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Javier E

Reasons for COVID-19 Optimism on T-Cells and Herd Immunity - 0 views

nymag.com/...t-cells-and-herd-immunity.html

immunity Covid-19 research science

shared by Javier E on 13 Aug 20 - No Cached
  • It may well be the case that some amount of community protection kicks in below 60 percent exposure, and possibly quite a bit below that threshold, and that those who exhibit a cross-reactive T-cell immune response, while still susceptible to infection, may also have some meaningful amount of protection against severe disease.
  • early returns suggest that while the maximalist interpretation of each hypothesis is not very credible — herd immunity has probably not been reached in many places, and cross-reactive T-cell response almost certainly does not functionally immunize those who have it — more modest interpretations appear quite plausible.
  • Friston suggested that the truly susceptible portion of the population was certainly not 100 percent, as most modelers and conventional wisdom had it, but a much smaller share — surely below 50 percent, he said, and likely closer to about 20 percent. The analysis was ongoing, he said, but, “I suspect, once this has been done, it will look like the effective non-susceptible portion of the population will be about 80 percent. I think that’s what’s going to happen.”
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  • one of the leading modelers, Gabriela Gomes, suggested the entire area of research was being effectively blackballed out of fear it might encourage a relaxation of pandemic vigilance. “This is the very sad reason for the absence of more optimistic projections on the development of this pandemic in the scientific literature,” she wrote on Twitter. “Our analysis suggests that herd-immunity thresholds are being achieved despite strict social-distancing measures.”
  • Gomes suggested, herd immunity could happen with as little as one quarter of the population of a community exposed — or perhaps just 20 percent. “We just keep running the models, and it keeps coming back at less than 20 percent,” she told Hamblin. “It’s very striking.” Such findings, if they held up, would be very instructive, as Hamblin writes: “It would mean, for instance, that at 25 percent antibody prevalence, New York City could continue its careful reopening without fear of another major surge in cases.”
  • But for those hoping that 25 percent represents a true ceiling for pandemic spread in a given community, well, it almost certainly does not, considering that recent serological surveys have shown that perhaps 93 percent of the population of Iquitos, Peru, has contracted the disease; as have more than half of those living in Indian slums; and as many as 68 percent in particular neighborhoods of New York City
  • overshoot of that scale would seem unlikely if the “true” threshold were as low as 20 or 25 percent.
  • But, of course, that threshold may not be the same in all places, across all populations, and is surely affected, to some degree, by the social behavior taken to protect against the spread of the disease.
  • we probably err when we conceive of group immunity in simplistically binary terms. While herd immunity is a technical term referring to a particular threshold at which point the disease can no longer spread, some amount of community protection against that spread begins almost as soon as the first people are exposed, with each case reducing the number of unexposed and vulnerable potential cases in the community by one
  • you would not expect a disease to spread in a purely exponential way until the point of herd immunity, at which time the spread would suddenly stop. Instead, you would expect that growth to slow as more people in the community were exposed to the disease, with most of them emerging relatively quickly with some immune response. Add to that the effects of even modest, commonplace protections — intuitive social distancing, some amount of mask-wearing — and you could expect to get an infection curve that tapers off well shy of 60 percent exposure.
  • Looking at the data, we see that transmissions in many severely impacted states began to slow down in July, despite limited interventions. This is especially notable in states like Arizona, Florida, and Texas. While we believe that changes in human behavior and changes in policy (such as mask mandates and closing of bars/nightclubs) certainly contributed to the decrease in transmission, it seems unlikely that these were the primary drivers behind the decrease. We believe that many regions obtained a certain degree of temporary herd immunity after reaching 10-35 percent prevalence under the current conditions. We call this 10-35 percent threshold the effective herd immunity threshold.
  • Indeed, that is more or less what was recently found by Youyang Gu, to date the best modeler of pandemic spread in the U.S
  • he cautioned again that he did not mean to imply that the natural herd-immunity level was as low as 10 percent, or even 35 percent. Instead, he suggested it was a plateau determined in part by better collective understanding of the disease and what precautions to take
  • Gu estimates national prevalence as just below 20 percent (i.e., right in the middle of his range of effective herd immunity), it still counts, I think, as encouraging — even if people in hard-hit communities won’t truly breathe a sigh of relief until vaccines arrive.
  • If you can get real protection starting at 35 percent, it means that even a mediocre vaccine, administered much more haphazardly to a population with some meaningful share of vaccination skeptics, could still achieve community protection pretty quickly. And that is really significant — making both the total lack of national coordination on rollout and the likely “vaccine wars” much less consequential.
  • At least 20 percent of the public, and perhaps 50 percent, had some preexisting, cross-protective T-cell response to SARS-CoV-2, according to one much-discussed recent paper. An earlier paper had put the figure at between 40 and 60 percent. And a third had found an even higher prevalence: 81 percent.
  • The T-cell story is similarly encouraging in its big-picture implications without being necessarily paradigm-changing
  • These numbers suggest their own heterogeneity — that different populations, with different demographics, would likely exhibit different levels of cross-reactive T-cell immune response
  • The most optimistic interpretation of the data was given to me by Francois Balloux, a somewhat contrarian disease geneticist and the director of the University College of London’s Genetics Institute
  • According to him, a cross-reactive T-cell response wouldn’t prevent infection, but would probably mean a faster immune response, a shorter period of infection, and a “massively” reduced risk of severe illness — meaning, he guessed, that somewhere between a third and three-quarters of the population carried into the epidemic significant protection against its scariest outcomes
  • the distribution of this T-cell response could explain at least some, and perhaps quite a lot, of COVID-19’s age skew when it comes to disease severity and mortality, since the young are the most exposed to other coronaviruses, and the protection tapers as you get older and spend less time in environments, like schools, where these viruses spread so promiscuously.
  • Balloux told me he believed it was also possible that the heterogeneous distribution of T-cell protection also explains some amount of the apparent decline in disease severity over time within countries on different pandemic timelines — a phenomenon that is more conventionally attributed to infection spreading more among the young, better treatment, and more effective protection of the most vulnerable (especially the old).
  • Going back to Youyang Gu’s analysis, what he calls the “implied infection fatality rate” — essentially an estimated ratio based on his modeling of untested cases — has fallen for the country as a whole from about one percent in March to about 0.8 percent in mid-April, 0.6 percent in May, and down to about 0.25 percent today.
  • even as we have seemed to reach a second peak of coronavirus deaths, the rate of death from COVID-19 infection has continued to decline — total deaths have gone up, but much less than the number of cases
  • In other words, at the population level, the lethality of the disease in America has fallen by about three-quarters since its peak. This is, despite everything that is genuinely horrible about the pandemic and the American response to it, rather fantastic.
  • there may be some possible “mortality displacement,” whereby the most severe cases show up first, in the most susceptible people, leaving behind a relatively protected population whose experience overall would be more mild, and that T-cell response may play a significant role in determining that susceptibility.
  • That, again, is Balloux’s interpretation — the most expansive assessment of the T-cell data offered to me
  • The most conservative assessment came from Sarah Fortune, the chair of Harvard’s Department of Immunology
  • Fortune cautioned not to assume that cross-protection was playing a significant role in determining severity of illness in a given patient. Those with such a T-cell response, she told me, would likely see a faster onset of robust response, yes, but that may or may not yield a shorter period of infection and viral shedding
  • Most of the scientists, doctors, epidemiologists, and immunologists I spoke to fell between those two poles, suggesting the T-cell cross-immunity findings were significant without necessarily being determinative — that they may help explain some of the shape of pandemic spread through particular populations, but only some of the dynamics of that spread.
  • he told me he believed, in the absence of that data, that T-cell cross-immunity from exposure to previous coronaviruses “might explain different disease severity in different people,” and “could certainly be part of the explanation for the age skew, especially for why the very young fare so well.”
  • the headline finding was quite clear and explicitly stated: that preexisting T-cell response came primarily via the variety of T-cells called CD4 T-cells, and that this dynamic was consistent with the hypothesis that the mechanism was inherited from previous exposure to a few different “common cold” coronaviruses
  • “This potential preexisting cross-reactive T-cell immunity to SARS-CoV-2 has broad implications,” the authors wrote, “as it could explain aspects of differential COVID-19 clinical outcomes, influence epidemiological models of herd immunity, or affect the performance of COVID-19 candidate vaccines.”
  • “This is at present highly speculative,” they cautioned.
tongoscar

U.S. prepares for coronavirus pandemic, school and business closures: health officials ... - 0 views

www.reuters.com/...health-officials-idUSKBN20F2GS

shared by tongoscar on 22 Feb 20 - No Cached
  • The United States has yet to see community spread of the virus that emerged in central China in late December. But health authorities are preparing medical personnel for the risk, Nancy Messonnier, an official with the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) told reporters on a conference call.
  • “We’re not seeing community spread here in the United States yet, but it’s very possible, even likely, that it may eventually happen,” Messonnier said.
  • “Our goal continues to be to slow the introduction of the virus into the U.S. This buys us more time to prepare communities for more cases and possibly sustained spread.”
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  • The World Health Organization has warned that the window of opportunity to contain the international spread of the epidemic that has killed more than 2,200 people was closing, as the virus has spread to some 26 countries with a large cluster in South Korea and recent outbreaks in Iran, Lebanon and Italy
  • “If we do well, we can avert any serious crisis, but if we squander the opportunity then we will have a serious problem on our hands,” WHO chief Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus said in Geneva.
  • The United States currently has 13 cases of people diagnosed with the virus within the country and 21 cases among Americans repatriated on evacuation flights from Wuhan, China, and from the Diamond Princess cruise ship in Japan, CDC said.
tongoscar

What scientists know so far about the effects of coronavirus on children | Jonathan Bal... - 0 views

www.theguardian.com/...irus-children-studies-carriers

shared by tongoscar on 24 Mar 20 - No Cached
  • These were the groups initially urged to socially distance themselves. But we’re beginning to see that coronavirus can make some younger people seriously ill.
  • Compared to other European countries, the UK was slow in closing schools – waiting until there had already been 104 deaths due to coronavirus to take action. Studies from China showed children were rarely diagnosed with novel coronavirus, and therefore presumably had little role in the spread of the disease.
  • Like many of my colleagues, I could see no obvious reason why children weren’t being infected: this was a virus spread by the respiratory route, not through a process unique to adults. If significant numbers of children were infected and suffered very minor cold-like symptoms, then their potential to spread the virus was immense.
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  • The current coronavirus is different. In more than 85% of confirmed cases symptoms can go undetected or be easily confused with the common cold of mild flu. Its biggest weapon – the thing that has, according to one study, allowed it to spread so easily – is this ability to cause mild disease in the majority of people it infects. When you can’t easily tell if someone has a cold or coronavirus, case identification and infection control are far more difficult.
  • Judging from past pandemics, school closures can be an effective way to reduce the spread of a virus – particularly when they form part of a larger programme of social distancing measures. Every school day, children congregate en masse, often in close proximity, and then return home, taking with them any new infection they’ve picked up. Intuitively, reducing this cycle should help slow the virus.
Javier E

Why the Past 10 Years of American Life Have Been Uniquely Stupid - The Atlantic - 0 views

www.theatlantic.com/...629369

politics history social media technology psychology bias fragmentation

shared by Javier E on 26 Apr 22 - No Cached
  • Social scientists have identified at least three major forces that collectively bind together successful democracies: social capital (extensive social networks with high levels of trust), strong institutions, and shared stories.
  • Social media has weakened all three.
  • gradually, social-media users became more comfortable sharing intimate details of their lives with strangers and corporations. As I wrote in a 2019 Atlantic article with Tobias Rose-Stockwell, they became more adept at putting on performances and managing their personal brand—activities that might impress others but that do not deepen friendships in the way that a private phone conversation will.
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  • the stage was set for the major transformation, which began in 2009: the intensification of viral dynamics.
  • Before 2009, Facebook had given users a simple timeline––a never-ending stream of content generated by their friends and connections, with the newest posts at the top and the oldest ones at the bottom
  • That began to change in 2009, when Facebook offered users a way to publicly “like” posts with the click of a button. That same year, Twitter introduced something even more powerful: the “Retweet” button, which allowed users to publicly endorse a post while also sharing it with all of their followers.
  • “Like” and “Share” buttons quickly became standard features of most other platforms.
  • Facebook developed algorithms to bring each user the content most likely to generate a “like” or some other interaction, eventually including the “share” as well.
  • Later research showed that posts that trigger emotions––especially anger at out-groups––are the most likely to be shared.
  • By 2013, social media had become a new game, with dynamics unlike those in 2008. If you were skillful or lucky, you might create a post that would “go viral” and make you “internet famous”
  • If you blundered, you could find yourself buried in hateful comments. Your posts rode to fame or ignominy based on the clicks of thousands of strangers, and you in turn contributed thousands of clicks to the game.
  • This new game encouraged dishonesty and mob dynamics: Users were guided not just by their true preferences but by their past experiences of reward and punishment,
  • As a social psychologist who studies emotion, morality, and politics, I saw this happening too. The newly tweaked platforms were almost perfectly designed to bring out our most moralistic and least reflective selves. The volume of outrage was shocking.
  • It was just this kind of twitchy and explosive spread of anger that James Madison had tried to protect us from as he was drafting the U.S. Constitution.
  • The Framers of the Constitution were excellent social psychologists. They knew that democracy had an Achilles’ heel because it depended on the collective judgment of the people, and democratic communities are subject to “the turbulency and weakness of unruly passions.”
  • The key to designing a sustainable republic, therefore, was to build in mechanisms to slow things down, cool passions, require compromise, and give leaders some insulation from the mania of the moment while still holding them accountable to the people periodically, on Election Day.
  • The tech companies that enhanced virality from 2009 to 2012 brought us deep into Madison’s nightmare.
  • a less quoted yet equally important insight, about democracy’s vulnerability to triviality.
  • Madison notes that people are so prone to factionalism that “where no substantial occasion presents itself, the most frivolous and fanciful distinctions have been sufficient to kindle their unfriendly passions and excite their most violent conflicts.”
  • Social media has both magnified and weaponized the frivolous.
  • It’s not just the waste of time and scarce attention that matters; it’s the continual chipping-away of trust.
  • a democracy depends on widely internalized acceptance of the legitimacy of rules, norms, and institutions.
  • when citizens lose trust in elected leaders, health authorities, the courts, the police, universities, and the integrity of elections, then every decision becomes contested; every election becomes a life-and-death struggle to save the country from the other side
  • The most recent Edelman Trust Barometer (an international measure of citizens’ trust in government, business, media, and nongovernmental organizations) showed stable and competent autocracies (China and the United Arab Emirates) at the top of the list, while contentious democracies such as the United States, the United Kingdom, Spain, and South Korea scored near the bottom (albeit above Russia).
  • The literature is complex—some studies show benefits, particularly in less developed democracies—but the review found that, on balance, social media amplifies political polarization; foments populism, especially right-wing populism; and is associated with the spread of misinformation.
  • When people lose trust in institutions, they lose trust in the stories told by those institutions. That’s particularly true of the institutions entrusted with the education of children.
  • Facebook and Twitter make it possible for parents to become outraged every day over a new snippet from their children’s history lessons––and math lessons and literature selections, and any new pedagogical shifts anywhere in the country
  • The motives of teachers and administrators come into question, and overreaching laws or curricular reforms sometimes follow, dumbing down education and reducing trust in it further.
  • young people educated in the post-Babel era are less likely to arrive at a coherent story of who we are as a people, and less likely to share any such story with those who attended different schools or who were educated in a different decade.
  • former CIA analyst Martin Gurri predicted these fracturing effects in his 2014 book, The Revolt of the Public. Gurri’s analysis focused on the authority-subverting effects of information’s exponential growth, beginning with the internet in the 1990s. Writing nearly a decade ago, Gurri could already see the power of social media as a universal solvent, breaking down bonds and weakening institutions everywhere it reached.
  • he notes a constructive feature of the pre-digital era: a single “mass audience,” all consuming the same content, as if they were all looking into the same gigantic mirror at the reflection of their own society. I
  • The digital revolution has shattered that mirror, and now the public inhabits those broken pieces of glass. So the public isn’t one thing; it’s highly fragmented, and it’s basically mutually hostile
  • Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, and a few other large platforms unwittingly dissolved the mortar of trust, belief in institutions, and shared stories that had held a large and diverse secular democracy together.
  • I think we can date the fall of the tower to the years between 2011 (Gurri’s focal year of “nihilistic” protests) and 2015, a year marked by the “great awokening” on the left and the ascendancy of Donald Trump on the right.
  • Twitter can overpower all the newspapers in the country, and stories cannot be shared (or at least trusted) across more than a few adjacent fragments—so truth cannot achieve widespread adherence.
  • fter Babel, nothing really means anything anymore––at least not in a way that is durable and on which people widely agree.
  • Politics After Babel
  • “Politics is the art of the possible,” the German statesman Otto von Bismarck said in 1867. In a post-Babel democracy, not much may be possible.
  • The ideological distance between the two parties began increasing faster in the 1990s. Fox News and the 1994 “Republican Revolution” converted the GOP into a more combative party.
  • So cross-party relationships were already strained before 2009. But the enhanced virality of social media thereafter made it more hazardous to be seen fraternizing with the enemy or even failing to attack the enemy with sufficient vigor.
  • What changed in the 2010s? Let’s revisit that Twitter engineer’s metaphor of handing a loaded gun to a 4-year-old. A mean tweet doesn’t kill anyone; it is an attempt to shame or punish someone publicly while broadcasting one’s own virtue, brilliance, or tribal loyalties. It’s more a dart than a bullet
  • from 2009 to 2012, Facebook and Twitter passed out roughly 1 billion dart guns globally. We’ve been shooting one another ever since.
  • “devoted conservatives,” comprised 6 percent of the U.S. population.
  • the warped “accountability” of social media has also brought injustice—and political dysfunction—in three ways.
  • First, the dart guns of social media give more power to trolls and provocateurs while silencing good citizens.
  • a small subset of people on social-media platforms are highly concerned with gaining status and are willing to use aggression to do so.
  • Across eight studies, Bor and Petersen found that being online did not make most people more aggressive or hostile; rather, it allowed a small number of aggressive people to attack a much larger set of victims. Even a small number of jerks were able to dominate discussion forums,
  • Additional research finds that women and Black people are harassed disproportionately, so the digital public square is less welcoming to their voices.
  • Second, the dart guns of social media give more power and voice to the political extremes while reducing the power and voice of the moderate majority.
  • The “Hidden Tribes” study, by the pro-democracy group More in Common, surveyed 8,000 Americans in 2017 and 2018 and identified seven groups that shared beliefs and behaviors.
  • Social media has given voice to some people who had little previously, and it has made it easier to hold powerful people accountable for their misdeeds
  • The group furthest to the left, the “progressive activists,” comprised 8 percent of the population. The progressive activists were by far the most prolific group on social media: 70 percent had shared political content over the previous year. The devoted conservatives followed, at 56 percent.
  • These two extreme groups are similar in surprising ways. They are the whitest and richest of the seven groups, which suggests that America is being torn apart by a battle between two subsets of the elite who are not representative of the broader society.
  • they are the two groups that show the greatest homogeneity in their moral and political attitudes.
  • likely a result of thought-policing on social media:
  • political extremists don’t just shoot darts at their enemies; they spend a lot of their ammunition targeting dissenters or nuanced thinkers on their own team.
  • Finally, by giving everyone a dart gun, social media deputizes everyone to administer justice with no due process. Platforms like Twitter devolve into the Wild West, with no accountability for vigilantes.
  • Enhanced-virality platforms thereby facilitate massive collective punishment for small or imagined offenses, with real-world consequences, including innocent people losing their jobs and being shamed into suicide
  • we don’t get justice and inclusion; we get a society that ignores context, proportionality, mercy, and truth.
  • Since the tower fell, debates of all kinds have grown more and more confused. The most pervasive obstacle to good thinking is confirmation bias, which refers to the human tendency to search only for evidence that confirms our preferred beliefs
  • search engines were supercharging confirmation bias, making it far easier for people to find evidence for absurd beliefs and conspiracy theorie
  • The most reliable cure for confirmation bias is interaction with people who don’t share your beliefs. They confront you with counterevidence and counterargument.
  • In his book The Constitution of Knowledge, Jonathan Rauch describes the historical breakthrough in which Western societies developed an “epistemic operating system”—that is, a set of institutions for generating knowledge from the interactions of biased and cognitively flawed individuals
  • English law developed the adversarial system so that biased advocates could present both sides of a case to an impartial jury.
  • Newspapers full of lies evolved into professional journalistic enterprises, with norms that required seeking out multiple sides of a story, followed by editorial review, followed by fact-checking.
  • Universities evolved from cloistered medieval institutions into research powerhouses, creating a structure in which scholars put forth evidence-backed claims with the knowledge that other scholars around the world would be motivated to gain prestige by finding contrary evidence.
  • Part of America’s greatness in the 20th century came from having developed the most capable, vibrant, and productive network of knowledge-producing institutions in all of human history
  • But this arrangement, Rauch notes, “is not self-maintaining; it relies on an array of sometimes delicate social settings and understandings, and those need to be understood, affirmed, and protected.”
  • This, I believe, is what happened to many of America’s key institutions in the mid-to-late 2010s. They got stupider en masse because social media instilled in their members a chronic fear of getting darted
  • it was so pervasive that it established new behavioral norms backed by new policies seemingly overnight
  • Participants in our key institutions began self-censoring to an unhealthy degree, holding back critiques of policies and ideas—even those presented in class by their students—that they believed to be ill-supported or wrong.
  • The stupefying process plays out differently on the right and the left because their activist wings subscribe to different narratives with different sacred values.
  • The “Hidden Tribes” study tells us that the “devoted conservatives” score highest on beliefs related to authoritarianism. They share a narrative in which America is eternally under threat from enemies outside and subversives within; they see life as a battle between patriots and traitors.
  • they are psychologically different from the larger group of “traditional conservatives” (19 percent of the population), who emphasize order, decorum, and slow rather than radical change.
  • The traditional punishment for treason is death, hence the battle cry on January 6: “Hang Mike Pence.”
  • Right-wing death threats, many delivered by anonymous accounts, are proving effective in cowing traditional conservatives
  • The wave of threats delivered to dissenting Republican members of Congress has similarly pushed many of the remaining moderates to quit or go silent, giving us a party ever more divorced from the conservative tradition, constitutional responsibility, and reality.
  • The stupidity on the right is most visible in the many conspiracy theories spreading across right-wing media and now into Congress.
  • The Democrats have also been hit hard by structural stupidity, though in a different way. In the Democratic Party, the struggle between the progressive wing and the more moderate factions is open and ongoing, and often the moderates win.
  • The problem is that the left controls the commanding heights of the culture: universities, news organizations, Hollywood, art museums, advertising, much of Silicon Valley, and the teachers’ unions and teaching colleges that shape K–12 education. And in many of those institutions, dissent has been stifled:
  • Liberals in the late 20th century shared a belief that the sociologist Christian Smith called the “liberal progress” narrative, in which America used to be horrifically unjust and repressive, but, thanks to the struggles of activists and heroes, has made (and continues to make) progress toward realizing the noble promise of its founding.
  • It is also the view of the “traditional liberals” in the “Hidden Tribes” study (11 percent of the population), who have strong humanitarian values, are older than average, and are largely the people leading America’s cultural and intellectual institutions.
  • when the newly viralized social-media platforms gave everyone a dart gun, it was younger progressive activists who did the most shooting, and they aimed a disproportionate number of their darts at these older liberal leaders.
  • Confused and fearful, the leaders rarely challenged the activists or their nonliberal narrative in which life at every institution is an eternal battle among identity groups over a zero-sum pie, and the people on top got there by oppressing the people on the bottom. This new narrative is rigidly egalitarian––focused on equality of outcomes, not of rights or opportunities. It is unconcerned with individual rights.
  • The universal charge against people who disagree with this narrative is not “traitor”; it is “racist,” “transphobe,” “Karen,” or some related scarlet letter marking the perpetrator as one who hates or harms a marginalized group.
  • The punishment that feels right for such crimes is not execution; it is public shaming and social death.
  • anyone on Twitter had already seen dozens of examples teaching the basic lesson: Don’t question your own side’s beliefs, policies, or actions. And when traditional liberals go silent, as so many did in the summer of 2020, the progressive activists’ more radical narrative takes over as the governing narrative of an organization.
  • This is why so many epistemic institutions seemed to “go woke” in rapid succession that year and the next, beginning with a wave of controversies and resignations at The New York Times and other newspapers, and continuing on to social-justice pronouncements by groups of doctors and medical associations
  • The problem is structural. Thanks to enhanced-virality social media, dissent is punished within many of our institutions, which means that bad ideas get elevated into official policy.
  • In a 2018 interview, Steve Bannon, the former adviser to Donald Trump, said that the way to deal with the media is “to flood the zone with shit.” He was describing the “firehose of falsehood” tactic pioneered by Russian disinformation programs to keep Americans confused, disoriented, and angry.
  • artificial intelligence is close to enabling the limitless spread of highly believable disinformation. The AI program GPT-3 is already so good that you can give it a topic and a tone and it will spit out as many essays as you like, typically with perfect grammar and a surprising level of coherence.
  • Renée DiResta, the research manager at the Stanford Internet Observatory, explained that spreading falsehoods—whether through text, images, or deep-fake videos—will quickly become inconceivably easy. (She co-wrote the essay with GPT-3.)
  • American factions won’t be the only ones using AI and social media to generate attack content; our adversaries will too.
  • In the 20th century, America’s shared identity as the country leading the fight to make the world safe for democracy was a strong force that helped keep the culture and the polity together.
  • In the 21st century, America’s tech companies have rewired the world and created products that now appear to be corrosive to democracy, obstacles to shared understanding, and destroyers of the modern tower.
  • What changes are needed?
  • I can suggest three categories of reforms––three goals that must be achieved if democracy is to remain viable in the post-Babel era.
  • We must harden democratic institutions so that they can withstand chronic anger and mistrust, reform social media so that it becomes less socially corrosive, and better prepare the next generation for democratic citizenship in this new age.
  • Harden Democratic Institutions
  • we must reform key institutions so that they can continue to function even if levels of anger, misinformation, and violence increase far above those we have today.
  • Reforms should reduce the outsize influence of angry extremists and make legislators more responsive to the average voter in their district.
  • One example of such a reform is to end closed party primaries, replacing them with a single, nonpartisan, open primary from which the top several candidates advance to a general election that also uses ranked-choice voting
  • A second way to harden democratic institutions is to reduce the power of either political party to game the system in its favor, for example by drawing its preferred electoral districts or selecting the officials who will supervise elections
  • These jobs should all be done in a nonpartisan way.
  • Reform Social Media
  • Social media’s empowerment of the far left, the far right, domestic trolls, and foreign agents is creating a system that looks less like democracy and more like rule by the most aggressive.
  • it is within our power to reduce social media’s ability to dissolve trust and foment structural stupidity. Reforms should limit the platforms’ amplification of the aggressive fringes while giving more voice to what More in Common calls “the exhausted majority.”
  • the main problem with social media is not that some people post fake or toxic stuff; it’s that fake and outrage-inducing content can now attain a level of reach and influence that was not possible before
  • Perhaps the biggest single change that would reduce the toxicity of existing platforms would be user verification as a precondition for gaining the algorithmic amplification that social media offers.
  • One of the first orders of business should be compelling the platforms to share their data and their algorithms with academic researchers.
  • Prepare the Next Generation
  • Childhood has become more tightly circumscribed in recent generations––with less opportunity for free, unstructured play; less unsupervised time outside; more time online. Whatever else the effects of these shifts, they have likely impeded the development of abilities needed for effective self-governance for many young adults
  • Depression makes people less likely to want to engage with new people, ideas, and experiences. Anxiety makes new things seem more threatening. As these conditions have risen and as the lessons on nuanced social behavior learned through free play have been delayed, tolerance for diverse viewpoints and the ability to work out disputes have diminished among many young people
  • Students did not just say that they disagreed with visiting speakers; some said that those lectures would be dangerous, emotionally devastating, a form of violence. Because rates of teen depression and anxiety have continued to rise into the 2020s, we should expect these views to continue in the generations to follow, and indeed to become more severe.
  • The most important change we can make to reduce the damaging effects of social media on children is to delay entry until they have passed through puberty.
  • The age should be raised to at least 16, and companies should be held responsible for enforcing it.
  • et them out to play. Stop starving children of the experiences they most need to become good citizens: free play in mixed-age groups of children with minimal adult supervision
  • while social media has eroded the art of association throughout society, it may be leaving its deepest and most enduring marks on adolescents. A surge in rates of anxiety, depression, and self-harm among American teens began suddenly in the early 2010s. (The same thing happened to Canadian and British teens, at the same time.) The cause is not known, but the timing points to social media as a substantial contributor—the surge began just as the large majority of American teens became daily users of the major platforms.
  • What would it be like to live in Babel in the days after its destruction? We know. It is a time of confusion and loss. But it is also a time to reflect, listen, and build.
  • In recent years, Americans have started hundreds of groups and organizations dedicated to building trust and friendship across the political divide, including BridgeUSA, Braver Angels (on whose board I serve), and many others listed at BridgeAlliance.us. We cannot expect Congress and the tech companies to save us. We must change ourselves and our communities.
  • when we look away from our dysfunctional federal government, disconnect from social media, and talk with our neighbors directly, things seem more hopeful. Most Americans in the More in Common report are members of the “exhausted majority,” which is tired of the fighting and is willing to listen to the other side and compromise. Most Americans now see that social media is having a negative impact on the country, and are becoming more aware of its damaging effects on children.
silveiragu

BBC - Future - The man who studies the spread of ignorance - 0 views

www.bbc.com/...tudies-the-spread-of-ignorance

research knowledge ignorance science social media

shared by silveiragu on 09 Jan 16 - No Cached
  • is the study of wilful acts to spread confusion and deceit, usually to sell a product or win favour.
    • silveiragu
      silveiragu on 09 Jan 16
       
      Interesting data point on the irrationality of words: individuals invent words all the time, purposefully or not. Additionally, this word is USEFUL, as it reveals a clear deficiency in public understanding of, say, the tobacco industry. So, why have I not been able to find any dictionary recognizing its existence? 
  • Ignorance is power
  • Agnotology is as important today as it was back when Proctor studied
  • ...18 more annotations...
  • politically motivated doubt was sown over US President Barack Obama’s nationality for many months by opponents until he revealed his birth certificate in 2011.
  • ignorance can often be propagated under the guise of balanced debate. For example, the common idea that there will always be two opposing views does not always result in a rational conclusion.
    • silveiragu
      silveiragu on 09 Jan 16
       
      What's the exploited heuristic? There must be one.
  • a false picture of the truth, hence ignorance.
  • For example, says Proctor, many of the studies linking carcinogens in tobacco were conducted in mice initially, and the tobacco industry responded by saying that studies into mice did not mean that people were at risk,
  • Even though knowledge is ‘accessible’, it does not mean it is accessed, he warns
  • often comes from faith or tradition, or propaganda
    • silveiragu
      silveiragu on 09 Jan 16
       
      If there are Ways of Knowing, what are the Ways of Not Knowing?
  • a scientifically illiterate society will probably be more susceptible to the tactics used by those wishing to confuse and cloud the truth.
  • It’s not just about the facts, it’s about what is imagined to flow from and into such facts,
  • Another academic studying ignorance is David Dunning, from Cornell University.
  • "While some smart people will profit from all the information now just a click away, many will be misled into a false sense of expertise
  • US presidential candidate Donald Trump's solutions that are either unworkable or unconstitutional are an example of agnotology, says Dunning
    • silveiragu
      silveiragu on 09 Jan 16
       
      Or, rather, the analysis of US Presidential candidate Donald Trump...is.
  • today the need for both a word and the study of human ignorance is as strong as ever
  • 1979, a secret memo from the tobacco industry was revealed to the public.
  • How do people or companies with vested interests spread ignorance and obfuscate knowledge? Georgina Kenyon finds there is a term which defines this phenomenon.
  • it revealed many of the tactics employed by big tobacco to counter “anti-cigarette forces
  • “Doubt is our product since it is the best means of competing with the ‘body of fact’ that exists in the mind of the general public. It is also the means of establishing a controversy.”
  • revelation piqued the interest of Robert Proctor, a science historian from Stanford University
  • led him to create a word for the study of deliberate propagation of ignorance: agnotology.
johnsonel7

How News Coverage of Coronavirus Compares to Ebola | Time - 0 views

time.com/...oronavirus-ebola-news-coverage

news bias west China coronavirus

shared by johnsonel7 on 09 Feb 20 - No Cached
  • A novel coronavirus that originated in China and has since spread to more than 20 other countries has dominated headlines across the globe since it was first announced in December 2019, as scientists and media outlets (including this one) scramble to understand the virus’ origins, trajectory and impact. The wall-to-wall coverage of the virus, known has 2019-nCoV, has been unusually heavy, even in comparison to other recent health threats, such as the Ebola outbreak in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) that began in August 2018 and continues to this day.
  • Throughout January 2020, the first full month of the 2019-nCoV outbreak, more than 41,000 English-language print news articles mentioned the word “coronavirus,” and almost 19,000 included it in their headlines, LexisNexis data show. By contrast, only about 1,800 English-language print news articles published in August 2018, the first month of the DRC outbreak, mentioned “Ebola,” and only about 700 headlines mentioned the disease.
  • The two viruses have also produced two very different outbreaks. Ebola, which causes a hemorrhagic fever that’s deadly in about half of cases, is incredibly potent but has been mostly contained to the DRC, where it has killed 2,246 of the roughly 3,500 people who have contracted it, according to World Health Organization (WHO) data. While the WHO declared the outbreak a “public health emergency of international concern” last year, Ebola has not spread far beyond the DRC. (The earlier West African outbreak was more widespread: It killed more than 11,000 people and spread to multiple continents.)
  • ...2 more annotations...
  • Meanwhile, 2019-nCoV, which causes symptoms similar to the flu, has killed about 2% of the 31,500 people it has infected so far, but has spread to more than 20 countries—including, crucially (at least in terms of understanding media coverage), the U.S. Any time an issue affects the U.S., the Western press kicks into high gear, Miller says.
  • After the 2014-2016 Ebola outbreak, the U.S. press was criticized for overstating the possible threat to Americans.
delgadool

Trump considers reopening U.S. economy despite coronavirus spread - 0 views

www.msn.com/...ar-BB11yyRg

shared by delgadool on 23 Mar 20 - No Cached
  • President Donald Trump is considering measures to reopen the U.S. economy, even as the highly contagious coronavirus is spreading rapidly and hospitals are bracing for a wave of virus-related deaths.
  • Trump issued guidelines a week ago that he said aimed to slow the spread of the disease over 15 days, including curbing unnecessary travel. Economic activity has ground to a halt in some states.
  • Trump, who had hoped to build his campaign for the Nov. 3 election on a booming U.S. economy, now is looking at the potential of millions of lost jobs. Many of his Republican allies fear the toll on the economy would make it harder for him to win another four-year term.
  • ...5 more annotations...
  • "If we can take some pressure off the economy fine, but my primary focus is to make sure the virus is contained and defeated. And we're just going to have to suffer through the economic consequences.”
  • Over the last few days, some economic policy advisers have started to focus on how long lockdowns and other measures to contain the virus might last, one outside adviser said.
  • Trump believes "we are strong and need a strong economy as we deal with this crisis," the source said.
  • Moore questioned California's plan to shut down much of the economy last week. "We have to ask this question, is it worth trillions of dollars of losses?," he said on Fox News. Moore didn't immediately respond to a request for comment.
  • "We’re going to have, in my opinion, if it continues for long, because of the financial distress that people will have … a month from now, two months from now, three months from now when people are financially devastated, the domestic violence, suicides, deprivation that we’re inflicting upon ourselves," he said.
julia rhodes

Why Seven African Nations Joined Anti-Monsanto Protests Last Weekend | ThinkProgress - 0 views

thinkprogress.org/...es-join-anti-monsanto-protests

african nations protests technology science research education

shared by julia rhodes on 28 Oct 13 - No Cached
  • One of the company’s most compelling arguments for its quest to spread GMOs is that Monsanto products are the solution to world hunger
  • The company’s defenders claim that opposing GMOs is a luxury of Western privilege that denies developing countries vital resources to feed impoverished communities
  • According to Food Sovereignty Ghana, seven African countries held anti-Monsanto rallies on Saturday
  • ...9 more annotations...
  • “GMO will make Ghanaian farmers poor” and “Our Food Under Our Control!!!”
  • Monsanto is also part of the New Alliance for Food Security and Nutrition, a group of private corporations tasked by the G8 to invest in solutions to African hunger over the next decade.
  • Hating Monsanto is “a luxury when you’re surrounded by food 24/7,” writes one defender, who argues that spreading negative sentiment against the company actually “impedes global economic growth.” Even Britain’s Environmental Secretary, Owen Paterson, said organizations fighting the spread of GMOs are “absolutely wicked” and “cast a dark shadow over attempts to feed the world.”
  • But African farmers also have very legitimate concerns about Monsanto’s reputation for investigating, suing, and ruining farmers who try to save GM seeds.
  • ood Sovereignty Ghana warns against the “control of our resources by multinational corporations and other foreign entities,” and the “avaricious calculations behind the proposition that food is just another commodity or component for international agribusiness.”
  • they call for “collective control over our collective resources.”
  • ontroversial GM golden rice, which is supposed to pump up Vitamin A levels in regular rice to make it more nutritious, could well be a promising use of technology
  • However, golden rice is still mainly theoretical after a decade of research.
  • hunger is not caused by a food shortage but by “a lack of purchasing power and/or the inability of the rural poor to be self-sufficient.”
  • julia rhodes on 28 Oct 13
     
    Who has the right to decide liberties, farmers or NGOs?
Javier E

Bile, venom and lies: How I was trolled on the Internet - The Washington Post - 0 views

www.washingtonpost.com/...5-829c-26ffb874a18d_story.html

social media misinformation bias troll hysteria epistemic

shared by Javier E on 15 Jan 16 - No Cached
  • Thomas Jefferson often argued that an educated public was crucial for the survival of self-government
  • We now live in an age in which that education takes place mostly through relatively new platforms. Social networks — Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, etc. — are the main mechanisms by which people receive and share facts, ideas and opinions. But what if they encourage misinformation, rumors and lies?
  • In a comprehensive new study of Facebook that analyzed posts made between 2010 and 2014, a group of scholars found that people mainly shared information that confirmed their prejudices, paying little attention to facts and veracity. (Hat tip to Cass Sunstein, the leading expert on this topic.) The result, the report says, is the “proliferation of biased narratives fomented by unsubstantiated rumors, mistrust and paranoia.
  • ...7 more annotations...
  • The authors specifically studied trolling — the creation of highly provocative, often false information, with the hope of spreading it widely. The report says that “many mechanisms cause false information to gain acceptance, which in turn generate false beliefs that, once adopted by an individual, are highly resistant to correction.”
  • in recent weeks I was the target of a trolling campaign and saw exactly how it works. It started when an obscure website published a post titled “CNN host Fareed Zakaria calls for jihad rape of white women.” The story claimed that in my “private blog” I had urged the use of American women as “sex slaves” to depopulate the white race. The post further claimed that on my Twitter account, I had written the following line: “Every death of a white person brings tears of joy to my eyes.”
  • Disgusting. So much so that the item would collapse from its own weightlessness, right? Wrong. Here is what happened next: Hundreds of people began linking to it, tweeting and retweeting it, and adding their comments, which are too vulgar or racist to repeat. A few ultra-right-wing websites reprinted the story as fact. With each new cycle, the levels of hysteria rose, and people started demanding that I be fired, deported or killed. For a few days, the digital intimidation veered out into the real world. Some people called my house late one night and woke up and threatened my daughters, who are 7 and 12.
  • The people spreading this story were not interested in the facts; they were interested in feeding prejudice. The original story was cleverly written to provide conspiracy theorists with enough ammunition to ignore evidence. It claimed that I had taken down the post after a few hours when I realized it “receive[d] negative attention.” So, when the occasional debunker would point out that there was no evidence of the post anywhere, it made little difference. When confronted with evidence that the story was utterly false, it only convinced many that there was a conspiracy and coverup.
  • conversations on Facebook are somewhat more civil, because people generally have to reveal their identities. But on Twitter and in other places — the online comments section of The Post, for example — people can be anonymous or have pseudonyms. And that is where bile and venom flow freely.
  • an experiment performed by two psychologists in 1970. They divided students into two groups based on their answers to a questionnaire: high prejudice and low prejudice. Each group was told to discuss controversial issues such as school busing and integrated housing. Then the questions were asked again. “The surveys revealed a striking pattern,” Kolbert noted. “Simply by talking to one another, the bigoted students had become more bigoted and the tolerant more tolerant.”
  • This “group polarization” is now taking place at hyper speed, around the world. It is how radicalization happens and extremism spreads.
Javier E

Bile, venom and lies: How I was trolled on the Internet - The Washington Post - 1 views

www.washingtonpost.com/...5-829c-26ffb874a18d_story.html

facebook fake news cocoon polarization internet social media

shared by Javier E on 20 May 17 - No Cached
  • In a comprehensive new study of Facebook that analyzed posts made between 2010 and 2014, a group of scholars found that people mainly shared information that confirmed their prejudices, paying little attention to facts and veracity. (Hat tip to Cass Sunstein, the leading expert on this topic.) The result, the report says, is the “proliferation of biased narratives fomented by unsubstantiated rumors, mistrust and paranoia.”
  • The authors specifically studied trolling — the creation of highly provocative, often false information, with the hope of spreading it widely. The report says that “many mechanisms cause false information to gain acceptance, which in turn generate false beliefs that, once adopted by an individual, are highly resistant to correction.”
  • in recent weeks I was the target of a trolling campaign and saw exactly how it works. It started when an obscure website published a post titled “CNN host Fareed Zakaria calls for jihad rape of white women.
  • ...3 more annotations...
  • Here is what happened next: Hundreds of people began linking to it, tweeting and retweeting it, and adding their comments, which are too vulgar or racist to repeat. A few ultra-right-wing websites reprinted the story as fact. With each new cycle, the levels of hysteria rose, and people started demanding that I be fired, deported or killed. For a few days, the digital intimidation veered out into the real world. Some people called my house late one night and woke up and threatened my daughters, who are 7 and 12.
  • The people spreading this story were not interested in the facts; they were interested in feeding prejudice. The original story was cleverly written to provide conspiracy theorists with enough ammunition to ignore evidence. It claimed that I had taken down the post after a few hours when I realized it “receive[d] negative attention.”
  • an experiment performed by two psychologists in 1970. They divided students into two groups based on their answers to a questionnaire: high prejudice and low prejudice. Each group was told to discuss controversial issues such as school busing and integrated housing. Then the questions were asked again. “The surveys revealed a striking pattern,” Kolbert noted. “Simply by talking to one another, the bigoted students had become more bigoted and the tolerant more tolerant.” This “group polarization” is now taking place at hyper speed, around the world. It is how radicalization happens and extremism spreads.
Javier E

Can We Save the Truth? | History News Network - 0 views

hnn.us/154308

truth history lies relativism gop language bias Knowledge

shared by Javier E on 08 Feb 20 - No Cached
  • For my own writing, I have settled on a method of writing and rewriting in which I seek to improve places where I use imprecise categories and labels, where I slide over gaps in my knowledge with vague phrases, where my ignorance leads to false statements. I find and fix many such places in the process of revising. I hope to produce writing which is as close as possible to being objective and true.
  • That I have such goals indicates that I do not accept the idea that there is no truth. I do believe that truth is very hard to reach, that nearly every proposition in history or science can be improved by more work, that we are imperfect seekers of truth. So we can approach truth, but perhaps never reach it.
  • I was prompted to write this because of the great irony that the political conservatism, which once argued for objective truth, now relies on the broadest attack on truth that we have ever experienced.
  • ...10 more annotations...
  • Conservative historians asserted that relativists were ruining everything, that truth did exist. They criticized post-modernism as a mask for moral relativism, connected this immorality with the popular movements of the 1960s, and asserted their own moral primacy (the Moral Majority).
  • The platform of the Republican Party about climate change and health care, two of our most pressing issues, is just one big lie
  • The intersection of a Republican Party which sees no value in distinguishing between truth and lies and an emerging technology that makes spreading lies incredibly easy is a great political danger. Is there truth? Not if those in power in America don’t care.
  • The use of a fabricated story about Ukraine and Joe Biden is a set of lies, that then led to one of the greatest scenes of collective public lying in American history, the response of Republican Representatives and Senators to the impeachment.
  • We are being bombarded with carefully crafted lies throughout cyberspace, designed to distort the results of the 2020 election. False stories about Joe Biden and Ukraine have already spread virally to millions of people.
  • Disinformation spread by bots can come from anywhere on the globe. The technology is non-partisan.
  • today we suffer from a multiplication of lies as a Republican tactic to win elections.
  • Does this mean that there is no truth? That any statement can be shown to be untrue by people with a different point of view? Objectivity is impossible, so there is no objective truth
  • This line of thinking was taken up especially by literary scholars, who argued that every text has multiple, perhaps infinite meanings. There is no true interpretation of a piece of writing
  • When this was expanded into other disciplines, it became more confusing. Some historians argued that it is impossible to make a true historical statement. Every statement can have multiple, even contradictory meanings. Excellent examples of this would be stat
Javier E

Five months on, what scientists now know about the coronavirus | World news | The Guardian - 0 views

www.theguardian.com/...now-know-about-the-coronavirus

Covid-19 theory results research science Knowledge

shared by Javier E on 12 Apr 20 - No Cached
  • The Sars-CoV-2 virus almost certainly originated in bats, which have evolved fierce immune responses to viruses, researchers have discovered. These defences drive viruses to replicate faster so that they can get past bats’ immune defences. In turn, that transforms the bat into a reservoir of rapidly reproducing and highly transmissible viruses
  • “This virus probably jumped from a bat into another animal, and that other animal was probably near a human, maybe in a market,
  • Virus-ridden particles are inhaled by others and come into contact with cells lining the throat and larynx. These cells have large numbers of receptors – known as Ace-2 receptors – on their surfaces. (Cell receptors play a key role in passing chemicals into cells and in triggering signals between cells.
  • ...19 more annotations...
  • “This virus has a surface protein that is primed to lock on that receptor and slip its RNA into the cell,”
  • Once inside, that RNA inserts itself into the cell’s own replication machinery and makes multiple copies of the virus. These burst out of the cell, and the infection spreads. Antibodies generated by the body’s immune system eventually target the virus and in most cases halt its progress.
  • “A Covid-19 infection is generally mild, and that really is the secret of the virus’s success,” adds Ball. “Many people don’t even notice they have got an infection and so go around their work, homes and supermarkets infecting others.”
  • the virus can cause severe problems. This happens when it moves down the respiratory tract and infects the lungs, which are even richer in cells with Ace-2 receptors. Many of these cells are destroyed, and lungs become congested with bits of broken cell. In these cases, patients will require treatment in intensive care.
  • Even worse, in some cases, a person’s immune system goes into overdrive, attracting cells to the lungs in order to attack the virus, resulting in inflammation
  • This process can run out of control, more immune cells pour in, and the inflammation gets worse. This is known as a cytokine storm.
  • Just why cytokine storms occur in some patients but not in the vast majority is unclear
  • Doctors examining patients recovering from a Covid-19 infection are finding fairly high levels of neutralising antibodies in their blood. These antibodies are made by the immune system, and they coat an invading virus at specific points, blocking its ability to break into cells.
  • Instead, most virologists believe that immunity against Covid-19 will last only a year or two. “That is in line with other coronaviruses that infect humans,
  • “It is clear that immune responses are being mounted against Covid-19 in infected people,” says virologist Mike Skinner of Imperial College London. “And the antibodies created by that response will provide protection against future infections – but we should note that it is unlikely this protection will be for life.”
  • “That means that even if most people do eventually become exposed to the virus, it is still likely to become endemic – which means we would see seasonal peaks of infection of this disease. We will have reached a steady state with regard to Covid-19.”
  • Skinner is doubtful. “We have got to consider this pandemic from the virus’s position,” he says. “It is spreading round the world very nicely. It is doing OK. Change brings it no benefit.”
  • In the end, it will be the development and roll-out of an effective vaccine that will free us from the threat of Covid-19,
  • the journal Nature reported that 78 vaccine projects had been launched round the globe – with a further 37 in development.
  • vaccines require large-scale safety and efficacy studies. Thousands of people would receive either the vaccine itself or a placebo to determine if the former were effective at preventing infection from the virus which they would have encountered naturally. That, inevitably, is a lengthy process.
  • some scientists have proposed a way to speed up the process – by deliberately exposing volunteers to the virus to determine a vaccine’s efficacy.
  • Volunteers would have to be young and healthy, he stresses: “Their health would also be closely monitored, and they would have access to intensive care and any available medicines.”
  • The result could be a vaccine that would save millions of lives by being ready for use in a much shorter time than one that went through standard phase three trials.
  • phase-three trials are still some way off, so we have time to consider the idea carefully.”
ilanaprincilus06

New York Launches First COVID-19 Vaccination, Test Result App For Event Attendance : Co... - 0 views

www.npr.org/...result-app-for-event-attendanc

New York Covid-19

shared by ilanaprincilus06 on 26 Mar 21 - No Cached
  • Cuomo announced Friday that the state's health status certification, called the Excelsior Pass, will help New Yorkers voluntarily share vaccination and COVID-19 negative statuses with entertainment venues and other businesses to put the state state's economy back on track.
  • New Yorkers can always show alternate proof of vaccination or testing, like another mobile application or paper form, directly at a business or venue.
  • The pass could see New York's Broadway theaters, concert venues and sports arenas fill seats again after closures that started in March of 2020.
  • ...4 more annotations...
  • Airlines and technology companies have been working on developing technology to do so, but New York's is the first pass being made widely available to residents.
  • The idea is similar to mobile airline boarding passes: they can be printed or stored on smartphones, and participating businesses and venues can use a companion app to confirm patrons' health status.
  • rather than boost the economy and encourage vaccination, efforts like the Excelsior Pass could wind up further spread of variants. It's also still not clear that vaccinated people cannot spread the virus to people who have not been vaccinated.
  • Some worry that the passes might encourage fraud and increase the spread of the virus by people who claim to be vaccinated or COVID-19 negative but aren't.
Javier E

Underselling the Vaccine - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...pector-coronavirus-deaths.html

vaccine statistics outcome research Covid-19 science

shared by Javier E on 27 Jan 21 - No Cached
  • Of the 32,000 people who received the Moderna or Pfizer vaccine in a research trial, do you want to guess how many contracted a severe Covid case? One.
  • If anything, the 95 percent number understates the effectiveness, because it counts anyone who came down with a mild case of Covid-19 as a failure. But turning Covid into a typical flu — as the vaccines evidently did for most of the remaining 5 percent — is actually a success.
  • Although no rigorous study has yet analyzed whether vaccinated people can spread the virus, it would be surprising if they did. “If there is an example of a vaccine in widespread clinical use that has this selective effect — prevents disease but not infection — I can’t think of one!” Dr. Paul Sax of Harvard has written
  • ...10 more annotations...
  • “Please be assured that YOU ARE SAFE after vaccine from what matters — disease and spreading.”
  • The risks for vaccinated people are still not zero, because almost nothing in the real world is zero risk. A tiny percentage of people may have allergic reactions
  • the evidence so far suggests that the vaccines are akin to a cure.
  • The Moderna and Pfizer vaccines — the only two approved in the U.S. — are among the best vaccines ever created, with effectiveness rates of about 95 percent after two doses.
  • That’s on par with the vaccines for chickenpox and measles.
  • The Moderna and Pfizer vaccines are “essentially 100 percent effective against serious disease,” Dr. Paul Offit, the director of the Vaccine Education Center at Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia, said. “It’s ridiculously encouraging.”
  • “It’s going to save your life — that’s where the emphasis has to be right now,”
  • “We’re underselling the vaccine,”
  • Right now, public discussion of the vaccines is full of warnings about their limitations: They’re not 100 percent effective. Even vaccinated people may be able to spread the virus. And people shouldn’t change their behavior once they get their shots.
  • These warnings have a basis in truth, just as it’s true that masks are imperfect.
martinelligi

It's not just a social media problem - how search engines spread misinformation - St Ge... - 0 views

www.stgeorgeutah.com/...-engines-spread-misinformation

social media psychology

shared by martinelligi on 11 Mar 21 - No Cached
  • Ad-driven search engines, like social media platforms, are designed to reward clicking on enticing links because it helps the search companies boost their business metrics. As researchers who study the search and recommendation systems, my colleagues and I show that this dangerous combination of corporate profit motive and individual susceptibility makes the problem difficult to fix.
  • It is in the search engine companies’ best interest to give you things that you want to read, watch or simply click. Therefore, as a search engine or any recommendation system creates a list of items to present, it calculates the likelihood that you’ll click on the items.
  • Similar to problematic social media algorithms, search engines learn to serve you what you and others have clicked on before. Because people are drawn to the sensational, this dance between algorithms and human nature can foster the spread of misinformatio
  • ...2 more annotations...
  • Search engine companies, like most online services, make money not only by selling ads but also by tracking users and selling their data through real-time bidding on it. People are often led to misinformation by their desire for sensational and entertaining news as well as information that is either controversial or confirms their views.
  • This pattern of thrilling and unverified stories emerging and people clicking on them continues, with people apparently either being unconcerned with the truth or believing that if a trusted service such as Google Search is showing these stories to them then the stories must be true. More recently, a disproven report claiming China let the coronavirus leak from a lab gained traction on search engines because of this vicious cycle.
Javier E

Opinion | Why Covid's Airborne Transmission Was Acknowledged So Late - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...rus-airborne-transmission.html

who cdc transmission Covid-19 Science research psychology bias

shared by Javier E on 08 May 21 - No Cached
  • A week ago, more than a year after the World Health Organization declared that we face a pandemic, a page on its website titled “Coronavirus Disease (Covid-19): How Is It Transmitted?” got a seemingly small update.
  • The revised response still emphasizes transmission in close contact but now says it may be via aerosols — smaller respiratory particles that can float — as well as droplets. It also adds a reason the virus can also be transmitted “in poorly ventilated and/or crowded indoor settings,” saying this is because “aerosols remain suspended in the air or travel farther than 1 meter.”
  • on Friday, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention also updated its guidance on Covid-19, clearly saying that inhalation of these smaller particles is a key way the virus is transmitted, even at close range, and put it on top of its list of how the disease spreads.
  • ...38 more annotations...
  • But these latest shifts challenge key infection control assumptions that go back a century, putting a lot of what went wrong last year in context
  • They may also signal one of the most important advancements in public health during this pandemic.
  • If the importance of aerosol transmission had been accepted early, we would have been told from the beginning that it was much safer outdoors, where these small particles disperse more easily, as long as you avoid close, prolonged contact with others.
  • We would have tried to make sure indoor spaces were well ventilated, with air filtered as necessary.
  • Instead of blanket rules on gatherings, we would have targeted conditions that can produce superspreading events: people in poorly ventilated indoor spaces, especially if engaged over time in activities that increase aerosol production, like shouting and singing
  • We would have started using masks more quickly, and we would have paid more attention to their fit, too. And we would have been less obsessed with cleaning surfaces.
  • The implications of this were illustrated when I visited New York City in late April — my first trip there in more than a year.
  • A giant digital billboard greeted me at Times Square, with the message “Protecting yourself and others from Covid-19. Guidance from the World Health Organization.”
  • That billboard neglected the clearest epidemiological pattern of this pandemic: The vast majority of transmission has been indoors, sometimes beyond a range of three or even six feet. The superspreading events that play a major role in driving the pandemic occur overwhelmingly, if not exclusively, indoors.
  • The billboard had not a word about ventilation, nothing about opening windows or moving activities outdoors, where transmission has been rare and usually only during prolonged and close contact. (Ireland recently reported 0.1 percent of Covid-19 cases were traced to outdoor transmission.)
  • Mary-Louise McLaws, an epidemiologist at the University of New South Wales in Sydney, Australia, and a member of the W.H.O. committees that craft infection prevention and control guidance, wanted all this examined but knew the stakes made it harder to overcome the resistance. She told The Times last year, “If we started revisiting airflow, we would have to be prepared to change a lot of what we do.” She said it was a very good idea, but she added, “It will cause an enormous shudder through the infection control society.”
  • In contrast, if the aerosols had been considered a major form of transmission, in addition to distancing and masks, advice would have centered on ventilation and airflow, as well as time spent indoors. Small particles can accumulate in enclosed spaces, since they can remain suspended in the air and travel along air currents. This means that indoors, three or even six feet, while helpful, is not completely protective, especially over time.
  • To see this misunderstanding in action, look at what’s still happening throughout the world. In India, where hospitals have run out of supplemental oxygen and people are dying in the streets, money is being spent on fleets of drones to spray anti-coronavirus disinfectant in outdoor spaces. Parks, beaches and outdoor areas keep getting closed around the world. This year and last, organizers canceled outdoor events for the National Cherry Blossom Festival in Washington, D.C. Cambodian customs officials advised spraying disinfectant outside vehicles imported from India. The examples are many.
  • Meanwhile, many countries allowed their indoor workplaces to open but with inadequate aerosol protections. There was no attention to ventilation, installing air filters as necessary or even opening windows when possible, more to having people just distancing three or six feet, sometimes not requiring masks beyond that distance, or spending money on hard plastic barriers, which may be useless at best
  • clear evidence doesn’t easily overturn tradition or overcome entrenched feelings and egos. John Snow, often credited as the first scientific epidemiologist, showed that a contaminated well was responsible for a 1854 London cholera epidemic by removing the suspected pump’s handle and documenting how the cases plummeted afterward. Many other scientists and officials wouldn’t believe him for 12 years, when the link to a water source showed up again and became harder to deny.
  • Along the way to modern public health shaped largely by the fight over germs, a theory of transmission promoted by the influential public health figure Charles Chapin took hold
  • Dr. Chapin asserted in the early 1900s that respiratory diseases were most likely spread at close range by people touching bodily fluids or ejecting respiratory droplets, and did not allow for the possibility that such close-range infection could occur by inhaling small floating particles others emitted
  • He was also concerned that belief in airborne transmission, which he associated with miasma theories, would make people feel helpless and drop their guard against contact transmission. This was a mistake that would haunt infection control for the next century and more.
  • It was in this context in early 2020 that the W.H.O. and the C.D.C. asserted that SARS-CoV-2 was transmitted primarily via these heavier, short-range droplets, and provided guidance accordingly
  • Amid the growing evidence, in July, hundreds of scientists signed an open letter urging the public health agencies, especially the W.H.O., to address airborne transmission of the coronavirus.
  • Last October, the C.D.C. published updated guidance acknowledging airborne transmission, but as a secondary route under some circumstances, until it acknowledged airborne transmission as crucial on Friday. And the W.H.O. kept inching forward in its public statements, most recently a week ago.
  • Linsey Marr, a professor of engineering at Virginia Tech who made important contributions to our understanding of airborne virus transmission before the pandemic, pointed to two key scientific errors — rooted in a lot of history — that explain the resistance, and also opened a fascinating sociological window into how science can get it wrong and why.
  • Dr. Marr said that if you inhale a particle from the air, it’s an aerosol.
  • biomechanically, she said, nasal transmission faces obstacles, since nostrils point downward and the physics of particles that large makes it difficult for them to move up the nose. And in lab measurements, people emit far more of the easier-to-inhale aerosols than the droplets, she said, and even the smallest particles can be virus laden, sometimes more so than the larger ones, seemingly because of how and where they are produced in the respiratory tract.
  • Second, she said, proximity is conducive to transmission of aerosols as well because aerosols are more concentrated near the person emitting them. In a twist of history, modern scientists have been acting like those who equated stinky air with disease, by equating close contact, a measure of distance, only with the larger droplets, a mechanism of transmission, without examination.
  • Since aerosols also infect at close range, measures to prevent droplet transmission — masks and distancing — can help dampen transmission for airborne diseases as well. However, this oversight led medical people to circularly assume that if such measures worked at all, droplets must have played a big role in their transmission.
  • Another dynamic we’ve seen is something that is not unheard-of in the history of science: setting a higher standard of proof for theories that challenge conventional wisdom than for those that support it.
  • Another key problem is that, understandably, we find it harder to walk things back. It is easier to keep adding exceptions and justifications to a belief than to admit that a challenger has a better explanation.
  • The ancients believed that all celestial objects revolved around the earth in circular orbits. When it became clear that the observed behavior of the celestial objects did not fit this assumption, those astronomers produced ever-more-complex charts by adding epicycles — intersecting arcs and circles — to fit the heavens to their beliefs.
  • In a contemporary example of this attitude, the initial public health report on the Mount Vernon choir case said that it may have been caused by people “sitting close to one another, sharing snacks and stacking chairs at the end of the practice,” even though almost 90 percent of the people there developed symptoms of Covid-19
  • So much of what we have done throughout the pandemic — the excessive hygiene theater and the failure to integrate ventilation and filters into our basic advice — has greatly hampered our response.
  • Some of it, like the way we underused or even shut down outdoor space, isn’t that different from the 19th-century Londoners who flushed the source of their foul air into the Thames and made the cholera epidemic worse.
  • Righting this ship cannot be a quiet process — updating a web page here, saying the right thing there. The proclamations that we now know are wrong were so persistent and so loud for so long.
  • the progress we’ve made might lead to an overhaul in our understanding of many other transmissible respiratory diseases that take a terrible toll around the world each year and could easily cause other pandemics.
  • So big proclamations require probably even bigger proclamations to correct, or the information void, unnecessary fears and misinformation will persist, damaging the W.H.O. now and in the future.
  • I’ve seen our paper used in India to try to reason through aerosol transmission and the necessary mitigations. I’ve heard of people in India closing their windows after hearing that the virus is airborne, likely because they were not being told how to respond
  • The W.H.O. needs to address these fears and concerns, treating it as a matter of profound change, so other public health agencies and governments, as well as ordinary people, can better adjust.
  • It needs to begin a campaign proportional to the importance of all this, announcing, “We’ve learned more, and here’s what’s changed, and here’s how we can make sure everyone understands how important this is.” That’s what credible leadership looks like. Otherwise, if a web page is updated in the forest without the requisite fanfare, how will it matter?
Javier E

Fight the Future - The Triad - 1 views

thetriad.thebulwark.com/...fight-the-future

tech social network social media disinformation extremism ch= psychology brain science bias friction

shared by Javier E on 22 Jan 21 - No Cached
  • In large part because our major tech platforms reduced the coefficient of friction (μ for my mechanics nerd posse) to basically zero. QAnons crept out of the dark corners of the web—obscure boards like 4chan and 8kun—and got into the mainstream platforms YouTube, Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter.
  • Why did QAnon spread like wildfire in America?
  • These platforms not only made it easy for conspiracy nuts to share their crazy, but they used algorithms that actually boosted the spread of crazy, acting as a force multiplier.
  • ...24 more annotations...
  • So it sounds like a simple fix: Impose more friction at the major platform level and you’ll clean up the public square.
  • But it’s not actually that simple because friction runs counter to the very idea of the internet.
  • The fundamental precept of the internet is that it reduces marginal costs to zero. And this fact is why the design paradigm of the internet is to continually reduce friction experienced by users to zero, too. Because if the second unit of everything is free, then the internet has a vested interest in pushing that unit in front of your eyeballs as smoothly as possible.
  • the internet is “broken,” but rather it’s been functioning exactly as it was designed to:
  • Perhaps more than any other job in the world, you do not want the President of the United States to live in a frictionless state of posting. The Presidency is not meant to be a frictionless position, and the United States government is not a frictionless entity, much to the chagrin of many who have tried to change it. Prior to this administration, decisions were closely scrutinized for, at the very least, legality, along with the impact on diplomacy, general norms, and basic grammar. This kind of legal scrutiny and due diligence is also a kind of friction--one that we now see has a lot of benefits. 
  • The deep lesson here isn’t about Donald Trump. It’s about the collision between the digital world and the real world.
  • In the real world, marginal costs are not zero. And so friction is a desirable element in helping to get to the optimal state. You want people to pause before making decisions.
  • described friction this summer as: “anything that inhibits user action within a digital interface, particularly anything that requires an additional click or screen.” For much of my time in the technology sector, friction was almost always seen as the enemy, a force to be vanquished. A “frictionless” experience was generally held up as the ideal state, the optimal product state.
  • Trump was riding the ultimate frictionless optimized engagement Twitter experience: he rode it all the way to the presidency, and then he crashed the presidency into the ground.
  • From a metrics and user point of view, the abstract notion of the President himself tweeting was exactly what Twitter wanted in its original platonic ideal. Twitter has been built to incentivize someone like Trump to engage and post
  • The other day we talked a little bit about how fighting disinformation, extremism, and online cults is like fighting a virus: There is no “cure.” Instead, what you have to do is create enough friction that the rate of spread becomes slow.
  • Our challenge is that when human and digital design comes into conflict, the artificial constraints we impose should be on the digital world to become more in service to us. Instead, we’ve let the digital world do as it will and tried to reconcile ourselves to the havoc it wreaks.
  • And one of the lessons of the last four years is that when you prize the digital design imperatives—lack of friction—over the human design imperatives—a need for friction—then bad things can happen.
  • We have an ongoing conflict between the design precepts of humans and the design precepts of computers.
  • Anyone who works with computers learns to fear their capacity to forget. Like so many things with computers, memory is strictly binary. There is either perfect recall or total oblivion, with nothing in between. It doesn't matter how important or trivial the information is. The computer can forget anything in an instant. If it remembers, it remembers for keeps.
  • This doesn't map well onto human experience of memory, which is fuzzy. We don't remember anything with perfect fidelity, but we're also not at risk of waking up having forgotten our own name. Memories tend to fade with time, and we remember only the more salient events.
  • And because we live in a time when storage grows ever cheaper, we learn to save everything, log everything, and keep it forever. You never know what will come in useful. Deleting is dangerous.
  • Our lives have become split between two worlds with two very different norms around memory.
  • [A] lot of what's wrong with the Internet has to do with memory. The Internet somehow contrives to remember too much and too little at the same time, and it maps poorly on our concepts of how memory should work.
  • The digital world is designed to never forget anything. It has perfect memory. Forever. So that one time you made a crude joke 20 years ago? It can now ruin your life.
  • Memory in the carbon-based world is imperfect. People forget things. That can be annoying if you’re looking for your keys but helpful if you’re trying to broker peace between two cultures. Or simply become a better person than you were 20 years ago.
  • The digital and carbon-based worlds have different design parameters. Marginal cost is one of them. Memory is another.
  • 2. Forget Me Now
  • 1. Fix Tech, Fix America
katedriscoll

Frontiers | A Digital Nudge to Counter Confirmation Bias | Big Data - 1 views

www.frontiersin.org/...full

shared by katedriscoll on 28 Mar 21 - No Cached
  • Information disorder in current information ecosystems arises not only from the publication of “fake news,” but also from individuals' subjective reading of news and from their propagating news to others. Sometimes the difference between real and fake information is apparent. However, often a message is written to evoke certain emotions and opinions by taking partially true base stories and injecting false statements such that the information looks realistic. In addition, the perception of the trustworthiness of news is often influenced by confirmation bias. As a result, people often believe distorted or outright incorrect news and spread such misinformation further. For example, it was shown that in the months preceding the 2016 American presidential election, organizations from both Russia and Iran ran organized efforts to create such stories and spread them on Twitter and Facebook (Cohen, 2018). It is therefore important to raise internet users' awareness of such practices. Key to this is providing users with means to understand whether information should be trusted or not.
  • In this section, we discuss how social networks increase the spread of biased news and misinformation. We discuss confirmation bias, echo chambers and other factors that may subconsciously influence a person's opinion. We show how these processes can interact to form a vicious circle that favors the rise of untrustworthy sources. Often, when an individual thinks they know something, they are satisfied by an explanation that confirms their belief, without necessarily considering all possible other explanations, and regardless of the veracity of this information. This is confirmation bias in action. Nickerson (1998) defined it as the tendency of people to both seek and interpret evidence that supports an already-held belief.
Javier E

Dengue Mosquitoes Can Be Tamed by a Common Microbe - The Atlantic - 0 views

www.theatlantic.com/...619161

mosquito infection suppression Science research

shared by Javier E on 14 Jun 21 - No Cached
  • Dengue fever is caused by a virus that infects an estimated 390 million people every year, and kills about 25,000; the World Health Organization has described it as one of the top 10 threats to global health.
  • It spreads through the bites of mosquitoes, particularly the species Aedes aegypti. Utarini and her colleagues have spent the past decade turning these insects from highways of dengue into cul-de-sacs. They’ve loaded the mosquitoes with a bacterium called Wolbachia, which prevents them from being infected by dengue viruses. Wolbachia spreads very quickly: If a small number of carrier mosquitoes are released into a neighborhood, almost all of the local insects should be dengue-free within a few months
  • Aedes aegypti was once a forest insect confined to sub-Saharan Africa, where it drank blood from a wide variety of animals. But at some point, one lineage evolved into an urban creature that prefers towns over forests, and humans over other animals.
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  • The World Mosquito Program (WMP), a nonprofit that pioneered this technique, had run small pilot studies in Australia that suggested it could work. Utarini, who co-leads WMP Yogyakarta, has now shown conclusively that it does.
  • Carried around the world aboard slave ships, Aedes aegypti has thrived. It is now arguably the most effective human-hunter on the planet, its senses acutely attuned to the carbon dioxide in our breath, the warmth of our bodies, and the odors of our skin.
  • Wolbachia was first discovered in 1924, in a different species of mosquito. At first, it seemed so unremarkable that scientists ignored it for decades. But starting in the 1980s, they realized that it has an extraordinary knack for spreading. It passes down mainly from insect mothers to their children, and it uses many tricks to ensure that infected individuals are better at reproducing than uninfected ones. To date, it exists in at least 40 percent of all insect species, making it one of the most successful microbes on the planet.
  • The team divided a large portion of the city into 24 zones and released Wolbachia-infected mosquitoes in half of them. Almost 10,000 volunteers helped distribute egg-filled containers to local backyards. Within a year, about 95 percent of the Aedes mosquitoes in the 12 release zones harbored Wolbachia.
  • The team found that just 2.3 percent of feverish people who lived in the Wolbachia release zones had dengue, compared with 9.4 percent in the control areas. Wolbachia also seemed to work against all four dengue serotypes, and reduced the number of dengue hospitalizations by 86 percent.
  • Even then, these already remarkable numbers are likely to be underestimates. The mosquitoes moved around, carrying Wolbachia into the 12 control zones where no mosquitoes were released. And people also move: They might live in a Wolbachia release zone but be bitten and infected with dengue elsewhere. Both of these factors would have worked against the trial, weakening its results
  • The Wolbachia method does have a few limitations. The bacterium takes months to establish itself, so it can’t be “deployed to contain an outbreak today,” Vazquez-Prokopec told me. As the Yogyakarta trial showed, it works only when Wolbachia reaches a prevalence of at least 80 percent, which requires a lot of work and strong community support
  • The method has other benefits too. It is self-amplifying and self-perpetuating: If enough Wolbachia-infected mosquitoes are released initially, the bacterium should naturally come to dominate the local population, and stay that way. Unlike insecticides, Wolbachia isn’t toxic, it doesn’t kill beneficial insects (or even mosquitoes), and it doesn’t need to be reapplied, which makes it very cost-effective.
  • An analysis by Brady’s team showed that it actually saves money by preventing infections
  • Wolbachia also seems to work against the other diseases that Aedes aegypti carries, including Zika and yellow fever. It could transform this mosquito from one of the most dangerous species to humans into just another biting nuisance.
jmfinizio

LA County records more than 1 million coronavirus cases - CNN - 0 views

www.cnn.com/...index.html

county records million cases

shared by jmfinizio on 17 Jan 21 - No Cached
  • Los Angeles has become the first US county to report more than 1 million coronavirus cases
  • The department also announced its first confirmed case of the UK Covid-19 B.1.1.7 variant Saturday,
  • Public Health said it believed the more contagious UK variant was likely already spreading in the community and urged residents to "more diligently" follow safety measures.
  • ...5 more annotations...
  • our healthcare system is already severely strained with more than 7,500 people currently hospitalized,
  • "This more contagious variant makes it easier for infections to spread at worksites, at stores, and in our homes.
  • "It feels like you're waking up to a nightmare, every day. We are trying to make a dent in this huge pandemic of people that are getting sick, hearing how many people are dying every day, it's, it's unfathomable," he said.
  • Ortiz said a lot of the deaths from Covid-19 were unnecessary but that the vaccination program provided hope.
  • Coronavirus has already infected and killed more people in the US than in any other country.
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