"One of the best ways the world has to get a clear view of COVID-19 is going underused. It’s time to exploit the power of random sampling."
Basically, a lot of the times, we have absolutely no clue what's going on with covid because of problems like undercounting or because our information is weeks out of date.
Are we undercounting because we've run out of tests and covid is surging out of control? Is it because lots of cases are mild so people aren't coming in to get tested?
We eventually figure it out when people either do (or don't) start overwhelming the hospital system or dying, but by then our understanding is weeks behind the virus.
Monitoring waste water helps a bit but "waste water can’t pinpoint who in a community is getting infected and who is getting sick." This means we can't pinpoint our efforts to respond.
A major problem with random sampling is people might opt out of it and end up biasing the sample. I think we should cross this bridge when we get to it. Maybe it will only be a small number so why not try?
I also think if politicians on all sides put a real effort into encouraging people to do it for their country, then it might be less of an issue.
I've been wondering why we aren't doing more random sampling for a while so I'm glad to see efforts like this to bring the issue to the attention of a wider audience.
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If free speech means anything, then we ought to be able to use our voices to engage in rational debate, but also to be annoying or silly or frivolous, or to say the truth about how we really feel about others, even if it hurts feelings or damages reputations.
In this context, Joe Rogan should be able to say anything he wants even the n-word, but others should also be free to use their voices to impose a reputational cost on him and on Spotify for their odious speech.
Freedom of speech and freedom of association go hand in hand. People should be free to disassociate themselves from Rogan and from Spotify, not just because of what they say, but because of where they stand. We get to choose whom we stand with.
I think the failures of the pandemic have exposed some cognitive biases in the science community.
We overestimate how much people care about avoiding death
We overestimate how much people care about other people
We overestimate how much people trust scientists
The main reason I think it must be some kind of cognitive bias is we seem to be having trouble absorbing this information no matter how much evidence we see for it.
I think the public has cognitive biases about scientists as well:
They underestimate how much we care about truth and our reputations as truth tellers
They overestimate how much we care about money and political power
I get why the lab leak hypothesis is of geopolitical interest, but I don't get how it's important scientifically.
The question for me isn't "did covid come from a lab?" but rather, "is there anything about the severity of covid that's unique to a possible lab origin"?
If there isn't anything about a lab origin that could have contributed especially to covid's severity, then digging into a potential lab origin feels like a waste of time and goodwill, fighting over who to blame for the current crisis instead of working to avoid the next one.
And for what? I think there's a good chance that any evidence in that direction would be extremely messy and circumstantial, convincing to China's geopolitical rivals and unconvincing to its friends.
Very interesting take from @StatModeling :
“The social sciences are useless. So why do we study them?”
He argues that the main benefit of good social science research is to push back against the bad social science that people would otherwise do.
I’m sympathetic to this argument. Social science does provide a strong pushback to amateurish analyses of race and gender related data for instance which are very common on social media.
I think sometimes people are little too quick to claim that based on FACTS and LOGIC other people's risk preferences don't make sense.
For instance, I frequently see the claim that it's hypocritical or unreasonable to be willing to participate in a high-risk activity but then not be willing to participate in other lower risk activities.
The idea seems to be that a fully rational person would have some kind of fixed risk threshold. Below the risk threshold, the person would be willing to participate in the activity assuming it's something they find worth doing. Otherwise, they would decline.
Never confuse "sensitivity" and "specificity" again!
Here's how I keep them straight. 👇
First some background. There are four categories of test results:
[Skip this tweet if you already know this part!]
TP: Tested positive, Infected
FP: Tested positive, Uninfected
FN: Tested negative, Infected
TN: Tested negative, Uninfected.
Sensitivity is how "sensitive" the test is meaning "does it pick up all the cases?" What's another name for the cases detected by the test? The true positives! Therefore, another name for the sensitivity is the *true positive* rate. It's the percent of cases detected by the test.