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Episode 216: Coronavirus Loneliness, Economy, Revolution, Bell Curves and Stereotypes
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good evening everybody it's Nate G here along with dr. Doug Lyall and dr. Jen hawk with the beat your genes podcast dr. Lisle dr. Hawk how are you both doing this evening well good life in a lockdown so it's awesome yes man this has been an interesting last few weeks oh what's that dr. Lyle yeah introverts paradise yeah to to to cats or refrigerator full of food acai bowls being delivered from Jamba Juice this is really doesn't get much better you've made great efficient leaps forward in your life sounds like you've been preparing for this lockdown for your entire life yes I have been I'm well prepared for it working out well you know I think this episode is still going to be on the coronavirus the pandemic that's been going on and has sheltered most of the population of the developed world in place particularly the United States and the developed countries and so you know we're gonna keep talking about this for now the one question you know I've come up with a few questions just that as far as my mind goes and as far as other people our listeners who've sent me questions and the Facebook group but one thing that has has come up is that you've talked you've talked about loneliness in past shows but it was kind of in a different context where someone may not be you know willing to go out and socialize or they just haven't found somebody yet or found you know mates friends or trading partners and in the pleasure trap dr. Lyle I learned that every animal has its evolutionary niche so your example was that sharks can smell a drop of blood in a million gallons of water whereas humans our niche is social behavior so dr. Lyle dr. Hawk what can you tell us about this current climate where we really can't socialize normally because I don't know about you guys but I believe I might be close to suffering from an oxytocin deficiency and get a dog yeah yeah yes are you talking about yourself or is this like a this is my question yeah this is your question yeah well you're not gonna die of an oxytocin deficiency for one thing you're not even gonna suffer that much however the certainly people and I'm not even joking I'm sure extroverts are are more frustrated than introverts Oh incredibly boring yeah yeah yeah the they're antsy to go out and hang out with a bunch of people and talk and then chow down and drink and dance and be noisy you know all those disgusting things extroverts do all I really want is a hug yo well yeah that like that that's that that's well your your this is now you're up against it Nathan as a as the single guy without without any attachments to animals see this is where this is where the dogs and the cats come in that's where that's where it's at oh I can't take this question I can take it seriously I'm sure I'm not the only one yeah I think I think it's for those of us who are a little more you know I I kind of identify as an introvert even though I test a little slightly extroverted but I haven a more introverted way yeah yeah but I am you know when I take the big five test I'm usually about 60th percentile and then on the extroverted side of the curve and I can you know I can enjoy an extroverted experience in a way that dr. Lisle maybe can't he's more of a true introvert than I am and I you know I I am NOT in great tune with it myself but I definitely see it in clients and some friends who are much more extroverted that it's hard for introverts to remember that as stressful as it is to an introvert to be you know thrown into a party where you don't know anybody or you know that overstimulated feeling that introverts will easily get where they sort of start to short out because there's just too too many social inputs and they handle it that's that's similar I mean it's not the exact same feeling but that's that's the kind of agitation that extroverts are feeling not being able to go out and socialize and connect with people and and get their oxytocin fix and everything else so this is this is just another way in which this whole episode is you know it's not it's not that it's doing anything to us it's not changing us it's not transforming humans it's not it's not all it's doing is revealing what's already there well it's whatever is there about us and our personalities and the dynamics and our relationships it's getting uncovered and revealed and amplified sort of exaggerated by the circumstances and so if you're slightly extroverted that's what's going to sort of get highlighted by this whole situation and if you're living alone and you don't have a couple of seventy pound dogs to hug which I do which is my my regular oxytocin drip in my life then yeah you're you are going to be feeling you're you're gonna be feeling the absence of that without being able to to distract and self-medicate with social regular stream of social activities so it's just presenting you with the the lack of a stable sustainable esteem dynamic that was not there to begin with and so this goes back to what we were talking about before word you know you don't when you lose don't lose the lesson so maybe this is the lesson mate for you and other people who are feeling this way that curating and and nurturing and seeking those kinds of relationships is worth more of an investment than they've been making prior to this whole situation yeah that's a good point because I certainly like I play ice hockey so on a couple of teams so I can certainly text friends and it feels a little different than actually being in person so I guess another question like a little supply-side spin off is does oxytocin get released if you're interacting with somebody but it's not face-to-face yes it does and so those those are signals that as you can imagine what it can feel like to if you haven't talked to somebody that's important for awhile and you hear their voice the phone yeah so that you know what that feeling feels like and however there is nothing really like watching somebody's facial expressions that you care about it just isn't and and so that's that is how we're built we're obviously we weren't built for cellphones and and we weren't built for even for Skype you know I'm saying that we were built to be more fully engaged like right in the room with people and that but we can get some facsimile and some percentage of that and we get by with it and but yeah this is I think I like Jen's talk about how this is sort of revealing this is a very interesting experiment to go through and it's an interesting thing to watch other people react to it and mmm the I was watching some some lady that worked in a hospital somewhere she was perfectly well rested when and she had time to shoot this video and she was I don't know what her line of work was it wasn't a doctor and it wasn't a nurse I don't know what it was but she moaned for 10 minutes about how how they had a lack of resources and this just went on and on I thought you know what this was actually kind of before the crisis began and it wasn't even that bad where you were and this this whining just continued and I thought wow here we see it you know this is an individual that this isn't the first claiming this person's done and and so this is this is now revealing this opportunistic whiner who just can't wait to get on the balcony and you know now that she's got a leverage over a worldwide sympathy of of how difficult this is going to be you know she gets one little tiny toenail of out of joint and now suddenly it's it's licensed to just complain about how horrible it all is and there was political implications in it how badly it's been managed with the resources and it's like wow try try fighting or being a nurse in the Civil War did you see Gone with the Wind okay let's get Betsy real hero there are government's at all levels all over the world are actually working feverishly to try to mitigate this crisis and the the complaining and the whining you know just it doesn't have any place in my in my estimation yet you know legitimate communication about miss allocation of resources does if the next county has you know 7,200 ventilators and they don't have any clients and you're short then squawk but otherwise you know you know what I think yeah yeah that's yeah there's a lot of a lot of language going around about how what if one of the most popular memes right now is about how you know don't don't let don't let people tell you that you're wasting this time if you're not being productive it's enough just to just to get through it it's enough just to survive because we're all going through a collective trauma so you're seeing you've seen a lot of language like this and you know there's there's some truth to it don't you know there's there's the the idea that you're wasting the time if you're not making the absolute most of it and I think this was all a response to an initial meme that said something like oh if you're not if you're not making progress on your dreams right now then it turns out time was never your problem discipline was so you know there's a little bit of kind of shaming and crappiness about that and I can understand where the blowback is coming from but at the same time the idea that we're going through this collective trauma like this this word trauma does not mean what you think it means like certainly there are there are individuals who are who are really up against very difficult circumstances right now who have lost jobs who are who are dealing directly with the disease who have loved ones in in the hospital there are individual cases all over the place where people are experiencing that but people who are insulated from that who who are just you know can't can't find yeast at the at the grocery store when they go shopping or are a little bit inconvenienced or working from home and and irritated by their neighbors like I am like this is not a traumatic experience this is an irritating inconvenient experience and it is a it is a time-limited irritating inconvenient experience because every projection that we've looked at continuing I mean we feel even more optimistic today I'm sure we'll get into this than we have in the last previous three times that we've talked about this looking at the data watching the curves across the globe watching the projections within the United States that are coming out of the University of Washington Medical Center and elsewhere like this this whole thing looks to be surging to its peak mid month in April and then it is declining thereafter and so this this whole intensity of inconvenience is is about to reach its zenith and that's that's that and then we're we're not back to normal for some amount of time but it is not a sustained protracted decade-long war where we're living on rations and we we don't know if our husband is coming home and all of this like the kind of things the kind of narratives that are being imposed on this are very often unreasonable and like Doug is saying you're not you're not watching those narratives emerge out of nowhere you're not watching previously very very stable very conscientious very well measured people suddenly completely freaking out you're seeing people who sort of have a lower threshold for freak-outs freaking out and you're watching that all across the bell curve so when I say that it's revealing and amplifying it's taking your personality distortions and it's really bringing them you know it's really it's it's putting you under a lot of pressure so if you do have some instability in in your nervous system this is going to be more disturbing to you if you do have kind of a little bit of a tendency to to use a situation like this to complain like Doug is talking about you were going to hit that complaint threshold earlier than other people well that is not a randomly distributed effect across the population it is mapping onto pre-existing personality trends and so that's that's very much what we're looking at both in our own experience and the people that were spending time with that just eliminated like seven of my questions that's all Oh happy to help that's great that's I mean I might ask a few of them anyway just to the listeners but it's it's just great because you know that my next question was was a little bit about about the same thing is I guess now I now I see the answer to it but one of my questions was over the last three episodes that we have done and the last I believe it was three or four videos dr. Lyle you did one which Gustavo one with chef AJ and dr. Hawk you did you and dr. Lyle did one together and then you guys both had a couple of others so hmm now I've you know watched these videos I have read the comments from the videos I've gotten emails from the podcast itself and you know I've gotten a few nasty emails but I've also got some people thanking us for thanking you guys for sharing the information but for the for the negative emails it leaves me wondering if people even heard what you said I mean nowhere in any of your talks or videos or articles dr. Hawk or dr. Lyle did you say not to follow the social distancing guidelines no where did you say not to practice high on washing no where did you say to ignore the statin recommendations and yet I got comments as though you had people were one person even told me even felt the need to message me on my facebook site for fasting escape after I posted a video of dr. Lyle talking about this thing saying how irresponsible it was of me to post that video so besides the IQ disagreeable and hearing problems are people hearing just what they want to hear or or is it well yeah to be fair in my first one that I did with Gustavo I may not have been as worried and our very first podcast that we did we were concerned but the the worry wasn't that high because it was early and so you know obviously as more data comes in and we learn more then we dial it up but there there really wasn't a panic bus button being pushed you know really in early March the this is a this is something that as we start to see trouble you know we start to see the first deaths in Europe in very late we start to realize okay well we're not sure what it's like but now you know by obviously by mid-march we know we're in were in for a serious storm so yeah I think that all kinds of people have needed to modify you some people even have to flat-out reverse field on some of their positions earlier but that's you know I had a there was a beautiful response to a criticism of I think it's Niles or Neil Ferguson the main model modeler at Imperial College in England the where he he was predicting enormous trouble and his model was was going down the pathway of saying listen we have to jump all over this thing because we could be absolutely cooked care and I've learned subsequently that his model I believe was based on an estimation of 0.9 death rate and so that and that wasn't an outrageous inference based on the evidence that they had and trust me these people are all like super sharp and so based on that model they pushed the panic button in you know late late February early March when ever it was and it was reasonable to push it at that point the and they didn't know and obviously it's been a big deal but it hasn't been a point nine the where was I going with this oh so then later he comes back fairly recently actually very recently I think in the last maybe two weeks ago or less he came back and said listen it doesn't look like half a million of our citizens in Britain it looks like 20,000 and he got you know a lot of heat from that in the press and a beautiful thing happened that one of his a respected colleague another really big time epidemiologist said listen people this it is completely legitimate for you to change your opinion in midstream and in the face of a mess as things continue we get better knowledge better evidence we are able to approximate the parameters better and house how incredibly stupid it would be to not be modifying our position as the evidence comes in so this is you know this is how we how we go about learning in a mess like this so it turns out my latest understanding actually gem is that the at the University of Washington I think the model they are using is 0.15 I think that's that's the kind of numbers that they're thinking so not pointone like we might hope point one five now in in Europe the Italians and Spanish Spaniards are they are they have older populations with higher smoking rates so they're probably going to be about one-third more lethal per capita than we are so it it may turn out that if their point one five we are point one or it could be that up throw point two two or point one five but whatever it is this is now evidence that is based on much more recent data watching this you know this disaster for a month and so it's we're honing in that's how that's how we learn so yeah I mean obviously this is all everybody can criticize and point fingers and but the truth is is that we learned I've had actually substantial disagreements on on what I think the parameters are with people that I think are very smart and that I respect a great deal and they're not heated they're they're questioning and and essentially you know different people are different in terms of what it is that they fear and what it is if they think this looks like I think is the evidence roles in our estimates here you know by virtue of nothing other than mostly luck and a little bit of decent arithmetic nothing sophisticated it looks like we're probably about right and it looks like this is going to be a really bad April and it looks like to say something that that you know has had downright political incorrectness attached to it this looks like a very bad flow is what it looks like it looks like essentially if it is 0.15 which is the current excellent estimate based on top-notch people looking at this the flu is 0.1 so that looks like a very bad flu that is visiting an entire world population that is has no immunity to it and it's racing through so of course it's a very short rapid extraordinary event but what the long-term issues are and the thoughts are the people that are supposed to be managing these problems are hey guess what we've got a new flu is what we've got and it's it's a bad version and and as a result you know we're gonna have to be preparing intelligently because we just got one more additional fairly substantial cause of death added to the rolls and that's that's where we are yeah just to well just to add a little bit just to kind of go back to what I would I heard you asking in that question Nate was a little bit of why people are are people hearing what they want to hear basically and not not change not updating based on new evidence and I think dr. Lyle has significant egocentric bias in the direction of intellectual honesty so it's one of the the most intellectually honest humans I have ever met he's he is he is willing and I am willing to update my my public stance on this issue as in the face of new evidence like very willing very very willing to reverse if called for very willing to you know suck it up and eat all the humble pie that is associated with that but not everybody is most people or not so most people are in a position and we've talked about this a little bit on the podcast before but certainly if they're in a professional position and they're taking a big public stand and they're publishing on this and they're the what they're publishing is associated with a certain version of events that is consistent with a more catastrophic view or a less catastrophic view they're they're very incentivized to dig into that even in the face of evidence the challenge is that and you see a microcosmic experience of that with people even who you know they're not they're not famous data scientists but they they have a twitter feed or they have a facebook feed and they they they essentially take a public stance on the issue and they they go up there and they associate themselves with a particular point of view and the cost of reversing that to them is is very very high and they they create everybody on social media creates a little bit of an echo chamber where there they're seen a lot of there's a lot of confirmation bias and what they're seeing and then their feed and and what people are posting that they're coming into contact with and there are all kinds of studies that show both the confirmation bias and the perceived cost of rehearsal with the the status loss in the village by saying oh hey my bad guess I was wrong guess I I didn't know what I was talking about after all guys sorry all of those things are contributing to people just really digging in their heels about around wherever they first staked out territory and so they're going to be particularly resistant to anything that confronts that and they're gonna come at you if they have some disagreeableness in their personality with extra vitriol wonderful dr. Lisle dr. Hawk thank you that brings us to the next question which is about social media and so my question is is do you think that the numbers of people addicted to social media pornography alcohol drugs whatever the the hyper normal stimuli of the of the month is do you believe that those numbers will go up after this and I guess a hidden question is is how many repeat exposures to this novel stimuli does it take for people to get addicted essentially I wouldn't think so because I think we're we're so we're so saturated in those things anyway that I think you're you see pretty much a population equilibrium just like you do with the pleasure trap like I don't think you're gonna see and you'll see the you know you're basically looking at the genes of the population spread out across the across the population with regard to the pleasure trap because everybody as I've heard Doug say before pretty much everybody's eating whatever the hell they want all the time anyway and pretty much anybody who wants to spend all day on Facebook is already spending all day on Facebook or already gaming all day or whatever it is that we would be worried about emerging as in addiction during this time so certainly some people who have lost their jobs or who who just find themselves you know kids kids who are home from school more or whatever they are having more repeat exposure to these things and may find themselves in a little bit of a dopamine trap with it but it's probably just moving the timeline on that particular addiction forward it's not creating it out of the blue it's just it's just in snaring them a little bit earlier than they might have otherwise gotten there in their in their natural progression in life that would be my my sense of it yeah keep people kind of don't change so and also people yeah personality is essentially immutable and that's circumcircle stances can change and so things can look different for a little while and then and then they don't so that's how that's what that's what we would we would predict wonderful oh I wanted it I wanted to just share with our our listeners so that they understand if they they look at if they're trying to look at data and try to understand for themselves kind of what we're saying versus what they may be seeing in headlines I knew by the way a few days ago I knew that us was gonna go over 10,000 and I knew it was going to be a headline and sure enough I booted up the next morning big headline over 10,000 deaths you know so it's gonna you know one of these days it's gonna go over a hundred thousand for the for the world and that's gonna be a big big you know trumpet is going to be going off on that so what I want people to do is they look at those numbers and they may not they may not have a lot of facility for for stats and they haven't they're not that now not that interested but they're interested enough that they're looking and they're essentially gaining impressions that are coming from media I want you to understand when you look at a graph if you get one thrown in your face but there's two very different graphs in the world one of them is essentially meaningless and the other one means everything and the first one is going to be what we're going to call a cumulative distribution so I want you to imagine if you had a car dealership and you sold you know a hundred thousand dollars worth of cars a month it's just a little lot and you sell five or six cars a month and you were to take data on this in a graph and so in January your total sales was a hundred thousand and then in February when you mark February it was the cumulative sales and so you sold a hundred thousand in February but the February score is two hundred thousand and then March it's three hundred and you can imagine look at look at the bar graph as we go from January on the on the horizontal axis on the x axis and then move it out to the right January February March April May all the way to December and look at this little stepping stone as there's another hundred thousand every month and it keeps going up and up and up and up and by December weren't 1.2 million and if you were naive and didn't understand what you were looking at you'd be saying like wow things got really booming in December it's like no they didn't it was just like it was in January or March or any other month it's that it is you accumulate it you add it to the to the previous bar graph of the previous month and then you add the little amount on top so the graph looks like it's exploding spectacularly but actually it's doing nothing of the kind so the appropriate way to look at it is to look at it you know per unit of time so for example how many sales are you making each month then January would look like a hundred thousand and then February looks like a hundred thousand and March looks like a hundred thousand so the graph is flat it's actually nothing exciting is happening at all there now when you look at this virus the what you're watching on everywhere is you're watching these graphs that are cumulative graphs they're sort of interesting I suppose just to give you an overall scope of how big the problem is ultimately been but it's not telling you anything about the process the process is what's everything here folks and so that you need to look at the daily graphs and so if you go on a thing like world a meter and you go by country you have to go down into the data set and look at the daily for example the daily deaths if you do that and you go to Italy and Spain which are two of the largest most affected countries you will see beautiful emergence of bell curves now it's hard to call a bell curve beautiful when we're talking about deaths so maybe I shouldn't call it beautiful but you're going to see a pattern that is intrinsic to the nature of the problem which is a bell curve and jen talked about this earlier and you're going to see that italy and spain are well past the middle of the bell curve they are they are in their last third of this mess folks the mess started on march 1st it's early it's early april and they've got a couple of bad weeks to go and then they'll be finished the same thing will happen in the united states you're already seeing it in states in states that have hit their peak that had an early washington state if you go look at the curve for washington state on the on the daily caseload and the daily resource load it is you can see clearly it's on the downslope of that bell curve right the utility of this is to understand that this is not an out-of-control phenomenon right it's not an endlessly increase a process mm-hmm no it's not an endlessly increasing process so looking at the wrong graph can can have you very intimidated and very reasonably you know very much more anxious than you need to be if you look at the graph as it is you understand we need to hunker down for a hard rain for the next three or four weeks be careful be smart you know keep yourself reasonably protected but this thing is going to be over and this this will probably go to an extremely important component of this issue which is obviously the economics so like how you know as you sit you know possibly unemployed or you know have dwindling savings etc and you're wondering what on earth is the future holding this is this is pretty bad okay it is but it's very time limited and so things are going to change and they're going to change for the better and they're gonna change for the better really quite rapidly thank you for saying that dr. Lisle and dr. Hawkins yeah that that certainly calms me down a little bit because one of the you know the topic of this entire podcast is beat your jeans and so I've been trying to find ways to beat my own jeans that that you know certain things that have arised do this pandemic and one of the things you know I don't talk Paul in my own politics very often but but maybe this question dr. Hawk you can answer as well as dr. Lyle but you know I've talked with friends you know trying to get the oxytocin hit because we've talked about earlier to talk with friends over the phone and you know this you know something that comes up is the fear that the government is now going to take over and continue limiting our freedoms a comment that I've heard is this is how revolutions begin is some well-meaning bureaucrat will instill certain rules and then as a result now we're all living with a much less freedom and then the explanation is given to us well but we're saving lives and the question is well are we really so anyway without getting too much into that dr. dr. Hawk dr. Lyle what say you oh let's listen to Jan I love it here in the Jen talk about anything but particularly politics yeah I would say that the the potential of a giant power grab on the part of the state is it's just limited by the the organization and the capacity of the state to execute that power grab so this is the same explanation that that I would I would give for anybody who is inferring some kind of grand conspiracy with this whole situation like conspiracies require a level of coordination and communication and the the resolution of so many collective action problems that they they're just they're very very unlikely to reflect reality in the in the way that people would like to imagine that sometimes they do and you know this the question of where to revolutions come from is perhaps the most the most dominant question in political science and it takes it takes quite a bit it takes it takes it takes a tipping point of enough cost-benefit analyses being profoundly affected at the individual level so you have to have enough people whose situation has really quite drastically changed from the status quo to put them in a completely different position in terms of what what they would be willing to to pay to give up the current reality that they have in in a trade for a very uncertain future and there are a lot of different things that can drive that but I don't think a little bit of consolidation of bureaucratic control is enough to push an entire revolution forward that said you know I I perhaps them a little more a little more pessimistic than dr. Lisle might be just in terms I don't I don't think we're gonna see the the full-scale collapse of democratic institutions in the United States any time soon but I do think that you know watching the elections in Wisconsin today watching like my just putting my political science goggles on and thinking about some of the implications for this particular election cycle in 2020 and the rest of this primary season and the upcoming conventions and the general and the the the oppositional incentives that the parties have which we've talked about before as well with which just very broadly speaking and I don't want to overstate this but very broadly speaking incumbents and power like to keep things stable they don't like a lot of uncertainty they don't like people feeling a lot of hurt in their pocketbook because they essentially want people to vote for the status quo they got the people to the place that they are currently they want to be reelected because they like where they are so incumbents people who are already in power don't like change they don't like turmoil challengers do like turmoil they like they like a lot of activity they like a lot of uncertainty they like a lot of they do well in an atmosphere of recession so the the general incentives of the two parties are very very different in terms of how they're going to spin this whole thing throughout the summer so you're gonna have you're gonna have Trump and the Republicans attempting to do you know a big victory lap very early on in the process perhaps a little prematurely even dare I say and you're gonna have the Democrats basically refusing to admit that that we are past the worst of it and catastrophizing that worst is yet to come and and that we're still very much imperiled and these two very different worldviews are going to be competing for public attention for the next several months and they're gonna inform how the whole primary cycle plays out and I don't think anybody can make any really good predictions about that I think we're we're facing really uncharted waters there and the just the case in Wisconsin today that that was leading to a lot of of you know systemic deprivation of people exercising the franchise it raises interesting political concerns that we haven't we really haven't ever dealt with before so I don't think that's enough for a quote-unquote revolution but I do think it's enough that you know we're gonna have to revisit some of these institutions that we have assumed to be incredibly stable and unchanging for a very long time Wow thank you it makes sense that you know my conscientiousness overestimates the worst case scenario revolution very specifically require a lot of a lot of young men out of work with with nothing to lose and that that is not the case in the United States that is not the case for the foreseeable future in the United States there are plenty you know these these are young men who don't have nothing to lose they have roofs over their heads they're living in mom's basement they're they they're animals in a zoo they're not it's not the same kind of situation that has motivated revolutionary activity throughout history where you know they're desperate so I very much doubt that we're gonna get to that kind of situation just with the the level of de facto social welfare that we have in a modern democracy and the fact that nobody is living in that kind of grinding poverty and desperation that is gonna motivate that kind of behavior [Music] yeah I mean I was thinking like revolution as far as revolutions - as far as limiting freedom so if the government says no you're not allowed to go here and there and this is supposed to be cut down and then now there's there's martial law but again hyper conscientious in that case here overestimate that's more cou than a revolution just to be precise about our [Laughter] I was an AmeriCorps for two years I don't think people know this about me so I did I did I was in Vista which is sort of the old Kennedy Johnson administration era response to the Peace Corps for like a domestic Peace Corps volunteers in service to America and then I did a second year in AmeriCorps as well and I went to some training at some point and we were talking there was there was somebody some excited young woman kept talking about how something was just so revolutionary it was just so revolutionary was just so exciting and this was in the this was in the mid 90s and and so it was not long after the end of the Cold War and there was this Russian woman who was in the in the crowd with us her name was Tatiana and finally she just raised her hand and she raised an eyebrow and she said please stop using this word revolution it does not mean what you think it means she was very displeased this is a precise term that has grand meaning in the Soviet context so yeah I don't I don't think you're I mean yes I don't think you're gonna see that kind of exercise of military power either and at least at least not with the current situation any time soon not to say it's not possible but not in the current context well I guess however one of the things I would say Nathan and that is that you could have you could have certain things put in place and it probably should be put in place the we're dealing with an epidemic and the and so I think we've seen actually this has been a world stage for some things that you know will be analyzed in the future and and we'll try going to try to learn a lot one of the things that's astounding to me as I stare at the data is ice I look at Singapore Hong Kong Taiwan Japan and South Korea and China itself but we don't necessarily trust the data from China but we can trust the data from those other places and what we see is a an unbelievable performance and in the face of this so they are and Jen would explain that this has a lot to do with the structure of their government and the government power said that exist the the United States is way free and as a result you know we have she do use the term I'm embarrassed to say she's been using the term Federalists on me what do you call it better federalism yes we're not a central it's not a central authority structure in the United States for the most part it's a you have you have a lot of state autonomy so you have regional some kind of regional autonomy so a lot of countries have that but the countries that you're talking about that have had you know a very what we would call efficient response very sort of quick efficient you know uncontested response to dealing with this those are countries that are much more top-down we may not classify them as authoritarian per se they might be technically democracies but they are they're much more centrally organized they can move much more quickly they don't have the kinds of checks and balances that we do either at the federal level or at the state level so you're gonna see a much more coherent response and they're able to move much more quickly and much more effectively if once they kind of come to a plan and a decision about a crisis and from what I understand that that's and why the government was set up like that to to maximize yes freedoms right exactly I take over very quickly and so this is why it's it's it's obsessively interesting for data nerds like us to look at these look at the numbers coming out for different states in the United States and the different predicted outcomes that you're seeing so it's not all a reflection of how the virus is traveling some of it is some of it maps on to the actual contagion process but some of it has a lot to do with how aggressively states are pursuing social distancing how you know how quickly they responded all of all of these things have impacts on when they're going to hit their peak what their peak resource use looks like and you see very different results than in Washington which basically has seen the worst of it and has declined then you do somewhere like Florida which is very slow very slow to to take the memo and to take action and to lock itself down and has a much more vulnerable population so this is this is kind of a natural experiment that is happening at the federal level that it's going to be fodder for many future political science dissertations yeah well sure I mean there's that's a non non-trivial effect that the the spring-break effect you know I mean it's it's absolutely this is this is part of it and that does I mean you were saying you're pointing out earlier that we've never said that social distancing was a bad idea of course we haven't social dismiss is a fabulous idea we're both practicing it ourselves as are you Nate as you've told us with your oxytocin deficiency and and you know I think I think it's a very important measure to take and and we're absolutely fully endorsing that we're just also trying to keep a very broad perspective of the behavior of a pandemic along a bell curve and the fact that no matter how much social distancing you're practicing that curve is going to look like a curve anyway and and that even even you know to the degree that some states are not as aggressive as others it's it's still not a full-blown catastrophe so because the death rate is not what it was earlier reported to be because the just like you don't want to be looking at the wrong cumulative curve when you're trying to make sense of this you also don't want to be looking at a headline on CNN or on a post that somebody's sharing on Facebook that's a headline that's derived from the wrong kind of graph so people just need to be very discerning about their information environment and make sure that they are they're really understanding what what information they're looking at and what kind of data it's coming from you know we were talking earlier about the Ferguson model and it reminded me that very early in grad school that the stats stats guru who teaches the the sort of advanced quantitative methods class his name's Gary King he's an extraordinary quantitative methodology he is notorious for going up to the board on the first day of that class and he draws a little stick figure says after dr. Lyles heart really draws a stick figure and he points to it and he says what's that and everyone sort of looks at each other and like I don't know it's a man it's a it's a person it's a human I don't know he says it's a model that is a model that is model of reality and that's all we're dealing with with the model is only as good as its assumptions and the information that you're putting into it and a lot of these models have been wrong and the people who have published them have really doubled down and refused to adjust them and and those are continuing to fuel erroneous headlines so people just need to check yourself before you wreck yourself the however one of the things that I consider this you know I I went when tragedies happen at the various degrees in in individuals lives including my own I've learned because I've had a essentially a bird's-eye view of so much of it as a as a psychologist for 30 years and that is that this isn't always the case that but it very very often is the case and that is that the worst thing that happened is the very best thing that could have happened so we find out that you know your your wife was cheating on you and you were in love with her and and yet so she's leading you and you're you're broken and heartbroken and you feel like that's the worst thing that it happened but the truth of the matter is is that it was an underlying mess that you didn't see and so that process actually brought to light something that needed to be fixed in your life and now that makes possible you meeting somebody that you are much better suited to so it turns out that when you look back over your shoulder the worst thing that could happen that happened is the best thing that could have happened the and so this is this is one of those times now it's not one of those times if your beloved aunt uncle mother brother sister wife child dies of the corona virus then it's not okay but for for so many of us and for even the world in general you know this is sometimes the best thing that could have happened is something like this this shows that we were in essentially a chaotic mystery as opposed to what the data was really you know could have told us I'm amazed that I have not heard about random samples that were drawn early in March and followed because they could have gotten parameters much more tightly analyzed sooner than they were I we also get to stand back as a world and look at the response of the Asian world and its incredible success with respect to a threat like this and now we know now we've been sensitized as a country and hopefully around the world that when something starts to get loose like that now we won't have a bunch of Americans partying at Mardi Gras and we won't have a bunch of people you know lounging on the beach in Florida and we won't have a governor of Florida saying gee you know I don't want to trash my economy these are things these are the growing pains of learning something the hard way but we may look back a decade from now or 20 years from now and this could have been an incredibly important learning moment where we learned guess what when it looks like it's bad the right thing to do is to assume the worst case scenario and really hard fast if we do that then it's way less expensive and if we're wrong fine we'll find out soon enough that it isn't that big a threat and we can all peace out but this is you know so we learn we had a tremendous dry run here not a dry run it you know some blood was let but this at what looks like now a 0.15 or you know probably one in whatever that is one in one in 600 one in 700 people that will be infected will die most of them elderly and he'll but not all a few capricious hits that makes it terrifying but it was a remember it was a originally hot hypothesized instead of being being point point one five moves point nine unbelievable now we're talking about we're talking about one in 110 instead of one in six or 700 that's a tremendous difference in a massive difference in outcomes and so it could have been they could have been right and this could have been a one percent disaster so this is this is the the wild West's warning that we might have to have some things Nathan in my judgment put in place so that we move much more quickly quickly we've we've discovered an underbelly to federalism which is now a word that I know what it means the so and so we're gonna I think we're gonna have to take this if we're smart we'll learn from it wonderful one more question dr. Lyle doc doc yeah mmm-hmm okay sure okay okay so this is actually from a listener of ours so dr. Lyle dr. hockey you talked about Germany but it got me thinking about the cultural stereotypes of certain nationalities is there higher conscientiousness and stability genetic is that that's the well there's a little bit more I can I can add to it but I think that that was the crux of it no no that's good I'll let Doug take that one okay well I think that that those of us that are in the know which are represent a very small percentage of people working in social science we we are aware that there is a considerable amount of truth in what we call stereotypes so that doesn't mean that every positive or negative stereotype has truth in it but it means that a lot of stereotypes have a lot of truth that's whether the stereotypes the so the it's going to turn out that we're going to see when you look around the globe you're going to see that people that have been essentially dealing with a certain ecology social and physical ecology are going to have different physical and mental characteristics that have been successful in those ecologies and so I don't think it is too difficult to see that your I I would bet even I haven't seen I haven't actually seen the data on this although it's been referred to I haven't seen the data myself but I'm not surprised for example at the impressive response of Asia to this problem the high conscientiousness and the essentially the the sort of lack of rebelliousness and willingness to to play on the team and be very conscientious about directions that makes sense to me and it makes sense to every teacher that has ever taught diversified peoples and the Asian the Asian students are likely to be very studious very conscientious and are going to be paying attention to what they're supposed to be doing so there's going to be other peoples of the world are going to sometimes be less that way there's going to be a fair amount of independence and rebellious that you're going to find for example and the the average American and average northern European and so that's not going to be too surprising you're going to find differences all over the globe continents that are going to reliably be associated to some degree with differences of groups of people's so this this has been explored this isn't just sort of armchair Talk this has been well-documented and you'll see documentation of this in and Charles Murray's outstanding book human diversity you will see forerunners of this this book was just published this year you'll see forerunners of this and discussions by Nicholas Wade who is essentially a polymath that has walked among us and has written you know a whole bunch of amazing books for the last thirty years Nick Wade's interests are very wide they go from examinations of vision of human evolution of the nature and source of language science and deceit and how deception and fraud have been such a major problem in science and finally to a very interesting work just a few years ago called the Troublesome inheritance where he talks about that the globe is not all homogeneous we're not homogeneous in our physicality we can see that and that's obvious and it's obvious that the differences in us physically around the globe even though we're 99 percent exactly the same the one percent that's different we're very sensitive to and that 1 percent is in the physical differences that you see the reasons why we have those physical differences are not random those are adaptations to local conditions and they make sense biologically the same thing is going to be true of personalities so you can imagine that there's going to be habitats where that it's going to encourage risk-taking and there's going to be habitats where it's going to be smarter to be more careful there's going to be habitats where it's going to pay to be more rebellious and there's going to be habitats where it's going to be pay to actually be more more careful and conscientious about voicing a dissenting opinion there's going to be habitats where it's going to be more useful to be more extroverted and where it's going to be more introverted and this is how it is and so we're seeing partially in response to how said the world has dealt with a large wide sort of theoretical crisis because if it's not right in your front yard you're having to take somebody's word for it and then the response of how how quickly people respond to what their government tells them to do and you know how much how inconvenient that is or how difficult and how much sacrifice is involved and you're gonna see that of course some of this definitely has to do with the histories of the individuals in their culture but it's also going to have to do with the genes certain kinds of genes are going to be more statistically likely to have certain reactions than others and so I will bet you that the people that were having a grand time and Mardi Gras and the people that were having a good time on the beach in the middle of this crisis are not the same in terms of their conscientiousness extraversion etc as the people that were doing exactly what they were told to do by their government and making sure that they follow directions carefully I think that that doesn't make anybody better or worse but it makes one set of people one type of individual better it with respect to a specific adaptive problem so this was a a novel adaptive problem and we watched the genes have a say in how different people's took it on and how they managed it yes it sounds like the people in well no I'm not going to put that in a podcast yeah doctor doc now dr. loud doctor hawk thank you very much sad enough to hang myself all right well thank you guys very much man you want to add it yes doctor hawk do you have a good distance no I think that that was a good summary I am I wrote about this in the first newsletter that I send out the of personalities in pandemics newsletter which is very you know making the same observation that doug is which is that you know how people not just how they respond to a particular situation ie whether they're they're gonna go party for spring break on the beach or not but also sort of what they're what they're sitting at home pontificating about as as what the strategy should be for everybody that is emerging from the egocentric bias of their own personality so so people who are much more conscientious in any context are gonna be leaning towards social distancing or much earlier before all of the evidence is in there they're gonna congregate around that solution just naturally because it's emergent from the conscientiousness and their personality it's going to take the less conscientious people a little more evidence a little more fear to come around to the same kind of social prescription it doesn't mean that they can't get there with the right CV but they're not going to naturally land there right away like the highly conscientious people well and you saw that you saw that filter through the way that people were expressing opinions about this back in January in February and if you if you had you know the the social scientists tools to map that that social media conversation onto personality characteristics both in the US and across different cultures in the world I don't doubt for a second that you would see very high correlations with these personality traits that would be absolutely linked up with particular social prescriptions
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