What I've Been Reading

All of humanity is searching for truth, justice, and beauty. We are on an eternal search for the truth because we only believe in the lies we have stored in the mind. We are searching for justice because in the belief system we have, there is no justice. We search for beauty because it doesn't matter how beautiful a person is, we don't believe that person has beauty. We keep searching and searching, when everything is already within us. There is no truth to find. Where-ever we turn our heads, all we see is the truth, but with the agreements and beliefs we have stored in our mind, we have no eyes to for this truth. 

We don't see the truth because we are blind. What blinds us are all those false beliefs we have in our mind. We have the need to be right and to make others wrong. We trust what we believe, and our beliefs set us up for suffering. It is as if we live in the middle of a fog that doesn't let us see further than our nose. we live in a fog that is not even real. This fog is a dream, your personal dream of life - what you believe, all the concepts you have about what you are, all the agreements you have made with others, with yourself, and even with God. 

The Four Agreements: A Practical Guide to Personal Freedom (A Toltec Wisdom Book) by Don Miguel Ruiz.

It's amazing how most of the ancient civilizations from different times and separated geographically (and most likely not accessible) came up with common themes (sans the "miracles") on how to be a good human and how to lead a good life.

Toltec was an ancient Mexican civilization and not surprisingly, I have never read anything on them until now. This is little book is a great introduction to their philosophy.

The four agreements are simple for everyone to follow:

• First Agreement: Be impeccable with your word. It sounds very simple, but it's very, very powerful.

• Second Agreement: Don't take anything personally. Nothing other people do is because of you. It is because of themselves. When we take something personally, we make the assumption that they know what is in our world, and we try to impose our world on their world. 

• Third Agreement: Don't make assumptions. It is difficult because we so often do exactly the opposite. We have all these habits and routines that we are not even aware of. Becoming aware of these habits and understanding the importance of this agreement is the first step, But understanding it's importance is not enough. What will really make the difference is action. 

• Fourth Agreement: Always do your best. This one agreement allows the other three to become deeply ingrained habits. The fourth agreement is about the action of the first three. 

There are three masteries that lead people to become Toltecs.

Mastery of Awareness - This is to be aware of who really are, with all the possibilities. 

Mastery of Transformation - How to change and free of human domestication (by society).

Mastery of Intent - Intent from the Toltec point of view is that part of life that makes the transformation of energy possible; it is the one living being that seamlessly encompasses all energy, or what we call "God". Intent is life itself; it is unconditional love. The Mastery of Intent is, therefore, the Mastery of Love. 

Best Movie Scene - Responsibility as a Human & Importance of Education

I think, growing up watching Tamil movies and listening to powerful lyrics written by some of the greatest poets has been one of the most powerful forces behind my lifelong longing to be a better person.

These little things can have a profound impact on a kid and do set the tone for the rest of life.

Plato's dream of ruled by philosopher-kings was indeed true until the last couple of decades in Tamilnadu.

As a young man, one of the most shocking realization after coming to the US was the lack of respect for knowledge and education (leave alone life-long education). I was in utter disbelief listening to people belive and debating still about the spontaneous genesis of humans and all other sentient lives were "made" to be used by humans. I haven't made peace with that truth until this day.

The past couple of months has clearly shown that a combination of lack of education with ultra-individualism can not only be disastrous but has the power to wipe out humanity.

In this scene from the movie Thevar Magan, Kamal wants to go back to London after experiencing religious fanaticism and realizing the backwardness of the village he grew up in.

His father's speech to convince him to stay and advising him on the "responsibility of a human" is one of the most powerful scenes in the history of cinema.

"Everyone has to die someday. Death is not important but how you live your life to be useful for others is important. 

You cannot expect to eat the fruit as soon as you plant a seed. It takes time and patience. How can you expect these people to talk science overnight when they lived for centuries fighting with knives and swords. 

It is the responsibility and obligation as a human being that you do something for these uneducated people."

This is not only true in movies but also there were numerous wise and unknown faces in parts of India who sacrificed their lives to educate and awaken minds.

I have been in the US for close to 25 years and I haven't seen anyone do this in say remote parts of West Virginia. Young men and women move to Afghanistan and African jungles to educate people but they never do that in their own backyard.

It is also very sad to realize that it is not safe to do educate minds in some parts of the US. I would further add mindless individualism has caused this more than religion. I have seen educated people fall into this category.

Those who believe in the continuous miracle of gods or markets or technology or human capacity to change without an iota of an effort fall under the same category. 

I am pessimistic about any immediate change in this attitude for one reason.

The most difficult subjects can be explained to the most slow-witted man if he has not formed any idea of them already; but the simplest thing cannot be made clear to the most intelligent man if he is firmly persuaded that he knows already, without a shadow of a doubt, what is laid before him. 

- Leo Tolstoy, The Kingdom of God Is Within You

Kamal heeds to his father's wish, sacrificing the love of his life and stays in the village. In the last few minutes of the movie, Kamal's pleads the villagers to stop these killings and invest in educating their children. It's time this country listens to that pleading. You can watch the full movie here.

Nothing is more commonplace than to lament that moral progress has failed to keep pace with scientific knowledge. If only we were more intelligent and more moral, we could use technology only for benign ends. The fault is not in our tools, we say, but in ourselves. 

In one sense this is true. Technical progress leaves only one problem unsolved: the frailty of human nature. Unfortunately that problem is insoluble. 

- John Gray,  Straw Dogs: Thoughts on Humans and Other Animals

Music Of Munching

Heaven is on a quiet morning, hearing three beautiful beings munching their breakfast. Everything in the world is still except for the sounds of their pleasures of eating.

I miss Max's routine of playing with his toys, running around the house while I am preparing his breakfast. He knew it's going to take a few minutes and he would optimize the time by playing in the meantime!

Neo, Fluffy, and Garph have their own routines. Garph likes to look outside and watch the birds. Fluffy likes to prowl around the house and Neo waits with bated breath for his breakfast like he has never seen food before.

A few centuries ago, Montaigne wrote

If you don't know how to die, don't worry; Nature will tell you what to do on the spot, fully and adequately. She will do this job perfectly for you; don't bother your head about it.

Until nature does her job, these precious simple pleasures from these animals show me that heaven is nowhere else but here on earth.

We Have To Wake Up (Factory Farms) - Jonathan Foer Safron

Author of Eating Animals has been screaming about this for over a decade.

Most "intelligent" people (read IYI: Intellectuals Yet Idiots) are talking about how to manufacture masks at economies of scale  and what will happen to the economy this year; he is the one the few people talking about prevention

The meat that we eat today overwhelmingly comes from genetically uniform, immunocompromised, and regularly drugged animals lodged by the tens of thousands into buildings or stacked cages – no matter how the meat is labelled. We know this, and most of us would strongly prefer it be otherwise. But we would prefer a lot of things in the world that aren’t so and, for most of us, the future of animal farming is low on our list of priorities, especially now. It is understandable to be most concerned with oneself. The problem is, we aren’t doing a good job of being selfish.

We don’t yet know the full history of the emergence of Covid-19, the particular strain of coronavirus that now threatens us. But with recent pandemic virus threats from influenza viruses such as H1N1 (swine flu) or H5N1 (bird flu) there is no ambiguity: those viruses evolved on chicken and pig factory farms. Genetic analyses have shown that crucial components of H1N1 emerged from a virus circulating in North American pigs. But it is commercial poultry operations that appear to be the Silicon Valley of viral development.

It is on chicken factory farms that we have most frequently found viruses that have mutated from a form found only in animals into a form that harms humans (what scientists call “antigenic shift”). It is these “novel” viruses that our immune systems are unfamiliar with and that can prove most deadly.

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Imagine if our military leaders told us that almost every terrorist in recent memory had spent time in the same training camp, but no politician would call for an investigation of the training camp. Imagine if we knew that those terrorists were developing weapons more destructive than any that has been used, or tested, in human history. This is our situation when it comes to pandemics and farming.

The United States CDC is the abbreviation for an agency whose name is actually the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. We drop prevention from the acronym, which is innocent enough. But we also tend to drop serious discussion of prevention in favour of tactics for responding once pandemics hit. This is understandable – especially in the midst of a pandemic – but recklessly dangerous. We are preoccupied with the production of face masks, but we appear unconcerned with the farms that are producing pandemics. The world is burning and we are reaching for more fire extinguishers while gasoline soaks through the tinder at our feet.

Building A Log Cabin!

Impermanence - We Not Masters But Temporary Guests

We fell asleep in one world, and woke up in another... 

Our hugs and kisses suddenly become weapons, and not visiting parents & friends becomes an act of love. 

Suddenly you realize that power, beauty & money are worthless, when you can't get you the oxygen you're fighting for. 

The world continues its life and it is beautiful. It only puts humans in temporary cages.  

I think it's sending us a message: 

"You are not necessary. The air, earth, water and sky without you are fine. When you come back, remember that you are my guests. Not my masters." 

- Haroon Rashid 

The Ethics of Predictive Journalism

Predicting aspects of social life is quite a different challenge from, say, forecasting the weather. Weather predictions don’t have to take into account the idiosyncratic behavior of individuals, who make their own choices but are also subject to influence. This creates a new ethical dilemma for journalists, who must reckon with how their news organizations’ behavior—publishing or framing information in particular ways—might influence how predicted events unfold.

Consider the potential impact of election predictions in 2016, many of which had Hillary Clinton as the clear favorite. It’s possible that individual Hillary supporters saw those predictions and thought something like, “She’s got this one in the bag. I’m busy on Tuesday, and my vote won’t be decisive anyway, so I don’t need to vote.” According to one study, election predictions may indeed depress voter turnout, depending on how those predictions are presented to people.

The important point here is that the act of publication may create a feedback loop that dampens (or amplifies) the likelihood of something actually happening. News organizations that publish predictions need to be aware of their own role in influencing the outcome they are predicting.

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Although the accuracy of the model is only truly knowable in retrospect, making the nuts and bolts of its process visible can at least help readers put predictions in perspective. If a model is built on a set of flimsy assumptions, readers can be appropriately skeptical of what it tells them.

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As predictions grow into and beyond their journalistic roots in elections, transparency, uncertainty communication, and careful consideration of the social dynamics of predictive information will be essential to their ethical use. We should expect the experiences of data journalists to coalesce into a set of ethical expectations and norms. We’re not there yet, but perhaps one day there will even be a style guide for predictive journalism.

- More Here

I Praise My Destroyer

In the name of the daybreak

and the eyelids of morning

and the wayfaring moon

and the night when it departs,

I swear I will not dishonor

my soul with hatred,

but offer myself humbly

as a guardian of nature,

as a healer of misery,

as a messenger of wonder,

as an architect of peace.

In the name of the sun and its mirrors

and the day that embraces it

and the cloud veils drawn over it

and the uttermost night

and the male and the female

and the plants bursting with seed

and the crowning seasons

of the firefly and the apple,

I will honor all life

—wherever and in whatever form

it may dwell—on Earth my home,

and in the mansions of the stars.

- School Prayer by Diane Ackerman from I Praise My Destroyer

Coddling Over & It's Time To Learn From Hardship

Death and talk of death is everywhere. The virus seems to do whatever it wants. “We put our full minds and whole hearts into trying to save them. Then I see their bodies shut down anyway. They are alone.” Wearing the same masks for so long etches lines into her face, but she keeps going back in.

There’s absolutely no self-glorification here, just endurance. I’m reminded of Dr. Albert Schweitzer’s 1931 memoir. When hiring doctors for his hospital in the African jungle, he wrote, he never hired anyone who thought he was doing something grand and heroic. The only doctors who would last are those who thought what they were doing was as ordinary and necessary as doing the dishes: “There are no heroes of action — only heroes of renunciation and suffering.”

I’m also reminded of the maxim that excellence is not an action, it’s a habit. Tenacity is not a spontaneous flowering of good character. It’s doing what you were trained to do. It manifests not in those whose training spared them hardship but in those whose training embraced hardship and taught students to deal with it.

I’m hoping this moment launches a change in the way we raise and train all our young, at all ages. I’m hoping it exorcises the tide of “safetyism,” which has gone overboard.

The virus is another reminder that hardship is woven into the warp and woof existence. Training a young person is training her or him to master hardship, to endure suffering and, by building something new from the wreckage, redeem it.

- More here from David Brooks

Epistemic Humility—Knowing Your Limits in a Pandemic

If you are successful in one field doesn't make one intelligent in another unless you meditate on the complexity of things and stop the urge to signal intelligence constantly. A beautiful and timely piece by Erik Angner: 

Being a true expert involves not only knowing stuff about the world but also knowing the limits of your knowledge and expertise. It requires, as psychologists say, both cognitive and metacognitive skills. The point is not that true experts should withhold their beliefs or that they should never speak with conviction. Some beliefs are better supported by the evidence than others, after all, and we should not hesitate to say so. The point is that true experts express themselves with the proper degree of confidence—meaning with a degree of confidence that’s justified given the evidence. 

Compare Epstein, Kushner, and Navarro’s swagger to medical statistician Robert Grant, who tweeted: 

“I’ve studied this stuff at university, done data analysis for decades, written several NHS guidelines (including one for an infectious disease), and taught it to health professionals. That’s why you don’t see me making any coronavirus forecasts.” 

The concept of epistemic humility is useful to describe the difference between these two kinds of character. Epistemic humility is an intellectual virtue. It is grounded in the realization that our knowledge is always provisional and incomplete—and that it might require revision in light of new evidence. Grant appreciates the extent of our ignorance under these difficult conditions; the other characters don’t. A lack of epistemic humility is a vice—and it can cause massive damage both in our private lives and in public policy. 

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If expertise does not protect against overconfidence, what does? Research in fact suggests one simple thing that everyone can do. It is to consider reasons that you may be wrong. If you want to reduce overconfidence in yourself or others, just ask: What are the reasons to think this claim may be mistaken? Under what conditions would this be wrong? Such questions are difficult, because we are much more used to searching for reasons we are right. But thinking through the ways in which we can fail helps reduce overconfidence and promotes epistemic humility. 

Again, it is fine and good to have opinions, and to express them in public—even with great conviction. The point is that true experts, unlike charlatans, express themselves in a way that mirrors their limitations. All of us who want to be taken seriously would do well to demonstrate the virtue of epistemic humility.

Our Pandemic Summer - Ed Young

As I wrote last month, the only viable endgame is to play whack-a-mole with the coronavirus, suppressing it until a vaccine can be produced. With luck, that will take 18 to 24 months. During that time, new outbreaks will probably arise. Much about that period is unclear, but the dozens of experts whom I have interviewed agree that life as most people knew it cannot fully return. “I think people haven’t understood that this isn’t about the next couple of weeks,” said Michael Osterholm, an infectious-disease epidemiologist at the University of Minnesota. “This is about the next two years.”

The pandemic is not a hurricane or a wildfire. It is not comparable to Pearl Harbor or 9/11. Such disasters are confined in time and space. The SARS-CoV-2 virus will linger through the year and across the world. “Everyone wants to know when this will end,” said Devi Sridhar, a public-health expert at the University of Edinburgh. “That’s not the right question. The right question is: How do we continue?”

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The U.S. is still a scientific and biomedical powerhouse. To marshal that power, it needs a massive, coordinated, government-led initiative to find the cleverest ways of controlling COVID-19—a modern-day Apollo program. No such program is afoot. Former Trump- and Obama-era officials have published detailed plans. Elizabeth Warren is on her third iteration. But the White House either has no strategy or has chosen not to disclose it.

Without a unifying vision, governors and mayors have been forced to handle the pandemic themselves. Ludicrously, states are bidding against one another—and the federal government—for precious supplies. Six states still haven’t issued any kind of stay-at-home order, while those that moved late, such as Florida, may have seeded infections in the rest of the country. 

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The U.S. needs to learn that lesson, but Trump is still behaving as if he’s engaged in a brief skirmish rather than a protracted siege. On April 8, before even the first pandemic peak had subsided, he tweeted: “Once we OPEN UP OUR GREAT COUNTRY, and it will be sooner rather than later, the horror of the Invisible Enemy, except for those that sadly lost a family member or friend, must be quickly forgotten.” The enemy isn’t going anywhere. To forget it would be to beget further horror.

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As the rest of the U.S. comes to terms with the same restless impermanence, it must abandon the question When do we go back to normal? That outlook ignores the immense disparities in what different Americans experience as normal. It wastes the rare opportunity to reimagine what a fairer and less vulnerable society might look like. It glosses over the ongoing nature of the coronavirus threat. There is no going back. The only way out is through—past a turbulent spring, across an unusual summer, and into an unsettled year beyond.

- More here from Ed Young

Why the War on Drugs is a War on People

There are so many little girls and boys kidnapped and forced into the sex trade every day but we are still fighting the stupid drug war. It's so ridiculous that we have let it go on for 50 years!

The only fraction of the cost spent on drug wars is spent on stopping sex trade in this country. Yes, in this great country of the USA. It's about time we move this money to help free kids and young women from this evil sex trade.

Remember: For thousands of years of human history, the sex trade has always occupied a small range in the moral spectrum from being looked down upon to being considered pure evil. 

China’s Wet Markets, America’s Factory Farming

If you’re up for a few further details, we have travel writer Paula Froelich, in a recent New York Post column, recalling how in the Asian live-animal markets she has visited the doomed creatures “stare back at you.” When their turn comes, she writes,

the animals that have not yet been dispatched by the butcher’s knife make desperate bids to escape by climbing on top of each other and flopping or jumping out of their containers (to no avail). At least in the wet areas [where marine creatures are sold], the animals don’t make a sound. The screams from mammals and fowl are unbearable and heartbreaking.

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Lest we hope too much for some post-pandemic stirring of conscience, consider the Chinese government’s idea of a palliative for those suffering from the coronavirus. As the crisis spread, apparently some fast-thinking experts in “traditional medicine” at China’s National Health Commission turned to an ancient remedy known as Tan Re Qing, adding it to their official list of recommended treatments. The potion consists chiefly of bile extracted from bears. The more fortunate of these bears are shot in the wild for use of their gallbladders. The others, across China and Southeast Asia, are captured and “farmed” by the thousands, in a process that involves their interminable, year-after-year confinement in fit-to-size cages, interrupted only by the agonies of having the bile drained. Do an image search on “bear bile farming” sometime when you’re ready to be reminded of what hellish animal torments only human stupidity, arrogance, and selfishness could devise.

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No, we in the Western world don’t get involved while grim-faced primitives execute and skin animals for meat. We have companies with people of similar temperament to handle everything for us. And there’s none of that “staring back” that the Post’s Paula Froelich describes, because, in general, we keep the sadness and desperation of those creatures as deeply suppressed from conscious thought as possible. An etiquette of denial pushes the subject away, leaving it all for others to bear. Addressing a shareholders’ meeting of Tyson Foods in 2006, one worker from a slaughterhouse in Sioux City, Iowa, unburdened himself: “The worst thing, worse than the physical danger, is the emotional toll. Pigs down on the kill floor have come up and nuzzled me like a puppy. Two minutes later I had to kill them — beat them to death with a pipe. I can’t care.”

Following the only consistent rule in both live-animal markets and industrial livestock agriculture that the most basic animal needs are always to be subordinated to the most trivial human desires this process yields the meats that people crave so much, old favorites like bacon, veal, steak, and lamb that customers must have, no matter how these are obtained. When the pleasures of food become an inordinate desire, forcing demands without need or limit and regardless of the moral consequences, there’s a word for that, and the fault is always easier to see in foreigners with more free-roaming tastes in flesh.

But for the animals we do eat, we have sprawling, toxic, industrial “mass-confinement” farms that look like concentration camps. National “herds” and “flocks” that all would expire in their misery but for a massive use of antibiotics, among other techniques, to maintain their existence amid squalor and disease — an infectious “time bomb” closer to home as bacterial and viral pathogens gain in resistance. And a whole array of other standard practices like the “intensive confinement” of pigs, in gestation cages that look borrowed from Asia’s bear-bile farms; the bulldozing of lame “downer cows”; and “maceration” of unwanted chicks, billions routinely tossed into grinders. All of which leave us very badly compromised as any model in the decent treatment of animals.

- More here from Mathew Scully author of Dominion: The Power of Man, the Suffering of Animals, and the Call to Mercy

I don't know what to say... I cannot even look into the eyes of people who sponsor these suffering without morally corrupting myself. I rather live and die alone than be spend a second with these sponsorers. If you are reading this and know me and eat meat - don't bother contacting me ever again.

Coronavirus Is Not A Natural But Ecological Disaster

Thankfully, people have started pointing fingers at factory farms and meat-eating as the source past, current and future pandemics.

Osama Bin Laden was the cause for 9-11 and now, factory farms, meat consumption and most importantly people who support this unwarranted suffering are the cause for Coronavirus (and future pandemics).

Kate Brown has a thoughtful piece:

Microbial webs have bridged the spaces between human beings and other species for all of our history. Long before anyone knew what a single-cell organism was, cultural practices maximized the exchange of microbes: as people farmed, foraged, tended livestock, fermented their food, dipped their hands in common bowls, and greeted one other with a touch, they engaged in rituals that bound them together with their neighbors and other organisms. This was probably not accidental. A wealth of evidence shows that, when we share microbes with other people and organisms, we become healthier, better adapted to our environments, and more in synch as a social unit.⁠

The interconnectedness of our biological lives, which has become even clearer in recent decades, is pushing us to reconsider our understanding of the natural world. It turns out that the familiar Linnaean taxonomy, with each species on its own distinct branch of the tree, is too unsubtle: lichens, for example, are made up of a fungus and an alga so tightly bound that the two species create a new organism that is difficult to classify. Biologists have begun questioning the idea that each tree is an “individual”—it might be more accurately understood as a node in a network of underworld exchanges between fungi, roots, bacteria, lichen, insects, and other plants. The network is so intricate that it’s difficult to say where one organism ends and the other begins. Our picture of the human body is shifting, too. It seems less like a self-contained vessel, defined by one’s genetic code and ruled by a brain, than like a microbial ecosystem that sweeps along in atmospheric currents, harvesting gases, bacteria, phages, fungal spores, and airborne toxins in its nets.

In the midst of the coronavirus outbreak, this idea of a body as an assembly of species—a community—seems newly relevant and unsettling. How are we supposed to protect ourselves, if we are so porous? Are pandemics inevitable, when living things are bound so tightly together in a dense, planetary sphere?

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In piecing together the origin story of the coronavirus pandemic, many narratives have pointed to Chinese “wet markets,” at which live animals are sold. But no matter where the viral “spillover” occurred, it was made more likely by widespread trends. The single best predictor of where new diseases will spring up is population density. The misnamed Spanish flu of 1918 most likely emerged on Kansas farms, where people, animals, and birds lived in close quarters. One study found that, from 1940 to 2004, infectious diseases materialized most in densely packed areas, such as the northeastern United States, Western Europe, Japan, and southeastern Australia. 

Why "AI" Has Been Useless In This Pandemic?

AI has been one of the biggest let down in this pandemic.

There was so much noise for over a decade and when it came to complex systems even Google's of the world didn't do shit (location tracking app is NOT AI).

Bill and Melinda Gates's philanthropic venture has been phenomenal while Microsoft's AI team has been and still taking a nap (chatbots don't count).

Finally, someone spoke what it needs to be said (and I do modeling n AI for a living).
Thank you, Cheryl Rofer - Read her entire twitter thread and I am posting it here too:

1. There are a hundred gazillion models out there. Few of their owners have bothered to compare their model to others to see what is working and what isn't.
2. By the standards of the models I've worked with, they are all simple - a few differential equations, a curve fit. I've worked with a hundred or more elementary reactions and then a mass- and heat-transfer model that incorporated those in. (Hint: we had to boil them down to six)
3. The only model I have seen that is at all transparent about its parameters is the Imperial College model. All the others I have seen are curve fits. They mumble about social distancing as a variable but never say which parameter it fits into.
4. All the curve fits are with different functions. At least, back in the day when chemical kinetics was curve fitting, we always used the same function.
5. It looks like amateur hour. Everyone's got their pet model, but they're not telling us what it is. And a further layer of amateurs on Twitter say solemn words like "assumptions" that they have nothing to back up.
6. I've spent a lot of time on the Imperial College and IHME models. I don't intend to do that for every single model out there. (The Imperial College Modeling Of The Coronavirus)
7. My assumption from here on in is that any model but the Imperial College model is crap until it's explained. With explicit connection of assumptions to parameters.
8. Tyler Cowen (and probably other economists who think they've got something to say) has never looked closely at the epidemiological models, judging from this. His questions are obnoxious. Ignore stuff like this - What does this economist think of epidemiologists?

Yes, this is a huge issue now - people cannot shut up. Most of them became overnight economists, virologists, epidemiologists, doctors, modelers and experts in everything under the sun (so much for epistemological modesty).

The best minds of my generation are thinking about how to make people click ads. That sucks.

- Jeff Hammerbacher

This is what we get from AI when we forget the sense of the reality of complex systems vs. earning million-dollar salaries by making people click on links.

As J.D Salinger's Holden would say - I could puke next time someone gives an intellectual fart talk on "the great AI threat".

But to be fair:

It takes lots of data, domain knowledge, a range of diverse knowledge (foxes and not hedgehogs) and more importantly patience and time to train a generalized model.  One cannot instantly "deep learn" the way out of a pandemic. 

There are some great exceptions - Five-Thirty-Eight had a good post on Why It’s So Freaking Hard To Make A Good COVID-19 Model and of-course Nassim Taleb.

There are some hidden treasures who have been modeling this for a long time - kudos to them:

• https://nextstrain.org/ (these guys are really good)
• https://bluedot.global/ 
• http://metabiota.com/
• https://www.epidemictracker.com/
• https://www.stratifyd.com/
• https://www.apixio.com/
• https://www.pacteraedge.com/
• https://www.sri.com/
• https://nexttrace.org/
• https://www.arcgis.com

Industry Scrambles To Stop Bird Flu In South Carolina

It's been over a month since the lockdown;  I do follow some of the most "intelligent" and "conscious" people on twitter - not one, not even one changed their mind about killing animals for their appetite (it goes without saying I deeply respect the ones who already changed and helping me become a better being). 

Most of them became overnight economists, virologists, epidemiologists, doctors, and experts in everything under the sun (so much for epistemological modesty) but none of them talk about their cognitive dissonance of killing animals for their gastro-intestinal pleasures. 

As expected, Turkey factory farms in South Carolina now has a known virus but we wouldn't be lucky next time. Its a matter of time before an unknown virus is going to evolve (and maybe already in the process of evolving)

An infectious and fatal strain of bird flu has been confirmed in a commercial turkey flock in South Carolina, the first case of the more serious strain of the disease in the United States since 2017 and a worrisome development for an industry that was devastated by previous outbreaks.

The high pathogenic case was found at an operation in Chesterfield County, South Carolina, marking the first case of the more dangerous strain since one found in a Tennessee chicken flock in 2017. In 2015, an estimated 50 million poultry had to be killed at operations mainly in the Upper Midwest after infections spread throughout the region.

Metabolic Effects of Intermittent Fasting

Abstract

The objective of this review is to provide an overview of intermittent fasting regimens, summarize the evidence on the health benefits of intermittent fasting, and discuss physiological mechanisms by which intermittent fasting might lead to improved health outcomes. A MEDLINE search was performed using PubMed and the terms “intermittent fasting,” “fasting,” “time-restricted feeding,” and “food timing.” Modified fasting regimens appear to promote weight loss and may improve metabolic health. Several lines of evidence also support the hypothesis that eating patterns that reduce or eliminate nighttime eating and prolong nightly fasting intervals may result in sustained improvements in human health. Intermittent fasting regimens are hypothesized to influence metabolic regulation via effects on (a) circadian biology, (b) the gut microbiome, and (c) modifiable lifestyle behaviors, such as sleep. If proven to be efficacious, these eating regimens offer promising nonpharmacological approaches to improving health at the population level, with multiple public health benefits.

- Full paper here

Exercise Induces Different Molecular Responses in Trained and Untrained Human Muscle.

Abstract

INTRODUCTION:
Human skeletal muscle is thought to have heightened sensitivity to exercise stimulus when it has been previously trained (i.e., it possesses "muscle memory"). We investigated whether basal and acute resistance exercise-induced gene expression and cell signaling events are influenced by previous strength training history.

METHODS:
Accordingly, 19 training naïve women and men completed 10 weeks of unilateral leg strength training, followed by 20 weeks of detraining. Subsequently, an acute resistance exercise session was performed for both legs, with vastus lateralis biopsies taken at rest and 1 h after exercise in both legs (memory and control).

RESULTS:
The phosphorylation of AMPK and eEF2 was higher in the memory leg than in the control leg at both time points. Post-exercise phosphorylation of 4E-BP1 was higher in the memory leg than in the control leg. The memory leg had lower basal mRNA levels of total PGC1α, and, unlike the control leg, exhibited increases in PGC1α-ex1a transcripts after exercise. In the genes related to myogenesis (SETD3, MYOD1, and MYOG), mRNA levels differed between the memory and the untrained leg; these effects were evident primarily in the male subjects. Expression of the novel gene SPRYD7 was lower in the memory leg at rest and decreased after exercise only in the control leg, but SPRYD7 protein levels were higher in the memory leg.

CONCLUSION:
In conclusion, several key regulatory genes and proteins involved in muscular adaptations to resistance exercise are influenced by previous training history. Although the relevance and mechanistic explanation for these findings need further investigation, they support the view of a molecular muscle memory in response to training.

- Full paper here

China Signals End To Dog Meat...

I am not impressed and not optimistic. When a change happens due to change in morality, then the probability of permanent to eternal change is very high. But when a change happens because of incentives then that probability is very low. The progress in human civilization happens from former and former only.

Nevertheless, it's is god-send news for the dogs in China:

The Chinese government has signalled an end to the human consumption of dogs, with the agriculture ministry today releasing a draft policy that would forbid canine meat.

Citing the “progress of human civilisation” as well as growing public concern over animal welfare and prevention of disease transmission from animals to humans, China’s Ministry of Agricultural and Rural Affairs singled out canines as forbidden in a draft “white list” of animals allowed to be raised for meat.

The ministry called dogs a “special companion animal” and one not internationally recognised as livestock.

Max, Frisbee, & What Undreamt Dreams May Come True

I was around 6 or 7 years old, when saw my first dog movie back in India. A movie named Digby: The Biggest Dog in the World.

I don't remember much about the movie than an abstract storyline but I do remember before the movie started, there were 10/15 mins of dog frisbee championship clips. It was mesmerizing to watch dogs run hundreds of yards and pluck frisbee out of the thin air. Their agility seemed like they were capable of flying.

There was a ritual of storytelling (and signaling) to siblings and friends every time I saw a movie (I used to see lots and lots of multi-lingual movies); I was bragging that I was able to see the dog frisbee championship and the immense agility of dogs (one has to read Swami and Friends to get an idea of how kids were although R.K.Narayan's book was based on much older time and fictional town).

Somehow, this memory of the dog frisbee championship and my bragging to my friends remained in my memory. No repetitive dreams but it was one of the oldest memories that I have from my childhood.

Little did that small kid knew not only how much of frisbee would be part of his life but also "frisbee" would be one of the most used words for the rest of his life.

I don't exactly remember when and how Max started playing frisbee (maybe it will come back to me one day). Max was one of the most amazing frisbee players I have ever seen - almost on par with those frisbee championship dogs.

Everyone in our community watched him play and even people used to stop their cars to watch him play. His agility, speed, and diving into the air were phenomenal. It was pure joy to watch him play.

He was playing frisbee until August 2019 even with cancer and months of chemo. And he was over 13 years at that point.

Max playing for the last time on August 1st, 2019

All of Max's toys and things are now packed and safe in the memory boxes except his frisbee. It's still sitting there near the kitchen sink where I used to wash it after he finished playing.

Last Sunday, I wanted to put his frisbee also into the memory box and took some pictures of the frisbee from Max's perspective while he would jump to pick up the frisbee and asking me to take him out to play.

Frisbee sitting on the kitchen sink from Max's perspective

We have done this ritual multiple times a day and thousands of times in the last 13 plus years. I miss Max, his energy and his naughty eyes with his frisbee in his mouth.

On the same day - last Sunday (04/05/2020), Neo got his first small frisbee. He was thrilled to see it and running crazy all around the house without an idea of how to use it. But he already started to understand the concept that it's not a chew toy but it's something that involves a partner that can throw to him.

Today was Neo's first day outside with his new frisbee

And just like that, the new chapter of my undreamt dreams has started to unfold. 

While taking pictures of frisbee from Max's perspective, I suddenly realized that I didn't have the heart to move his frisbee. And just like that, I decided that his frisbee is going to stay there for the rest of my life - as a constant reminder no matter how painful life is, a devasting virus,  all the cruelty and animal sufferings, no matter how mean and self-serving people are - life is still beautiful and there is no point to life without play. 

Yes, there is no point to life without play.

While Max's ashes is a constant reminder of memento mori but his frisbee will be a constant reminder for me that life can be filled with playfulness and joy even in the worst of times.

I love Max.

Mindfulness Meditation Center - Powerful & Blunt Talk From 04/05/2020

I got an email from a friend telling me that this talk by Michael Gregory (a Buddhist monk) reminded them of the way I talk about animals.

Intrigued, I started listening... it is one of the most powerful talks I have heard about animal suffering and how it correlates to the current situation we are facing.

Gregory is wiser than I would ever be and his message is powerful. I highly recommend everyone to listen to this (and also join this Zen Center - they conduct free lectures and meditation online every week).

Many of you wish things go back to normal. If normal involves doing the same things again and again, why do you want to be normal? If normal is the best idea, I wish all of you to be abnormal because this is NOT normal - what we have done to this planet and what we have done to the animals.

We have turned into no big deal to walk into a grocery store and pick your killing.  

How can you contribute to suffering and expect not to suffer in return?

If you don't like the effect then don't commit the cause. This is Buddhism. 

We blame to Chinese for having these markets. Look at your own market. What is it filled with? Do you have a mountain of food which is a mountain of death? 

I am not convincing you to become a vegetarian but I am convincing you to accept responsibility to your world.

Stefano Mancuso Studies The Intelligence & Behavior Of Plants

Mancuso and his colleagues have become experts in training plants, just like neuroscientists train lab rats. If you let a drop of water fall on a Mimosa pudica, its kneejerk response is to recoil its leaves, but, if you continue doing so, the plant will quickly cotton on that the water is harmless and stop reacting. The plants can hold on to this knowledge for weeks, even when their living conditions, such as lighting, are changed. “That was unexpected because we were thinking about very short memories, in the range of one or two days – the average memory of insects,” says Mancuso. “To find that plants were able to memorise for two months was a surprise.” Not least because they don’t have brains.

In a plant, a single brain would be a fatal flaw because they have evolved to be lunch. “Plants use a very different strategy,” says Mancuso. “They are very good at diffusing the same function all over the body.” You can remove 90% of a plant without killing it. “You need to imagine a plant as a huge brain. Maybe not as efficient as in the case of animals, but diffused everywhere.”

 “Let’s use another term,” Mancuso suggests. “Consciousness is a little bit tricky in both our languages. Let’s talk about awareness. Plants are perfectly aware of themselves.” A simple example is when one plant overshadows another – the shaded plant will grow faster to reach the light. But when you look into the crown of a tree, all the shoots are heavily shaded. They do not grow fast because they know that they are shaded by part of themselves. “So they have a perfect image of themselves and of the outside,” says Mancuso.

[---]

The notion that humans are the apex of life on Earth is one of the most dangerous ideas around, says Mancuso: “When you feel yourself better than all the other humans or other living organisms, you start to use them. This is exactly what we’ve been doing. We felt ourselves as outside nature.” The average lifespan of a species on Earth is between 2m and 5m years. “Homo sapiens have lived just 300,000 years,” he says – and already “we have been able to almost destroy our environment. From this point of view, how can we say that we are better organisms?”

- More Here

Emergent Systems & Collective Intelligence - Lessons From Schools Of Fish

• Ignorance and uninformed can be a positive thing. Having uninformed individuals participating in this decision making actually democratizes the group decision making. This prevents extremist individuals from having a disproportionate influence. (what a lot of dictators did decades ago, now its tv/radio talk show heads turn to ruin our civilization)
• When you broadcast the same information to multiple individuals, you have eroded the capacity for collective intelligence.  (I don't see too much difference between people in North Korea and religious nut cases here and how these tv/radio talk show hosts are creating impotent minds) 
• Collective intelligence relays on the individual to gather evidence themselves towards the problem. Not to be told what to think. (constant bayesian updates, keeping the mind as a river and keeping an open mind until we kick the bucket)
• Animal groups evolve strategies to avoid overly correlated information. Unfortunately, in human society, we rely on highly correlated information. 

The insight that there is collective intelligence, an intelligence that goes beyond an individual that is "embedded somehow" into this collective has been the focus of research for the last few years. 

Wow! What a brilliant insight!! You can read more about this here.

Many great philosophers and thinkers have been warning for centuries about thinking too much about "self",  too much of "outsourcing" our thinking process and too much dependence ("insourcing") on everything our mind confabulates without any sense of external realities.

Each one of the fish in the school has a brain and sense which learns based on evidence and does an "almost perfect" bayesian update to their brain and senses. The process repeats, ad infinitum.

Yes, "almost perfect".

A multiple "almost perfect" bayesian updates from all the fish in the school then creates "better than almost perfect" bayesian update to the collective brain and senses. The process repeats, ad infinitum.

Nature is indeed beautiful. I am so grateful to be part of this wonderful planet and given a chance to experience this beauty.

Thank you Max, for helping me see the world through your eyes.

There Is Nothing Biologically That I See In The Virus That Troubles Me - Larry Brilliant

The Economist: Do you believe a vaccine will be found and if so, how quickly? And what are the alternative options in the meantime?

Mr Brilliant: I see no reason to not believe that a vaccine will be found. While we weren't successful In making the vaccine after the first SARS or MERS outbreaks, that was just because the epidemic was over so quickly that we didn't keep a sustained effort. There is nothing biologically that I see in the virus that troubles me. We already do have putative or potential vaccines.

That's great news from epidemiologist Larry Brilliant. We are so lucky to encounter a virus that we know a lot about. Now imagine what the world would look like if we didn't know much...  see what happened with smallpox even after a vaccine was found:

The Economist: In your time, you have seen pandemics subside. What does a return to normality look like? Life after covid-19?

Mr Brilliant: It's going to be hard. You know, first, during the peak of this pandemic, we will see things that my generation, your generation, has never seen before. When I was in India—and I lived in India for 10 years; I love India—working on the smallpox eradication programme, in the year that we began the programme, there were 250,000 children who were stricken with disease. At least a third would die, perhaps more. And the crematoriums were unable to handle the load. So you would find bodies wrapped in paper cloth that would be stacked like cords of wood.

We are not able to look at a scene like that, like Dante's Inferno or Hieronymus Bosch’s paintings. We're not able to look at that without feeling something that we don't feel for almost anything else in the world. We'll look at that; we'll look at the way that we see wonderful, good people—shopkeepers and workers—who are made homeless. We will go back to a time and a state that we're not ready for emotionally.

AI Decodes The Facial Expressions Of Mice

Researchers have used a machine-learning algorithm to decipher the seemingly inscrutable facial expressions of laboratory mice. The work could have implications for pinpointing neurons in the human brain that encode particular expressions.

Their study “is an important first step” in understanding some of the mysterious aspects of emotions and how they manifest in the brain, says neuroscientist David Anderson at the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena.

Nearly 150 years ago, Charles Darwin proposed that facial expressions in animals might provide a window onto their emotions, as they do in humans. But researchers have only recently gained the tools — such as powerful microscopes, cameras and genetic techniques — to reliably capture and analyse facial movement, and investigate how emotions arise in the brain.

“I was fascinated by the fact that we humans have emotional states which we experience as feelings,” says neuroscientist Nadine Gogolla at the Max Planck Institute of Neurobiology in Martinsried, Germany, who led the three-year study. “I wanted to see if we could learn about how these states emerge in the brain from animal studies.”

- More Here (Darwin was right again!)

There is no fundamental difference between man and animals in their ability to feel pleasure and pain, happiness, and misery.

Man in his arrogance thinks himself a great work, worthy the interposition of a great deity. More humble and I believe true to consider him created from animals.

- Charles Darwin, The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals

Providing Hindsight Wisdom - Ed Yong Interview

WHY DO IT? - Spend hours and hours on research, write 5000 words essays for people to digest easily but it is never going to change any policy at the White House? Then WHY DO IT?

It might not cause an immediate policy change but it lays the intellectual and historical groundwork for people to carry on, pushing and fighting later on.

If we are consigned to ONLY learn from hindsight then still someone should provide them that hindsight. And I am thinking about that a lot now. 

- Ed Yong

Listen to his interview @Longform.

I have been reading his pieces for over a decade now - he and Carl Zimmer (who became a science writer after he lost his girlfriend to a virus in Africa) are someone of wonderful people who still make this world a better place.

Thank you!

It's The Civilization Stupid!

People are worried about the economy, global supply chain, politics, liberty and so on during this pandemic. Some "smart" minds are even debating if this is a "recession" or "depression". Their worries are right but highly misplaced and untimely. None of those matters if civilization, as we know, collapses. We are at a point where our main focus should be preserving our civilization by controlling this pandemic.

History, as well as life itself, is complicated -- neither life nor history is an enterprise for those who seek simplicity and consistency.

[---]

Two types of choices seem to me to have been crucial in tipping the outcomes [of the various societies' histories] towards success or failure: long-term planning and willingness to reconsider core values. On reflection we can also recognize the crucial role of these same two choices for the outcomes of our individual lives.

- Jared Diamond, Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed

Why aren't so many people paranoid enough (bored is not paranoid) and don't adhere to even the simplest of rules like staying at home? I have listed a few hypotheses; one or many might apply to most people:

• Libertarian and liberty bullshit: The irresponsibility of the libertarian syndrome is irrespective of the level of education (or lack of it). I tried to cover that here. To my surprise, one of the most prominent libertarians' Matt Ridley was humble enough to use his common sense and changed his mind: 

"I'm afraid it is necessary to be pretty draconian when you're in the middle of a pandemic. If you want to preserve freedom…you need to unleash the freedom to innovate, to solve the problem in good times."

• War metaphors: Drawing an analogy from previous wars (WWII to Iraq war) and using Churchill's calmness as an example. I am a big fan of Churchill but something tells me he wasn't fighting viruses. It's ridiculous to hear the war metaphors from intelligent people and expecting current politicians to emulate Churchill. This is a time to panic and to focus on the precautionary principle. Yes, one should do that calmly. But neither pep talks nor silent machoness work in the world of viruses.  We should be scared shit about this now more than ever given we have already seen how bad our infrastructure, political response, and our medical capabilities are. It's better to panic and be wrong (one will look like a fool) than not panic and be wrong (collapse of civilization). David Wallace-Wells has a great piece on this: 

A widespread cultural conviction that keeping your cool and trusting the political and social status quo is preferable to a radical response, any radical response — in all ways, at all times, and in the face of all kinds of threats. Indeed, that the ideal political and social response, no matter the particular crisis, is not responding to the threat but just grinning and bearing it. This is a conviction that serves those people and institutions in power, of course, since it’s a defense of the status quo, but also one which we may have been formed in part by some almost accidental cultural legacies, perhaps chiefly the experience of the British, under Churchill, facing the Blitz. The stiff upper lip has a certain theatrical, patrician appeal in the face of great catastrophe, but it is probably worth keeping in mind, when thinking about the coronavirus or climate change or any number of other potentially devastating threats to stability and prosperity and justice in the world, that we may well have learned the wrong lesson from the Blitz, since ultimately the most important directive was not “keep calm and carry on,” but “win the war, however you can.

This is bad. As I’ve written before about climate change, when the news is alarming, the only responsible response is to be alarmed — and raise alarm. And like runaway climate change, the threat of a global pandemic, which graybeards have been warning about for years, is a reminder that we should always build public policy around the precautionary principle, rather than waiting until uncontestable and inarguable evidence arrives that action is necessary. If we wait that long, it will always be too late.

• Hollywood syndrome: Please don't underestimate the biases that are now part of most minds after watching numerous dystopian movies where a bunch of self-sacrificing "heroes" come to save the world or the world collapses (thankfully there is some good news on this front). One cannot make millions at the box office showing people sitting quietly at home. Hollywood forces our minds for action even none is needed. I have heard people trying to gather outside the hospitals to "cheer" for the health care workers (God, I rest my case!). We need to learn to use action during good times - like electing right politicians, understanding the fundamentals of fat tail events and so on. Here's a good summary of action bias: 

Action bias urges us to do things in ambiguous situations where we feel we should be doing something, whether it is a good idea or not. It is something you should keep in mind because we usually take very bad decisions in such circumstances. Action bias pushes us to act in order to feel good —usually, to act improperly, or at least to act before the right time comes. 

We need to appear active, even if it does not lead to anything. Often, the best strategy is to let the events pass and wait until the situation is clarified to act later. But human beings tend to do anything in a situation of uncertainty, rather than sitting and waiting to see what happens. This was fine 10,000 years ago, when acting before thinking could save one’s life. In today’s world and despite our instincts, thinking and reflecting almost always produces better results than acting without thinking.

• Pandemic, uh? What is that?: One can bring all biases under the universe to retrofit into the current mindset. But yet, survivorship bias has a huge impact. The last big pandemic was is 1918 - exactly 102 years ago. Almost all of them are dead now (leave alone having any "vivid" memories). A great example of a brilliant statistician named Abraham Wald who exposed the survivorship bias of the US army:

When failure becomes invisible, the difference between failure and success may also become invisible.

[---]

Simply put, survivorship bias is your tendency to focus on survivors instead of whatever you would call a non-survivor depending on the situation. Sometimes that means you tend to focus on the living instead of the dead, or on winners instead of losers, or on successes instead of failures.

• Political tribalism: I have no idea what to do about this almost omnipresent syndrome except to say one has to have a very open mind. To say the least, I am not a big fan of the current Indian prime minister. But I applaud his decision to lockdown a country of 1.3 billion people which is more or less a political suicide if things go well (or doesn't go well). I don't see people who voted for the current occupant of White House criticizing him in spite of his continuous arrogance, only this time against a "virus" of all things. I do feel like I am living inside a cartoon movie where rules of gravity nor common sense apply. This is the kind who "intelligently" spread conspiracy theories and refuse to look at what in front of their nose. 

Well, personally, I’ve seen enough of people who die for an idea. I don’t believe in heroism; I know it’s easy and I’ve learned that it can be murderous.  

What interests me is living and dying for what one loves. 

- Albert Camus, The Plague

I know what coming back to America from a war zone is like because I’ve done it so many times. First, there’s a kind of shock at the comfort and affluence that we enjoy, but that is followed by the dismal realization that we live in a society that is basically at war with itself. People speak with incredible contempt about, depending on their views: the rich, the poor, the educated, the foreign born, the President, or the entire US government. It is a level of contempt that is usually reserved for enemies in wartime except that now it is applied to our fellow citizens. Unlike criticism, contempt is particularly toxic because it assumes a moral superiority in the speaker. Contempt is often directed at people who have been excluded from a group or declared unworthy its benefits. Contempt is often used by governments to provide rhetorical cover for torture or abuse. Contempt is one of four behaviors that, statistically, can predict divorce in married couples. People who speak with contempt for one another will probably not remain united for long 

[---]

For a former soldier to miss the clarity and importance of his wartime duty is one thing, but for civilians to is quite another. 'Whatever I say about war, I still hate it, " one survivor, Nidzara Ahmentasevic made sure to tell me after I'd interviewed her about the nostalgia of her generation. "I do miss something from the war.  But I also believe that the world we are living in - and the peace that we have - is very fucked up if somebody is missing war. And many people do. 

- Sebastian Junger's book Tribe: On Homecoming and Belonging is a good meditation to keep myself calm when I encounter one of these kinds. 

• Doomsday savvy dude: They want the civilization to collapse so they can laugh and say - I told you so. These are folks who forgot to live life while perpetually preparing for the doomsday. Extreme fundamentalists who mostly live off-the-grid (and some amongst us). These are mostly silent kind while their families are silent victims. Tara Westover's book Educated should be a wake-up call that this is not uncommon. 

Understand: Each and every one of us is a ticking timebomb waiting to host the virus. If not this pandemic, there will be a bigger one coming soon. We can learn and prepare for it once we restore and upgrade the civilization in the coming months. Until then:

• Stay home: No one is asking you to meditate or be still. Watch oodles of TV (avoid news). Play video games if you cannot read a book. Keep yourself and your house clean. You don't have to work out nor start a new routine that you are not comfortable with. Do whatever you are comfortable doing but do it inside your house. Don't overestimate our understandings of aerosols. The goal is to avoid contact with the virus.
• Cook your own food: Avoid take out - it's a minefield. Restaurants and delivery options are breeding grounds for viruses no matter how clean they keep it. My heart goes out to restaurant businesses and their employees. But they will recover when we're back again. Eat canned or frozen foods if you don't know how to cook. You don't have to eat healthy if you cannot. Don't force your body to do something if its not comfortable with it. The goal is to eat food that is not hosting the virus. 
• Avoid or limit alcohol: The temptations are very high when one has nothing to do. Alcohol is bad for your immune system. If you are an addict, try to limit the intake. You can try some immune-boosting recommendations. The goal is to prepare your immune system to defend against the virus.

The above three things are very easy to do. The economy is just a reflection of the civilization it inherits and not that other way around. Even Cormac McCarthy's novel The Road had an "economy" but with a very different kind of economics. We don't want to end up in a civilization portrayed in The Road.

The Road isn’t about the apocalypse. It’s about love. It’s about having the courage to be decent in indecent times.

It may seem that compassion is an outdated practice yet The Road argues compassion is as primal as cruelty. That compassion, not cruelty, will restore order to the fallen world.

The Road is bleak. It will test your spirit. It will make you question the fate of humanity.

We can use all the luck we can but remember that luck favors the prepared. Let's observe and learn from the mistakes we did and doing now. Let's be decent and be civilized in these difficult times. We can work on restoring and upgrading our civilization only if most of us survive this pandemic.

On The Statistical Differences Between Binary Forecasts And Real World Payoffs - Taleb

The fact that an "event" has some uncertainty around its magnitude carries some mathematical consequences. Some verbalistic papers still commit in 2019 the fallacy of binarizing an event in      [0, ∞): A recent paper on calibration of beliefs, [14] says "...if a person claims that the United States is on the verge of an economic collapse or that a climate disaster is imminent..." An economic "collapse" or a climate "disaster" must not be expressed as an event in {0, 1} when in the real world it can take many values. For that, a characteristic scale is required. In fact, under fat tails, there is no "typical" collapse or disaster, owing to the absence of characteristic scale, hence verbal binary predictions or beliefs cannot be used as gauges.

The point can be made clear as follows. One cannot have a binary contract that adequately hedges someone against a "collapse", given that one cannot know in advance the size of the collapse or how much the face value or such contract needs to be. On the other hand, an insurance contract or option with continuous payoff would provide a satisfactory hedge. Another way to view it: reducing these events to verbalistic "collapse", "disaster" is equivalent to a health insurance payout of a lump sum if one is "very ill" –regardless of the nature and gravity of the illness – and 0 otherwise.

And it is highly flawed to separate payoff and probability in the integral of expected payoff. Some experiments of the type shown in Fig. I-5 ask agents what is their estimates of deaths from botulism or some such disease: agents are blamed for misunderstanding the probability. This is rather a problem with the experiment: people do not necessarily separate probabilities from payoffs.

[---]

Misunderstanding of Hayek’s knowledge arguments: "Hayekian" arguments for the consolidation of beliefs via prices does not lead to prediction markets as discussed in such pieces as [25], or Sunstein’s [26]: prices exist in financial and commercial markets; prices are not binary bets. For Hayek [27] consolidation of knowledge is done via prices and arbitrageurs (his words)–and arbitrageurs trade products, services, and financial securities, not binary bets.

- Full paper by Taleb here

Smell Test - The Risk Management Tool for Coronavirus

The inability to smell was the first symptom many patients noticed; in some cases, it was the only symptom the patients noticed. 

That's from ever-fascinating Michael Lewis. Signup and get involved @ sniffoutcovid.

Mike adds:

Another possibility is that a lot more people than we know — even 80-year-old people — have had the virus but never got sick enough to get themselves tested. That’s what’s so interesting about the simple, one-page letter written last week by two British doctors. Claire Hopkins and Nirmal Kumar, among the country’s most prominent ear, nose and throat specialists, had both noticed the same odd symptom in their coronavirus patients: a loss of the sense of smell. “Anosmia,” it is called, but I suppose they have to call it something.

The inability to smell was the first symptom many patients noticed; in some cases, it was the only symptom the patients noticed. “In the past it was once in a blue moon that we saw patients who had lost their sense of smell,” Kumar told me. “Now we are seeing it 10 times as often. It’s one of the things that happens with this virus.” The British doctors compared notes with doctors from other countries and gathered what data they could. They concluded that roughly 80% of the people who lost their sense of smell would test positive for the coronavirus, and that somewhere between 30% and 60% of those who had tested positive for the virus had also lost their sense of smell.

Those numbers might turn out to be a bit off — maybe even way off. They are a heroic guess, given how little testing has been done. But it’s precisely the scarcity of tests that makes the observation so intriguing, as it offers the possibility of a crude alternative to a test. Lose your sense of smell and you know to isolate yourself, even if you feel great.

It offers two other things as well: a way to glimpse the virus as it moves through various populations, and a tool for managing the risk. Oddly, hardly anyone who read the doctors’ letter had this thought — or, at any rate, hardly anyone who got in touch with the doctors. “We’ve had more than a thousand responses,” Kumar said. “But almost no one really seeing it as a risk management tool.” The exception was a former Wall Street guy, an Englishman named Peter Hancock.

Hancock had spent much of his career at JPMorgan, where, in the late 1990s, he had served as the bank’s chief risk officer. After the financial crisis he’d been tapped to run the giant risk management mess that was AIG. When he read the letter written by the British doctors, he thought, “Here might be a free way to get a signal, out of all the noise.”