Tweet

Patrick McKenzie

16 Feb, 8 tweets, 2 min read

I've got the update baton again for VaccinateCA.com on Day 33.

We:

* Made several hundred calls throughout the state of California to pharmacies/etc, transcribing what medical professionals said about vaccine availability.

* Added *120* new locations, to total of ~760.

"That sounds like a very high hit rate for a rather scarce vaccine, Patrick."

Indeed it does, second thoughts! Welcome to the magic power of a) lead qualification through use of Eva, our bot which asks a pharmacist one single question to leave the important details to humans and

b) the pedestrian work of having enough surplus call capacity in a day to work through the list of recent Eva leads, which we accomplished with some creativity around tasking, specialization, etc.

* We continued doing the daily keep-the-lights-on work of refreshing old results

Sometimes situations change slow and sometimes they change fast, and we're trying to have data-driven and research-driven approaches to understanding which are likely where, but we don't want to send vaccine searchers to sites which have narrowed their availability.

So that means we need to call back to check on inventory levels, changing policy, etc etc.

Frequently, as supply increases & policies change, we get happy news during the call: the vaccine is still available, but more broadly. When a professional tells us that, we update site.

* As presaged during previous updates, our data model is getting more complex because the ground state is getting more complex. Some jurisdictions are adopting policies that are more nuanced than previous, and we generally want to be able to capture that in a structured form.

We will have to work on how to *present* these policies to searchers who are not themselves public health professionals, because "Think fast: is the patient over the age of 65 or a teacher, food service, healthcare worker, day care worker, or county seat resident" tough to parse.

(That is a representative example of a hypothetical policy for vaccine availability, not an actual policy anywhere, as far as I'm aware.)

• • •

Missing some Tweet in this thread? You can try to force a refresh

This Thread may be Removed Anytime!

Twitter may remove this content at anytime! Save it as PDF for later use!

More from @patio11

Patrick McKenzie

@patio11

15 Feb

Valentine's Day was Day 32 for VaccinateCA.com

Here's what we did on it:

* Called hundreds of pharmacies across the state of California asking about vaccine availability and conditions, and wrote down what the pharmacists said.

* Completed preliminary work on our new caller experience, which is Slack- and bespoke-app-based rather than Discord- and Airtable- based. We had heard from our volunteers that, after most were not themselves technologists, the barriers to participation were formidable.

We'll be rolling that out to our volunteer callers over the next few days.

* Continued work on data freshness and strategizing for upcoming changes in society's posture. The vaccine supply is still critically limited, but more doses get delivered almost every day, and this will

Read 7 tweets

Patrick McKenzie

@patio11

12 Feb

I think people underrate the societal importance of us being post-scarcity for basically anything you can buy in a shipping container from 1,000+ manufacturers in, without loss of generality, China.

I broke a dish recently and was mortified, then remembered that human attention about the dish is now much more expensive than the dish itself.

This was not true when I was growing up, surrounded with non-negligible-marginal-cost dishes.

(You can pay more than effectively nothing for a dish, but the thing you're buying is in large part the fact of having paid more than effectively nothing for a dish. The unscarce dishes are perfectly servicable dishes and in many cases actually physically indistinguishable.)

Read 4 tweets

Patrick McKenzie

@patio11

12 Feb

The set of things that appear hard and the set of things that are actually hard overlap a lot less than one would expect.

This is something I have believed a long time, but which continues to surprise me when I try new appears-to-be-hard things.

The best *systematic* explanation of a major difference I've seen is here: paulgraham.com/schlep.html

My far less systematic version: "If I need X's cooperation to do Y, and X would give that cooperation to a professional who possessed A, B, and C... is that the minimum possible set of requirements, truly, and could I bet that professional in, say, two $UNITS of determined work."

Read 5 tweets

Patrick McKenzie

@patio11

9 Feb

Seems like I've got the update baton for Day 26 of VaccinateCA.com . Here's what we did today to get Californians accurate info on the availability of the vaccine:

* Called hundreds of pharmacies and wrote down what they said for publication on site.

* Worked on redesign of our calling app. On Day 1 it was a one-size-fits-all experience; we're just calling about the vaccine, right?

Soon we'll have multiple location types (pharmacies, doctors offices, etc), multiple call goals (discovery, refresh of info, QA, debugging), ...

... multiple types of callers (senior ones with charm and ability to improvise, fresh volunteers still getting used to the phone, call center workers in various places, etc).

And so we want to make the calling app more usable and more configurable by our project, to handle these

Read 6 tweets

Patrick McKenzie

@patio11

8 Feb

On the state and tech platforms:

"The state is the monopolized use of violence" the traditional definition, but I think "The state is that which is maximally legible to the state" a more useful operational definition, and other functions are just epiphenomena of that legibility.

This is true both historically (various religious organizations in various places had the act of censusing down before local states did; those pretty reliably got co-opted or read-into-the-state because, again, legibility is the core function) and, I think, more recently.

One could make some extremely pointed observations about the financial system here, and those pointed observations would not be incorrect. It's the thing the cryptocurrency enthusiasts are probably most correct about.

Transactions and identity are not sole axes of legibility.

Read 4 tweets

Patrick McKenzie

@patio11

6 Feb

Wowza now is this an interesting business model: HP "Instant Ink."

In lieu of selling you ink and having you own the ink, we will sell you the thing you actually want, which is printing capacity. We will forward-deploy some compute and chemicals at your printer to fulfill this.

Some geeks are going to *hate* this but it's almost obviously good?

"Patrick why would a consumer ever want that."

Among many other things, because it allows a capital stack arbitrage similar to how consumers get very cheap access to cell phones without owning "cell phone ink."

HP can use your commitment to print in future to fund printer, etc.

Read 10 tweets

Support us! We are indie developers!

This site is made by just two indie developers on a laptop doing marketing, support and development! Read more about the story.

Become a Premium Member ($3/month or $30/year) and get exclusive features!

Become Premium

Too expensive? Make a small donation by buying us coffee ($5) or help with server cost ($10)

Donate via Paypal Become our Patreon

Thank you for your support!