Daniel Goldman

Archives for February 2019

Redefining Homeroom in the American Education System

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One of the topics I wrote about in my essay, A Brief Discussion of Education, was the concept of redefining homeroom. These ideas are in many ways just suggestions. They’re good suggestions, but they shouldn’t be implemented by force. Above all else, school choice should drive changes in the education system, as educational decisions should be bottom up, not top down. And this discussion on homeroom really highlights that idea, especially in terms of education planning.« Continue »

The Miseuse of the word Myth

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I wasn’t going to write this article, but I suppose it fits this month’s theme on Medium: reasonable doubt. In common parlance, “myth” is used to mean something that is false or something that people believe without justification, like an urban legend. But for a mythicist and anthropologist, like myself, that’s simply not the case. The use of the word, in this sense is in many ways very similar to how certain people use the word “theory.”

So what is a myth? Let’s get a bit more basic. What is a narrative? Wikipedia’s explanation is pretty easy to understand.

A narrative or story is a report of connected events, real or imaginary, presented in a sequence of written or spoken words, or still or moving images, or both. The word derives from the Latin verb narrare, “to tell”, which is derived from the adjective gnarus, “knowing” or “skilled”.

On Myths

A myth is a type of narrative. But it’s more than just any story. It’s a story about ourselves. A myth is narrative, which is written with the intention of being truthful, which tries to establish our place in the world.

One can see now why history is a form of myth. It is written with the intention of being truthful, and its goal is to not only explain the past, but to connect the dots from the past to the present, explaining why things are the way that they are today.

History also has other components that other forms of myth don’t have. For one thing, a proper history should have a rough outline explaining how the information was transmitted from the observer to the historian, something I refer to as the genealogy of knowledge [1]. That’s one reason why the bible is myth, but not history.

I want to reiterate that a myth doesn’t have to be true or false. That’s not the point. History is overturned with new information all the time. What’s important is that it is written with the intention of being truthful.

Religion as Myth

One of the most frequent topics in which I hear the abuse of the word “myth” is in discussions on religion. Often it’s used to demean religion and religious people — “ah those people and their Bronze Age myths” — in a way which shows one’s own ignorance of the topic.

Religion does indeed have myths, or at least, that’s one of the cultural dimensions of religion described by Ninian Smart’s seven dimensions of religion. But pretty much every culture has some form of myth, because we all like to have an idea of where we’re from. It’s all a part of trying to find order in nature.

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The Lawyers of the Future

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So most people are familiar with “the blockchain” by now. But fewer people are familiar with smart contracts. Bitcoin was the first blockchain based cryptoasset. But the types of transactions that Bitcoin’s system could perform were very limited. Ethereum expanded on this limitation, by allowing full scale programs to be run by the system, with some limitations. There’re many places to learn about the full nature of what smart contracts can and cannot do. But what the addition allowed is for very complicated transactions to be conducted in a distributed and decentralized fashion.

Blockchain technology and smart contracts are in their infancy. So far, they’re mainly being used to create digital tokens that are traded for speculation, or for the funding of business operations via ICOs. But over time, we’ll start to see more technology that can be controlled through smart contracts. And as that happens, smart contracts will become an increasing part of our every day lives.

The DAO Debacle

DAOs or “distributed autonomous organizations” are an interesting use of blockchain and smart contracts. But the basic proof of concept DAO, literally just called The DAO, happened to be a total failure. What happened?

The smart contract that defined the DAO had a bug. Basically, when a transaction was made, the order that the balance was updated was backwards, so before the new balance was updated, a person could ask for the money back, and could do so multiple times. This allowed the attacker to siphon off a lot of money, and that spelled the end of The DAO, and unfortunately, the emergence of a fear of this technology.

Contract Failures

But not only is such failure possible with any program, and in fact there was a recent example of a person in China siphoning off a lot of money from ATMs (The Verge), but actual contracts often have loopholes, especially with poorly written ones. Carl Vitullo, in The Future of Bitcoin and Ethereum, suggests that smart contracts aren’t reliable, and with the whole DAO mess, it’s easy to see why. But are actual contracts reliable? If two average people wrote up a contract, odds are any good lawyer would be able to poke a hole in it. Just look at Judge Judy.

The job of a lawyer is to ensure that there are no significant loopholes, or at least do everything possible to limit them. And so, in the future, a lawyer will need to be able to evaluate smart contracts. For this reason, a lawyer is going to be as much programmer as anything else, and while the law will still matter, it will be the proper functioning of the smart contract that will matter the most.

A good smart contract lawyer should have been able to realize that transaction order mattered and that the way in which The DAO was coded would allow for someone to withdraw large sums of money from The DAO. But this also brings up another good point.

“Smart” Smart Contracts

In reply to my discussion on an alternative to Facebook, provisionally called Topix, Mark Stair asked me what I thought was missing from EOS. While EOS seems like an interesting alternative to Ethereum, it doesn’t do what I need for my projects. It can, and so can Ethereum, as both are able to implement almost any time of distributed and decentralized application, but the type of smart contract system that I would like to see developed has as its goal the coordination and maintenance of contracts between humans and institutions, rather than the development of software applications.

This means that human readability should be improved. But it also means that a system of credit worthiness and arbitration needs to be built into the core of the system. In terms of credit worthiness, I would like to see an algorithm which determine an overall metric.

This metric could be combined with a proof of lock system, as I call it. It’s similar to a proof of burn system, where consensus is determined by sending tokens to an unusable address. From Wikipedia:

The idea is that miners should show proof that they burned some coins — that is, sent them to a verifiably unspendable address. This is expensive from their individual point of view, just like proof of work; but it consumes no resources other than the burned underlying asset. To date, all proof of burn cryptocurrencies work by burning proof-of-work-mined cryptocurrencies, so the ultimate source of scarcity remains the proof-of-work-mined “fuel”.

The only main difference between the proof of lock and proof of burn system is that locked tokens could be released in order to repay debts.

But who gets to unlock those tokens? And what happens when there’s a disagreement with the human readable contracts? I think this issue can be solved with a system of trusted nodes, similar to the anchor system in stellar: see cryptocurrency ecosystem. If there is a disagreement about whether a contract was executed correctly, the two parties could ask an arbiter node to make a decision. Once the decision is made, locked tokens could be released to the appropriate party, thus making the locking system a sort of escrow.

It’s possible that tokens could also be generated based on the amount locked, and thus the proof of work system could be bypassed, and making the system a hybrid between proof of burn and proof of stake, or proof of work could still be used in the generation of new tokens.

Going back to EOS, while this system can indeed be implemented on the system, as it could be with Ethereum, I would prefer to see it as an integral part of the system, rather than as an overlay.

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If you Want Businesses to Treat you Well, Pay Them!

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This article is largely a rant about people simultaneously complaining about businesses putting advertisers first, while demanding everything for free. And while I use “you” in the article, I am not necessarily speaking to my readers. In fact, I hope that those who are reading this article, at least on Medium, are paying subscribers. The “you” to whom I refer is anyone who thinks that content on the internet should be free.

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The Pseudoscience and Science of Astrology

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There might be something to astrology after all, but not in a mystical sense. I’ve been thinking about writing this article for a while, but I just wasn’t sure if anyone would be interested. Some people might even take it as a defense of astrology. I’m still not sure, but after reading Martin Rezny’s review of a season two episode of The Orville, I’ve decided to at least write a short version of it, though it does deserve being turned it into a full scholarly paper, and might do so one day.

While I am one of the first to admit that the majority of astrology is pseudoscience, or at the very least protoscience, there is actually something to astrology. But it has nothing to do with the mysticism generally attributed to the practice.

It has nothing to do with the alignment of the stars or planets, or anything like that. But when you are born has a real world impact on your life. It was likely true even more so in the past. Let’s think about it. The first few years of development are very important for long term health. Malnutrition in youth, and also during gestation, can have long term consequences.

In “Fetal malnutrition and long-term outcomes,” Caroline HD Fall goes over a number of ways in which prenatal nutrition can influence long term health outcomes. And in the past, the distance between harvest season, as well as other related factors, could have a significant influence on prenatal nutrition.

The issue is that these factors are fairly local. After all, one half of the planet’s summer is the other half of the planet’s winter. But even still, it wouldn’t be surprising that, coupled with a desire to attach order to nature, that people would recognize similarities in health outcomes, and other related outcomes, based on when a person was born, and create a system which sought to improve their ability to predict the future.

These systems would also act as self fulfilling prophecies. Once people identify patters in groups of people, based on when they’re born, they’ll act in ways that will reinforce those patterns. It’s kind of like getting cursed. If you believed that you’re cursed, odds are you’ll start to make mistakes, you’ll focus on the negatives in your day, and so on. And if a person is burn in an unlucky month, and they believe it, they’ll start to be unlucky.

Evolutionary Dynamics of Culture

While some of astrology is just an attempt to impress order on an apparently unordered reality, the possible link between birth month and health outcomes may also be reinforced by evolutionary dynamics. Just like with biological systems, cultures evolve, and they are subject to natural selection. Traits which are beneficial to the culture, or at least allow the culture to persist and pass on those traits, tend to continue, while those that are harmful tend to die out. The recognition that there is a difference between health outcomes and related outcomes, by time of birth, could have helped those cultures prepare in ways that we’re not aware of.

Sources

Mary Regina Boland, Zachary Shahn, David Madigan, George Hripcsak & Nicholas P Tatonetti (2015). Birth month affects lifetime disease risk: a phenome-wide method. Journal of the American Medical Informatics Association, 22, 1042–1053.

 

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From Preprints to Omniprints

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Starting with ArXiv, the idea of preprints has been increasingly in popularity for some time. But now is the time for omniprints. Preprints were a good start. And Crossref has been indexing more and more preprints, with preprints outpacing journal articles by far (Crossref). There are a number of servers, including ArXiv and its derivatives, OSF’s preprint servers, ResearchGate, and more.

I rely exclusively on preprint servers for my publication, mostly out of spite for modern academia and its toxic nature. I absolutely refuse to pay a company so that they can profit off of my work. And honestly, if the goal of publishing is to communicate with other researchers, than traditional publications are not the answer, especially when they’re not open access.

But there’s an issue. A lot of people reject citation of preprints. They want to wait until there’s a “final” version. It’s not even that they’ll scrutinize it more heavily, but rather they will outright use the preprint nature of the paper to ignore it.

Of course, what matters isn’t whether a journal has decided to pick up an article — Wakefield taught us that—but rather what matters is that the content of the article is sound. And in order to determine whether that’s the case, a person has to read the article.

I do think that part of the problem is that the articles are called pre-prints. It’s right in the name: the article hasn’t been printed yet. It hasn’t been completed. That’s why we need to rename preprint servers, which have long since become far more than that, to something else. I’m not really sure what name we’ll end up using, but perhaps “omniprint” is the best option, as it implies “all prints” whether preprint or postprint, draft print, or final print.

Real Open Science

Related to omniprints is the idea of open access, where a journal lets anyone access the publication. I don’t see open access as real open science. It’s certainly a start. After all, if the goal of publishing is to communicate, we need to be able to read what’s being published! But it’s simply not enough. For one thing, publishing in open access journals is often very expensive, literally costing the author thousands of dollars! That’s why we need omniprint.

Actual Peer Review

Of course, in order to take full advantage of omniprint servers, they need to provide a number of tools to allow for an open peer review. Comment systems are useful, but they’re not a great way to quickly measure the quality of the paper. I think a tagging system might be useful, where people can anonymously tag a paper. Tags would probably have to include whether or not the paper is scholarly, if it justifies its position, if it needs improvement, and so on.

And that would be actual peer review. What we think of as peer review is really just one or two reviewers, who might be quite biased, along with an editor. How can we trust two or three people to make a decision about a paper, in an unbiased way? We can’t. That’s why we need omniprint.

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Ramblings on a Paraconsistent Reality

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There are two camps of science: the provisional verification camp, which was really the first to arise, in a formal sense, when Francis Bacon formulated “the scientific method.” The second camp arose when philosophers such as Kant and Hume realized that there was an issue with induction. They questioned why repeated observations, consistent with a given explanation, really provided any justification for the theory. This concern led to Karl Popper creating a new view of science, as a system of falsification. And that’s where we’ll start this discussion.

Logical Consistency

Consistency is at the heart of science. If we have one theory, and it says that another is false, we can conclude that at most one is true. So if we have a theory that’s well justified, and another that we know little about, if the first theory informs us that the second is false, we’re fairly confident in rejecting the second theory, at least for the time being. And whether we’re discussing the Baconian camp or the Popperian camp, logical consistency is still king.

The Issue

But what happens when two theories both seem true? That’s the case with general relativity and quantum mechanics. Both of these theories are very useful to us. Both have undergone numerous tests. And both of them have survived all of those tests. But there’s a catch. While these two theories generally mind their own business, there’s an area of physics where both theories make predictions.

You see, general relativity mostly involves big things, like planets and other objects moving through space. General relativity is what replaced Newtonian physics, and involves treating the universe as a smooth space-time manifold that can be warped by mass and energy.

Quantum mechanics usually involves really tiny things, like atoms and stuff that makes them up. It views the universe as being coarse rather than smooth. But in general, quantum mechanics does not make any predictions about types of things that on which general relativity informs us. And in that case, there’s no issue.

But in really strange areas, like near black holes, general relativity and quantum mechanics don’t play nice. They both make predictions and neither is reconcilable with the other. So as scientists know, we need a new theory that can properly work in both domains: a so called “grand unification.”

String theory, super-string theory, and many other theories have been proposed in order to extend quantum mechanics into the domain of large scale predictions (The Final Contradiction). But for now, these theories do not make predictions that can be tested, and so they’re not scientific in nature. They are simply mathematical extensions of quantum mechanics (Not Even Wrong). So right now we’re stuck. That being said, scientists area confident that they will make progress.

But What If…

Maybe the problem isn’t with general relativity and quantum mechanics, but with our fundamental understanding of reality. Maybe general relativity and quantum mechanics are both correct. As I said at the beginning of this article, a fundamental assumption that science makes is that reality is consistent. That is, a statement cannot be both true and false at the same time. But there’s a whole field of mathematics dedicated to logical frameworks in which it’s sometimes possible for a statement to be true and yet also false.

It’s called paraconsistent mathematics. And no, it’s not an area of mathematics where anything goes. In most cases, the logical framework does work just the same as our normal mathematics. It’s just that it’s a but looser. We allow, in certain instances, for contradiction, without “explosion” (normally if we have that a statement is indeed both true or false, then we can show that anything we wish is true, but not in paraconsistent systems).

Paraconsistent logic is one of my areas of interest, and I’m hoping that it can help solve another problem: the brittleness of Bayesian inference. It’s important to solve this brittleness, because it would allow us to actually turn science into a system which increases our confidence, even if still just provisionally, in the truth of a model of reality.

Right now, science is limited to falsification and therefore we only know when we’re likely to be wrong. There’s no justification for calling a theory true, or even likely to be true, simply because it’s succeeded in its testes. That’s known as “the problem of induction.” Bayesian inference seems to allow for this change, but in many cases we can end up with a situation where the results are actually a product of our initial guess, rather than on the chain of evidence.

But let’s say my work on paraconsistent yields results, and I can show that if we reformulate our theories in this paraconsistent framework, we can finally solve the problem of induction. That’s great! Now we can stop thinking of science purely as a way to know when we’re wrong, and we can start actually feeling confident that our well tested theories are true. It sounds like there are no downsides. Except that we could end up with cases where two contradictory theories could really both be correct. And that’s weird. Luckily, as far as I know, the apparent conflict with general relativity and quantum mechanics is about the only reason we have to maybe think that reality cannot be modeled in a consistent framework.

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The Cryptocurrecy Ecosystem

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The cryptocurrency (or cryptoasset) ecosystem is a complicated topic, and when that I’ve written about only briefly, but it is an important topic. This article is partially an update of a Seeking Alpha article that I wrote back in June of 2017, however I won’t necessarily be covering the same cryptoassets that I mentioned in the original.

Cryptoassets

I tend to use the term “cryptoasset” a lot when discussing blockchain technology and so called cryptocurrencies. There’s a reason that I use this term. Most cryptoassets are not currencies. They are generally not used as a medium of exchange. They’re used as speculative vehicles. A currency is essentially just something that is accepted as barter, for a large number of different goods and services.

Bitcoin

Patrick Singson suggested that Ripple will overtake Bitcoin in value, and he argues that it’s because utility matters. I do agree that utility matters, but I disagree with his following suggestion: “cryptos with actual use cases, and real world adoption such as Ripple will overtake the HODLers very quickly.”

HODLing is unfortunately the primary use of $BTC, at least right now, but at the same time, $BTC has a real world use and thus utility. $BTC is the king of the exchange world, in many ways even more so than the $USD. While exchanges allow some trading in other cryptoassets, such as $ETH, there are far more BTC priced currency pairs. So in many ways, $BTC is the reserve currency of the crpyotworld. As long as people need to use Bitcoin to exchange between other cryptoassets, Bitcoin will survive, as a technology.

But how could BTC be all that if it is denominated in USD, you might ask? The answer to this question goes back to how I described currencies in the first place. exchanging money for something else is just barter. That most currencies are so universally accepted doesn’t change that. Because it’s all just barter, we can think of the currency priced in any of the items used to barter with it. A gallon of gas is $2.50 a gallon? Okay, so a $USD is worth 0.4 gallons of gas, or 0.00028BTC.

Then and Now

Even with the collapse in price, $BTC is still up over its value when I wrote the first article on the ecosystem. When I published the article on June 7, 2017, the price of 1BTC was $2,800 as opposed to over $3,600 right now.

Ethereum

Repeating Singson’s point: utility matters. And that’s what’s keeping Ethereum afloat, aside from another currency in which many other currencies are traded. Ethereum is what generated the altcoin boom. With ERC20 token contracts, it was super easy to create new cryptoassets. And so many altcoins in use are still ERC20 tokens that Ethereum will be around as long as someone’s using ERC20 tokens.

Then and Now

I didn’t include Ethereum in the original article. I’m not sure why. Perhaps it’s because I had done a full article on Ethereum prior to that one. Ethereum has dropped since I wrote the article however, which isn’t surprising considering the massive slowdown of the ICO craze. In fact, as FlatOutCrypto mentioned in their article last year, entities are actually working on returning assets to their investors.

Stellar

Here’s a new currency that I just came across a little bit ago. I probably wouldn’t have noticed it at all, if not for the integration of a wallet into the Keybase application. The goal of the network seems to be fast payments that can be made directly and the construction of a low cost financial service system. Stellar isn’t entirely decentralized. There are some nodes that require trusting. They’re called anchors, and are responsible for all non-native currency transactions.

Anchors are simply entities that people trust to hold their deposits and issue credits into the Stellar network for those deposits. They act as a bridge between different currencies and the Stellar network. All money transactions in the Stellar network (except the native digital currency of lumens) occur in the form of credit issued by anchors. — Explainer

Dogecoin

I didn’t mention Dogecoin in my original article on the cryptocurrency ecosystem, because it seemed foolish, but I kind of wish that I had included it. I like Dogecoin, because it doesn’t suffer from the inherently deflationary aspect of most other cryptoassets available. After all, there’s no fixed supply. This feature keeps $DOGE cheap, but unlike with other cryptoassets, $DOGE is actually used for every day transactions, including tips. In fact, in terms of the percentage of its market cap, $DOGE is actually traded more than $BTC. For a currency that started as a meme, that’s pretty damn good.

Energy Efficiency

Bitcoin, and other proof of work systems have been criticized for their massive energy consumption. And it’s true. Cryptoassets require a lot of energy to produce and transfer. But what tends to be left out of the equation is the fact that blockchains do more than just act as ledgers. They are, or at least easily can be, a complete alternative to the banking industry.

A wallet is a replacement for a bank account. Smart contracts can easily allow for an alternative to traditional bank lending. So all the resources that go into the activities of banks, and really the entire traditional financial system, including the energy cost of the ACH system, need to be included in the comparison.

The One Coin?

Something I find interesting is the idea that eventually a single cryptoasset will win out and become the cryptocurrency of the world. I honestly don’t understand why. Different cryptoassets serve different functions. As I mentioned, BTC is primarily the reserve currency of the crypto world. Ethereum et al. are the frameworks on which DAPPs are built. Just like there are numerous assets and asset classes, there will likely always be numerous cryptoassets and cryptoasset classes. And many of them will be used as currencies.

Moreover, cryptoassets don’t need to entirely replace other forms of currency. In fact, I would love to see silver and gold return to currency status, sitting alongside cryptocurrencies. As for the USD, eventually it will need to die, and quite frankly, it’s already at risk of dying, simply because of what the United States is doing with global trade, and how sick and tired the world is of dealing with the petrodollar. But the rise of cryptocurrencies does not necessarily mean the immediate death of the USD. And so the world could have time to adapt, and in fact, it could have more time than if the dollar was killed by a new reserve currency issued by other governments.

Portfolio Strategy

I don’t want to really give advice here, so these are just my thoughts on the matter. Because different coins will continue to survive to fill different needs, I continue to reiterate my initial idea that a proper long term investment in cryptoassets should include a good degree of diversification. The goal is to try to find a nice mix of options that serve different needs, as well as perhaps a few types of assets in each subcategory. That being said, I don’t think that BTC or ETH are going away anytime soon.

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Further Discussion on the Measles Outbreak

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In my first article on the measles outbreaks in the Pacific Northwest, I argued that measles vaccination rates have declined little since 1995. Here I’d like to expand on that idea, and comment on specific claims made by various sources.

Is the Washington Post Right?

Twitter seems to have stored a clip that cannot be found in the actual article being linked to in Dr. Pan’s tweet, so I am including it here. According to the summary, “lax state laws have helped drive down vaccination rates across the pacific Northwest.” What the article does state is the following.

The Pacific Northwest is home to some of the nation’s most vocal and organized anti-vaccination activists. That movement has helped drive down child immunizations in Washington, as well as in neighboring Oregon and Idaho, to some of the lowest rates in the country, with as many as 10.5 percent of kindergartners statewide in Idaho unvaccinated for measles. That is almost double the median rate nationally.

So is the article being truthful? Well, I’d say it’s an “alternative fact.” Consider the following graphs.

Washington State Vaccination Rates

I gave an overall analysis of immunization rates at the HHS region and state levels, in my first article. But I want to go into a little more detail about Washington State’s vaccination rates. First off, in the last couple of years, there’s been a rise in volatility, but it’s hard to tell whether this rise is out of the ordinary. When people cite such a short length of time and argue that there’s been a “decline” in vaccination rates, it’s no better than when people look at a few years of cold winters and say “look, the Earth is cooling!” A proper analysis does not look at a few data points. It looks at how those data points compare to the overall known data set.

This graph shows the volatility in the last few years. And perhaps there’s something in the 2012 blip, however it doesn’t seem to be enough to explain the timing of the outbreak, especially since overall vaccination rates are a an average of annual rates. That means that year-by-year variations are smoothed over multiple years.

Better Data Needed

In order to make any more conclusions, a lot more data will be needed. Pockets may be on the county level, or the nodes may be even smaller. If that’s the case, there could still be a change in distribution that my analyses aren’t capturing. But if that’s the case, then it doesn’t seem reasonable that they’d be having such an impact on larger scale outbreaks. We can think of very small communities, within a very large population, almost as individuals.

A Serendipitous Experiment has come out of these recent outbreaks. According to Ars Technica, the recent spike in cases, and widespread attention and concern, has caused a massive increase in vaccinations. So not only should we see an increase in vaccination rates in the coming data sets, but we should see a decline in pockets as well.

Now, the issue is that even if source of the recent outbreaks is something other than the antivax sentiment, we should see a decline in cases, because the vaccine does a good job at preventing symptoms. And that’s why we should ensure that vaccination rates are high. But this result also will cloud any data. A proper analysis would therefore have to adjust for changes in vaccination, if the goal is to see if perhaps the pathogen is becoming more virulent.

Asymptomatic Infection Analysis

Especially because of the recent outbreak and rapid changes in vaccination rates among certain populations, now is the time to take action in analyzing asymptomatic infections. As I’ve mentioned in my paper on whooping cough, asymptomatic infections are poorly understood and studied. While there are certainly differences between whooping cough and measles, and their associated vaccinations, there’s still something we should see, if we took a random sample of the population: infection rates should be significantly lower among vaccinated individuals than in unvaccinated individuals. And how different they are can give us greater insight into how well the current vaccine is working to stop the measles infection.

To give some insight into what we could find, I recently came across a paper studying measles vaccination in Taiwan, presented to me as justification for current understanding of measles vaccination. What the person failed to notice is that based on a random sampling of the population, rather than a survey of cases, it seems that the basic reproduction rate is not driven below one, suggesting an inability to generate herd immunity. One reason that I use “seems” is that I’m currently trying to double check with the authors to see if this was an estimate in the case of 100% vaccination or not.

The disconnect between the apparent “eradication” of measles in the United States, and the general recognition by the medical community that a 95% vaccination rate should generate herd immunity, may suggest that asymptomatic infection is indeed a problem. And that’s why we really need to do a wide-scale analysis in the United States.

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