Introduction summary does not summarise article

[0atman]

This is related to #2, I think the extra tl;dr (in simple language) could go in the Introduction?

The current intro says:

upon review of the evidence concludes that the unprecedented policy of “lockdown” is likely to result in far more mortality than the best alternative.

You have to be careful with such language ("likely" does not seem to be backed up by the rest of the text), I think this rather brash sentence is in contrast to the very measured approach shown in the rest of the article.

Lets break it down:

"Review of the evidence"

Because you've mostly presented the evidence that agrees with your conclusion, you've not demonstrated impartiality to the reader. They won't believe you've "reviewed" the evidence if you seem partisan. I personally believe you have taken a balanced, scientific approach, but you must prove it to the reader by showing it.

Astonishing claims require astonishing evidence: Because you're arguing against the current policies of most governments and public health organisations, you have to present both sides as well as show why your side is superior. Your assertion of "than the best alternative" here needs to be clear, name it and quantify it.

"Unprecedented"

See #6, it's very precedented.

"Lockdown mortality"

For this summary to hold true, you must contrast the deaths without lockdown, with lockdown and with the partial measures you present in the article.

Some good analysis of the Imperial College COVID research was published by: https://twitter.com/jeremycyoung/status/1239975682643357696

There are some numbers there that seem reasonable to me, and you can confirm it with the original text.

[ryankemper]

Thanks @0atman. These contributions are really incredible.

As a quick aside - in https://gitlab.com/ryankemper/writings/-/merge_requests/1 someone mentioned they would share the post, so out of curiosity I searched twitter for the URL of my blogpost.

Well, first I found your tweet, which gave me a good chuckle. And also it's quite humbling that you are contributing towards something where you might not necessarily agree with the conclusion. It shows a bizarre amount of integrity. BTW, Twitter held a gun to my previous (and hardly used) twitter account @ryankemper7 and thus it's now suspended since I didn't provide them my phone number, so if you want to @ me you should tweet at @ryankemper10 which I created to try to publish my post.

But what also caught my eye is this: https://twitter.com/jtepper2/status/1256119383027527681 So, it looks like there might be some more eyeballs on it soon. 37k followers might not be that much in the scheme of things but that still feels like a pretty damn big number to me...

I'm thinking critical path right now is softening some of the intro language (perhaps s/likely/possibly), then shoring up the suicide numbers, nuking or improving the overdose subsection, and then adding a fair characterization of the "opposing" side as you said. I also think addressing the Imperial College model is really important; I don't know if I can do it justice tonight though.

[0atman]

Thank you for not letting my hot-take on twitter sour our collaboration, I'm relieved you see that my contribution is in good faith!

You've collected such a good body of evidence here, I just had to investigate why our conclusions differ so widely.

I agree with your plan, that sounds like a great start.

[0atman]

By the way (and I promise this is as political as I'll get) what I'm seeing more and more is people questioning the assumption that things that are bad for the economy are bad for the people.

I'm inclined to leave out this from our conversation, because your article is very US-focussed, I understand that the US has very little national infrastructure (ie most services are privately held, such as hospitals), maybe my Euro-centric ideas don't work.

To contrast how things are here in the UK, the government pays up to $3,100 equivilant per month to people who are furloughed. It is my understanding that the US's response has been to bail out the companies instead. Top vs bottom economics, I guess? I'm no expert.

So, as I joked on twitter, I'm VERY cautious about plans that involve sacrificing 1% of the population for some nebulous "economy".

I'm digging so deep into your numbers to make sure my own views on lockdown are valid. 1% of the US population is 3.3 million. That's a daunting figure that even if an order of magnitude out, dwarfs your estimates for the dangers of lockdown.

I have too many American friends (and perhaps made a new one today!) to want to risk it, even if my country continues lockdown. :muscle:

[ryankemper]

We should be careful not to view the economy as an abstraction. I mean, by definition the word is an abstraction, but the economy is people, so to speak.

You can't eat money (or at least, I don't recommend it). Money is an abstraction we use to measure (relative) value. Wealth is the sum total of physical goods/services/resources that we rely on.

If it were just a matter of, say, the supply of makeup products going down, I don't see that leading to mortality. But, the global food supply? Yeah, that does. (Extreme and contrived examples, I know)

--

Just to give you some insight into a small subset of my political beliefs, given we have an income tax that won't be going away any time soon, I support what is called UBI, specifically at a level that allows one to purchase food and housing but not much more without working. I think that's the right balance. However I don't support ushering it in right now after forcibly shutting down the economy because that has a really bad smell.

As things currently stand in the US, we don't have UBI, altho right now unemployment payments are absurdly high, so those who have made it thru the other end of the bureaucracy are doing fine money-wise. Many have had trouble getting through to the other end. Ditto for the "stimulus" checks (they should have called them "hey sorry we made you miss rent, and by the way flip a coin on if it shows up or not" checks :P)

As you may know, the majority of Americans live paycheck-to-paycheck. There is not a culture of saving money here (compare to a place like China), which is one of many reasons we have a very startling divide between those who earn all their wages from work, versus those who make significant income from financial assets.

Also critically, our healthcare is tied to our employment. And we just unemployed a massive section of our society. Oops...

I had to make an ER visit here in California today (incidentally I'm with one hand for the next few days). I can afford the >$600/month that COBRA (govt. program that lets you stay on your previous employer's healthcare plan for some time, but you pay all of the costs yourself) requires, so even though I quit my previous job back in February I won't be getting bankrupted. But for many Americans, they no longer have healthcare and cannot afford the payments, or are too stressed/overwhelmed to navigate the system at all.

It's not a pretty situation. I agree that we should have better systems in place. And we can probably both agree, even without much first-hand knowledge of US politics, that we aren't going to have those systems in place any time soon :P

Thanks for your thoughts, friend :)

[0atman]

I'm a BIG proponent of UBI too, it seems like such an obvious solution!

Sorry to hear about your ER visit, hope it all works out.