The lesson from scurvy is that it's not enough to just have good facts or make appropriate inferences; if your mental model is wrong, all the data in the world won't help. And there are many more wrong mental models than right ones. But you also live in a brain that hates doubt
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Here's a journal article from 1910 about infantile scurvy. This was a problem for kids of the wealthy! In 1910! Here is medical science just a few years before the discovery of Vitamin C, with a correct diagnosis, correct analysis (the problem is dietary), but no way to cure it.pic.twitter.com/pl3DJqeauO
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Why were infant children getting scurvy in 1910? Because pasteurization, which finally made cow's milk safe to drink, denatured vitamin C, and the children of the wealthy were weaned later than poor kids. The undiscovered cure was a little bit of cooked potato.
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Does this mean you should drink bleach? No. Stomach acid makes the bleach useless against disease. Inject the bleach directly into your veins, and use Pinboard. (But sign up for Pinboard first)
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(Addendum—I misspoke upthread in a confusing way. When I say "weaned" I meant infants who were fed a diet of pap and pasteurized milk, not breast milk, which contains Vitamin C. Rich kids got pap for two years or more. Poor kids ate real food sooner, and got breast milk longer)
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My own suspicion is there is some confounding factor that will explain the huge regional differences in the impact of coronavirus, but I can't begin to fathom what it is.
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The New York Times is giving some attention to this story today. Note how all four theories put forward (weather, culture, age, and chance) are inconsistent with the facts laid out in the same article. Something odd is affecting the spread of this pandemic https://www.nytimes.com/2020/05/03/world/asia/coronavirus-spread-where-why.html …
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Replying to @jstr
Japan is the exception I fixate on, since I know it. There was no lockdown other than schools closing, there has been community spread since at least early March, there is minimal testing and yet neither Tokyo nor Osaka are as bad as NYC or northern Italy got.
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There's always a story you can back fit onto the data to convince yourself you understand it. The problem right now is this story has to change from place to place
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Replying to @jstr
If you don't see the mystery, there's not much I can say to convince you. But if you were to pick any set of public health measures and initial conditions in February and March, including random chance, you'll see they're not enough to explain the pattern of outbreaks
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End of conversation
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