Coronalinks 5/18/20: When All You Have Is A Hammer, Everything Starts Looking Like A Dance
HumorMan of One Studya lone chuckleRead the original on Slate Star Codex →
Follow-up reading
↳ Coronavirus: Links, Discussion, Open Thread — revival of the old Coronalinks — Scott's own backlink · Feb 2021
Summary
A substantive May-2020 Coronalinks roundup with several genuine analytical mini-sections: cell-phone data showing government stay-at-home ORDERS barely changed behavior (people self-distanced first); cross-country heterogeneity suggesting policy matters less than assumed (Sweden vs Denmark, Switzerland's French/Italian/German cantons); speaking/singing as a major transmission vector (+ the 'loud cultures' crackpot hypothesis); a lockdown-forever cost-benefit (the 'When All You Have Is A Hammer' framing); the sharp 'no arbitrage in the market for lives' section (100k deaths = 15% of heart attacks OR Vietnam+Korea+9/11, same number); prediction markets; and dense shortlinks (vetocracy/Ezra Klein, EMH, Elon/Tesla, seroprevalence/iceberg, the confirmed-vs-estimated flu-death comparison).
Why this score
Quality 66 · Strong. 66 — low Strong. Well above a stub linkpost: multiple sections (the no-arbitrage-in-lives insight, the lockdown-behavior data, the cross-country heterogeneity synthesis) are genuine mini-essays, and the Coronalinks series was widely read. Held at low-Strong because the roundup format is diffuse and topical rather than a single focused contribution.
Claude’s paradigm shift 50 · Moderate. 50 — Moderate. The individual insights (no-arbitrage-in-lives, speaking-transmission) are somewhat fresh, but a topical roundup isn't paradigm-shifting.
Real-world impact 2 · Minor. 2 — minor/within-blog. Part of an influential, widely-read COVID series; discourse-level, no material change.
Humor 2/5 · Man of One Study. 2 — gate PASSES. A serious analytical roundup whose comedic framing is a genuine, notable, intentional feature: the crafted absurdist opening scene (Epstein-slogan protesters, quarantine-enforcement lions, Trump eating silica-gel packets) plus the all-punny section headers ('Sing, O Muse, Of Arbit-Rage'). Notable-humor-in-a-serious-piece tier (2), not primarily-comedic (3), since the substance is real COVID analysis.