Software Engineer. My tweets express my own views, but I don't mind if my views are also yours. I also don't mind if they aren't.
#COVID19isNotGood
Typos ahead!
Sep 3, 2024 • 12 tweets • 2 min read
It may seem surprising that, in a world awash of information, it's become almost impossible to figure out what's true, what's valuable, what's useful. It's not an unexpected result, if we look at some basic tenets of information theory (IT). 1/
From IT pov, what matters when recovering/understanding a message is the ratio b/w the strength of the signal carrying the message (eg radio waves) and the amount of noise distorting the signal. If the noise is high, it's more difficult, even impossible to recover the message. 2/
Mar 25, 2023 • 55 tweets • 18 min read
Understanding the science of the Sars-2 pandemic has been difficult enough (see 👇), but, my main interest, as a lay person, was on pandemic policies. While policies are informed by science, the relation between them isn't always straightforward.
1/🧵
2/ Let's get one thing out of the way: could we let the technocrats decide the pandemic policies?
Absolutely not!
How resources are allocated in a society, who benefits or suffers, who lives or dies as a consequence is ALWAYS a political decision.
Dec 17, 2022 • 16 tweets • 3 min read
My lack of expertise in infectious diseases, epidemiology or virology meant that I had to rely on other people's expertise during the Sars2 pandemic. However, from the beginning, experts had different views on the pandemic, so I had to decide which experts I should trust.
1/🧵
If you haven't suffered from the same problem, but want to understand it, imagine that your and your family's lives suddenly depended on your knowledge of farming snakes and the credentialed experts express contradictory opinions on the topic. Which experts will you trust?
2/
Oct 30, 2022 • 13 tweets • 5 min read
The loss of freedom has been my main concern regarding the laissez-faire response to the ongoing Sars2 pandemic. I view freedom as a collective, as explained 👇
Let's see how the failure to get rid of a dangerous pathogen violates our freedoms.
First, the obvious: outside the realm of macabre cults, being killed prematurely is seen as a severe restriction of freedom. Excess deaths (EDs) are a common statistical measure of untimely death, comparing the count of currents deaths to an average of previous years.
2/
Sep 18, 2022 • 4 tweets • 2 min read
Notice that Prof. Doherty actually explains, in terms accessible to a lay person why Covid is not like the flu and why Covid is a more complex disease than the flu. He doesn't use his credentials, he doesn't say "I'm a Nobel laureate, therefore I'm right!" 1/
He's done the same, but in more details in the video 👇. 2/
May 26, 2022 • 18 tweets • 4 min read
🇫🇮 Defense vs Health Policies
How Finland handled, politically, the security threat posed by the SARS2 pandemic and the security threat posed by Russia's invasion of 🇺🇦 and its aggressive stance toward neighbors could very well be the tale of two different countries.
1/🧵
When Russia attacked Ukraine in Feb. 2022, the entire political class reacted to the event and NATO membership was immediately put on the table. Two civic initiatives on the topic gathered enough signatures in record time.
2/
Jan 15, 2022 • 19 tweets • 5 min read
A comment I hear often in private, from my friends, is that we should just listen to the public health experts. Folks like me, who've never worked in public health should stay in their lane. I explain👇when and why we have a duty to speak, esp. for the benefit of our friends.
🧵
2/ Public health (PH) is a big umbrella, which covers many domains of expertise. Those domains are studied and taught by a wide range of professionals. For some of them, the expertise outside the medical fields may be much deeper and further developed. Let's see some examples.
Jan 9, 2022 • 4 tweets • 5 min read
The past year, like the year before, it has been hard to find clear, coherent and truthful info about the C19 pandemic. I wish to express my deep gratitude to all who, as primary sources and/or skillful aggregators of information, have helped me navigate these crazy times.
1/
I found some of them in the first year of the pandemic: @nntaleb, @yaneerbaryam, @mlipsitch, @DrZoeHyde, @jburnmurdoch, @jljcolorado, @michaelmina_lab, @eppe, @DellAnnaLuca, @zin_zah. 2/
This 🧵is a layman's understanding regarding virus pathogenicity and evolution: science only says that viruses which kill all their hosts will disappear. That's all. From this, it doesn't follow that viruses have an "inner desire" not to kill their hosts or to become milder.
2/ Starting with viruses affecting non-human animals, species with small populations can quickly go extinct due to viral epidemics.
Ebola has pushed gorillas toward extinction. newscientist.com/article/dn1074…
