ok.

the coffee is working.

it's time to get up.

there are serious ramifications of this as well, if it turns out in the end that we've collectively made the wrong decision.

for, if we all made the same decision together to take in one last ham, we may lose the social knowledge of ham-making, as our nanas all die off simultaneously; this last-ham prerogative would in turn end up rather pyrrhic, as we face a sordid and difficult no-ham future.

we may, in the end, see the development of ritual vomiting, as we plead with the gods to take the ham back, as a sacrifice, in return for a renaissance of ham-making knowledge.

but, it is too late to undo.

so, let's hope the nanas of the world don't fare too poorly this week, so that we may protect the precious wisdom behind this ancient ham production.

we're going to be able to empirically measure how people worked this through fairly soon.

really.

next week...

what?

it's a real dilemma. literally. we're going to see the data around this, soon.

so, there's a pandemic going around, and you're supposed to avoid your grandmother. this is understood by all. but, she's making a ham! so, what is the right choice, here? do you avoid your grandmother, and thereby miss out on the ham, or do you reason that she's going to die soon anyways, so you'd might as well get one more ham in before it's too late.

i'm a logician, i'm not an ethicist. don't look at me.

and, regarding these questions i've been drawing attention to?

1) the death toll in new york city is beginning to tip over into my middle range of mortality rates, which i believe was around 18,000. so, i'm willing to acknowledge that the 0.1% number is maybe too low a bound; the middle bound of 0.3% may turn out to be more correct, at least in new york city. but, it's not like this is going to be precisely constant through diverse populations and shifting demographics, either. everybody knows that new york city is an exceedingly densely populated place...

so, if the mortality rate in new york city ends up around 0.2% rather than 0.1%, i'll need to accept the adjustment. but, i'll still be, conceptually, much closer to the truth - if the antibody tests back up the point.

2) the data is messy, and the numbers are being revised, but, regardless, it's not going to be very much longer before i have to concede that it's a plateau, and not a peak. but, the other data seems to point more towards a peak than a plateau.

do i think there was perfect social distancing over easter? no. so, this is another thing we can test. if we accept that the likelihood of transmission over the previous weekend was much higher than it was over the preceding weekends, we should see the effects of this kick in about this time next week. if we see a small blip, we'll know that most of the population is probably already immune, as this increase in exposure will have led to minimal increases in hospitalization rates. but, if we see a substantive spike, we'll know that social distancing was working, until we decided that access to nana's delicious easter ham took priority over maintaining her actual life.

the most important thing i got from cuomo today is that it seems like he's going to make an attempt to correct the numbers coming out, to try and clarify how the curve is developing. it is probably not a coincidence that the dip under 700 was on a sunday; that would suggest some lagging into monday or tuesday.

in mathematics, we can actually talk about facts, if we are very careful in doing so. that's unusual in the existing epistemological framework, where our understanding of reality is necessarily limited by our inability to perfectly measure it. so, what exactly are the facts, here? that's what people like me are sitting here and trying to figure out, by analyzing the data in front of us.

and, these are two different things, facts and data. data is messy, full of error and full of bias. you can sometimes pull facts out of the data, but you have to do it carefully. you should never conflate the two ideas.

i am not one, but i could be if i wanted to be, and, to a very large extent, what a statistician does is analyze bias. they don't just look at the data, because they know immediately that the data, on it's face, is always wrong. so, they figure out tools to analyze the data, tools that are not objective, but are rather reliant on the assumptions put into them. if you want to get into the philosophy of this, look up david hilbert, who wrote most of it. but, the basic point is that anything a statistician is going to give you is really just their informed opinion, because what they're doing is trying to identify biases in the data and correct for them.

statisticians will consequently give you a variety of analyses, and they're all just somebody's opinion as to what test needs to be used where, what bounds are appropriate, etc.

so, when is something a fact? it's when you decide that it is, and you'll know it is when you've convinced yourself of it. that sounds hokey, but it isn't. first, you have to do more than just measure it once - if something is a fact, it should be repeatably demonstrable as such. worse, if you can't repeat the experiment, as is often the case in economics, and as is the case in the current scenario, then you need to be very cautious about using words like "fact". repeatability is fundamental to the idea of factuality. you should also be able to derive the same facts using multiple methods; that is, facts should be consistent. and, yes, you have to do the tests to figure this out; otherwise you shouldn't be using terms like "fact", as the definition of what a fact is is tied up in these tests.

we don't know how many people have died from this, and we don't know how many people have contracted it. we know how many people have come into hospitals, at least, but that's a very restricted subsample with large amounts of inherent bias that needs to be corrected for before anything can be extrapolated from it.

so, do we know the facts? no. we don't. that's what people like myself are trying to figure out. what are the facts here?

so, when i tell you that we need to wait to know if this is a curve or a peak, i'm pointing to the inaccuracies in the data - i'm pointing out that we shouldn't be drawing conclusions until we're sure that we have the facts clear, and i'm actually getting a little bit of back-up on that point from cuomo, who is expending what are currently sparse resources in trying to actually figure that out.

and, when i say we need to wait for antibody testing to understand whether this is crashing due to immunity or distancing, i'm also making an appeal to the facts - rather than relying on the correctness of models (which are an opinion), or interpolations of incomplete data sets.

what they've done is run a set of very, very loose models, declare the outcome of that modelling to be reality, and then measure the effectiveness of their behaviour based on the sanctity of the models. while we have no choice but to do the best we can in terms of building models to guide the public service, even if it's not good enough, there is really little excuse for the way they've presented these models. we really have to wait for the data to know the facts.

politicians are actually good people for scientists or logicians to argue with, because they're sneaky. they're good with words; they're good at debate, at spinning concepts over in confusing ways designed to obfuscate, even when they don't really fully understand what is actually exiting their lips. for a logician to sit down and really deconstruct these political briefings is actually great real-world debating practice, as it should help both in working through the problems in the presentation and also in helping clarify the concepts in the mind of the logician.

i would encourage it as good downtime practice, if you find yourself off for the rest of the semester, and unable to find a job in the existing economy.

canada has actually experienced some rather serious unrest during periods of serious war.

that's our actual history around this - strikes, riots, etc.

and, what percentage of the population has immigrated to canada at some point after 1950? 70%? 80%?

so, if they think that this attempt to rally around world war imagery is going to make us more compliant or lead to a round of flag-waving, they're probably in for a very rude awakening.

personally?

i think that bringing in war imagery during a pandemic is actually fairly inappropriate. i think that's actually fairly tone-deaf and kind of insensitive.

the ruling class seems to think it's war propaganda actually works, for some reason. but, nobody except the elite looks back at these world wars as a period of increased nationalist fervour, or whatever warped perception that the rulers seem to have about this. most people just interpret these wars as a lot of senseless slaughter. and, as wwII exits our living memory, what is left to replace it - korea. vietnam. aghanistan. iraq. - is even less likely to generate the kind of response in us that our rulers seem to think it's going to.

i'd stop doing that, if it were up to me.

nobody wants to rally around war imagery in 2020.

it's kind of barbaric.

if i'm so tired, am i actually sick?

i have no symptoms.

i think it was just the drugs.

and i think i'm up, now.

trudeau is talking about the "greatest generation" in his talk today.

if you are 90-100 years old today, you were born between 1920-1930. ish. that means, you were between 15-25 years old at the end of the second world war, and, unless you were a child soldier at the tail end of the german occupation, you did not actually fight in the second world war. essentially any existing veterans would be over the age of 95, at this point.

if you are 80-90 years old today, you were born between 1930-1940 and likely have few memories of the great depression, even if you remember the war.

if you are 70-80 years old today, you were born between 1940-1950 and likely do not remember the war at all. you've probably even spent your whole life identifying as a boomer.

and if you are 60-70 years old today, you were born after 1950 and are clearly a boomer.

so, the virus is mostly killing boomers. actually. the wwII veterans are already all dead and buried.

the trudeau government has a history of these kinds of messy anachronisms, especially in relation to his father. 2013-1985 = 28. they seemed to underestimate how much time that really was, or how old you'd have to be to actively remember politics in the 70s. that distance has only increased...

i would support opening up the benefit to people that make less than $1000/month. but, i actually make $1169/month. so, i still don't think i qualify for anything, but i haven't actually lost any income, either...

i've said this before - as a disability recipient, i probably have the most reliable, stable income in the country. it's designed that way, because we're the most vulnerable; this is maybe the one social system that is just intended to keep running, more or less no matter what. it's not very much money, but it's reliable. at least. i still have to deal with markets, and that's often frustrating, but the social contract with the disabled is that we get these monthly checks, more or less no matter what.

the trade-off is that you accept poverty in exchange for certainty, and i'm happy to do that due to how i've ordered my life around my art. others may, of course, have less of a choice. i should probably be on some kind of artist subsidy rather than strict disability, but that doesn't currently exist.

the point i'm getting at is that i'm not really complaining - my income is intended to be stable, if low, and i've prioritized freedom over wealth, in that sense. so, this is the consequence of that decision, even if it's kind of frustrating, as i watch all this money float around.

i'm eating well. i'm ok.

and i think i'm awake now, even. it's been two days, it's time to get up...

so, am i awake yet?

it's getting better.

soon.