# How to make a fast but bad COVID-19 test good

Among the myriad of problems we are having with the COVID-19 pandemic, faster testing is one we could actually improve. The standard test for the presence of SARS-CoV-2 virus uses PCR (polymerase chain reaction), which amplifies targeted viral RNA. It is accurate (high specificity) but requires relatively expensive equipment and reagents that are currently in short supply. There are reports of wait times of over a week, which renders a test useless for contact tracing.

An alternative to PCR is an antigen test that tests for the presence of protein fragments associated with COVID-19. These tests can in principle be very cheap and fast, and could even be administered on paper strips. They are generally much more unreliable than PCR and thus have not been widely adopted. However, as I show below by applying the test multiple times, the noise can be suppressed and a poor test can be made arbitrarily good.

The performance of binary tests are usually gauged by two quantities – sensitivity and specificity. Sensitivity is the probability that you test positive (i.e are infected) given that you actually are positive (true positive rate). Specificity is the probability that you test negative if you actually are negative (true negative rate). For a pandemic, sensitivity is more important than specificity because missing someone who is infected means you could put lots of people at risk while a false positive just means the person falsely testing positive is inconvenienced (provided they cooperatively self-isolate). Current PCR tests have very high specificity but relatively low sensitivity (as low as 0.7) and since we don’t have enough capability to retest, a lot of tested infected people could be escaping detection.

The way to make any test have arbitrarily high sensitivity and specificity is to apply it multiple times and take some sort of average. However, you want to do this with the fewest number of applications. Suppose we administer $n$ tests on the same subject, the probability of getting more than $k$ positive tests if the person is positive is $Q(k,n,q) = 1 - CDF(k|n,q)$, where $CDF$ is the cumulative distribution function of the Binomial distribution (i.e. probability that the number of Binomial distributed events is less than or equal to $k$). If the person is negative then the probability of  $k$ or fewer positives is $R(k,n,r) = CDF(k|n,1-r)$. We thus want to find the minimal $n$ given a desired sensitivity and specificity, $q'$ and $r'$. This means that we need to solve the constrained optimization problem: find the minimal $n$ under the constraint that $k < n$, $Q(k,n,q) = \ge q'$ and $R(k,n,r)\ge r'$. $Q$ decreases and $R$ increases with increasing $k$ and vice versa for $n$. We can easily solve this problem by sequentially increasing $n$ and scanning through $k$ until the two constraints are met. I’ve included the Julia code to do this below.  For example, starting with a test with sensitivity .7 and specificity 1 (like a PCR test), you can create a new test with greater than .95 sensitivity and specificity, by administering the test 3 times and looking for a single positive test. However, if the specificity drops to .7 then you would need to find more than 8 positives out of 17 applications to be 95% sure you have COVID-19.

using Distributions

function Q(k,n,q)
d = Binomial(n,q)
return 1 – cdf(d,k)
end

function R(k,n,r)
d = Binomial(n,1-r)
return cdf(d,k)
end

function optimizetest(q,r,qp=.95,rp=.95)

nout = 0
kout = 0

for n in 1:100
for k in 0:n-1
println(R(k,n,r),” “,Q(k,n,q))
if R(k,n,r) >= rp && Q(k,n,q) >= qp
kout=k
nout=n
break
end
end
if nout > 0
break
end
end

return nout, kout
end

# Slides for Covid-19 talk

Here are my slides for my recent COVID-19 talk at the Centre for Applied Mathematics in BioScience and Medicine (CAMBAM). It’s an updated version of the one I gave to the FDA.

# A Covid-19 Manhattan Project

Right now there are hundreds if not thousands of Covid-19 models floating out there. Some are better than others and some have much more influence than others and the ones that have the most influence are not necessarily the best. There must be a better way of doing this. The world’s greatest minds convened in Los Alamos in WWII and built two atomic bombs. Metaphors get thrown around with reckless abandon but if there ever was a time for a Manhattan project, we need one now. Currently, the world’s scientific community has mobilized to come up with models to predict the spread and effectiveness of mitigation efforts, to produce new therapeutics and to develop new vaccines. But this is mostly going on independently.

Would it be better if we were to coordinate all of this activity. Right now at the NIH, there is an intense effort to compile all the research that is being done in the NIH Intramural Program and to develop a system where people can share reagents and materials. There are other coordination efforts going on worldwide as well.  This website contains a list of open source computational resources.  This link gives a list of data scientists who have banded together. But I think we need a world wide plan if we are ever to return to normal activity. Even if some nation has eliminated the virus completely within its borders there is always a chance of reinfection from outside.

In terms of models, they seem to have very weak predictive ability. This is probably because they are all over fit. We don’t really understand all the mechanisms of SARS-CoV-2 propagation. The case or death curves are pretty simple and as Von Neumann or Ulam or someone once said, “give me 4 parameters and I can fit an elephant, give me 5 and I can make it’s tail wiggle.” Almost any model can fit the curve but to make a projection into the future, you need to get the dynamics correct and this I claim, we have not done. What I am thinking of proposing is to have the equivalent of FDA approval for predictive models. However, instead of a binary decision of approval non-approval, people could submit there models for a predictive score based on some cross validation scheme or prediction on a held out set. You could also submit as many times as you wish to have your score updated. We could then pool all the models and produce a global Bayesian model averaged prediction and see if that does better. Let me know if you wish to participate or ideas on how to do this better.

# Covid-19 talk

Here are the slides for my webinar at FDA today .

# COVID-19 Paper

Global prediction of unreported SARS-CoV2 infection from observed COVID-19 cases

Carson C. Chow 1*, Joshua C. Chang 2,3, Richard C. Gerkin 4*, Shashaank Vattikuti 1*

1Mathematical Biology Section, LBM, NIDDK, National Institutes of Health2Epidemiology and Biostatistics Section, Rehabilitation Medicine, Clinical Center, National Institutes of Health 3 mederrata 4 School of Life Sciences, Arizona State University

*For correspondence contact carsonc@nih.gov, josh@mederrata.com, rgerkin@asu.edu, vattikutis@nih.gov

Summary: Estimation of infectiousness and fatality of the SARS-CoV-2 virus in the COVID-19 global pandemic is complicated by ascertainment bias resulting from incomplete and non-representative samples of infected individuals.  We developed a strategy for overcoming this bias to obtain more plausible estimates of the true values of key epidemiological variables.  We fit mechanistic Bayesian latent-variable SIR models to confirmed COVID-19 cases, deaths, and recoveries, for all regions (countries and US states) independently. Bayesian averaging over models, we find that the raw infection incidence rate underestimates the true rate by a factor, the case ascertainment ratio CARt that depends upon region and time. At the regional onset of COVID-19, the predicted global median was 13 infections unreported for each case confirmed (CARt = 0.07 C.I. (0.02, 0.4)). As the infection spread, the median CARt rose to 9 unreported cases for every one diagnosed as of April 15, 2020 (CARt = 0.1 C.I. (0.02, 0.5)).  We also estimate that the median global initial reproduction number R0 is 3.3 (C.I (1.5, 8.3)) and the total infection fatality rate near the onset is 0.17% (C.I. (0.05%, 0.9%)). However the time-dependent reproduction number Rt and infection fatality rate as of April 15 were 1.2 (C.I. (0.6, 2.5)) and 0.8% (C.I. (0.2%,4%)), respectively.  We find that there is great variability between country- and state-level values.  Our estimates are consistent with recent serological estimates of cumulative infections for the state of New York, but inconsistent with claims that very large fractions of the population have already been infected in most other regions.  For most regions, our estimates imply a great deal of uncertainty about the current state and trajectory of the epidemic.

# Exponential growth

The spread of covid-19 and epidemics in general is all about exponential growth. Although, I deal with exponential growth in my work daily, I don’t have an immediate intuitive grasp for what it means in life until I actually think about it. To me I write down functions with the form $e^{rt}$ and treat them as some abstract quantity. In fact, I often just look at differential equations of the form

$\frac{dx}{dt} = r x$

for which $x = A e^{rt}$ is a solution, where $A$ is any constant number, because the derivative of an exponential function is an exponential function. One confusing aspect of discussing exponential growth with lay people is that the above equation is called a linear differential equation and often mathematicians or physicists will simply say the dynamics are linear or even the growth is linear, although what we really mean is that the describing equation is a linear differential equation, which has exponential growth or exponential decay if $r$ is negative.

If we let $t$ represent time (say days) then $r$ is a growth rate. What $x = e^{rt}$ actually means is that every day $x$, e.g. number of people with covid-19, is increasing by a factor of $e$, which is about 2.718.  Now, while this is the most convenient number for mathematical manipulation, it is definitely not the most convenient number for intuition. A common alternative is to use 2 as the base of the exponent, rather than $e$. This then means that tomorrow you will have double what you have today. I think 2 doesn’t really convey how fast exponential growth is because you say well I start with 1 today and then tomorrow I have 2 and the day after 4 and like the famous Simpson’s episode when Homer is making sure that Bart is a name safe from mockery, goes through the alphabet and says “Aart, Bart, Cart, Dart, Eart, okay Bart is fine,”  you will have to go to day 10 before you get to a thousand fold increase (1024 to be precise), which still doesn’t seem too bad. In fact 30 days later is 2 to the power of 30 or $2^{30}$, which is only 10 million or so. But on day 31 you have 20 million and day 32 you have 40 million. It’s growing really fast.

Now, I think exponential growth really hits home if you use 10 as a base because now you simply add a zero for every day: 1, 10, 100, 1000, 10000, 100000. Imagine if your stock was increasing by a factor of 10 every day. Starting from a dollar you would have a million dollars by day 6 and a billion by day 9, be richer than Bill Gates by day 11, and have more money than the entire world by the third week. Now, the only difference between exponential growth with base 2 versus base 10 is the rate of growth. This is where logarithms are very useful  because they are the inverse of an exponential. So, if $x = 2^3$ then $\log_2 x = 3$ (i.e. the log of x in base 2 is 3). Log just gives you the power of an exponential (in that base). So the only difference between using base 2 versus base 10 is the rate of growth. For example $10^x = 2^{(log_2 10) x}$, where $\log_2 (10) = 3.3$.  So an exponential process that is doubling every day is increasing by a factor of ten every 3.3 days.

The thing about exponential growth is that most of the action is in the last few days. This is probably the hardest part to comprehend.  So the reason they were putting hospital beds in the convention center in New York weeks ago is because if the number of covid-19 cases is doubling every 5 days then even if you are 100 fold under capacity today, you will be over capacity in 7 doublings or 35 days and the next week you will have twice as many as you can handle.

Flattening the curve means slowing the growth rate. If you can slow the rate of growth by a half then you have 70 days before you get to 7 doublings and max out capacity. If you can make the rate of growth negative then the number of cases will decrease and the epidemic will flame out. There are two ways you can make the growth rate go negative. The first is to use external measures like social distancing and the second is to reach nonlinear saturation, which I’ll discuss in a later post. This is also why social distancing measures seem so extreme and unnecessary because you need to apply it before there is a problem and if it works then those beds in the convention center never get used. It’s a no win situation, if it works then it will seem like an over reaction and if it doesn’t then hospitals will be overwhelmed. Given that 7 billion lives and livelihoods are at stake, it is not a decision to be taken lightly.

# Covid-19 modeling

I have officially thrown my hat into the ring and joined the throngs of would-be Covid-19 modelers to try to estimate (I deliberately do not use predict) the progression of the pandemic. I will pull rank and declare that I kind of do this type of thing for a living. What I (and my colleagues whom I have conscripted) are trying to do is to estimate the fraction of the population that has the SARS-CoV-2 virus but has not been identified as such. This was the goal of the Lourenco et al. paper I wrote about previously that pulled me into this pit of despair. I argued that fitting to deaths alone, which is what they do, is insufficient for constraining the model and thus it has no predictive ability. What I’m doing now is seeing whether it is possible to do the job if you fit not only deaths but also the number of cases reported and cases recovered. You then have a latent variable model where the observed variables are cases, cases that die, and cases that recover, and the latent variables are the infected that are not identified and the susceptible population. Our plan is to test a wide range of models with various degrees of detail and complexity and use Bayesian Model Comparison to see which does a better job. We will apply the analysis to global data. We’re getting numbers now but I’m not sure I trust them yet so I’ll keep computing for a few more days. The full goal is to quantify the uncertainty in a principled way.

2020-04-06: edited for purging typos

# 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.

# Fake news and beliefs

Much has been written of the role of fake news in the US presidential election. While we will never know how much it actually contributed to the outcome, as I will show below, it could certainly affect people’s beliefs. Psychology experiments have found that humans often follow Bayesian inference – the probability we assign to an event or action is updated according to Bayes rule. For example, suppose $P(T)$ is the probability we assign to whether climate change is real; $P(F) = 1-P(T)$ is our probability that climate change is false. In the Bayesian interpretation of probability, this would represent our level of belief in climate change. Given new data $D$ (e.g. news), we will update our beliefs according to

$P(T|D) = \frac{P(D|T) P(T)}{P(D)}$

What this means is that our posterior probability or belief that climate change is true given the new data, $P(T|D)$, is equal to the probability that the new data came from our internal model of a world with climate change (i.e. our likelihood), $P(D|T),$ multiplied by our prior probability that climate change is real, $P(T),$ divided by the probability of obtaining such data in all possible worlds, $P(D)$. According to the rules of probability, the latter is given by $P(D) = P(D|T)P(T) + P(D|F)P(F)$, which is the sum of the probability the data came from a world with climate change and that from one without.

This update rule can reveal what will happen in the presence of new data including fake news. The first thing to notice is that if $P(T)$ is zero, then there is no update. In this binary case, this means that if we believe that climate change is absolutely false or true then no data will change our mind. In the case of multiple outcomes, any outcome with zero prior (has no support) will never change. So if we have very specific priors, fake news is not having an impact because no news is having an impact. If we have nonzero priors for both true and false then if the data is more likely from our true model then our posterior for true will increase and vice versa. Our posteriors will tend towards the direction of the data and thus fake news could have a real impact.

For example, suppose we have an internal model where we expect the mean annual temperature to be 10 degrees Celsius with a standard deviation of 3 degrees if there is no climate change and a mean of 13 degrees with climate change. Thus if the reported data is mostly centered around 13 degrees then our belief of climate change will increase and if it is mostly centered around 10 degrees then it will decrease. However, if we get data that is spread uniformly over a wide range then both models could be equally likely and we would get no update. Mathematically, this is expressed as – if $P(D|T)=P(D|F)$ then $P(D) = P(D|T)(P(T)+P(F))= P(D|T)$. From the Bayesian update rule, the posterior will be identical to the prior. In a world of lots of misleading data, there is no update. Thus, obfuscation and sowing confusion is a very good strategy for preventing updates of priors. You don’t need to refute data, just provide fake examples and bury the data in a sea of noise.

# Revolution vs incremental change

I think that the dysfunction and animosity we currently see in the US political system and election is partly due to the underlying belief that meaningful change cannot be effected through slow evolution but rather requires an abrupt revolution where the current system is torn down and rebuilt. There is some merit to this idea. Sometimes the structure of a building can be so damaged that it would be easier to demolish and rebuild rather than repair and renovate. Mathematically, this can be expressed as a system being stuck in a local minimum (where getting to the global minimum is desired). In order to get to the true global optimum, you need to get worse before you can get better. When fitting nonlinear models to data, dealing with local minima is a major problem and the reason that a stochastic MCMC algorithm that does occasionally go uphill works so much better than gradient descent, which only goes downhill.

However, the recent success of deep learning may dispel this notion when the dimension is high enough. Deep learning, which is a multi-layer neural network that can have millions of parameters is the quintessence of a high dimensional model. Yet, it seems to be able to work just fine using the back propagation algorithm, which is a form of gradient descent. The reason could be that in high enough dimensions, local minima are rare and the majority of critical points (places where the slope is zero) are high dimensional saddle points, where there is always a way out in some direction. In order to have a local minimum, the matrix of second derivatives in all directions (i.e. Hessian matrix) must be positive definite (i.e. have all positive eigenvalues). As the dimension of the matrix gets larger and larger there are simply more ways for one eigenvalue to be negative and that is all you need to provide an escape hatch. So in a high dimensional system, gradient descent may work just fine and there could be an interesting tradeoff between a parsimonious model with few parameters but difficult to fit versus a high dimensional model that is easy to fit. Now the usual danger of having too many parameters is that you overfit and thus you fit the noise at the expense of the signal and have no ability to generalize. However, deep learning models seem to be able to overcome this limitation.

Hence, if the dimension is high enough evolution can work while if it is too low then you need a revolution. So the question is what is the dimensionality of governance and politics. In my opinion, the historical record suggests that revolutions generally do not lead to good outcomes and even when they do small incremental changes seem to get you to a similar place. For example, the US and France had bloody revolutions while Canada and the England did not and they all have arrived at similar liberal democratic systems. In fact, one could argue that a constitutional monarchy (like Canada and Denmark), where the head of state is a figure head is more stable and benign than a republic, like Venezuela or Russia (e.g. see here). This distinction could have pertinence for the current US election if a group of well-meaning people, who believe that the two major parties do not have any meaningful difference, do not vote or vote for a third party. They should keep in mind that incremental change is possible and small policy differences can and do make a difference in people’s lives.

# AlphaGo and the Future of Work

In March of this year, Google DeepMind’s computer program AlphaGo defeated world Go champion Lee Sedol. This was hailed as a great triumph of artificial intelligence and signaled to many the beginning of the new age when machines take over. I believe this is true but the real lesson of AlphaGo’s win is not how great machine learning algorithms are but how suboptimal human Go players are. Experts believed that machines would not be able to defeat humans at Go for a long time because the number of possible games is astronomically large, $\sim 250^{150}$ moves, in contrast to chess with a paltry $\sim 35^{80}$ moves. Additionally, unlike chess, it is not clear what is a good position and who is winning during intermediate stages of a game. Thus, any direct enumeration and evaluation of possible next moves as chess computers do, like IBM’s Deep Blue that defeated Gary Kasparov, seemed to be impossible. It was thought that humans had some sort of inimitable intuition to play Go that machines were decades away from emulating. It turns out that this was wrong. It took remarkably little training for AlphaGo to defeat a human. All the algorithms used were fairly standard – supervised and reinforcement backpropagation learning in multi-layer neural networks1. DeepMind just put them together in a clever way and had the (in retrospect appropriate) audacity to try.

The take home message of AlphaGo’s success is that humans are very, very far away from being optimal at playing Go. Uncharitably, we simply stink at Go. However, this probably also means that we stink at almost everything we do. Machines are going to take over our jobs not because they are sublimely awesome but because we are stupendously inept. It is like the old joke about two hikers encountering a bear and one starts to put on running shoes. The other hiker says: “Why are you doing that? You can’t outrun a bear.” to which she replies, “I only need to outrun you!” In fact, the more difficult a job seems to be for humans to perform, the easier it will be for a machine to do better. This was noticed a long time ago in AI research and called Moravec’s Paradox. Tasks that require a lot of high level abstract thinking like chess or predicting what movie you will like are easy for computers to do while seemingly trivial tasks that a child can do like folding laundry or getting a cookie out of a jar on an unreachable shelf is really hard. Thus high paying professions in medicine, accounting, finance, and law could be replaced by machines sooner than lower paying ones in lawn care and house cleaning.

There are those who are not worried about a future of mass unemployment because they believe people will just shift to other professions. They point out that a century ago a majority of Americans worked in agriculture and now the sector comprises of less than 2 percent of the population. The jobs that were lost to technology were replaced by ones that didn’t exist before. I think this might be true but in the future not everyone will be a software engineer or a media star or a CEO of her own company of robot employees. The increase in productivity provided by machines ensures this. When the marginal cost of production goes to zero (i.e. cost to make one more item), as it is for software or recorded media now, the whole supply-demand curve is upended. There is infinite supply for any amount of demand so the only way to make money is to increase demand.

The rate-limiting step for demand is the attention span of humans. In a single day, a person can at most attend to a few hundred independent tasks such as thinking, reading, writing, walking, cooking, eating, driving, exercising, or consuming entertainment. I can stream any movie I want now and I only watch at most twenty a year, and almost all of them on long haul flights. My 3 year old can watch the same Wild Kratts episode (great children’s show about animals) ten times in a row without getting bored. Even though everyone could be a video or music star on YouTube, superstars such as Beyoncé and Adele are viewed much more than anyone else. Even with infinite choice, we tend to do what our peers do. Thus, for a population of ten billion people, I doubt there can be more than a few million that can make a decent living as a media star with our current economic model. The same goes for writers. This will also generalize to manufactured goods. Toasters and coffee makers essentially cost nothing compared to three decades ago, and I will only buy one every few years if that. Robots will only make things cheaper and I doubt there will be a billion brands of TV’s or toasters. Most likely, a few companies will dominate the market as they do now. Even, if we could optimistically assume that a tenth of the population could be engaged in producing goods and services necessary for keeping the world functioning that still leaves the rest with little to do.

Even much of what scientists do could eventually be replaced by machines. Biology labs could consist of a principle investigator and robot technicians. Although it seems like science is endless, the amount of new science required for sustaining the modern world could diminish. We could eventually have an understanding of biology sufficient to treat most diseases and injuries and develop truly sustainable energy technologies. In this case, machines could be tasked to keep the modern world up and running with little need of input from us. Science would mostly be devoted to abstract and esoteric concerns.

Thus, I believe the future for humankind is in low productivity occupations – basically a return to pre-industrial endeavors like small plot farming, blacksmithing, carpentry, painting, dancing, and pottery making, with an economic system in place to adequately live off of this labor. Machines can provide us with the necessities of life while we engage in a simulated 18th century world but without the poverty, diseases, and mass famines that made life so harsh back then. We can make candles or bread and sell them to our neighbors for a living wage. We can walk or get in self-driving cars to see live performances of music, drama and dance by local artists. There will be philosophers and poets with their small followings as they have now. However, even when machines can do everything humans can do, there will still be a capacity to sustain as many mathematicians as there are people because mathematics is infinite. As long as P is not NP, theorem proving can never be automated and there will always be unsolved math problems.  That is not to say that machines won’t be able to do mathematics. They will. It’s just that they won’t ever be able to do all of it. Thus, the future of work could also be mathematics.

1. Silver, D. et al. Mastering the game of Go with deep neural networks and tree search. Nature 529, 484–489 (2016).

# The simulation argument made quantitative

Elon Musk, of Space X, Tesla, and Solar City fame, recently mentioned that he thought the the odds of us not living in a simulation were a billion to one. His reasoning was based on extrapolating the rate of improvement in video games. He suggests that soon it will be impossible to distinguish simulations from reality and in ten thousand years there could easily be billions of simulations running. Thus there are a billion more simulated universes than real ones.

This simulation argument was first quantitatively formulated by philosopher Nick Bostrom. He even has an entire website devoted to the topic (see here). In his original paper, he proposed a Drake-like equation for the fraction of all “humans” living in a simulation:

$f_{sim} = \frac{f_p f_I N_I}{f_p f_I N_I + 1}$

where $f_p$ is the fraction of human level civilizations that attain the capability to simulate a human populated civilization, $f_I$ is the fraction of these civilizations interested in running civilization simulations, and $N_I$ is the average number of simulations running in these interested civilizations. He then argues that if $N_I$ is large, then either $f_{sim}\approx 1$ or $f_p f_I \approx 0$. Musk believes that it is highly likely that $N_I$ is large and $f_p f_I$ is not small so, ergo, we must be in a simulation. Bostrom says his gut feeling is that $f_{sim}$ is around 20%. Steve Hsu mocks the idea (I think). Here, I will show that we have absolutely no way to estimate our probability of being in a simulation.

The reason is that Bostrom’s equation obscures the possibility of two possible divergent quantities. This is more clearly seen by rewriting his equation as

$f_{sim} = \frac{y}{x+y} = \frac{y/x}{y/x+1}$

where $x$ is the number of non-sim civilizations and $y$ is the number of sim civilizations. (Re-labeling $x$ and $y$ as people or universes does not change the argument). Bostrom and Musk’s observation is that once a civilization attains simulation capability then the number of sims can grow exponentially (people in sims can run sims and so forth) and thus $y$ can overwhelm $x$ and ergo, you’re in a simulation. However, this is only true in a world where $x$ is not growing or growing slowly. If $x$ is also growing exponentially then we can’t say anything at all about the ratio of $y$ to $x$.

I can give a simple example.  Consider the following dynamics

$\frac{dx}{dt} = ax$

$\frac{dy}{dt} = bx + cy$

$y$ is being created by $x$ but both are both growing exponentially. The interesting property of exponentials is that a solution to these equations for $a > c$ is

$x = \exp(at)$

$y = \frac{b}{a-c}\exp(at)$

where I have chosen convenient initial conditions that don’t affect the results. Even though $y$ is growing exponentially on top of an exponential process, the growth rates of $x$ and $y$ are the same. The probability of being in a simulation is then

$f_{sim} = \frac{b}{a+b-c}$

and we have no way of knowing what this is. The analogy is that you have a goose laying eggs and each daughter lays eggs, which also lay eggs. It would seem like there would be more eggs from the collective progeny than the original mother. However, if the rate of egg laying by the original mother goose is increasing exponentially then the number of mother eggs can grow as fast as the number of daughter, granddaughter, great…, eggs. This is just another example of how thinking quantitatively can give interesting (and sometimes counterintuitive) results. Until we have a better idea about the physics underlying our universe, we can say nothing about our odds of being in a simulation.

Addendum: One of the predictions of this simple model is that there should be lots of pre-sim universes. I have always found it interesting that the age of the universe is only about three times that of the earth. Given that the expansion rate of the universe is actually increasing, the lifetime of the universe is likely to be much longer than the current age. So, why is it that we are alive at such an early stage of our universe? Well, one reason may be that the rate of universe creation is very high and so the probability of being in a young universe is higher than being in an old one.

Addendum 2: I only gave a specific solution to the differential equation. The full solution has the form $Y_1\exp(at) + Y_2 \exp(ct)$.  However, as long as $a >c$, the first term will dominate.

Addendum 3: I realized that I didn’t make it clear that the civilizations don’t need to be in the same universe. Multiverses with different parameters are predicted by string theory.  Thus, even if there is less than one civilization per universe, universes could be created at an exponentially increasing rate.

# Chomsky on The Philosopher’s Zone

Listen to MIT Linguistics Professor Noam Chomsky on ABC’s radio show The Philosopher’s Zone (link here).  Even at 87, he is still as razor sharp as ever. I’ve always been an admirer of Chomsky although I think I now mostly disagree with his ideas about language. I do remember being completely mesmerized by the few talks I attended when I was a graduate student.

Chomsky is the father of modern linguistics. He turned it into a subfield of computer science and mathematics. People still use Chomsky Normal Form and the Chomsky Hierarchy in computer science. Chomsky believes that the language ability is universal among all humans and is genetically encoded. He comes to this conclusion because in his mathematical analysis of language he found what he called “deep structures”, which are embedded rules that we are consciously unaware of when we use language. He was adamantly opposed to the idea that language could be acquired via a probabilistic machine learning algorithm. His most famous example is that we know that the sentence “Colorless green ideas sleep furiously” makes grammatical sense but is nonsensical while the sentence “Furiously sleep ideas green colorless”, is nongrammatical. Since, neither of these sentences had ever been spoken nor written he surmised that no statistical algorithm could ever learn the difference between the two. I think it is pretty clear now that Chomsky was incorrect and machine learning can learn to parse language and classify these sentences. There has also been field work that seems to indicate that there do exist languages in the Amazon that are qualitatively different form the universal set. It seems that the brain, rather than having an innate ability for grammar and language, may have an innate ability to detect and learn deep structure with a very small amount of data.

The host Joe Gelonesi, who has filled in admirably for the sadly departed Alan Saunders, asks Chomsky about the hard problem of consciousness near the end of the program. Chomsky, in his typical fashion of invoking 17th and 18th century philosophy, dismisses it by claiming that science itself and physics in particular has long dispensed with the equivalent notion. He says that the moment that Newton wrote down the equation for gravitational force, which requires action at a distance, physics stopped being about making the universe intelligible and became about creating predictive theories. He thus believes that we will eventually be able to create a theory of consciousness although it may not be intelligible to humans. He also seems to subscribe to panpsychism, where consciousness is a property of matter like mass, an idea championed by Christof Koch and Giulio Tononi. However, as I pointed out before, panpsychism is dualism. If it does exist, then it exists apart from the way we currently describe the universe. Lately, I’ve come to believe and accept the fact that consciousness is an epiphenomenon and has no causal consequence in the universe. I must credit David Chalmers (e.g. see previous post) for making it clear that this is the only recourse to dualism. We are no more nor less than automata caroming through the universe, with the ability to spectate a few tens of milliseconds after the fact.

Addendum: As pointed out in the comments, there are monoistic theories, as espoused by Bishop Berkeley, where only ideas are real.  My point about the only recourse to dualism is epiphenomena for consciousness, is if one adheres to materialism.

# Probability of gun death

The tragedy in Oregon has reignited the gun debate. Gun control advocates argue that fewer guns mean fewer deaths while gun supporters argue that if citizens were armed then shooters could be stopped through vigilante action. These arguments can be quantified in a simple model of the probability of gun death, $p_d$:

$p_d = p_gp_u(1-p_gp_v) + p_gp_a$

where $p_g$ is the probability of having a gun, $p_u$ is the probability of being a criminal or  mentally unstable enough to become a shooter, $p_v$ is the probability of effective vigilante action, and $p_a$ is the probability of accidental death or suicide.  The probability of being killed by a gun is given by the probability of someone having a gun times the probability that they are unstable enough to use it. This is reduced by the probability of a potential victim having a gun times the probability of acting effectively to stop the shooter. Finally, there is also a probability of dying through an accident.

The first derivative of $p_d$ with respect to $p_g$ is $p_u - 2 p_u p_g p_v + p_a$ and the second derivative is negative. Thus, the minimum of $p_d$ cannot be in the interior $0 < p_g < 1$ and must be at the boundary. Given that $p_d = 0$ when $p_g=0$ and $p_d = p_u(1-p_v) + p_a$ when $p_g = 1$, the absolute minimum is found when no one has a gun. Even if vigilante action was 100% effective, there would still be gun deaths due to accidents. Now, some would argue that zero guns is not possible so we can examine if it is better to have fewer guns or more guns. $p_d$ is maximal at $p_g = (p_u + p_a)/(2p_u p_v)$. Thus, unless $p_v$ is greater than one half then even in the absence of accidents there is no situation where increasing the number of guns makes us safer. The bottom line is that if we want to reduce gun deaths we should either reduce the number of guns or make sure everyone is armed and has military training.