philosophical movements

 Empiricism.

Existentialism.

German idealism.

Logicism.

Logical Positivism.

Modernism.

Objectivism.

Phenomenology.

Is a free press is necessary for democracy to survive?

 Parler may go offline following suspensions by Amazon, Apple and Google.

Why it sometimes hurts to ask

 My experience with Ann and Sue.

If you ask a problem solver, it may hurt to ask.   It hurts to ask a problem definer.

Both survive by asking questions.

What @realdonaldtrump should do:

 He should write #WordsMatter but #meaningmattersmore.

In a digital architecture the only binary choices are at the top and bottom levels of the architecture.

I was in Chicago shortly after Nixon "lost" the 1960 election to JFK.  I recall Nixon claiming he didn't want to a part of "a CONSTITUTONAL CRISIS" and he wasn't until LATER.

The media claim that there NOT good people on BOTH SIDES in CHARLOTTESVILLE.  

IN THE SYSTEM VIEW THE ELECTION IN 2020 WAS STOLEN!

I tried to join the elites

My Hope

 That only one Church Committee is required per Halley's.

Trust the Science

 When and How We Should “Trust the Science”

Public health officials should

communicate that policy decisions by their very nature cannot be made solely on the basis of scientific evidence; they will always involve normative questions and tradeoffs of values;

communicate that the “science” is rarely so clear that the wise policy decision is self‐​recommending and that even when science is clear and decisions seem straightforward, scientific knowledge can change because of new evidence; and

communicate that the first two points are especially true with the COVID-19 pandemic, given how little we know and how much of the evidence is in flux.

 #CatoCOVID

In medical and environmental policy, scientists play prominent roles in decisions. Agencies such as the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services and the Environmental Protection Agency have scientific advisory councils that review the relevant scientific literature and advise policy decisionmakers about pollution exposure standards and pharmaceutical and medical device safety. When the decisions of governmental officials do not follow scientific recommendations, critical news coverage follows. The implication is that “science” is sufficient for policy decisions and that “politics” should not play a role.

The discussion about science and politics is occurring during the COVID-19 pandemic. A recent New Yorker article lauded Iceland’s response to the pandemic because the prime minister deferred to scientists in her decisions: “It was very clear from the beginning that this was something that should be led by experts—by scientific and medical experts.” In the United States, 57 former scientists and public health officials issued a statement calling for a science‐​based approach to the pandemic. The signatories said, “Sidelining science has already cost lives, imperiled the safety of our loved ones, compromised our ability to safely reopen our businesses, schools, and places of worship, and endangered the health of our democracy itself.”

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Americans Have Always Politicized Public Health

But scientific findings, by themselves, are rarely sufficient for individual or policy decisions. Such findings can tell us about the causes of outcomes but nothing more. The question of how we should evaluate those outcomes in our own decisionmaking requires other considerations, such as costs, benefits, and philosophical or religious values. And the relative importance of those considerations will vary across individuals. Finally, aggregating those individual differences into collective policy decisions involves even further nonscientific choices about the relative importance of different individual preferences about outcomes. So even under the best circumstances, policy decisions involve more than science, and in the case of COVID-19, our scientific knowledge is very limited.

Even Science Is Not Just Science

What is science? Science is an ongoing discussion about the testing of hypotheses of cause and effect through experiments and comparison with the possibility that random variation produced the same outcome.

Researchers can be either too cautious or too cavalier about concluding that the results of inquiry reflect real cause and effect rather than random variation. Confidence that results reflect real cause and effect increases with replication by other experimenters and the magnitude of the result relative to the number of data points under study.

How cavalier or cautious should scientists be about their results? Ironically and importantly there is no scientific answer to this question. Instead there are only adopted conventions. Scientists are usually reluctant to say a result is “real” rather than the result of normal variation around zero effect unless they are 95 percent confident that the result did not arise simply because random variation happened to produce an outcome that appears to be a “real effect.” But even if a scientist is 95 percent confident, 5 percent of the time the observed result arises simply through sampling variation rather than a “real” effect. And 95 percent confidence is a convention.

How confident one should be in hypothesis testing is a value choice and not scientifically determined. Experimental physicists, for example, take the concern for avoiding “false positive” results to the extreme. They use what is referred to as the five‐​sigma rule, which allows a result to be considered “real” only if the probability of a false positive result is less than 1-in-3.5 million, which translates to 99.99997 percent confident. If medical science adhered to such a rule, there would be no accepted results.

Regardless of the false‐​positive acceptance rate a researcher chooses, the number of observations dictates our ability to differentiate a small result from no result. In the context of any medical treatment, including vaccines or antiviral medication for COVID-19, our ability to declare the treatment “safe” after clinical trial results depends on the number of subjects in the trial (as well as representativeness of the participants). Side effects that affect only small percentages of the population will manifest themselves with 95 percent confidence only after the medication is widely used because clinical trials have thousands rather than millions of participants.

Table 1 shows how much larger (in percentage) that the harmful effect of a medication or vaccine would have to be in the experimental group relative to the control group to allow us to state with 95 percent confidence that the negative effect is the result of the medication rather than random variation. If scientists or policymakers wanted to ensure that the negative side effects of a vaccine affected only 0.1 percent of those who received it, the trial would require 2.9 million people. While 0.1 percent might seem small, 0.1 percent of the U.S. population is 330,000 people. Thus, a vaccine trial with almost 3 million people that passed a clinical trial test with 95 percent confidence would not preclude the possibility that universal administration of the vaccine would have negative side effects on 330,000 people. Whether that is acceptable is not a scientific question.

Table 1

Medication/vaccination side effect detection

Chart

Sample size Threshold in percentage

50                         23.0

100                         16.4

1,000                 5.2

5,000                 2.3

10,000                 1.6

26,896                 1.0

2,896,000         0.1

Source: Peter Van Doren, Chemicals, Cancer, and Choices: Risk Reduction through Markets (Washington: Cato Institute, 1999), pp. 5–6.

Sometimes Science Is Much More Than Science

Scientists occasionally interject values into their recommendations—not in the pervasive, subtle, and unavoidable manner previously described but in obviously avoidable ways that undermine their role as neutral providers of information. A prominent example occurred when 1,300 public health officials signed a May 30, 2020, letter of support for the public protests in the wake of the May 25 death of George Floyd in police custody in Minneapolis. But the same officials had earlier condemned public protests against mandatory business closures.

Why the difference? A New York Times article asked, “Was public health advice in a pandemic dependent on whether people approved of the mass gathering in question?” According to the article, “To many, the answer seemed to be ‘yes.’” Mark Lurie, a professor of epidemiology at Brown University said, “Instinctively, many of us in public health feel a strong desire to act against accumulated generations of racial injustice. But we have to be honest: A few weeks before, we were criticizing protesters for arguing to open up the economy and saying that was dangerous behavior. I am still grappling with that.”

To his credit, Lurie recognized the failure to separate his role as a scientist from his role as a citizen with views about public policy after he took his daughter to a protest early in June. “We felt afterward that the risk we incurred probably exceeded the entire risk in the previous two months,” he said. “We undid some very hard work, and I don’t see how actions like that can help in battling this epidemic, honestly.”

Luckily, it appears little damage was done by this crossing of the boundaries between science and politics. A recent paper using cellphone tracking data shows that cities with protests saw increased social distancing compared to cities that did not have protests—presumably because nonprotestors changed their behavior. And net COVID-19 case growth did not differentially increase in those cities that experienced protests.

Some Scientific Results Lead Easily to Decisions

Though by itself “science” cannot dictate our personal or policy choices, in some cases the information it provides can make those choices rather clear with few additional considerations. If the benefits or harms of a medical decision (such as taking a medicine or vaccine) are large and discontinuous (an abrupt change in outcome with respect to exposure or dose), even with the confidence‐​interval and sample‐​size qualifications previously described, then “science” leads fairly easily to decisions. If the harm from a medication or vaccine increases abruptly with the dose and the benefits do not decrease abruptly below that dose, then the appropriate dose is below the threshold at which side effects appear.

In the COVID-19 pandemic, the wearing of masks seemed initially to fall into the category of decisions that follow simply and directly from the science. The problem is that new evidence led scientists to change their understanding of viral transmission. At the start of 2020, scientists thought that coronavirus transmission occurred only from people exhibiting symptoms, such as its genetic cousin Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome (SARS) does. Thus, general mask wearing was a waste of resources and reduced those supplies available to those dealing with active infections. Hence, the early universal public health advice was not to wear masks.

But evidence accumulated that asymptomatic COVID-19 transmission was real and large; 35–60 percent of infections cause no symptoms. Thus, the advice to stay home if you’re sick may have been insufficient. More aggressive measures, such as ordering healthy people to wear masks, may have been necessary.

The transition from masks are not required and not helpful to masks are required and you are irresponsible if you do not wear one was not easy even for scientists. European public health scientists resisted the claims of asymptomatic transmission. As the New York Times reported:

Sweden’s public health agency declared that [the original journal article reporting asymptomatic transmission] had contained major errors. The agency’s website said, unequivocally, that “there is no evidence that people are infectious during the incubation period”—an assertion that would remain online in some form for months. French health officials, too, left no room for debate: “A person is contagious only when symptoms appear,” a government flyer read. “No symptoms = no risk of being contagious.”

Science is always a conversation about current knowledge and new results.

Science is always a conversation about current knowledge and new results. And science is by its nature conservative in that it worries greatly about accepting new or unusual results because they may be the result of random error or mistakes. But sometimes that conservatism is wrong. And that appears to have been the case with asymptomatic coronavirus transmission and the utility of generalized mask wearing. Researchers have not conducted trials, but when people wore masks in a seafood plant and on a cruise ship, the proportion of severe cases decreased dramatically, reducing hospitalizations and deaths.

All nonscientists have noticed, however, that the surgeon general of the United States has dramatically reversed course. In late February he tweeted, “Seriously people‐ STOP BUYING MASKS! They are NOT effective in preventing general public from catching #Coronavirus, but if healthcare providers can’t get them to care for sick patients, it puts them and our communities at risk!” By early July he told NBC’s Today, “As we talk about Fourth of July and independence, it’s important to understand that if we all wear these, we will actually have more independence and more freedom because more places will be able to stay open. We’ll have less spread of the disease.”

This reversal, along with the contradictory advice of epidemiologists toward demonstrations, has left many people skeptical of experts and expertise.