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wrongfullythinking · 4 years ago

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Twitter and the “Public Forum”

There is a very large looming legal question about whether or not social media sites, such as Twitter, are “Public Forums.” Most would agree that they are not... at least... not yet. But the question is... should they be?

First, a look into why it matters.

In a public forum, all First Amendment protections apply. So you can say any number of very objectionable things (https://scholar.google.com/scholar_case?case=12634874511090553174) and be protected. In a private forum, this is not so. I can kick you out of my house for wearing an Abercrombie shirt, and you have no Free Speech/Expression reason to contest my staggeringly good decision-making.

Second, the public forum cannot be policed for any content that may be stated. This is why if you go to reserve time at a public park, you don’t have to tell the Parks and Rec department what your event is for. Just things like how many people, how long the event will last, etc. This is well-established and well-backed by many years of precedent.

Finally, there is the very serious matter of personal liability. In certain circumstances, officials can be held personally liable if their policies deliberately and knowingly infringe upon Bill of Rights protections (most often First Amendment protections). This means that you could literally sue for the property and assets of a person. (Also, this is why those of us who own either physical property [like a house] or intellectual property [like a book] buy “Umbrella Coverage” from insurances... I recommend State Farm, but that’s totally irrelevant and I’m not getting any kickbacks for that shill =P.)

But hang on... so if the government owns a billboard and rents it out to whomever can pay, can I rent it and post a naked lady?

You could try, and you might win! What you can’t do is post something obscene. And yes, whether or not a naked person is obscene is staggeringly controversial. There’s a 3-part test from the Burger court, a host of vague terms like “average person” and “contemporary community standards,” and “lacks serious artistic/literary/political/scientific value.” And then there are protections for children, a whole separate piece, as well as child pornography, which is always classified as obscene... except when it is not, like in the cases of naked cherubs in church windows. So, confused yet? We’re off topic, but I make this point to explain that even in public forums, where First Amendment rights are fiercely protected, there are still outstanding issues of content censorship.

So, is Twitter / Facebook / Tumblr a public forum?

At this point, the answer is no. They are privately controlled by companies, not owned by the feds or states or local municipalities, and thus can make almost any policy they want. The idea here is that the free market dictates the life or death of these platforms... and that idea tends to hold true! Tumblr itself is a good case-in-point, because it has lost millions of dollars in value due to bad leadership decisions, and at least partially because of censorship. There are countless examples of others... I remember when Yahoo! was the primary search engine of the internet and Xanga was the biggest blogging platform. While you can still Yahoo, I’m not sure there are more than a few hundred people on Xanga, if it still exists in any useful format. So, since places like this are subject to the free market, and thus can die... they should be allowed to make all the good or bad decisions they want about their content. Or at least, that is how the theory runs.

But really... ARE they subject to the market? Now we’re getting into the really interesting territory. If Facebook shut down tomorrow, would it be a problem? Maybe, but life would continue. But if Google shut down tomorrow? Well, millions of schoolchildren are in GoogleClassrooms right now, so that would certainly be a problem. It would at least cause massive disruption... and Facebook shutting down would cause some disruption. Likewise, Twitter controls so much speech that instead of publishing headlines from Newspapers, newspapers publish headlines from Twitter! The 14-year-old looks at that line like “well, duh” and the 44-year old reads that line like “wow, we’ve come a long way,” and the 84-year-old reads that line with just a sad headshake.

So, now we’ve joined one of the most controversial points of the last 20 years... the Fannie Mae “Too Big to Fail” problem. Basically, a set of banks and big mortgage companies (Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac) made a bunch of bad decisions in about 1995 - 2008. [As an aside, whether or not Fannie Mae {technically, the “Federal National Mortgage Association”} is actually a company comes up as an issue... it originated as a government program, but is today a publicly-traded company and has been since the late 60s, though it was delisted from NYSE and is only traded off-exchange]. And the government had to step in. You can read all about that issue at another time, the bottom line is that actually Fannie Mae has paid back more than it borrowed, but there was a ballooning of the debt ceiling by over 800 billion. Some people care about the national debt, some don’t, and again, not the subject of this commentary. The point is that it set a very odd precedent, whereas a company could make extremely bad decisions and then the burden would be placed on the taxpayers to fix their decision, because the company itself was a part of so many people’s lives. Would social media fall under this guidance? Unlikely, and I think we would all run from state-sponsored social media... but hey, what do I know.

So... get to the point. Should they be public forums, or not?

My two cents always comes down against censorship, especially censorship by entities that don’t have my best interests at heart... so basically, everybody else. I think that it is so easy to self-censor the internet at the personal end (for example, by installing filters and blocking services for objectionable content), that companies should not be unilaterally making these decisions, especially if those companies want to be venues for mass public communication.

Let’s go with another example... let’s say you wanted to call up your buddy and have a nice long phonesex session. Good for you. Or just chat with them about the latest Dr. Doe video (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QXgT8WXaPUY), because enthusiasm is important. Would you be okay with Verizon telling a robot to monitor your call, and then automatically hang up if you said “penis” too much? Or “Trump”? Or “Black Lives Matter?” What about “Nazi,” “Rohypnol,” “Mary Jane,” “negritos” [I’ve got your back, Mr. Cavani], “snowbunny,” or “Insane Clown Posse”? I think most people would be upset about any of those, and they would rightfully tell Verizon that they will find another provider. So Verizon doesn’t do that, although it could. But Twitter does do that. And the availability of another Twitter is in question. Will something succeed Twitter? Absolutely. But right now, Twitter is under no market pressure, so it is succeeding at taking off its platform any number of conversations that it probably should not be policing.

There’s also a social-justice side of this. So, let’s say that we all decide Twitter is a bad platform and move to something else. And that something else costs us 10$ a month. I wouldn’t notice this fee. Others would. So that’s an access issue. Or, let’s say that some people start migrating to a new platform, and they only tell their friends about it. That’s okay, right? Absolutely... but imagine that college student who is trapped at home in a pandemic right now who cannot get any viewpoints outside of what her parents approved of, and previously used Twitter to explore and challenge her upbringing. If she doesn’t get an invite to the new platform, is she just lost?

And that brings up the Pandemic. Many, many common public forums have been shut down due to the pandemic. This alone has caused serious controversy (see: BLM protests on crowded streets where state governors participated, while those same governors implemented executive orders enforcing 6-foot distancing in churches and stores), so the argument for Twitter censorship “but you have many other public forums!” is tough to substantiate during the COVID-era. And this is a HUGE problem. Historically, taking away public forums is always an early move of totalitarian regimes. Taking away rights to assembly and speech follows soon after. We’re now in Phase 2 there... and our governors keep assuring us it is temporary... while at the same time, encouraging Twitter to take off any viewpoints they don’t like, under the guise of “false or misleading information.” Soon, they start moving into the schools, and that leads to...

SCIENCE!!!

So, to talk about what rigorous debate means, we need to understand a bit about Science. And specifically, the philosophy of science, what scientific discourse looks like, and why review and critique are parts of the scientific process.

Point 1: “Scientific consensus” is hogwash. Yes, we all agree that the Earth orbits the Sun, and the Sun itself moves, but beyond that, there isn’t much scientific consensus. If you see an article that starts with the phrase “Expert say,” you can go ahead and close your browser window right there. The rest is bull****.

Point 2: The limits of science are boundless. Any specific scientific paper is, by necessity and the peer review process, very strictly bounded. “Whether or not a vaccine is efficient” is an entirely different paper than one titled “Whether or not 80-year-olds with lung cancer should get the vaccine,” and both of those are different than “How the US should achieve herd immunity, and if it is even possible for COVID-19 before significant mutations cause current immunizations to be ineffective,” and all three of those are different from “Do we need to vaccinate our cats from COVID in order to reach herd immunity?”

Point 3: There is no “finalized” science. The answers are never finished. What is “cutting edge” science today is out-of-date tomorrow, barbaric and backwards by the end of the year, and grounds for an abuse lawsuit by the end of the decade. The best examples of this are from Psych treatments.

Point 4: I get very worried when anybody starts to censor scientific content... especially those without any qualifications. Okay, so this one is a personal sentence (note the “I”), but I’m going to go ahead and guess that Twitter robots and interns flagging posts don’t have any idea the difference between sensitivity and specificity, the background as to why the FDA has never approved an mRNA vaccine previously, the difference between statistical and clinical significance, and how to read a limitations section. The people who are qualified to do so are peer reviewers... and in the case where those fail (which happens!), the rest of the writer’s peers. And we do that. Anything published is open to critique, which leads to the final point, that...

Point 5: Critique and Review are THE MOST IMPORTANT PARTS of scientific publishing. If a piece is published without review, it is called an “opinion” and not science. Even more worrisome than the censoring of unpopular papers is the censoring of the opinions of scientists on the papers of their peers. Should someone publish a paper where I believe they overstretched their claims, it is a HUGE part of my job to call that out. For an agency like Twitter to be able to say “you don’t have the right to say that they overstated their claim, because expressing a concern about a vaccine is against our Terms of Use” is a very big problem for science.

The flipside is that you get into the part where now a company can, through its policy, dictate what science gets done. For example, lets say I wanted to examine an unpopular question... and I’m a social scientist, so there are plenty of those, but say I wanted to do something semi-controversial but apolitical. I’ll say my research question is “How do the happiness of those in committed multi-year polyamorous relationships compare to the happiness of people in similar economic and social situations but in closed marriages where additional intimate partnerships would be viewed as grounds for relationship termination?” There are plenty of ways I could conduct this study and I’ll spare you my methodological musings, but safe to say there are platforms who would not want me to publish my results. And that’s fine.

But let’s say that I did publish my results, and a commenter took to Twitter. And their response was “I read your paper, and I see your conclusion that those in committed multi-year polyamorous relationships score no differently on a happiness scale than those in the closed marriages. However, I disagree with your use of this scale, because it was tested on populations of retirees, and most of the people in your sample are in their late 20s or early 30s.”

That is an EXCELLENT and VALID critique. And let’s say that Twitter was heavily into the social justice and had a policy that said “you can’t say negative things about polyamory.” And they deleted this person’s comment. Now, Twitter has interfered with the scientific process. That comment IS PART of the dialogue and that dialogue is part of Science. Yes, there are other places that those comments could be made, and not be censored... but we should not be encouraging that censorship ANYWHERE. And Twitter has vastly overstepped the line on this point. Random Twitter employees have no business removing professional critiques about a study, even if there are other platforms for those critiques.

Other Thoughts

1) Generally, you can’t prohibit meetings in a public forum based on prior behavior. Thus, “X group was violent in the past” is not a reason to prohibit X group from accessing a public forum for speech. So there’s no saying “Proud Boys were violent once, so no Proud Boys on Twitter” if it were to be declared a public forum.

2) I’m really not aware of any large precedents for taking a private company and declaring it a public forum. That may seem redundant (obviously, if there was precedent, this wouldn’t be such a hot-button issue), but it bears specific mention.

#twitter #public forum #legal #science

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wrongfullythinking · 5 years ago

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squishy poison dragons

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wrongfullythinking · 5 years ago

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Science and Data and Freedoms

There are millions of these rants around, so you are under no need to read mine. In fact, what I am about to say here should not be taken as anything more than one person’s opinion. OPINION. I have several qualifications (I will get to those in a second), but still, this blog is primarily concerned with, as the title suggest, wrong thought. And yes, thoughts can be flat-out wrong, but that’s another topic for another time, yes? I primarily abandoned this blog when tumblr decided to advocate for censorship, and well, if you don’t think that was very bad thinking, then I can’t help you and you certainly should stop reading now. But mostly, I find myself needing a little bit of a platform to rant, so here it is. This is not for you. This is for me. But maybe, if you read it, and you learn something, then it was a little bit more than that, and that’s entirely unnecessary but I’ll be fine with it. Don’t worry, I’ll keep it a secret.

My qualifications 1) I have a Ph.D. from a major research institution in America. What that means, most importantly, is actual training in how to read and understand academic writing. 2) I teach statistics, among other things, and I teach in a public health college at another major research institution in America. 3) I work with epidemiologists, though I don’t claim that title myself (I describe myself a psychometrician with an expertise in educational measurement), and I am currently working on several projects using epidemiological methods. 4) A portion of my work in educational measurement focuses on critical thinking, particularly the development of critical thinking and problem-solving skills.

Premises So, let’s organize this in a logical manner. To do so, we generally start with a series of premises. Here are some of mine. 1) Most people are afraid of dying. 2) The fear of dying plays some part in how people live their lives. 3) People are willing to make some tradeoffs between Safety and Liberty. 4) There is an inverse relationship between Safety and Liberty. The more liberty, the less safety. This is only a unidirectional inverse relationship (as liberty ascends, safety decreases), and NOT true in the opposite direction (as safety ascends, liberty must decrease). This is VERY IMPORTANT. 5) People are poor estimators of their own odds of death, and especially how certain events (say, getting drunk at a party or smoking a hallucinogenic drug or driving recklessly) contribute to their risk of death. 6) There is much unknown about the “novel coronavirus” or SARS-COV_2 or Covid-19 (use whatever term you are comfortable with, the distinction between all of these is arbitrary and unimportant... the root of communication is exchange of messaging between two parties, and all these terms work fine in most cases, since we’re hardly in a lab where it is very important to separate out disease, virus, symptoms, and classifications). 7) Action has been taken by governments and individuals exceeding their statutory authorities. 8) Some of the actions taken by governments and individuals makes no difference in the ability of people to live disease-free, but does have other impacts. 9) The “other impacts” in Premise 8 can directly cause loss of life, as well as other ramifications (lack of social mobility, inability to secure safe food supplies, increase in spousal/partner/child abuse, lack of ability to achieve an education, etc.) that have social and personal consequences for potentially many years, if not generations. This is the most controversial premise, because it has a tendency to operate on some slippery-slope type logic, which is exactly what I am going to rant against in a second. Be wary of this one! But it is important too.

Statistical Problem #1: Never Believe a Point Estimate If you take (my) Stats101 class, and hopefully anybody else’s similar course, one thing that should be a key takeaway is “NEVER BELIEVE A POINT ESTIMATE.” That’s huge. Never. Believe. A. Point. Estimate.

So, for the people who haven’t had a Stats class recently, what is a point estimate?

When you see something like “an estimated 2.2 million Americans will die from the coronavirus if action is not taken,” that “2.2 million” is a point estimate. It is a single point. And point estimates are a hallmark of bad reporting of often bad science. In statistics, any time we make an estimate, we generate a confidence interval: that is, the range around which we believe that estimate to be actually correct. This is because we don’t measure everybody; we measure a small sample, and use math to make estimates. Since we didn’t measure everybody, there is some degree of uncertainty, and so we calculate a range that we think is very likely to contain the actual number. This is called a confidence interval. The wider the confidence interval, the LESS confident you are. The narrower the confidence interval, the more confident you are.

An example. The New York Yankees hit 306 home runs last year, and had 5561 at-bats over 162 games, meaning they hit a home run about once every 20 at-bats. Let’s say I believe the season will be cut in half (so, 81 games instead of 162). So, I want to know how many home runs the Yankees will hit in this shortened season. Let’s work through several examples.

The worst example (okay, not actually the absolute worst, because I could just guess, but pretty bad). In half the games, the Yankees will hit half the home runs. So that’s 306/2, so that’s 153.

Here’s another BAD example, but it does look legit, doesn’t it? Half of 162 is 81. So in half the games, they will have half the at-bats, so that’s 2780.5 at-bats. They hit a home run previously in 5.5026% of their at-bats, and 5.5062% of 2780.5 is 153. The Yankees will hit 153 home runs next year.

A much better example The Yankees averaged 1.8888 home runs a game (306 / 162) last season. If we take the low-end of 1.5 home runs per game (or three home runs every two games), and a high end of 2.25 home runs per game (or 9 home runs every 4 games), we expect the Yankees to hit between 121.5 and 182.25 home runs in the shortened 81 game season.

Is there a perfect example? No. This is a great question. Introductory statistics students will start to add all sorts of great considerations to this question: in the shortened season, won’t pitchers have less time to get warmed up, so home runs will go up? But the same is true for batters, so home runs might go down? If the shortened season starts later, and is played in more colder weather, are there fewer home runs? How did the Yankees roster change? Are they playing against more fly-ball or ground-ball pitchers? Who changed in the rotations of the teams they will play most? Will the rule change about facing three batters or the end of an inning increase the amount of home runs? What about conditioning of athletes who are homebound? No statistical estimate can take into account all factors. And we don’t try to. We just play the games and then call it history. So, what are the problems with the “much better example” besides not adding in all those other things? There is nothing wrong with it, it is just not very precise. A range between 121.5 and 182.25 is more than 60, which is basically half of the low-end. We could be like, 50% wrong from our low end and still be in the range! That’s not very precise!

So, what does this have to do with the current issues? Mostly, I want you to very carefully consider any number you hear without a confidence interval. If you hear a number like “2.2 million,” realize that without a stated confidence interval, the interval could be ANYTHING. Something like, oh, I don’t know... 2.199 million. Yep. In other words, the only thing you could take away from that number is “anywhere between 1 person and 5 million people. And how much are you willing to give up for that particular risk?

Statistical Problem #2: Confidence Intervals WITHIN models So, to this point, hopefully I’ve described all the things that can go wrong if you don’t use a confidence interval in your ANSWER. But what about in the MODEL (or the prediction) itself? Let’s say that, in the above example, we wanted to know how many home runs the Yankees will hit, and we know that MLB will shorten the season. But we don’t know by how much.

So, let’s say that I estimate the season will be between 60 and 100 games. That’s a pretty big margin. Using my earlier estimates, now my confidence interval expands again: 1.5 x 60 for the low end is only 90 home runs, and 2.25 x 100 is 225 home runs! Now my range is [60:225]. That is VERY imprecise!

The important part is that this problem compounds each time we don’t know something. You get a wider and wider range, the less you know. So, the more you want to put into a formula, the more you need to know... and the less you know, the wider your estimate.

Statistical Problem #3: The Missing Denominator None of the math here is particularly difficult, especially with the aid of computers and a bit of training. So, if somebody is presenting it to you like it is super complex, think of them like a stage magician: distract, watch the glitter, and you will never notice my hand pulling the pigeon out of my coat pocket and putting it into my hat.

So, what have models been hiding from you?

The big missing piece is the denominator, or in this case, “how many people have the virus.” That’s a VERY important number. We need several things to build an epidemiological model, and without even an estimate of “how many people have it,” then all the rest of this is pretty much pointless. This is because “how many people have it” is needed for at least the following: 1) Transmission Rate 2) Infection Rate 3) Fatality Rate

Luckily... we’re actually getting close to having that number! Or at least, a confidence interval for that number.

Understanding recent data

https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2020.04.14.20062463v1.full.pdf

Basically, that paper says that in one county with a lot of cases, they estimate there are somewhere between 2.49% and 4.16% of the population infected, and they wouldn’t be surprised if those numbers are between 1.80% and 5.70%. There are about 1.93 MILLION people in Santa Clara county. 1,930,000, and between 2.49 and 4.16 are ALREADY infected. So, let’s math that out, and I’m using their narrower confidence interval here.

Low End (2.49%): 48057 already infected High End (4.16): 80288 already infected.

So, now we have an actual denominator! Or at least, RANGES of one. They’re pretty confident the actual number is somewhere between those.

The date is important here. The data here is April 1. That range (48000-80000) the number of infected people as of April 1. As of April 17th (over two weeks later), Santa Clara had reported 73 deaths. 63 of those had one comorbidity, and only 5 had no comorbidities. Here’s the source.

https://www.sccgov.org/sites/covid19/Pages/dashboard.aspx

So, what’s the fatality rate?

LOW pop prev: No comorbidities: 5 / 48000 = .0001041666. LOW: One or no comorbidities: 68 / 48000 = .00141666 HIGH pop prev: No comorbidities: 5 / 80200 = .000062344 HIGH: One or no comorbidities: 68 / 80200 = .00084788

We’ll go broad here, and assume one comorbidity. Hey, a lot of us have something that is an issue, right? But let’s apply those number to the American Population of approximately 330,000,000 people.

LOW (zero or one comorbidity) pop prev: 330mil * .00141666 = 467,497.8 HIGH (zero or one comorbidity) pop prev: 330mil * .00084788 = 279,800.4

There’s your number. WOW, you say! Wow! A QUARTER TO HALF A MILLION PEOPLE MIGHT DIE! That seems shocking!

It is, super shocking. Remember, that’s the zero-case scenario. The scenario where we do nothing. Worst-case. No vaccine, no medication, no treatment, no social distancing, nada.

Oh, let’s go ahead and go over some other numbers. Not scenarios, actual data.

Motor Vehicle Deaths (2018): 36,560 Medical Error Deaths (2011): Between 210,000 and 400,000 https://journals.lww.com/journalpatientsafety/Fulltext/2013/09000/A_New,_Evidence_based_Estimate_of_Patient_Harms.2.aspx Accidents (2017): 169,936 Diabetes (2017): 83,564 Influenza/Pneumonia (2017): 55,672 Suicide/Self-harm complications: 47,173 https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/fastats/deaths.htm

((Note, because somebody will inevitably ask: The “Death by Guns” rate is a tough one to count, because the majority of gun deaths are also suicides. The Gun Homicide+Accident fatality rate is likely between about 10,000 and 13,000 per year (about a third of the car accident fatality rate). If you’re interested in that number, be sure to look at the data split by category, or if you are interpreting suicides with guns in your gun death count, just be explicit about it, don’t be a pigeon-holding magician.))

Interpretation: Doing nothing at all, we would expect Covid to jump the rates of Influenza/Pneumonia deaths from 7th to 3rd in America, with somewhere between about 340,000 and 530,000 deaths. I arrive at that number by adding 60,000 to the estimates above, for other non-Covid related Flu/Influenza deaths. That would put Influenza/Pneumonia above the estimates of death due to medical errors, and well behind the two leading causes of death in the US (CVD and Cancer). This is provided that there is no emergent medical option.

So, what’s the downside? Why not do all these drastic things (like shelter-in-place orders and be forced to shut down your business) if it prevents between 1/4 and 1/2 of a million deaths? That’s a good question! The point here is that orders have consequences, and most of them are unknown at the time of the order. For example, let’s take a pretty simple policy: requiring every driver to car insurance. Seems like a fundamental thing, right? Well, now you’ve also driven the price of car ownership up. More rural areas (which are often poorer) now have an additional cost burden, that is not shared by people who live in major cities with large public transportation networks. And you’ve created a secondary market (insurance agents) who now have incentives to raise prices, and huge potential for collusion. And what about people who defy that order? Well, that’s tricky-- in some places there are additional policies for covering wrecks involving uninsured drivers, and in those places, car insurance costs more. So you’re paying more, out of your pocket, because somebody else didn’t follow a policy. And that means you have less money to go shopping or go out to eat, which means fewer people at stores have jobs. All of this ties together.

So, what are the unintentional consequences of the shelter-in-place and business-shuttering orders? The most obvious ones are the losses of income, including jobs, and the 10 million accompanying jobless claims. But is that such a big problem? Think about what is happening in homes without jobs... and remember, you are still legally required to pay car insurance. So that’s the direct one.

But there are multitudes of indirect ones. For example, this is not an academic article, but...

https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/investigations/2020/03/21/coronavirus-pandemic-could-become-child-abuse-pandemic-experts-warn/2892923001/

And remember, a lot of children who are subject of abuse are from low-income families. And what did they normally get? Free and reduced-price lunch at schools. Now, they aren’t getting those. Sure, in a few places here and there, some schools are delivering similar meals. But the vast, vast majority of elementary and high-school aged students on free/reduced lunches are not getting them. So that leaves parents (or caretakers) to pick up the burden. Those same parents and caretakers who are filing the 10 million unemployment claims. Uh-oh. Sounds stressful.

Guess what stress does to people? It makes them sick. And you know what happens when you get an ulcer? Hopefully not much, but bad ones can end you up in a hospital. Where there are many procedures, but most of them minor. Unfortunately, hospitals right now are being forbidden from doing elective surgeries. And elective surgeries helped pay for other services, like necessary surgeries and emergency care. So, the ER is literally understaffed, even in regions where there are no COVID patients, because the state has forbidden the tummy tucks that pay the salaries of ER nurses.

You see the tumble here? This is where I cautioned earlier about the slippery slope argument, and it is an absolutely valid critique of what I’m putting here. But we’ve gone past speculation territory and are now in data territory. And (again, work in health care education), I know some people who are starting to see these effects. One of the faculty at my school (teaches our Law course) is a lawyer for a rural hospital service. He has watched them lay off or furlough over 60% of workers. And they have had... wait for it... 0 covid cases. The few that were suspected, they flew down to a much larger hospital. At high cost, because they can’t charge for COVID services.

Meanwhile, you’re talking a rural system that was one of the top employers in four different counties. Laying off or furloughing 60% of workers. The guy was so upset telling me about this that he almost cried, especially because he knew the families of so many of the people his board had just let go.

Any caveats to add? The big caveat that I place on the interpretation here (basically, that’s we’ve VASTLY oversold the risk of this thing) is that we don’t know about secondary infections. If you can get infected twice, and that second infection is harmful or make you able to spread the disease to others who are then harmed, then all these numbers are too low. Bottom-line it for me, WT. Fear leads to the dark side, where you have no freedoms. Don’t give up things because you were scared and because somebody showed you a point of data that you should not believe.

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wrongfullythinking · 5 years ago

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wrongfullythinking · 6 years ago

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We were traveling in the underdark for “Out of the Abyss” recently. Our DM has decided that in rooms where Faerzress (weird magical eminations) can be found, everyone rolls for wild magic after each spell. I also believe our DM uses an extended wild magic list, but I don’t know what happens behind the screen.

The DM rolled a random encounter, and we ended up fighting a group of Slaad and Vrock in a room full of Faerzress. It went something like this:

DM: “Player one, what do you do?”

P1: “I cast healing word on Player 2”

Rolls for Wild Magic, surge happens

DM: “Um… Ok.. A clone of you pops into existence directly beside you. You can use two actions and bonus actions per turn now, but all slots and damage hit you”

P1: “awesome! I use the second action to do it again!”

Now, it’s important to note that P1 was a rather small gnome bard. 3'2", 30lbs.

In the next three rounds he managed to surge - and we all double checked his rolls - four more times.

DM: “I can’t believe…. Your weight increases by… *a couple rolls* 90lbs” - We all die laughing as my character turns into a sphere - “and loses 8 inches of height”

The next round goes by

DM: *facepalming* “you gain another 20lbs, and turn blue”

And that’s how the gnome turned into a giant blueberry.

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wrongfullythinking · 6 years ago

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wrongfullythinking · 6 years ago

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Yesterday we explored Snow Kobolds, but today we look into Swamp Kobolds! If an Arctic aKobold is called a Snowbold, would a swamp one be a Swampbold?

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wrongfullythinking · 6 years ago

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The Leader, the Loser, the Trump?

One of the biggest questions facing democratic primary voters is “how much of your vote is about Trump?” Interestingly though, unlike the Kerry-Bush election, the party is not split in two: an Anti-Bush wing and a Political Change wing. No, everybody is Anti-Trump, but there are two solid wings: we’ll call them “Traditional” and “Progressive.”

“Traditional” Democrats are the ones who believe in things like American jobs, the middle class, and that the American dream is that one day, your kids can attend a better school than you did, and have a bit better job. That if you work hard, you might become a doctor, or possibly even an astronaut. That the military isn’t a bad career, and “blue collar” isn’t a bad word. That the Fourth of July is a good holiday, and we venerate George Washington, even though we acknowledge he came from a different time period.

“Progressive” Democrats are the ones who believe that the “middle class” is a fallacy perpetrated by the elitist, and social mobility largely a farce. That the system is never going to pull you out of debt, and trying to get a suburban single-family home and stay in a marriage your whole life is a foolish waste of resources. That change needs to be immediate and drastic. After all, if we ban the automobile, then car accidents go down to 0, and there are a LOT more of those than gun deaths. Oh, and carbon emissions. Because if we all just bring our own bags to the grocery store, the seas will stop rising. I may find the extreme edge of the progressive wing a bit... overdramatic.

The problem is that the nomination is not clear on where these lines are. Healthcare is a fool’s errand, because the system has so much history engraved in it that trying to figure out someone’s political views based on only that issue is like trying to figure out which mountains contain gold by studying the trees that grow on them. And that’s the real problem with the nomination at the moment. We’re not really sure who is Progressive and who is Traditional, because we’re hearing all this noise about whether illegal immigrants should get that non-existent free healthcare package. It’s like hearing people argue that when dolphins learn to fly, we’ll really need to revise our air traffic control laws. I mean, it’s not wrong, but it certainly doesn’t seem the best way to address the issue.

So, back to Trump. The impeachment flag is a false one, and a giant waste of taxpayer money (by the way, so is continuing to investigate a dead guy). But the primary voter has a decision: try and sort through all the best policies for them, or pick the person they think is most likely to defeat Trump?

On to the ratings!

Biden: 35% to win the nomination Biden’s going to be the frontrunner until either Warren or Sanders gives up, and more and more, it looks like that might be Sanders. Honestly, if Sanders got out tomorrow, I think Biden would have less than a 15% chance of securing the nomination, and we’d be talking a Harris/Warren showdown going into next Spring. But, Biden will remain the top as long as Sanders and Warren both stay in. It’s a little bit like Alabama and the SEC. If all the SEC teams are ranked at the top in the preseason poll, and they only lose to each other, than it is impossible for a PAC school to break into the rankings. Gaffes are nice fodder, but the people backing Biden knew he’d be trolled by Trevor Noah.�� They don’t care about that. They’re solidly in the “beat Trump” camp and believe that Biden’s the most that can get the most votes.

Biden has two biggest vulnerabilities, and neither of them are his gaffes, his voting record (seriously, we care about a busing vote in the 70s or a crime bill in the 90s?), or his milquetoast presence at debates. They are the divided opposition from Sanders/Warren (as stated in the previous paragraph) and his connection to Obama. This is a coat-tails presidential run. And how’d that work out for Hillary? If voters worry about that, then Biden’s support could begin to run dry. Worse, if Obama endorses a different candidate (which I do not see him doing until after the nomination is final), then Biden is done. His numbers as Obama Part 2 are decent. His numbers as Joe Biden? Less thrilling.

Warren: 30% to win the nomination The only invulnerable presence on this list, Warren just needs to continue to make strong statements, shore up support, and get Bernie off her back. I become more convinced by the day that Warren is the strongest democratic candidate not named Michelle Obama or Oprah Winfrey, but Bernie is a problem. Warren does need to get voters to read her proposals, and stop denying herself as an academic elite. Her “really, I’m friendly!” posts are not helping her at all, and she needs to stop trying to be everything to everybody. Stick with the debates, the policy proposals, and don’t make yourself into a meme.

Sanders: 10% to win the nomination Sanders has one path forward: Harris and Warren both get out of the race. Right now, I think one of them will push towards the bitter end, and that eliminates Sanders, and may draw just enough support away from each other to nominate Biden. Sanders doesn’t look progressive any more, he looks foggy. Like he’s raging against something that most of us don’t really care about. His proposals lack precision, are lofty on idealism, and nobody believes they can actually ever get any of them through Congress. I was not the biggest Sanders fan four years ago, but I did think he was a more passionate candidate than Clinton. Now? He’s not passionate, he’s somewhere between crotchety old man screaming “you screwed up last time, you owe it to me this time,” and a sulking teenager who thinks the world would be better if everybody just followed his directions. Very similar to a certain president. That’s not the look Sanders wants, but it is not a tough one to draw.

Harris: 20% to win the nomination Can Harris pull something off? Well, the unlikeable female is the unelectable female, and that sexism isn’t going anywhere. And I’m still not sure anybody likes Harris. And can we please get over the “good for her for holding Biden accountable for busing?” Seriously, if that is your major policy point, you’ve already lost the general election to Trump. He’s immune to being called a racist. Better find a different strategy. I can see a situation where Warren gets out, Biden alienates the black community, and Harris carries enough of the mid-range primary voting to take the South and win the nomination. And that’s not too difficult a conversation to imagine. But frankly, I see Harris as Warren’s VP.

All others: 5% Could someone emerge from the pack? Possibly. But it’s not going to be Andrew Yang, who has one talking point that’s pretty pointless. It’s not going to be Castro, who is even less likable than Harris and who Trump will destroy. It could be Buttigieg, but that would take some serious injuries to the top tier of candidates. Gillibrand is done if she can’t qualify for the next debate. Booker can have a presidential air, but he’s too often in the mud to seem like a departure from Trump. I’d like to see more Gillibrand, Buttigieg, and Gabbard, but I’m not sure any of them will be around long enough to make an impact.

#politics #democratic nomination

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wrongfullythinking · 6 years ago

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wrongfullythinking · 6 years ago

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wrongfullythinking · 6 years ago

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And always remember: extraordinary claims demand extraordinary evidence, and never confuse facts with opinions, or vice versa.

Dr. Karl Shuker, cryptozoologist. (via cryptid-wendigo)

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wrongfullythinking · 6 years ago

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Are we down to 4?

Some are tolling the bell for Biden. I think it’s early, but I do agree that he’s got probably two more debates to figure out something. Honestly, I don’t see any of the top five dropping out before California, but if one is to get out early, could it be Biden?

The Facts For... He seemed pretty reluctant to get into this thing to start.

He’s not Obama.

He has the longest record in the field, and long record are not a boon. In this world of context-free revisionist history that is sweeping the left (seriously Nike?), the longer your record, the more shots you are going to take.

He’s not Obama.

Biden has never shown resiliency. On one hand, it is hard to point to the big losses in his career (even his previous aspirations at higher office) because he’s always back, smiling as he signs some paper or deal. But the problem is, he’s always back because it seems like he never wants to dive in with both feet. The perfect Vice. Hard to see it as presidential.

The lack of a platform. You know, when Bush was up for re-election, I said “The democrats will never win on a platform of “**** Bush”.” They tried it, they lost. Trump may not be Bush, but he probably has a stronger base, and I don’t think “Not Trump” is a platform. And frankly, I’m pretty excited that Warren and a few others are not going to let the primary be about beating Trump, a trend that I hope continues.

He’s still, really, not Obama.

The Facts Against He has reached deep into pockets that, although very deep, may be a little miffed if he drops out and “wastes” their money at this point.

The racist argument is a terrible way to go after him, because it almost guarantees you’ll lose the General Election. Any candidate that calls Trump a racist will cede the high ground that the moderates really want from a candidate. Yes, I know that Trump is hardly a high-ground candidate. But he’s an incumbent riding a recovering economy that still has remarkably low interest rates on mortgages (and I know, simultaneously low interest rates on savings account, but Americans are terrible at saving anyways). It doesn’t matter if it is true, but a mud-slinging match with Trump is a poor way to go about the matter. And starting out the Primary with mud-slinging the racism card at a pretty solid candidate is a really, really bad idea. Because this is a bad idea and it will play it, riding it out means Biden should stay in.

We’ve not heard from a single voter with a primary vote yet, and Biden is still likely to pull either Iowa or NH. If he does, it is hard to see him dropping out. However, if he doesn’t outright win at least one of those two, I think that’s it.

The Obama Endorsement has not dropped yet. Until Obama endorses somebody, it is hard to count Biden out. Honestly, this whole primary could end up in a murky mess, and Obama might have to step in and sort it out with a personal endorsement. The problem there is... he’ll regret not doing it month agos, as well the entire party.

How much does the Debate matter? Remember at this point, we’re more about eliminating candidates than confirming them. It is not about “who is in the lead” but rather “who is out.” And that means the casualty of the debate isn’t Biden, because he’s so far from out. If I was an analyst, the only camp I’d be jumping out of is Beto’s. If I’m working for Beto, I’m giving Warren, Harris, or Buttigieg’s campaign a call.

Did anybody else break out? Harris did well, but I already had her as a known quantity. Warren was exactly as good as expected, but she’ll survive this first bit of the race no matter what happens, so it is too early to say. There seems to be two “early-ins” from the pundits: Booker and Castro.

First off, can you imagine “President Castro”? That just sounds... I mean, I’m sorry, but remember Cuba? Is that a thing that will hurt older voters? Possibly, I’m not sure. Can you be done in by a name? Likely not, because I remember at least half a dozen times in the early days of 2007 when “Senator Osama” was referenced on national television. He got that sorted pretty quick. Still, I’m not seeing Castro commanding anything other than a percentage of the LatinX vote, and a percentage of the LatinX vote wins you nothing.

Booker never came off as the Obama-Successor he wants to be. Maybe it is the shouting, maybe it is the anger, maybe it is the height and the frank problem that our country is scared of large black men. Jon Bones Jones for President, by the way, he will take anybody on. But I’m not sure what Booker can do to beat Harris. He’s sounding a little like Harris-lite, and that’s not a good place to be in. If she drops out, I think he could slide into a slot that takes the minorities away from the older, whiter candidates, but while Harris in the field, I think her argument there is stronger and her momentum is certainly riding high. If Harris gets sunk by a wave of anti-prosecutor “she’s too mean” liberalism [I dearly hope not, but it’s happened before], it is hard to see Booker not getting hit by that same wave. So although I see Booker being relevant, I don’t see him getting past Harris, and that leaves him no path through Sanders, Biden, or Warren.

Updated Percentages? To win the nomination: Warren: 35 Biden: 30 Harris: 15 Sanders: 15 Buttigieg: 5

#politics #democrats #debate #biden

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