Coronavirus - spread

Social Distancing Isn’t Enough to Prevent Infection – How to Detect COVID-19 Super-Spreaders

This is an interesting article about the physics of transmission of the coronavirus. Detecting super-spreaders requires a sophisticated device now being used in hospitals.

A Metaphysics for Freedom #7

The following is a continuation of my summary of, much of it quotes and paraphrases from, Chapter 8 of A Metaphysics for Freedom by Helen Steward.

Often said about top-down causation is that if such a thing existed, it would have to involve suspension of, or interference with, operative laws at the lower level. But how does the apparent commitment to law violation arise from the assumption that certain psychological states and events can cause the cells and molecules in a bird’s body to move? Why would physical laws be such that do not allow for any variation according to their setting? Is it that laws of physics completely dictate the movements of all physical things? What if they only constrain the movements without dictating every detail? A free falling tennis ball will obey Newton’s laws of gravity and the laws predict its travel without interference, but interference is possible. There is no scientific reason to endorse the claim that physical laws completely dictate movement. There is only the grip of a mesmerising world view.

John Searle has argued there is no room for free will because neurophysiology settles everything. On the other hand Roger Sperry defends downward causation on the grounds of emergent properties. We cannot understand the movement of a small part of a wheel apart from understanding the movement of the whole wheel.

“Our standard model for causation involves one object impacting on another and thereby producing a change in it, usually a change in properties that relates to its motion (though perhaps not only those.) The wheel certainly does not impact on the molecule in this way, but must that be the only kind of causal interaction we can envisage? Might there be types of causal affecting that obtain only in the special case where one object is part of another?” (p.235).

“The key to to this puzzle about top-down causation, I think, is the phenomenon of coincidence. For in general the ‘basal conditions’ from which complex entities may be said to ‘emerge’ tend to be complex conditions, which require for their generation that a great many quite separate things occur together or else in some precise order, or (more usually) both” (p. 236).

“That molecules are in this special kind of arrangement, that they are ordered in the necessary way, is a fact that is to be causally explained by appeal to someone’s plans and designs: a wheel was wanted and so a wheel got made. Without this part of the causal story, it would just be an enormous and totally inexplicable coincidence that the universe had managed to throw up molecules arranged wheelwise” (p. 237).

“Causation is about how things come to be. Where certain things require for their coming to be that complex synchronous arrangements to exist has to be part of the causal story, part of the relevant metaphysics of causation and not just part of what is required to satisfy the intellectual curiosity of the investigator” (p. 239).

“The question is how on earth a whole person or animal could manage to have effects on its own parts in such a way that causation does not simply reduce to the causation of parts on parts? It is of course not possible for me to give a full account here of what the cause of human action actually involves, for that is the scientific question to which there will have to be scientific answers” (p. 243).

An animal could affect things without its role collapsing into the role played by the various lower-level entities out of the activities from which its own doings emerge. It is essential to avoid thinking of the animals input as something prior to whatever neural processes initiate and then monitor and control the relevant bodily movement or change.

“In more complex animals [ ] it seems the need to respond swiftly to the ever-changing demands of an unpredictable environment has made it imperative that the integration of subsystems be organized overall by a top-level system that differs from the other systems that operate in it in a special way. The important new feature of the top-down system is discretion [ ] as to optimize its chances of survival and success.” (p. 245)

Truth, Power, Money

The spectacle of the 2020 U.S. election brought to mind the above competitors.

“Rather than love, than money, than fame, give me truth.” - Henry David Thoreau

Some might say that the 3-word title is too short, since it doesn’t include love and fame. In my opinion love and fame don’t compete in a political context nearly as much as the three. By “power” I mean political power.

In all the noise about Democrats stealing the election from Donald Trump and others denying it, I’d say truth is in third place in the competition. It seems that power is in first place for most Democrats, most of the media, Trump and most pro-Trumpers. Die-hard Democrats and major media brand any allegations of flawed vote counts as completely absurd. Apparently the quest for power trumps truth.

It is hard for me to rank the three for the leaders of Trump’s legal team Rudy Giuliani, Sidney Powell, and Jenna Ellis. (Giuliani recently said Powell is no longer part of the "team", whatever means. Regardless and doubtless, Powell remains part of the effort of Trump being re-elected.) I’m inclined to say money is #1. Are they being paid from campaign funds whose purpose is to re-elect Trump? I would not be surprised if the answer is ‘yes’.

There was a Legal Defense Fund for the American Republic established to fund the legal effort on behalf of Trump. It apparently has been superseded by another fund. Sidney Powell established a legal defense fund called Defending the Republic. Checks are payable to Sidney Powell, PC. If all the money to pay the team is not coming from one of these fund, then where? Have campaign funds for Trump gone to said funds? What will happen to any money remaining in the funds after the dust settles?

Giuliani, Powell, and Ellis are all lawyers. So I suspect they know pretty well about libel, slander, and perjury. I also suspect they know pretty well how to use half-truths, hyperbole, innuendos, omit things that challenge their hype, and to stretch the truth, but not go so far as cross the line into lies that could have adverse legal problems for them.

They and others have made lots of allegations. Some sound like far-fetched conspiracy theories. Whether or not they have enough solid evidence to overturn the election of Biden is yet to be seen. If the Dominion Voting System allows manipulating the vote count, where are the lines of code and/or the user interface that allow such manipulation?

Newsweek reports that Sidney Powell claimed that Republican Georgia Governor Brian Kemp and Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger were being paid to be part of a conspiracy with Dominion Voting Systems. She said, “And Mr. Kemp and the secretary of state [are] in on the Dominion scam with their last-minute purchase or reward of a contract to Dominion of $100 million."

Hmm. If Kemp and Raffensperger were paid “proves” a fraudulent vote in Georgia, then doesn’t Sidney Powell getting paid to represent Trump “prove” her allegations are fraudulent?

I don’t doubt that there were some illegitimate votes, e.g. from “dead voters” or altered ballots or altered counts. However, were there enough to overturn the election?

For most of the media, left-wing and right-wing, the quest for power outranks truth. It is not about the opiner having the power personally, but deciding what politicians will have power.

This webpage, obviously pro-Trump, claims the following.

“The democrats found a batch of 23,277 votes in Philadelphia and incredibly, every single ballot was for #GropeyJoe. 🤔 Not a single ballot was for President Trump. Not a single ballot was for third party candidates.

"In a hypothetical precinct with a 50/50 split of voters, the chance of a vote going for either President Trump or #GropeyJoe is statistically equivalent to a coin flip. Now imagine flipping a coin 23,277 times, and every single time it lands on tails. That is what the democrats would have us believe happened.”

How did this allegedly occur? The article doesn’t say.

From a pile of votes, some for Trump and some for Biden, 23,277 in a row for Biden is extremely unlikely. However, assume 45,000 (legitimate) ballots are firstly sorted into two bins, one for Biden and a second for Trump, and then counted. Then finding 23,277 in a row for Biden in the first bin would not be surprising! Saying so would be wholly truthful. Neither would finding 21,723 in a row for Trump in the second bin be surprising, and saying so would also be wholly truthful. Citing one number but not the other would be a half-truth.

I am not alleging that Trump’s lawyers actually claimed such a half-truth about only votes for Biden. However, I have not seen proof that they didn’t either.

Addenda

The following is only one of many news stories about money flow.

Nov. 27: https://www.usnews.com/news/top-news/articles/2020-11-11/donations-under-8k-to-trump-election-defense-instead-go-to-president-rnc

Coronavirus -- vaccine effectiveness

"Hopes are soaring that a Covid vaccine is within reach, following news that an interim analysis has shown Pfizer/BioNTech’s candidate to have 90% efficacy in protecting people from transmission of the virus in global trials.

This article was amended on 18 November 2020 to clarify that results of vaccine trials at this stage refer to “efficacy” – the performance of an intervention under ideal and controlled circumstances – not “effectiveness”, which describes performance under real-world conditions" (The Guardian).

"In Moderna's trial, 15,000 study participants were given a placebo, which is a shot of saline that has no effect. Over several months, 90 of those people developed Covid-19. Another 15,000 participants were given the vaccine, and five of them developed Covid-19" (CNN). 

News reports from other sources are very similar. 

Okay, so 90% or 95% effectiveness or “efficacy” means that of the people who got the vaccine, 90% or 95% of them did not get Covid-19. This doesn’t answer the question of how many of them were enough exposed to the coronavirus to get Covid-19. If the people in the clinical trials wore masks, washed hands often, and minimized social contact, then it should not be surprising if effectiveness falls when people who get vaccinated during the big roll-out are not so precautious. Of course, effective rates depend on the degree of presence of the virus, and herd immunity will be reached eventually.

I heard a doctor say on television that he expects effective rates will fall as the vaccine is more widely distributed. He wasn’t clear about why.

Both vaccines are type mRNA. There are many articles on the Internet about this, such as this one.

Coronavirus – clinical trials #5 (& statistics)

The New York Post reports that a clinical trial has shown another repurposed drug, baricitinib (brand name Olumiant) is effective in reducing mortality rates of Covid patients.  Other sources, such as news-medical.net report the same. 

The articles say baricitinib reduces mortality by two-thirds or 71%. I don't understand how, because 1 - 17/35 = 0.514 is significantly less. Moreover, I have seen other cases where I didn't understand how the number was calculated. 

I have heard of other metrics used for clinical trials, such as odds-ratio and Cox Proportional Hazards-model but have been unable to replicate numbers the story claimed. I couldn't calculate an odds ratio for baricitinib because the news stories do not give all the numbers needed. Anyway, the alleged number in the news story has every time been higher than the number I got using the simple method shown above.

A Metaphysics for Freedom #6

Following is a summary of, much of it quotes and paraphrases from, Chapter 8 of A Metaphysics for Freedom by Helen Steward. It is the last chapter and titled Agency, Substance Causation, and Top-Down Causation. It is also the longest chapter in the book, so a later post will also be about it.

Steward’s view has much in common with what’s called agent causationism, which holds that causation by agents is fundamental to any solution to the problem of free will. She doesn’t believe agent or substance causation is reducible to event causation. (She doesn’t say so explicitly, but her use of substance seems like that of Aristotle.) “The first and most crucial point to be made is that it is simply not correct to suppose that the ontology of most non-human causation is an event ontology. Causation by substances is utterly ubiquitous. Inanimate substances can cause things just as well as animate ones.” The idea seems to have become very prevalent in philosophy that where an inanimate substance may be said to cause something, it is always ‘really’ some event involving it that is the cause (p. 207).

Steward states three categories of cause – movers, makers-happen, and matterers.

“Roughly speaking, movers are things: usually substances, or collections o substances, although [ ] I would not want to rule out [ ] less familiar sorts of endurants, such as fields, might also be movers of a sort. They are such entities as stones and masses of air and water, animals and persons, as well as some of the smaller entities that go to make them up, like molecules and ions” (p. 212). One might object that fundamental physics may ultimately recognize no entities of the sort we generally suppose enduring things like this to be, but fundamental physics has little use for the concept of causation either. Movers are the primary doers of so-called ‘causal work’.

“Makers happen, roughly speaking, are the proper [Donald] Davidsonian events that trigger substances into action.” Often the event that triggers a mover into action is the impact of some other substance.

Matterers are facts. They are the causes we advert to by means of basically sentential expressions and which we link together with their effects by means of sentential connectives like ‘because’. For example, the match did not light because it was too damp.

There is no need for an agent causationist to deny that actions may have causes, but not all actions have a necessitating cause. If the latter were so, there would be no settling by agents.

The idea of a form of causation that is ‘top-down’ evidently exploits a metaphor of ascending levels. The relevant levels are relative, not absolute. There is no need to commit to monolithic divides across all of nature. For animals, for example, at the bottom there may be subatomic particles, moving up to atoms and molecules, then cells, tissues, and then organs, and finally top-level.

Self-employment taxes

I believe this MarketWatch article about self-employment taxes -- for Social Security and Medicare -- could have a better title. Like the article says, the full-time self-employed are well aware of said tax. The article's purpose seems to be to inform readers -- especially those self-employed part-time or who do occasional work -- whether or not they are subject to said taxes. A title such as 'Is Work Income Subject To Social Security & Medicare Taxes?' better fits that purpose. 

Some more specific kinds of work that the article doesn't mention are:

- Driving for Uber or Lyft is subject to self-employment taxes. The state of California government based on Assembly Bill 5 tried to turn said drivers into Uber or Lyft employees instead of independent contractors. This attempt was defeated by Proposition 22 this month (link). If treated as employees, they would pay half and their employers pay the other half of Social Security and Medicare taxes.

- Income to poll workers (for voting) and door-to-door census workers presumably are not subject to Social Security and Medicare taxes, since the work does not qualify as a "regular trade or business."

This Motley Fool article implies that Social Security and Medicare taxes are owed on all gig work. “Gig work” is not defined, but there can be exceptions if the work does not qualify as a "regular trade or business."

When filing taxes, self-employment income is reported on Schedule C and line 3 of Form 1040 Schedule 1. Income to poll workers (for voting), to door-to-door census workers, and for jury duty are reported on line 8 of Schedule 1 and not on Schedule C. The Form 1040 Instructions, page 82 show more kinds of income that go on line 8. Many are non-work income.