The Unit of Caring
you gave me wings when you showed me birds
Anonymous asked:
Where did you find the stats that are showing a decrease in cases? That sounds wonderful!
You can see it on the SF Chronicle’s case dashboard:
Note that the peak in the seven-day average is about three weeks after the lockdown, which is what we’d expect based on data from Italy and Wuhan.
Some important caveats: Santa Clara County didn’t report over the weekend because they’re updating their data compliance procedures or something, so take the last two days of data with a grain of salt, they’re incomplete. In addition to that, there’s a distinct fall in reporting every weekend; you can see it on the graph. Confirmed case numbers aren’t everything; you can see that deaths (which are counted more reliably) don’t show the same trend (though you’d expect death trends to lag case trends because it takes infected people who will eventually die some amount of time to do so).
But even with those caveats, yeah, it’s cautiously encouraging! If we ramp up testing I’m optimistic that we can resume some low-risk activities in May.
Anonymous asked:
I have a really big ask about a sensitive topic that I've been sitting on for a long time. It's not about your area of expertise but you're the only person I know of I trust to give a worthwhile answer. I want to make sure it all gets through and I want to make it as anonymous as possible. Is it alright if I send it to the e-mail address you recently gave?
Yes, though note that I’m juggling a lot of things right now and more than ever cannot guarantee responses.
Anonymous asked:
How's the coronavirus situation for you? Have you suffocated to death yet? Or anybody you know?
(beneath a cut for positivity)
Anonymous asked: Hi. If I want to contact you in your capacity as a journalist to privately provide you with information about a topic you've written about on Twitter, how should I do so? I'm aware Vox has a "Send Us a Tip" link but I don't trust Vox as a company and do trust you as an individual.
Hey! You can reach me at me@kelseypiper.com
Relevant careers include science (developing helpful technologies to eg capture carbon or understand AI), politics and policy (helping push countries to take risk-minimizing actions), and general thinkers and influencers (philosophers to remind us of our ethical duties, journalists to help keep important issues fresh in people’s minds)
Too bad we didn’t have any journalists working for influential publications that could have helped keep important issues like “exponential growth is really fast and you should say so even if you might look silly” fresh in people’s minds back in February
Are you implying that other EA-flavored journalists would have the same hesitation Kelsey did?
If so, do you believe that because you think they are bad at predicting which problems will actually matter, or because you think they will easily bow to social pressure?
Nothing so general as all that, just that this is marginal evidence that very intentionally “being an EA in journalism” might not result in EA goals being met.
First of all, @#%^ you.
Second of all, Kelsey is doing her normal “feel guilty even though she did an incredibly good job” thing. On February 6th, two weeks before the first community transmission of the virus in the US was detected, she was already writing articles condemning the rest of the media for underplaying the coronavirus crisis and arguing that it was actually really important - see https://www.vox.com/future-perfect/2020/2/6/21121303/coronavirus-wuhan-panic-pandemic-outbreak , which says things like:
“Don’t worry about the coronavirus. Worry about the flu,” BuzzFeed argued. The flu “poses the bigger and more pressing peril,” the Washington Post said. “Why should we be afraid of something that has not killed people here in this country?” an epidemiologist argued in the LA Times. Other outlets have agreed. An ex-White House health adviser has told Americans to “stop panicking and being hysterical.”
On one level, this impulse is understandable. Panic isn’t good, and we’re apt to act more sensibly with a clear head.
But something about the insistence that we not freak out has also rubbed me the wrong way. Some of these reassurances come off as too dismissive and not very fair to their audience.
And:
“‘No reason for alarm’ is bad science as well as bad risk communication,” risk communications expert Peter Sandman wrote last week
And
New infectious diseases are scary, and any one might well be catastrophic if it’s highly lethal and spreads quickly. The way we avoid catastrophe is by reacting strongly to every new emergent human-transmissible disease that we don’t know much about, and throwing tons of resources at containment, vaccine development, treatments, and research. Worry about pandemic diseases isn’t misplaced. The reality is that pandemic diseases are potentially very scary, and that on the whole the world is underprepared, not overprepared.
And
If we fail, then the coronavirus death toll could well climb up into the tens of thousands. It also remains to be seen if vaccines or effective antiviral treatments will be developed. That’s just far too much uncertainty to assure people that they have nothing to worry about. And misleadingly assuring people that there’s nothing to worry about can end up doing harm. “Instead of deriding people’s fears about the Wuhan coronavirus,” Sandman, the communications expert, writes, “I would advise officials and reporters to focus more on the high likelihood that things will get worse and the not-so-small possibility that they will get much worse.” That’s a less reassuring message, but it more accurately represents the current situation.
Again, she was writing all of this before Recode wrote their infamous piece making fun of Silicon Valley for having some people who took coronavirus seriously. She then continued to pound the same subject in a bunch of articles throughout February and early March, eg https://www.vox.com/future-perfect/2020/2/26/21155282/trump-coronavirus-covid19-cdc-response-cases. She wrote what I think was the first major news article telling people to prep for coronavirus, in late February, and it basically got everything exactly right.
Kelsey’s evaluations of her own competence are not to be taken seriously. Interpret them they same way you would interpret statements from an especially neurotic character in a David Burns cognitive-behavioral therapy workbook.
Third of all, !@$% you.
I definitely think that I wrote good articles unusually early. Also, it looks likely that hundreds of thousands of people in this country are going to die, and I feel like when hundreds of thousands of people die of a preventable situation, everyone should take an hour to think about whether there are changes they could reasonably make to how they think about the world which would have let them do more – even if they were 99th percentile in the first place.
I agree that it is normally unhealthy and neurotic to spend your free time asking yourself what you could have done differently in a context where you did notably well, but these are really unusual times! “When a catastrophe of this magnitude happens, spend extra time and energy on retrospectives” feels totally reasonable to me (not if it will make you unproductively miserable. But it doesn’t make me miserable, and so far it’s been super productive.)There has got to be a healthy, non-self-hating, non-self-flagellating, genuinely constructive way to ask “great, I wrote that piece Feb 6th, and it did a lot of good, and I’m proud of that – what would I have needed to be thinking about and paying attention to to follow it up with one on the testing fiasco on Feb 7th?”
With that in mind, I think if this happens again next year I can do significantly better. I feel like this is a useful category of update to make. When I wrote about it, a bunch of people went “I have been feeling the same way”, so I think there’s a reasonable number of people here who 1) were early by objective measures and 2) outperformed most people but also 3) can easily identify stuff they can improve on, and it’s healthy for them to have conversations identifying that stuff and trying those improvements out.
And of course a lot of people who don’t read anything I write on Vox except screenshots on Twitter will take those conversations as an excuse to conclude that actually maybe EA is futile and journalism is inherently corrupting and Future Perfect was a waste of time, but, like, it feels like surrendering something really important if we give up on reflecting on how we can do better just because people will seize on that reflection as proof we were not worth listening to in the first place.There has got to be a healthy, non-self-hating, non-self-flagellating, genuinely constructive way to ask “great, I wrote that piece Feb 6th, and it did a lot of good, and I’m proud of that – what would I have needed to be thinking about and paying attention to to follow it up with one on the testing fiasco on Feb 7th?”
I don’t read much of anything on Vox, but I do follow you on twitter and did read your thread, not just screenshots. Even going back and reading it now, it paints a much worse picture than your and Scott’s assessments here. I don’t think it’s unreasonable for people to see a journalist agreeing that she has an “inability to think about complex systems and their dynamics”, saying that fears of contradicting public health officials were a major driver, and suggesting her public presentation was widely divergent from her privately held beliefs, and come away thinking something seriously went wrong.
I linked in my Twitter thread to the posts that Scott quotes from above. Twitter’s metrics say that very few people clicked from the thread on the posts, but they were linked right there! I think fundamentally one problem here is that the critique was aimed at people who have read the work I was critiquing and then got reblogged/signal-boosted/argued about primarily by people who had not. The thread definitely conveys a misleading impression if it’s read without the background context above – I just assumed it wouldn’t really be widely read without that. After all, people who read my February coverage would be more interested in discussing where it’d fallen short than people who hadn’t, right?
I also definitely wasn’t agreeing that I had an “inability to think about complex systems” when I said that zeynep’s article resonated with me. The thing that made that article ring true was the observation that there was a growing consensus that the waste of February was the fault of the administration for lying to us -but we all knew this administration would lie to us whenever it could! Why weren’t we in the field searching for the proof it was lying? I think on reflection I mostly disagree with her diagnosis of that problem in that screenshot (elsewhere in the article there are characterizations that hit the mark more closely), but I appreciated seeing someone push back on “it’s the fault of the administration for lying” with “okay, why did we think they wouldn’t do that? why did we proceed as if they weren’t lying? what made us hesitate to call them liars?”
And like - the default way self-criticisms work is that they’re not harsh enough. They find all the self-protective evidence and line it up and then say a few things about how it would’ve been possible to do even better. I was trying pretty hard to avoid that, and I do regret it if the result is misleading in the opposite direction, but it’s very hard to hit the precise amount of criticism that conveys both “I think I wrote solid coverage that significantly improved the information environment here and made readers better off” and “I think there are easily-identifiable-in-hindsight errors here which I can fix and am thinking how to fix” and “on close honest examination, some of those errors are *stupid*,and the sort one should know better than to make, and it is, actually, bad that they happened even if the overall output stands up well to the test of time” and “to the extent people had narratives in which I was heroically fighting Vox for the ability to publish as much as I did, they should revise their opinion of me downwards, because the constraints on my willingness to say more were about my own caution and my own difficulty in balancing various obligations, not about external pressure to downplay things.”
One takeaway I have here is that Twitter is bad and when trying to convey anything with meaningful nuance I should use a different platform. Tone is really really hard to manage in 240-character bursts, and you can’t go back and edit things if they’re failing to convey your intended point, either.
Anyway, idk, I don’t think I’m being absurdly scrupulous and I don’t think my self-criticism should be ignored because my articles were good but I absolutely might be conveying a misimpression of what I did in February because of tone being hard on Twitter. If I could write the thread again I’d start with quotes from what I did write and then describe some articles I didn’t write and what questions I could’ve asked myself to prompt myself to write them.
Relevant careers include science (developing helpful technologies to eg capture carbon or understand AI), politics and policy (helping push countries to take risk-minimizing actions), and general thinkers and influencers (philosophers to remind us of our ethical duties, journalists to help keep important issues fresh in people’s minds)
Too bad we didn’t have any journalists working for influential publications that could have helped keep important issues like “exponential growth is really fast and you should say so even if you might look silly” fresh in people’s minds back in February
Are you implying that other EA-flavored journalists would have the same hesitation Kelsey did?
If so, do you believe that because you think they are bad at predicting which problems will actually matter, or because you think they will easily bow to social pressure?
Nothing so general as all that, just that this is marginal evidence that very intentionally “being an EA in journalism” might not result in EA goals being met.
First of all, @#%^ you.
Second of all, Kelsey is doing her normal “feel guilty even though she did an incredibly good job” thing. On February 6th, two weeks before the first community transmission of the virus in the US was detected, she was already writing articles condemning the rest of the media for underplaying the coronavirus crisis and arguing that it was actually really important - see https://www.vox.com/future-perfect/2020/2/6/21121303/coronavirus-wuhan-panic-pandemic-outbreak , which says things like:
“Don’t worry about the coronavirus. Worry about the flu,” BuzzFeed argued. The flu “poses the bigger and more pressing peril,” the Washington Post said. “Why should we be afraid of something that has not killed people here in this country?” an epidemiologist argued in the LA Times. Other outlets have agreed. An ex-White House health adviser has told Americans to “stop panicking and being hysterical.”
On one level, this impulse is understandable. Panic isn’t good, and we’re apt to act more sensibly with a clear head.
But something about the insistence that we not freak out has also rubbed me the wrong way. Some of these reassurances come off as too dismissive and not very fair to their audience.
And:
“‘No reason for alarm’ is bad science as well as bad risk communication,” risk communications expert Peter Sandman wrote last week
And
New infectious diseases are scary, and any one might well be catastrophic if it’s highly lethal and spreads quickly. The way we avoid catastrophe is by reacting strongly to every new emergent human-transmissible disease that we don’t know much about, and throwing tons of resources at containment, vaccine development, treatments, and research. Worry about pandemic diseases isn’t misplaced. The reality is that pandemic diseases are potentially very scary, and that on the whole the world is underprepared, not overprepared.
And
If we fail, then the coronavirus death toll could well climb up into the tens of thousands. It also remains to be seen if vaccines or effective antiviral treatments will be developed. That’s just far too much uncertainty to assure people that they have nothing to worry about. And misleadingly assuring people that there’s nothing to worry about can end up doing harm. “Instead of deriding people’s fears about the Wuhan coronavirus,” Sandman, the communications expert, writes, “I would advise officials and reporters to focus more on the high likelihood that things will get worse and the not-so-small possibility that they will get much worse.” That’s a less reassuring message, but it more accurately represents the current situation.
Again, she was writing all of this before Recode wrote their infamous piece making fun of Silicon Valley for having some people who took coronavirus seriously. She then continued to pound the same subject in a bunch of articles throughout February and early March, eg https://www.vox.com/future-perfect/2020/2/26/21155282/trump-coronavirus-covid19-cdc-response-cases. She wrote what I think was the first major news article telling people to prep for coronavirus, in late February, and it basically got everything exactly right.
Kelsey’s evaluations of her own competence are not to be taken seriously. Interpret them they same way you would interpret statements from an especially neurotic character in a David Burns cognitive-behavioral therapy workbook.
Third of all, !@$% you.
I definitely think that I wrote good articles unusually early. Also, it looks likely that hundreds of thousands of people in this country are going to die, and I feel like when hundreds of thousands of people die of a preventable situation, everyone should take an hour to think about whether there are changes they could reasonably make to how they think about the world which would have let them do more – even if they were 99th percentile in the first place.
I agree that it is normally unhealthy and neurotic to spend your free time asking yourself what you could have done differently in a context where you did notably well, but these are really unusual times! “When a catastrophe of this magnitude happens, spend extra time and energy on retrospectives” feels totally reasonable to me (not if it will make you unproductively miserable. But it doesn’t make me miserable, and so far it’s been super productive.)
There has got to be a healthy, non-self-hating, non-self-flagellating, genuinely constructive way to ask “great, I wrote that piece Feb 6th, and it did a lot of good, and I’m proud of that – what would I have needed to be thinking about and paying attention to to follow it up with one on the testing fiasco on Feb 7th?”
With that in mind, I think if this happens again next year I can do significantly better. I feel like this is a useful category of update to make. When I wrote about it, a bunch of people went “I have been feeling the same way”, so I think there’s a reasonable number of people here who 1) were early by objective measures and 2) outperformed most people but also 3) can easily identify stuff they can improve on, and it’s healthy for them to have conversations identifying that stuff and trying those improvements out.
And of course a lot of people who don’t read anything I write on Vox except screenshots on Twitter will take those conversations as an excuse to conclude that actually maybe EA is futile and journalism is inherently corrupting and Future Perfect was a waste of time, but, like, it feels like surrendering something really important if we give up on reflecting on how we can do better just because people will seize on that reflection as proof we were not worth listening to in the first place.
Anonymous asked: Really a random curiosity question, so ignore if it's too invasive - do you think the cost of inducing breast feeding medically was less than feeding the baby with formula would have been? Hope you're all doing well, it's great to hear about other ways families can work !! Thanks for sharing about it.
Almost certain it was cheaper - I don’t think I had a copay for the consultation with the lactation consultant, I think we paid like $100 for the domperidone, insurance covered the pumps, and formula can run between seventy and several hundred dollars a month apparently. I guess I’m eating more food but I don’t think it’s that much more food.
Anonymous asked: What made you decide to start breastfeeding?
Well, we were having a baby, and being able to breastfeed the baby is a really helpful ability when you have a baby, because you can feed them on the go/in bed in the middle of the night/without waiting for a bottle to warm up, etc.
I feel like this can’t possibly be the answer you were hoping for but I’m kind of not sure what is missing from it, so please let me know!
Anonymous asked: What medicine do you use to breastfeed someone else's baby?! I tried to combo breastfeed and formula feed my own baby, and my milk supply dried up, and now he gets only formula. I'm wondering if there's the same medical intervention would help me start breastfeeding him again.
I took hormonal birth control (Zovia 1/35; I think the progesterone/estrogen balance is important but it doesn’t have to be this specific birth control) to imitate pregnancy progesterone levels, and domperidone (20mg, four times a day) for six months, then went off the hormonal birth control and started pumping every four hours for two weeks. By the end of those two weeks I was producing about 4oz a pumping session, and gradually grew that to about 7.
I did this in consultation with a lactation consultant and I recommend that if you can afford it/access it, but hormonal birth control has well-understood relatively limited risks and domperidone is a safe medication you can order online at inhousepharmacy so I can imagine doing it yourself being the right choice for some people who don’t have meaningful access to a lactation consultant.
Sam did this too and got some milk but lower milk supply than me, so results definitely vary, and of course the most important thing for thriving kids is parents who are not stressed and miserable, not whether they’re fed breastmilk or formula. I hope it works for you if you end up deciding to try it but I am sure your baby will be totally fine either way.
Anonymous asked: Sorry if this is too prying, but what are your family/living arrangements? From what I understand you're polyamorous, married and helping raise someone else's biological child, and I'd be fascinated to hear more about how your situation came about and how you/your partners make it work. It might also be helpful for other people who want to try living similarly.
For sure! So when I was just out of college and kind of floundering and writing a lot of fanfic with @luminousalicorn she invited me to come live with her spouse @michaelblume and their new baby Merlin. I took them up on it and it was a great living environment for me and I fell in love with Merlin and offered to help with childcare and got my life together and got a job and at some point we talked things through and realized that it’d be really hard on Merlin if I were to vanish from his life.
I decided that I wanted to commit to being within a distance Merlin could traverse from him for his whole childhood (so, in the same house, when he was small, and nearby, when he was bigger, and in the same neighborhood for good). And I started dating Sam (I am also dating a lot of other people but this doesn’t actually feature in my home situation very much; I’m not dating Merlin’s mom or dad) and Sam was excited about also making this commitment to be in Merlin’s life, and in the life of subsequent babies, and we bought a house together.
There are a bunch of ways this is really challenging; I think you have to have a lot of patience and flexibility and stuff to make anything like it work. Instead of two sets of instincts about screen time and healthy food and education and discipline, you have four; with two parents there are a lot more norms you can rely on than you can in our situation. But it’s been worth it to me, because kids are really important to me and living with friends is really important to me and Merlin and Mike and Alicorn are specifically people who are really important to me and who I want to build a life with.
The thing our family is doing right now with Koios looks like: Mike has the evening shift (until 3am) with the baby and gets him down to sleep and sleeps in his room and soothes him if he wakes before three, Alicorn feeds the baby when she gets him after 3 and hands him over to Sam as early as 4, Sam hopefully gets him to sleep in her room from 4 to 7, and Sam hands him to me for a morning feeding between 6:30 and 7:30, and then he sleeps after the morning feeding while I start my work day at 7:30, Sam goes off to work, and Mike goes off to work.
I have no idea how people with two parent households manage. Part of the answer is that they’re just really really sleep-deprived; Alicorn doesn’t remember much of Merlin’s infancy. Part of it is that unlike me they don’t have a bunch of chronic health issues that eat a lot of their energy. Part of it is that they try to juggle fewer other things; if I were one of two parents of a three-year-old and a newborn I probably wouldn’t attempt to play D&D or be in a really impressive choir like two of my coparents are or date other people or have hobbies or throw weekly dinner parties on Shabbat or help other friends with job hunting or travel for work. (I know some people manage this but I am pretty sure I wouldn’t be able to.)
And in practice I think a lot of people just - have fewer kids than they might have wanted, or kids later in life than they might have wanted, or choose between kids and their demanding long-hours career, and I’m endlessly grateful that I’m not going to have to do that. I think probably lots of people would be happier if they had this option, and I’m super lucky that I do.