(Worth reading article by Naseem Nicholas Taleb, a Lebanese American mathematician statistician who writes that six serious errors in the start of pandemic led to serious consequences of loss of life and money. Bureaucrats ignored simple solutions. f.sheikh)

SIX ERRORS: 1) missing the compounding effects of masks, 2) missing the nonlinearity of the probability of infection to viral exposures, 3) missing absence of evidence (of benefits of mask wearing) for evidence of absence (of benefits of mask wearing), 4) missing the point that people do not need governments to produce facial covering: they can make their own, 5) missing the compounding effects of statistical signals, 6) ignoring the Non-Aggression Principle by pseudolibertarians (masks are also to protect others from you; it’s a multiplicative process: every person you infect will infect others).

In fact masks (and faceshields) supplemented with constraints of superspreader events can save us trillions of dollars in future lockdowns (and lawsuits) and be potentially sufficient (under adequate compliance) to stem the pandemic. Bureaucrats do not like simple solutions.

First error: missing the compounding effect

People who are good at exams (and become bureaucrats, economists, or hacks), my experience has been, are not good at understanding nonlinearities and dynamics.

The WHO, CDC and other bureaucracies initially failed to quickly realize that the benefits of masks compound, simply because two people are wearing them and you have to look at the interaction.

Let us say (to simplify) that masks reduce both transmission and reception to p. What effect on the R0(that is, the rate of spreading of the infection)?

Simply the naive approach (used by the CDC/WHO bureaucrats and other imbeciles) is to say if masks reduce the transmission probability to ¼, one would think it would then drop from, say R0= 5, to R0=1 ¼. Yuuge, but there is better.

For one should count both sides. Under our simplification, with p=1/4 we get R0′= p² R0 . The drop in R becomes 93.75%! You divide R by 16! Even with masks working at 50% we get a 75% drop in R0.

Full Article

Social Media sites are struggling how to handle some of Donald Trump’s misleading, outright false, and sometime violence inciting posts. Twitter and Snapchat have started to flag some of the postings but Facebook is refusing so far to censor or flag any of the Trump’s postings.

Freedom of Speech protected under 1^st Amendment applies only to Government and not private entities or individuals. It bars government to censor or bar any speech with few exceptions such as obscenity and speech that incites imminent lawless action.

When private entities like Twitter flag or restrict certain speech, they are also exercising their freedom of speech right to restrict certain postings as they see fit according to their own policy or morals. However, as a business, it is a slippery slope from public relations point of view because they may be perceived as siding with one political side or the other. Facebook’s position, although hated by many, is the proper approach. If Trump is posting lies on Facebook, others have equal access to post the truth in reply and let the readers decide. Ironically, in all this saga, it is President Trump who is violating the 1^st Amendment by signing executive order to take away protections for content posted on social media sites