How can China become zeroth world shortly when half of the country is still living in third world conditions? I suppose if you only consider how the wealthiest in Shanghai and other Tier 1 cities live their lives then yes China is approaching parity with the West but that ignores that America's per capita income is almost 5 times higher than China's.
China also has the nasty problem of many of its best and brightest wanting to come to America and the West where they will have political freedom and more broadly freedom of expression, something that cannot be bought in China no matter how wealthy one becomes.
I have seen the progress in China since the late 1990s. A rate of change impossible for a modern westerner to believe. China is not a photograph but a video on fast-forward.
people were saying this about the USSR in the 1930s (see beyond the urals by john scott). it's always faster to catch up than to break new ground. their rate of progress will slow dramatically as they approach the state of the art.
maybe, maybe not. it's impossible to say. developing new stuff is a very different game from catching up, especially when you get to manufacture mid-tech stuff for the west and take a loose interpretation of intellectual property. as a state, china currently seems much more able to direct its resources towards worthwhile endeavors than the US, but afaik they are still pretty far behind when it comes to cutting-edge stuff. the new j-20 fighter isn't a match for the f-22, let alone the f-35. they can't touch the level of US silicon fabs without annexing taiwan. I've read some convincing arguments that it may have an edge in cyberespionage/warfare, but it's always hard to judge those capabilities.
The same way the US is considered first world with half of its population living in poverty, a third or more without proper healthcare, almost one percent in prison, etc.
That's irrelevant, what matters is that a high IQ society has a vested interest in measuring IQ as a proxy for general intelligence and standardized testing results should reliably correlate to IQ and general intelligence.
It's not impossible that these tests measure something other than general intelligence, that just happens to correlate with social outcomes (like historical, relative familial wealth).
IIRC general intelligence also doesn't simply measure speed of cognition, but also ability to choose what to focus on ("intuition"), which these tests do not measure.
Adoptees have IQs in line with their biological parents, not their adoptive ones. It’s heritable like every other psychological variable I’m aware of.
Speed of cognition is absolutely correlated with IQ but the difference in speed doesn’t cause the differences in results. Both are downstream of being more intelligent.
> Speed of information processing and general intelligence
> One hundred university students were given five tests of speed-of-processing, measuring their speed of encoding, short-term memory scanning, long-term memory retrieval, efficiency of short-term memory storage and processing, and simple and choice reaction time or decision-making speed. They were also given the Wechsler Adult Intelligence Scale and the Raven Advanced Progression Matrices. A number of multiple regression analyses show that the cognitive processing measures are significantly related to IQ scores. Other analyses indicate that this relationship cannot be attributed to the common content shared by the reaction time and the intelligence tests, nor to the fact that parts of the WAIS are timed. It is concluded that the reaction time tests measure basic cognitive operations which are involved in many forms of intellectual behavior, and that individual differences in intelligence can be attributed, to a moderate extent, to variance in the speed or efficiency with which individuals can execute these operations
There is no evidence connecting IQ to hereditary traits. This has been demonstrably proven false multiple times. What you are arguing is eugenics and that is patently false.
> Substantial genetic influence on cognitive abilities in twins 80 or more years old.
> General and specific cognitive abilities were studied in intact Swedish same-sex twin pairs 80 or more years old for whom neither twin had major cognitive, sensory, or motor impairment. Resemblance for 110 identical twin pairs significantly exceeded resemblance for 130 fraternal same-sex twin pairs for all abilities. Maximum-likelihood model-fitting estimates of heritability were 62 percent for general cognitive ability, 55 percent for verbal ability, 32 percent for spatial ability, 62 percent for speed of processing, and 52 percent for …
This is great for Swedish people. The problem is that humanity consists largely of not-Swedish people. Same for most studies of this kind, which are largely concerned with populations that are already genetically closely related; it stands to reason that the differences between people who are closely related will be more attributable to their inborn differences, than the differences between people who are not closely related. They haven't been able to do an interracial, intercultural comparison on this because socioeconomic circumstances are so substantially different between groups (and have been so since the rise of modern empirical research) that it's impossible to set up a decent comparative study.
So if intelligence is inherited, then children of geniuses should be uber-geniuses. And if intelligence is a desired trait, then people can breed for that. And that's eugenics, so I believe you're agreeing with me.
Or intelligence is correlated with familial wealth because it is hereditary and smarter people tend to end up in more complex cognitively demanding professions which tend to pay more.
Maybe? The confounding factors are many. How to account for war (which often accrues wealth to the most brutal among the reasonably intelligent), disease (where selection is based on behavior, e.g., adherence to cultural norms, not necessarily intelligence), disparities in wealth across geography and culture (relative shifts in the normal distribution of IQ across demographics are reflected exactly in measures of wealth)? Let alone that procreation necessarily requires the joining of individuals who might have disparities in wealth, or intelligence, or both.
I tend to err on the side of caution with this one.
Those who fight for fair admissions on the basis of intellectual ability and academic potential should hold up the SAT and standardized testing as a cornerstone of the admissions process.
Standardized testing significantly levels the playing field for students across income brackets. Returns on study investment quickly diminish, and reaching a plateau on returns doesn't require much investment at all (internet connection and the purchase of a few large study manuals).
At my high school in sophomore year I remember speaking with a wealthy friend whose father had signed him up for flying lessons so he could "stand out in college admissions". There are many, many cases like this.
Admissions should disregard such superficial peacocking and focus on metrics like the SAT that disentangle intellectual and academic potential from wealth.
The premise of your answer is that MIT wants good "students" and "test takers". What if that's not what they want so much anymore? A test is supposed to be a metric, an indicator of something. But metrics tend to become target as soon as they're exposed. Maybe then they still remain an indicator of something, but not necessarily what they were originally intended to filter for.
I understand that it might feel like the goalposts are being moved for people who optimize to score high on such metrics, but such is the nature of this type of games. That's also why search engine companies have to keep refining their algorithms.
MIT has an obvious incentive to admit rich, well-connected people, and an obvious incentive to maintain a reputation for admitting the most intelligent on merit. We should be sceptical of any changes they make that purport to be about getting more meritorious students, especially if those changes result in the admission of more rich, well-connected people.
Good test takers are people who have learned things and know them well enough to pass a test on it. There are many kinds of test. The SAT is the kind designed by psychometricians, experts with Ph.D.s building on millions of man hours of research to make tests that are both valid and reliable, that predict success in college and are as close to ungameable as possible.
MIT could drop the real SAT tomorrow and still fill its freshman class with valedictorians who captained their high school sports team and have ten AP 5s. Schools with fewer applicants have the SAT.
>Good test takers are people who have learned things and know them well enough to pass a test on it.
Tell that to the massive test prep industry. Many many years ago I took a trial SAT and scored around 1000. Then I took a Kaplan SAT prep course, and lo and behold after learning all the tricks scored a 1300 on a test SAT. Back then the test prep course cost > $1000. I had a car in high school, so I could drive to the test prep school in the evenings.
Seems to me that people who prep for the tests (not necessarily learned things through high school) and are willing to spend time and money have a great margin of benefit.
It's the same thing for tech interview prep industry. The ones who prep well for the interview, do well in the interview.
> The SAT is the kind designed by psychometricians, experts with Ph.D.s building on millions of man hours of research to make tests that are both valid and reliable, that predict success in college and are as close to ungameable as possible.
This is what the CollegeBoard wants you think. You don’t have to be all that great to realize that the people writing the test are hardly better than you are at both the subject and writing test, and in many case significantly worse.
These are positions for which a Ph.D. is an absolute requirement. Compare Assistant or Associate Professor.
> About you
> Education/Experience:
> Doctorate in psychometrics, educational research, educational measurement or a related field is required. New PhD level applicants will be considered, as will applicants with additional experience. A minimum of 3 years relevant experience is required for the Associate level.
I suspect this is just getting rid of redundancy. Everyone taking the SAT subject tests is probably taking the equivalent Advanced Placement test anyhow.
However, the biggest problems with these tests (and the AP tests) is that they are expensive--they cost a non-trivial amount of money to sign up for and they cost a lot of time to prepare for if your school doesn't offer direct AP classes.
Also, I wouldn’t necessarily agree that AP exams are more difficult than the SAT subject tests. School curriculum is not uniform. In fact, in my high school the material for certain SAT subjects tests was _only_ taught in AP classes.
My school had a deal where when you signed up for an AP class you had to take the AP test. But if you pass the AP test (3 or higher) the school would reimburse you. I took 5 tests and never paid for one. Including the one where we didn't have a teacher for half a year (long story).
I think this is the fairest way to do it. If you got talent but no money, the opportunity is still there.
> My school had a deal where when you signed up for an AP class you had to take the AP test. But if you pass the AP test (3 or higher) the school would reimburse you.
This just drives home the unfairness though.
You had a school that was willing to pony up this money. That is not universally true.
While I agree, let's acknowledge the fair critique from the end that is not, "Keeping high-achieving Asian kids out": the part where the tests themselves cost money parents (and school systems) don't have; the part where the study guide in and of itself is not enough to prepare for these exams, leaving us the true, astronomical cost of preparation; the part where this is all begging the question of what admissions tests are for anyway (generally, the same things poll taxes and quizzes were for).
I agree that the answer is the base SAT, but with an addition of a lottery past a point threshold. Luck (of birth) got us into this mess, and luck could get us out.
> Luck (of birth) got us into this mess, and luck could get us out.
I'm all in favor of adding some kind of RNG to this process. The overpreparation of the wealthy in all kinds of aspects of admissions gives them a big advantage over those who don't. RNG evens it out.
I disagree. A raffle system, while inevitable in some cases (H-1B lottery comes to mind), is totally inappropriate when applied to a standardized test. Quite on the contrary, a standardized test aims to measure capability (however abstract it is), not luck.
I think it's perfectly reasonable to go with a lottery system after some point. Most people with a ACT over ~30 are going to be completely capable of performing the coursework for an undergraduate degree at MIT. And anyone with a perfect score is going to be fine anyway. There are plenty of world-class institutions in the USA that would be more than happy to accept these peopl.
>I think it's perfectly reasonable to go with a lottery system after some point.
Only the wealthy can afford to apply to every single "prestige" college and university available. A lottery where some people get twenty tickets and others get one or two seems just as silly.
This is not entirely true. SAT scores can be used as ways to admit more privileged students, as they tend to have access to more test prep along with privileges such as extra time:
> In 2010 three College Board researchers analyzed data from more than 150,000 students who took the SAT, and they found that the demographics of the two “discrepant” groups differed substantially. The students with the inflated SAT scores were more likely to be white or Asian than the students in the deflated-SAT group, and they were much more likely to be male. Their families were also much better off. Compared with the students with the deflated SAT scores, the inflated-SAT students were more than twice as likely to have parents who earned more than $100,000 a year and more than twice as likely to have parents with graduate degrees. These were the students — the only students — who were getting an advantage in admissions from the SAT. And they were exactly the kind of students that Trinity was admitting in such large numbers in the years before Pérez arrived.
> By contrast, according to the College Board’s demographic analysis, students in the deflated-SAT group, the ones whose SAT scores were significantly lower than their high school grades would have predicted, were twice as likely to be black as students in the inflated-SAT group, nearly twice as likely to be female and almost three times as likely to be Hispanic. They were three times as likely as students in the inflated-SAT group to have parents who earned less than $30,000 a year, and they were almost three times as likely to have parents who hadn’t attended college. They were the students — the only students — whose college chances suffered when admissions offices considered the SAT in addition to high school grades.
The article goes on to explain that while grade point average is relatively consistent across income level, SAT scores are skewed towards the rich. Schools have realized this, which is why many schools no longer require the SAT or ACT.
Does that study control for school quality? If grades are normalized for a local school population, then good grades at one school can be worse than mediocre grades at another school.
This was exactly the purpose for which tests like the SAT were created. If that factor wasn’t controlled for, then the quote above is misleading.
While I've heard that said, I've never seen proof that grades are inflated at poor schools. I wouldn't be surprised if it wasn't actually the opposite, as helicopter parents and their ambitious students are more able (more free time) to self-promote and argue their way into higher grades.
Grades are more inflated at rich school. The presure teachers are under is great. For private school, if parents can get better grades elsewhere they will move them.
The material may be easier in a poor school and an average student can seem amazing compared to a below average student.
The rich dumb, poor smart both come in from behind the eightball. Rich can buy there way out and poor can work there way in. If I'm mit I want rich smart.. seems less risky.
The tests don't not work (I believe that within the middle of bell-curve they accomplish their goal well), but at the extremes they are prone to gamification, especially to those in the know. For example, the pre-2017 SAT had some well known (and some lesser known) tricks that you would only know by studying the test, rather than the material:
- ALL sections (and sub-sections) have questions that strictly increase in difficulty / projected "miss-rate" as time goes on. This is to keep test takers from coming back to answers they're unsure about but may themselves know how to solve -- so if you find yourself struggling with questions in a row, it's better to stop and go back rather than miss out on what you may already know trying to solve questions that you don't. For the reading section, the scale is scoped to each passage. For the vocab section, where there are 3 sections (vocab, grammar, and multiple-choice fill in the blank), the scale is scoped to each subsection. For the math section, it is scoped to the whole thing.
- The "Free Section" (e.g. the one that doesn't count toward your score, which instructors tell you before you start that section, so you can use it as a break if you wish) is usually section 4 or 5 of the test, to help plan your breaks. Some students, not previously-knowing or confused that the "free section" is ungraded, still take it thinking there must be a penalty of some sort.
- The word "equivocal" is tested within the SAT Vocab in around 60% of tests. Unequivocally, these questions have some of the highest wrong-rates of any question on the test.
- Within the grammar questions, Choice (e) "None of the above" is 99% of the time NEVER the answer. This is one of the most certain things on the test.
- The math questions will usually have (1) answer that is an outlier. 95% of the time, this is not the correct answer; (2) will be similar to the correct answer in different ways; and (1) will be the correct answer (e.g., say you're supposed to subtract "x" by 5 to get to the real answer. The obviously fake one might be multiplied by 5. One of the slightly-wrong answers might have 5 added rather than subtracted, another might just be off by 1). If you're ever in doubt, you can drastically increase your chances at guessing on a question by picking the question "most similar" to all of the others -- something like 65% chance, rather than 25% in the naive case.
- Again for math questions -- particularly the "word riddle" type ones -- the SAT will generally purposely pick questions that could have multiple seemingly-correct questions if you plug in 1, 2, 5, or 10 for the variables. 3 is almost always a safe bet, though I particularly liked to choose 7, because who thinks you'd ever choose to plug in 7.
- The essay is funny. Per the SAT's own published rules, they are not graded on fact at all; purely rhetoric, vocabulary choice, and clarity. All of the prompts also usually include a historical figure or event of some sort -- you don't need to know anything about them other than what the prompt tells you, but a well-known and easy way to win points with the graders is to make up a fake quote from someone adjacent to the event / historical figure as a hook: e.g. "Disconsolate upon hearing the tragedy of [EVENT X], [FIGURE Y]'s au pair journaled 'His life was short, but his memory will last forever'. Previously unknown to historians until then, Y's au pair embodied Y's belief that [SOMETHING FROM THE PROMPT]. [then THESIS STATEMENT on 3rd or 4th sentence, always]." (this is an objectively wrong and terrible sentence that I would hate to read in any other context. This is, however, similar to the SAT's example of a top-tier intro).
This is just the tip of the iceberg, too. It's a very predictable format and pattern (it has to be, as it's given multiple times during the same academic year; tests must be similar, lest one session of test takers do statistically significantly better than an equally-talented group which takes the test a month later)
So yes, while I believe the SAT does attempt to test for knowledge, it's that same pursuit of a bell curve that makes it easily gamifiable for those who know the test and not the material -- who are, once again, usually already the wealthy and connected.
Wow, this is a remarkable level of gaming that I never was aware of!
> - Within the grammar questions, Choice (e) "None of the above" is 99% of the time NEVER the answer.
> - The math questions will usually have (1) answer that is an outlier. 95% of the time, this is not the correct answer; (2) will be similar to the correct answer in different ways; and (1) will be the correct answer
This is exactly the reason that, when I design tests, I strive to make "none of the above" or the outlier answer the correct one about 20% of the time. I really hope the SAT writers are doing that now.
> ALL sections (and sub-sections) have questions that strictly increase in difficulty / projected "miss-rate" as time goes on.
The computerized GRE goes even further... it's like a videogame, it feeds you harder questions the better you do, then reverts to easier ones when you mess up.
> The computerized GRE goes even further... it's like a videogame, it feeds you harder questions the better you do, then reverts to easier ones when you mess up.
Isn't that one of the better ways to finely calibrate a score? Rough approximation of heapsort?
It does feel a little crazy, though, when suddenly all the vocab words are like, "tergiversate" and "pulchritudinous". And then when you get them all wrong it's back to "the cat sat on the mat". :P
I completely agree, and as much as I hate CollegeBoard hope they've done more to reinvent their tests, as I do think objective measurement of some kind does have a place in admissions, even though perhaps as not the end-all-be-all it used to be.
I used to be semi-adjacent to that sphere, but I do not know anything about the current format of the tests other than what is published.
> The essay is funny. Per the SAT's own published rules, they are not graded on fact at all; purely rhetoric, vocabulary choice, and clarity. All of the prompts also usually include a historical figure or event of some sort -- you don't need to know anything about them other than what the prompt tells you
When I realized this applied to a lot of required essays -- ie, they can be fiction or satire -- I had a lot more fun writing papers. I wouldn't exactly recommend it but can confirm it doesn't completely tank your GPA.
This reminds me of a Physics GRE I took. I studied all the tests and remember very clearly the test saying to only calculate to two decimal places to save time. There was a relativity question that had 3 answers that just varied on how many decimal places you carried through your calculations. That question had the answer if you kept 2. But it also had the answers for more. I'm not sure questions like this actually show that you know the material, considering to get 3 of the 5 answers you have to do the actual calculations.
What I learned about studying for tests like these was that you were studying for the test, not the material. This felt extremely different than studying for... say... an actual physics test.
I wish more people who fall into the kneejerk "we must emphasize only objective testing" group were aware of things like these. Standardized tests are incredibly game-able, particularly at the upper tail of the distribution. Because of the nature of that distribution, that means that if you selected students only by "objective" measures like standardized test scores, you will be disproportionately selecting for students who are experts at test-taking, not experts at being good students.
The more we can reduce the overdependence on standardized tests, the better we can be at selecting for well-rounded students and not just test-gamers.
Indeed, much better to select for the kinds of people whose parents know how these things work and can ensure their child has the right letters of recommendation, internships and extracurricular activities. And don’t be terribly specific about what exactly it v is you want; that way you can change it from year to year to ensure the right kind of people get in. Wouldn’t want Harvard to look like Cal Tech or Berkekk OK way would we? That’s what happens when you have a public, objective test instead of being able to select some smart and some connected.
Maybe this is will be seen as radical but I think the best way to end all this gaming is for collegeboard to not release their previous tests to the public. There simply shouldn't be enough data out there to study the test rather than the material. All that should be known in advance is the topics, format (multi choice v. Open ended) and point system. I'm sure the cottage industry of test prep companies would hate it, as would those that prefer studying the test to having merits, but those groups can pound sand.
You don’t need examples of previous tests to prepare. Even if there was perfect enforcement of no recording devices, no corruption, no breaking in and stealing test papers people would talk about what the test was like, sitting to sitting. Some people retake the test multiple times. This would probably become normative in this case because the practice effect on IQ tests like the SAT is small but real. If people were really motivated you can just pay 100 people to do the test and get them to memorize parts of it, then stitch the parts together afterwards.
> Standardized testing significantly levels the playing field for students across income brackets.
There's a correlation between parental income and SAT scores.
“[S]tudents from families earning more than $200,000 a year average a combined score of 1,714, while students from families earning under $20,000 a year average a combined score of 1,326.”
There's a correlation between parental income and IQ scores too. There's also a correlation between parental income and GPA. It's just a correlation, though, and it does not follow that a good standardized test would result in the average score would match across different parental income groups.
Just because a test is standardized doesn't mean it completely eliminates all confounding factors outside of the test, but it does mitigate some of them. Equality and equity aren't the same thing.
Certainly, without reliance on standardized testing I'm somehow certain that Braden who got a helicopter pilot's license at 16 so he could fly the family helo from Manhattan to Westchester is going to do better in admissions than Tyrone who excelled in academics and was lucky enough to attend a technology magnet school, but grew up in the projects and had no access to anything outside of what school and the library provided. With SAT tests included, the fact Braden made a 1530 and Tyrone made a 1970 plays a factor.
But there’s a much greater correlation between parental income and other measures you could use to evaluate applicants. Even height has parental income correlation, you can‘t eliminate it completely.
Not sure why you're being downvoted. We have massive debt and our Federal Reserve is now resorting to buying treasuries again but in spite of that yields are rising! This should disturb everyone. Helicopter money won't necessarily cause hyperinflation but it will cause some inflation along with massive new debt.
Here's a reality check: MMT and related ideas are nonsensical. They cannot work. They will destroy economies where they are implemented.
Exactly. All this talk of "flattening the curve" is counterproductive if the curve remains flattened right at capacity for an extended period of time, which is what these measures will cause, rather than spiking for a short period.
No one in this country is mentally ready for hospitals to just not be available for an unknown amount of time. IMHO this would cause complete societal breakdown. It's one of our basic needs like food and shelter.
Can you print economic output though? Printing dollars only works when there are things to buy and sell. More money and less things to use it on only makes the money less useful (inflation). Usually the economy can absorb that extra supply pretty well to the point of being insignificant, but that doesn't work when you just stop said economy.
Also, how do you think we will be able to support and help those more vulnerable if we don't have any economic output? Will printing money make supplies appear from nowhere?
It's not "death fast", it's: 1) way more deaths and a complete congestion of medical services vs. 2) less deaths, manageable medical service and a period of painful stagnation for the economy.
If you get critically sick or injured (not COVID19 related) and hospitals are overflowing, you will suffer when no one can see you because of COVID19 cases.
And the problem is that during an extended period of curve reduction there will still be people pushed out of medical care due to surging cases (but not spiking!). The total area between the number of patients and hospital capacity curves may be similar in both cases.
This also assumes an invariant capacity. Extended period gives us the opportunity increase that capacity through means including getting folks trained as hospital techs (4 week training) and having local teams sew & build our filters and masks.
Essentially given a will, we could transition part of our economy to a war footing (against the virus). Do we have the will?
Why not move to a system where those most likely to live with minimal resource consumption move up? You’d probably need a multiplier for those that are useful to society but need more resources
That sounds an awful lot like a romanticized perfect democracy, which cannot exist outside of fiction, or a social credit system. There's an ongoing study on the effectiveness of a social credit system. It's happening in China. Go test it out and report back.
It will be impossible for us to permanently stop the spread with half measures. As viral spread continues due to half hearted social distancing, when will we be able to return to normalcy? Given the characteristics of this virus even a few cases floating around seem to be enough to reignite contagion.
So we persist in stasis for a month or a year with no end in sight while the economy begins to collapse, which will also destroy lives and lead to humanitarian disaster?
And all of that on shoddy evidence which probably is not counting the true case fatality rate due to woeful ignorance of the total number of infected people?
This article from a Stanford Professor makes the case that COVID-19 mortality is not as high as initial reports make it seem:
We also have potential treatments emerging that could alleviate much of the strain on the healthcare system.
We need to make rational and strategic decisions here, not decisions based out of fear.
Massive and systematic society wide testing is the first step, the second step is the bulk manufacture of demonstrated COVID-19 treatments. The third is ramping up hospital capacity.
All of this is so that we can reopen society in a reasonable amount of time prepared to deal with the inevitable spread of this virus.
> It will be impossible for us to permanently stop the spread with half measures.
You're not going to like this, but at this point, no one expects anyone to permanently stop the spread of the virus. It is very contagious, it has a very effective stealth mode, and it is widespread. You should probably expect that over half of the world population will contract this virus.
New York's restrictions are primarily to make people contract it more slowly, so that the state (and other states) can deal with it more slowly.
Why would we only expect half the world to get it? My understanding is that everyone needs to be eventually exposed in one way or another, either contracting the virus or getting a vaccine (when they are ready).
On a different note in scientific paper what is considered too large an error margin to consider it a value to talk about.
If the above is true that makes it what 52%+- 23
Assume that everyone who has it spreads it to 2 people on average before dying or recovering. If one of the 2 people you would have spread it to is immune, you will only spread it to 1 person instead, and the total number of infected will not rise.
The parent poster asked "Why would we only expect half the world to get it?". It sounds like your answer to that is "no no, almost everybody will get it, they'll just get it at different times".
This is a 100% serious question: I see that your statement is simply stated (and it's a fair representation of what China is saying as of /right now/), but I get the feeling you either agree with it and are applauding China, or are pointing out how ludicrous / absurd such a position is.
For the tone-impaired amongst us, if you are taking one of the positions, can you please help this simpleton understand what you think of China's proclamation?
I ask because I really don't know what most people think these days about the news coming out of China.
Personally, I take anything announced by the ccp with a grain of salt. They can maneuver the news any which way they want without being challenged internally.
Hong Kong announced ~48 new confirmed COVID-19 cases today [1] (within last 24hrs) with experts predicting 300-500 in the next two weeks. Unless HK (and Taiwan who also has seen spikes) is still not considered China?
We already know most test results are days late from the actual swabbing + ~5-10 days of being asymptomatic + showing early symptoms before ending up in a hospital to be tested. Making the results we see from HK's (free) press today are up to 2 weeks old already and China's second wave could have already started.
Either way mainland China faces a similar increase by the second-wave return of citizens as people return from visiting the rest of the world - a world increasingly being ravaged by COVID. Ignoring the global travel, HK<>mainland travel is super common and a good early signal for mainland.
I personally know lots of Chinese citizens who stayed in Canada after early results from China and are waiting it out here with family.
I highly doubt the Chinese authorities can rest until the virus is shutdown globally. We live in a global economy with China as the engine. If China returns to normal before that it won't be long until super-infectors return to some of the most densely populated cities on the planet and everyone is being told to self-isolate again.
If China does end self-isolation (or the far more authoritarian measures that aren't found elsewhere) early then they also better close their borders from inbound travelers and tell their returning citizens to stay where they are.
China locked down the entire country and implemented draconian never that we have (and will not). Check out what is required to travel right now in China:
Here in the USA we are only two days removed from having run Democratic primaries where millions of people lined up and crowded together in small rooms - the total opposite of what China (and South Korea and Japan) have done. Images of packed beaches and boardwalks continue to emerge. The unfortunate fact is that many Americans aren't taking this pandemic seriously which is going to result in a much worse time of it than it could have otherwise been.
You think they handled a billion infections? Did you really think this through? The current numbers in China are ~80,000 not 1,000,000,000. Common sense should explain to you why that's not possible.
Which means the only winning strategy is resume our lives - not hide in our homes. Those who are in the vulnerable categories should absolutely shelter-in-place, but the rest of us need to earn a living.
The government cannot possibly bail out every single business in the nation.
TLDR: Everyone under 50- go to work, wash your hands, maybe get sick. Everyone over 50 - stay at home until there's a vaccine.
Except it doesn't work that way, because a certain % of people who get sick require hospitalization to survive - including people under 50 - even if that's a lower % than those who are older and/or have underlying medical conditions. We have under a million total hospital beds in the USA. If 100 million under 50s get sick right away and just 3% of them require hospitalization that's still 3x as many hospital beds as we have in the entire country (and that doesn't factor in all the people who require hospital beds for non-coronavirus reasons).
How many hundreds of thousands or millions of preventable deaths are acceptable to you for a faster bounceback of the economy?
> How many hundreds of thousands or millions of preventable deaths are acceptable to you for a faster bounceback of the economy?
This is a really good question, because a dead economy is deadly too, and a shutdown is particularly hard on the people who can afford it least.
Normal Quality-Adjusted-Year-of-Life estimates are $50,000-$150,000. If this is a good estimate then ideally our economic shutdown won't pay much more than that overall; if we pay much more as a society, we have probably gone too far.
(And of course it feels bad to put a dollar value on a human life, so not everyone will want to do that. This doesn't change that we have to make this decision, though, it just means that we make our decision blindly and harm people more than we ought.)
> Massive and systematic society wide testing is the first step, the second step is the bulk manufacture of demonstrated COVID-19 treatments. The third is ramping up hospital capacity.
By the time we would get tests and hospital beds, we'd already be too deep into the crisis for them to matter much. Millions will be dead.
Garcetti, the mayor of Los Angeles, said last night that we are shutting down the city to buy time to get more beds, tests, and treatments. Our leaders have a good idea of what's necessary.
These current shutdowns are really just to buy some time for all the steps you talked about. Basically get a re-try and try to go for a more SK/Taiwan style approach.
Problem with this line of thinking is it doesn't match up with the body count in the small areas in Italy that have had high infection rates. It probably turns out to be the only choice: there is no plan B where we just let bodies pile up.
Hopefully once antibody testing is rolled out (two weeks?) your theory about high undetected infection rate will be proven true.
They were setting testing check points in major highways. It wasn't a full lockdown, because they tested everyone and had enough information to be able to contain it effectively.
And more competently. They actually managed to make enough tests in time and use them on all known contacts of any infected individual. We're long past the point of that being remotely possible in the US.
The main stupid thing we did was very little testing. Our genius prez kept saying it was no big deal, and they followed policies that in retrospect make it look like they were trying to test less. At least the effective situation in the end was the entire us country has 100 times less testing that the tiny country of S.K.
If we had testing and actively tested 2 months ago we'd have see the problems and started dealing with them more aggressively. We stupidly seemed to follow a policy of no visible harm, no preperations necessary.
how does that work out since S Korea is linked with the outside world? Is it sustainable for as long a the virus in out in the world? I guess that they stopped this round...if tens or hundreds of millions in the world have it, game over.
The site is from the 14th century. Europeans came to central Africa in the 15th century when there were still many well organized kingdoms and societies there. European interference in terms of guns and the slave trade was a major part of these cultures dissolving.
The GP is presumably referring to the Ghana and Mali Empires, which did arise in large part through ironworking, and then declined due to internal strife some time before European colonialism took off in the region (the former empire collapsed centuries before the Europeans arrived).
China also has the nasty problem of many of its best and brightest wanting to come to America and the West where they will have political freedom and more broadly freedom of expression, something that cannot be bought in China no matter how wealthy one becomes.