Rationality and math amid COVID-19
Take a breath. You don't need a mask, unless you are already ill and trying to avoid spreading it.
The Buchler-Gekko Rule: The point is, ladies and gentleman, that math, for lack of a better word, is good. Math is right. Math works. Math clarifies, cuts through...
See, also, the Bene Gesserit Litany Against Fear.
I advise people to keep calm and do the math. If I were a Brit, I'd say something about carrying on, but too many people are carryin' on crazily. Try this.
I don't like Kansas, so I'm going with CSNY. I taught myself guitar listening to Stephen Stills.
Anyway, my campus just shut down. Now I get to learn how to set up on-line teaching. Yay. Then again, my commute time is going to be awesome, and the big question will be whether or not my cat attempts to give guest lectures. Pay no attention to her, kids. She refuses to keep up with the journals! (I won't tell you what she does with the pages...)
Getting back on track, which is only slightly less difficult for me than for my future guest lecturer, let's do some math. According to the Census, the current population estimate is roughly 330 million. Mortality rate for COVID-19 is difficult to estimate. There are high estimates north of 3%, with other estimates putting it somewhere around 2%, and a lot of variation. I'm going with 2% for now, but for my purposes, it won't matter much. Epidemiological estimates run at around 1/3 of the population contracting COVID-19. It will simply be minor for most. This is a multiplication problem.
110,000,000 infected in the US, if it hits 1/3 of the population. If it really is a 2% mortality rate, you're looking at 2 million dead.
That's a rather horrifying number. Let's put that in perspective. When you want scale and mortality rates, consult CDC. Take cancer and heart disease. Combine them. Double that. That's the scale.
Hopefully, you already knew that cancer and heart disease were the leading causes of death. To combine them, and double that... that's big. Really big. Human toll here could be very big.
OK, now the question is how rational it is for you, individually, to worry. Put this in perspective. Imagine you knew nothing of your age, lifestyle, etc. How worried would you be, in any given year, about dying of cancer? Heart disease? Double that, and that's how worried you should be. Sort of. Except, not quite, because this is also moderated by lifestyle, precautions, and stuff.
But let's say COVID-19 were totally random, just to do some simple math. Contagion at 1/3 of the population with 2% mortality. That would be a 0.67% chance of dying, multiplied out. (OK, that's 2/3 of a percent, but I can't get the "repeating" sign in my blog editor.) So imagine this, for perspective. You go in for a checkup. The doctor says they need to do a follow-up. There is a tiny, tiny, tiny (0.67%) chance of a cancer that they just can't treat. 99.33% you'll live. How much do you, individually, freak out?
Realistically, you're gonna worry. You don't want to hear that you have a 0.67% chance of incurable cancer. But by the numbers, that's a very low number, and the doctor is right to tell you that you shouldn't be freaking out because it is almost certainly not that.
And of course, the actual analogy here involves risks that can be mitigated. Like, washing your hands. And if you are at risk for other reasons, like age, avoid chances of exposure to the degree possible.
Closing college campuses? I don't have the knowledge or training to assess that. However, in terms of the scale of the risks, this is where it is.
Note how different it seems when I say, 2 million dead, versus 0.67% chance.
Most people, at some point in their lives, will wind up with some kind of medical scare. Breast cancer is so common for women that realistically, if you are a woman, at some point, there is a high likelihood that you encounter a version of this scenario. This year, it's everyone at once, with variation across age and other factors. However, the 2 million death toll puts a different "face" on it.
That's what happens when you toggle back and forth between the individual perspective and the national perspective. Small probabilities carried out over millions of iterations. Scale. Perspective.
When I tell you not to freak out, that means individually. Don't be irrational. Do the math.
This'll turn out to be really funny if I get COVID-19 and die from it, right?
The Buchler-Gekko Rule: The point is, ladies and gentleman, that math, for lack of a better word, is good. Math is right. Math works. Math clarifies, cuts through...
See, also, the Bene Gesserit Litany Against Fear.
I advise people to keep calm and do the math. If I were a Brit, I'd say something about carrying on, but too many people are carryin' on crazily. Try this.
I don't like Kansas, so I'm going with CSNY. I taught myself guitar listening to Stephen Stills.
Anyway, my campus just shut down. Now I get to learn how to set up on-line teaching. Yay. Then again, my commute time is going to be awesome, and the big question will be whether or not my cat attempts to give guest lectures. Pay no attention to her, kids. She refuses to keep up with the journals! (I won't tell you what she does with the pages...)
Getting back on track, which is only slightly less difficult for me than for my future guest lecturer, let's do some math. According to the Census, the current population estimate is roughly 330 million. Mortality rate for COVID-19 is difficult to estimate. There are high estimates north of 3%, with other estimates putting it somewhere around 2%, and a lot of variation. I'm going with 2% for now, but for my purposes, it won't matter much. Epidemiological estimates run at around 1/3 of the population contracting COVID-19. It will simply be minor for most. This is a multiplication problem.
110,000,000 infected in the US, if it hits 1/3 of the population. If it really is a 2% mortality rate, you're looking at 2 million dead.
That's a rather horrifying number. Let's put that in perspective. When you want scale and mortality rates, consult CDC. Take cancer and heart disease. Combine them. Double that. That's the scale.
Hopefully, you already knew that cancer and heart disease were the leading causes of death. To combine them, and double that... that's big. Really big. Human toll here could be very big.
OK, now the question is how rational it is for you, individually, to worry. Put this in perspective. Imagine you knew nothing of your age, lifestyle, etc. How worried would you be, in any given year, about dying of cancer? Heart disease? Double that, and that's how worried you should be. Sort of. Except, not quite, because this is also moderated by lifestyle, precautions, and stuff.
But let's say COVID-19 were totally random, just to do some simple math. Contagion at 1/3 of the population with 2% mortality. That would be a 0.67% chance of dying, multiplied out. (OK, that's 2/3 of a percent, but I can't get the "repeating" sign in my blog editor.) So imagine this, for perspective. You go in for a checkup. The doctor says they need to do a follow-up. There is a tiny, tiny, tiny (0.67%) chance of a cancer that they just can't treat. 99.33% you'll live. How much do you, individually, freak out?
Realistically, you're gonna worry. You don't want to hear that you have a 0.67% chance of incurable cancer. But by the numbers, that's a very low number, and the doctor is right to tell you that you shouldn't be freaking out because it is almost certainly not that.
And of course, the actual analogy here involves risks that can be mitigated. Like, washing your hands. And if you are at risk for other reasons, like age, avoid chances of exposure to the degree possible.
Closing college campuses? I don't have the knowledge or training to assess that. However, in terms of the scale of the risks, this is where it is.
Note how different it seems when I say, 2 million dead, versus 0.67% chance.
Most people, at some point in their lives, will wind up with some kind of medical scare. Breast cancer is so common for women that realistically, if you are a woman, at some point, there is a high likelihood that you encounter a version of this scenario. This year, it's everyone at once, with variation across age and other factors. However, the 2 million death toll puts a different "face" on it.
That's what happens when you toggle back and forth between the individual perspective and the national perspective. Small probabilities carried out over millions of iterations. Scale. Perspective.
When I tell you not to freak out, that means individually. Don't be irrational. Do the math.
This'll turn out to be really funny if I get COVID-19 and die from it, right?
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