Texas and Covid/Hurricanes
8As @kdemo noted, things are not looking good in Texas with in another episode of Covid Gone Wild as overzealous reopening and ham-fisted disregard for public health and safety leave the state ill-prepared for hurricane season, which is expected to be a doozy this year.
Covicane season is coming.
https://www.thedailybeast.com/i-was-a-military-covid-planner-trust-me-texas-is-in-deep-deep-trouble
Human-caused Climate Change, like the Covid pandemic don’t care if y’all don’t believe in them. It still doesn’t make them any less true, or people any less dead.
Why let Florida and Alabama have all the fun?
- 8 comments, 44 replies
- Comment
Texas Resources:
https://mobile.twitter.com/TexasDSHS
and
Texas DSHS ArcGIS Dashboard
Oh but I am sure all three states have “a plan” for how social distancing will work in shelters, how masks will continue to do any good when they are soaking wet with rain, and how hand washing will work with you have no clean water coming out of the faucets but a ton of muddy water in your living room. I mean the pandemic isn’t real. Right? So how will a hurricane make something fake any worse. Sigh.
Except covidcane is a dumb name. They should shorten it to Cocane and hope it stays underground.
@kdemo Then you’ll have people snorting it.
Virucane. Hurricovid. Any other ideas?
@OldCatLady rapture, no I kid
@OldCatLady
Coronacane
Hurricane COVID-19 the First
Hurricane COVID-19 the Second, and so on for subsequent named storms
Hurvid
I’m partial to Hurrivid or Covhehe of course we could always call it Smitty season.
For another take, with maybe a little bit more reasoning behind it, if you think this country is going to hell in a handbasket. From a New York Times contributing author:
https://imprimis.hillsdale.edu/four-months-unprecedented-government-malfeasance/
Well worth the read, IMO. We do want to consider both sides of every argument, don’t we, or has that idea also gone down the drain in our enlightened society?
@phendrick
Both-siderism is also a false equivalency fallacy.
It is definitely an opinion piece, and clearly from someone who clearly enjoys and wishes to continue enjoying their white privilege. So their opinions on the topics presented is not surprising.
This is a dog-whistle call for maintaining the white patriarchy because the white patriarchy has benefitted so much and that is at risk if one disagrees with the author’s position.
I found it to be a seductive piece of right-wing white privilege dogma. However, there is cherry-picking, context bait-and-switch, and by attacking science-based premises in the actions of “blue-state governers” they eliminate any science-based position of their own elsewhere. Such as quoting the Massachusetts Attorney General as an expert on ecology and forest management on how forests regenerate (setting aside the fact man-made destruction is orders of magnitude beyond natural processes combined).
Reading through the credentials, I do not see a deep stature either in academia or journalsim.
This was a transliteration of a zoom meeting among the like-minded, dressed up as an “online lecture”, not really any different than a self-promoting youtuber struggling to be a career influencer.
@phendrick
Over reaction and so we have a major spike in cases in states that opened way too soon?
But ignores that hospitals are full and overflowing something that normally doesn’t happen.
My state is shipping patients out of state and ER’s and hospitals have been closed for days. Many “elective” and not so elective procedures have been cancelled because there are no hospital beds and ICU’s are at capacity.
The local solution to no beds and patients being held in the ER so they are closed is rotating which ER is open between the 4 local hospitals even though technically there are no hospital beds. Not to mention 3 of the 4 don’t accept ACA care nor medicaid and no special arrangement has been made to accept that insurance under the circumstances. This is something that normally doesn’t happen. Not to mention if you have a stroke you want to go to one ER as that hospital has the only good stroke center in the state. If you had major trauma you want to go to a different one as it is the only level 1 trauma ER in the state… You don’t even want to go to one of them unless it is the last health care place available on earth.
Nah nothing wrong with this picture. We didn’t over react. /sarcasm
I could go on with the rest of the article, as this same kind of stuff continues, but won’t. What a dog heap pile of crap that mixes facts, some/much used out of context and/or not updated, along with ignoring facts that don’t support her point of view. No wonder this country is in so much trouble.
@phendrick
This is very telling about the biases and primary interests of The Manhattan Institute, the employer of that opinion piece you presented.
Directly from The Manhattan Institute’ twitter feed:
Ah, yes, ye olde “Trickle Down” die-hards just can’t put down the crack-pipe of that failed trope.
@mike808 Your typical unbiased response, also. (Not.) Note that the New York Times is also an “employer of that opinion piece” I presented.
I guess the NYT is a bastion of right wing thought, since they published someone that also published for the Manhattan Institute? (That would be following your usual line of logical reasoning.)
As pointed out before, you have the habit of taking a statement and twisting it to imply something it didn’t come close to saying: How does something referring to “tax-the-rich sloganeering” wind up as an endorsement of “trickle down” economics?
Do you refute the claim that it is indeed “tax-the-rich sloganeering” coming from the powers that be on the blue side of the aisle, Pelosi, Bernie, politicians from New York, et al? If so, I want to see that. All I see from you is opinions, but very little fact (though you tend to state everything as a fore-gone-concluded fact).
I posit that you are the embodiment of the contradictions and double standard the article mentions.
“crack-pipe” reference? Besides having connotations of people on the liberal side of this issue, that sounds like it is bordering on being racist, in these times when saying blacklisted or white washed is construed as racist.
no more replies will be worth my time on this thread, as impenetrable as your brain seems to be to any thought you didn’t previously have
@phendrick
Thanks for sharing. Really good stuff there, especially big picture. We all do well to consider multiple angles and seek to educate ourselves. “Seek first to understand, then to be understood”, right?
@phendrick
I appreciate that you tried to bring some diversity of political orientations and philosophies to these discussions.
I am guessing the writer’s relationship to the NYT is on the editorial side (I’m not looking that up tho). The Times does try to publish editorials from a variety of political philosophies.
There are decent/useful conservative thinkers and writers out there. This piece indicates this writer is not among them.
Nothing wrong with looking for various perspectives.
But please do some quality checks along the way.
That piece flunks.
@phendrick I thought it was interesting too. Thanks for posting it.
@f00l @phendrick Why do you say that piece flunks?
@f00l
“flunks”? Specifics?
“The Times does try to publish editorials from a variety of political philosophies.” – IIRC, doing that with a piece from Sen Cotton got one editor at NYT fired recently and led to the resignation of the successor Beri Weiss (who could forget that name?), so I wouldn’t say they exactly are the poster child for fostering two-sided discussion.
Personally, I want to hear both sides of any question so I can apply my critical thinking to the issue, but that seems to be definitely frowned upon by the left-leaners right now. Once in a while I actually see things a little differently/get my mind changed. –
If I’m wrong, persuade me! But there are many people on this site’s fora (that word seems archaic) that are quick to try to shut down anyone with an opposing view.
How many of the following have we seen resorted to in various posts (especially political) around here? :
Diverting the argument to unrelated issues with a red herring (Ignoratio elenchi)
Insulting someone’s character (argumentum ad hominem)
Assume the conclusion of an argument, a kind of circular reasoning, also called “begging the question” (petitio principii)
Making jumps in logic (non sequitur)
Identifying a false cause and effect (post hoc ergo propter hoc)
Asserting that everyone agrees (argumentum ad populum, bandwagoning)
Creating a “false dilemma” (“either-or fallacy”) in which the situation is oversimplified
Selectively using facts (card stacking)
Making false or misleading comparisons (false equivalence and false analogy)
Generalizing quickly and sloppily (hasty generalization)
[all the above blatantly stolen from wikipedia:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fallacy#Informal_fallacy]
I think the one I see the most is “begging the question”, closely followed by “ad hominem” (often implicit).
@f00l There used to be a segment on some show called “Point - CounterPoint”, or some such, giving opposing arguments to whatever question. I would love to see that type of show return, with reputable people on each side. Right now, when Fox or CNN or whoever tries it, one side is always relatively lame, IMO.
@f00l [I had to pause in the middle of that above comment, came back and tried to add to it, but then found it had timed out and flushed it.]
I used to make sure not to miss any episode of The McLaughlin Group, while John M was alive. It always had a good representation of both liberals and conservatives on the panel and you could usually be sure of serious discussions.
Another good one was Firing Line, notable for its unhurried pace and (with few exceptions) very civil discourse.
With a very critical time in our nation’s history upon us, we have some potent political decisions to make, and we NEED serious, two-sided discussions of these matters, preferably before the national, state-wide, and local elections. Unfortunately, in the current climate, I don’t have much faith or hope that we will get those (certainly not in the presidential debates – assuming there will be such).
@phendrick
Never watched McLaughlin.
Have a great fondness for all things Buckley; even when his “reasoning” was not even close to sound.
He was just so damned much fun.
I still love his books. I love the sailing books best, and love God and Man at Yale; not that I take seriously the written polemic as persuasive; rather, that the book is so full of Buckley’s energy.
PS Buckley did so well v Vidal, not because he reasoned better; rather (as with many of Churchill’s political arguments not dealing with a then current emergency) because he was personally so much more fun.
Re Buckley; he was a great debator.
But debate is akin to courtroom argument and akin to political speech. The standard is “does it persuade” (by any variety of rhetorical practices).
The standard for such (debates, opinion pieces, etc) is explicitly not “is the logic/reasoning sound?” And explicitly not “are the alleged facts presented either widely assumed to be true across the entire culture, with little or no hard evidence refuting them; or are the facts presented backed by hard scientific evidence and scientific consensus?”
Sometimes these (debates, courtroom arguments, opinion pieces, etc) do get close to serious reasoning, in spite of the usual extra-sloppy and rhetorically-questionable tactics common to those forms of speech and writing. Rare, but not impossible.
We are a species in our bare infancy in terms of serious reasoning about issues not reducible to the best methods of current hard science (combined with reams of excellent data and much self-questioning and argument critique, performed and published by the best practitioners, as part of their regular daily routines)
Never assume you will find much solid final conclusion logic in a political piece of writing or speech. It might be there, but that’s surpassingly rare. And. in such pieces, facts are commonly cherry-picked and distorted from the start.
This includes commentary on economics; by even the best economists: they omit so much.
Ok, we often don’t have confirmed versions of that data in solid form yet. So they might be ok in drawing small conclusions in small areas of Econ.
Large conclusions about the entire economy? They’re welcome to guess and to argue to support their guess. But they don’t know.
None of them know
Give them 1k years and maybe economists will make it to the certainty level of our current freshman chemistry courses.
This is not to trash economics and economists. They’re doing, mostly, the best they can.
The problems arise when they attempt to reason far beyond the boundaries of what they know anything about. Or when they pretend to themselves that current data isn’t massaged and manipulated. Or that current data is even 1/1000000 of the data we need to actually start to understand economics.
I don’t mind that people try, with economics. We have to make real world decisions, perfect understanding and data, or no. We have to survive and go forward here and now. We can’t wait for perfection, we can’t even wait for bare competence
In both politics and in economics (and in many other similar spheres), we are all living by and are “reasoning” (so to speak) by personally preferred myths, supported by cherry-picked and selectively interpreted facts.
That’s it. For all of us.
You wanna get “both sides”? There’s aren’t two sides; there are trillions of sides.
And more are coming.
And you more or less won’t find this discussed on any tv program, ever. TV just doesn’t go there.
You might find hints of some alternatives where we need to explore more in a given area of contention, in better-than-usual books and articles.
If we, as a species, survive and keep trying, snd gather as much intellectual rigor and intellectual honesty and honor as we possible can, arguments and issues in the far future won’t even look like those of today. Many areas of current debate will be, I hope, practically speaking, improved upon, understood better, and the then current unresolved issues of the future will be about topics we never even tried to parse.
To those future humans, if we succeed as a species, today’s political and econ arguments will look about as salient, relevant, and effective as trepanning. (Those cute skull holes in primitive humans).
Or we will, as a species, get stuck, fuck up, and still be really really really stupid.
Dunno.
If would be nice to think that, at some point, the general educated population actually knows what logic and reasoning are, as offered up within the murkier, less easily rigorously understood and argued, topics.
We sure don’t do that now. We don’t even know how.
I haven’t read in full that Wikipedia piece on reasoned argument. It looks ok from what you quoted; I suspect it’s highly incomplete even by today’s standards, but have no free time to check.
That opinion piece you linked failed by some of the standards mentioned in the wikipedia you quoted. I’m not going to go dissect it.
FWIW, most such pieces are written as a “confirm our biases” and a “arouse the troops” effort for those already committed to a given POV crowd.
That’s one reason I hardly ever read them. From any POV.
Fact pieces (using good quality facts) are useful.
Those opinion pieces are so often a waste of time and energy, unless one is reading just to see which way the arguments are flowing.
Sometimes, rarely, such a piece (a typical editorial, or similar) can illuminate. Tho, often, that’s almost accidental.
Notes & caveats:
We as a species are fucking terrible at complexity.
We as a species are fucking terrible at knowing or measuring what we don’t know.
Both of these are well proven by experiment. And we’ll know more about how terrible we are, over time.
And also; our brains are our tools, and also our handicaps. How good at all this are these brains, or how good can they be? Do we have hard limits? Can we make our brains better over time?
(Answers unknown).
So why pretend otherwise, re any of those caveats? All pretending one knows more than one knows gets for us: a chance to be wrong or irrelevant, yet again. Bingo!
Maybe, over time, we’ll get better at those things. We were really shitty at medicine and physics once.
(And in medicine, physics, similar, we still may be relatively terrible compared to our potentials or to what’s out there. But, at least, we have hard evidence we’ve made some progress.)
@f00l @phendrick
“There used to be a segment on some show called “Point - CounterPoint“
It was 60 Minutes. And SNL. They were both good.
@f00l Wow, that was far-ranging! And quite a lot to think about. I don’t have time to respond to many individual points (I barely had time to read it all ;>) ), but will say I agree with about 45% of it, disagree with about 25%, and go along that I don’t know what to think about on maybe 30% of it. But a few random comments, i.e., thoughts that hit me while reading:
McLaughlin Group stayed pretty much up with current issues week to week so was a good barometer of thought from both left and right. It was always fun when they did their individual predictions before elections, end of the year best and worst awards, or what the new year would bring.
Some notable panelists were Eleanor Clift, Pat Buchanan, Clarence Page, Larry Kudlow (yep, him), Lawrence McDonnel, Monica Crowley, Bob Novak (not sure about spellings, and too lazy to look them up), probably more I’m forgetting.
One problem economists have (and probably will continue to have) is that they have to factor PEOPLE into their equations. (Good luck with that – easier to bet on the stock market.) One assumption they make is that people will act rationally, under a given circumstance. Right. Cf pandemic toilet paper.
I wonder where we’d be if such as Leibniz and Boole had gotten further in applying symbolic logic to analyzing reasoning and logic of argumentation? Today’s artificial intelligence doesn’t worry about that – it just tries to be good at pattern matching. Think “muscle memory”.
You have more faith in the advancement of humanity than I do. I’m not sure we will even be around long enough to improve significantly.
You point out issues of “complexity”; I counter with “chaos”. (Somehow, it seems CV-19 embodies both! Who woulda thunk it, a year or two ago, and all the ramifications on life today?)
Oh yeah, many sides, not just two, to an issue. Definitely. But that is not simple enough for the media – or Congress; note they don’t sit in a circle.
Out for now…
@phendrick @sammydog01
Oh yes.
I’m just an ignorant slut.
Always.
@f00l @sammydog01
Ah, yes, 60 Minutes! I remember now. I sure miss that part (even more than Andy Rooney and all the other old guys)…
And those SNL skits were classic (I had forgotten all about them), and I think you linked to the most classic of the bunch. Curtain and Akroyd. Back in the days when I watched it regularly. Enjoyed Jane on 3rd Rock, and Blues Brothers is near the top of my favorite movies of all time.
Thanks for the memory jog, and the YT link.
@phendrick
Complexity and chaos are related topics. Lots of fun to get lost in.
We suck at both topics.
Even if we’ve taken so baby steps.
Re humans within economic systems acting “rationally” or not
One big issue with that: economists assumed they understood what “rational human conducts was within a given scenario ir model.
They didn’t. And they don’t. Even if our species happens to be capable of that.
An assuming “rational economic conduct” is, to some degree, a wildly irrational assumption.
Limits:
Habits and the known human and biological cost of changing them (given limited time and energy) Stress.
No free time to properly evaluate choices.
Time spent gathering info and trying to know when the right or best info has been gathered or not, or how to gather it,
Or if it’s possible to get that info;
And how to evaluate if the info or reasoning is or isn’t “good” given limited time and energy;
the cost of crossing social barriers (how many “rational” actions resulted in failure because someone crossed a social barrier and was punished for it?);
whether the rational being is under coercion in some way;
and on and on and on.
Aristocrats, and the very wealthy and independent, and those with lots of time and resources and few constraints, and those who won’t be punished for their independence, might be able to pull off a lot of rationality.
Maybe.
Maybe we don’t even begin to know what that is.
But, for me, the place to start is the notion that we barely know what rationality is, as applied to current human choices.
Boolean? Come on
How many current serious human and political problems fit nicely into a Boolean framework without severe distortion?
Math - serious abstract mathematical logic I mean - might help a little. If applied properly.
But translating the rigor of current higher pure math logic into something application to broad human problems - and into something that can be properly applied to the legitimate and necessary complexity of colloquial human language and thought - is not something even mathematicians can currently pull off.
And they’re the only ones competent in the methodology.
There prob needs to be a new field of study. Pieces of it exist here and there, scattered into other fields. It will be a tough go.
The minute real rigorous logic starts getting applied to human issues expressed in natural language, people (often even v smart people) go cheap out. They lose their rigor, but claim a rationality they no longer possess within the current instance.
They fool themselves. Happened all day long.
So it will be a tough go.
Re other stuff
I’m prob not more optimistic than you. I don’t assume our species will survive.
I just thought my post already contained enough crap, and so didn’t go there.
PS I gave no idea why the paragraph starting “aristocrats” got a font upgrade. Prob done control character I can’t see on this very cracked screen. And my eyes are tired.
Anyway, the font upgrade was unintentional.
@phendrick
PS
If you like Buckley, and you haven’t read the sailing books, do that! They’re wonderful!
@f00l economics - it’s very, very good at figuring out how, in retrospect, to explain the past using math. It is not so good at predicting the future. Too many variables they choose to ignore (like what motivates people outside of, for example, self interest). Behavioral economics though is, in my opinion, really interesting. Frequently they are doing a better job with explaining what overlaps with psychology than many of the psychology theories.
This is in part due to having no problem using primary data (for example brain scans while decision making and then using what we know about different parts of the brain and what goes on there) rather than secondary data to predict behavior and explain it (well secondary in some respects as we are looking at someone’s interpretation of their own behavior or the outcome of the behavior without really having anything we can touch or see to explain the “why” or “motivation”, etc.). Some of that stuff is really, really cool.
@Kidsandliz
Exactly.
Truest useful econ will have to take into account the entire set of stresses, info, and opportunities available.
For instance, making a complex decision is likely far easier for someone who has friends and family and connections in which that sort of decision is well understood and lots of informally offered salient info is available.
For someone outside the golden demographic, with no culture of info and decision support for that sort of decision, the choice is a whole diff matter if “fraught”.
Esp if the decision carries potential social/legal risks or social/legal consequences.
@f00l What you are talking about (more or less) is called absorptive capacity (in strategic management) where one’s depth of knowledge in an area makes it more likely that one identifies other, new to them, information that is useful and then uses it, often in unique or innovative ways. It helps one make connections between seemingly disparate (to the less informed) information, sees the opportunities for new products that others may miss, etc. Breadth of knowledge is most helpful when one also has deep absorptive capacity in the different “breadth areas” of one’s knowledge base. In business companies with strengths in both tend to be more innovative, create more innovative products and processes, make better decisions, etc.
A catch with “traditional” economics is that they are focused on finance, the economy, markets, etc, and less so on the importance of the human side that helps shape this. They are looking at things from the “group” level and not the “individual” level of analysis. This tends to underplay the affects that individuals can have, other than “on average as a group”. They tend to try to describe the “ideal”, perfect market (of course they have also focused on how the market can be affected to not operate in a “perfect” way). They really, only belatedly, have started to look at how humans can screw up their theories because humans are more complex than how they “generalize” behaviors into a fewer number of variables than behavioral fields do (this is why/how economists have backed into behavioral economics).
The same thing has happened in strategy. They have started to utilize organizational behavior (which generally looks at what goes on inside a company at the individual or small group level and not at the company or industry level which is what strategy does) in trying to explain how companies and industries behave.
Of course, what goes on in the world involves all levels of looking at things (eg all levels of analysis) but it is awfully complicated to study all of them at the same time. And in creating depth of knowledge there is the tendency to focus just on a few things. It is incredibly difficult to have both depth and breadth of knowledge in multiple fields/knowledge areas or to study things that way. Of course those who manage to be able to do that, in academia tend to get research awards, in the “practitioner” area tend to be more innovative, successful…
@Kidsandliz
That’s a little of what I’m talking about.
Also, or more, to the point: we don’t know what rationality really is when applied to human situations, due to issues of attempting to apply hard logic and rigorous thought to human situations, or to situations whose parameters can only be fully expressed in colloquial human language.
We simply have no true parameters for measuring logical rigor in this setting. It’s a logic, linguistics, metaphysics, epistemology prob, among other things, wrapped around the core of what it means to know something in a verifiable way.
Going back to grad school in another related field won’t help this; at least not at present.
@f00l
Hahaha - econ and finance think they know what rationality is. It is only slowly seeping in to those fieds that humans’ first approach to making decisions are often not “textbook” rational.
Grad school? You don’t need grad school to read reputable (eg not wikipedia, business answers, etc.) articles/sources and learn a lot about something on your own.
@Kidsandliz
And you won’t find the answers - or even reputable info - or even much in the way if speculative discussion - on the many of the issues I’ve raised; not in grad school; not in books; not in the media; not in a wiki; not in math, linguistic, or philosophical writings.
Not as written, nor as read, by the intelligent and careful; nor as written or read by by the self-deluded.
It’s a real and critical issue. As real as surgeons and physicians finally learning to wash their hands before touching a patient.
But we just aren’t there yet.
If the academic econ industry is getting into the complexities of info, evaluation, constraint, and “rational choice”, I supppse that’s a teeny tiny start on a teeny tiny area of the issue.
So, if they’re doing that, good for them.
@f00l Haven’t read his “sailing” books, but couple years ago when I had more time, I was reading a lot of “mystery/detective” books (Agatha Christie, Brother Cadfael, & lots similar) on my Kindle, and picked up some of Buckley’s spy series on his protagonist Blackford Oakes when they were on sale, but never got to reading them. You didn’t mention them, so I am wondering if you had read any of them, and what you thought?
@phendrick
I read some of those from his mystery or thriller series way back when - decades ago. They were just OK. Entertaining and amusing, but not much more than that.
It’s also been decades since I read his sailing books, so maybe I’ve got them wrong; maybe I overrate them or something. But I remember them as being wonderful
These are memoirs of specific sailing journeys he took, and of his sometime brief life on the sea
@f00l OK, thanks for the info on his books. I’ll try to add them to my list, but they’d be pretty far down, and afraid I just having been able to do much about keeping up with it lately…
Stay safe.
@f00l There are plenty of other fields that are looking at the complexity of decision making - psych, organizational behavior, industrial psych, behavioral econ (as already mentioned)… Sociology is getting at some of it sideways through, for example, network influences, education (although a lot of that research is incredibly low quality), brain and aging research is finding information that affects many cognitive issues, not just decision making… and then there are studies looking at group/team decision making across a number of fields that shed some light on how people actually make decisions.
In most of these fields they are also looking at how you can influence people’s decision making processes (marketing is a field that is really skilled at understanding what goes into a buy/not buy decision and how you can use “non-rational” variables to influence a consumer’s actions (eg to buy or not to buy). Those non-rational factors aslo affect how people make decisions outside of markting decisions. Artificial Intelligence work to mimic how humans makes decisions of course runs into the differences between purely rational decision making and how humans operate. In figuring out how to make AI match how humans operate they have found some underlying “rules” that also follow some of the existing theories… Lots of credible research out there and a fair bit is known. Of course like all things a fair bit is not known too.
Even when you look at, for example in finance, choosing the project with the highest net present value - which on the surface would appear like a “rational” approach and what is taught you are supposed to do in finance - how some of the numbers are derived that go into the formula is influenced by human choices, biases, priorities, etc. Theoretically you can account for the non-directly monetary factors that influence how something will turn out when you put decide what exactly the number will be that you use, of course that is also influenced by how the brain works. BUT a lot of progress has been made that has been independently verified, triangulated, etc. with how to deal with that quagmire of human non-rationality such that the results you get are reasonably accurate.
To some degree, because we know of biases that exist and reliably influence human behavior, etc. you can set up a “rational” (using the word in the lay sense) formula that accounts for those variable and in many cases those formulas do a reasonably good job at predicting the decision a person will make. While we have a definition of rational as bias free, that we can predict a decision someone will make including other variables means that that outcome could be considered rational as we have accounted for decision making under certain conditions.
Many years ago I did a study that I predicted a behavior (eg decision) that all employees (this was a field study across 5 organizations that were very similar) would need to make in about 3 months and make again 15 mo later. What I found out is that using the variables I was using I predicted accurately a fair bit better than chance. I did an even better job (a hit rate of correctly predicting 84% of the decisions) correctly 15 mo later. If I could have figured out what went into the delay in raising my accuracy that high, I could have incorporated that into my first year formula and thus raised that accuracy. I would call that “rational” (in the non-technical sense) decision making because knowing how someone responded to a group of variables I could, with a high degree of accuracy, predict their behavior choice. They followed the “rules” in making their decision.
Thanks for sharing. Really good stuff there, especially big picture. We all do well to consider multiple angles and seek to educate ourselves. “Seek first to understand, then to be understood”, right?
Well, it look like Gov. Abbot’s “leadership” is bringing Death Panels to the citizens of Texas. Sarah Palin must be so proud.
Source
@mike808
The Valley area initially did a very good job controlling virus contagion (In early and mid-spring) by implementing local mandatory mask rules and strong lockdown measures.
Texas Gov Abbot opposed these measures. and forced these cities and counties to stop enforcement, remove various orders, and relax their social behavior controls.
At the time, Gov Abbot was in lockstep with the Trump admin preferences of the time. Medical science/epidemiology seemed to have been absent from his calculations.
By mid-May, most virus contagion measures the Valley counties had originally put in to place had been made “voluntary” by state order, with some remaining restrictions or limits on social gathering places. Gov Abbot intended to “open Texas for business” as quickly as possible, and forced localities to comply.
And now, the state is short of ICU beds and we have need of the new medical triage panels your article mentioned.
@mike808 And while they will be sending home very sick covid patients thus exposing the entire family who are now taking care of them, we are not letting this same family into the hospital to see their loved ones and be with them when they die. Makes sense to me. Not.
@f00l and others:
Beware of “sky is falling” alerts selectively culled
from papers that are aimed at one side of the political spectrum, not from the mainstream papers in the state. (Do your own Google search, if you don’t believe me.) Notice that our reporter above gave no source for his quotes.
From what I found, Starr County has exactly ONE hospital with a total bed count of 37 (didn’t see the # of ICU beds listed, but I imagine it’s quite a bit fewer). Doesn’t take many patients to fill it to capacity.
The Valley area there is a very poor area, and there just have not been that many hospitals built there in the counties adjacent to Starr. (If that bothers you, I’m sure they would be happy to take your donation towards expanding the bed count, but you’d probably also have to give additional money to make doctors and nurses want to work there – that is economic reality.)
The state as a whole is NOT out of hospital beds total, nor ICU beds. My county has numerous hospitals plus Emergency care centers and Critical care centers that have additional beds. The county health authority here (who comes across as not a fan of Abbot’s policies) said today that our local ICU beds are at 75% capacity, and that already includes patients who have come in from out-of-county. (They don’t give exact counts of that, because apparently that violates patients’ privacy.)
I’d take more heed of current event type posts here if they had sources. Notice that is seldom the case here. As I said before, way too much is stated by certain individuals as facts, when they are not (except maybe in that individual’s head).
A few of mine for what I said are:
https://www.msn.com/en-us/health/medical/coronavirus-updates-some-texas-hospitals-at-100-capacity/ar-BB16kjAs
[says SOME Texas hospitals at capacity – those in the Valley, in particular]
https://health.usnews.com/best-hospitals/area/tx/starr-county-memorial-hospital-6742915
https://www.krgv.com/news/starr-county-hospital-facing-ethical-dilemma-receives-federal-help/
The “Death Panel”:
@phendrick
WTF are you talking about?
There’s a link titled “Source” right at the top.
What I noticed is that you can’t read.
@Kidsandliz I imagine that policy of the hospitals comes from the hospitals themselves (and their lawyers). I have heard no claims that that comes from any politicians at local, state, or national level. Please give me the source if you find otherwise.
My wife is in Alzheimer’s care, and we have not been allowed in to visit the residents since March. That is the policy of their administration. (I imagine it is condoned by the local health authority.) A large proportion of the early death in my county were at nursing homes.
So it has been four months since my wife and I have had a face-to-face conversation. What I miss most, and think she got the most out of, was just being able to hold hands with her while we talked. I have given up on trying to talk with her by telephone. The last two times I tried, she just put the phone down and walked away while I was in mid-sentence. I don’t think she realized who I was, though I tried telling her several times. I doubt that she will be able to recognize me when (IF?) we ever see each other again. I tell myself it is for her best good to be there that way (but I’m not sure I’m entirely convinced of that).
I heard through a third party that one of the employees there (but don’t know who or what) tested positive for CV19, and that all other employees and residents were then tested and found negative. None of that has been made public.
I tell myself, It is all out of my hands now.
@mike808 Ok, fuck, it’s not your top post I’m talking about. It’s your later post that has no source, unless you found a way to put it in invisible ink.
It looks like you read but don’t comprehend.
Since we are now being so polite.
@phendrick
The issues you present cover some valid concerns; i don’t have the time to look up the source or verifiability of every single thing I see
But fortunately for the world, these are casual conversations here, and no one’s future depends on what we say here
Early during the lockdowns of March and April, there were articles about how things are going fairly well in the valley and detailing what they have done.
Later, articles from legitimate sources (I forget which now) appeared about how the state government had forced valley communities to back down on some of their anti-contagion efforts, and to open up public interaction and lift restrictions, and to open the local economy more than the local health authorities wished
I don’t remember exact details re that either.
The valley is poor, but they didn’t create all their own problems to date re this.
It’s an ugly situation, and I hate that it became so politicized in the early stages, and has been so ever since.
@phendrick
Re your wife
I know some people working in nursing homes.
The residences I know of; will all at least answer questions from family about the state of things, such as the overall health of staff and residents, case counts (if there are cases), etc.
I don’t know that all of them do this. But worth a try, maybe, if you want info?
Some of them arrange f2f conversations where a resident is separated from an outsider by a glass or other barrier, with distancing, masks, sometimes gowns, etc.
no hand holding tho, which is terribly sad loss.
@phendrick That has to be a an incredibly difficult and painful situation for you and your wife. And it isn’t even close to being her best interests (or yours either).
@phendrick PS - Like you I’d presume facility director policies, not politician ones.
In my mom’s assisted living facility the no visitor even outdoors and separated by 6’ is the policy of the director (not a medical person as where she is is part of a larger retirement community), not any politician that I know of. Unfortunately some of his policies - like people can’t drop off at the entrance things their family members need, instead they have to send them USPS - makes no scientific (that I know of anyway) sense.
@phendrick
What later post? I have posted only once to start the thread.
If you’re talking about the last paragraph I separated, I did so because it was further down in the article I was quoting from the source I linked to.
Once more, WTF are you prattling on about? Or are we both mis-attributing this kerfluffle to what f00l posted? If so,
@phendrick Re your wife. If her room or the facility has a room with a window where she can see you standing outside, perhaps you can arrange with her on-duty caretaker/nurse for a viewing meeting.
I would think that any licensed facility that refuses to allow the legal guardian/POA/conservator of a person any contact other than by phone, given your wife’s condition, would be something of interest to your state’s ombudsman, the licensing body of the facility, your insurance (who is footing the bill for your wife’s care, and has likely more leverage with the facility), or the state’s elder abuse reporting hotline.
A call to your family attorney to send a C&D letter to the facility might do the trick to negotiate something better. The basis of the C&D would be on denying you both access to your wife under your guardianship and the mental anguish their interference with no accommodation whatsoever is causing to both of you. In addition, there is an issue with failure to disclose very real health risks to your wife by refusing to disclose to you, even in person or on the phone, the presence of COVID-positive in this facility that even you have not been able to have any contact with any resident or staff, making the staff the only possible source of liability were such a thing to occur. Hypothetically, you know.
They are duty bound to disclose to you all health information related to your wife, as guardian/POA/conservator, including the immediate environmental risks of in-facility COVID-positive patients and staff to your very high at-risk wife.
Your family attorney might also suggest other avenues of pressure on the facility to relent and find a way to meet the needs of the people in their care that isn’t equivalent to incarceration and isolation.
@phendrick maybe you can use this information to help force that facility to let you come visit. Especially if you can come up with an N95 mask.
https://www.the-scientist.com/infographics/infographic-what-social-isolation-can-mean-for-the-brain-67706
and a similar one to the one above
https://www.the-scientist.com/features/how-social-isolation-affects-the-brain-67701
and one about lack of touch
https://www.the-scientist.com/news-opinion/losing-touch-another-drawback-of-the-COVID19-pandemic-67542