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A university president makes a case against cowardice

newyorker.com

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Re: A university president makes a case against cowardice

#121

Post by SauciestGNU »

dingaling wrote: post #109
techpineapple wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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First we're not allowed to call the detention camps "concentration camps" because there aren't ovens, now we can't call them "disappearances" because they're not getting thrown out of helicopters. Forget that people are getting shipped to a foreign torture slave camp from which nobody has been released with, and with no due process.

I think this language policing may be because people don't want to allow opposition to these things, rather than out of honor for the dead. The way to honor the dead is to prevent the circumstances of their deaths from happening again.

Which is exactly why we must stand up against the disappearances, the camps, the collaborators, the secret police.

Re: A university president makes a case against cowardice

#122

Post by TimorousBestie »

somenameforme wrote: post #93
TimorousBestie wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is what statistics is for? We rarely ever “know” (in the sense of your restrictive epistemology) the precise value of ANY demographic measure. We don’t know how many people live in the United States at any particular moment, but the Census is still useful.

It's useful when done in good faith. During COVID there were numerous decisions that even if not intended to inflate mortality figures, then they did so inadvertently. In particular the CDC gave extremely broad guidance on what to classify as a death "of" COVID, and the government was giving hospitals additional funding per COVID death. So for the most ridiculous example of what this led to, in Florida some guy died…

I’m neither an epidemiologist nor a statistician (just a mathematician pretending to be a coder and/or butterfly), but I do not believe there are no mathematical tools to mitigate the statistical impact of comorbidities and accidental misreporting.

To contextualize this: my position is “weak signals are possible even with noisy data”; I read your response as “but the data is really noisy,” which, sure, agreed; the user I was responding to seems closer to the solipsistic position “there is effectively no data at all.”

Re: A university president makes a case against cowardice

#123

Post by dekhn »

carbocation wrote: post #119
dekhn wrote: post #112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

https://dellweb.bfa.nsf.gov/awdlst2/default.asp shows the NSF funding for Wesleyan. You can drill down and infer some of the details about the funding programs.

Thank you. So, another de minimis amount ($1.8 million): it's not exactly zero, but it's just about as much as their NIH support. Columbia, as a comparator, gets $100 million in NSF funding.

I also found a DOE grant, about $800K.

I think this is the full list, NIH looks like a subset of overall HHS funding, and NSF is the actual single largest (around $2.5M)

https://ncsesdata.nsf.gov/profiles/site?method=report&tin=U3...

Wesleyan falls into a really weird bucket: a private liberal arts university, generally considered a "little Ivy" with a modest, slightly better than its competitors (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Little_Ivies) in terms of research clout. The impact of losing all scientific federal funding would be noticeable, but presumably, not fatal; I don't think they structured the operating costs of the university to be dependent on federal research funding like many other schools.

I grew up at Wesleyan- both my parents worked there, it paid for my university education, gave me access to the internet in the 1980s (via NSF funding), and gave me insight into liberal education, all of which prepared me to go off to a California university, maximize my education, and deploy that into my career. I think many people don't recognize the intense second order effects (mostly positive) of federal funding of research.

Re: A university president makes a case against cowardice

#124

Post by e40 »

krapp wrote: post #77
drooby wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think it's actually extremely simple.. because the herd mentality is extremely simple. Intellectuals think it's complex because intellectuals love complexity.. This is what happened.. The right witnessed riots over the past decade. These riots were in response to police brutality and perceived racism. The ideas behind anti-racism spawned a perceived new ideology - "wokism". This frightened the right. Intellectuals…

Nothing about this is new - the right has harbored a particular hatred for "academics" and "intellectuals" since at least the anti-war and civil rights movements of the 1960s. Today's fear of "wokism" is just the prior generation's fear of "cultural marxism" with a new coat of paint. But this kind of political talk is against the guidelines. Good hackers don't care about any of this. So Javascript is getting crazy, h…

When the politics get crazy enough it bleeds into everything, which is why it's now acceptable to discuss here.

Re: A university president makes a case against cowardice

#126

Post by russdill »

ty6853 wrote: post #120
russdill wrote: post #114

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The graph here could be instructive: https://www.reuters.com/world/us/us-coronavirus-hospitalizat... It varies widely by state/county, etc, but in most of the US, hospitalizations were pretty low still in April. The first peak was around August which was my experience, and the second peak was around January 2021. So as far as "A bunch of medical professionals shaking in their shoes waiting for something that never ca…

The chart you posted conveniently cut off april, which was higher than August. https://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/volumes/71/wr/figures/mm7112e2-F1-l...

Your chart only includes a subset of states. Again, when things peaked varied widely by state. Here's a good one from California that includes April:

https://calmatters.org/health/coronavirus/2020/06/california...

Number of patients in April peaked around 3000, then August around 7000, then Jan 2021 around 21,000.

Re: A university president makes a case against cowardice

#127

Post by dekhn »

techright75 wrote: post #33
acc_297 wrote: post #9

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Endowments are typically restricted funds (imposed by the fund provider) and can't be used (unless the restrictions are removed) to be used for general operating budget.

Harvard generally uses the interest on the fund principal to pay for things and it was a massive internal controversy when folks proposed drawing down the (absolutely enormous) principal as payment for capital expenditures (among other controversies).

Re: A university president makes a case against cowardice

#128

Post by somenameforme »

rimunroe wrote: post #104
somenameforme wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Look at the timeline of literally any plague, as they all follow a very similar pattern. For instance here [1] is the one for the Spanish Flu. There are a number of peaks and valleys that gradually recess to noise as viruses tend to evolve to less virulent forms while people also simultaneously develop broader immunity. This makes observational data highly unreliable for determining the efficacy of a vaccine during a…

> These biases and trends are facts most people may not be aware of, but big pharma certainly is. I have a hard time believing that “most people” also means “most epidemiologists” or “most medical organizations” would be unaware of such an obvious problem. It seems like it would be day one of school stuff. It seems trivially obvious to me, someone whose closest qualification to being able to debate the actual science…

I mean laymen. All epidemiologists and the like are certainly aware of such problems. You'll see these biases and many others buried in the discussion/limitations or other such section in any study. Here's [1] a random one from the CDC:

- "confounding might exist because the study did not measure or adjust for behavioral differences between the comparison groups"

- "these results might not be generalizable to nonhospitalized patients who have ... different health care–seeking behaviors"

Along with many more. The problem is that there was no meaningful public debate whatsoever. You were on board with absolutely anything and everything, or you must be an "anti-vaxer" and just wanted everybody's grandmother to die, and probably also thought COVID was caused by 5G.

[1] - https://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/volumes/70/wr/mm7044e1.htm

Re: A university president makes a case against cowardice

#129

Post by anonymousiam »

n4r9 wrote: post #66
inglor_cz wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Maybe he is, but forcing teens to take the vaccination was still rather illiberal. We knew perfectly well back then that bad cases of Covid were rare in teenagers.

We also knew perfectly well that allowing it to spread among teenagers would make it impossible to control. When I got vaccinated it was to protect elderly friends and family, not myself.

You've assumed that the vaccine reduces transmission risk, which is not the case:

https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/39283431/

Re: A university president makes a case against cowardice

#130

Post by westurner »

ty6853 wrote: post #94
TimorousBestie wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because a lot of people, including many economists, believe capital accumulating endlessly to the same class of thousand-ish people is bad. A flat income tax exacerbates wealth inequality considerably.

Our tax now is worse than flat. Warren buffet brags about paying less % than his secretary.

IDK if it's bragging or voiced concern.
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