ELEMENTAL FAULTS

ELEMENTAL FAULTS...What are these?

Decisions are made from a set of assumptions. Most assumptions are derived from a set of generated hypotheses for driving those decisions, others are based on prior experience and understanding and still, others are based on all three. In the confluence of such adventures one learns new things and generates still newer ideas to create newer paradigms, to change the world. 

The Wrights Brothers had a set of priors from the unpowered flight and the motor vehicle that they applied to the Wrights Brother Flyer. The process of learning was by experimenting with their model aircraft.

Today we have modeling generated by a set of assumptions based on previous assumptions. Untested in the past they become the models for a future. Any future. All such models have a fallacy stored in them. The fallacy of unknowns, unknown being the variables. Since priors are rarely used in certain unique circumstances that do not comport to priors, assumptions are heavily weighted in the direction to where the creating entity wants to divine the potential future. The surface is clear to see, albeit it is quicksand. Further, ascribing virtue to such assumptions, augers complete obedience, a difficult bridge to cross. Crossing that bridge means you are a heretic or a radical rebel without the requisite finesse of understanding.

These elemental faults have long been the bane of human existence ever since such practices began to take hold of “scientific rigor.” And scientists became comfortable in talking about science rather than experimenting in the blind with their hypotheses. Life has become easy for the armchair crowd. Using a set of pre-existing patterns, they plug in the numbers and the computer spits out a set of probabilities that soon through an elaborate web of followers, becomes gospel.  We have endured many such ethereal flows of intellect couched carefully in some dense and difficult scientific papers that over time prove these flows to have failed to hold ground. The quicksand is forever unforgiving.

Common sense has been relegated to idiocy, stupidity, and ignorance by those touting the benefits of their new and shiny models. Models that sometimes, even the creator does not understand, as happened to Neil Ferguson’s graphic depiction from the Imperial College of London regarding the COVID-19. When tinkering did not fix a certain divined prophesy, but a much different one than expected, he, the modeler is known to have said, “that should work.” The old adage “garbage in, garbage out,” seems valid at all times when dealing with numerical assertions based on flawed algorithms, resident in the CPUs. Such manifestations cannot be good. It cannot be bad. If good, then why do I take such venom to them in my own mind. Why does the future, these manifestations predict never comes true? If bad, then why do those with supposed wisdom continue to promote such meaninglessness with abandon? These questions are timeless and recurring and are answered only with silence.

Decisions regarding life and death as are made by physicians in the Emergency Rooms and hospital floors every day, take into considerations the priors and the fund of accumulated knowledge and experience to drive a potential outcome and are a whole different matter. Success is never guaranteed, but the pursuit of success is never in question. Yet some folks who have never seen the light of such burden grow deep, soft, and comfortable armchairs around themselves and pontificate the hypotheticals without an ounce of priors or understanding. A perfectly coined phrase exists for such, it is: “they have no skin in the game.” They seem to look at the future without looking at the past. And that brings into the fore, the question, Is the past worthless for any assessment of the future, as they seem to suggest? The answer that comes to our minds differs based on our own personal priors. Yet the past is the constant and the future is well, an undiscovered ground. History teaches if one wishes to learn.

So, what is to be done about the confusion that unfolds for those of us in the fields of science? Perhaps a breath, a memory of the past, a tincture of silence, a drop of solitude, a fragrance of thought, and a large dollop of reason, might come in handy making decisions for the future. Perhaps?

We need more awareness rather than building an army of guideline-following robots. We need more critical thinking in medicine and science, but especially in medicine. We need reason and logic based on priors and a good deal of basic fundamental knowledge. We need skeptics. We need questioners. We need thinkers. We need real educators. We need teachers that give a damn. And we need real scientists and doctors who desire to ponder, to provoke and to prick the bubble of comfort that endlessly surrounds us!

When we solve this problem that has plagued the very essence of the underpinnings in science and medicine, then and only then can we begin to call our skepticism as “scientific inquiry.” It then becomes a real inquiry into the fundamentals of science and equally into the nature of a patient’s illness. A diagnosis is not a patient, and neither is the patient illness. Until we can reconcile that, we will continue to exist in a carefully crafted bubble of IFTTT (If this then that).

SIGNIFYING NOTHING

“…a poor player
That struts and frets his hour upon the stage
And then is heard no more: it is a tale
Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury,
Signifying nothing. “  -Macbeth by William Shakespeare

And so, begins our tale with that quote from Macbeth, a Shakespearean play. The stage has been lit up with bright lights and much fanfare. The spotlights are aglow and the “poor player” steps on the stage and looks bewildered for a moment, then finds his stride and erupts into a most alluring and mystifying speech for all to hear. The audience is transfixed and motionless, riveted to their seats awaiting the next uttered melodic syllable. The moment passes and lights fade, the “player” dissolves into the darkness, and the audience leaves in single file bewildered and disoriented.

What has happened over the past three months is nothing short of a play orchestrated by a few on the many. A play that may have cost many their livelihood and ultimately their lives. Act one takes us into an office chaired by a be-speckled “scientist” who determined that using outdated software with some tweaks in the codebase, could magisterially predict the future. His determinant may have lacked the necessary tools, yet he soldiered on with his predictions. The predictions were so dire that every lowly mind fell lockstep behind them. The player never ceded to the fact that the computer code might be using a single initial variable that might have been erroneous. A further critical review showed that even using the same parameters and the single variable the computer output showed a wide swath of unrelatable non-conforming results. Nope, he marched on the stage and delivered a powerful soliloquy to the willing, ticket holder audience. His complex model suggested that the reliability of his model was based on a highly accurate deterministic nuanced variable “seed” grounded in reality. He further claimed in these captivating terms, “this has historically been considered acceptable because of the general stochastic nature of the model.” The world was awash with the spellbinding ferocity of his monologue. He discussed the many iterations that he had used with some small non-determinant errors in the scheme of things. To some, the 80,000 predicted deaths were more than “non-determinant,” but not to the epidemiologist “player.” There was no mention of error rates when using parallel computing where errors were magnified when iterations achieved high-speed throughputs, nor the potential of those tiny miscreants called “Heisenbugs” that can make most outputs “signify nothing.” Yet this piper piped, and the music played which soothed the fears of the many in attendance. Alarmed by the horrible future that lay ahead, yet disquietly comforted by the preventative measures of shuttered doors and isolation that would defeat this “plague,” and return their universe to a higher version of harmony.

When the play was over and the “player” had been regaled, destined for greatness, the spotlight disappeared as did he, returning back to the apple of his eye and resigned to his fate as an interloper.

Meanwhile under the shadows of the greatest “Play,” the world had ever seen, the Second Act saw the doors starting to shutter in lockstep with the dictates of the easily distracted policy-makers. Fear spread through societies like volatile fuel ignited by a spark. Nations both under authoritarian rule and democratic rule clamped down on the basic liberties of their citizens. The world was ablaze with news as each new case was glorified in headlines and each new resulting death from the plague as a means for more restrictions on freedom. The standstill in commerce caused a significant decline in the economic activity and bode a serious blow, to the future of each nation harnessed by the dictatorial dictates of the few. Countries with the means paid the citizens to keep the economy moving temporarily, but those without such means saw the policy harm to the youngest in their midst with a rising tide of childhood malnutrition. The policy-makers and their marketing accessories continued to gloat about a restricted shutdown in perpetuity till something was done about the plague. They modeled forecast using similar computer codes as previous with dire circumstances if the people were set free to start their lives again. The predictions of 200,000 cases a day with over 350,000 deaths from the plague if the people were allowed to return to their normal lives were broadcast for all to see and shiver in fear. However, a piece of little-known evidence was glossed over that the people actually contracting this “plague” were those huddled in their homes behind shuttered doors. More evidence suggesting that the in the name of “public good,” some of the plague victims were placed in Nursing Homes for the elderly where the deaths mounted and accounted for a large tragedy in numbers. Some estimated the deaths from those policies/mandates by the governing individuals cost almost 45% of the total deaths from the plague. Further analysis on the shutdown of planned healthcare estimated that 80,000 cancer diagnoses would be missed and 6200 untimely deaths from these diagnoses. Other diseases including, heart disease, high blood pressure, diabetes, kidney disease, and lung disease would suffer a similar fate due to fear of contracting the plague from venturing out into the open. In fact, the fear instilled in the populace was so strong that 3 out of 4 people thought that restrictions on liberty and freedom should continue for fear of the escalating infections and deaths from this plague. The marketers and promoters of this “pandemic” had achieved their version of utopia.

Governors heeded to their new-found power and ejected executive order on a daily basis and disciplined anyone, not in compliance with their edicts. This was the utopia some had secretly yearned for and dreamt. Citizens  were bereft of their ability to make a living for themselves while the ruling class steadied with a steady paycheck clamped down further. Policies with no merit surfaced; you could not give a haircut, go to the beaches or the parks, or golf courses, but you could visit the buildings of large retailers for goods and services. Power being the strongest known aphrodisiac, created nuances to stick to the weak individual at the hem. Goal-posts started to shift: From “Flattening the Curve” to “universal Testing” to “Availability of Vaccine” became the war-cry before liberty would be regranted by these people-servants turned tyrants and before freedom was earned.

But as all things real and fictional reveal themselves, so did this plague. Locking down seemed to harm more. The despair form job loss, the abuse from depression, the turmoil from lost wages, the foreclosures, the bankruptcies, the destruction of the economies had a larger price. One that had started to unfold before the seeing eyes. 

Meanwhile, some states in the United States decided to forgo the warnings and maintained their functioning economies and freedoms. As William Briggs showed, the States listed below have a substantially diminished number of deaths from this plague: In deaths (XXX) per million (5/7/2020) “using the COVID Tracking Project’s numbers): Iowa (111), Oklahoma (73), Nebraska (64), North Dakota (56), South Dakota (50), Arkansas (32), Utah (25), and Wyoming (14).” While the States with the strictest clamped down restrictions: “California (83), Illinois (330), Michigan (490), New York (1162), New Jersey (1166)” were a runaway-disasters!

When this “Play” is ultimately analyzed and the dust settles, it should give us pause. The belief in modeling based on faulty premises and inadequate tools or even with adequate tools should be countered with well-reasoned thoughts. Perhaps the Insurance Actuaries are better at forecasting the future of pandemics than self-appointed experts and epidemiologists playing with computer codes.

Plagues and Pandemics have a short shelf-life. They create havoc for a few weeks or months and then they are gone. It is the nonsensical policies of the grifted, the power-hungry, and the least intelligent amongst us that make human disasters out of natural events. A sane policy would have been sheltering the high-risk population and allow the rest to create herd-immunity for the benefit of all. In this case, the vulnerable were subjected to direct harm by locking them in with the asymptomatic or mildly symptomatic individuals while everyone was sheltered to increase the chance of injury to those that could be harmed.

Economies take a long time to wind up and deliver the promise of wealth and security, but they can wind down suddenly and lay waste to nations and hurl havoc on their citizenry. Decisions made through the eyes of a select few with blinders must be tempered by the many who face the daily turmoil of survival. The future is still us. The future is still tomorrow. Perhaps we will learn a hard lesson and be stronger for it. 

I pray so.

LOGICAL FALLACY

"False equivalence is a logical fallacy in which an equivalence is drawn between two subjects based on flawed or false reasoning. This fallacy is categorized as a fallacy of inconsistency. A colloquial expression of false equivalency is "comparing apples and oranges"

Apples 

 Oranges

are not the same...

There is a powerful force in humans that drives their destinies. This force asserts itself in the form of Liberty. In the Declaration of Independence, the statement “Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness,” is the most powerful of liberating words written. The absence of subjugation to power and the right to act, speak, or think as one wants, are the tenets of what makes us all Americans. When these basic rights are threatened the ire of freedom-loving people is raised.

The current COVID-19 pandemic seems to have roiled the tranquil waters. In this chaos, many a voice seems to invoke falsehoods and render them as truths. There is a false equivalency between disparate ideas that rule the minds of the policymakers for ruling the minds of the citizens. 

Let us look at the past 6 weeks and gather reality from this recent past. As the pandemic broke across the Pacific and Atlantic shores simultaneously there was a sense of urgency and panic. The urgency was implied by some very poor models that were based on hypotheticals that overtime failed to materialize. The pandemic continues to march through the country from both the coasts into the middle taking down thousands of lives in its wake. The tally of the infections and deaths has become the daily mantra of the experts. In fact, some seem to thrive in reporting such numbers and take delight in the fact that the worse is yet to come. Even in the face of a slow and steady decline, these experts continue to feed the beast of fear. Caught in the trap are politicians that have lesser of a sense of what is real. The louder the drumbeat, the more deference is given to the experts. Policies are made to counter this beast of an epidemic. No one seems to pause and reflect for a moment as to what is at stake with each policy or mandate, they conjure. No one! 

One such policy is the “lockdown” of the private commerce in its many forms. Closure of hotels, airline travel, shops, and even short-distance travel is frowned upon. So much so that drones have been utilized by various police precincts to usher an era of command and control through virtual means. In a Texas city, the SWAT Team was called upon to close down a bar. The loudest voices seem to be repeating the phrase, “We must flatten the curve.” By that, they mean that by distancing from one another and “shelter at home” the spread of the virus will be contained, and the healthcare system will not be overburdened. Meanwhile dubious policies are in effect; releasing prisoners, arresting law-abiding citizens walking with their children. Yet given the information from recent events, when large quantities of beds were made available and larger numbers of ventilators were built to respond to the need, the threat never materialized. Most of the beds remained empty and as far as the ventilators they are being sent to other countries to handle their respective crises.

But within this “shelter in place” and other such terms is a sinister mechanism that has raised its ugly head and seems to hover over us as the Damocles Sword. The thinking goes that if the private business is opened too soon then we will have many hundreds of thousands of more deaths. That specter shakes the core of any human being. But time is passing, and more and more information is being revealed. The virus seems to not like living under sunlight and moist air. Yet even armed with this knowledge, the powerful governing forces have shut down parks and beaches, albeit a few have been reluctantly opened due to people pressure. Small businesses still are forced to remain closed. Among small businesses include the physician offices that are having a deleterious effect on the medical care of the infirmed and ailing fellow citizens. There are estimates of over 6,000 early deaths just among cancer patients. Other specialties are also seeing fewer patients with heart disease, diabetes, lung disease, and kidney disease. All these patients have been furloughed from healthcare due to fears of hospitalization and close contact with others for fear of contracting COVID-19. How many people will die from such an action will probably scale the number of COVID deaths.

The false equivalency exists between the control of the virus and the shelter in place concept. Although shelter in place may have flattened the curve, that still remains in dispute given the data from Sweden and the U.S. and other parts of the world, where shelter in place was not undertaken by the government. The essence of this virus suggests that it will find “parity” with its surroundings and eventually die off. “Parity,” here means herd immunity. Scientists have since the beginning said that it will take 70% or greater infected populations for the virus to finally die off. But some epidemiologists have models that suggest only 25-30% of the infected population shuts the virus down. Further evidence from other countries including, Sweden, France, and others including the United States suggests that between 40% to as much as 65% of the deaths were from Nursing Home patients. In fact, the Swedish Health Minister stated as such that the increased deaths in Sweden were from the Nursing Home due to poor Infection Control. The incomprehensibility of some enforced policies of moving COVID patients into the Nursing Homes in New York, New Jersey and California are counterfactual to scientific reality. It would, therefore, be prudent to allow the country to open for business and people over 65 years of age with co-morbidities might continue social distancing as preventative measures against the virus. The younger population meanwhile can begin the process of normal living with recommended good hygiene standards. The herd will get itself immunized and the virus will become a distant memory.

While Aristotle suggested that desire can be subjugated to reason and Plato stated that all desire must be postponed for a higher ideal, the current ideal seems to threaten the economic welfare of everyday workers in every country as the economic collapse continues from these unbridled restrictions. Socrates meanwhile argued, “that happiness and personal growths were a major purpose of life and a central goal of education.” If that is true, and it is, then the current actions by some governors are a direct assault in human liberty and freedom to pursue happiness.

It is therefore imperative that Governors exerting an undue force of their incomprehensible logic should undo their dictates and open the civil activities of daily life so that for the time being those aged 18 to 60 years of age can work and provide for their families. Government subsidies cannot sustain life as has been evidenced through history by a top-down movement. The United States Constitution states, ““Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof, or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press, or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.”

As the New Hampshire automobile license moniker states, “Live Free or Die,” let us continue to live under that banner of liberty.