Civility, ergodicity, false prophets

“Don’t do to others what you would not want done to you.”

Anonymous, Silver Rule

Background

A Twitter user asks what the link is between smoking and Covid transmission.

Another user states that the upcoming confinement will not be complied with.

Both want to give an image of an enlightened and independent citizen. Personally, I don’t know how these two individuals have managed their day-to-day lives with regard to safety distance, use of masks, hand washing, evening applause, nightly parties, post-applause pots and pans, flags of different colours, spitting on others, use of Bach flowers… As you can see, the spectrum can go from the reasonable and rational to the imbecilic and crass with dizzying ease.

Several thousand people exercise their civic right to demonstrate to deny the evidence, proving once again that having the right to an action does not necessarily make it meaningful. These people also wield a fierce independence and want to signify themselves as epitomes of advanced thinking and civic-mindedness.

The question is this: how independent can one qualify oneself as independent? This is an old dichotomy, pointed out by people much wiser than me, such as Socrates, Plato, Pericles, Aristotle, or Cicero. It is partly related to the dichotomy between centring political action on the individual or on the state.

Spain

The problem in our battered, immature and Manichean Spanish society is that pseudo-enlightened people demand the best of both worlds. Absolute freedom for the individual, and punishment from the state for those who oppose me. But we are not alone in our decadence. We have reached a vicious confluence between the doctrine that advocates the use of positive rights over negative rights and vestigial notions of the second current. The Anglo-Saxon world, traditionally based on the existence of negative rights, is following an analogous path starting from the opposite shore. And that is why both worlds, Latin and Anglo-Saxon, are now in the same schizoid situation.

Schizoid, yes. The same person can, in the space of a few weeks, go from praising Dr. Simón’s comments, applauding his health workers, to denying the seriousness of the pandemic, taking a plane with the whole family to the Costa del Sol, demanding the resignation of the entire government and the crucifixion of Dr. Simón. The nonsense culminates in the denial of the very existence of the disease. And without batting an eyelid. Few voices have been critical at the beginning and even fewer are critical now. And it is possible to be critical. There have been rights and wrongs. With the critics, who seem like personal enemies, I often find myself reminding them of Fernando Simón’s successes, and with those in favour, who sometimes seem like groupies, I am sometimes obliged to point out the mistakes and blunders.

We are living in a situation that cries out for a national consensus, lest it end in barbarism (since there is no historical record of it ever having ended in socialism) or tyranny. We are all laying the foundations for the emergence of a new caudillo. On the other hand, the government must try to appeal to both individual responsibility and collective conscience. This is a bit complicated, considering that collective conscience, seen from the most elemental and tribal point of view, has been systematically destroyed by the institutions and the market. The systems are perfectly designed to produce the results they do, says the expert. Our system of (mis)government is good proof of this. And we are back to individual Manichaeism. The same voices that cried out against confinement in the spring months, citing excessive government paternalism, are now demanding that the President of the Government come out of his holiday retreat and «bring order». There never was any order. And there never will be if we citizens continue to behave like spoiled brats, whether Pedro Sánchez governs, or El Cid Campeador, as some old-fashioned people seem to demand.

From the Reformation, to the < 300 characters, passing through the Enlightenment (in the Spanish way).

From a very early age, I have been taught and trained to react with suspicion, if not contempt, against any philosophical stance coming from the USA. In my immediate environment, the good side of the iron curtain was the side that lost. The other side was the oppressor side. This view has served me to be eminently critical of the current structure of society, but for too long it has prevented me from seeing the cultural virtues of the Anglo-Saxon world. The years have made me less radical and more curious, and this has allowed me to remain attentive to some discourses that creak around difficult issues, where the need for the individual to make meaning and generate buoys that can serve as a guide for those who are trying not to drown in the ocean of information in which we are involved on a daily basis.

In our environment, we are slowly moving towards a society based on state clientelism, while our inner self revolts against the idea that too much of our daily life is imposed on us from an external source. An external source, which is less and less subject to any form of accountability. It is worth considering where we are moving from. It may sound somewhat anachronistic, but it is obvious that the generations that preceded us counted on the existence of a higher authority that dictated how we should go about our daily lives, not only morally but in many cases materially as well.

In a context of enormous asymmetry between leaders and the led, massive poverty, high mortality in all age groups, ignorance of the rudiments that govern the functioning of reality, the natural need to give meaning to the above, enables the existence of a closed set of rules, beliefs, taboos and prejudices that provide answers to all the concerns previously exposed. The idea of Catholicism immediately arises in our not so recent history, as does the idea of Lutheranism and its iterations in the Anglo-Saxon world.

Our persistence on the counter-reformationist side partly, but not entirely, determines our tendency to expect answers to rain down on us from above. Our attempt to emancipate ourselves from this idea, together with the way we have received democracy from the previous generation, explains our vitriolic and inappropriate response to the current conjuncture.

Moreover, with the advent of the twentieth century and the progressive abandonment of theism, the vacuum is left to the mercy of a new substitute for religion: ideology. Barring conjectures about the existence and form of an afterlife, ideology perfectly fulfils the premises discussed above for religion. Yuval Noah Harari argues quite consistently, in Sapiens, that capitalism and socialism perfectly fill the gap left by God and should be considered, in their own way, religions in their own right.

The arrival of the Enlightenment had a strange effect on our country, or at least that is the idea I came away with. Our Enlightened Despotism was more Despotism than Enlightenment, perhaps because we were on the wrong side of the Reformation in the period immediately before the Enlightenment.

Flash forward. My parents’ generation was born into a national-catholicist dictatorship, received an education superior to that of the previous generation, became emancipated and built a democracy. What kind? The only possible kind, of compromise, so that the not-so-ancient fratricidal enemies keep their guard down. It is like in fantasy legends, a monster is locked up in a grotto, a hole, a castle, another dimension, since it cannot be eliminated. So at least people are safe. The problem is that people tend to forget the nature of monsters, and that the guardians also tend to forget the small details, and stop paying attention to certain keys. Some keys lead to really rotten places.

The compromise illustrated above implies accepting outcomes that satisfy no one, it implies being pragmatic, renouncing asymptotes, utopias.

Ergodicity and Covid-19

My favourite teacher used to say that nothing should be defined in negative terms. So I will listen to Ms Mateos and give a twist to Nassim N. Taleb’s definition of the term in «Skin in the game».

Ergodicity: a situation in which observed probabilities are applicable to future processes.

The concept itself could be the subject of a blog entry, but a brief reflection already gives us an idea of how wide-ranging it can be. To continue paraphrasing the Lebanese thinker, and to give a couple of examples, what cannot be considered ergodic?

1) The relationship between food intake and the physical integrity of the turkey in the US as Thanksgiving approaches.

2) The long-term exposure of your pension plan (not the turkey’s, yours and mine too).

It has to do with the decoupling that occurs between the probability of an iterated event and the assumption of independence between events. In other words: in the old problem of flipping a balanced coin, where the chance of heads and tails is exactly 0.5 respectively, each flip is assumed to be independent of the previous one. Formally, theoretically, this is correct, and classical probability theory teaches us that if we make a very large number of tosses, the frequency of each outcome will tend to that 0.5. It also tells us, because they are independent, that the result of one throw does not affect the probability of obtaining one result or another in the next. Now, if we had tossed a coin 100 times and got heads 99 times, can we really think that the chance of getting tails on the 100th toss is 0.5? For this reason, the mathematical definition of probability, especially the classical one, contains many problems and contradictions.

Ignorant people who despise the danger to which they subject themselves and their loved ones (not to mention the strangers they may end up condemning), do not understand the problem of ergodicity. It is not the same for 1000 people to play a game of Blackjack as it is for one person to try to play a thousand games. In the first case there may or may not be an event of ruin. In the second case, ruin is guaranteed.

Children have a better concept of ergodicity than the adult twitterers illustrated above.

In the case of Covid, the pandemic severity denialists seem to completely ignore a number of key insights:

1) We have never been exposed to a phenomenon of this nature. It is simply a lack of knowledge, a lack of experience, that cries out for caution, not audacity.

2) We are talking about linked events and occurrences. The actions I take in terms of my personal safety and that of my loved ones necessarily affect my environment.

We make a somewhat more morbid reflection in an aside. By the time the original post was published, Covid had killed more than 40,000 people in Spain only. Each of us, if we are lucky enough to reach the age of 75, will have known at most around 400 different people. This means that Covid has wiped off the face of the earth as many people as a hundred independent Spaniards would have known in a lifetime. In other words, imagine that all the people you know cease to exist in the space of 4 months. Imagine that happens to you and 100 people you know. If you are one of the people who have exercised your democratic right to demonstrate, and have done so against the use of the masks or denying in any way the magnitude of this event, but you have two fingers in front, after reading these lines perhaps you will feel like reading more, becoming more informed and, hopefully, raising your digital voice in an outcry against these false prophets.

Reflection on those who claim that this disease «only» affects elderly people: this stupid argument can be refuted in several ways. The simplest is to look at the tables of affected/dead people provided by the Ministry of Health. A single person (and it is not a single person, as you know), disqualifies the argument. Assuming that the life of a young person would matter more than that of an elderly person, which is already quite vomitous without going into details, it is only necessary for the size of the pie to increase sufficiently for us to see lethal cases in young people. That is without going into the particular epidemiological profile we are witnessing in recent weeks, where the vast majority of those infected are in my own age cohort.

Then there is the childish argument that the current curve is only because there is more testing, that these are asymptomatic. If this is so, what are the proportionately increasing admissions, a hallucination?

Doctors for Truth. 21st century hawkers

outlined at the beginning of this post. With the idea of commenting on the phenomenon in this Blog, I tried to do some research on the group and its leaders. I came across a strange video on Youtube, where María José Martínez Albarracín, one of the most prominent exponents of this association, explained her position on the matter. I even took notes, in my deluded intention to make a classical argumentation type discussion and somehow promote critical thinking, as you know, one of the ideas behind this Blog. Wrong. I lasted less than half an hour on the video, which is how long it took the «doctor» to mention Stefan Lanka as an authority on virology. Who is Stefan Lanka? None other than an HIV denier.

I have never liked to put my profession and my job before anything else in any argument, but here it seems essential. The first young person who died of me died of cerebral toxoplasmosis, a disease made possible by this person’s refusal to take antiretrovirals.

After Martínez Albarracín quoted Stefan Lanka as an authority on virology, it was clear that there was no more time to waste listening to anything he had to say, at least for me, who have the training and empirical experience to know that what he says is nothing more than nonsense.

The problem is that there are many people who are defenceless against the hucksters of the 21st century, such as María Jóse Martínez Albarracín and the whole Médicos por la Verdad clique. The vast majority of people have no reason to know medicine. It is the sacred duty of doctors, if there is anything sacred left in the world, not to take actions that endanger the lives of others.

I dare say that all these «colleagues» are violating by word, deed and omission the principle of Primum non nocere, and I wish them nothing but the full weight of the law upon them.

However, their delirious position would have an argumentative-philosophical salvation if they would agree to the following (contributions welcome):

1) Working as volunteers, WITHOUT PROTECTION EQUIPMENT, attending Covid-19 patients or processing their samples.

2) Submitting to a double-blind experimental allocation study, in which one group was inoculated with placebo in one group versus SARS-2-CoV in another.

3) Refusing medical care should they become infected in the course of their delusional actions.

4) Financially or materially reimburse with their own property and assets those who would listen to them as «health professionals» and become infected.

5) Allow their partners, their elders or their children to be exposed to this «fundamentally mild disease».

I want you to know that as an Association, as a collective, you cannot arouse more disgust in me. Personally, I wish you to reflect, to study, to retract. Every innocent person who listens to your ideas is a potential victim. You are adding to the chain of ergodicity. Since you have no brains, please have a conscience.

I have been equally disgusted by the «vestigial» press, who in an attempt to hunt clicks, have for the most part treated this collective with an objectivity and equanimity they do not deserve. Nor have they given the public any clues as to how to form their own opinions about the group and its positions. If this is the behaviour of the vestigial press on every issue where access to information is unequal, they deserve their early demise.

Another day we will talk about the fasts, PROMISED.