Reverse mortality

Virginia had its first coronavirus death on Friday, March 14. Working backwards according to some numbers and calculations in a big article I highly recommend (Coronavirus: Why You Must Act Now), this means that, statistically, we probably had 692 to 1384 cases in the state that day, rather than the 41 confirmed. Obviously the real number of infections could be more or less, since we're talking exponential growth around 30% per day, which will amplify little differences. The range 692-1384 comes from 1% versus 0.5% mortality when medical services are good. If we assume that healthcare around here is great (0.5% mortality), that actually means 1 death implies 1000+ cases now, and 200 when the person got infected.

Well, hold on.

The big problem with the calculation is that it assumes the first 200 people caught the disease on the same day. That isn't totally impossible, given that COVID and SARS have super-spreading (and people flow across borders), but it isn't likely.

I'll try to fix that "big problem" in a minute. Let's look at the basic reasoning first, though.

The focus is on number of deaths because it's the only reliable count. That will be true regardless of whether people are quarantined, locked down, going to concerts, etc. Asymptomatic passengers get on planes and go to restaurants... corpses don't, really, and it's hard to miss the fact someone died. COVID-19 was discovered when someone died from an unknown virus in China. (It was seen in bats earlier, back in 2015, but never mind.)

For the first critical cases, medical staff can work their miracles. Later on, with overloaded hospitals, mortality goes up to 4 and 5% (it'll look higher thanks to an illusion of record-keeping as partial data pours in), but that isn't relevant early on. Thankfully 0.5% is the best estimate when everything's working (thanks go to Tomas Pueyo for explaining this so well in his article). Around 1 in 200 people wouldn't make it. That's on average, but the virus has not been mutating fast for a virus, and no one has a cure. It should be fairly consistent.

Let's try to address the inaccuracy I mentioned. It changes the emphasis more than the numbers, because of the wonders of exponents.

First we'll assume "low" mortality at 0.5%.

If the very 1st person who caught the virus in a region was the one who died, and we assume steady growth from 1 case, then there could be as few as 7 cases (on average) when that person died 17.3 days later (about how long it takes).

On the other hand, if the 100th sick person was the one who died, there would be 692 cases at that point, on average.

If the last of the 200 people was the one who died, or if they all contracted it on the same day, then there would be 1384 cases at that point.

The article estimated ~800, which is the exact same calculation as the one with "probable" next to it below, only rounding the exponent off to 3 for simplicity. Anyway, here are the calculations if you're curious (doubling happens every 6.2 days according to lots of data now):

1*2^(17.3/6.2) = 6.9
100*2^(17.3/6.2) = 691.8     ← probable
200*2^(17.3/6.2) = 1383.6

And if healthcare isn't quite as great and mortality is 1%, the expected total number of sick people on Friday would be more like:

1*2^(17.3/6.2) = 6.9
50*2^(17.3/6.2) = 345.9     ← probable
100*2^(17.3/6.2) = 691.8

Notice two of the numbers get repeated above (6.9 and 691.8). We're just highlighting different parts of the same curve. Neither mortality rate nor the patient's "position in line" for catching the virus alters that fundamental curve.

Looking at the reporting for Saturday, March 15, I see there are 6 states with 1 death each. Colorado and Georgia have about 100 cases each, but the others have a lot less: 45 for Virginia, 36 for Oregon, and Kansas and South Dakota with 8 and 9. Those numbers are systematically a lot less than 692, which should be a typical number of cases with 1 death reported so far. (Many would be silent or still incubating, so the discrepancy wouldn't be surprising even in a fantasy land of excessive testing.)

That's an average of 50 cases when we'd expect 692. So... for lack of a better approach, maybe multiply cases reported in the US by 14?

Unless I've missed something else major—other than that people get better and this changes the dynamics (but not much early in an outbreak).

Also, I must say calculus would give a slightly better estimate than 692... wait, scratch that! Exponential curves are neat. Integrate x*2^(17.3/6.2) from 1 to 200 and divide by 200. The mean number of cases by the time of the first death (whatever that person's position was in the first 200, averaging all the possible infection counts when they die, ie from 7 to 1384) is precisely the same, 692.

Out-rocked

It's easy to think of things like rains, hills, or sunshine as earthly. But think how many places out there have rains, hills, sunshine.

Almost everything you associate with Earth is out there in incomprehensible quantity.

Look straight ahead of you. What's there? Whatever you see—yes that—and about half of the universe behind that.

When you take a long flight over the ocean, and you land, and you notice that this new place is real, just as real as your own, yet feels so different...

That's arriving in a new star system, landing somewhere you can put your feet. Hey look, there's rock. There are breakers. Little puddles of water bake in the sun. Sand is over there, oh wow, and there's a pebble beach. You can pick up pebbles and skip them. The sun is different, but it's more of the same. It's star.

Neither of us has any idea how much of that is out there, other than: it's more than we imagine.

If you think an ant is small and expendable, never forget that you're about the same size. The difference seems big to you, but if it were really big, you'd have difficulty comprehending the scale separation. An ant feels small to you because you're almost the same in size. An atom doesn't feel small to the stomach. We have little comprehension of it.

This isn't abstract. Try to feel how much damn rock is out there, out in space orbiting, spinning, heating and cooling at the same time, forming new chemicals. How many galaxies of that. How many galaxy-sized containers of rock evolving like that? Trying to feel it all is like trying to pick up a brick wall. You're going to lose traction. That's very concrete.

The July 19, 2013 Cassini image of Earth from Saturn (The Day the Earth Smiled), Earth glinting under its rings, was the prompt for these efforts to express the wonder I feel. It's as if those rings are a foreign airport terminal, a very foreign one.

Where's that?

The question "where do you get your ideas" is a really weird one. And I've heard a number of creative people answer this, and they always seem bemused. It's as if people think there's this special place you go, a corner cafe maybe, and if they dutifully mosey their flip-flops on down to that same corner cafe, now they will have great ideas. In reality, ideas come from absolutely all over. It isn't a place you go. It's called opening up your skull and using your sense of wonder. Anything can be an idea. Turn your head to the left. There are 5 ideas right there.

To maintain some kind of standard, I just did that. I stared at my closet door for a minute, and I imagined 5 different visual/story ideas, and they were all based on details of or defects in my closet door. (One was a strange pattern of tall, thin windows that give a view of the seaside; one was a bird's eye view of a dad wearing a long, blue dress jacket walking over a desert of dried paint and falling face-first over a large lump of paint that, to little him in that great white paint desert, is almost a hill; one involved a virus spewing like steam out of a cut wire; one was a sliding door on a cozy spaceship; and I forget the other one, but let's take another and say a closet is covered by a big rectangular granite slab that has misshapen eyes near the top, and maybe that kind of interior decoration is fashionable in this time and place.)

It's like asking, "Where do you go to listen to NPR?" That's fine for a person curious about your habits, but otherwise it shows a misunderstanding of the availability of NPR. If you've got a working radio, you just turn it on and tune in, wherever you are. If it isn't working, or you don't have one, you go and get one, or get it fixed.

The most basic trick to ideas is to stop worrying if it's a great idea, or if it works, and start pulling around the clay in your mind, the clay of all those sensations and memories, and, yes, whatever is in front of you at the time. The weirder, queasier, more outlandish, more half-formed and emotional and impossible to describe, the better. If it's terrible, that's like stretching before a run. There's no shame in it. Ignore any suggestion there's shame in it.

Sometimes an idea will punch you in the gut from around a corner you don't even see.

For example, two days ago, a student mentioned... what was it... ah, the French Revolution, when the revolutionaries wanted to change everything, including the calendar. So they adopted a completely new, bizarre, unfamiliar calendar. And it quickly fell through, because no one got used to it. Were the weeks even 7 days? I wanted to find out more. It excited my imagination. I said, that's a really interesting opportunity for a story, that moment in history, the bewildering calendar, what happened.

And I know I'm right.

What did that take? Almost nothing. It's like going to the supermarket. Go there, you'll see things you can eat. Except... the supermarket is everywhere. "Where is the supermarket?" happens to be exactly the wrong question. Where I S N ' T the supermarket? Now we're talking. Now we're cooking with gas.

There's this misconception that unless you are very responsibly worrying all the time that this idea won't work, you won't come up with any ideas that work. Totally wrong. Just come up with ideas. Don't shut off all critical thinking always, but suspend it sometimes, sometimes completely. And don't be too quick to kill something that doesn't pass the critical filter when you turn it on. Often it just needs tweaking or reimagining.

There's no shortage of people in the world who will delight in telling you what they think is wrong with your idea. They won't always be wrong, won't always be right. And you'll need to do some of that work yourself, a lot of it. But you are being different from them. You can do more than just shoot an idea down.

The biggest mistake most people make with ideas is confusing familiarity with plausibility. In cognitive science, that's sometimes called the availability heuristic. Basically, you try to imagine a thang, and if you run into any resistance, you conclude that this indicates the thang is not plausible. For example, if you are really straining to imagine that Puerto Rico could ever become the 51st state in the US, then you may conclude that this means it is correspondingly unlikely to happen, or unlikely to work if it does start to happen. Conversely, if it's easy to imagine your neighborhood's nuclear power plant melting down and spewing radiation all over the continent, or your next flight losing both wings and crashing into the ocean, you conclude that's very likely.

Just reminding you to remind yourself, then: "imaginability" is a well-known and carefully studied fallacy. Your brain is not half as good at all that as you assume. You are often enough drawing the wrong conclusions without realizing it, just on the basis of ease or difficulty of imagining scenarios. To put that differently: on the basis of familiarity.

If you've ever described new ideas to people, you have run into this. Even if the thang is true, even if it works, even if you know this, people will push back because they have trouble imagining, and they are sure this must mean it just isn't realistic at all.

Don't do that, and you're already a million miles ahead of most people. Notice that isn't a place you go! It's just watching out for a bias and shooting it in the head when you see it. With a Nerf crossbow. But it'll get the idea and leave you alone for a few minutes.

This is rarely talked about, at least not around me where I look. When you make something, something expressive, you are going to be misinterpreted. It is inevitable. I'm not saying lay down your white-out brush and never attempt clarity. But if you are always breaking and papering over and whitewashing your efforts to make sure they cannot possibly be misread, what you are doing is technical writing, not expressive writing.

Someone's going to misread you. The best you can do is the best you can do. Sometimes you will have to leave in the possibility of an interpretation you don't like, one you see, one that's painful to know is latent in this, because you do not have the skill to recapture what you would lose if you surgically removed this possibility.

There is no perfect creation. The closest creation to perfect is the millionth, not the millionth revision of one.

These days

The claim that there's too much political correctness these days raises my hackles. On the one hand, I'm really not a fan of "correctness" to begin with. True is true. What's correct? Someone's opinion. But my attitude here is nothing new at all. It isn't "these days." It's my permanent attitude, and I'd apply it to every era of human history.

If you're in a minority and you say "political correctness these days," I will fully sympathize, for the reason I just stated. For you, I will not assume that "THESE DAYS" is code for being unwilling to consider yourself prejudiced when you are. To state that differently, if a lot of prejudice gets directed at you, I will not infer that the actual problem is in you. Furthermore, I do agree that there is something going on THESE DAYS that's relatively different from how things were a generation ago: extreme polarization.

If you're a white guy (doesn't mean you aren't in any minorities, but bear with me) and I hear "political correctness THESE DAYS" as a complaint coming from you, I will be seeing Trump's face in my mind, unfortunately.

It's a double standard, I know. It is not strictly applied. But "political correctness THESE DAYS" is automatically suspicious to me, and I'm very willing to sympathize, but, see, I need an actual reason. I need a reason to see those words as something other than prejudice.

To NOT get this response from me, all you need to do, really, is talk about polarization instead. I don't care who you are or what country you live in. Polarization is quickly a sickness. Extreme polarization is ultimately worse than COVID-19.

As for political correctness THESE DAYS, a lot of it is about making sure people who are not like you feel welcome in society. If there are a few verbal misfires, it's well worth it for that larger goal. Most of the change (the "these days"), if we filter out polarization, is absolutely needed, even critical.

We've really gotta watch out for this ready assumption that there are two sides to every coin, and therefore two genres of human, one for each side, and that's that. Come on, fellow beings. Nothing could be further from the truth. We are not a flat surface.

There are not two sides to every story. There are more than two sides to every story. There is not a reason for everything. There are multiple factors behind everything. There is not one causal sequel for an event. There are multiple causal sequelae, probably impossible to list, because there are so many.

That's how reality actually works. Binary numbers are great, but splitting a nation or a world into two parties is an unhelpful fantasy.

So no, I am not worried about people becoming more mindful of others these days. More of that, please! I'm worried about people who stop thinking, who lose curiosity, who are suddenly convinced they have nothing to learn. I worry whenever it's the general belief that to stop thinking is correct and good—versus incorrect and bad, the only other possibility, apparently—which means now we are not mindful enough.

And that is not a kind of person. It is no indication of being on a right side or a wrong side. This mindset, the way it feels to be in it, does not carry a barcode that identifies whether you're mistaken or not. It isn't one kind of person who thinks in black and white. That is what humanity is like. We've all got to watch out for it, and help each other be better, more observant, wiser.

Debatiary

I've noticed there are at least 5 quite different kinds of debate. What they're called isn't that important, so don't mind my names too much.

• Gladiatior
• Procedural
• Feminist
• Academic
• Collaborative

Televised debates are almost always gladiator debates. Representatives of factions duke it out, striving to show each other up and seize prime moments for one-liners. Two things set this debate style apart from others. First, it's done for the spectacle. Everything is pitched, above all, for the wider audience: pitched to persuade, pitched to win favor. Second, no one on stage can ever admit they're wrong or express much doubt. Not only would such an admission seem weak, but the speaker making it would be seen as failing to represent—or even as betraying—their ardent supporters, and they'd be punished.

The debates that go on in courtrooms and houses of deliberation are what I call procedural. They have clear rules that must be followed closely. These are similar to games, with distinct moves. They have a lot in common with gladiator debates, in that, for example, lawyers aren't primarily concerned with sharing the complete truth. Participants want to win for their clients or constituents, and they will use persuasion to do so. But procedural debates can also have an objective focus. A jury's purpose is to select the true story. A good lawmaker wants the law that works best for everyone.

Feminist debates are similar to what's seen in classroom discussions. Everyone has a perspective and this is politely respected. There is not a pressing need to establish fact versus illusion. That would be seen as rude. Another place this style is seen is in group therapy sessions. The emphasis is on sharing, respect, listening, and turn-taking.

Academic debates prioritize theories, interpretations, argumentation, and evidence. They have some of that in common with procedural debates and feminist debates. They are often competitive in the sense that participants will take clear positions and promote those. Ever human, academic debaters can still become offended when someone doesn't agree, which introduces an ironic element of interpersonal squabbling and feuding where, in theory, it ought to have disappeared.

Collaborative debates are what I consider true debates. They take all the best qualities of the others. Participants strive for truth, uncovering it by sharing and listening to and critiquing evidence. They take positions, but they freely change these, and they know that they can play Devil's Advocate and they won't offend their fellow participants. Everyone there knows that they are all there to advance their knowledge together. Winning means learning something new, helping to build a product, or even just imagining in a fresh way.

That last kind is rarely seen, except maybe between two or three close collaborators.

Stuck appearing

I have a recurring dream that there's a class I've been forgetting to go to all semester. However well I do in the others, this one is an F, probably an unavoidable F, come to think of it (how do I keep blotting it out so completely?), and I bet there's a test today or tomorrow. Fear rises. I don't remember how I'd find out when the next test is, or what's on it. Where did I put the syllabus? Don't I have one? It would be so embarrassing to go and see the professor—I probably won't. Sometimes, the dream includes the detail that I never finished high school, so I'm back in high school as an adult to get this out of the way, and I'm the only one like that, which makes me self-conscious. At first, I'm glad to finally get around to this. Then I realize I've somehow completely forgotten that class all quarter, and I'm going to fail it. So I'm back in high school remedially, but I'm failing it.

Considering that I spend so much time teaching high schoolers, and there actually were classes in college just like that, the only thing that's really surprising is that after I wake up, I still fully believe there's that panicky class I haven't been going to, and it takes a few minutes to convince myself it isn't true. On the other hand, I haven't finished my Master's project in 8 years and counting, so there's that.

This time, my mother was driving me to school. We stopped at a supermarket and spent a strange amount of time there, so I prepared mentally to arrive at lunch. She took a photo of the checkout conveyor and put it on Facebook (she's never used social media, and it didn't exist then). Back in the car whirring down the main road to school, I closed my eyes and imagined I was on a yellow bus; and I was, looking out the window. I tried to think about less typical things to photo and post (in the dream apparently my mom's conveyor belt snapshot was a total cliche). I fell asleep. When I woke up, my brother was to my left driving the car, his present age. "What are you doing here? How did you get here?" I asked. He sort of chuckled and said, "Hm. How DID I get here?"