This week I did a "deep dive" into the currently available COVID-19.medical research.

My conclusions::

1) hydroxychloroquine is somewhat effective as an early-stage prophylactic

2) inhaling interferon reduces the odds of patients needing intensive care

3) the steroid dexamethasone lessens late-stage infections

4) vitamin D (actually it is more of a hormone than a vitamin) is generally beneficial

5) no vaccine has been found for any of the corona viruses

Most of the deaths happened to patients with multiple co-morbidity problems, such as obesity, diabetes, or hypertension. Over 3/4 of all USA deaths occurred in nursing homes. School-aged kids rarely die, probably due to their low level of ACE-2 cells which develop later. The virus uses fat cells to help itself reproduce so obese people have higher mortality rates. Surprisingly, smokers have a lower death rate, maybe due to lower obesity, or maybe due to a stronger lung repair system, or maybe due to the anti-inflammatory effect of nicotine.

The best strategy is simply to avoid crowded rooms. Immunocompromised people can get infected at lower levels of aerosolized virus than healthy people, so risky people should stay away from other people. The lockdowns had a negative effect by forcing people closer.

The government attempt to "flatten the curve" was a giant failure. Many hospitals had to layoff medical workers. Then the bureaucrats insisted that lockdowns were needed to stop transmissions. Again it was a mistake. Now these nitwits are requiring masks.

Masks can slow exhalations so that the viral plume doesn't travel as far, but masks are ineffective at blocking infections. No medical study has shown that masks lower disease. Surgeons wear masks to prevent the spread of bacteria, which are 100 times larger than viruses.

Masks are good at containing droplets. Someone who is coughing or sneezing should wear a mask. Since the earliest days, the WHO has maintained that the chief mode of transmission occurs via respiratory droplets blasted into the air by infected patients when they sneeze, cough or talk. However, the scientific evidence is that the virus spreads via aerosols, not droplets. Aerosolized

viruses are too small to be stopped by masks. So there isn't proof that masks prevent transmission.

Of course, government officials dispense simplistic (and wrong) advice. Historians will write about the quackery and false promises that worsened the disease. Japan was condemned for not following the hysteria, but just announced the end of its state of emergency without imposing any lockdowns.

Likewise Sweden was condemned when it rejected lockdowns. Now they have no new deaths and did not wreck their economy. The epidemiologic evidence is confusing. For example, why has Iran been hit much harder than war-torn Iraq? Africa has a very young population so it has low deaths.

A positive trend is that some parts of the US may already have reached herd immunity. According to some early T-cell tests reveals that many people might now be immune. Death totals have been dropping for 12 weeks.

 

Europe will be funding long-term studies on social forecasting.

How good are experts at predicting the future?
Answer: Horrible.

Beginning in the 1980s, Tetlock examined 27,451 forecasts by 284 academics, pundits and other prognosticators. The study was complex, but the conclusion can be summarized simply: the experts bombed. Not only were they worse than statistical models, they could barely eke out a tie with the proverbial dart-throwing chimps.

NY Times

Will dictators beat democracies?

Will the future be a world of dictatorships? Will central-planning beat free markets?

It looked like this area of questioning was resolved when the Soviet Union collapsed. But
this paper finds that democracies have less than half of the growth variance of non-democracies.

In the long run, the countries with the highest growth will accumulate wealth.

How do social fads/trends/memes form?

The initial cause is likely from multiple sources. Once formed, they are sustained and expand like a disease. Outbreaks occur periodically and grow in semi-predictable patterns.

The following shows the re-occurrence of crop circles:

Talkin' 'bout a revolution

Why don't social revolutions occur?

There are revolutions against governments, against religions, and against taxes. But there aren't revolutions against social rules.

The answer seems to be that social rules are flexible or forgettable so they aren't rigid enough or permanent enough to require a revolution. Individuals can avoid social rules. Change to social patterns occurs a person at a time and does not require a massive synchronized change for eveyone.

Cliometrics and cliodynamics

This blog has mused about historical and social trends. In particular, how can those trends be understood or predicted.

Two academic fields have emerged -- cliometrics and cliodynamics. These fields attempt to measure and model human historical phenomena and processes.

Both fields start with economic history but now look to widen their study.

Where does complex phenomenon come from?

Most people believe complex phenomenon requires a complex origin.
(Yes, that's an assumption.)

The common belief is that a complex phenomenon implies a designer (an old argument for the existence of God). But very complex systems are based on simple rules. Physics is replete with examples, such as gravity controlling everyday objects and distant galaxies. Economics has the "invisible hand" law. Natural Selection is well accepted in biology. Medicine has revealed how life depends on one molecule, DNA.

Another common mis-perception is that change is linear. From the simple rules, change can be exponential. From the emergence of a small start, growth can be rapid as the rules lead to repeated doublings.

On a societal level the spontaneous emergence of an phenomenon will proceed like biological event. Both are undesigned and unplanned. Both need resources to maintain and grow. Both result in unintended consequences. Both change their environment and intermingle with the old structures.

The hardest task is to recognize which social phenomena are dangerous before the threaten.

Macroeconomics studies the behavior of an economy as a whole. This differs from microeconomics, which concentrates more on individuals and how they make economic decisions.

Sociology hasn't split like economics into a group vs individual focus. Perhaps psychology could be said to be the field that looks at individual behaviors. But that is not likely a view shared by many in those fields.

A project called the Living Earth Simulator (LES) plans to look at recording and modeling all aspects of society.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-12012082

Their quote:

"Revealing the hidden laws and processes underlying societies constitutes the most pressing scientific grand challenge of our century."

Laws of cities

Can cities be predicted? Or is each city unique and incomparable?

Here's one (retired) physicist that says there are simple equations that describe cities:
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/12/19/magazine/19Urban_West-t.html

Warming or cooling?

Many people have tried to forecast societal change through a "Newtonian" model. They think they can use historical trends, contextual understanding of those trends, and guesses about future influences. Combine all that into a complex model and -- voila! -- instant prognostication.

The poor record of predictions doesn't stop new predictions. If such predictions were true, humanity would be over, the planet wasted, oil and resources at an end, et cetera.

And yet populations keep increasing. The medical problems are from over-eating and living long enough that cancers spread.

Is predicting possible or useful? Maybe lessons learned in meteorology can be applied in social science areas.

Philosophers have looked at societies and individuals without agreeing on the effects.

To greatly simplify, three views have formed:
1. people are not perfect, but society can be perfected
2. people are not perfect, but society can prevent people from regressing
3. people are not perfect, but people are capable of greatness

The first reflects Rousseau and utopian writers who see society as order-able and suited to defining individuals' behaviors, beliefs, and character. Communist theoreticians sought to have a "scientific" society constrained by laws. Socialists adopt this view.

The second reflects natural law philosopher Thomas Hobbes and religious writers who see society as required to control the baser tendencies of natural people.

The third elevates people to self-rule. Here, society is dynamic and emerges from autonomous individuals.

How a society changes depends on its expression. No society purely expresses just one of the models. Elements of all three appear in every nation and conflicts between the models is endless.

What is "society"?

Society is made up of individuals but, like fish in water, do the individuals know they are in a society? How many societies can one individual be in? With the web, societies can form without regard to physical location.

Legendary football coach Vince Lombardi describes society as "Individual commitment to a group effort -- that is what makes a team work, a company work, a society work, a civilization work."

Philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau called the rules that a society lives by "the social contract."

Birth of social trends

Where do new social trends come from?

Who originates fads or fashions? Who creates memes or trends?

After one is created, how does it spread and grow?

Most trends are created at the edge of society. The edge might be defined by wealth, location, life-style, or other dimensions. From, the edge, it is eventually transferred to the center.

Like an infectious disease, society is continually assailed with many new social trends. Most trends are ignored or rejected but a minority enter the society where they may briefly blossom or, rarely, become part of the society. The parallels to processes in biology are notable.

Throughout human history, societies have feared the outsiders who have strange customs and barbarous languages. Walled countries (Han China, imperial Japan, modern Cuba, Soviet Russia, etc) succeed in slowing the influx of social change but change is rapid when the barrier breaks.

How quickly does a society change?

There are many ways to measure change:
- propagation speed of fads or memes
- language migration
- acceptance time of new ideas or mores
- establishment of new technology or science

While everyone today thinks technology changes rapidly, major changes take a long time. Looking at the "industrial revolution", the time from basic tool-making to assembly lines was thousands of years.

Why has Marxism been widely believed?

Marxism as a testable theory has been repeatedly debunked, disproved, and dismissed. But many people still believe it.

A possible reason is that Marx told a simple and compelling story. Like many religious stories, Marx's story gives a purpose to humanity. The story frames a "big picture" view to those confused by the world's randomness.

Marx used Hegel's framework of linear progression to describe steps to a social utopia.

It's not useful to point out Marxism's failures or fallacies if the believers accept it on faith.

How will a new theory be developed that captures the faith of the average person? In a world of seven billion people, a movement of a small minority, say 10%, is still huge.

factors in change

Change in large system often starts gradually.

After a period where a factor influences the system but no change is observed, suddenly the effect becomes obvious. Why the sudden switch? If a change cannot be detected until it erupts, can the influence be detected?

These questions appear in complex systems of all types -- biological, human, financial, and others.

One possibility is that the normal spectrum of a system will show a difference in its statistical variance before there's a noticeable difference in the average.

Prologue

So far this blog has mused on predictions and historical info.

The direction and goal is to examine social predictions. Can a society's evolution be predicted? Could a child's life be predicted? What is unpredictable? Could a simple rule be enough or would any useful prediction system require many complex rules?

Trees and forest

When individual objects are grouped, new behaviors emerge, some good, some bad, many unexpected.

Who could foresee the behavior of an entire anthill by looking at one ant? Or traffic at an intersection by looking at a single car? Or the beauty of a lake by examining a molecule of water?

Trying to simplify the model by ignoring single objects helps to an extent, but, when the objects are complex (eg, cars, stock traders) the simple model misses critical details.