Here is a digest of the best links I found each week for anyone who might be interested.

The Pandemic: the reality we live in

It’s almost a daily wondering: where are we now? However, it’s such a complicated topic. The more I read, the more questions I get. To this moment, many start to wonder what questions we should even ask. Here are a few articles that really helped me to get some clarity:

• The original WashingtonPost article offered a simple and elegant view of how covid19 spreads, and the idea behind “flatten the curve”. Kevin Simler gave a more detailed look into diffusion within general networks, while providing the definitions for many key concepts, fundamental assumptions and interactive simulations.

What we need to know is there are many factors (e.g., transmission rate, immunity, degree, clusters, etc.) that can affect the spread of the virus.

• That’s what make the decisions hard. Thomas Pueyo had an early call for action at March 10th, with a series of great follow ups on global policies and their effects. The best strategy the author argues is the Hammer and the Dance, which goes hard early with strict lock-down, and gradually release the measures with tracing, testing, distancing, etc. The alternative strategy is herd immunity to protect economy, and how it turns out to be not working as expected (6/9/20).
• However, the debate is still on-going. One reason is that many key factors are hard to estimate correctly, such as IFR(infection fatality rate) and CFR(case fatality rate), Rt, death count, asymptomatic ratio, time lag for symptoms, etc.
• Nate Silver explains why Coronavirus Case Counts Are Meaningless.

Though we might all follow the daily new case numbers closely, it doesn’t really reflect the real situation.

• At the end, all of the above analysis are based on the assumptions that the current understandings about the virus are somewhat accurate, and it won’t change dramatically. But, in reality, the middle ground between mild and severe has been hell for many.
• To completely address the issue, we need an effective antiviral, and maybe an vaccine. While computation can be sped up nowadays, there is a limit of how much calculation can help with antiviral discovery. Also, what if there is a vaccine, but we can’t find enough patients to run a randomized clinical trial?

Before that happens, we should all wear masks, keep distance, and wash hands.

• And, travel will look like this for a while.
• At the end, it’s more important to reflect on the long-term perspectives than ever before.

Disruptions: how it might be different

Navy Report offers an official accounting of UFOs. I won’t be surprised that aliens will be soon revealed. Alexander Wendt explains why they are really UFOs:

Sean Illing: If some of these UFOs are the products of alien life, why haven’t they made their presence more explicit? If they wanted to remain undetected, they could, and yet they continually expose themselves in these semi-clandestine ways. Why?

Alexander Wendt: That’s a very good question. Because you’re right, I think if they wanted to be completely secretive, they could. If they wanted to come out in the open, they could do that, too. My guess is that they have had a lot of experience with this in the past with civilizations at our stage. And they probably know that if they land on the White House lawn, there’ll be chaos and social breakdown. People will start shooting at them. So I think what they’re doing is trying to get us used to the idea that they’re here with the hopes that we’ll figure it out ourselves, that we’ll go beyond the taboo and do the science. And then maybe we can absorb the knowledge that we’re not alone and our society won’t implode when we finally do have contact. That’s my theory, but who knows, right?

I found all the interesting UFO readings from Tyler Cowen. There is no better way than he has put it:

“Humanity has a long history of being caught unawares by outside arrivals, and so we should pay more attention to that bias in ourselves, just as we should have for the arrival of Covid-19.”

Tips: raise the bar for myself

One of the best professional advice I think is to start writing and write on a multi-decade time frame. Andrew Chen shared a lot of great tips in this blog, e.g. writing is the most professional network activity.

Paul Graham (whose book Hackers & Painters has changed my perspective towards life) shared a framework of importance + novelty + correctness + strength to write usefully. In this masterpiece, he also explains why this framework may bring you many criticism in the meantime.

Management: the ideas for better collaboration

Agreat thread about peer review. Though it’s about publications in medical journals, the similar arguments can be easily made in all peer-review systems. I put it under management, since I think about it a lot in the context of promotion and performance review. A lot of great quotes from the author:

The problem with peer review is the peers.

Peer review is fine for what it is — it tells you that a paper is up to standard in its subfield.

The reason you like “peer review” is that it seems better than two alternatives: (1) “political review” and (2) “pal review.”

What’s important is the science, not the author.

Instead of thinking of the alternative to peer review as backroom politics, think of the alternative to peer review as post-publication review..

I have always been wondering what if we bring ultra honest and transparency into internal processes within an organization. How can we do that? What will all the processes look like? What can we achieve with it?