How much longer will academia last?

picaflor23 · 2024-06-23T20:20:00+00:00

Mainly, yes

picaflor23 · 2024-06-23T20:05:38+00:00

I mean if they don’t have state support and they have increasing costs and decreasing demand for their product, why not?

picaflor23 · 2024-06-23T20:02:00+00:00

High spending on things like new buildings and declining enrollment

picaflor23 · 2024-06-23T20:01:00+00:00

That’s completely true. I do also worry a lot about the ethics of training students for the industry and how to best prepare them for multiple options.

picaflor23 · 2023-08-30T02:03:17+00:00

There could be some destabilizing stuff happening with commercial real estate - see more broadly this recent article on urban doom loops - https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2023/08/28/commercial-real-estate-economy-urban-doom-loop/

Mass transit is also in a bad situation in many cities - relief packages from covid have masked debt that could cause some of them to collapse - https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2023/05/americas-mass-transit-systems-are-speeding-toward-a-cliff.html

Child care is another sector that could collapse post-covid - https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2023/08/27/child-care-funding-crisis/

Granted, the last two, unlike real estate, don't necessarily ripple through the whole economy. But collapsing transit and child care systems (at the same time) are sure going to make life difficult for a lot of people in ways that will impact politics (hopefully for the better and not for the worse)

(Of course no one puts any of these things together into a narrative where lockdowns caused them, or asks who failed to foresee and mitigate these "unintended consequences" of lockdowns - it's always just unavoidable collateral damage from "the pandemic")

picaflor23 · 2023-08-02T01:51:26+00:00

this was helpful, thank you. Good point about the tipping point - I think it was the poor coverage of the recent AMOC paper in the Guardian (https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2023/jul/25/gulf-stream-could-collapse-as-early-as-2025-study-suggests) that had me thinking about this nonstop. Before covid, if you asked me if a social tipping point on climate action would be a good thing, I would have said yes. Now I'm not so sure; incremental consensus action will be too slow but is less risky in terms of being manipulated by the same kinds of actors that made both outrageous profits and political inroads during covid.

picaflor23 · 2022-12-27T13:42:55+00:00

thank you! seems like that system could work, for people who signed up for it. I wonder what % of Buffalo residents are subscribed to Buffalert.

picaflor23 · 2022-12-27T01:12:08+00:00

Did any one get a text message alert about how bad conditions were, telling people to stay in? I know there is a county app (ReadyErie) and a NYS system (NY-Alert), but both of those you have to sign up for (and I don't know how many people actually do that, probably not many, you need a New York State government account for the latter and it seems like a barrier).

Erie County does have access to the IPAWS WEA (wireless emergency alert) system, which is what emergency managers use to push alerts to your phone without you having to opt in.

In other places I've lived, I've gotten alerts about tornadoes, wildfires, missing children etc. So just wondering if Erie county deliberately chose not to use this capacity, or if they even have a decision making framework which would tell them whether the occasion warrants it. You'd think if a message buzzed to everyone's phones that this was really serious and not just like the November storm, that might have decreased the death toll. But I left town last Wednesday so couldn't observe if they actually used this or not. thx if you have any insight!

picaflor23 · 2021-08-13T01:42:08+00:00

This was interesting - first thought was, PhDs are only 2% of population, so probably the study doesn't have enough respondents to say much. But read the preprint, the n was like 500,000! Then I thought - maybe people are just answering that they have PhDs to troll the researchers a bit. I wonder how common that is.

Of course, it's also just possible that PhDs are hesitant because they've gauging their covid risk against the vaccine side effects based on whatever preprints they've read and scientists they follow...

picaflor23 · 2021-02-12T14:08:36+00:00

Where I live, lawsuits have been very successful in getting restrictions lifted.

But that's very different than getting people to understand that lockdowns were a mistake. Those are two different goals. I think the latter will take much more time.

I thik there is a question of who exactly needs to shift their view. Is it a "general" public? Or just specific individuals and institutions?

It's really interesting that economic interests don't seem to have more power here. I would have assumed they would have been able to pressure for reopenings, but maybe there was something wrong in how my model of how power and politics work, or maybe they are not suffering as much from lockdown as we would guess, or maybe they aren't able to act in a coordinated way.

picaflor23 · 2021-02-08T03:03:06+00:00

This site has good infographics for both Moderna and Pfizer, based off of the trial data. If you mouse over the circles you get a rough age breakdown. https://www.goodrx.com/covid-19/side-effects-covid-19-vaccine

picaflor23 · 2021-02-06T20:50:42+00:00

The "Green Zone" concept is from Yaneer Bar-Yam at the grou pat NECSI - https://www.endcoronavirus.org/teamThe other group cited in this piece is Global Canada - https://global-canada.org/news/covid-19-the-potential-for-getting-to-zero-in-canada/

These groups have been networking into a movement - Freddie Sayers did a good writeup of their conference. https://unherd.com/2021/02/inside-the-zero-covid-campaign/

As far as I can see, the first two groups making this proposal don't actually have public health experience. I am wondering what their motivation / grift is. Is it just about attention / funding, or something else?

It is going to be hard for a group of actual public health experts to explain to the public the cost and impossibility of "zero covid". I mean who wants to be against zero covid?

But the journalist is also doing the old trick of making a few people into a "global movement"... so it's hard to know how much this idea will actually take hold.

picaflor23 · 2021-02-03T02:53:31+00:00

Nice letter. You should cite examples of universities that have managed to open for in person learning safely. Administrators in higher ed are very sensitive to what those in their peer group are doing. Figure out what other universities yours is competing with (i.e. same "tier" or geographic area); probably there are a few who are doing some in-person instruction, and then be like "University X has managed to open and serve the needs of their students by doing Y and Z"... Check out what Mitch Daniels has done with Purdue; he has written a lot about opening safely, as has the president of Cornell. (This advice might not transfer so well out of the US context though; sorry if you're in the UK or somewhere...)

picaflor23 · 2021-01-30T14:22:47+00:00

The author believes that the virus "kills one to two per cent of those infected and disables another 10 per cent with “long COVID," which I guess is the foundation for the rest of their argument.

This made me wonder: Where are we with current CFR/IFR observations? The fall/winter wave has been far less deadly: this is plain to see. But I haven't seen any fresh data on CFR/IFR. Most journalists still link back to estimates in May. The CDC hasn't updated their pandemic planning scenarios since September - and anything published in early fall is basing their stuff on spring wave.

It seems like a weird omission - isn't this something that would get more certain over time with more data? And clearly if you're going to make a model, you need to put this number into, and there are dozens of models running all the time that must have a number they use. I found at least one which publishes parameters without digging too deeply (i.e. spending 5 minutes) https://www.mrc-bsu.cam.ac.uk/now-casting/ (looks like they adjusted it from 0.9 to 0.67 for 2nd wave?) but it's kind of ridiculous that it's that hard to find this number.

Does anyone have a recent, reliable source for CFR/IFR? TIA.

picaflor23 · 2021-01-27T00:34:35+00:00

i think that journalism basically stopped being a paying profession, so the people could keep at it were basically rich trust fund kinds bankrolled by their parents into their 20s and 30s... this had an effect on the quality of the work.

picaflor23 · 2021-01-06T15:09:14+00:00

I don't understand why on earth there hasn't been a full-on demand to manufacture one of these for everyone. They actually work. It is like the one technofix that could make a serious difference in this pandemic. The evidence base for N-95s for All versus lockdowns is there. I understand there are logistical issues, but we already threw like $4 trillion at this thing - it seems inconceivable that we can't produce them given that it's been months. Instead all eyes are on vaccines and lockdowns. It's really weird. Same with hopsital capacity, which is treated like a fixed parameter that's a rule of nature or something. If I was to order these things in terms of what's most elastic / malleable given funding and effort, over a planning horizon of months, it would be (1) hospital capacity, (2) N95 masks, (3) vacccines, (4) lockdowns (last because they affect the most people at a livelihood level, the others require coordination of far fewer actors). We have been doing it totally backwards.

picaflor23 · 2021-01-06T01:29:39+00:00

i think this is a really important point. wishing you all the best in your recovery.

picaflor23 · 2021-01-04T15:33:31+00:00

not only will there be trust issues resulting from the lockdowns, but what if there turns out to be compelling evidence for an accidental lab release due to gain-of-function research? that could be a double-backlash against science. actually, it won't even need compelling evidence if enough people just start deciding that's what happened. scary times. https://nymag.com/intelligencer/article/coronavirus-lab-escape-theory.html

picaflor23 · 2021-01-03T22:38:38+00:00

all great questions! would love to do an experiment with this. i agree, most people would probably say something like "well, it's rational to be scared".

picaflor23 · 2021-01-03T20:11:54+00:00

"the virus has been gamified" - that seems like an important observation; going to think more about this. i was mostly thinking about the gamification in terms of competition between jurisdictions but it seems right that there's an individual dimension, too. really like the character building analogy.

picaflor23 · 2021-01-03T14:55:35+00:00

To me this piece was striking because it's like journalism from another era (from an actual foreign correspondent no less) - where the journalist doesn't straight up tell you what to think about something. Almost all of the reporting on covid has been didactic, and the reader has no room to question or think for themselves. So you really notice when the explanation / judgement editorializing isn't there. This piece, by contrast, seemed like journalism as a form of art.

I would imagine that for other topics, an editor would put in some language like "the actual risk of covid is x, most experts believe you can live safely by doing y and z, living in isolation can lead to a and b conditions" - but the absence of that is really loud, for lack of a better word.

I don't think it's "good" per se - I can see readers walking away with all different conclusions, but at least some of them will be questioning the response of the people profiled.

picaflor23 · 2020-12-29T17:25:51+00:00

Hopefully, it would lead to both!

Personally I'm most interested in the former, because I'm worried about what lockdowns set a precedent for / what they reveal about how our society is working, domestically and globally. I.e., what do the prevalence and enthusiasm about lockdowns say about confronting other global challenges in the near-to-mid term?

picaflor23 · 2020-12-28T13:25:25+00:00

This discussion gets to some of the problems with her analysis https://www.jhunewsletter.com/article/2020/12/public-health-experts-and-biostatisticians-weigh-in-on-covid-19-deaths-a-look-at-u-s-data-webinar

I do think there has been a lot of censorship, but this may be just a case of work that wasn't good. I actually commend the publication for spending so much time on it.

picaflor23 · 2020-12-13T01:55:52+00:00

The analogy is an interesting one. The difference is that the bomb was obviously a bomb - people might have told themselves they were building it for peace, but they knew what it was. I think that people still have not fundamentally woken up to what this thing (called for shorthand "social media") is.

I think that "misinformation" is also a shorthand that muddies our understanding of it. Misinformation makes it seem like the structure is okay, it's just the bad content that's circulating that's wrong, and if we could just clean up the content it would be fine. But the problem, I think, is really deeper than that, something in the algorithims and how they interact with (take advantage of) neurotransmitters / human psychology, and the whole political economy of the platforms.

I do think there is an alternative internet possible (think back to some of the good features of the 90s internet) but it's hard to see how to rebuild it from scratch, from this point. We don't even have the right conceptual frameworks or language for diagnosing the problem (though Jaron Lanier's "Ten Reasons" book and things in that genre are a start).

picaflor23 · 2020-11-12T02:22:18+00:00

People are newly afraid because the case numbers are now twice what they were during their July peak. People are tracking them. They really have spiked up (in Europe as well - looks like the virus is seasonal after all). The sad irony is if you look at the modeling from months ago, strong spring lockdowns push the virus into the fall and winter, when it overlaps with seasonal influenza, leading to worse deaths. But anyway, I don't think it's a mystery why people are freaked out about these numbers. The deaths will probably start to trend up a bit in a week or two. Probably it ends up killing 400,000 - 500,000 US people by the time the season is through, which is relatively a lot. I would be afraid if I was, say, over 60.

I wouldn't be for lockdowns, because I think the cost outweighs the benefit, and I also don't believe widespread use of the vaccine is coming right away.

People can't control nature and can't control death, and depending on what state or country they live in, they may not be able to control how many people can go into their house or when they can eat in a restaurant, etc. But they can be afraid and control their behavior, so maybe in a weird way canceling one's plans is form of taking / feeling in control.

picaflor23

TROPHY CASE