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vgr's profile
Venkatesh Rao
Venkatesh Rao
Venkatesh Rao
@vgr

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Venkatesh Rao

@vgr

Conversational account. For work follow @ribbonfarm, @breaking_smart, @artofgig. Tweets are 90% vacuous views, apathetically held. Mediocritopian. IKEA builder.

Los Angeles, CA
venkateshrao.com
Joined August 2007

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    1. Venkatesh Rao‏ @vgr Sep 30
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      With the rise of big cities and other forms of travel besides sea, these measures became less popular. Takes a small town where everybody knows each other for this stuff to work without external top-down authoritah. Large cities = impersonal = defection behaviors.

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    2. Venkatesh Rao‏ @vgr Oct 1
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      Huh interesting, disease surveillance became a governance thing after the Middle Ages and by 20th century most western countries had systems for tracking spread of key diseases. The problem is, in 1918, influenza was not on the list. Slipped under the surveillance radar.

      1 reply 0 retweets 8 likes
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    3. Venkatesh Rao‏ @vgr Oct 1
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      For modern disease control you need 3 top down things to work: detection, tracking of spread, and compliance with measures. In our case, testing, research on spread (droplets etc), and masking. Older control measures don’t scale to modern cities.

      1 reply 0 retweets 11 likes
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    4. Venkatesh Rao‏ @vgr Oct 1
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      This point about historically cities and villages administering their own measures, often really harsh, is surprising. Town in England cordoned itself off and half the people died before it was lifted. Makes sense. They had no good medicines. Containment had to do all the work.

      2 replies 0 retweets 10 likes
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    5. Venkatesh Rao‏ @vgr Oct 1
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      Flu snuck under radar everywhere except a few islands, Australia being the major one. They had enough warning and got quarantine right to skip first 2 waves. New Zealand didn’t. American Samoa escaped because they figured out spread. Western Samoa, under New Zealand, didn’t.

      1 reply 0 retweets 7 likes
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    6. Venkatesh Rao‏ @vgr Oct 1
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      Long discussion of epidemiology 101, social distancing, masks, vaccine controversies etc. All familiar now but would have read like science fiction when this book came out. It’s weird to read about this stuff covered with reference to 1918 with academic distance.

      1 reply 0 retweets 11 likes
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    7. Venkatesh Rao‏ @vgr Oct 1
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      Feeling of not deja vu exactly but something like it. As in “omg they already knew all this stuff 100y before Covid and we’re just learning it under live fire and relitigating 1918 arguments like they’re new?”

      3 replies 3 retweets 23 likes
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    8. Venkatesh Rao‏ @vgr Oct 1
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      Must be weird for authors like Spinney to suddenly see their obscure interests take over headlines. It’s like if 2x2s suddenly took over headlines and everybody started citing my 2x2 stuff.

      1 reply 0 retweets 11 likes
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    9. Venkatesh Rao‏ @vgr Oct 1
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      This part is a bit boring but would have been interesting in 2019. Authoritarianism vs democracy, role of newspapers, minorities and marginalized populations suspicious of health measures. All stuff we’ve been through live.

      1 reply 1 retweet 3 likes
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    10. Venkatesh Rao‏ @vgr Oct 1
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      One difference is that keeping schools open was a better bet then since kids otherwise lived in crowded tenements or ran around unsupervised.

      1 reply 1 retweet 5 likes
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      Venkatesh Rao‏ @vgr Oct 1
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      Extended description of New York’s relatively good performance despite early fumbles. It was full of particularly vulnerable Italian peasants at the time, living in slums and already disproportionately suffering from respiratory diseases like TB. Pandemic led to improvements.

      10:59 PM - 1 Oct 2020
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        2. Venkatesh Rao‏ @vgr Oct 1
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          ...Paired with similar extended description of events in Mashed, Persia, where things went much worse. At the time it was a medieval pilgrimage center and Persia was in a partial vacuum due to the collapse of Tsarist Russia and the Great Game.

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        3. Venkatesh Rao‏ @vgr Oct 1
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          The British were filling the vacuum and doing their usual thing of simultaneously raiding the country (for troops) and trying to govern it. Two bad harvests and the people were already starving. It was set up to be a shitshow and it was.

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        4. Venkatesh Rao‏ @vgr Oct 1
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          Weird time machine aspect here. 1918 was around the beginning of global synchronized time. Local stories ranging from nefyevsl to modern. Governance systems with similar range of vintages.

          1 reply 0 retweets 4 likes
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        5. Venkatesh Rao‏ @vgr Oct 1
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          Mashed appears to have been somewhere between Shanxi and South America in development terms. New York comes off most modern so far. As in Shanxi, Christian missionaries played a significant role. Targeting a Shiite holy spot for evangelism and being tolerated for medicine.

          1 reply 0 retweets 1 like
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        6. Venkatesh Rao‏ @vgr Oct 1
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          We interrupt this thread to note that Trump and Melania apparently just tested positive. Well our own shitshow just got worse so I’m glad to read about even worse shitshow in Persia 102 years ago 💀😖

          1 reply 1 retweet 9 likes
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        7. Venkatesh Rao‏ @vgr Oct 1
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          That Mashed vignette was interesting. A sense of modernity arriving alongside missionaries and medicine. Persia modernized shortly after in 1921 under Reza Khan. Seems like Spanish Flu triggered a lot of modernity arrivals. Covid might trigger a lot of anthropocene arrivals.

          1 reply 2 retweets 3 likes
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        8. Venkatesh Rao‏ @vgr Oct 1
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          We stop here tonight. Gotta check on what the Discourse is saying about Trump having Covid. This seems like an awful development to me. He might win on sympathy votes or die and trigger a civil war from the grave. Ugh. BoJo, Bolsanaro, and now Trump. Hmm.

          5 replies 0 retweets 11 likes
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        9. Venkatesh Rao‏ @vgr Oct 3
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          We return to 1918, and the next chapter, titled The Placebo Effect. Conventional medicine had just recently been privileged by law over alts like naturopathy and faith healing. There were no antibiotics or antivirals. Drugs were artisan. No double-blind or animal trials, no QA.

          1 reply 1 retweet 4 likes
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        10. Venkatesh Rao‏ @vgr Oct 3
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          Aspirin was the big deal and heavily overprescribed in unsafe doses, which may have caused some deaths. Quinine too which may have caused some of the reported loss of color vision as a side effect. Digitalis, strychnine... sounds like an Agatha Christie medicine cabinet.

          1 reply 0 retweets 6 likes
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        11. Venkatesh Rao‏ @vgr Oct 3
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          Arsenic, Epsom salts, castor oil... Some doctors fell back on older techniques. Bloodletting etc. Galenic “humors” medicine was still strong. Medicine was closer to astrology than astronomy in 1918.

          2 replies 0 retweets 6 likes
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        12. Venkatesh Rao‏ @vgr Oct 3
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          Temperance movement was big so alcohol was controversial as a treatment. Some thought cigarette smoke killed the virus.

          1 reply 0 retweets 4 likes
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        13. Venkatesh Rao‏ @vgr Oct 4
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          Le Corbusier “retreated to his rooms in Paris” drinking and smoking and reflecting on how to impose Modernist Authoritah on the world. Gee thanks Spanish Flu. Wonder what bad ideologies are taking shape in Covid domestic cozy retreat right now 🤔 I’d better get Raoism codified.

          1 reply 0 retweets 27 likes
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        14. Venkatesh Rao‏ @vgr Oct 4
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          Lots of dubious patent medicines flourished since there was no regulation. Dr. Kilmer’s swamp root was one. https://americanhistory.si.edu/collections/search/object/nmah_714581 …pic.twitter.com/nNDWwOPDmh

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        15. Venkatesh Rao‏ @vgr Oct 4
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          Traditional home remedies also thrived. Mustard poultices and stuff. This stuff is living memory even for me. When I was sick with coughs and colds and bronchitis as a kid in the early 80s (often), I was often administered Ayurvedic remedies like Starbucks turmeric lattes.

          1 reply 0 retweets 10 likes
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        16. Venkatesh Rao‏ @vgr Oct 4
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          So basically all treatments being tried were placebos at best (hence the chapter title). Many were nocebos it actually harmful. The only worthwhile advice was to stay hydrated.

          1 reply 0 retweets 6 likes
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        17. Venkatesh Rao‏ @vgr Oct 5
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          Section on fate of Odessa, which had been curiously unaffected by Bolshevik revolution and the only city to even detect the flu. Couldn’t do much with knowing because it kept changing hands through the war and revolution.

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        18. Venkatesh Rao‏ @vgr Oct 5
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          The city was half Jewish and a prominent Jewish doctor/bacteriologist Yakov Bardakh led what efforts could be undertaken. The city was reeling under a flood of refugees from the revolution. It was apparently a famous cosmopolitan city of its time, known as Marseilles of Russia

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        19. Venkatesh Rao‏ @vgr Oct 5
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          The Russian silent movie star Vera Kholodnaya retreated to Odessa and died of the flu there at age 25. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vera_Kholodnaya …

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        20. Venkatesh Rao‏ @vgr Oct 5
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          A Jewish “black wedding” was held in a cemetery to ward off the flu. Between beggars. Apparently many such were held around the worldhttps://www.google.com/amp/s/www.myjewishlearning.com/article/black-wedding-marrying-the-spanish-flu-away/amp/ …

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        21. Venkatesh Rao‏ @vgr Oct 7
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          Next chapter, titled “Good Samaritans” begins with observation that your best strategy was to to be selfish and isolate yourself and hoard food. This would starve the flu and it would die out. Then as now, people mostly didn’t do that.

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        22. Venkatesh Rao‏ @vgr Oct 7
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          Generally adaptive strategy of “social resilience” (coming closer together in a disaster) is maladaptive in a pandemic. Apparently there’s lots of theories why. Force of habit, fear of ostracization later for bring antisocial, all-in-this-togetherism, expanded sense of self...

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        23. Venkatesh Rao‏ @vgr Oct 7
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          With few exceptions people generally pitch in to help each other. Notable exceptions were in colonial conditions (Africa, India) where the colonized had learned to distrust white behaviors in crisis and deserted.

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        24. Venkatesh Rao‏ @vgr Oct 7
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          “At some point... group identity splinters and people revert to identifying as individuals. It may be at this point — once the worst is over, and life is returning to normal — that truly ‘bad’ behavior is most likely to emerge” Ah shit. The assholery hasn’t even really started.

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        25. Venkatesh Rao‏ @vgr Oct 7
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          Rio carnival in 1919 was more out of control than before and there was a spike in rapes it seems. And reports of a related ‘sons of flu’ baby boom (“hard to confirm”). Spinney cites Decameron for similar effects after Black Death.

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        26. Venkatesh Rao‏ @vgr Oct 7
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          Long bleak account of ravages of flu among Yupik of Alaska. Already dwindling from other European diseases, the Spanish flu hit them hard, wiping out entire villages. Relief ships found dogs eating bodies in some. Weird subplot of Russian orthodox vs American Protestant missions.

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        27. Venkatesh Rao‏ @vgr Oct 7
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          300 orphans were brought to town of Dillingham of population 200. Today most inhabitants claim descent from flu orphans. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dillingham,_Alaska …

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        28. Venkatesh Rao‏ @vgr Oct 7
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          This was a messy story, hard to summarize. Weird mix of Russian-American-native history, transition to modernity, decidedly mixed role of relief ships that appear to have done some looting of dead villages, but helped others... there’s an Oscar-worthy movie in this episode.

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        29. Venkatesh Rao‏ @vgr Oct 7
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          Next chapter, “hunt for patient zero”. We stop here tonight. This is an oddly choppy book. Lots of jump cuts and impressionistic dabs. It’s not as enjoyable as Tuchman’s more classical renaissance-painting tale of 14th century but in some ways more effective and comprehensive.

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        30. Venkatesh Rao‏ @vgr Oct 10
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          The origins of the Spanish flu are uncertain. We begin with the hypothesis that it emerged in Manchuria in 1910 when China was weak and sick. The mandarins appointed the first western educated Chinese doctor, Wu Lien-Teh, to try and do something https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wu_Lien-teh …

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        31. Venkatesh Rao‏ @vgr Oct 10
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          That appears to have been pneumonic plague and looked similar to the another in 1917 that Wu thought was also plague but is contested. Hard to do autopsies due to tradition. 300k men from this region served as a labor force in the European theater the following year.

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