Disinfecting my mind: a case study

Earlier today, I wrote a post, Defending our minds because the day before a friend posted a link to an article.

Don’t read the article

I encourage you not to read it. It will make you stupider.

Even reading the headline and the parts I’ve excerpted—each followed by an explanation of what’s wrong with it—risks making you stupider.

Sorry. But I thought it might be worth following my prescriptive post with a practical example of the harm that can come from wasting time, reading a shitpost, and the harm that might come from sharing it.

Before the article, the facts.

Neil Ferguson (epidemiologist) - Wikipedia), is an epidemilologist at Imperial College London.

He’s the leader of the Imperial_College_COVID-19_Response_Team. There are about 30 people on the team.

The Response Team has so far produced 30 papers. The most significant, concerning government policy, is probably Report 9 - Impact of non-pharmaceutical interventions (NPIs) to reduce COVID-19 mortality and healthcare demand with 32 co-authors, and Ferguson as the lead.

He’s a member of the Scientific Advisory Group for Emergencies. There are 22 other members, most with relevant science backgrounds.

At the end of March and the first week in April, a woman named Anita Staats traveled across London to spend time with him. He’s 51 and married. She’s 38 and married.

The article in question comes from ZeroHedge. If you know ZeroHedge, none of this will surprise you.

The title: is: Scientist Whose Doomsday Models Sparked Global Lockdown Resigns After Breaking Quarantine To Bang Married Lover | Zero Hedge

Stop for a minute.

What’s the likelihood that this article will make you any wiser, better informed about things that matter?

I didn’t stop. Someone who I like and respect had posted it. I should have known better.

The lurid headline misleads in many ways. The model wasn’t his, but the product of a team. It was one of several other models almost all of which said the same thing: without mitigation, the UK would see the kinds of problems that Italy, Spain, and France were experiencing, and China had experienced.

The paper proposes that the response might be mitigation or the stronger measures of suppression.

suppression will minimally require a combination of social distancing of the entire population, home isolation of cases, and household quarantine of their family members. This may need to be supplemented by school and university closures.

Was the model correct? We don’t know. But the number of deaths in the UK was growing exponentially—as it had in Italy and Spain before those countries took drastic action. So it was probably the reality as much as the model that prompted action.

The story tells us that:

Ferguson, who resigned from his Government advisory position on Tuesday, predicted that up to 500,000 Britons and 2.2 million in the US would die without measures. Somehow, Sweden - which enacted virtually no measures to mitigate the virus, has a lower per-capita mortality rate than the UK, Italy, Spain, France, Belgium and the Netherlands - all of which enacted lockdown measures.

First off, Sweden did enact measures. Although not as many as were enacted in the UK. But never mind that detail. What conclusion are we to draw from this paragraph? That enacting “virtually no measures” reduced the per-capita mortality rate?

Why don’t we compare Sweden with some nearby countries that are a bit more demographically and culturally similar to see how well Sweden is doing with “virtually no measures.”

Our World In Data provides an interactive graphic here (and you can go there and play with some other countries to test your own theories. The screen capture is from May 7. YMMV

.png?dppx=2).png)

Jeez. Now Sweden doesn’t look so good. But let’s throw the UK back into the mix and think for just a second. Really only one second.

If a group of countries clusters around 50 deaths per million WITH measures, and a similar country has 5-6 times as many deaths with measures, and if the UK has more deaths than that with measures, what would likely happen in the UK if there were no measures?
a) Half as many, because measures are bad
b) Many more, because measures are good

I could go on. And on. The article is a hot mess of inuendo. What effect does the fact that the lead researcher for a modeling group can’t his dick in his pants have on the validity of his model?

I’m sorry I read the article and damaged my mind.

I’m sorry that I then needed to spend time finding the facts so that I could undo some of the damage.

I’m not sorry that I wrote this. I hope you’re not sorry if you read it.

​