In the kingdom of the blind . . .
. . . everyone falls over the cliff
Rules can be OK. As a general rule, “don’t stick a metal fork into an electrical socket” is definitely one I would recommend following.
Many rules, like this, make a lot of sense.
Lots of other rules make no sense whatsoever. These nonsensical rules seem to be the product of some diseased and deranged imagination, designed to take the piss rather than to have any beneficial effect.
The Neverending Story that is covid has these latter kinds of rules aplenty.
The sit-down-mask-off, stand-up-mask-on, rule that has been applied is one example. It’s so delightfully potty that one can hardly imagine what kind of “mind” dreamt it up. Yet it has been rigorously applied, in all seriousness, as a “covid-safe” measure.
I can’t even begin to process the level of stupidity involved in creating such a rule in the first place. As to those who follow such a rule, well now we’re plumbing the infinite and unfathomable depths of human stupidity. Humanity is a clashing mess of paradox. We can create quantum computers - and also rules like this.
At least many creative people can see the absurdity too
Much more insidious, however, are those rules that appear to make some sort of sense on the surface. They become dogmas and few ever stop to think about the fundamental assumptions that went into building those rules in the first place. We blindly follow these rules, and fall over the cliff.
I have a great deal of respect, and envy, for mathematicians. On the whole they appear to be human-shaped machines for transforming alcohol into theorems - at least in my experience. They have an amazing precision of mind - and also no little amount of perversity. Only a mathematician could dream up a function that is everywhere continuous, but nowhere differentiable.
But all gentle teasing aside, there is a very powerful lesson to be learned from mathematics.
In elementary mathematics we learn to do things like differentiate and integrate (I’m sorry if this brings back some understandable trauma to memory). If you survived the horrors of algebra and the daily “why do I have to learn this crazy shit?”, you are rewarded with more crazy shit - like integration and differentiation.
Eventually you learn to apply various rules - and things don’t seem quite as bad. You might not have a clue what’s going on, but at least you can get good marks on a test. Life, even with the torture of having to learn maths, becomes tolerable again.
In very broad terms integration and differentiation are opposite operations. Integration “undoes” differentiation, and differentiation “undoes” integration. A bit like using a microwave and a freezer. A microwave “undoes” the operation of freezing. Integration is much harder than differentiation, in general (it’s harder, in general, to freeze things than it is to heat them).
We learn to apply rules to help us out. When we integrate a simple function like “one over x squared” we use the rule add one to the power (in this case the power is minus 2) and divide by this number. So when we integrate one over x squared, we end up with the result “minus 1 over x”.
We also learn that (broadly) we can often represent a function as a graph. With this pictorial representation we can work out the area under the curve between two points and we find that we can use integration here. We learn the rule for doing this too.
So, we get to the point where we ask the question “what is the area under the curve representing one over x squared between x = -1 and x = 1”?
We naïvely apply the rules we have learned and get the answer minus 2. Great. Another homework question done. Unfortunately, the actual answer is that there is an infinite area under the curve between these 2 points.
The problem here is the blind application of the rules. With every set of rules, there are usually a whole bunch of conditions that have to be in place before we can legitimately apply them.
In this integration example, we integrated (to try to find the area) over a region where there is a problem - and forgot. If we work out the value of one over x squared as x gets close to zero it gets very large. At x = 0, the value is undefined (infinity).
When you apply any mathematical theorem (a rule) you have to also remember all the conditions for which that rule applies. These are the assumptions that often get forgotten. I’ve fallen foul of this too many times to remember. I’d be working out some physics problem, and apply a mathematical theorem, and get a crazy result. I’d spend the next few days doing the calculations again and again to check. And then a little light would pop into my brain flashing the words “did you check that you actually could apply that theorem?”
Even if you didn’t follow the integration example above, the take-away here is that you can get really crazy results if you just blindly follow the rules.
So what are the core assumptions involved in building the various covid rules?
The biggest assumption of all has been that asymptomatic transmission is a significant driver of infection. Let’s label this assumption with the symbol AT.
We then have the “lockdown theorem” :
If AT is true, then locking down everyone will have a bigger impact on transmission than just locking down those who are actually sick
This means that if we can find two similar places (geographically and demographically) where one locked everyone down and the other didn’t, there should be a significant difference in the progression/outcome of the disease.
South Dakota, with many more significant drivers of infection walking freely about, should have seen a much higher case rate than neighbouring North Dakota if the “lockdown theorem” were true.
We know from previous experience of pandemics and outbreaks of respiratory diseases that some form of “quarantine” for people who are actually sick is a helpful measure - so the problem isn’t in the “then” part of the theorem, it’s in the “if” part.
We can, therefore, conclude that the “lockdown theorem” is false. It is false because the fundamental assumption is false.
My logic here may not be 100% watertight, but my view is that this graph alone disproves the assertion that asymptomatic transmission is a significant driver of infection. I don’t need to wade through a whole bunch of crappy associational studies with dubious methodologies - the real-world data here is more than sufficient.
The same assumption has been used to justify mask mandates. The notion here is that there are all these people walking about, with no symptoms, who are significant sources of infection. In order to mitigate against this we need to make everyone wear a mask. Quite apart from whether masks actually work to any significant degree (they do not), this whole edifice crumbles, too, upon the realisation that our AT assumption is false.
Masking everyone has no additional benefit over masking those who are actually ill (assuming that masks work to any significant degree).
Once again, we can write things as a theorem with the extra symbol MW for “masks work”, so we have the “mask theorem” :
If AT is true and MW is true, then if everyone wears a mask this will have a bigger impact on transmission/outcome than without mask-wearing
It’s a bit harder to disentangle this one because there are two “if” conditions here. But the basic idea is the same : IF we had a load of unmasked, infectious, people walking freely about we should see a much higher rate of cases and, therefore, a higher mortality in general (assuming deaths follow cases), than in places that follow the mask rules. Here’s the mortality curves for the UK and Sweden up to March 25th 2021
If AT was a thing and if masks worked, we should see much bigger differences between countries that adopted masks (UK) and Sweden (no mask mandate or high level of mask wearing).
So, either AT or MW, or both, are wrong. We can’t conclude that both are wrong from this graph, because it could be the case that AT is true, but masks don’t work - so we could have lots of asymptomatic spreaders walking about, but it makes no difference whether they wear masks or not. We can already discount any reasoning based on the lockdown theorem which we have already demonstrated is false (with reasonable certainty).
We can also apply a similar kind of reasoning (although it’s not as easy) for the vaccines. I’ve been trying (and failing) to find a way to use the basic UK data to answer the question : if the vaccines are 90% effective would we have seen the disease progression we have witnessed over 2021?
The failure is one of data - I don’t have the data I need to actually do the calculation. Or it might be that I’m missing something obvious in the data I do have which would allow me to make a sensible estimate. Either way, it’s an important question that needs to be answered.
The answer seems intuitively clear - there is no way the vaccines can have anything like their claimed efficacy against infection/transmission, otherwise things would be very different now (the UKHSA do give quite high figures for these efficacies - but we can’t see the underlying data or calculations on which these estimates are based).
Whenever rules are introduced it is important to properly examine the underlying assumptions upon which they rest. Blindly following the rules is very dangerous. We’ve already walked off one cliff - we now seem to think that lockdowns are an effective measure, and that they are the right thing to do in the event of an outbreak of an airborne respiratory pathogen.
This blindness is going to haunt us for years to come.
Oh Dear Mr. Rigger, I am totally traumitized now...math before coffee in the early am. Seriously, I have a headache. Where is the Tylenol? But I do get what you are saying...we know masks don't work against a respitory aerosolized infection. Open windows help. But here is what I would love you to do. Go look at the recent UK, Israel, Gibralta, and US data. Not only do the shots not work, but indeed, if you look at the data, they have succeeded in tamping down mild symtoms, just like they were designed to. So now we do have asymptomatic drivers...all the vaxxed walking around without symptoms, happily giving it to others. Hence, the data shows increasing transmission among the more vaxxed countries...
Since you obviously can do maths and I cannot without serious migraines, please take a look at the vaxxed as asymptomatic super spreaders theory...I would love to know what you think. (no ALGEBRA PLEASE!)
As a mathematician, I don't see mathematics as rule-based in the sense of "restricting". Instead, the "rules" are what makes mathematics so beautiful and powerful. Yes, the definition of a group comes with axioms, and it is not discriminatory that each element is only allowed to have exactly one inverse. But the axioms open up incredible spaces. You (I mean, not "you", but hundreds of mathematicians after tens of years) end up with 26 sporadic simple groups, the largest of them (the "monster") having incredible connections to other parts of mathematics.
One of my professors once explained his theory that non-mathematicians (when mathematics is forced on them, eg, in school) often seem to have this idea of mathematics as an incredibly large tree of only mildly connected rules. They always try to find a suitable place for new rules but they are not able to step back and see the beauty of the tree.