Stalemate

There are those interesting moments when again you briefly stand up in the river of time and realise how far the world has moved, in a good way, from how it was technologically. There is the incremental addition of apps, devices and Big Data applications that come to mind but there is nothing better than looking at one aspect of life and comparing how it was and how it has become.

Most will know that I had chess as a hobby through my teenage years. I read books, played tournaments and followed the comings-and-goings of the elite level chess. I only abandoned it when I went to university as other passions like language learning and philosophy soaked up time. I think I only went in one tournament in my twenties and apart from some social games with friends it was just a very, very idle interest. Put simply, between the ages of 20 and 40, I played more games of Chinese chess than standard international chess.

To set the scene of when I did play in my "prime" (about 1997), the internet had just arrived in New Zealand, but there were almost no mobile phones, not even iPods, let alone smartphones. There were rudimentary computer chess computers on the market but they were not strong. (In that year though the world chess champion of the time, Garry Kasparov, lost to Deep Blue.) To say there was internet is to say there were webpages, YouTube was eight years away. For chess, with the use of special chess notation, you could read what happened in various tournament games. There might have been rudimentary chessboard interfaces back then to click through moves but maybe not. 

As a learner, you had to find people to play which for me at the time involved going one evening a week to Glen Eden to Waitematā chess club and the occasional tournament. Most of the famous games were in books and mainly in notation except for the occasional chess grid illustration of a crucial position, so to study you would play through and try to understand what the grandmasters were doing. During my "active period", let's say the five years of high school. there were three World Chess Championship matches, but I only followed one because there wasn't easy access to the games. Back then, learning did take some dedication, support and resources. 

Now, you don't even need a chessboard to play. Many players play more online chess than over-the-board (OTB) chess, which meant that the Covid pandemic may have led to more chess being played. I have barely ever played online but I enjoy now just following what's going on and, my gosh, it's never been easier. The most recent world chess championships was all live and I could wake up in the morning and watch the middlegame (the middle phase of the game) Chromecast to the television. While watching live, they have a commentary team looking at all probable variations with one of the best chess computers rate the position so, like a scoreline, you could see the theoretical state of the match as well as hypothetical positions after suggested moves. When one of the players does a mistake, the rating could shoot from being in favour of one player to being in favour of the other.

It was a match of two halves. Magnus Carlsen of Norway, the four-time defending champion and highest rated player of all time, was against Ian Nepomniatchi of Russia (AKA Nepo), a player who had the rather unique status of having a positive score against Magnus in classical chess, mostly due to the fact that he was stronger in their younger years. At first there were five tough draws before the historic game six, the longest game in championship history, a 136 move win to Carlsen. Even for a "slow" game like chess, there was remarkably quick collapse in Nepo thereafter, who lost all focus with it three of the next five games with some stunningly bad moves, usually made after not much time thinking and always followed by a long retreat away from the board leaving the champion sitting there waiting for his return. 

That was all "classical chess" - the test match cricket equivalent of chess. But at the start of my holiday, I got to see the semifinal and final of the online speed chess championships as well, and this is incredibly watchable. You can watch the two players face-on (as they are shot through the webcam) and hear the commentary at short game formats; they pack up to 32 games head-to-head in a few hours! 

After watching, you have the usual pangs about what I could have been with such a rich digital environment of chess. (But of course all of my opponents would too have their playing environments thus enriched.)

I've now completed day four of this summer break. Despite the chess watching, it's  a kind of a let-down, feeling as if it's been a little frittered away, but I guess this is expected at the start of a holiday when your mind and body are a just mending their frazzled edges from the preceding months.

States of mind

There are many things that one takes for granted in life, often unconsciously. And sometimes in a twist of fate, or "a learning moment" we discover the assumptions we had relied on, often as a rude surprise. It could be mundane, too, like that the laundry doesn't do itself. Or dramatic, when you discover that you are not invincible and levelled by sickness. Such things are on a personal, individual level but, of course, groups of people can have this, too. And it is often in extraordinary times, such as the Covid period before us, that some of our collective assumptions are brought into a stark light. 

In my twenties, I thought a lot about the social contract, which is, in a word, the written or unwritten agreement people have to live in a society. At the time, I had some resentment about rules and expectations that I felt I hadn't consented to - I took myself as an individualist and a libertarian and felt that we should be able to have some liberty to choose for ourselves. However, logically I agreed that there had to be some bottom-line mutual understandings. An obvious example would be that taxes and council rates make sense: roads don't build themselves; there needs to be services and support to those who have lifequakes, etc. so I could support the idea of unemployment benefits and public health services. Maturing and having a greater view of the challenges of staying together as a society made me buy more into the importance of a social contract, and if anything I would have wanted the agreement to be more explicit, subject to education and clarification. 

There is always a tension between individual liberty and social or community well-being. Traffic safety is a fruitful source of examples: Seatbelts and speed limits are both compelled upon individuals by the authorities and by-laws. A great driver with 20/20 vision, insured, driving in perfect conditions with a recently warranted and serviced vehicle might want dispensation to drive faster or, more likely, presume it and speed; and may also anger when they are "caught out". Speed limits are calibrated based on the community, not individuals. An individual would have more enjoyment and time for the things they love by speeding safely, but it is not allowed. 

It comes to mind as we are making our way to the end of a social dilemma around vaccination. The vaccination of an individual provides a degree of protection to one's own health, albeit with a small risk. For those in middle age or older, for whom Covid-19 infections causes far more problems, it is a no-brainer: benefits in protection grow exponentially over the risks of vaccination. But for younger people and people who consider themselves free of "co-morbidities", who are healthy and active, the risks and the benefits are similarly small and there is no urgency to take the risk.

But vaccination is a national campaign because there is a multiplier effect when there are more and more people with immunity for others' safety (AKA herd immunity). On top of that, there are other societal benefits such as protecting healthcare system capacity and reducing the disruptions caused by clusters of cases and the follow on effects on productivity. Similar to tax or the speed limit, there is a huge benefit in having everyone complying, including those with little risk. 

Naturally, there cannot be forced vaccination upon anyone despite the strong social good in having the vast majority including the disinclined and not-at-risk vaccinated. And that is the dilemma: we are relying on individual choices to achieve what is a collective good. Around the time of the Vaxathon many of the vaccinated and unvaccinated resented that people were being bribed into getting the jab. But that is the cost to hasten and encourage those individual choices to happen to get closer to the goal of 90% double vaccinated.

And now the mandates and the implications of the traffic light system are coming in to stimulate further vaccination. Mandates are not forcing people in the physical sense but are very blunt tools and often thought as compulsion. It should not have come to it, really, but here we are having passed the US, Israel and about to pass the UK in our vaccination push. Yet still we will almost certainly be short of Singapore's effort and may, if we don't have some restrictions, be met with a similar "opening wave" to what they had. 

The protests against the mandates, while probably stirred up by disinformation, should have been a moment to contemplate how we understand our mutual social responsibility, that there is a balance between social and individual rights and responsibilities because, after all, many of those people may also agree that a society needs to have concessions for a civil society as part of the social contract. But they also might have a different understanding of statehood, and even those who support mandates should reflect on their base assumptions, one of which is that anyone who believes in mandates is a "statist" and that not everyone is. The opposite of a statist would be an anarchist, but there are many shades of the two in between. There are topical groupings like ethno-nationalists, libertarians and communists who are all statists with consistent logical beliefs but who would not be the best bedfellows. Tribal groupings, nomadic groups and anarchists are not statists, but worldwide they are in the vast minority.

In past blogs I have spoken of JC, who I came to know in a professional capacity and who incidentally is an antivaxxer and along self-identified anarchist. He posts and re-posts screeds about many things, much more in this pandemic but generally a lot. One of his more delightful series is on the topic of anarchy. It has two columns "When the government does it" and "When anybody else does it" (it's written from a USA perspective so has a few that don't pertain to New Zealand):

The point of course is that, but for a statist belief, the government literally is performing daily insults, injuries and crimes upon those who are not statists. That is not to say that avowed statists would say they agree with everything that is listed on the left, and would say that governments or authorities should be restrained by written constitutions and systems of laws to prevent the corruption of the intent of the actions on the left becoming of the same nature as the equivalency on the right. And in the assessment of our states, we should always look to see how the intentions of the right are in fact preserved and not insults, injuries and crimes. Historically speaking we know that they are truly not sustained.

Older now as I am, I am an avowed statist. When you are growing up you can imagine your own autonomy and liberty being all you need, or that all you need is you and your group, and dropped in the jungle that is true. But it isn't a surprise that people no matter where in the world they developed, as the number went up city-states, then states arose. States, and the concessions to individual liberty that comes with being in them, fulfil the need to organise humanity. But I think that times like the mandates do help us challenge either our assumption that they are a left-side function and for those who think it's a right-side offence to challenge their beliefs, too.

Numbers fun

There is a curiosity in contemplating the subtle differences that lead to vastly different outcomes. I remember trying to grow seedlings from seed in egg cartons. Sometimes they grew; sometimes they didn't. When you are young, if they didn't you might blame your skill or your luck. It might have been just the matter of not deep enough, or that the water just happened not to get to the seed, or an hour too long on the window sill, or a day passing without the care that it might have deserved. Of course, it could have also been a dud or sterile seed. Either way, some grew. Some didn't. To someone who thinks on paper, with cause-and-effect logic, there should be no fail; but to a child, sometimes something working is a matter of people and luck, it working for you and not for me.

Anyhow, sometimes the countries approach to Covid felt a bit like that. Take Singapore - on 1 May 2021 they still had only 30 official deaths, while already clocking over 60,000 positive cases. Any of the "Covid is just the flu" people should have been saying "What about Singapore?" instead of Sweden, but for the fact that the narrative was all wrong - they were doing with collective responsibility and restrictions, though not onerous. The maths doesn't work really either unless they had a secret protocol. New Zealand with a rather untaxed medical system at present has got to 30 with 7,000 positive cases and we are about the same population. Presuming 60,000 cases and that all the deaths were recorded, it truly doesn't sound like a dangerous pathogen. One might even suppose that someone was cooking the books, which did fit right either with Singapore's image. 

But their zero Covid glory days have gone out the window like ours: in just over 6 months, they have gone from 60,000 to 210,000 cases, and from 30 deaths to almost 460 deaths. Even that screaming increase is actually relatively mild globally speaking, but does put paid to the idea they were necessarily hiding anything. They might have just had an approach that suited them. 

Singapore was on NZ levels of deaths/million until very recently when it shot from 6 to 78, but there has been another country that has never really had respite from Covid, effectively on their sixth wave, not to mention being one of the first hit while unsuspecting: they are South Korea. Singapore's 78 deaths/million population is very good; South Korea's is 57. How can Singapore have one significant wave and be worse hit than South Korea? 

Two recent deaths, including one a five minute walk from my home, have changed things somewhat lift this Delta toll to four. But even our situation seems weird: We have gone from 2880 to almost 7000 cases in three months and which, vaccinated or not, we should have been at least doubling our toll.  

But that's were we go back to our childish minds. Despite the gripes about vaccination roll-out, it currently seems fortuitously well-timed: my speculation would be that with most of our population, particularly the vulnerable elderly freshly vaccinated it is sticking to the young. Singapore has the curse of high population density, too, whereas we have open windows, warming weather and less required contact. That would be speculation. There is so much to idiosyncrasy and happenstance. 

New magic, old magic

I was listening to a podcast on "consciousness", as in the way that we all believe ourselves conscious, and how in different levels of complex animals that we would also assume that there is a degree of consciousness. But at some point of lower level organism you'd think that there would be a point where there is no light of consciousness, like a worm, perhaps which has senses but is automatic in its responses. We lack the ability to put ourselves in the mind of another organism so never really know, say, cat consciousness but for what we observe and intuit from the contemptuous or smug cat faces and expressions we see. To me it begs the question a little because while we may be able to put ourselves in another human's shoes, we can't really know their mind.  

In the brainspace of impossible hypotheticals, we have the thought experiment of contemplating what it's like to be in someone else's head. Why they react or cannot tame their feelings, while they are like the like the anthropomorphic scorpion on the anthropomorphic frog stinging away to their own demise or detriment.

But I digress, what I wanted to talk about was magical thinking. It is probably possible to think that you roughly know how another person thinks, or why another person think it without the fully experiencing their minds. Flicking our minds into the medieval minds we assume that the they were immersed in the magic potential latent in the world, of gods, spirits, miracles, blessings and curses. In magic there is a certainty, a black-and-whiteness: the wicked are cursed; sins stain; there is a divine order; and the pious will win in the end. Such thinking is a salve to the uncertainty and grey that plague the objective world. 

If I were to speculate, I would say as the Enlightenment drained this old magic from the world a new magic took its place, and for the exact same reason: without the old magic giving us certainty and confidence, we would have been left without that special something to make the uncertainties of life bearable. 

The magical mantra of the moment is, of course, "vaccine". Where in the Grimms tales there were witches and wizards with their spells, nowadays we have things like vaccines, which regardless of how they are explained to people, are always trapped by the common conception of  a magic protective charm that makes you able to walk through a viral storm unharmed. Because of the pervasiveness of the disease and also the fractiousness of the community vaccination effort, their weaknesses and side effects, waning immunity and "breakthrough infections" have become headline news. But the vaccines do not give you a force field aura: they're just a drug that stimulates the body in particular ways, how your body reacts is not guaranteed. 

The last phase of the trials for Pfizer's vaccine had the headlines showing over 90% effectiveness against symptomatic infection, an astonishing headline which remains largely true. But that huge news still has the inverse fact latent: For every 10 people unvaccinated who would develop symptomatic infection, there would still be one vaccinated for every similar ten vaccinated people who would get symptomatic infection, and probably one or more with asymptomatic infection. This is to say, a vaccine in a league of its own was still expected to have recipients who could become symptomatic and infectious. Even after waning, and for new variants, it is probably though as effective as many of the other vaccines that are given to us, if it were taken by the most of the community.

Which is where we come to the thorny topic of mandates, which I would presume most administrators and officials probably wouldn't want to use. The magical view of vaccines sometimes gets in the way of mandates, but only because of magical thinking. This video by JP Sears, for which he argues against restrictions on the unvaccinated is latent with the magic. The strawman is that vaccines are 100% effective so what do the vaccinated have to worry about the unvaccinated, if the vulnerable are all vaxxed, and why compel or exclude those who choose not to? 

Many of the vulnerable people who have done the right thing and got vaccinated also are the ones who the vaccine may have less protective power. In a relatively unvaccinated community, they might still die at a high rate (though lower than without the vaccine). All it might take is for them to have poorer sleep and a period of lower immunity. Vaccines are both for individual protection as well as community protection, yet most of the antivaxx calculations emphasise the individual risks and benefits, which is understandable, and dismiss or ignore that it is a public good to have wide protection for all of society, and depending on the needs of the society it might encourage it in different ways. 

There is a similar magic in natural immunity, which does bestow immunity to future infection and thus could be seen similarly to a vaccination, with the proviso that one is ultimately not permanently harmed by their infection (and hopefully nor others by their onward transmission of the virus). Again the magical thinking comes into it, the aura of protection and the need for nothing more. 

But the magical thinking about the vaccine and natural immunity, and similar thinking about "young", "healthy" and "vulnerable" are nice to simplify the world. It doesn't take much for the world to shatter that with young people hospitalised by the virus, reinfection and breakthrough infections. None of these phenomena should be remarkable except if one misapprehends how things happen with magical thinking. The fact of breakthrough infections were literally printed on the box when the phase three trials were run. Reinfection is no surprise - some viruses you only get once but others, especially respiratory viruses, like to visit again and again. Some people are "unluckier" with it, sometimes due to innate factors, sometimes circumstantial factors, sometimes with behavioral factors. Sometimes any one kind of factor (for example, an innate risk towards ACE2 receptor targeting viruses) might overcome all circumstantial factors (low inoculum of virus, generally healthy) and behavioral factors (wearing a mask, generally socially distancing). There is plenty of grey to cause a decent number of exceptional cases when something is happening across vast swaths of the population.

The failure of reason

t has been often said that the very intelligent are not immune to bad ideas, often because they underestimate the powers of their own biases and often cannot step back. The US Senate and Congress are full, both sides, with bad faith actors. They are tribal and toe party lines without without much reason, or if so, it's with forced reason. There are a few who forcefully show reason, often forcefully in opposite directions, and Rand Paul, the Republican Senator for Kentucky, is one of those.

For those that don't know, he is the son of another senator, Ron Paul, who as a maverick independent ran for President on several occasions, but as an outsider to the Republican establishment failed, a bit like a libertarian Bernie Sanders but not getting quite so close. The son thinks closer to Republican orthodoxy and ran, like his dad, for the Republican nomination in 2016, which was when Trump smudged out the opposition to be the contender and eventual president.

Anyway, he is one that can put a thought or more together and here I give you a smart man with wrong ideas. (1) Rand Paul Attacks Dr. Fauci (Again) Over Vaccines, Covid Mandates - YouTube

I like smart people who disagree with me because it is an interesting mental challenge which forces you to ask yourself how entrenched are your own biases are, or whether it is reason or truth that makes their words have power. He is a convincing speaker.

But I would still argue, despite his conviction, that his reason is more a product of his biases. Let's look:

The opening has him saying that the US vaccination situation is not perilously placed because "over 90% of people over 65% are vaccinated". To be clear, the United States has pretty much hit its ceiling for willing recipients and resorting to mandates and they're not that far along. For perspective as of today, 65% of the whole US population has at least partially vaccinated (compared with 72% for NZ) with 56% fully vaccinated (compared with 52% in NZ), but New Zealand is still steaming along! We'll probably pass them for double within the next week. 

But does he not have a point: Covid-19 is particularly harsh on those 65 and older, and it has long been a suggested strategy that we somehow shield the old and let the young go about their lives, and vaccination should be that shield. And this fits a very libertarian view of the world that has a lot of merit, that people should make the choices that suit them: Young people want to play. Old people should hunker down. And with a much vaunted highly effective vaccine the libertarians, even the circumspect ones, would want to return to their principles.

Except you can't and the representative for Kentucky should know that almost 25% of their death toll for the duration of the pandemic has been in the last two and half months, when the majority of the vaccinations in his low vaccination state have already had plenty of opportunities to vaccinate. 

The difference of course is in the herd immunity concept, and that is where the libertarian bias is exposed. Vaccination, even before Covid, was not just for individual protection but to have a community protection, because even if the elderly are vaccinated, they will still be vulnerable, albeit much less so. The probability of them meeting this virus when their immune system is low is a function of their environmental level of protection, the people around them. And while kids have the lowest risk, they are the grandchildren who spend time with their elders. And this is the aside because age is only one aspect of risk. 

Paul thus overstates the personal responsibility that in economic terms would be reasonably rational and applies it to pandemic public health. But community responsibility has little part in his consideration - it has a whiff of socialism and collectivism and the greater good. These would not be part of this speech.

The part about multiclonal antibodies has more than a trace of bad faith. The treatment costs about $2000 compared to over $20 for a Covid jab, and was in limited supply, bankrolled by the Federal Government which pre-ordered it, and best used in the early stages of the condition when the virus, rather than the body's response to it, can be curbed. Public health is caught in this dilemma that any treatment detracts from the push for vaccination, but Paul is also one for autonomy and choice of healthcare and resents people not having the choice. The central government control is something that chaffs a libertarian; in New Zealand we have a similar situation with regard to Pharmac which allows medicines to be purchased by the state and subsidised for use in public health services. 

His discussion about masks could be more relevant. There is no doubt that there are masks of differing effectiveness, and in the situation he specifies you would hope that the elderly positive case was in hospital for care, in the usual isolation practiced; and if not, that all the precautions and guidance for care made. But any mask, especially for the infected is better than no mask. And almost any mask in a poorly ventilated room over a long enough time will fail. In the end, it's a matter of probabilities. When we go walking, we generally wear cloth masks, but more as a consideration for others. But if I go to the supermarket, I'll wear a surgical mask. Now that the pandemic in Auckland is getting a bit worse, I think we'll upgrade to N95 if they are available. Really the argument is really just picking a fight with his nemesis "Dr Fauci".

His final argument seems a strawman. Or a couple of strawmen. The idea of targeting the vaccine in the US is not an issue unless he is suggesting what he would never suggest: the mandatory vaccination of the elderly. But that never would be more reasonable to him than the mandatory vaccination of children as part of a childhood vaccination. He is not suggesting forcing the unvaccinated elderly to get the jab. His argument about doing antibody tests prior to getting vaccination seems reasonable except for the fact that it again puts up more drag and resistance to the vaccination campaign, and thus the community protection. And how many pre-existing antibodies are enough? As was found early in the pandemic, asymptomatic infection is reasonably common, which might cause a very mild immune response but perhaps detectable antibodies. 

To be clear, I think if someone can prove their previous infection and antibodies to it, which is probably something becoming more commonly done and more feasible to do, I'd say let them have an immunity passport but it should also be understood as having an expiry. 

The final conclusion is where the bias, which is his pre-existing lens for which all of public health is understood comes out: individual responsibility; personal choice is king; dissension should be encouraged. In most contexts I agree, except for a time when we should be pulling together like now.

A final note: I'm not sure how I feel yet about the YouTube, Twitter and Facebook censorship of "misinformation". I think like all things it is something that is easier said than done, and almost any rule for it is likely to have unintended consequences, or require a byzantine system that will certainly seem unfair to some. Right now the by-catch of reasonable discussion is getting hit to the extent of exacerbating the sense of an authoritarian plot.

Anyway, I enjoy listening to Rand Paul even if he cannot get down from his a priori views.

Certitude, part 2

In my previous posts I have thought aloud about two phenomena: the over-emphasis of single or few data points; and then in the latter post talking about how certain data points (to me) have a certain invalidating power over the explanations often given by the data points gave birth to conspiracy theories. 

At the heart of it is, and this is the amateur non-well-read thinker understanding, are two engines to the variance in our understandings of how things are, and the departure from a common truth. These engines are attribution and the desire for narrative. 

Attribution is the explanation or cause you assign to something, for example, I might attribute my car crash to others cars parked too close together blocking my view of oncoming traffic on a difficult corner, rather than my approach to difficult corners that might inevitably lead to a crash. The problem with attribution is that it is prone to our cognitive biases. When we already have a generalisation about a category of things, we notice when things prove it and ignore those that don't fit the generalisation, even if the contrary examples are more plentiful (i.e. confirmation bias).

The desire for a narrative is that a stories that these explanations weave together to make the world understandable. The crash might be part of my narrative of being unlucky in everything; or a world-against-me, "people should learn to park" narrative. 

Conspiracy theories are the latent super-narratives linking all sorts of smaller narratives together. For example, in our current pandemic there is:

• Bill Gates wants to depopulate the world and inject microchips in people.  
• The virus was man-made and funded by the US government in the lab in China. Dr Fauci knows everything but can't reveal his complicity. The Chinese deliberately released the virus.
• The virus is not as bad as people mention and only kills those "on death's door", or have co-morbidities and would die anyway. Normal people have sufficient natural immunity to resist it.
• Big Pharma are suppressing simple cures to this virus and has bought out government and public health officials. The medical professionals are all in on in and profiting from it, claiming money for each "covid" death.
• The vaccine is ineffective and more dangerous than they want you to know but they are committed to it and using it to create a system to restrict freedom of speech and movement from their enemies.
• ...

Some people believe in none, one, some or all of these narratives, and when a new event or data point comes along it could be fit into any one of these, even if it contradicts another that may be simultaneously held. When a fully vaccinated person dies with or of Covid, which is fully expected to happen, especially in the older age group, it fits the narrative of vaccination being ineffective. When a recently vaccinated person dies, as they may when 9-10 people die each day in a given year and most of the population is getting two jabs this year. 

(Coincidentally NZ's excess deaths for 2021 might be the best evidence for whether vaccinating the whole country with Pfizer has a disproportionate death rate than the disease, which I would already say is unlikely. In many countries, doubters could say that vaccination deaths are covered up in the Covid numbers, or that excess deaths in 2021 not reported officially as Covid deaths are vaccination-related. 2021, while not over yet, in NZ would be expected to have an almost insignificant number of actual Covid deaths and there would be room to analyse whether a year where between 50%-90% of the population being fully vaccinated without widespread community transmission to confound the figures.)

There can be a lot of contradictions between the narratives we believe. Often we have a narrative of ourselves and one for the world and the data points are attributed in different ways if something happens to oneself versus if it is seen in others. An example given would be something like "I was speeding because I had something urgent to do and it won't hurt anyone" while others "are speeding because they are young/female/Polynesian/on drugs/have toxic masculinity and they'll crash and kill someone". The contradiction between the narrative for own choices and life and the narrative you understand for the world and for others do not necessarily have to correspond. There are funny examples of American politicians trying to refute accusations of sexism by saying that they couldn't possibly be sexist when they have a daughter, wife and mother. There are those that say they have no racist or homophobic inclinations by saying "some of my best friends are (fill in the gap)". Again, that's a matter of attribution. Not many people have a narrative that they themselves are a bad person, so when critical things are said, there is an immediate attribution for the criticism: the speaker doesn't like me; the speaker does has questionable judgement, etc. Of course, there are people who take criticism well - and their narrative might be as a humble learner in life, or a "growth mindset" individual. 

Some people are motivated enough to go in front of a building in London where Bill Gates was having a meeting and chant: "Arrest Bill Gates". It is rather extraordinary the dehumanising power of narrative when it comes to someone who does fit the mould of a philanthropist. He has views on climate change and poverty and had devoted a lot of time and money to try and make the world a better place. He does believe the global population is high and, for humanity's sake, should be restrained in some way as he said in a famous 2010 TED talk. There is a much quoted line about 4 minutes in: "First, we've got population. The world today has 6.8 billion people. That's headed up to about nine billion. Now, if we do a really great job on new vaccines, health care, reproductive health services, we could lower that by, perhaps, 10 or 15 percent," which those with a conspiratorial narrative read as a reduction of the current population. The quote usually does not include what he said immediately after: "But there, we see an increase of about 1.3." (1.3, indicating it would be x1.3 its current size, 30% growth overall.) The point being that he would propose growth not to be to 9 billion but perhaps 8.3 billion, not as the selective quoting suggests of reducing the current population by 10 or 15 percent by vaccines. Raising vaccinations as a way to arrest population growth, though not spelled out, is because there is a correlation between infant mortality and having more children per person. Reducing the infant deaths increases the investment results in fewer children, greater investment in the smaller number and smaller families.  

The irony is that the funny not-so-secret plot to depopulate the world by vaccinations would work if you want a virulent virus run rampant, rather than fund the production of vaccines to blunt it, which Gates did, or if even the vaccines are meant to be some secret death sterilising "death chemicals" to depopulate, you'd charitably fund them to get to more than 2% of Africa and a still low rate in India and other countries. You wouldn't want India to be vaccinating with its own vaccine using very different technology. Or China to be using its own technology and not the Bill Gates sterilising death chemical. And you wouldn't want the wealthy elite to be the main recipients of vaccines, with targeted disinformation discouraging minorities and the poor from getting vaccinated. 

There is so much dissonance in this yet so much certitude in the narrative that force-fits the data point pieces as data points with questionable attribution. We are generally blind to our own cognitive biases, but narratives are easier to elicit. Ask anyone: "Why are successful/unsuccessful?" "Why are you healthy/unhealthy?" for one's own narratives. Generally, people will resolve this to their own attributes and habits and not the circumstances and environmental variables. Also ask them: "Why is the country going well/going to hell?" "Why is there so much conflict in the world/the world becoming more peaceful?" and you'll maybe get a narrative about the corruption of the elite; capitalism; the stimulation of technology; globalism; etc. but the world and the country are infinitely complicated systems. In many narratives there is some explanatory power over the cases and the data points, but nothing can really wrap things up in an explanation.

Power to the people

The current limbo phase of the Delta lockdown has had a lot of twists and turns, which for an Auckland population that is still largely housebound, the frustration is showing. One constellation of concerns is around "gangs": Pre-lockdown there was the controversy of a gang receiving government funding for drug rehabilitation services; more recently there have been cases within gangs, a gang funeral; rumours of large parties under lockdown; a stowaway gangster in the back of a freight lorry going over the Auckland boundary; Brian Tāmaki leading a lockdown protest in the Domain with bikers; and then the news that Destiny Church received lockdown support funding. It isn't a surprise that the repressed conservative parts of the population have a new fire in the belly, and the outrage machines are swinging back into action. The most recent pressure has been that Labour has not been forceful with the gangs.

Now perhaps I should give two caveats to what I'll say next: (1) I don't know anything about gangs; (2) I can assume that most of those who comment on gangs don't know anything about gangs. My thoughts are musings and you can feel free to ignore, but if you do, please also ignore the musings of most that go around musing.

Firstly, I'd like to make a plaintive call against the abuse of language that goes into the commentary on the topic. Gangs are usually said and even mentally apprehended as a monolith. This kind of sloppy language use I think leads to very black and white thinking which is unhelpful. There are many different gangs, many their own histories, organisational structures, degrees of criminal involvement and so forth. This is not to say that one needs to know these things to talk about gangs - just that it is important to view them as a diverse group.

Gangs in New Zealand, and probably, all around the world are products of exclusion and opposition, but also safety and being part of a group. Gang formation, I would hazard a guess, is a fairly natural social response that has been seen in a wide variety of cultural and demographic groups, from Japan, to South America, to Europe to Polynesia. I would further guess that there will always be gangs when there have been exclusionary forces, whether it be the historic or structural racism, policies that put more of them in jail, immigration policies against people from the Pacific islands, constant reinforcement of negative stereotyping in the media, or profiling by the police, as well as general deprivation, excluding some from a fair economic part of the pie. 

The choice that the authorities have is to either to continue to increase the exclusion, call for toughness to smash the gangs; or to find ways to increase the rapprochement between the two sides, reduce the exclusionary factors and stance of authorities, while still ensuring law and order. 

The former approach is basically either an "eternal war" approach. The exclusionary force can only lead to a greater resistance. Only a technological authoritarian society (think Mainland China) could stomp out these organisations, but it would still lead to a mass of disenfranchised, antisocial individuals. It would be a losing game for a society unless it is accompanied by a huge effort to re-incorporate them in with dignity (jobs and resources).

The latter approach is often the politically unpalatable one: rapprochement involves understanding and cooperation with those who are often public enemies. Even for the "enemy"-side of the equation this is a difficult political move internally. They have to collaborate with the authorities. That is not to say that the current government is far along this path, but it would seem to be the approach. 

The latter is also a tightrope and you can see similar kinds of attempting to pull together in history: Sinn Fein and the British Government (which can be considered successful), and the PLA and the Israeli government (which was not). In any case, there is an importance in recognising and respecting the other. Often political forces preclude it.

The humorous expectation that gangs, whatever patch they be, would follow lock-step with the democratically elected elite to deal with Covid-19 was not ever going to be a thing, despite the hope that we could be a team of five million. Firstly, without Covid support for the gangs directly (which I assume has not happened and would have been political suicide), the gangs would have no money to support themselves so forget about drugs not being sold, if not because they are hugely profitable, then because they would not be able to fund their organisation. Though not gang-related, the criticism of Brian Tāmaki's Destiny Church of taking government support in the weeks before having an anti-lockdown protest are also a bit facile for the same reason. 

One of the interesting underlying assumptions underneath a lot of the conservative reasoning is also the belief in a Leviathan state force and power to oversee the implementation of policy. Even though I do not like the man, Brian Tāmaki, and the presumably the gang-leaders, they are all people with unofficial constituencies. Judith Collins thoughts that she would have prevented Brian from having his day in the sun is interesting. I am interested what that would have looked like when he insisted on going, or if the Bishop were arrested in front of his mass. Destiny is pretty disciplined with its flock, but they were not the only ones at the protest.

Even in non-democratic societies, past and present, ruling groups have worked directly and indirectly with formal and informal power holders in society. For a society to thrive and be (more or less) unified is its ability to balance its different factions' views and needs.

But what about those other data points...

When it comes to the so-called conspiracy theories, they often focus on the conclusions drawn from some explanations of certain data points. The explanations for individual data points may be separately logical, or even collectively logical, or not logical at all. But being logical, after all, doesn't mean something is true: it just means with the propositions and assumptions given that something ought to be right or to have happened. For example, the idea that Covid-19 pandemic as a globalist, Agenda 21 depopulation plan, New World Order, Great Reset, fascist control grab while also a PsyOps ploy does have meaningful events and data points to support it: Agenda 21 is a real thing, after all. 

But the obsession with certain data points is often with ignorance and blindness of others. When I first heard about the idea of a "plandemic" my initial thought was that the usual "conspiracy theory" smell test was failed; that is, it would require too many people to be in on the "plan" for it to work and improbable that no-one would fall out of line. Some world leaders, especially the Trumpy kind, could do at a whim. But that was just a gut feeling. The data point for me that indicated that the virus was very real and there was no "plan" (as the conspiracy theory claims) was China, and to a degree also Iran. 

The "plan" would have presumed that China decided to be the sacrificial lamb taking all the risk for a global power play that it was not a master of; it would have it inflicting a savage economical bodyblow upon itself, not to mention the shame that it has accrued through this whole chapter by those who claim it was the China virus. Their government is venal and paranoid and neither of these make sense. Even though there are those who would claim that Western governments might use this pandemic as a further control on their own populations, China does not need to use any artifice to control things further. In its crackdowns, it doesn't expend much creative energy at all, because it doesn't need to. It knew more about the virus sooner than any other country and slammed its own economy shut scrambling to suppress what it knew to be a massive threat. I have heard some speculate that it was an elaborate ruse to get the virus to its economic rivals where it would certainly flourish uncontrolled and crush the US, but there was no certainty that it would successfully get out, or be allowed in. Iran is pretty much the same. It had no realistic reason to play ball but still acted as if the virus was real and that measures had to be taken - probably because it was and they had to be.

The same analysis works for the conspiratorial thinkings around Ivermectin and its predecessor hydroxychloroquine (HCQ) is similar. The line was that government and public health officials were in the pay of Pfizer and other vaccine companies, let's just call them Big Pharma even though it's sloppy shorthand, blocking the off-patent cheap drug in favour of the expensive vaccines. In a previous post, I mentioned that this was a logical, plausible thesis - but that doesn't mean that it is actually is true. The invalidating data point is again China, and Iran, and Russia and well any country that does not get its vaccines from Big Pharma of which there are many. 

Why do these invalidate the conspiracy theory and, by extension, the belief in these drugs' effectiveness? China's vaccine producer is government-owned and is producing and injecting its citizenry with the vaccine for free, and has expended a lot of resources in incentives for it. There is no profit in this venture. Similar to Oceania, they have very strict controls of people into and out of the country with quarantine facilities, and even recently spent hundreds of millions on bespoke quarantine facilities for international visitors. Which has been a huge capital cost and the system itself is an impediment to commerce and trade. Though domestic tourism is far bigger, the border control has crippled its international tourism industry. This is all significant because if there were an effective therapeutic drug that works as prophylaxis and a treatment, off-patent so could be mass produced in a single super-factory and be given to the masses, it would have saved the state a huge expense and economic disadvantage had there been drugs that worked. In fact, at a time when the United States and Europe are back economically functioning and other crises are on the horizon (fuel shortages, inflation) it would be foolish not to use them if they had tested them. HCQ was tested very early on in China and deemed not to have any significant effect. I am not sure about Ivermectin but chances are that it had been, too. It had no vested interests against what are simple trials to do. China might not have had regular outbreaks in the past but they do now and had plenty of returning Chinese travelers and MIQ staff to implement small scale tests to lead onto larger scale tests. Needless to say Iran and Russia would be no different, and both have had horrendous outbreaks to throw the kitchen sink with, including the "out there" speculative drugs and none of these countries are entangled with Big Pharma like the doubters would have us believe our own public health and government staff have been corrupted.

Anyway. Auckland has endured another tedious week and there is now a simmering dissatisfaction with how elements of society are seen as contributing to the very long tail of this outbreak. I would like to make a standalone blog on this later.

Running has some data points and they have been good of late for me. I ran 30km for the first time in two months today with no niggles or sensations from old injuries. I've run some really fast training sessions which put me on track with some of my 2019 times, and despite the hiccups, I will almost certainly make it to 3000km for the year, which was my goal in the beginning. Of course, I'm running for no real goal now because all the bets are off when there will be another event. Auckland Marathon has been postponed. I have only one registered event that I'm waiting for (Tāmaki Half Marathon) but with my fitness solid and my injuries and niggles silenced I'm probably going to run any one of the events that will be the first to be approved under whatever regime we are under after this Level 3. I'm so glad I got in the Ōrewa half and though it was a disaster, the Onehunga half, before the outbreak. 

Certitude

It is in extreme moments that subtle strengths and weaknesses become more apparent. I used to say this about the Trailwalker 100km challenge: walking that kind of a distance, your weaker joints or muscular imbalances will come out, and eventually by the 80th kilometre the weaknesses will metastasize into full-blown motion ceasing discomforts that can only be overcome with your inner strengths of determination or the resourcefulness you bring to the walk. Now I would probably use the marathon example because a single 42.2km event is far more revealing than any number of half marathons.  Whether it's your mental game, your flexibility, your proprioception, your ability to run "tangents" (the shortest route) or race strategy are not quite there, it makes a huge difference.

Covid times seem much like this, too. Countries have revealed their values and fault-lines and people's critical thinking, communication, biases, probabilistic literacy also become more obvious. The former you can see in the varied pandemic responses. The latter is though less about bulk mortality is also rather disturbing: I know many smart people who interpret simple statements poorly. Let's take a few example statements with the common inference:

- "Masks do not prevent infection." (So why wear them?)

- "Full vaccination does not prevent transmission." (So if I'm only protecting myself and my risk is low because I'm young and healthy, why would I get vaccinated?)

Both of the statements can be correct if one understands them as black-and-white statements where "prevent" is an absolute thing; but neither fact should be presented or understood in a black-and-white way. It is the same with the risks of side-effects from the vaccination and the chance of getting seriously ill from Covid. Even the best masks over time will allow the possibility of infection and some masks are better than others. Masks also have a psychological function - they do show that you care about others and others will often give you a wide berth. Widespread mask wearing can make the non-wearers more apparent and cause you to take an even wider berth, especially if they are inside. The second fact was true about all vaccines at the stage 2 trials, i.e., before they were even approved for use outside a study. But that they reduce the chances of infection (a prelude to transmission) as well as shorten the time shedding virus if one is infected and possibly, though not yet verified, with virus particles that are of a poorer quality than from an unvaccinated person (i.e., that the antibodies in a vaccinated person may incapacitate the shed viral particles). All is to say that those two statements deserve better verbs:

- Masks reduce the probability of infection to the healthy and reduce the probability of the infected transmitting the virus.

- Full vaccination reduces the probability of one becoming infected, and further reduces their chances of transmission, and possibly even the severity of a subsequent infection.

Certitude for things unknowable or not completely knowable is a vice in my book but no-one is comforted by probabilistic explanations, and we seek our authorities to be definitive and clear. When experts speak and are pinned or lulled into voicing the much desired certitude at one time, they're mocked later for flip-flopping when new evidence becomes available, typical retrospective bias. There were all sorts of statements made in 2020 and early 2021 about the end of Covid and then Delta came. The approach of NZ, Australia, Vietnam, China and Taiwan worked rather well before Delta came along and it cracked set-up without fail. And even if we see off our current outbreak, the odds are on that it'd find another crack before too long, with or without some cautious reopening to a hopefully highly, and freshly, vaccinated populace. But even that might be a disaster: there is a plausible future where our virus naivety might count more when the successor to Delta rolls in and states with survivor immunity during the tamer earlier waves are spared while the protection from the vaccine, based on the original strain, is ineffectual. Or Delta could be the end of it; or an even more contagious but completely innocuous strain outcompetes all others and gives every essentially free immunity.

What could be retrospectively analysed as some pre-existing determining factor in any state or group of people for success or disaster might just be the result of chance. Drunk drivers don't always crash their cars after all, while great drivers may err fatally on a rare occasion, and people are bound to find reasons for these outcomes. It might, once the heat of this prolonged Melbourne moment has passed, to judge whether the lack of success in suppressing Covid completely and then the unrest that has recently followed were from pre-existing weaknesses, or just circumstance. Just like the arguable success in New Zealand might be some intrinsic factors (centralised response, island nation, trust-oriented) or that we just had a better hand given to us by Lady Luck. 

20 years

It was half a life-time ago but it is one of those days that a lot of the memories and reactions were clear. Back in the late-90s and early 2000s in New Zealand there weren't many global events that could simply reduce our public television to live recasting but 9/11 was the pinnacle event for such coverage. 

Me, I was a year back from my scholarship in Taiwan, had almost completed my university studies and had begun my ESOL teaching career. I was still living at home and with the talkback radio on and in an almost unbroken broadcast, I switched on the television to watch those loop replays, over and over again. Over and over again. I went to work where others, staff and students, who back in the non-smartphone era and potentially no early morning exposure to radio or morning TV, were only just learning about it just before class or even in class. Having a chance to prepare, I wheeled in the only mounted television into my class to show and discuss live. I recall how one teacher was aghast when a Chinese student was happy at the news. (He was in the Chinese military man, extraordinarily; he might have been genuinely elated, or like many in these moments perhaps not understanding the gravity of the moment. For context though, this was only five months after the Hainan Island incident where a US spy-plane crash landed on Hainan island, China.)

In the moment it is always hard to really know the gravity, significance or extent. It still boggles the mind the conception of the idea, the planning and preparation and then the execution of it, not to think of the actual atrocity itself, let alone the consequences from the mundane hypervigilance at airport security, or the fact that that a costly war and occupation of Afghanistan only ended last month. Or the cultural influence that you could measure in discrimination and similar movements and acts, including the one perpetuated at Countdown New Lynn.

On the day of the attack, I remember going to Club Space at Auckland Uni and talking about it with some AIESEC friends and used what I thought an apt word that I heard in the coverage. I said the attack was an audacious. One person asked me why I would use that word, suggesting that it was not the right word for something so repugnant as a terrorist attack that claimed the lives of almost 3,000 innocent people. It is with distance that I would still use that word, referring to simply one element of it, the masterminding and execution. Every other component is pretty horrific and karmic. 

With further time it becomes just a fascinating historical pivot, like when Gavrilo Princip shot into Archduke Franz Ferdinand's car; or the invasion of Poland; or the fall of Constantinople; the European discovery of the Americas; or the death of Mao.

Data points and where it doesn't point

Twitter was something I did not deign to use for a very long time. I probably poked and prodded it around the time it came out, and then later and could not really "get" it. Why express yourself in such a limited number of characters? Since I'm writing this in a now rarely used format, the blog, you can imagine that the limitation was not appealing. At one stage in my life, I used Facebook updates for what would be considered tweets; and then since coming back from China, I haven't really had the desire to share short messages broadly. 

I still don't but oddly Twitter has come into my life. It happened in 2019 when the SkyCity Convention Centre caught fire and I realised that the fastest way to follow the updates from civil defence was to "follow" civil defence. Late 2019 it went on and 2020 brought a whole lot of new reasons to keep abreast of current happenings. But that is not Twitter's main flow of information - majority is just people expressing themselves about anything and responding to others and because of its fast-moving nature, and the smaller size of journalistic staffs at media companies, it has since become a proxy vox pop for what "people" think. Unfortunately, Twitter represents and amplifies only a subset of humanity's views and so there is a lot of power in the influence of some. It is rather depressing at times to read because you do start to question yourself how common some opinions may be when you see it expressed and a chorus sing in support of it. As well as the pile-ons of criticism that some people get.

But it is also an incidental observational study of humanity, too. It really does just illustrate how confirmation bias works, where humans naturally look for things to support their viewpoints, and tend to reject things, often vehementally, that challenge them. Probably the one phenomenon that you can see even more easily on Twitter than in our everyday interactions is the state of being "triggered". The linguist in me likes the fact that this term, in the sense that we use it today is very new. It really got a push in the tumultuous year of 2016 - think Brexit and Trump. Google Trends show it nicely:

My understanding is that "triggered" was an extension from the use of "trigger warnings", a term which only started to appear in the 2010s with a big increase in usage in 2014 and 2016 and 2019. Though there is almost certainly a cultural, zeitgeist feeling to these terms, that could consign them to the lexical dustbin, I do think they have a certain utility and express something quite tangible and unique to other terms. 

For some definitions, a "trigger warning" is a label, sign or verbal note before something begins to warn the participants or audience that there may be a potentially upsetting topic exhibited. For example, often before news about suicide, rape or other violence, a presenter may suggest viewer discretion whether to watch or not. This has extended to what lecturers or speakers giving such warnings before discussions. The trigger is a particular theme, topic or word, that could cause psychological distress to some people. They would be "triggered" as a result. 

Triggered in the sense above is quite understandable - someone with suicide in the family, or who has had a history of suicide should be given some time for deciding whether to participate or how to participate in a discussion. However, trigger warnings got associated with liberal college campuses in America, and the more culturally conservative side saw them as a weakness, that academics who should be preparing for the "real world" actively avoiding it.  

From this it got the extended meaning of just reacting strongly to a word, idea or topic. In the term of the previous US president a term, Trump Derangement Syndrome (TDS), humorously emerged to describe how the liberal side of the American spectrum (and most of the non-US population of the world) became enraged or agitated by almost any utterance or action by him. Triggered, if you will.

Why do I raise this with respect to Twitter? People get quite, well, triggered with any suggestion or mention of one of:

- lockdown

- vaccination

- masks

- "freedom"

- mandates

- Government control

and often cannot move past them in order to logically weigh up further nuances in what is being raised. 

It calls to mind the hair-in-my-soup kind of reaction where basically anything else served is essentially replied to with: "But there is a HAIR in my SOUP!" Possibly due to some cognitive shortcut they have associated two things, for example, vaccinations with pollution, or lockdowns with fascism, that once something is mentioned; or some form of ideological hygiene where one cannot brook a scintilla of an iota of connection, like the religious conservatives reaction to contraception or abortion. While many people have now adapted to lockdowns, others take the idea, let alone the life under it, as an affront to their dignity, common sense and any sense of goodness in the world. Worse, they could feel it as a threat, that this is the start of the slippery slope toward some form of a New World Order, authoritarian takeover.

When there are strong reactions like this, it would seem any example becomes confirmation, and any counter-example a red rag to charge. In this particular phase of the pandemic, New Zealand and Australia have swung back into global focus for our late winter Covid troubles. While hailed at various times for our apparoach, the Twittersphere from all over the world has weighed in on our outbreak, especially the schadenfreude of the anti-lockdown, "Plan B" factions. For many of them, from even New Zealand's first outbreak and lockdown, they voiced cynicism about eliminating Covid, and that the cure of lockdown was worse than the disease. The blushes and crowing they received for the long stretches of Covid-free here probably burned for quite sometime while everyone was having a lovely, free summer. But even then their data-point de jour was always: "What about Sweden?", Sweden whose two waves of outbreak left it with a considerable body-count although not the epic numbers seen in Western, Eastern or Southern Europe. (But don't ask them about the rest of Scandinavia because the Finland and Norway kick its arse...) 

The data point is thus the shield to protect the user from further thought, because it supports that gut outrage - but the problem is that data points are just points devoid of their place in the trend, or even their place within the trend, are they close to the the correlation line, or an outlier. The art of abusing a data point is the taking of an outlier, or just a decontextualised form of evidence and neutralising any character from it apart from the point that you wish to make. For the Sweden data-point, the point is that with lax measures they achieved a better than average outcome for most countries. But the idea of laxness is often seen as an absolute sense: Sweden, lax; NZ, strict. There was a measure of stringency for Covid-19 measures established, and a chart of the two countries are below from Our World in Data:

Clearly, on average we have had it lax with brief patches of strictness and clearly our peaks were higher than anything Swedes had to endure. Of course, New Zealand itself is a data point raised by those in favour of short, sharp responses which again is not appropriate because New Zealand has some very nature advantages such as being an island, one government over the whole to ensure consistency of messaging and approach. This isn't possible to too many other countries, but nor is it a surefire success.

Sweden, to be clear, has some clear characteristics. They are culturally more distant, have Vitamin D fortified staple foods and were blacklisted from many countries because of their laxness, which in turn meant that they were not seeded much with other variants of concern. It might also be quite possible that being ethnically homogenous might serve some "data points" better than others for some variants. A kind of Russian roulette to see who is affected or "dodges the bullet". In a more diverse country, there might always be a portion of the population vulnerable.

During the verbal meleeing for this particular Delta outbreak in New Zealand, there have been some further examples. Two Australian states have given up pursuing elimination (Victoria and New South Wales), with the Prime Minister saying that Delta has changed the rules and it is impossible to pursue zero Covid and now trying to cow two zero Covid states to loosen up! There have been some countries such as Vietnam and Fiji that after success in elimination in 2020 have been overwhelmed by Delta in 2021. Name any of these and you would think New Zealand too should give up. But China and Taiwan have both suppressed outbreaks of Delta. Really raising data points here have different sides raising their own trump cards and thinking they've won. The argument may be resolved for New Zealand in a week or so if Auckland can have start having "doughnut days" (days with no cases). 

There has been something of a strawman argument that has accompanied the anti-lockdown choir that zero-Covid was something any place was pursuing forever. Even Scott Morrison's comments were in that vein: "Any state and territory that thinks that somehow they can protect themselves from COVID with the Delta strain forever, that's just absurd," which even Australia's plan has never been, nor has it been New Zealand's. Yet, zero-Covid is attacked thusly.

The latest "what about" data points have been Israel and India, but for opposite reasons. Israel was a poster child for vaccination early, with a swift, corporately owned roll-out which had a large proportion of the population vaccinated before most of the world got out of bed. It has recently had its own Delta outbreak and people are dying. Also research there has shown that vaccines have had a waning effect over time. Yet, while their name lingers as the "leader" other countries have long since passed them:

The problem with taking Israel as a data point is that there is plenty of idiosyncrasy in their situation: early adopters (and thus had their Pfizer three weeks apart), exposed to the Delta variant at a time when the earliest vaccinated, the elderly, have the most diminished antibodies, and an ultra-orthodox portion of the population who are not willing to be vaccinated. 

"What about India?" Well, now that we've mentioned Israel, there are many who will compare the rate of Covid for these two countries. India has started to use ivermectin since its Delta outbreak and still has a low vaccination rate; Israel is all on board with Pfizer:

"What about India?" and "What about Israel?" is thus the catch-cry of the Team Anti-Vaxx, Anti-Big Pharma, Pro-Ivermectin. India hasn't had any further Delta burn (relatively speaking). Often the graph above is only showing the segment of time from May 2021 to the present time. This is a bit cynical because the previous trends are quite revealing of the nature of India as a whole: either numbers are under-reported, or Indian nationals are less susceptible to Covid. Smaller populations are more likely to have the huge spikes like Israel above, while big countries like India, Russian and the United States should have lower spikes, anyway, because regions without outbreaks mitigate the impact of those with outbreaks, but all things remaining equal the number should be balanced. Above, even before the vaccinations and Ivermectin, Israel had a massively higher case rate. The data points are thus moot data points.

The final data point is Delta itself. There is a lot of hindsight bias that results from what has been the most difficult variant yet. It's easy to say that an approach was always wrong because Delta came, but that ignores that Delta was not an inevitability. A contagious, yet more innocuous variant was just as possible. Yet conclusions are made to serve the a priori beliefs.

Falling short

It's been a full-on three weeks since my last blog. I had laid it out so that I would have a final push to prepare for the Onehunga Half, then a week "off" to do our education audit, and then to swing back into training the week after. What did I get? Well, that familiar story.

The week before the race I ran mostly at night for once. I tend to be a morning runner but with so much going on in preparation for the audit, an early morning blessing at a new campus one one morning I decided to switch to flip it. Evening is not my preference, for one, I would have to do it before dinner as it takes too long to digest dinner, run, then have the body settle down. On the Tuesday I did a "double tempo" which is a longish run with two patches of fastish pace. The first stretch I ran through the familiar Balmoral and Three Kings streets at the target paces before I dropped pace for the "rest" period. I was making my route as I went along and thought I would have enough distance to do the second stretch and be back in good time for dinner if I traversed into the St Andrews Road and Manukau Road.

St Andrews Road isn't a good running road in several places. There is one section where there is minimal footpaths on both sides, and in the section I was going to traverse across it had a part where the thin footpaths were well-separated from the road with a grassy verge. This meant that to cross it I would have to be mindful of cars and then run across possibly uneven grassy ground, cross the road and overcome something similar on the other side. I did 99% of that smoothly and it was only when I hit the footpath that I rolled my ankle on a slopping concrete edge. The previously sprained left ankle. 

I ran a few more paces with full sensory focus on that ankle and though it had the usual "light twist" feeling, there was no pain, no issues with movement or flexibility, and after a few more hundred metres I thought it was nothing and proceeded into my second tempo. 

The next evening, since it was a rare week of running in the evening, I went to a social running club that I would attend from time to time in the past. There were some really fast youngsters doing the 10kn route and I was pretty happy to try my best to keep up with them. But at the 8km mark I noticed a distinct change in my left ankle it became sore in places it hadn't been for months and my whole confidence it its stability disappeared. I kept going at a slower pace and eventually crawled back to shop where it starts and finishes. I did my stretches, chatted a bit and then went home. On the way home I tried running but strangely didn't feel any issue. That gave me the confidence to test it the following evening but again, the ankle was just useless after about 5km and I aborted the run. This was three days before the event and I decided to not run at all for the two days before and then see how I would be. 

Sprint forward to race day, I did my warm-ups and felt nothing amiss. It started and I was right on my planned pace and really enjoying it... until about 8km when that familiar feeling came in. I had to drop pace and though it was a manageable level of discomfort it was then the focus of everything. The route itself was beautiful - I wish I could have just enjoyed the running and the scenes without thinking about my ankle with every stride. Surprisingly, the pace was sustainable and I crossed the bridge and went to Māngere Bridge and back. People were passing me but I was fine. 

It was about the 15km mark that something strange happened. I realised I could go faster, close to my pace at the start of the race. I crossed back across the bridge and was looking forward to registering a time similar to my last race. However, maybe because I was unconsciously changing my gait to go fast on a hopeless ankle the stresses on my body had changed and at 18km my left hamstring pinged. 

It was pain and I had to stop. I gave it a rub and tried again, and stopped. I stretched it thinking it was cramp, and tried running and couldn't. I could walk but I couldn't extend strides without pain, and so it was walking that I did back to the race base. DNF. 

At least that meant that I could focus on the education audit with plenty of sleep. That week went by in a flash and all signs are that it went well. For all my fears about them making something out of nothing, or the students (or staff) saying something that is misinterpreted, the final summary meeting alluded to nothing out of place. The executive team as a whole was relieved to have a smooth audit done and dusted. 

As for my hamstring, I occasionally jogged over the road that week and I could feel the tightness and planned to give it at least a week. My regular physio was booked up for the week so I got a time in the future but I gave it my own treatment. It was only on the Monday morning that I gave it a kilometre run and found both the ankle and my hamstring fine. I extended on the Tuesday to 5km and again, no issues. Then came lockdown but Wednesday evening I gave it a 10km tempo run and while I felt the hamstring it didn't impede my pace at all. Even so, having felt it on the run, and noticing some tightness the following morning, I had two days of running rest.

Finally, bring on the weekend, I ran 26km and 21 km this morning and though my body feels a little tired for all the work I hadn't expected from them for two weeks, both the hamstring and the ankle did nothing out of the ordinary; the ankle feels a bit more flexible than in the days before I rolled it. I'm going to rest tomorrow and hopefully start back to my normal training again.

So, I feel back on "track" though in lockdown. In three more weeks I have the third in the series of three half marathons, the Tāmaki River Half. It is probably after that that I'll know if I should aim for the Auckland Marathon, which is 10 weeks away.

Whaowhia te kete mātauranga - Fill your baskets of knowledge

The zeitgeist is a funny thing. There probably hasn't been a year where the passions of people aren't tied up in some cultural moment, and at every moment it is easy to believe that there wasn't a time more contentious and polarised on certain issues than the current time. It might be that recency bias, that is, that every moment is just as controversial and you only perceive the current and recent times to be moreso because of amnesia. But perhaps the world really is becoming more complicated with a tipping point of pluralism and technology has both been reached where sudden the once settled world is now lacking the blacks and the whites of an earlier age, and now we have a confusing grey.

I tend to subscribe to the latter idea and there are 101 examples of late, whether it be antivaxx movement(s), Critical Race Theory and, now, New Zealand's own indigenous culture war flare-up: the equal recognition of mātauranga Māori in our education system. Missed it? Here is a taster from the Herald. The letter that kicked off the kerfuffle is here. My own synopsis of it is that the Ministry of Education now insists on mātauranga Māori to be included in NCEA alongside "Western science" and with equal status. This triggered a lot of fire and heat, the misuse of the word "racist" prematurely, followed by a lot of views expressed by a whole range of people that verge on, and often go well into the deep dark valleys of racism.

The term mātauranga is broad as a dictionary reference should give you an overview. It comes from the word mātau which means wise, smart and knowledgeable. From my understanding, mātauranga should cover the knowledge and understandings gathered from the te ao, and shared down the generations. This you could translate as "science" but there is a separate word for that: pūtaiao. In the definition linked above it shows that it has also been used as the Māori word for "education" and "science". Some formal translations that involve it are force-fits for modern concepts as well as the evolution of the language for modern uses. 

So the battle-lines in this tussle? Well, there is what I would call "the white scientist in a white coat" (no, they're not just pākehā). Let's just call it the white-in-white view. Opposing them is a view that is more relativistic - let's call them "the woke". Both have their own beliefs and biases. White-in-white view has two oversimplifications - that there own craft is pristine and non-racial on the inside in how it works; and, in the way it is traditionally learned, objective world knowledge on the outside, and perceived in that way by students and society. The letter discusses quite rightly that what we see as modern science is not western and its goals are universal. This is an enlightened view but one that does not necessarily come from the education system, nor how it is seen. Let's have a look.

The history of science or development is often plotted with these points: Aristotle - Galileo - Newton - Einstein - modern science, or some such variation. It is not an isolated view that European cultures did all the heavy lifting to hoist us up the tree of knowledge, for where are the coloured people? The gaps are many -  the conceptualisation of zero in maths (Indian), gunpowder and paper (China), the gap between Aristotle and Galileo (about 1800 years) where European cultures burned the classic books as heretical, where Arabic libraries retained the language and pushed it forward. The fossil evidence for this is clear in language where al-cohol (which was isolated by al-Khwarizmi) and al-gebra (Jābir ibn Ḥayyān) which both were developed in this time. The modern body of knowledge we call science has been blessed with the contribution of all world's peoples, and it is often the acceptance of "foreign" ideas that things get a move-on. The vanguard of the white-in-white, the letter writers, know this implicitly if not explicitly.

Behind the white-on-white line, there is quite a faction of cultural conservatives that decry and moderation of the white secular mainstream that prevailed before. The Don Brashes of this world are in here who would rather let bygones-be-bygones with respect to Māori, insist that we are all equal under the law and things should just move on. There are many who see no purpose or need for progress, or see it as a threat. (Sidenote: I met an old friend yesterday who'd trained as a high school teacher but now is homeschools his son full-time due to his concerns. Though he didn't raise the topic of Māori, it was about the slide away from just teaching children knowledge, but the increasing priority of education on what to think. I'd include him in this camp.)

Louder behind the line though are people who vehemently do not like these changes, the kind who would say "Māori can have the foreshore but only if they go fishing in waka and with spears" (paraphrasing my father); or willfully throw around strawmen saying that Māori science would be teaching the pantheon of gods who were responsible for creation and natural forces, that biologists should know Tangaroa; botanists, Rongomātāne, and the meteorologists should consult Tāwhirimātea. I would say that these go into the realms of racism.

 

I have only had a brief review of how Ministry of Education recommends the teaching of mātauranga Māori. As this was specifically brought up by academics in the science faculty at the University of Auckland, it was interpreted solely in the context of science, and this has narrowed down what is meant to be a wider focus. It is intended that mātauranga Māori and te ao Māori (the Māori world) are included, where "possible and appropriate", into the curriculum, achievement standards and assessments, and treating these equally and not with Māori content being the add-on, the one that you need to leave the room for, etc. Art and architecture, for example, could easily have this component; right now, in my organisation none of the "creatives" have any idea about Māori design, which are now in huge demand. 

But its not just meant for an "ends" approach where having appropriate and equal treatment of content will result in a more complete graduate. I read into that part is to make it clear that other cultures' accumulated knowledge and wisdom are all valued and that your identity in turn has value. There will be a lot of people who pooh-pooh this idea. I do not know how much research "stock" is behind the more woke perspective that providing safety and dignity ends up with better outcomes overall. I just know people who do not feel they have a place in an institution opt out of it. The white-in-white view would be that provision of the best learning techniques with the best information, regardless of where it comes from, is the best way to develop the potential of our students. It probably served me well, and the co-signers probably did well too. I do not know whether there is any research "stock" in this, either, apart from the obvious result being that an elite do arise from it, a few Māori, but the overwhelming majority of them not.

With respect to science, there is still a lot more to be said than just recognising the fact that the Polynesian oceanic navigation techniques were top-notch and led to the location and migration to New Zealand, and to sail to Madagascar in the west and possibly to South America in the east as early as the 12th century; or the cultivation of kūmara in New Zealand conditions; or the development of medicine with New Zealand plants. It is to show that Māori and their ancestors were not merely war-like primitive stone-age people but developed through observation and experimentation, just as readily as those in other cultures. European science had the foot-up from their own cross-fertilisation of ideas through invasions, immigration, competition and communication, but both cultures had the same potential to achieve. They were just placed in different environments. 

New Zealand public schools are now a common environment for students of all cultural backgrounds and there needs to be an equitable approach, and the chance to know they can achieve. Māori students demographically speaking are out-competed by other Polynesians and other immigrant cultures for an array of reasons. 

I for one think the changes are a good start at least at addressing one of those reasons, and making the rest a bit broader minded and appreciate the achievements that sprung up from this place.

A tale of two running years

I write this with much hesitation as I am a superstitious person, and rightly so. In March I blogged about my running renaissance and promptly sprained an ankle. But I would like to risk it all and write about where things stand. Since I'm a data and tracking guy, I'll furnish this with graphics!

So in was the start of Dec 2019 when, after my best running year, I went to my bogey-event, the Omaha Half, where it perpetuated the reason for it being a bogey event: I slipped on a boardwalk, bruised myself, still ran and completed the event, but it left me with issues that took months to recover from. After some physio and then some run/walks during the 2020 lockdown, eventually I got back to some running, but was always hampered by niggles and issues. 

In the end, I only ran a single half marathon that year and a handful of 10k events. In November I strained my hamstring and again had physio and light exercise. But over the summer holidays and on our South Island trip, I started running again and even though at first the hamstring was still noticeable, its irritation got less as I ran more. And as you'll see below, there was a beautiful rise in mileage from Jan 2021 until the ankle sprain "cliff" happened. But I pushed to keep moving and running to recover from it, and again there is a gentle rise until the present day. 

100km is the sweet spot for training where improvements are apparent and in the last five weeks I've plateaued my mileage there. There have been two races recently, one two weeks ago and one today. Today's Ōrewa Half Marathon was a big test whether things were moving forward. 

The weather forecast for Sunday had been a roulette wheel of possibilities, every day I would check and get a different colour, a different chance of rain. Last night it rained. In the morning in rained, but in the end the needle fell on "extraordinarily windy". It is possibly the strongest wind I've run in, let alone raced in. The course was two laps around the Millwater Estuary, going out you were running with the wind; on the homeward leg, and especially the final stretch was near the beach without protection going straight into the buffeting wind. It was funny to start off with the wind so powerfully behind you and not knowing if you really are running too fast or being carried in the gusts. After my first kilometre, I actively slowed myself down.

Half marathons are tricky to pace. I had an idea of keeping pace between 4:40min/km and 4:50min/km, aiming for a 1 hour 40 minute result, with the chance of pushing it at the end if I was feeling strong, with a stretch goal of 1:38. The paces per kilometre for the first half were: 4:36, 4:40, 4:45, 4:30, 4:41, 4:58 (uphill), 4:12 (downhill), 4:34, 4:48 and 4:52. The slowest kilometre was all uphill and the last kilometre was all downhill but the rest were on target or below. And the last two were into that wind. I was a little perturbed that I had the 4:3X splits because they might feel them in the second half. The second half kilometre times, starting back with the wind, were 4:35, 4:35, 4:39, 4:30, 4:39, 5:00 (uphill), 4:24 (downhill), 4:35, 4:45 and 4:52.

Happily the second half was marginally faster than the first. Disappointingly, almost everyone's smartwatch including mine showed that the course was not 21.1 km, probably somewhere between 20.3-20.6 km. If I could keep running until 21.1km with my pace, I would have landed on about 1:38, so I'm pretty pleased. To be clear, and to put it into stark relief, my 2019 personal bests for a half marathon are 1:29 and 1:30 respectively, so there is still a lot of ground for progress.

The Ōrewa event was part of the the Run21 series, three events each with a half marathon. The other halves are in Onehunga in two weeks and Tāmaki River in September. Onehunga's is ridiculously close - not sure if I can really improve much but will go "all out" and try and break 1 hour 35 minutes. My big aim would be to get Tāmaki River's time down to 1 hour 30 minutes. That would put me right back to my personal best and mean that I would be well set for a tilt at the Auckland Marathon.

I'm leaving my entry to the marathon to when I can be sure I'll be healthy. It might surprise you, Dear Reader, that my sprained ankle is still not 100% back to normal. I have discomfort in two places because of it and also some issues as a result of the lack of flexibility that has remained despite the treatment and the regular activity. This might just take time - the nature of the partial tears, scar tissue and blood flow might mean there is still months to go. The key thing is that activity will help, and it has not stopped me running what I would want to be running.

The practicality of the situation

Even though Covid still shrouds a lot of places with death, sickness or in some cases just inconvenience, it has not really appeared much in my blog. After 2020 being wall-to-wall aerosol spread, 2021 has settled on things closer to home. But in real life, many of my habits have remained the same. I still check Worldometer daily just to see whether the case numbers and deaths are getting better or worse in various places; I listen daily to podcasts and vlogs for any insights or food for thought about the progressing pandemic; and even of late I have tuned into the 6pm news, a rarity even in 2021, to see any on the ground reporting especially, of late, Fiji, or the NZ ramifications for the Sydney outbreak. Regrettably a year and a half in, there is still this silly polarisation of attitudes about how to deal with the virus. Perhaps, it's just that we as societies have not had recent historical experience of an analogous situation so to reflect on to consider it thoroughly.

Two of the vloggers I paid most attention to since 2020 have been Chris Martenson (Peak Prosperity) and Dr John Campbell, and their trajectories in the last year have diverged a lot. The former was my favourite for most of the first half of 2020. He was quick, excitable, incisive and clear about the keys to early action with travel bans, quarantine and non-pharmaceutical interventions (NPIs) such as masks. He was good for deep dives into information and subtle comparisons. The latter comes across as a humble investigator commenting on the trends, news and relevant research. One commonality is that both noticed and reported on re-purposed off-patent medicines as prophylaxis or treatment of Covid-19. But it is in their respective approaches where their similarities ends.

Chris was obsessed by hydroxychloroquine (the drug that President Trump famously tried to hawk from his presidential podium) and ivermectin, both of which he called DWSNBN, the "drugs that shall not be named", ironically because his mention and advocacy of them literally had videos taken down. There today, gone tomorrow. The two drugs were not approved as treatments and since YouTube had implemented rules against disinformation, someone would report his videos. I'm prepared to consider this not in a corrupt, conspiratorial way but as an unintended consequence where tech-giants made rules that did not quite have the right settings and incidentally shut down debate. It became his obsession though, not against the virus, but against how things could be deemed disinformation to stifle free discussion. His partnership with his financial expert partner in Peak Prosperity seemed to have had issues, since the branding was getting complicated by the size of the feud, so after a pause came back with more videos from a different set-up now with an even stronger counter-authoritarian flavour even heading into the anti-vaccine territory.

Dr John reported on hydroxychloroquine weighing up the research and considered it not effective, but ivermectin he looked at and considered a useful, life-saving drug that was being overlooked. I don't believe any of his videos were taken down (can be corrected if I'm wrong), but after some statements to the effect of demanding authorities to consider it for use as a treatment, he has gone back to emphasising the use of vaccines, with only occasional lateral comments about ivermectin. He nailed my feeling on the topic in a recent video (11:25, but the whole video is pretty interesting).

I would like to explain my own feelings on this phenomenon, first by looking at the background of the situation, how it's played out but also looking at some counter-factuals which regrettably I haven't heard voiced yet. (Standard disclaimer: I am not a epidemiologist, virologist, pharmacologist, and have not personally read or reviewed the research. Do not take this as a statement of support for anything except the medicinal power of dark chocolate and strong Chinese liquor.) 

Early in the Covid pandemic, there were no clear ways to pharmaceutically prevent or treat the Covid condition; all that there was were NPIs to prevent infection and luck that either you were less disposed to it, or had less inoculum (fewer viral particle king-hits on your ACE2 receptors). Pharmaceutical companies invested money in development of their vaccines and countries made orders to have certainty for their own ways through this crisis. Needless to say there was a lot of money tied up in the development and the promise of their roll-out all over the world. Then came DWSNBN 1 and 2. The fly-in-the-ointment issue with these is that they were both off-patent - there was thus very few interested parties to fund the requisite large scale double-blind trials. What trials that were run were mostly done in third world countries such as Costa Rica and India. The evidence shows that someone taking ivermectin would have a greatly reduced chance of infection, reduced chance of hospitalisation and death. There was a lot of drama in the middle including an obvious hatchet job against one of the two drugs that caused a retraction in The Lancet. In terms of treatments for Covid-19, it seems clear that especially ivermectin has a better success rate than patented drugs such as remdesivir. But it is not even mentioned as possible drug for treatment and is actively discouraged in many countries. It may be because experts have really looked at it and thought it not to be better than placebo - or perhaps there are more commercial factors at play.

One possible reason for this phenomenon is the expected impact of the discovery and widespread use of a off-patent medicine to treat such a novel disease that has already such a valuable market for the pharmaceutical industry. In the first counter-factual, imagine if any time prior to December 2020, when vaccines were started to be offered to the public in some countries, news about a cheap, effective treatment emerged, was approved by the relevant health authorities and was widely used. It might have caused a massive rejection of the "experimental" vaccines that had already had massive investment from the government and industry. People would instead use a cheap, easily manufactured generic medicine, usually applied to farm animals. Provided it was actually useful, it would have changed the trajectory all together. It would be interesting to know whether such a shock might have bankrupted any business - I'm guessing not, none of the businesses would have "put the house" on the vaccine development.

Back in the reality where such a discovery has not been approved or promoted, it has meant people's lives may have been terminated by the virus at a greater rate than if this wonder-drug had superior efficacy and could be moved more efficiently to the places that needed it. But by suppressing this knowledge and medical approval, it kept the stability within the economic system. This seems akin in some way to the financial bail-outs of the banking sector where industry losses are mitigated through a socialised sacrifice. 

If so, this yet again the bug of the capitalist system. Unethical results from rational big picture financial rational decision-making. In the same realm of pharmaceuticals, there is the well-known dilemma of the development of two drugs - one that cured a condition completely and another that treated it but did not completely cure them, and would be required to be taken over the life time of the patient: only the latter would go to market because the former does not really have a business plan. There is a lot of gnashing of teeth in liberal sections of society when there such an outcome occurs but it is the compromise that was made in accepting this otherwise very efficient economic system.

Another aspect of the counter-factual is that had ivermectin derailed vaccine roll-outs, the world would now be dependent on the supply of one drug which doesn't in itself trigger immune protection. The positive would be that, being off-patent, any country or business could start manufacture it in vast amounts but also that we would be consuming ivermectin in prophylaxis and treatment through the whole pandemic period. It might be able to get individuals through the infection but would still mean that is a reduced or minimal immune response. And alternatively, it might have been found that it does not work as well scaled up, and by then the vaccine developers have moved onto other things and perhaps not keen to have the commercial exposure to further development.

It could be from some of these fears that a health expert may in good conscience downplay or not mention this other drug. A big picture risk analysis to the works of a off-patent spanner might have caused hesitation, or alternatively been provided to decision makers as ethical "cover" for not indulging the easy-out of promoting cheap alternatives. There might also be a tacit understanding that once the pharmaceutical industry had covered its losses that ivermectin might be approved to blunt the third world from future surges. 

The key though as Dr John has said is that no-one is likely to say it as there is a "realpolitik" at play. Although such things are irksome, and enraging for some like Chris, I only shrug. I think it's unusual to see people acknowledge in public: "yes, it's not the outcome we want but this is probably the price of the any greater good." 

Or there could be a prudent "kicking for touch" element where the vaccines work and should be able to end the pandemic, and the desire not to muddy the already muddy waters. 

When it gets down to it, in almost every aspect of my life I've now found myself identifying as a pragmatist, not an idealist. I am quite comfortable with the compromise because I cannot be always confident of the correctness of my own views to run over the top of others. That being said, in my own conduct I'll follow my own way in an experiment of one. 

This last week has been my "run down" week. My immune system stopped really caring and my sleep was rather disrupted. Despite this, my running performance on training runs was as good as I would expect at this stage. God might have dealt me a good hand - Saturday was a wash-out and I didn't run on what would have been a long run. I slept well on Friday and Saturday night. Sunday, I ran my longest run since October 2019 and felt fine. This week has begun and my energy is back. Yesterday I ran a half marathon distance in the morning, not as a time trial but as a fartlek (where you choose different speeds, including slow, for different sections) and still had an energetic day afterwards. Sunday I have my first half marathon in the last nine months and am feeling confident that I can break 1:40, a good standard of training. (For the record, my personal best is 1:30 but will need a couple more months to get to that fitness.)