I'm going to start a thread on global first reported #COVID19 cases. Things to look out for: Date, location, demographics, stage, visible vs invisible world (tourists go to the doctor, supply chain workers don't), indicators of fast spread (many reports in diff locations). 👇
SOUTH KOREA: 20 Jan, Chinese woman, Incheon, hospitalization; nice table and dynamic map, early cases NW then SW, current center Daego is in the SE. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2020_coro…
GERMANY: 27 Jan, Starnberg, Bavaria, Webasto employee, finally a first case from the industrial world; there is a nice dynamic map, this was all over Germany in a flash. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2020_coro…
JAPAN: 10-15 Jan, Chinese national, Kanagawa, hospitalization, direct contact with Wuhan. Many more direct contacts with Wuhan in January. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2020_coro…
Emerging public discussion in 🇩🇪 that the internal debate of the German health office @rki_de didn't match the political pronouncements, centering on 17 March 2020 and the call to increase Covid hazard level from "moderate" to "high".
A good opportunity to recapitulate...
...the biggest mistakes that drove the response to the pandemic.
1⃣ The perpetual lack of recognition that we were observing events that had occurred weeks before, and the refusal to account for this.
What exactly happened on March 17? Nothing much in terms of the spread. /2
Like most other countries, Germany started to expand testing rapidly, leading to a massive increase in cumulative numbers, dramatically visualized in dashboards and charts.
But the rate of positive tests (MPC in my nomenclature) stayed mostly the same thru March. /3
The German health authority @rki_de has evaluated the efficacy of pandemic restrictions it supported, and unsurprisingly it awarded itself a good grade. Overall everything worked out quite well, it says. We looked under the hood and found some surprises. A thread (🇩🇪 below). /1
For starters, in order to show that an intervention had a hypothesized causal effect, a study has to be able to reject the null hypothesis. The null hypothesis generically says that the observed curved, with its ups and downs, was not caused by the hypothesized factors. /2
To reject the null hypothesis in a setting like this, a study has to show two things: that an effect happened after an intervention ("post hoc"), and that it happened because of the intervention ("propter hoc"). The RKI study ignores the first and fails at the second. /3
I was asked to elaborate on why this claim is nonsense, so a good opportunity to summarize a few things I wrote about game theory, machine learning, and Silicon Valley over the years.
Exhibit 1. A short clip on just how much Silicon Valley runs on game theoretic concepts, in many cases decades adopted decades after they had been invented and languished in obscurity. link.medium.com/wtm0D49zqwb
Hal Varian crossing the SF Bay to bring the "new", game-theory derived Industrial Organization to the Silicon Valley tech companies might've been just as much of a historical juncture as Michel Porter crossing the Charles River from Harvard Econ to HBS.
A book a day on the Cold War era development of cybernetics, game theory, information science, and operations research: histories, biographies, autobiographies.
Day 1. Age of System: Understanding the Development of Modern Social Science by Hunter Heyck. play.google.com/store/books/de…
Day 2 in the history of cybernetics etc. Rise of the Machines: the lost history of cybernetics by Thomas Rid. play.google.com/store/books/de…
@CzypionkaThomas Hab genau das Gleiche so im März 2020 geschrieben. Ist halt leider komplett durch die Realität widerlegt worden. Wissenschaftlich ausgedrückt: die Nullhypothese ist nicht falsifizierbar, ganz einfach weil die Nullhypothese viel näher an der Realität ist als die Kausalhypothese.
@CzypionkaThomas Anders ausgedrückt, das was wir damals als kausal angesehen haben (Japan, Hongkong etc.) hat sich nicht in irgendeiner Form irgendwo anders replizieren lassen, insbesondere nicht in den populären Universalhypothesen "Maske wirkt" oder, enger umschrieben, "Maskenpflicht wirkt".
@CzypionkaThomas Zugegebenermassen ist die Hürde für einen Kausalnachweis doppelt hoch: eine Differenz zwischen Treatment und Control muss nicht nur statistisch signifikant sein, sondern auch politikrelevant, dh die Wirkung muss gross genug sein um die Sozialkosten des Eingriffs zu rechtfertigen.
A single truth without a single source: a thread 🧵. Thinking about decentralized systems means thinking about how an organization can agree upon what it holds to be true and how this relates to the actual ground truth. /1
A “single source of truth” is a concept from information science, but it’s so universal that it can be applied to a whole variety of scenarios and organizations. /2
It means that whenever participants disagree about the state of the world, or a particular aspect of it, a single designated participant gets to decide which state is the true state. /3