Eric, Thanks very much for this! I was asked about it by some humanities friends in Pittsburgh who were alarmed. They thought I was qualified to evaluate her claims. You are more so. The benefits of Friam are clear.
Tangentially, I was recruited by an insurance company to be an actuary when I was a grad student in math based on my GRE scores. The salary promises made me curious enough to investigate. I was deeply into the theorems of measure theory, complex analysis, algebra, etc., which I liked and what I gleaned from a brief investigation of actuarial science didn't excite me. They urged me to visit them in Hartford anyway. I'm glad I didn't go. Again, i appreciate the time you spent on this. Frank --- Frank C. Wimberly 140 Calle Ojo Feliz, Santa Fe, NM 87505 505 670-9918 Santa Fe, NM On Sun, Aug 8, 2021, 2:26 AM David Eric Smith <desm...@santafe.edu> wrote: > Hi Frank, > > Only because Marcus responded…. > > This article > > https://ourfiniteworld.com/2021/08/05/covid-19-vaccines-dont-really-work-as-hoped/ > Isn’t a good start. > > I didn’t read the whole thing, so I will confine my remarks to the title > and second paragraph, relative to the reported data. > > 74% of people in the P-town outbreak had been vaccinated. What does that > tell us? Very nearly nothing. This is the like the textbook question > given to any undergrad in statistics. (And remember: “She’s an actuary!” — > be ready to take her word for things.) > > There were, if I remember the number, 60k visitors to P-town. How many of > them were vaccinated? Don’t have numbers on that. Suppose 99.67% of them > were, for the sake of making a point. 800 cases (rounded out). 600 among > the vaccinated. Suppose everyone in P-town was exposed (also not reported, > I have no idea how many were). At that rate, the number of infections > among the vaccinated would be 1%. Sounds well within the range of a > vaccine that tests as 94% effective against infection. > > Suppose that only the state average of 64% were vaccinated and everyone > was exposed. Then the fraction infected becomes 1.5%. Since P-town is a > destination for the educated and rich, and known as a gay-friendly place so > probably lefter than Mass as a whole, I would be very surprised if the vax > fraction of the visitors were not above the state average. Not least > because they were going to a party. > > How many were unvaccinated among the 60k? Again, not reported, presumably > not something one is even allowed to ask about, and so probably impossible > to know with precision and not easy to estimate. But again to make a > point, suppose the number of unvaccinated was 200 ppl. Infections among > the unvaxsed: 200. Wow! That would be 100% infectivity among the > unvaccinated. > > Suppose the fraction actually vaxxed was 50/50 and everybody was exposed. > Well, then, the vaccines were terrible; increased your chance of being > infected by 50%. But of course that would require that the unvaxsed were > also only catching delta at <2%, which is improbable. So presumably, if we > knew the other numbers, we could guess at about what fraction of people > actually had exposure. > > But then to use that, we need the correlation between degree of exposure > and vaccination status, and who the hell knows even what the sign of that > number would be? > > MY POINT (sorry to be so ugly all the time): we can find any > interpretation you like, from completely anodyne to totally absurd, from > within feasible ranges of other variables on which we have little or no > information. > > How much drama does any of this warrant? > > Well, we were told that, what, 5 people landed in the hospital? Out of > 60k visitors plus locals. Of whom 3 had preexisting problem conditions. > No reports on whether the ones with problem conditions were vaxxed. Even in > that tiny sample, we know nothing about correlation information that would > change the direction of its implications qualitatively, from moving 1 or 2 > people between categories. > > One final thing: those positive cases are outcomes of tests. I don’t > recall seeing anything on how many were symptomatic. Could be all of them, > but in many of these cohorts that use any contact tracing, it is fewer. > That’s PCR in the nose or throat. > > So really? Is the title “the vaccines don’t work as believed on the delta > variant” warranted? > > Speaking in slightly fuller sentences, what did we “expect” from > experience with vaccines up to now? The vaccines enable the learning phase > of immunity to be done and stored, so that one may or may not have > antibodies in any given quantity (variable across people and probably > usually degrades with time; six month numbers being given a a guess at a > time frame, with considerable imprecision), but one does have whatever > genetic memory there is to activate antibody-producing cells quickly. That > has been reported for about 1/2 year in dribs and drabs, and the variance > in the results gives us an idea of roughly how much uncertainty we should > have. > > So virus establishes a beachhead in the nose and throat, and rather than > taking a week and a half to figure out an immune response, during which > time it makes you much sicker, you knock it out (for most of those who do > get sick) in a few days. All this seems to me well within the range of > things that have been publicly reported. > > Zaynap Tufecki had a nice piece in the NYT a few days ago, something like > CDC should stop confusing the public. It sounds like a dramatic title, but > the content is good and sensible, and I think she mentioned part of this as > well. Let me look: > https://www.nytimes.com/2021/08/04/opinion/cdc-covid-guidelines.html > > The Crooked guys also did a nice interview with Ashish Jha from Brown, > here: > https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SddFBebSk-c > where, in addition to being asked interesting questions and given time to > give coherent answers, he was able to relax a bit and talk as if from > thought instead of from script. > > So it strikes me that, so far, we are getting small updates to how viral > attacks and immunity are relating, and a little info on distributions. > None of it seems very surprising, and the early estimates are still closer > than we have any right to hope for, given a new disease in the period of > rapid change. The fact that you can get high PCR titers in the nose of a > vaccinated person is useful to know, perhaps not predicted per se, but not > bizarre either. > > — > > I have thought, throughout the attention to these topics during the past > year and a half, that we swim in viruses all the time. We catch a cold > once every few years, and suppose that is because our exposure Is > intermittent. But I’ll bet what is going on with the ambient virosphere > looks much more like this business we are seeing with COVID than we would > ever have guessed, with the important exception that we are all naive to > COVID, and not to all the other stuff. I have wished there were time and > manpower to use this unprecedented effort at measurement, to revamp our > mental pictures and epidemiological models of how ambient viruses are > moving around. It may be that a lot of this is already known, and I am > just ignorant of it (that would be my first assumption), but I can’t > imagine all this measurement doesn’t have _something_ of a general nature > that we could learn from. > > Eric > > > > > > > On Aug 8, 2021, at 6:16 AM, Frank Wimberly <wimber...@gmail.com> wrote: > > Gail Tverberg: does anyone have an opinion about her? Based on her > career as an actuary she writes various blog posts and articles warning of > imminent disasters related to Covid, oil prices, etc. When I search for > commentaries about her I find almost nothing except items that she has > written. She is associated with "Our Finite World". > > --- > Frank C. Wimberly > 140 Calle Ojo Feliz, > Santa Fe, NM 87505 > > 505 670-9918 > Santa Fe, NM > > On Sat, Aug 7, 2021, 1:28 PM Marcus Daniels <mar...@snoutfarm.com> wrote: > >> No need for victims when there are (pandemic) volunteers. >> >> On Aug 7, 2021, at 11:43 AM, Steve Smith <sasm...@swcp.com> wrote: >> >> Marcus - >> >> The pushback on everything from low wattage lighting to mask mandates >> leaves me thinking that there is really only one thing that motivates >> certain people: That they can do whatever the hell they want and, >> crucially, that other people cannot. A living wage infringes on that >> ranking and so must be terrible. What if there were physical space for >> everyone, food for everyone, and many optional ways to invest one’s time? >> What if one didn’t need a wage at all? What if you had to decide for >> yourself what was worth doing? Heck, what if one (some post-human) didn’t >> even need food and didn’t need to reproduce? >> >> >> Sounds Utopian... erh... Dystopian... no... UTOPIAN! Uhm... I just hope >> posthumans collectively find the rest of us boring enough to leave alone >> and interesting enough to not need to extinct us. Homo Neanderthalenses >> had a long run (~.4My?) before Homo Sapiens Sapiens found our way into >> their territory and apparently ran over them with our aggressive adaptivity >> (over a period of tens of thousands of years). I suspect *some* >> trans/post humans will also have a somewhat more virulent (or at least very >> short time-constant) adaptivity indistinguishable (to us) from >> extermination-class aggression. >> >> I like the fairy tale Spike Jonze wove on this topic with HER >> <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Her_(film)>, and in particular the >> virtual Alan Watts <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alan_Watts> >> conception. But I highly doubt we might be so lucky. More likely some >> version of "the Borg" or "Cylons" or "Replicators" or (passive aggressive) >> "Humanoids" (minus the gratuitous anthropomorphism). To us, it will >> probably look more like a "grey goo" scenario. Or perhaps more aptly >> hyperspectral rainbow-goo. >> >> At the current rate of change/acceleration/jerk in technosocial change I >> may even live to see the whites of the eyes of the hypersonic train >> headlights I mistook for "light at the end of the tunnel". >> >> I'm going to go now to get my telescoping (drywall stilts) runner's legs >> fit in place of the organic ones I grew (and then abused/neglected) over >> the past 65 years. I'm holding out for AR corneal transplants for a few >> more months, I think it will be worth the long wait for the upgraded >> features and the new neural lace interface specs. >> >> - Sieve >> - .... . -..-. . -. -.. -..-. .. ... -..-. .... . .-. . >> FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv >> Zoom Fridays 9:30a-12p Mtn GMT-6 bit.ly/virtualfriam >> <https://linkprotect.cudasvc.com/url?a=http%3a%2f%2fbit.ly%2fvirtualfriam&c=E,1,ToX9SHL_B1Ax8AfT6DsuRDrH1GeA3821EoHrJDVxgsrKpUyNiuUv0WVOJqCZ-U4wflyTf-g7UdCZb7l7yM5hBHx0lTJD1fG_Wq6B_k3vFpy8Jw,,&typo=1> >> un/subscribe http://redfish.com/mailman/listinfo/friam_redfish.com >> <https://linkprotect.cudasvc.com/url?a=http%3a%2f%2fredfish.com%2fmailman%2flistinfo%2ffriam_redfish.com&c=E,1,0BDfdnUIr69GQTWqjHdPTRPgDXNJ9daZqONk6gU5WLyx3rGtZ9_NA7Yu91odYRJnCM66Fh_AyRPOVW1lPgRpgCXBd7GBqyVLWnouCBFM&typo=1> >> FRIAM-COMIC http://friam-comic.blogspot.com/ >> <https://linkprotect.cudasvc.com/url?a=http%3a%2f%2ffriam-comic.blogspot.com%2f&c=E,1,hZAtZ-SOsCEsB5OOSrCfWKhtzkc1rItlal1EH668JK84oGXr8J1p0tquCt-uYhvQb3C4Ne57gwScJrtLp_uOO-bwpXcx4JSE6yL6YLz5&typo=1> >> archives: http://friam.471366.n2.nabble.com/ >> >> - .... . -..-. . -. -.. -..-. .. ... -..-. .... . .-. . >> FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv >> Zoom Fridays 9:30a-12p Mtn GMT-6 bit.ly/virtualfriam >> <https://linkprotect.cudasvc.com/url?a=http%3a%2f%2fbit.ly%2fvirtualfriam&c=E,1,M1rKUWWDn5gTdqF_hDnTW3p9JfyzZwmmMeg5qbU9GmjJbEpkmMlgAG80ywQlLKRL-DBPbau9Tf32yRJxvLSud_2-bo_TYEI8KgnOd3bFyR0I&typo=1> >> un/subscribe http://redfish.com/mailman/listinfo/friam_redfish.com >> <https://linkprotect.cudasvc.com/url?a=http%3a%2f%2fredfish.com%2fmailman%2flistinfo%2ffriam_redfish.com&c=E,1,-fb-DH50jElEQU7kuALRVNTE58o-LZswpSoVG6U3AY3G8sOGQAz1vUmNbVMUx0Ss4cF5N-Jm366iOkDupQTuJBMeLNvED3dsGkSRB14F6EJM3VNpMBno1gyT56U,&typo=1> >> FRIAM-COMIC http://friam-comic.blogspot.com/ >> <https://linkprotect.cudasvc.com/url?a=http%3a%2f%2ffriam-comic.blogspot.com%2f&c=E,1,_tpgwFNH5aZH9tqHKPmxgJJ0cL3oKCTAStfkBcbTLJxnVgUIz-JZ_EmDAdP1AOHjYvnmrWumoSqWNwzTfb_4vqO3WWviRr2kEOJMP8Ypi7R-wbi0PiH80kmz&typo=1> >> archives: http://friam.471366.n2.nabble.com/ >> > - .... . -..-. . -. -.. -..-. .. ... -..-. .... . .-. . > FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv > Zoom Fridays 9:30a-12p Mtn GMT-6 bit.ly/virtualfriam > un/subscribe > https://linkprotect.cudasvc.com/url?a=http%3a%2f%2fredfish.com%2fmailman%2flistinfo%2ffriam_redfish.com&c=E,1,6nqVZWGHP0j-TMe4XMD9O2nHcxuEfXM-PuQP9ch6llP2SpjT6tGWx6gKTeCZL1nVUY0O8vPztWZXtHjY9ESUjqtCSsWPosMim81TSwSR32sk7fe4&typo=1 > FRIAM-COMIC > https://linkprotect.cudasvc.com/url?a=http%3a%2f%2ffriam-comic.blogspot.com%2f&c=E,1,ros1hCGo0SjFEDu2q1m-xqJtruPoFAzubnUl_1K-8CbgHRIxF7zqWElWmThueDiZrmkIgtemPDzn5ulAIMEsfJsAM7MGkTFFfVilIRPjkYEFUMc,&typo=1 > archives: http://friam.471366.n2.nabble.com/ > > > - .... . -..-. . -. -.. -..-. .. ... -..-. .... . .-. . > FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv > Zoom Fridays 9:30a-12p Mtn GMT-6 bit.ly/virtualfriam > un/subscribe http://redfish.com/mailman/listinfo/friam_redfish.com > FRIAM-COMIC http://friam-comic.blogspot.com/ > archives: http://friam.471366.n2.nabble.com/ >
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