It’s All on the Ballot

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Here and now I give you my word, if you entrust me with the presidency, I will draw on the best of us, not the worst. I will be an ally of the light, not the darkness.

United we can, and will, overcome this season of darkness in America. We will choose hope over fear, facts over fiction, fairness over privilege.

This is a life-changing election that will determine America’s future for a very long time. Character is on the ballot. Compassion is on the ballot. Decency, science, democracy. They are all on the ballot. Who we are as a nation, what we stand for, and most importantly, who we want to be – that’s all on the ballot.

Yesterday, I posted the former president’s speech at this week’s online Democratic National Convention. Therefore, it’s only fair that I post the next president’s too. Joe Biden’s speech was vigorous, intelligent and delivered with feeling. It was also the shortest Democratic acceptance speech since Walter Mondale’s in 1984. Joe is fine. We desperately need him in the White House.

Understanding Perspectivism: Scientific Challenges and Methodological Prospects, edited by Michaela Massimi, et al.

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I’ve been building up to writing a book about perspective and perspectivism for about ten years now. I’ve read articles and books and written thousands of words in emails (mostly to myself) and other places. (It doesn’t pay to rush these things.) 

This isn’t about perspective in the artistic sense — how painters make a two-dimensional surface look three-dimensional — although that’s a related idea or practice. This is about perspective in the sense of a point of view or frame of reference or standpoint. It’s what we mean when we say “that’s your perspective” or “this is where I’m coming from”. Similarly, it’s what we mean by statements like “she’s speaking from a scientific perspective” or “it’s a bad decision from an ethical perspective”.

Perspectivism is a philosophical view about the importance of perspective when it comes to subjects like science or ethics, but also the way perspective functions in everyday life. This view is associated with Friedrich Nietzsche, but other philosophers have had similar ideas, including some academic philosophers working today. There is even a website devoted to “perspectival realism” funded by a European Union research program.

Understanding Perspectivism features essays by twelve academics. It’s not going to make the New York Times bestseller list. Putting aside the subject matter and the fairly technical language, that’s guaranteed by the price of a hardcover copy: $140. Rather oddly, however, anyone interested can download it free (which is how, no surprise, I got mine).

If you want to know more, there’s a positive account of the book at Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews. I’ll quote a bit that gives a feel for the collection’s subject matter and style:

Another standout [chapter] is David Danks’ “Safe-and-Substantive Perspectivism” which presents a view refreshingly unique from all other chapters. . . . Danks does what philosophers do best and takes a step back, thinking about perspectivism from a broader perspective. He works to dig in to just where and how perspectives enter into science and draws a useful distinction between two extremes: ‘unsafe’ hyperlocal perspectivism and ‘insubstantial’ high-level perspectivism. The former refers to the notion that perspectives set the basis for science at the level of individual scientists, which may be “dependent on local, contingent properties of specific people”. The latter refers to an opposite notion that scientific perspectives are highly abstract and general human activities — a notion that Danks deems uninformative regarding the nature of scientific perspectives.

To that end, Danks offers an alternative that construes science as necessarily and unproblematically perspectival. Here the big picture is that perspectives aren’t unique to science, and consequently aren’t any more of a problem for science than they are for any other domain where there are multiple, often incompatible perspectives, such as general human perception:

“More precisely, these sources of perspectivism are not unique to scientific theories, knowledge, and beliefs but rather apply to their everyday counterparts. That is, there is nothing special (with respect to these arguments) about science, and so the resulting perspectivism about science does not threaten a collapse into complete relativism (or at least, poses no more threat than we face about all of our beliefs and knowledge).”

So We Leave No Doubt What This Country Stands For

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This administration has shown that it will tear our democracy down. . . . So we have to get busy building it up. By pouring all of our efforts into these 76 days and by voting like never before. For Joe and Kamala and candidates up and down the ticket. So that we leave no doubt about what this country that we love stands for, today and for all our days to come. — Barack Obama

In case you missed it, a former president, a real president, addressed the nation last night from Philadelphia. It’s nineteen minutes that are worth your time.

When the Election Results Are Official

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We’ve wasted thousands of hours the past four years repeating and correcting the lies and stupidities of You Know Who. But along the way there’s been some educational value. Here’s an example from The Washington Post [with my commentary in italics]:

President Txxxx is ramping up his attacks on mail-in voting by insisting election results “must” be known on election night. “No more big election night answers?” he tweeted last month. “Ridiculous! Just a formula for RIGGING an Election . . .”

The news media have pushed back on his baseless claims of fraud. But they agree with him on one point: There is likely to be a “delay” in election results because of a surge in mail-in votes.

But that’s wrong. If results aren’t known on election night, that doesn’t mean there’s a delay. The fact is, there are never official results on election night. There never have been.

Predictions of a delay rest on a misunderstanding of the vote-counting process . . . If election-night results are considered the norm, and what happens this year is described as a “delay,” it will be easy to paint the result as problematic — and for Txxxx to continue to spread suspicions about the entire process.

Concerns about a supposed delay stem from a coronavirus-fueled interest in absentee and mail-in ballots. . . . Counting [all of] those ballots could potentially take days or weeks . . .

Yet even if [the final count] takes several weeks, that wouldn’t constitute a delay — because by law, election results aren’t official until more than a month after the election. The 12th Amendment and the accompanying Electoral Count Act of 1887 give states five weeks — this year, until Dec. 8 — to count their popular votes. That tally determines each state’s presidential electors, who cast their state’s votes six days later, on Dec. 14. Only if states miss that December deadline would election results be genuinely late.

That means all of us — politicians, the media, pundits and voters in general — need to reorient our thinking. The election is officially decided in December, not in November. There is nothing pernicious, or even unusual, about this. The only problem is one of perception.

The misperception isn’t surprising. We’ve come to expect that the media will announce the winner on election night. After all, that’s been the case for more than six decades. News outlets often report the results calculated by research groups or the Associated Press, which collect returns from individual precincts and add them up.

It’s essential for us to get this right. If we do not, we give ammunition to those who would undermine democracy by willfully [and/or foolishly] getting it wrong.

But the media results are projections based on preliminary returns rather than a certified final number. In previous years, that has been a distinction without a difference, since there was virtually no daylight between news media projections and actual results. One notable exception was the 2000 presidential election, when confusion over the Florida vote ended with the Supreme Court declaring George W. Bush the winner over Al Gore.

. . . Since 2000, Democrats have done better as later ballots are counted — the “blue shift” first identified in a 2013 paper by one of us, Edward Foley — which could significantly impact results. Hypothetically, Txxxx could be winning on election night [although he won’t be] . . . . and claim he has enough electoral college votes to declare victory. Yet after all votes are counted, Joe Biden could be [will be] the actual winner. Txxxx has been pushing the false narrative that any change after election night is fraudulent. That is unequivocally not the case. . . .

Unquote.

I don’t think it’s going to be a close election. The result will be reasonably clear on election night (technically, by early the next morning). But it’s good to be prepared when people who don’t know or care what they’re talking about start talking.

Seven Months Later, What We Know About Covid-19 (and Don’t)

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Our president announced that New Zealand suffered a major surge of Covid-19 on Monday (“big surge in New Zealand, you know it’s terrible, we don’t want that”). They had nine new cases. The U.S. had 42,000. 

For somewhat more reliable information, see this informative summary from StatNews (the article has more about each item):

. . . In the time since Chinese scientists confirmed the rapidly spreading disease in Wuhan . . . an extraordinary amount has been learned about the virus, SARS-CoV-2, the disease it causes, Covid-19, and how they affect us.

Here are some of the things we have learned, and some of the pressing questions we still need answered.

What we know

Covid and kids: It’s complicated 

. . . Everything Covid is complex, and kids are no exception. While deaths among children and teens remain low, they are not invulnerable. And they probably contribute to transmission of SARS-CoV-2, though how much remains unclear. . . 

There are safer settings, and more dangerous settings

Research has coalesced on a few key points about what types of setting increase the risk that an infectious person will pass the virus to others. . . . 

People can test positive for a long time after they recover. It doesn’t matter 

There was a lot of angst a few months ago about some people who had seemingly recovered from Covid-19 infections continuing to test positive for the virus for weeks. Were they infectious? Should recommendations be changed for how long infected people should be isolated? It turns out it is an issue of testing. . . .

After the storm, there are often lingering effects 

Name a body part or system and Covid-19 has left its fingerprints there. . . . There are growing worries that these and other health effects will be long-lasting. . . .

‘Long-haulers’ don’t feel like they’ve recovered

We know they’re out there, but we don’t know how many, why their symptoms persist, and what happens next. . . . 

Vaccine development can be accelerated. A lot

An extraordinary amount of progress toward Covid-19 vaccines has been made, in record time. . . . 

People without symptoms can spread the virus

Whatever group you’re talking about, there are some key implications for the pandemic, and trying to rein it in. . . .

Mutations to the virus haven’t been consequential 

Coronaviruses in general do not mutate very quickly compared to other viral families. This is a good thing . . .  .

Viruses on surfaces probably aren’t the major transmission route

The general consensus now is that “fomites” — germs on surfaces — aren’t the major transmission route for Covid-19. . . .But it’s clear from lots of studies that surfaces around infected people can be contaminated with viruses and the viruses can linger. . . . 

What we don’t know

People seem to be protected from reinfection, but for how long? 

The thinking is that a case of Covid-19, like other infections, will confer some immunity against reinfection for some amount of time. But researchers won’t know exactly how long that protection lasts until people start getting Covid-19 again. So far, despite some anecdotal reports, scientists have not confirmed any repeat Covid-19 cases. . . .

What happens if or when people start having subsequent infections? 

Given that most respiratory viruses are not “one-and-done” infections — they don’t induce life-long immunity in the way a virus like measles does — there is a reasonable chance that people could have more than one infection with Covid-19. . . .

How much virus does it take to get infected? 

Whether you become infected or not when you encounter a pathogen isn’t just a question of whether you’re susceptible or immune. It depends on how much of the virus (or bacterium) you encounter. . . .

How many people have been infected?

There have been 21 million confirmed cases of Covid-19 around the world, and 5.3 million in the United States. Far more people than that have actually had the virus. . . .

It’s not clear why some people get really sick, and some don’t 

The sheer range of outcomes for people who get Covid-19 — from a truly asymptomatic case, to mild symptoms, to moderate disease leading to months-long complications, to death — has befuddled infectious disease researchers. . . .