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A review by lpm100
The Rules of Contagion: Why Things Spread - and Why They Stop by Francesca Barrie, Adam Kucharski
5.0
Strained reasoning, but with some interesting insights.
Reviewed in the United States on January 2, 2021
Disclosure:
1. I had purchased this book because I wanted to get some new insights into the nature of disease transmission as a result of the Ongoing Coronavirus Hysteria.
2. Coronavirus was not quite the focus of this book, but there was some interesting peripheral information.
If you were interested in information specifically about coronavirus, this book can only serve as a companion to some current periodicals that are being published about that disease. (I have in mind Alex Berenson books.)
*******
There is just so much going on in this book that is hard to keep track of it, and I would suggest that this is one of those books that you might read once and then put down and pick up a year later and read again. (Or take copious notes the first time around.)
The prose is certainly very easy to read/nonfatty and it would not take too much reading time to reread this whole book.
*******
We do learn some things
1. New terms and concepts:
-Descriptive versus mechanistic methods.
-Models are not evidence, and predictions are not data (p.141).
-If you've seen one pandemic, you've seen one pandemic (p.3)
-"Fake news" can mean more than one thing: clickbait/conspiracy theories/misinformation/disinformation (p. 204)
-"Spark/growth/peak/decline" are the terms that are used in epidemiology to describe growth of a disease, and they are directly analogous to those used in microbiology to describe bacterial growth. (Lag / log / stationary / decay).
2. Great (but forgotten) names of major contributors.
Ronald Ross--responsible for figuring out about the distribution patterns of malaria. (And just as an example of how great the thinking was: he has no idea of the mechanism of action of the disease.).
William Kermack- responsible for building sundry mathematical modeling tools--and he only started working on this after he was blinded and could not do experimental work later.
3. The goal of people who spread misinformation on the internet is not to spread it to the maximum number of people, but instead for it to reach a person that is visible to many other people. (The easiest way to get people to believe that vaccines cause autism was not to repeat it a million times, but just to make sure that Pamela "Airhead" Anderson believed it. And the rest was a done deal.)
4. The 80/20-Pareto rule (80% of outcomes result from 20% of all causes (or inputs for any given event.) works in epidemiology, as well.
*******
I do have some problems with the way that Kucharski overextends his theoretical apparatus to situations that aren't quite analogous to Epidemiology.
-As when he applies the same treatment to violence (in places like Chicago) as to disease Epidemiology.
The author seems to assume that everybody in the situations is genetically the same thing.
Places like Kingston, Jamaica/ South Africa, Detroit / Chicago / Atlanta / St Louis all have huge amounts of crime, and they are also very full of black people.
In the same way that it doesn't make any sense to discuss the behavior of the pathogen independent of a host, it doesn't make any sense to discuss some behavior that really does have to come through a biological substrate: violence is not going to spread through Chinese / Japanese people in the same way that it spreads through jamaicans, because they are just genetically not the same thing.
-And as when he equates the 2008 US housing bubble to other panics, and then tries to use disease transmission models to explain them.
*******
A lot of philosophical questions.
1. Once some government somewhere knows that an idea can spread in certain ways, is it such a bad idea for them to stop it?
For example: The Chinese government is very aware that the internet can create a bunch of hysteria and also churches / mosques/ Falun Gong meetings are places where people can meet each other and then repurpose those meetings into some political movement. And so, the Public Security Bureau is all over those types of meetings. (The author does, in fact, get around to discussing the Chinese case. Page 197.)
And, after reading this, it's not that they don't have a logical/ empirical case for behaving in the way that they do.
The stupidity of the vaccine – autism link could never have caught on in China, but it did catch on in the United States with damage and spillover effects that are huge and ongoing.
2. If somebody studied malaria susceptibility in two populations (one black/one Chinese), he would get very different ideas about the susceptibility of the population/"R value" of the disease.
And the reason why would be a mystery until he realized that because of sickle cell trait a lot of black people have lower receptiveness to malaria.
In that case, is "R" only an empirical value /impossible to generalize/ situational?
3. In the case that you have a government with a huge, slow, lumbering bureaucracy for a government (let's choose the United States as an example), what can you really expect them to be able to do about preventing a spark of disinformation from starting a forest fire of fake news?
There is the example of all of the many millions of dollars that were spent in Chicago trying to stop spreads of gang violence.
And even after one year of all of that effort and all of those man hours-- they only stopped around 35 shootings and 5 homicides in Chi-Raq. (Oops! Sorry, I mean "Chicago." p.128)
4. When can/can't you reinterpret everything as an issue of public health?
The author gets into some strange efforts to define gun violence as a "public health menace." (You know, kind of the way that abortion is redefined as "reproductive health.") And he, in so many words, says what all left-wing intellectuals ALWAYS AND EVERYWHERE do which is: "Well, they do such and such in Europe and so why can't/ shouldn't it be that way in the United States?"
5. Given that what you read in the newspapers is somewhere between 90 and 100% untrue, what is the best way to filter out fake news?
-Maybe rely only on non mainstream sources?
-Maybe just not bother about the news at all, and assume that if something is important that it will find its way to your ears? (NN Taleb does this, and I can say that it is quite tiring to pick up a newspaper and have to go through it with such a fine tooth comb because so little of the information is accurate.).
-Maybe only deal with treatments that are in excess of 700 words? (>The length of New York "Fake News" Times?)
*******
Most germane (in the opinion of this reviewer) points from each chapter:
1. Basics of epidemiology as it was discovered just over a century ago.
2. Somewhat strained analogizing between financial hysteria (such as tulip mania), and poorly understood financial products (such as in the 2008 Real Estate Cris) and transmission of diseases (such as HIV and gonorrhea). These things are connected in that they have vectors, networks and contagion.
3. Transmission of diseases is better explained by movement of vectors between space rather than imagining that the disease itself moves over all space universally. (In that case, San Francisco is further than China geographically, but much closer in terms of vector space than Barbados... Which is the opposite.) Speculation on the way that social contagions can be minimized by modifying the behavior of vectors.
4. Attempts to model shootings in a place such as Chicago using epidemiological apparatus. Study of a program that tried to use certain techniques to stop shootings by treating them as a public health issue.
5. Observations on the techniques of people that try to find ways to broadcast their message, viewed in terms of epidemiological concepts.
6. Observations about hackers / computer virus coders choosing different vectors / mechanisms of action in order to deliver their virus payload. (Stuxnet. WannaCry. Mirai.)
7. The direction of viruses is trackable over time/space based on changes in the genetic code. (It is cheaper and easier than it ever has been to sequence viruses.) The electronization of things such as medical records / GPS movements / license plates make it such that it is extremely easy to be found and extremely difficult to not be found.
8. Recapitulation, conclusion, and speculation about the future direction that these unrelated threads could take. (Unrelated threads: banking crisis / gun violence / opioid use / computer viruses / diseases / privacy)
Conclusions:
1. In some sense, much "new" here is old: Mark Twain has said before (a century or so ago) that "a lie can travel halfway around the world while the truth is still putting on its shoes."
Thomas Sowell has written one chapter in a book about "fictitious persons." He gave the examples of Clarence Thomas and Herbert Hoover, each of whom has a character that is created by journalists and historians by sheer force of repetition (p.203).
2. It's pretty safe to say that the Internet is just a tool to facilitate what already happens very naturally: the spread of panic and misinformation.
Verdict: Recommended
Reviewed in the United States on January 2, 2021
Disclosure:
1. I had purchased this book because I wanted to get some new insights into the nature of disease transmission as a result of the Ongoing Coronavirus Hysteria.
2. Coronavirus was not quite the focus of this book, but there was some interesting peripheral information.
If you were interested in information specifically about coronavirus, this book can only serve as a companion to some current periodicals that are being published about that disease. (I have in mind Alex Berenson books.)
*******
There is just so much going on in this book that is hard to keep track of it, and I would suggest that this is one of those books that you might read once and then put down and pick up a year later and read again. (Or take copious notes the first time around.)
The prose is certainly very easy to read/nonfatty and it would not take too much reading time to reread this whole book.
*******
We do learn some things
1. New terms and concepts:
-Descriptive versus mechanistic methods.
-Models are not evidence, and predictions are not data (p.141).
-If you've seen one pandemic, you've seen one pandemic (p.3)
-"Fake news" can mean more than one thing: clickbait/conspiracy theories/misinformation/disinformation (p. 204)
-"Spark/growth/peak/decline" are the terms that are used in epidemiology to describe growth of a disease, and they are directly analogous to those used in microbiology to describe bacterial growth. (Lag / log / stationary / decay).
2. Great (but forgotten) names of major contributors.
Ronald Ross--responsible for figuring out about the distribution patterns of malaria. (And just as an example of how great the thinking was: he has no idea of the mechanism of action of the disease.).
William Kermack- responsible for building sundry mathematical modeling tools--and he only started working on this after he was blinded and could not do experimental work later.
3. The goal of people who spread misinformation on the internet is not to spread it to the maximum number of people, but instead for it to reach a person that is visible to many other people. (The easiest way to get people to believe that vaccines cause autism was not to repeat it a million times, but just to make sure that Pamela "Airhead" Anderson believed it. And the rest was a done deal.)
4. The 80/20-Pareto rule (80% of outcomes
*******
I do have some problems with the way that Kucharski overextends his theoretical apparatus to situations that aren't quite analogous to Epidemiology.
-As when he applies the same treatment to violence (in places like Chicago) as to disease Epidemiology.
The author seems to assume that everybody in the situations is genetically the same thing.
Places like Kingston, Jamaica/ South Africa, Detroit / Chicago / Atlanta / St Louis all have huge amounts of crime, and they are also very full of black people.
In the same way that it doesn't make any sense to discuss the behavior of the pathogen independent of a host, it doesn't make any sense to discuss some behavior that really does have to come through a biological substrate: violence is not going to spread through Chinese / Japanese people in the same way that it spreads through jamaicans, because they are just genetically not the same thing.
-And as when he equates the 2008 US housing bubble to other panics, and then tries to use disease transmission models to explain them.
*******
A lot of philosophical questions.
1. Once some government somewhere knows that an idea can spread in certain ways, is it such a bad idea for them to stop it?
For example: The Chinese government is very aware that the internet can create a bunch of hysteria and also churches / mosques/ Falun Gong meetings are places where people can meet each other and then repurpose those meetings into some political movement. And so, the Public Security Bureau is all over those types of meetings. (The author does, in fact, get around to discussing the Chinese case. Page 197.)
And, after reading this, it's not that they don't have a logical/ empirical case for behaving in the way that they do.
The stupidity of the vaccine – autism link could never have caught on in China, but it did catch on in the United States with damage and spillover effects that are huge and ongoing.
2. If somebody studied malaria susceptibility in two populations (one black/one Chinese), he would get very different ideas about the susceptibility of the population/"R value" of the disease.
And the reason why would be a mystery until he realized that because of sickle cell trait a lot of black people have lower receptiveness to malaria.
In that case, is "R" only an empirical value /impossible to generalize/ situational?
3. In the case that you have a government with a huge, slow, lumbering bureaucracy for a government (let's choose the United States as an example), what can you really expect them to be able to do about preventing a spark of disinformation from starting a forest fire of fake news?
There is the example of all of the many millions of dollars that were spent in Chicago trying to stop spreads of gang violence.
And even after one year of all of that effort and all of those man hours-- they only stopped around 35 shootings and 5 homicides in Chi-Raq. (Oops! Sorry, I mean "Chicago." p.128)
4. When can/can't you reinterpret everything as an issue of public health?
The author gets into some strange efforts to define gun violence as a "public health menace." (You know, kind of the way that abortion is redefined as "reproductive health.") And he, in so many words, says what all left-wing intellectuals ALWAYS AND EVERYWHERE do which is: "Well, they do such and such in Europe and so why can't/ shouldn't it be that way in the United States?"
5. Given that what you read in the newspapers is somewhere between 90 and 100% untrue, what is the best way to filter out fake news?
-Maybe rely only on non mainstream sources?
-Maybe just not bother about the news at all, and assume that if something is important that it will find its way to your ears? (NN Taleb does this, and I can say that it is quite tiring to pick up a newspaper and have to go through it with such a fine tooth comb because so little of the information is accurate.).
-Maybe only deal with treatments that are in excess of 700 words? (>The length of New York "Fake News" Times?)
*******
Most germane (in the opinion of this reviewer) points from each chapter:
1. Basics of epidemiology as it was discovered just over a century ago.
2. Somewhat strained analogizing between financial hysteria (such as tulip mania), and poorly understood financial products (such as in the 2008 Real Estate Cris) and transmission of diseases (such as HIV and gonorrhea). These things are connected in that they have vectors, networks and contagion.
3. Transmission of diseases is better explained by movement of vectors between space rather than imagining that the disease itself moves over all space universally. (In that case, San Francisco is further than China geographically, but much closer in terms of vector space than Barbados... Which is the opposite.) Speculation on the way that social contagions can be minimized by modifying the behavior of vectors.
4. Attempts to model shootings in a place such as Chicago using epidemiological apparatus. Study of a program that tried to use certain techniques to stop shootings by treating them as a public health issue.
5. Observations on the techniques of people that try to find ways to broadcast their message, viewed in terms of epidemiological concepts.
6. Observations about hackers / computer virus coders choosing different vectors / mechanisms of action in order to deliver their virus payload. (Stuxnet. WannaCry. Mirai.)
7. The direction of viruses is trackable over time/space based on changes in the genetic code. (It is cheaper and easier than it ever has been to sequence viruses.) The electronization of things such as medical records / GPS movements / license plates make it such that it is extremely easy to be found and extremely difficult to not be found.
8. Recapitulation, conclusion, and speculation about the future direction that these unrelated threads could take. (Unrelated threads: banking crisis / gun violence / opioid use / computer viruses / diseases / privacy)
Conclusions:
1. In some sense, much "new" here is old: Mark Twain has said before (a century or so ago) that "a lie can travel halfway around the world while the truth is still putting on its shoes."
Thomas Sowell has written one chapter in a book about "fictitious persons." He gave the examples of Clarence Thomas and Herbert Hoover, each of whom has a character that is created by journalists and historians by sheer force of repetition (p.203).
2. It's pretty safe to say that the Internet is just a tool to facilitate what already happens very naturally: the spread of panic and misinformation.
Verdict: Recommended