Matt credits much of this thinking to Taleb but the concept of sports and gambling make it clear. It seems like the unknown parts of the CoVid19 pandemic tilt the outcomes in favor of what’s much worse. Good data is a necessary start but ambiguity must be considered too.

Latest book: Idea Trails, 50 ideas from blogging the last four years.

Quarantine Education

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Shane Parrish asked, “What are some of the second and subsequent order consequences of covid-19 that you foresee with 80 percent confidence?”, how things would be different from the quarantine for CoVid19. It’s a good question to ask, if students participate in home school what else will change. A running list.

  • Better chronotype matching. Morning people get to do school in the morning, night owls at night. My oldest daughter gets two extra hours of sleep and goes to math class in her pajamas.
  • Better resources. We’ve taken drawing class from Mo Willems and learned about animals from the Cincinnati Zoo and Botanical Garden staff. My kids had great teachers but online they have access to the best ones.
  • Teaching young people. Though I haven’t seen much of this yet, it’s coming. Many instructors comment that they didn’t really understand something until they taught it. This can be true for kids at home too.
  • Learning technology tools. My younger daughter dictates her homework rather than typing it which she could do whereas in school she would use a pencil. If tools shape our thinking she’s thinking in new ways.
  • Plato’s cave and school. That same younger daughter needed help with answering why we have a leap day. That led to a talk about why we have the Georgian Calendar and not one that uses a leap week. Which also applies to why we do school-school and not home-school.
  • Asynchronous communications. If the future of work requires some asynchronous skill then this quarantine has been good practice.
  • Intrinsic motivations. My kids follow a program put forth by their school but this is mostly finished before lunch and they can move onto more enjoyable things. My guess is that a long-term homeschool arrangement would break the link between learning and school and create a hub where learning is connected to school, but many other things as well.

One week down and we are doing well.

Hand Washing Design

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Update, April 25, 2020: The Behavioral Insights team researched which infographics communicated the best. 

John Gruber posted at Daring Fireball that when he washes his hands, he turns the water off and feels less rushed and more likely to wash for the CDC suggested twenty seconds. “It’s very clear to me after just two days that doing so makes it far more natural to spend more time actually sudsing your hands up. When you leave the water running, it subconsciously puts you in a bit of a rush, because you know you’re wasting water.” 

Rationally whether the water runs or not shouldn’t matter. The most important thing (mid-March 2020) is to kill the harmful viruses and bacteria people pick up during their (limited) social exposures. Though the chances are small, the consequences are the largest. However we aren’t rational and we don’t always wash our hands. 

At one teaching hospital, the best predictor of hand-washing was attending physicians. If they washed, the medical students followed. Multiple meta-analysis (meta-meta-analysis?) suggest the best option might be “multifaceted” nudges, educational materials, and bedside hand sanitizers. Another showed that performance reviews (personal wealth) and access to hand sanitizer (ease) had the strongest though-not-super-duper-strong effects. Incentives (personal health) also kept hand-washing levels high after the 2003 SARS outbreak.

What’s so interesting is that even though one path is clearly better, people need help following it. Hygiene is like diet or investments. 

This randomized control trial in India found a way to increase hand-washing 30X, even twelve months after the intervention. 

A study of 802 Kenyan households offers the model that makes the most sense to me for why people do anything. Those, “significant predictors of observed hand-washing behaviour: having the habit of hand-washing at particular junctures during the day, the motivated need for personal or household cleanliness, and a lack of cognitive concern about the cost of soap use.” 

Like finches, people are influenced by their environment. If we want to encourage actions like hand washing, social distancing, and factfullness we should design conditions that make those thing easy.

Disagreeing in a Crisis

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Recently on Twitter there’s been a trend of “it’s not that bad” tweets gong around. One said that half of Italy’s CoVid19 fatalities were people with three or more existing illness while people with no other illnesses existed in less than one-percent of deaths. Among the ‘maybe it’s not that bad’ list are Elon Musk, Phil Hellmuth, and Bill Gurley.

No one is saying doing nothing, but many are saying to look at the costs. Many are saying to think like economists. 

With hindsight we’ll see that someone had the right model from day one. It likely won’t be you or me. However we get to sharpen our thinking (skill) rather than be right (luck).

So, what might account for these experts in one domain to be right in this one too? 

  • Data. It could be that there’s so little good data that we face an elephant problem. The Italy statistics look like this. The China statistics look like this. One country sees a pandemic, one an outbreak. 
  • Uncertainty. Maybe I’m too confident in my projections of outcome distributions. It could be way better or way worse than I expect right now. 
  • Salience. It could be we’re all caught up against a ‘common enemy’ with nonstop news fanning the flames. 
  • Opportunity costs neglect. People tend to overemphasize the importance of what comes to mind and dismiss what else they could spend money or time on.
  • Stock data. The stock market thinks that immediate future earnings will be significantly less. Could this be a bad proxy? 
  • Outcome severity. Maybe there will be many more with ‘zero effects’ than ‘death/ruin’. If that’s the case then CoVid19 edges more towards “driving across the country” and away from “contracting Ebola.”
  • Existing immunity. The virus has already spread through many people and those that have survived are resistant to antibodies. The influence like illness data that’s coming out might suggest this. 

It could be that Musk, Gurley, and Hellmuth were wrong in their consideration of all the details. However the process of considering why is right. Our Phantom Tyler Cowen suggests we write out why the opposing side is correct. 

There’s a lot here about arguing well and the critics of that idea say that doing is so much more difficult than discussing it. In this crisis is an opportunity.

(I use luck in the Mauboussin sense of anything out of one’s control. For example, if this were a physics problem like ‘where will planet X by at time t we would have the answer for the CoVid19 pandemic).