OK, Glen, fair enough and stipulated. I hope you know how much I value your
perspective.
But ...One of the constant debates in my field (well, perhaps more accurately,
in the field of most of the members of my Department, was between the
"nomothetic" and the "idiographic". Knowing you as well as I do, I know that
before I get to the end of this sentence you will have looked those terms up
and come to understand them better than I do. But still, to bolt the argument
to the ground, a bit, let me explain them myself. It is like the difference
between the graph in a scientific paper of the mean value of the independent
variable and the values of the dependent variable, as interpolated -- that's
nomothetic -- and the picture of three individual subjects which represent the
values of the independent variable -- that's idiographic. Nomothetic study
seeks to get at the laws that relate one kind of thing to another; the other
seeks to capture the ... dare I say .... essence of a phenomenon through a
single instance. Physics writing is often said to be nomothetic; history
writing is said to be idiographic. Psychology is said to be both. Studies of
rats in mazes are nomothetic in intent; we really DON'T give a damn for the
individual rat. But clinical case studies are definitely idiographic. My
field -- ethology -- has often been torn between the two impulses, and the
idiographic gave way in the end to the nomothetic. To my regret, while I was
on sabbatical in the Maddingley {ethological} Field Station in Cambridge,
England I met a woman, Joan Hall Craggs, who had managed to record and sonogram
all the song types sung by a single male black bird during his 18 year (could
that be right?!) career. She had binder upon binder of them in her office, all
beautifully preserved, dated, and fieldnoted. I am afraid, when she died, the
whole lot went in the dumpster. A nomothetical scientist would argue that such
a record would tell one nothing about "blackbirds"; an idiographic scientist
would claim that without such a record, we would never know what was possible
for a black bird. (By the way, a "black bird" in England is a very close
relative of our American robin'\; robins, in England are something else
entirely.)
Now, I have already stipulated that, in a sense my focusing on my individual
case is to some extent narcissistic and, well, stupid. However, focusing on a
single case is not necessarily either. And since I know my case best of all,
and since the home church is living it right now, I think keeping the Santa Fe
numbers before us GROUNDS us and helps us, perhaps, not to think of "cases" and
"deaths" in the disembodied way that we do when we are performing as nomothetic
scientists. Every nomothetic case is an intersection of just a few variables
of interest; every idiographic case is the intersection of an infinity of
variables, any one of which may be of interest to somebody. Thinking of the
“self-case”, helps to keep that fact in view.
Thanks as always for you insights,
Hope to see you tomorrow.
Nick
Nicholas Thompson
Emeritus Professor of Ethology and Psychology
Clark University
[email protected]
https://wordpress.clarku.edu/nthompson/
-----Original Message-----
From: Friam <[email protected]> On Behalf Of u?l? ?
Sent: Thursday, April 9, 2020 4:26 PM
To: FriAM <[email protected]>
Subject: Re: [FRIAM] covid19.healthdata.org
OK. This is definitely a different message from what I thought you said. I
thought you were saying their estimates were optimistic. And since their
estimates include their uncertainty bands, that includes not peaking till much
later than what their chart might suggest, maybe 4.5k deaths PER DAY at the
peak, 125k dead overall, etc. If we consider the outside of their uncertainty,
that's not optimistic at all.
You can go back to MA right now. And if you're super careful, you can most
likely do it without getting infected. So, your "pessimism" is not about the
peak, total bed availability, or whatever. Your pessimism seems to have more to
do with *you* (and your immediate clique). That you could go ahead and do what
you need to do now, but won't, isn't pessimism about these estimates. It's fear
for your own condition. That's understandable, of course, but not really about
this estimate or its methods.
On 4/9/20 2:49 PM, [email protected] wrote:
> Perhaps they seem optimistic to me only because mine have been so
> pessimistic. I have assumed that I am immobilized here in Santa Fe for the
> next year. I even put up a list on my wall of 365 days and have been
> crossing them off, one by one. What I see on that site suggests to me that I
> might actually get to my garden in Massachusetts by early June. I just
> heard an interview with Daniel Kahneman (who is in my age range) who says
> essentially that he expects to stay home for the rest of his life because of
> the disease. I just heard from Dave West (He's fine!) who decided to make a
> run for home from Amsterdam and essentially had a 747 to himself. Perhaps
> now is exactly the time to make a run for MA.
>
> So, you see, my thinking about all of this is deranged and intensified by its
> personal implications. So perhaps I ought to be keeping my thoughts to
> myself. I have my favorite dog in this fight; too much skin in this game.
>
> My pessimistic view is that until we are back to contact tracing levels
> everybody should stay home. Others seem to imagine essentially eliminating
> the disease from the population by social distancing in the next month. and
> then going back pretty much to business as usual. I WANT those "others" to
> be right, but I am having a hard time selling it to myself. At the minimum,
> any restarting would require public health departments to have the power to
> snatch contacts off the street, throw them in sterilized vans, and cart them
> off to motels to watch Fox News for two weeks. Apparently, people boarding
> airplanes in Wuhan, are doing so in hazmat gear. I just don't see that
> happening, here. Even at the current "peak", SW airlines is not screening
> passengers or taking temps at the gate.
>
> I read some where that Trump is losing a Billion dollars (a month? from the
> crisis. Hey, every cloud has a silver lining.
--
☣ uǝlƃ
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Nicholas Thompson
Emeritus Professor of Ethology and Psychology
Clark University
[email protected] <mailto:[email protected]>
https://wordpress.clarku.edu/nthompson/
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