Covid-19 and Reactionary thinking

I've been tweeting a lot more. Probably because I think the world has gone a little sideways, but mostly not because of the virus. I know in times of uncertainty people have a tendency to be more fearful (I have noticed people struggle with uncertainty). Others will try to profit and superimpose their previously held viewpoints on the situation in a way that is more opportunistic and transparent than I am used to seeing. I thought this was particularly true of this NY Times piece about how as early as 2006, the United States federal government found that it was 700,000 ventilators short in the event of a pandemic. Rather than just buy more ventilators, it tried to contract with medical device companies to produce some very cheaply. Companies submitted buds, but it wasn't until 2010 (a few months after the H1N1 outbreak, so already too late for the next pandemic) that a contract was signed with a company. So it took  4 years of the government dicking around from realizing it needed 700,000 ventilators to signing a contract to procure those ventilators. Remember, design and production are still years away. 

The lowest bid was for 15% the going rate of ventilators by a very small, unproven company. Why 15%? Apparently the government really didn't feel like this emergency surplus warranted paying retail rates. To me, this is a little like (as I tweeted) leaving my car on the side of the road gasless and waiting until gas prices drop below $3 before I gas it up again. Like knowing that you don't have fire extinguishers for your 50 story building, but waiting until they go on sale for 85% off until you buy any. This alone is not the craziest part of the story to me, in terms of shocking government decisions.

$6M government dollars later, the contracted for medical device company got stalled at FDA approval in 2012 (apparently because it didn't work on infants), but the NY Times article tried to make it seem like the failure was because the company was intentionally purchased by a bigger company to stifle innovation (no sources were named to support this proposition). The contract was finally cancelled in 2014.

But now 8 years after it realized it was short 700,000 ventilators and not being able to get a single one (at least according to the NY Times), instead of just buying ventilators on the open market the federal government again chooses to contract with a medical device producer, Philips. I can't really tell from the gaps in the NY Times timeline, but I think that contract happened around 2014. Philips has also failed to produce any usable ventilator in the past 6 years. Why? The FDA: "It wasn’t until last July that the F.D.A. signed off on the new Philips ventilator, the Trilogy Evo. The government ordered 10,000 units in December, setting a delivery date in mid-2020."

The NY Times take on this, with zero facts to support their argument:

The stalled efforts to create a new class of cheap, easy-to-use ventilators highlight the perils of outsourcing projects with critical public-health implications to private companies; their focus on maximizing profits is not always consistent with the government’s goal of preparing for a future crisis.

Whoa kay! Sounds like a defamation lawsuit to me, especially since Medtronics (the parent company of the original contracting party) is not in any way a public figure under the Supreme Court standard from NY Times v. Sullivan and its progeny.

People have a lot more spicy takes nowadays. The arguments I see most from though-leaders are that these circumstances call for extreme measures, and don't worry we can just trust them that what they're saying is necessary and if we don't comply we lack empathy and are team virus and should be fined or imprisoned. At least, that's according to my local subreddit that is saying that surfers who want to still surf during this pandemic are "entitled fucking children" lacking in "empathy".

I've seen other people savagely (gleefully, I think) tear apart Richard Epstein after this New Yorker interview. Not his ideas, mind you, just him, or perhaps in fairness laser focusing on some ideas they disagree with and ignoring his other points.

I guess that's the most common thing I have seen that scares me, much more than the virus -- that people are no longer willing to attack other people's ideas, they seem to be only attacking people. And the people they attack are people who do not share the same "feelings" they do about what is happening.

Because the truth is even the data we have is extremely all over the place (even when you exclude the the Chinese data and try to account for differences in culture, etc.). If you hear anyone say that they know what is happening, you can know for a fact that there is no definite evidence to prove practically anything. We are in the extreme position of flying blind on almost every level.

So why attack each other personally and not the ideas? And here's what I mean using Epstein as an example. I think the main issue that people seemed to take with Epstein is that he said that viruses evolve, and tend to (1) evolve in response to their hosts responses and they (2) evolve to weaker strains, which I don't know anything about but a quick google turned up innumerable sources that support number 1, including this peer reviewed article from two years ago in the journal of Molecular Biology and Evolution. And again without spending too much time on this issue, I found in support of number two this and this. But read the interview, it's crazy how much of a set-up hit piece it is and how cherry-picked their own experts are to contradict Epstein. They knew ahead how they wanted to discredit Epstein, not just his ideas but to discredit him as a person. Why? Because Epstein made the mistake of asking what is the basis for all of this non-democratic action from the executive branches in this country:

Well, I’m saying in effect, by this particular point—this is not the medical side—is after you start declaring emergencies you have time for reflection and adaptation and modification, which you don’t have in a fire case. So the political point is one which essentially says, when you see governors of three major states putting out statements that their experts have said this, that, and the other thing is a result, and you don’t see the studies and you can’t question the assumption, I regard that as a serious breakdown in the political process. So my view on that particular point is I’d like to know which of these studies they’re relying on. If it’s the New York Times studies, then I thought that that study was mistaken for the reasons that I was trying to give you a moment ago, which is that as the virus becomes more apparent, adaptive responses long before government gets involved become clear.

The craziest thing is he doesn't even criticize them for acting with urgency, he just says that now that we have some down time and this is the new normal, maybe they could do us the favor of explaining what models and assumptions they're basing their decisions on.

I want this too. I'm tired of being subject to mob mentality throughout with people who appear to be (at least to me) fear driven and not thinking as well as I am used to seeing from them, but instead being reactionary and making knee-jerk decisions with lasting consequences on the spur of the moment with seemingly little before-thought. But even some of that, that's ok that's predictable, that's fine. Pandemics, I get it. But what about after thought, i.e. thought after we've jumped to decisions and conclusions about what we think is going on or should be going on? What about allowing new ideas in? What about challenging what we think we know? What about attacking ideas instead of people? What about using data instead of feelings? Can we at least agree that those precepts don't go out the window in an emergency?

Hopefully another we can get back some humility to question our own thinking and that of our leaders, lest we turn out like Hungary.

When we choose how to react in a crisis, let’s strive for consistency. The WHO estimates that 4.6M people die each year from causes directly attributable to air pollution. Worldwide more deaths per year are linked to air pollution than to automobile accidents. What do we do? https://t.co/BBSSy75v7U

— M.E. (@sociopathworld) March 18, 2020

Seeing what you want to see

I studied economics for a time. I was introduced to behavioral economics and how the heuristics that help us deal with day to day problems can also frequently lead us astray. I had understood for a long time that people often self-deceived, but even I was surprised by the depth and breadth of the way we misperceive the world (me included). I learned the lessons of decisionmaking and rationality and tried to become more rational myself. I have since noticed that many of my friends who did fine understanding the concepts but lacked the humility or insight to see an application in their own lives.

My friend I mentioned earlier is a good example. He is so afraid of making a bad decision that he avoids making them until they are made for him. That or he waits until his fear and panic of making the decision cause him to take action, any action at all, but all in a fog of willful ignorance -- pretending that certain facts don't exist or (intentionally?) misrepresenting probabilistic outcomes in his mind. All of this is done in an attempt to shield himself from self-hatred or acknowledging certain basic truths about the world that he would rather ignore. I see this sort of ex post self-justification happen in the comments section of this blog from people who are doomed to repeat past mistakes because they refuse a sense of responsibility about their own destiny.

It's a good example of seeing what you want to see and the harm that can come from it. I actually advise people to not even form a belief if they can -- the temptation to anchor their future assessments or see all new information through the distorted lens of whether or not it confirms that belief is just simply too high.

Even if people get the probability correctly, they often don't understand what that means. It's one thing to say there's a 1% of getting caught stealing a mobile phone, but many people have trouble understanding that means if you steal 100 phones you will statistically get caught once. Instead they act as if anything less than 5% means never going to happen no matter how repeatedly they engage in it. Which is why I liked this recent article in the NY Times about understanding low probability risks. It's worth reading in its entirety, here's a teaser story:


I first became aware of the New Guineans’ attitude toward risk on a trip into a forest when I proposed pitching our tents under a tall and beautiful tree. To my surprise, my New Guinea friends absolutely refused. They explained that the tree was dead and might fall on us.

Yes, I had to agree, it was indeed dead. But I objected that it was so solid that it would be standing for many years. The New Guineans were unswayed, opting instead to sleep in the open without a tent.

I thought that their fears were greatly exaggerated, verging on paranoia. In the following years, though, I came to realize that every night that I camped in a New Guinea forest, I heard a tree falling. And when I did a frequency/risk calculation, I understood their point of view.

Consider: If you’re a New Guinean living in the forest, and if you adopt the bad habit of sleeping under dead trees whose odds of falling on you that particular night are only 1 in 1,000, you’ll be dead within a few years. In fact, my wife was nearly killed by a falling tree last year, and I’ve survived numerous nearly fatal situations in New Guinea.

Wired for risk

This was an interesting article sent to me courtesy of a reader, "Economic decision-making in psychopathy": A comparison with ventromedial prefrontal lesion patients," featuring our good friend Newman as one of the authors. The gist of the article is that "born" sociopaths share certain risking taking and economic decision-making patterns in common with people who have an impaired ventromedial prefrontal cortex, the part of the brain that is associated with risk, fear, and decision-making.

First, the researchers make a distinction between classes of sociopaths:

“primary” (low-anxious) psychopathy is viewed as a direct consequence of some core intrinsic deficit, whereas “secondary” (high-anxious) psychopathy is viewed as an indirect consequence of environmental factors or other psychopathology. 

Next, the sociopaths were given two classic decision-making tasks, the Ultimatum Game and the Dictator Game. Regarding the Ultimatum Game:

In the Ultimatum Game, two players are given an opportunity to split a sum of money. One player (the proposer) offers a portion of the money to the second player (the responder), and keeps the remainder for himself. The responder can either accept the offer (in which case both players split the money as proposed) or reject the offer (in which case both players get nothing). “Rational actor” models predict that the responder would accept any offer, no matter how low. However, relatively small offers (less than 20–30% of the total) are rejected about half the time (Bolton and Zwick, 1995; Guth et al., 1982). The “irrational” rejection of unfair offers has been correlated with feelings of anger (Pillutla and Murnighan, 1996), suggesting that the responder’s ability to regulate anger and frustration plays a critical role in task performance. Patients with vmPFC lesions, who are known to exhibit irritability and poor frustration tolerance despite an otherwise generally blunted affect (Anderson et al., 2006; Barrash et al., 2000), reject an abnormally high proportion of unfair offers (Koenigs and Tranel, 2007). Thus the first aim of this study is to determine whether either of the psychopathic subtypes (primary or secondary) also rejects an abnormally high proportion of unfair offers.

And the Dictator Game:

In the Dictator Game, there are again two players with an opportunity to split a sum of money. However, in this case the responder has no choice but to accept whatever split the proposer offers. Thus, the amount offered by the proposer in the Dictator Game is presumed to reflect a prosocial sentiment, such as empathy or guilt. Patients with vmPFC lesions, who are known to exhibit deficits in empathy and guilt (Anderson et al., 2006; Barrash et al., 2000), offer abnormally low amounts in the Dictator Game (Krajbich et al., 2009). Thus the second aim of this study is whether either of the psychopathic subtypes (primary or secondary) also offers abnormally low amounts in the Dictator Game.

I'm not surprised at all by the results. The only thing I find somewhat puzzling is that the primary and secondary sociopaths differ. I would think that both types would try to shortsell their partners in the games. Unless the secondary sociopaths are a little bit more aware or paranoid that this may be a situation that would leave them vulnerable to the unpredictable social judgment of others?

Halo effect

As a partial continuation of yesterday's post, I found this description of how child molesters target their victims and get away with it to be pretty interesting and relevant to all victims and victimizers. From Malcolm Gladwell via the New Yorker:


The successful pedophile does not select his targets arbitrarily. He culls them from a larger pool, testing and probing until he finds the most vulnerable. Clay, for example, first put himself in a place with easy access to children—an elementary school. Then he worked his way through his class. He began by simply asking boys if they wanted to stay after school. “Those who could not do so without parental permission were screened out,” van Dam writes. Children with vigilant parents are too risky. Those who remained were then caressed on the back, first over the shirt and then, if there was no objection from the child, under the shirt. “The child’s response was evaluated by waiting to see what was reported to the parents,” she goes on. “Parents inquiring about this behavior were told by Mr. Clay that he had simply been checking their child for signs of chicken pox. Those children were not targeted further.” The rest were “selected for more contact,” gradually moving below the belt and then to the genitals.

The child molester’s key strategy is one of escalation, desensitizing the target with an ever-expanding touch. In interviews and autobiographies, pedophiles describe their escalation techniques like fly fishermen comparing lures. Consider the child molester van Dam calls Cook:

Some of the little tricks that always work with younger boys are things like always sitting in a sofa, or a chair with big, soft arms if possible. I would sit with my legs well out and my feet flat on the floor. My arms would always be in an “open” position. The younger kids have not developed a “personal space” yet, and when talking with me, will move in very close. If they are showing me something, particularly on paper, it is easy to hold the object in such a way that the child will move in between my legs or even perch on my knee very early on. If the boy sat on my lap, or very close in, leaning against me, I would put my arm around him loosely. As this became a part of our relationship, I would advance to two arms around him, and hold him closer and tighter. . . . Goodbyes would progress from waves, to brief hugs, to kisses on the cheek, to kisses on the mouth in very short order.

Even when confronted, child molesters frequently get away with it because they seem so charming and likable and molestation is such a horrible thing to believe about someone, much less accuse someone of participating in:

The pedophile is often imagined as the dishevelled old man baldly offering candy to preschoolers. But the truth is that most of the time we have no clue what we are dealing with. A fellow-teacher at Mr. Clay’s school, whose son was one of those who complained of being fondled, went directly to Clay after she heard the allegations. “I didn’t do anything to those little boys,” Clay responded. “I’m innocent. . . . Would you and your husband stand beside me if it goes to court?” Of course, they said. People didn’t believe that Clay was a pedophile because people liked Clay—without realizing that Clay was in the business of being likable.

I thought this was an interesting example of the halo effect, the residual goodwill that accompanies one good trait like physical attractiveness or likability and unduly impacts the viewers ability to accurately assess other aspects of the person. The overall impression of the person as likeable blinds the viewer to evidence that the person does bad things. Take as an example Jerry Sandusky -- so successful and relatively powerful in his own slice of the world that he is able to get away with one of the most unthinkable crimes for decades.

What I don't understand is, how did humans evolve to be this way in the first place? Shortcut thinking? First impressions are actually more accurate than they are inaccurate? Not like I'm complaining. Obviously I have benefited from being able to fly "under the halo" myself.