# Response to Oxford paper on covid-19

Here is my response to the paper from Oxford (Lourenco et al.) arguing that novel coronavirus infection may already be widespread in the UK and Italy.  The result is based on fitting a disease spreading model, called an SIR model, to the cumulative number of deaths. SIR models usually consist of ordinary differential equations (ODEs) for the fraction of people in a given population who are susceptible to the infectious agent (S), the number infected (I),  and the number recovered (R). There is one other state in the model, which is the fraction who die from the disease (D).  The SIR model considers transitions between these states.  In the case of ODEs, the states are treated as continuous quantities, which is not a bad approximation for a large population, and each equation in the model describes the rate of change of a state (hence differential equation).  There are parameters in the model governing the rate of different interactions in each  equation, for example there is a parameter for the rate of increase in S whenever an S interacts with an I, and then there is a rate of loss of an I, which transitions into either R or D.  The Oxford group model D somewhat differently.  Instead of a transition from I into D they consider that a fraction of (1-S) will die with some delay between time of infection and death.

They estimate the model parameters by fitting the model to the cumulative number of deaths.  They did this instead of fitting directly to I because that is unreliable as many people who have Covid-19 have not been tested. They also only fit to the first 15 days from the first recorded death since they want to model what happens before social distancing was implemented.  They find that the model is consistent with a scenario where the probability that an infected person gets severe enough to be flagged is low and thus the disease is much more wide spread than expected. I redid the analysis without assuming that the parameters need to have particular values (called priors in Bayesian inference and machine learning) and showed that a wide range of parameters will fit the data. This is because the model is under-constrained by death data alone so even unrealistic parameters can work.  To be fair, the authors only proposed that this is a possibility and thus the population should be tested for anti-bodies to the coronavirus (SARS-CoV-2) to see if indeed there may already be herd immunity in place. However, the press has run with the result and that is why I think it is important to examine the result more closely.

# The tragedy of low probability events

We live in an age of fear and yet life (in the US at least) is the safest it has ever been. Megan McArdle blames coddling parents and the media in a Washington Post column. She argues that cars and swimming pools are much more dangerous than school shootings and kidnappings yet we mostly ignore the former and obsess about the latter. However, to me dying from an improbable event is just so much more tragic than dying from an expected one. I would be much less despondent meeting St. Peter at the Pearly Gates if I happened to expire from cancer or heart disease than if I were to be hit by an asteroid while weeding my garden. We are so scared now because we have never been safer. We would fear terrorist attacks less if they were more frequent. This is the reason that I would never want a major increase in lifespan. I most certainly would like to last long enough to see my children become independent but anything beyond that is bonus time. Nothing could be worse to me than immortality. The pain of any tragedy would be unbearable. Life would consist of an endless accumulation of sad memories. The way out is to forget but that to me is no different from death. What would be the point of living forever if you were to erase much of it. What would a life be if you forgot the people and things that you loved? To me that is no life at all.

# Optimizing luck

Each week on the NPR podcast How I Built This, host Guy Raz interviews a founder of a successful enterprise like James Dyson or Ben and Jerry. At the end of most segments, he’ll ask the founder how much of their success do they attribute to luck and how much to talent. In most cases, the founder will modestly say that luck played a major role but some will add that they did take advantage of the luck when it came. One common thread for these successful people is that they are extremely resilient and aren’t afraid to try something new when things don’t work at first.

There are two ways to look at this. On the one hand there is certainly some selection bias. For each one of these success stories there are probably hundreds of others who were equally persistent and worked equally hard but did not achieve the same success. It is like the infamous con where you send 1024 people a two outcome prediction about a stock.  The prediction will be correct in 512 of them so the next week you send those people another prediction and so on. After 10 weeks, one person will have received the correct prediction 10 times in a row and will think you are infallible. You then charge them a King’s ransom for the next one.

Yet, it may be possible to optimize luck and you can see this with Jensen’s inequality. Suppose $x$ represents some combination of your strategy and effort level and $\phi(x)$ is your outcome function.  Jensen’s inequality states that the average or expectation value of a convex function (e.g. a function that bends upwards) is greater than (or equal to) the function of the expectation value. Thus, $E(\phi(x)) \ge \phi(E(x))$. In other words, if your outcome function is convex then your average outcome will be larger just by acting in a random fashion. During “convex” times, the people who just keep trying different things will invariably be more successful than those who do nothing. They were lucky (or they recognized) that their outcome was convex but their persistence and willingness to try anything was instrumental in their success. The flip side is that if they were in a nonconvex era, their random actions would have led to a much worse outcome. So, do you feel lucky?

# Catch-22 of our era

The screen on my wife’s iPhone was shattered this week and she had not backed up the photos. The phone seems to still be functioning otherwise so we plugged it into the computer to try to back it up but it requires us to unlock the phone and we can’t enter in the password. My wife refused to pay the 99 cents or whatever Apple charges to increase the disk space for iCloud to automatically back up the phone, so I suggested we just pay the ransom money and then the phone will back up automatically. I currently pay both Apple and Dropbox extortion money. However, since she hadn’t logged onto iCloud in maybe ever, it sent a code to her phone under the two-factor authentication scheme to type in to the website, but of course we can’t see it on her broken screen so that idea is done. We called Apple and they said you could try to change the number on her iCloud account to my phone but that was two days ago and they haven’t complied. So my wife gave up and tried to order a new phone. Under the new system of her university, which provides her phone, she can get a phone if she logs onto this site to request it. The site requires VPN and in order to get VPN she needs to, you guessed it, type in a code sent to her phone. So you need a functioning phone to order a new phone. Basically, tech products are not very good. Software still kind of sucks and is not really improving. My Apple Mac is much worse now than it was 10 years ago. I still have trouble projecting stuff on a screen. I will never get into a self driving car made by any tech company. I’ll wait for Toyota to make one; my (Japanese) car always works (my Audi was terrible).

# Missing the trend

I have been fortunate to have been born at a time when I had the opportunity to witness the birth of several of the major innovations that shape our world today.  I have also managed to miss out on capitalizing on every single one of them. You might make a lot of money betting against what I think.

I was a postdoctoral fellow in Boulder, Colorado in 1993 when my very tech savvy advisor John Cary introduced me and his research group to the first web browser Mosaic shortly after it was released. The web was the wild west in those days with just a smattering of primitive personal sites authored by early adopters. The business world had not discovered the internet yet. It was an unexplored world and people were still figuring out how to utilize it. I started to make a list of useful sites but unlike Jerry Yang and David Filo, who immediately thought of doing the same thing and forming a company, it did not remotely occur to me that this activity could be monetized. Even though I struggled to find a job in 1994, was fairly adept at programming, watched the rise of Yahoo! and the rest of the internet startups, and had friends at Stanford and Silicon Valley, it still did not occur to me that perhaps I could join in too.

Just months before impending unemployment, I managed to talk my way into being the first post doc of Jim Collins, who just started as a non-tenure track research assistant professor at Boston University.  Midway through my time with Jim, we had a meeting with Charles Cantor, who was a professor at BU then, about creating engineered organisms that could eat oil. Jim subsequently recruited graduate student Tim Gardner, now CEO of Riffyn, to work on this idea. I thought we should create a genetic Hopfield network and I showed Tim how to use XPP to simulate the various models we came up with. However, my idea seemed too complicated to implement biologically so when I went to Switzerland to visit Wulfram Gerstner at the end of 1997,  Tim and Jim, freed from my meddling influence, were able create the genetic toggle switch and the field of synthetic biology was born.

I first learned about Bitcoin in 2009 and had even thought about mining some. However, I then heard an interview with one of the early developers, Gavin Andresen, and he failed to understand that because the supply of Bitcoins is finite, prices denominated in it would necessarily deflate over time. I was flabbergasted that he didn’t comprehend the basics of economics and was convinced that Bitcoin would eventually fail. Still, I could have mined thousands of Bitcoins on a laptop back then, which would be worth tens of millions today.  I do think blockchains are an important innovation and my former post-bac fellow Wally Xie is even the CEO of the blockchain startup QChain. Although I do not know where cryptocurrencies and blockchains will be in a decade, I do know that I most likely won’t have a role.

I was in Pittsburgh during the late nineties/early 2000’s in one of the few places where neural networks/deep learning, still called connectionism, was king. Geoff Hinton had already left Carnegie Mellon for London by the time I arrived at Pitt but he was still revered in Pittsburgh and I met him in London when I visited UCL. I actually thought the field had great promise and even tried to lobby our math department to hire someone in machine learning for which I was summarily dismissed and mocked. I recruited Michael Buice to work on the path integral formulation for neural networks because I wanted to write down a neural network model that carried both rate and correlation information so I could implement a correlation based learning rule. Michael even proposed that we work on an algorithm to play Go but obviously I demurred. Although, I missed out on this current wave of AI hype, and probably wouldn’t have made an impact anyway, this is the one area where I may get a second chance in the future.

# Jurgen Moser Lecture

The SIAM Jorgen Moser Lecture prize is now open for nominations.

# Technology and inference

In my previous post, I gave an example of how fake news could lead to a scenario of no update of posterior probabilities. However, this situation could occur just from the knowledge of technology. When I was a child, fantasy and science fiction movies always had a campy feel because the special effects were unrealistic looking. When Godzilla came out of Tokyo Harbour it looked like little models in a bathtub. The Creature from the Black Lagoon looked like a man in a rubber suit. I think the first science fiction movie that looked astonishing real was Stanley Kubrick’s 1968 masterpiece 2001: A Space Odyssey, which adhered to physics like no others before and only a handful since. The simulation of weightlessness in space was marvelous and to me the ultimate attention to detail was the scene in the rotating space station where a mild curvature in the floor could be perceived. The next groundbreaking moment was the 1993 film Jurassic Park, which truly brought dinosaurs to life. The first scene of a giant sauropod eating from a tree top was astonishing. The distinction between fantasy and reality was forever gone.

The effect of this essentially perfect rendering of anything into a realistic image is that we now have a plausible reason to reject any evidence. Photographic evidence can be completely discounted because the technology exists to create completely fabricated versions. This is equally true of audio tapes and anything your read on the Internet. In Bayesian terms, we now have an internal model or likelihood function that any data could be false. The more cynical you are the closer this constant is to one. Once the likelihood becomes insensitive to data then we are in the same situation as before. Technology alone, in the absence of fake news, could lead to a world where no one ever changes their mind. The irony could be that this will force people to evaluate truth the way they did before such technology existed, which is that you believe people (or machines) that you trust through building relationships over long periods of time.