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America’s Covid-19 endgame could be much closer than you think

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As America’s Covid-19 vaccine rollout got underway last December, White House medical adviser Anthony Fauci <a href="https://thehill.com/policy/healthcare/531611-fauci-herd-immunity-could-require-90-percent-of-country-to-be-vaccinated">said</a> the herd immunity threshold for the coronavirus could be 80 to 90 percent. The implication was demoralizing: America would need to get as many as 90 percent of its people vaccinated to truly stop the virus from spreading freely. With <a href="https://khn.org/news/article/covid-vaccine-hesitancy-drops-among-americans-new-kff-survey-shows/">roughly 20 percent</a> of the population still resistant to getting a vaccine, near-universal vaccination seems very unlikely — leading a recent New York Times article <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2021/05/03/health/covid-herd-immunity-vaccine.html">to suggest</a> that herd immunity may be impossible.
But recent data out of Israel paints a more hopeful picture: With around 60 percent of its population vaccinated, Israel has managed to almost fully reopen its economy and crush the number of coronavirus <a href="https://ourworldindata.org/explorers/coronavirus-data-explorer?zoomToSelection=true&time=2019-12-31..latest&pickerSort=asc&pickerMetric=location&Metric=Confirmed+cases&Interval=7-day+rolling+average&Relative+to+Population=false&Align+outbreaks=false&country=EuropeanUnion~ISR">cases</a> and <a href="https://ourworldindata.org/explorers/coronavirus-data-explorer?zoomToSelection=true&time=2019-12-31..latest&pickerSort=asc&pickerMetric=location&Metric=Confirmed+deaths&Interval=7-day+rolling+average&Relative+to+Population=false&Align+outbreaks=false&country=EuropeanUnion~ISR">deaths</a> to nearly zero. The country still has some requirements in place — particularly indoor masking and vaccine passport requirements — but it’s much closer to normal than it could afford to be, with any guarantee of safety, just months ago.
We still don’t know with certainty what the herd immunity threshold is. Some experts said it could be as low as 60 percent. But Israel’s data suggests that we could get our lives much closer to normal without worrying about the risk of deadly infection — at much less than 90 percent vaccination rates.
It’s a sign that there’s a fairly safe gray area — an endgame to Covid-19 of sorts — between lockdowns and the pre-pandemic normal, after a year in which trying to find that balance in the US sparked wave after wave of Covid-19.
The best news for Americans: We’re not too far from getting 60 percent of the country vaccinated. Already, more than 40 percent of the population has gotten at least one dose, and more than 30 percent are fully vaccinated, based on <a href="https://covid.cdc.gov/covid-data-tracker/#vaccinations">federal data</a>. At current vaccination rates, the US could hit 60 percent partial vaccination as soon as this month or June and 60 percent full vaccination in June or July — all within three months. Already, Covid-19 cases in the US have dropped by <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2021/us/covid-cases.html">around 27 percent</a> in the last two weeks.
There’s still a lot we don’t know. Hitting 60 percent might allow for infection control without being true herd immunity, when the virus can no longer circulate widely. Either way, getting the vaccination rate higher than 60 percent would still help ensure the coronavirus doesn’t come back — especially if variants, changes in the weather and seasons, or state-by-state variation in vaccination rates can let the virus break through our defenses.
So until we know for sure it’s safe, it’s a good idea to continue to be cautious in some ways, including wearing masks and considering limiting some activities to vaccinated people.
Still, Israel shows that we might be able to resume our lives much closer to normal — enjoying everything from restaurants to live music and sports — long before we vaccinate 90 percent of the country (if we can even do that). As University of Florida biostatistician Natalie Dean told me, Israel’s data “bodes well for what we can do in the US. Maybe we can get really far off of 60 percent of people being vaccinated.”
Compared to the rest of the world, Israel’s current experience can look almost like another planet. Writing in the New York Times, Isabel Kershner <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2021/04/05/world/middleeast/israel-vaccinations.html">detailed</a> the normalcy Israelis now find themselves in as they get “a taste of a post-pandemic future.” People are dining out, going to packed concerts, and attending sports events — often without masking and with little to no physical distancing.
Part of the story here is that Israel still has <a href="https://www.gov.il/en/Departments/Guides/ramzor-cites-guidelines">some precautions</a> in place, particularly masking and capacity requirements for indoor venues. The country has also embraced widespread use of “<a href="https://corona.health.gov.il/en/directives/green-pass-info/">Green Passes</a>,” in which proof of vaccination, past Covid-19 infection, or a negative coronavirus test becomes a ticket for some of the riskier activities, although enforcement is reportedly spotty.
But the big element seems to be Israel’s world-leading vaccination campaign. Israel had tried reopening before, only to see some of the world’s <a href="https://ourworldindata.org/explorers/coronavirus-data-explorer?zoomToSelection=true&time=2019-12-31..latest&pickerSort=asc&pickerMetric=location&Metric=Confirmed+cases&Interval=7-day+rolling+average&Relative+to+Population=true&Align+outbreaks=false&country=EuropeanUnion~ISR~USA~GBR">biggest surges</a> of the coronavirus last summer and then winter.
When Israel <a href="https://www.arkansasonline.com/news/2021/mar/08/israel-eases-restrictions-as-vaccination-rates/">moved to nearly fully reopen</a> in March, it still had <a href="https://ourworldindata.org/explorers/coronavirus-data-explorer?zoomToSelection=true&time=2019-12-31..latest&pickerSort=asc&pickerMetric=location&Metric=Confirmed+cases&Interval=7-day+rolling+average&Relative+to+Population=true&Align+outbreaks=false&country=USA~EuropeanUnion~ISR">a lot of daily new Covid-19 cases</a> — more than twice as many per capita as the US. But this time, <a href="https://ourworldindata.org/explorers/coronavirus-data-explorer?zoomToSelection=true&time=2019-12-31..latest&pickerSort=asc&pickerMetric=location&Metric=People+vaccinated&Interval=7-day+rolling+average&Relative+to+Population=true&Align+outbreaks=false&country=EuropeanUnion~ISR~USA">nearly 60 percent</a> of the population had gotten at least one vaccine dose (which <a href="https://www.vox.com/future-perfect/2021/1/7/22213953/covid-vaccine-pfizer-moderna-dosing-science-delays">provides at least some protection</a>), and <a href="https://ourworldindata.org/explorers/coronavirus-data-explorer?zoomToSelection=true&time=2019-12-31..latest&pickerSort=asc&pickerMetric=location&Metric=People+fully+vaccinated&Interval=7-day+rolling+average&Relative+to+Population=true&Align+outbreaks=false&country=EuropeanUnion~ISR~USA">more than 40 percent</a> was fully vaccinated. With that, Israel’s cases started plummeting — dropping more than 95 percent through today. Israel had nearly fully reopened, but instead of the previous surges it saw in past reopenings, it saw a massive decline in cases.
Today, more than 60 percent of Israel’s population is fully vaccinated, and as the country remains open, <a href="https://ourworldindata.org/explorers/coronavirus-data-explorer?zoomToSelection=true&time=2019-12-31..latest&pickerSort=asc&pickerMetric=location&Metric=Confirmed+deaths&Interval=New+per+day&Relative+to+Population=true&Align+outbreaks=false&country=EuropeanUnion~ISR~USA">Covid-19 deaths reported each day</a> are in the single digits and sometimes zero.
“The Israel data should make us feel optimistic and persuade people to get the shots,” William Hanage, an epidemiologist at Harvard, told me.
None of this means that Israel has definitively defeated Covid-19. The apparent inflection point — 60 percent of the country at least partially vaccinated — could instead reflect the point at which “<a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2021/04/29/opinion/covid-exponential-decay.html">exponential decay</a>” begins, as cases drop just as quickly as they previously rose. It doesn’t mean Covid-19 is vanquished, and the virus could still come back, even regionally. But it’s the kind of decline in Covid-19 that just about everyone has been waiting for since the vaccine rollout began.
There are some other notable caveats. The biggest: Israel has not completely reopened. It’s very likely that its current restrictions, from mask mandates to vaccine passports, are keeping cases suppressed — and things would be much worse without these interventions. Israel is not evidence that a place can nearly fully reopen by hitting 60 percent vaccination rates; it’s proof that a place can nearly fully reopen with the least intrusive precautions at 60 percent vaccination rates.
It could be that Israel is being too cautious and could fully reopen with none of these precautions at 60 percent vaccination rates, but we just don’t know that yet.
Another important consideration is natural immunity. In places that have seen big waves of Covid-19, including Israel and the US, many people have built up immunity after recovering from infection. We don’t know exactly the total number of people with natural immunity, given the role of asymptomatic spread. We also can’t just add the previous case count to the total number of vaccinated people because some previously infected people have gotten the vaccine (since vaccines provide more protection than natural immunity). But we do know natural immunity is another layer of population protection on top of the vaccine.
Other factors can also play a role. The number of daily new cases is important because more virus out there makes it much more likely that the pathogen will be able to jump from host to host. Seasonality can matter, too: If the weather is nice and people are able to do things outdoors, it’s going to be much harder for the virus to spread as the open air, heat, and humidity weaken it.
What might truly matter is the vaccination of older adults. Israel, notably, has vaccinated <a href="https://datadashboard.health.gov.il/COVID-19/general?utm_source=go.gov.il&utm_medium=referral">90-plus percent</a> of its population 60 and older. Given that people 65 and up in the US make up <a href="https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/nvss/vsrr/covid_weekly/index.htm">80 percent of Covid-19 deaths</a>, perhaps it’s vaccinating this group, along with populations with comorbidities, that matters most for the coronavirus endgame. That could even bring reported cases down, not just deaths and hospitalizations, since people are less likely to report asymptomatic or mild-symptom cases. (To that end, the US is on track for this goal, with <a href="https://covid.cdc.gov/covid-data-tracker/#vaccinations">more than 80 percent</a> of people 65 and up now at least partly vaccinated.)
An important consideration is the <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2020/us/covid-19-vaccine-doses.html">massive state-by-state variation</a> in vaccination rates. While 61 percent of people in New Hampshire have received at least one shot, only 31 percent of people in Mississippi have. So just hitting 60 percent at a national level likely won’t be enough for every state to swing its doors back open, at least safely.
Even with those caveats, the news from Israel seems pretty good: There seems to be a safe way to get much closer to normal at a 60 percent vaccination rate — and the US is very close to hitting that point.
When I asked experts about all of this, they repeatedly emphasized that we still don’t know what the herd immunity threshold really is. Experts give different estimations: While Fauci estimated the right threshold is 80 to 90 percent, Baylor College of Medicine infectious disease expert Peter Hotez told me his estimate of herd immunity is 60 to 75 percent.
Herd immunity could also be a moving target. “One of the challenges is people hear [of population immunity] and think of it as a very static concept,” Jen Kates, director of global health and HIV policy at the Kaiser Family Foundation, told me. But that’s not true, given the effects that different interventions, the weather, and other variables can have on the rate of infections and, therefore, the level of immunity required to suppress infections. “That makes it hard to say what the percent is for the US. It’s going to vary by place.”
That’s why real-world data matters. “The proof was always in the numbers, in what we actually observe in case incidents,” Dean said. “Everything else was just speculation, estimation.”
At the same time, the uncertainty surrounding the inflection point and herd immunity should make us all a bit cautious about putting too much stock in Israel’s experience. There are also other good reasons to get vaccinated, from the selfish (a vaccine is the best guarantee we have as individuals against the coronavirus) to the population level (more vaccination, above a theoretical herd immunity threshold, stops even more transmission).
“The hope is we’ll start to see declines as we start hitting around 60 percent,” Hotez said. “But I think to really bring it down to true containment mode and really stop transmission, we’ll probably have to go higher than 65 percent.”
One big complication here is children, since there are still no Covid-19 vaccines authorized for kids under 16. If the goal is to vaccinate 60 percent of the population, but there’s no vaccine for kids, the goal is really to vaccinate at least 75 percent of adults, which is a bigger challenge. With <a href="https://covid.cdc.gov/covid-data-tracker/#vaccinations">56 percent</a> of adults getting at least one dose, we’re not there yet.
To that end, America still has to do a lot more work to vaccinate people. The number of doses administered daily has <a href="https://ourworldindata.org/explorers/coronavirus-data-explorer?zoomToSelection=true&time=2020-12-20..latest&pickerSort=desc&pickerMetric=total_vaccinations_per_hundred&Metric=Vaccine+doses&Interval=7-day+rolling+average&Relative+to+Population=false&Align+outbreaks=false&country=~USA">declined</a> in recent weeks to around 2.4 million on average from a high of nearly 3.4 million.
Experts attribute this to America’s vaccine rollout problem <a href="https://www.vox.com/future-perfect/22289545/covid-19-vaccine-hesitancy-coronavirus-anti-vaxxers">shifting from supply to demand</a>. Brown University School of Public Health dean Ashish Jha used the analogy of a new iPhone coming out: So far, the US has vaccinated the most enthusiastic, those willing to camp out overnight for the vaccines. Now, the US has to make it less difficult for the less enthusiastic to get the shot — make it easier to get an appointment or remove appointment requirements entirely, and bring vaccines closer to where people are, including their homes, workplaces, doctor’s offices, or even hot spots for socializing and entertainment.
The US also may have to do work with those who are truly resistant. Based on <a href="https://www.cnn.com/2021/04/29/politics/cnn-poll-covid-vaccines/index.html">public</a> <a href="https://khn.org/news/article/covid-vaccine-hesitancy-drops-among-americans-new-kff-survey-shows/">polls</a>, that’s about 10 to 25 percent of American adults. We could hit 60 percent of Americans or even 75 percent of adults without them. But converting as many of those people as possible still would help get us there quicker. That could require extensive messaging efforts, especially <a href="https://psyarxiv.com/f9jq5">from Republican leaders</a> whose constituents are more likely to be hesitant.
If we do all of this right, there’s genuinely good news: The end not only may be in sight, it’s perhaps even closer than we think.
“After going through this, people have a tendency to go crazy,” Kates said. “[People] are like, ‘Is this real? Are we really okay?’ The trauma is deep, so there’s a bit of anxiety about that. But I think we’re just in a much better place than we were not too long ago.”
 
 
source <a href="https://www.vox.com/22400322/vaccines-herd-immunity-coronavirus-israel">https://www.vox.com/22400322/vaccines-herd-immunity-coronavirus-israel</a>

vox America’s Covid-19 endgame could be much closer than you think

As America’s Covid-19 vaccine rollout got underway last December, White House medical adviser Anthony Fauci said the herd immunity thresho...

Lumber mania is sweeping North America

For some people, the journey into America’s lumber crunch starts with the decision to build a new home, or at Home Depot, where the pandemic-driven home renovation craze has contributed to making basic materials pricey and hard to come by. For others, it starts with the memes. The price of lumber has soared over the past year, and it’s an incredibly hot commodity. The internet has taken notice.
“Not even one police escort,” on person on Twitter <a href="https://twitter.com/OffTheRunTrades/status/1385032386392461312?s=20">quipped</a> alongside a photo of a truck stacked with lumber rolling down the highway. Another <a href="https://twitter.com/BongCapital/status/1384164788293431296">snapped a picture</a> of a pile of boards in a building, remarking, “Wow, neighbors just casually flaunting their wealth in the hallway.”
While the memes are a joke, the situation is real: Demand for lumber has exploded in recent months, and suppliers have struggled to keep up. Much of the industry has been on its heels since the Great Recession, and it slowed down production accordingly. Those sawmill closures and such aren’t easy to reverse, even if someone might have predicted things would pick up now.
Prices have, in turn, skyrocketed. For years, the price of 1,000 board feet of lumber has generally traded in the $200 to $400 range. It’s now well above $1,000. (One board foot is 12x12x1 inches, and the average new single-family home takes about 16,000 board feet of lumber to construct.) A new house that would have cost $10,000 in wood to get off the ground a couple of years ago now costs $40,000 worth of wood — assuming, that is, you can even get your hands on the lumber.
Most people in the sector expected that Covid-19 would induce an industry-wide slowdown, not an industry-wide boom. Many were caught flat-footed.
“Not only has it surprised me, it’s just surprised the whole industry, how quickly we came roaring back. Housing and construction, repair and remodel, that’s where so much money was pointed by American consumers that the sheer scale of demand was hard to fathom,” Stinson Dean, CEO of Deacon Lumber, a lumber trading company based in Missouri, told me.
In the middle of our call, he had to pause to make a sale. “I’m so sorry, everyone needs lumber, and I have it,” he said after putting me on hold. He explained it probably would have been cheaper for his client, in Texas, to buy the truckload of lumber he just sold them directly from a producer up in Canada, but that producer is sold out through May, and they needed the materials ASAP. “You can’t get anything prompt, and a lot of folks have just underestimated their inventory needs, so they need to lean on folks like me.”
The lumber frenzy is part of a string of unexpected and strange developments in the Covid-19 economy. Before there was the great run on wood of 2021, <a href="https://www.vox.com/the-goods/2020/4/3/21206942/toilet-paper-coronavirus-shortage-supply-chain">there was the great run on toilet paper of 2020</a>. The same lockdown boredom and extra cash that inspired <a href="https://www.vox.com/business-and-finance/2020/7/9/21314119/stock-market-day-trading-reddit-dave-portnoy-barstool-robinhood">some people to get into day trading</a> animated people to decide it was time to fix up their homes. Those who fled cities decided not only to <a href="https://www.vox.com/22264268/covid-19-housing-insecurity-housing-prices-mortgage-rates-pandemic-zoning-supply-demand">buy existing homes</a> but also to build new ones.
In recent days, I spoke with a dozen people across the lumber industry about the economics of the current craze and why lumber is so expensive and so hard to come by. Many were bemused that anyone was even interested. Panels and two-by-fours and studs are not usually the stuff of public intrigue.
“I honestly don’t know what to make of it,” said Chace Barber, a Canadian logger and truck driver who’s become a bit of a lumberjack <a href="https://www.tiktok.com/@chacebarber?lang=en&is_copy_url=1&is_from_webapp=v1">TikTok star</a> in recent months, of his newfound internet following. “I guess I’ve been trying to explain as much about logging as I can.” It wasn’t a given that the TikTok crowd would be particularly into his line of work, but the memeification of lumber has certainly helped — not to mention that the 32-year-old Barber is quite attractive. (Though he says he doesn’t get as many DMs as you’d think.)
Barber isn’t the only one who’s puzzled — at the cultural interest, and also the broader situation. Beyond a <a href="https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2018-05-15/lumber-prices-catch-fire-as-tight-supply-meets-trade-tariffs">2018 blip</a>, the lumber industry hasn’t exactly been thriving lately. “Everybody’s hot and heavy about this business we’re in, and to us, it’s kind of funny, because this is a generational run,” said Chip Setzer, director of trading and growth at Mickey, a commodities trading platform. “I would venture to guess there’s nobody alive that has ever seen what we’re going through right now.”
Before we get further into the lumber industry crunch, it’s probably a good idea to explain how the flow of material usually goes: Someone cuts down a log in the forest, it gets put in a truck, and goes to a sawmill or panel mill to be processed into a finished product — a stick of lumber, a sheet of plywood or OSB (oriented strand board), etc. That then goes out into the world to be sold.
Timber and lumber refer to different things: Timber is the raw fiber from the forest, the tree; lumber is a manufactured finished good, like what you’d buy at the hardware store to fix your fence. You can sort of think of the chain like the oil industry. The unprocessed oil is the log, the refinery is the sawmill, and gas is the lumber — the product everyone’s talking about now.
To a certain extent, the story of that lumber mania is a pretty straightforward one of supply and demand: People want more wood than there is to go around.
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<aside><q>“Housing and construction, repair and remodel, that’s where so much money was pointed by American consumers that the sheer scale of demand was hard to fathom”</q></aside>
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And while there are places where the supply of timber is tight, there are others where it’s not at all. What’s vexing people trying to build a deck isn’t really a shortage of trees to be cut down, it’s more a shortage of the processed wood you can actually use — the lumber.
When the pandemic hit in the spring of 2020, many people in the lumber industry assumed business was about to go sour. Millions of people were out of work, businesses across the country were shuttered, and the country was in a recession. And so, producers reacted accordingly.
“They really dialed back, thinking that demand would fall, and the reality is that demand never slowed,” said Dustin Jalbert, senior economist and lumber industry specialist at Fastmarkets RISI.
Instead, things sped up. People stuck at home because of Covid-19 shutdowns across the country decided it was a good time to take on home improvement projects repairing and remodeling their homes — they put up fences, added on decks, built out offices, refinished basements. The DIY trend helped drive stellar sales numbers at stores such as <a href="https://ir.homedepot.com/~/media/Files/H/HomeDepot-IR/reports-and-presentations/quarterly-earnings/2020/4Q/q4-2020-press-release.pdf">Home Depot</a> and <a href="https://corporate.lowes.com/newsroom/press-releases/lowes-reports-fourth-quarter-2020-sales-and-earnings-results-02-24-21">Lowe’s</a>.
Many of those who weren’t busy fixing up their homes <a href="https://www.vox.com/covid-19-coronavirus-economy-recession-stock-market/2020/5/29/21273520/housing-market-coronavirus-impact-home-prices-mortgages-crash">went looking for new ones</a>. And where they couldn’t find preexisting homes, they started to build. Whatever initial slowdown there may have been in construction pretty quickly subsided. “Us being capitalist America, if people want to buy a house because they want to move out of the city and move to the suburbs, someone will build it for them. They’ll figure out a way,” said Michael Wisnefski, CEO of MaterialsXchange, an online marketplace for lumber and plywood.
Residential housing starts — a metric of when new construction projects start — <a href="https://www.census.gov/construction/nrc/pdf/newresconst.pdf">have consistently climbed</a>, <a href="https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2021-04-16/housing-starts-in-u-s-rebound-sharply-after-winter-setback">hitting rates not seen since before the Great Recession</a>. The hot housing market helped heat up the lumber market, and in turn, that’s made new housing prices higher.
“It’s adding about $36,000 to the price of a typical newly built home and almost $13,000 to a typical apartment,” said Robert Dietz, chief economist at the National Association of Home Builders.
<figure class="e-image"><picture class="c-picture" data-cid="site/picture_element-1620055820_1002_530245" data-cdata='{"asset_id":22481706,"ratio":"*"}'><source srcset="https://cdn.vox-cdn.com/thumbor/pvh717Ju7vf84RKctPVrj7CBh-g=/0x0:1860x1560/320x0/filters:focal(0x0:1860x1560):format(webp):no_upscale()/cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_asset/file/22481706/New_housing_starts_2000_to_2021.png 320w, https://cdn.vox-cdn.com/thumbor/ESa38A7QuSLqJPeZAiJkh43lG6o=/0x0:1860x1560/520x0/filters:focal(0x0:1860x1560):format(webp):no_upscale()/cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_asset/file/22481706/New_housing_starts_2000_to_2021.png 520w, https://cdn.vox-cdn.com/thumbor/zeid3i8KAZSfbLMstqo7b4dMTdo=/0x0:1860x1560/720x0/filters:focal(0x0:1860x1560):format(webp):no_upscale()/cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_asset/file/22481706/New_housing_starts_2000_to_2021.png 720w, https://cdn.vox-cdn.com/thumbor/x4mXe6u_k_UTCHqXw7Oq9CMxDrc=/0x0:1860x1560/920x0/filters:focal(0x0:1860x1560):format(webp):no_upscale()/cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_asset/file/22481706/New_housing_starts_2000_to_2021.png 920w, https://cdn.vox-cdn.com/thumbor/M_NvP5YOxMK_ZXEluQj-ltSm4ow=/0x0:1860x1560/1120x0/filters:focal(0x0:1860x1560):format(webp):no_upscale()/cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_asset/file/22481706/New_housing_starts_2000_to_2021.png 1120w, https://cdn.vox-cdn.com/thumbor/mtnYjUmMIxc4MIH2vUdRE3JwioY=/0x0:1860x1560/1320x0/filters:focal(0x0:1860x1560):format(webp):no_upscale()/cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_asset/file/22481706/New_housing_starts_2000_to_2021.png 1320w, https://cdn.vox-cdn.com/thumbor/XoiMUODKHkGBPZ2h1mRrOldrYOY=/0x0:1860x1560/1520x0/filters:focal(0x0:1860x1560):format(webp):no_upscale()/cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_asset/file/22481706/New_housing_starts_2000_to_2021.png 1520w, https://cdn.vox-cdn.com/thumbor/jLlM2_5WOXRqRIYs_FDZCJxudw0=/0x0:1860x1560/1720x0/filters:focal(0x0:1860x1560):format(webp):no_upscale()/cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_asset/file/22481706/New_housing_starts_2000_to_2021.png 1720w, https://cdn.vox-cdn.com/thumbor/NNS4eOv3f-f7h5jxFhCJXl10Cx0=/0x0:1860x1560/1920x0/filters:focal(0x0:1860x1560):format(webp):no_upscale()/cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_asset/file/22481706/New_housing_starts_2000_to_2021.png 1920w" sizes="(min-width: 1221px) 846px, (min-width: 880px) calc(100vw - 334px), 100vw" type="image/webp" /> <img alt="A line chart showing housing starts from 2000." data-upload-width="1860" sizes="(min-width: 1221px) 846px, (min-width: 880px) calc(100vw - 334px), 100vw" src="https://cdn.vox-cdn.com/thumbor/HtMjm8V62lX938SRqa7bXZGRJ9s=/0x0:1860x1560/1200x0/filters:focal(0x0:1860x1560):no_upscale()/cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_asset/file/22481706/New_housing_starts_2000_to_2021.png" srcset="https://cdn.vox-cdn.com/thumbor/cHtBuWBE9w260H4sJcw37e_fAAo=/0x0:1860x1560/320x0/filters:focal(0x0:1860x1560):no_upscale()/cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_asset/file/22481706/New_housing_starts_2000_to_2021.png 320w, https://cdn.vox-cdn.com/thumbor/e1ut-ipiWkx1T5Q7JtTIo3QmK3g=/0x0:1860x1560/520x0/filters:focal(0x0:1860x1560):no_upscale()/cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_asset/file/22481706/New_housing_starts_2000_to_2021.png 520w, https://cdn.vox-cdn.com/thumbor/9kUNtwfQfwA73ZIpzxoGEEVxpJQ=/0x0:1860x1560/720x0/filters:focal(0x0:1860x1560):no_upscale()/cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_asset/file/22481706/New_housing_starts_2000_to_2021.png 720w, https://cdn.vox-cdn.com/thumbor/KVIrEURD8ISlaROSsMqrhqvuPuU=/0x0:1860x1560/920x0/filters:focal(0x0:1860x1560):no_upscale()/cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_asset/file/22481706/New_housing_starts_2000_to_2021.png 920w, https://cdn.vox-cdn.com/thumbor/9Bekluoo6ZtIwcTGKQ2GvuD-hZY=/0x0:1860x1560/1120x0/filters:focal(0x0:1860x1560):no_upscale()/cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_asset/file/22481706/New_housing_starts_2000_to_2021.png 1120w, https://cdn.vox-cdn.com/thumbor/6xH9GjdFCvyXn3UJ1hzI96Owgms=/0x0:1860x1560/1320x0/filters:focal(0x0:1860x1560):no_upscale()/cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_asset/file/22481706/New_housing_starts_2000_to_2021.png 1320w, https://cdn.vox-cdn.com/thumbor/fxbOCtwAeoi_gKQE7FP3e-Sq39k=/0x0:1860x1560/1520x0/filters:focal(0x0:1860x1560):no_upscale()/cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_asset/file/22481706/New_housing_starts_2000_to_2021.png 1520w, https://cdn.vox-cdn.com/thumbor/vp3C1CRYHsfQRTIaDwKyIxvGEuo=/0x0:1860x1560/1720x0/filters:focal(0x0:1860x1560):no_upscale()/cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_asset/file/22481706/New_housing_starts_2000_to_2021.png 1720w, https://cdn.vox-cdn.com/thumbor/I4CygpC26bcRzDg41cEXk0NAQhc=/0x0:1860x1560/1920x0/filters:focal(0x0:1860x1560):no_upscale()/cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_asset/file/22481706/New_housing_starts_2000_to_2021.png 1920w" /></picture>
<figcaption>New houses are being built at levels the US hasn’t seen since before the Great Recession.</figcaption>
<cite>Rani Molla/Vox</cite></figure>
It’s worth noting that demand isn’t just surging in North America; it’s also up overseas, which further strains the industry.
The lumber industry has struggled to recover in the wake of the Great Recession and housing bubble, and a series of <a href="https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2018-05-15/lumber-prices-catch-fire-as-tight-supply-meets-trade-tariffs">economic</a>, <a href="https://apnews.com/article/donald-trump-wildlife-lawsuits-forests-oregon-9924eefafc7cfb807b56b504a6ed0284">regulatory</a>, and <a href="https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2021/04/climate-origins-massive-lumber-shortage/618727/">environmental</a> issues have weighed it down. In the US and Canada, many sawmills closed up shop altogether or otherwise adjusted operations downward; <a href="https://www.wsj.com/articles/behind-lumbers-collapse-a-perfect-storm-of-housing-and-trade-11546437601">2019 was a bad year for lumber in particular</a>.
“You can’t have 12 recessionary years in an industry and not have that industry adjust how it behaves,” said Paul Jannke, principal at Forest Economic Advisors.
In the spring of 2020, in preparation for even worse business, a lot of wholesalers sold off inventory and dialed down operations. As it became increasingly clear that the pandemic might not be such a disaster for the sector after all, it took the industry a while to believe it would last. “They didn’t actually start production up right away, and by the time they figured out this was actually real and it was going to last, they ran into issues with quarantining their employees, so they weren’t able to ramp up production,” Jannke said.
Finding lumber workers was challenging pre-Covid-19; during the pandemic, it’s been even harder. Sawmills have had a hard time staffing up and adding shifts, not only because of Covid-related restrictions and safety measures but also because a lot of people don’t want to work those types of jobs. Some people I spoke with suggested expanded unemployment insurance, which adds an extra $300 a week onto state benefits until September 6, may also be a factor — though, of course, sawmills are making so much money now they might be able to afford to pay workers more and court them back.
<div class="c-float-right">
<aside><q>“You can’t have 12 recessionary years in an industry and not have that industry adjust how it behaves”</q></aside>
</div>
Steve Swanson, who runs one sawmill and two plywood mills in Oregon, is among those who have worked to keep up with the current demand. “At these price levels, we’re doing very, very well,” he said. “We suffered dramatically over the last decade, and now we’re getting rewarded for having the tenacity to stay in business.”
Still, things could be better. Since 2007, he sold off one sawmill and completely shut down two others; he employs about 700 workers now, but with those jettisoned operations, he estimates he’d have employed 500 more. He notes that many people just don’t understand how hard it is to get a sawmill up and running. “They’d like to see our industry respond to these prices and make new lumber, but a new sawmill today is $100 million, it takes two years to build, and there’s no guarantee you’re going to have the raw materials to run it.” Plus, who knows how long this current surge will last.
The lumber supply chain, up and down, is tight, from the trucks and railcars moving materials from point A to point B, to workers to staff the lumber yards and sawmills, to, of course, the logs themselves. You can’t grow a tree overnight, or get it to the sawmill to turn it into lumber. And once you cut a tree down, it takes years to grow it back.
In the Pacific Northwest and British Columbia, where many of the logs come from, the “timber baskets,” or how much wood is available to cut, <a href="https://insights.risiinfo.com/permanent-sawmill-curtailments-british-columbia-pacific-northwest-september-2019/index.html">are fairly constrained</a>, Jalbert explained. About 30 percent of US lumber consumption is from Canada, and a lot of it is from British Columbia, and they’ve been dealing with a multi-decade beetle infestation <a href="https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2020-08-17/mountain-pine-beetle-infestations-are-killing-forests-could-worsen-emissions#:~:text=A%20mountain%20pine%20beetle%20at%20Rocky%20Mountain%20National%20Park%20in%20Colorado.&text=All%20told%2C%20the%20beetles%20felled,to%20the%20U.S.%20housing%20market.">that’s hurt the supply</a>. Wildfires pose a threat to logging in those areas, and there’s an <a href="https://apnews.com/article/donald-trump-wildlife-lawsuits-forests-oregon-9924eefafc7cfb807b56b504a6ed0284">ongoing battle</a> between conservationists and loggers in the Pacific Northwest, where logging on federal lands is restricted.
On the other hand, in the US South, another area abundant with timber, the problem is sort of the opposite. “They have a glut of timber,” Jalbert said. Until the region has enough sawmill capacity to turn that timber into lumber, however, production will remain slower than it could be.
“We’re finding that we have a huge inventory of trees ready to be harvested. There’s this increased demand on the lumber side of things with the same production capacity ... but the production side has all they need as far as the logs to produce lumber,” said Dan Hockenberger, the owner of Virginia Forest Resources, a timber company.
And even if it were to ramp up, softwood lumber from the Pacific Northwest and British Columbia isn’t necessarily interchangeable with what’s being produced in the South, said Dean, the lumber trader. “The lumber that is produced from a Southern yellow pine tree does not have the same use cases as lumber that’s produced from a Canadian spruce tree,” he said. But out of necessity, many builders are figuring out how to adjust and use more of what’s available.
This disconnect between raw materials and processing capacity means that the wealth of the lumber boom isn’t really being shared up and down the supply chain, and <a href="https://www.wsj.com/articles/lumber-prices-are-soaring-tree-growers-miserable-11614177282?mod=hp_lead_pos6">many of the people growing trees are being left out</a>. Timber prices in many places have remained stagnant, especially when you account for taxes and inflation. “We are swimming in wood in the South,” said Brooks Mendell, chief executive of forest supply researcher Forisk Consulting. “The sawmills can just buy what’s out there, there’s so much available. We have an imbalance.”
For his part, Barber, in Canada, isn’t seeing much of a bump in his paycheck. “The price of lumber has gone way up, the mill’s making a lot more money, but they’re not paying us any more,” he said. “It’s funny how that works.”
The surge in demand and dearth of supply in lumber are causing all sorts of volatility and distortions in the market. The lumber futures market <a href="https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2021-04-27/-frenzied-lumber-market-touches-new-record-amid-wild-swings">keeps hitting new highs</a>, surpassing $1,400 per 1,000 board feet, and <a href="https://twitter.com/LumberTrading/status/1388224461065711616?s=20">things might be about to get even wilder</a>. The cash market — meaning the actual physical product — is booming. <a href="https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2021-04-29/lumber-producer-resolute-is-selling-boards-it-hasn-t-yet-sawed">Some sawmills are selling boards before they’re even cut</a>. Those in search of lumber are paying a high price to get it, if they can get their hands on it at all.
“I have customers in foreign markets that are like, ‘I will wire transfer you $1 million right now, can you just get me some product?’ And no, I can’t,” Setzer, the commodities trader, said. He described having to place countless calls to truckers just to get something moved, and said he tells members of his team to sometimes pad their numbers on quotes to buyers because prices are moving so quickly that “you’re going to end up taking a loss on stuff if you quote it cheaply.”
Lumber futures contracts as far out as November <a href="https://www.cmegroup.com/trading/agricultural/lumber-and-pulp/random-length-lumber.html">remain above $1,000</a>, suggesting things might not settle down anytime soon. While the music’s going, producers are going to keep on dancing — and, if they can manage, dancing faster.
“We simply respond to the higher prices,” Swanson said. “Why would I sell lumber at $800 per 1,000 board feet when others are offering me $1,500? It’s a commodity not any different than oil and gas and corn and orange juice — when there’s not enough of it to go around, the price goes up.”
There’s consensus that the lumber mania will slow down at some point. Eventually, prices will settle back down and sawmills will catch up. But nobody is quite sure when. The spring and summer building season is upon us, and if demand didn’t slow down this past winter, it’s not going to right now. If there is a slowdown in the coming winter, combined with strong production in the mills, that may allow the chain to get back into equilibrium. By and large, everything settling down and the supply chain getting in order is going to take time.
“In forestry, this sort of rebalancing takes time. The trees take a long time to grow, and it takes years to build a new mill,” Mendell said.
While some people have pointed to lumber prices as a sign of increasing <a href="https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/22346376/inflation-rate-explained-federal-reserve">inflation</a> and a sign that the economy is overheating, there’s really not much that, say, the Federal Reserve can do about it. Increasing the federal interest rate, for instance, might discourage people from building homes, but it might also deter lumber producers from making the investments to up their sawmill capacity.
“If we’ve got supply-side constraints, the best way to battle supply-side constraints is more supply,” Dietz said. “We need more sawmills, and that takes capital.”
Duties on Canadian lumber, currently at 9 percent, <a href="https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2018-05-15/lumber-prices-catch-fire-as-tight-supply-meets-trade-tariffs">may have driven up prices in the past</a>, but that’s not really what’s going on right now either. Given how much prices have skyrocketed, that 9 percent is pretty negligible.
Dean said he doesn’t expect to get back to pre-Covid-19 lumber pricing, but he does think the situation will moderate. “People are only paying these high prices because they have to, and eventually those people who have to buy lumber will buy enough and we’ll be able to breathe and prices will reset. To me, the question is, where will we reset?” he said.
To be sure, one nagging question is why soaring prices and scarce lumber haven’t caused a slowdown already. You might think that if it’s so hard and expensive to build out your deck right now, you might wait until next year. But thus far, that’s not what’s happening.
The situation has also sprouted conspiracy theories that there isn’t a shortage at all — you don’t have to dig very far into the internet to <a href="https://www.reddit.com/r/HomeImprovement/comments/msqorl/is_there_truly_a_lumber_shortage_or_is_the_price/">find theories</a> that there’s a plethora of lumber out there and that the lumberyards, mill owners, and other powers-that-be of the forest are just hiding it. The experts I asked about the conspiracy theories laughed them off.
“They’re not hiding the boards, they’ve got nothing. They’re going to sell every board they can at these prices,” Mendell said.
<div class="c-float-right">
<aside><q>“They’re not hiding the boards, they’ve got nothing”</q></aside>
</div>
Dean also pointed out that what looks like a lot of lumber to a regular person is not actually a lot of lumber, despite what the truthers out there might believe. Again, it takes thousands of board feet of lumber to construct your typical single-family house. “A lot of the lumber you see is already sold, it’s already committed, so it’s not available for sale on the open market.”
“That conspiracy is crazy,” Barber said. “If you just see the trucks go in and out, you can see the lumber cycling.”
Hockenberger, the timber company owner, initially thought that I might be a lumber truther reaching out to him to talk conspiracies. “Nowadays when somebody wants to talk to you about the topic, you don’t really know what their intent is with that information,” he said.
The finance industry has birthed a number of memes in recent months — you’ve got the meme stocks like <a href="https://www.vox.com/the-goods/22249458/gamestop-stock-wallstreetbets-reddit-citron">GameStop</a>, the Fed-dedicated “<a href="https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/money-printer-go-brrr">Money Printer Go Brrr</a>,” and <a href="https://www.cnet.com/news/dogecoin-the-meme-that-became-a-real-cryptocurrency/">Dogecoin</a>, for example. And now, you can add lumber to this list.
Reporting for this story, I discovered that lumber Twitter is definitely a thing — and figures such as Dean (<a href="https://twitter.com/LumberTrading">@LumberTrading</a>) and Jalbert (<a href="https://twitter.com/2x4caster">@2x4caster</a>) are among the stars of it. Some of the discussion is serious, and a lot of it is jokes. Snap a picture of some wood, toss off a one-liner about how much money it’s worth, and you’ve struck meme gold.
Workers at places like Home Depot, who are experiencing the lumber craze firsthand, are in on the joke, too. “Customers pressing me about why I don’t have lumber like I’m suppose to go out back and cut a tree down for them,” one user <a href="https://www.reddit.com/r/HomeDepot/comments/i20xak/customers_pressing_me_about_why_i_dont_have/">recently joked</a> on the r/HomeDepot page on Reddit.
One Wisconsin consulting forester, who asked to remain anonymous for the confidentiality of his clients, says he’s seen more interest among people looking to get into growing timber given the lumber craze … and he’d advise thinking about it practically before jumping in. “They think it’s cool or this is the next bitcoin, but then they also have to realize that this is big enough, complex enough, that they’re going to have to commit to it. People that do commit to it, I think they see pretty quickly that this isn’t going to be a get-rich-quick type thing,” he said.
For now, most of the people involved are having fun.
Barber got into TikTok less than a year ago after some of his coworkers told him to give it a try. “I notice truckers do really well on TikTok, and my only theory is we have a lot of time during the day to sit and think about things,” he said. He now has about 300,000 followers.
He’s still a little befuddled about having found an audience — his most <a href="https://www.tiktok.com/@chacebarber/video/6925507419934166278?lang=en&is_copy_url=1&is_from_webapp=v1">popular</a> <a href="https://www.tiktok.com/@chacebarber/video/6947413830590827781?lang=en&is_copy_url=1&is_from_webapp=v1">videos</a> are just him sharing random information about his truck and about logging. “Little fun fact about logging trucks: There is actually nothing that secures the logs to the truck. The only thing holding these things to the truck is gravity and Jesus, I guess,” he said in one recent video, filmed as he walked around his truck. <a href="https://www.tiktok.com/@chacebarber/video/6915513531664272646?lang=en&is_copy_url=1&is_from_webapp=v1">It got nearly 700,000 views</a>.
When we spoke, he talked about <a href="https://www.tiktok.com/@chacebarber/video/6897434282466331905?lang=en&is_copy_url=1&is_from_webapp=v1">another video</a> he filmed of himself driving his truck down the middle of a snowy road, tying it back to the lumber surge that’s made him a star in the first place. “This is why lumber’s so expensive, guys,” he said. “You’ve got to pay me to drive down the side of a cliff.”
Even some people within the industry are frustrated with the price of lumber when it comes to their own personal plans. “I have a garage I was wanting to build over a year ago, and I’ve been waiting for prices to drop,” Hockenberger said. “I should just buy a sawmill.”
Rani Molla contributed data reporting to this article.
 
 
source <a href="https://www.vox.com/22410713/lumber-prices-shortage">https://www.vox.com/22410713/lumber-prices-shortage</a>

vox Lumber mania is sweeping North America

For some people, the journey into America’s lumber crunch starts with the decision to build a new home, or at Home Depot, where the pandemic...

The book that changed how I think about thinking

<div><img class="ff-og-image-inserted" src="https://cdn.vox-cdn.com/thumbor/pIwSffFJPagMAdEUWvp5Yn3tOS4=/0x0:3088x1617/fit-in/1200x630/cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_asset/file/22482482/Ey3CTW_WgAIWiJj.jpeg" /></div>
I’ve learned more about how to think and reason well from Julia Galef than from almost anyone.
Galef, a writer, researcher, and podcaster, is obsessive about improving her own reasoning processes and helping other people improve theirs. For years, she led <a href="https://www.rationality.org/">a group</a> offering seminars and workshops for people to improve their reasoning skills. But lately, her approach has changed.
In her new book, <a href="https://www.amazon.com/Scout-Mindset-Perils-Defensive-Thinking/dp/0735217556?sa-no-redirect=1&pldnSite=1" has-subtag="true" data-cdata='{"subtag_max_length":99,"subtag_delim_length":2,"subtag_key":"ascsubtag","subtag_query_data":{"sa-no-redirect":"1","pldnSite":"1","ascsubtag":"[]vx[p]22174415[m]m-placeholder[s]s-placeholder[t]w[c]c-placeholder[r]r-placeholder[d]d-placeholder"},"encode_subtag":false}'>The Scout Mindset</a>, she argues it’s not enough to teach people which cognitive biases we all suffer from and how to avoid them. If someone wants to think more clearly, they have to cultivate an attitude of curiosity and openness to evidence.
This week, I had <a href="https://open.spotify.com/episode/1FQagT8e4jFQ3CG3Mcwt6g?si=gISeXYqIS9m45hjDviwZ_g">Galef on the Vox Conversations podcast</a> to talk about how to develop the scout mindset. Below is a transcript that’s been condensed for brevity and clarity.
<h4>Dylan Matthews</h4>
Walk me through what you mean by “scout mindset.” What does it mean to have it? How do you know if you have it?
<h4>Julia Galef</h4>
It’s my term for the motivation to see things as they are and not as you wish they were, being or trying to be intellectually honest, objective, or fair minded, and curious about what’s actually true.
By default, a lot of the time we humans are in what I call “soldier mindset,” in which our motivation is to defend our beliefs against any evidence or arguments that might threaten them. Rationalization, motivated reasoning, wishful thinking: these are all facets of what I’m calling a soldier mindset.
I adopted this term because the way that we talk about reasoning in the English language is through militaristic metaphor. We try to “shore up” our beliefs, “support them” and “buttress them” as if they’re fortresses. We try to “shoot down” opposing arguments and we try to “poke holes” in the other side.
I call this “soldier mindset,” and “scout mindset” is an alternative to that. It’s a different way of thinking about what to believe or thinking about what’s true.
<h4>Dylan Matthews</h4>
You have a lot of examples of “scout mindset” in the book, and one of my favorites was the French Colonel Georges Picquart in the late 19th, early 20th century. He’s a kind of loathsome guy in some ways, but admirable in others.
<h4>Julia Galef</h4>
So in the late 19th century in France there was what’s called the <a href="https://johnganz.substack.com/p/the-century-of-rubbish">Dreyfus Affair</a>. A memo was found in a wastebasket written by someone in the French army, addressed to the Germans, divulging a bunch of top-secret military plans.
The French army realized they had a spy in their ranks and launched an investigation. They quickly converged on this high-ranking officer named Alfred Dreyfus, who was the only Jewish member in the top ranks of the French army.
The officers who prosecuted Dreyfus genuinely believed that he was the spy. But their investigation, if you look at it from the outside, was incredibly slanted. They ignored testimony from experts who said that Dreyfus’s handwriting didn’t match the memo, and they only trusted the experts who said the handwriting did match the memo. So they convicted Dreyfus in this “soldier mindset”-filled investigation.
Dreyfus gets imprisoned on Devil’s Island. But then another officer gets promoted to the head of this investigative department. His name is Colonel Picquart and he is anti-Semitic, just like his fellow officers were. That was just kind of the norm in France at the time.
He didn’t like Dreyfus and he had all of the same biases that his fellow officers did. But he also had a much stronger drive to recognize and pursue the truth than his fellow officers did.
He started looking into the investigation that had been conducted into Dreyfus, he went through all this evidence and realized, wait, this is actually a really flimsy case. We just don’t have a strong case against this guy. I think we might have just convicted an innocent man.
His fellow officers just kept kind of dismissing his concerns and rationalizing away the inconsistencies he’d found. And this just made him really angry. And so he kept pursuing it and pursuing it. And it took many years, and the army actually tried to shut him up by putting him in jail as well. But eventually, Colonel Picquart managed to get Dreyfus exonerated and Dreyfus was reinstated back in the Army.
Colonel Picquart is a hero to me because, even though he was an anti-Semite, which, as you say, makes him kind of a loathsome figure, in a way that I think makes a scout mindset even more admirable. His love for the truth was so strong that it was able to outweigh his personal biases against Dreyfus and his personal biases towards preserving his job and his reputation and so on.
<h4>Dylan Matthews</h4>
When I first met you, you were doing seminars and workshops that were trying to help people notice their cognitive biases, think more rationally, and use better reasoning methods in their own lives.
In the book, you seem a little disillusioned from that project. You write that just telling people they have these biases isn’t enough for them to change that. They have to cultivate a whole different attitude toward the world.
What was the evolution of your thinking on this?
<h4>Julia Galef</h4>
Back in 2012, I co-founded this educational nonprofit called the <a href="https://www.rationality.org/">Center for Applied Rationality</a>, and I helped run it for several years. Part of what we did was run these workshops where we tried to take concepts from cognitive science, but also from basic economic theory and even philosophy, and use those concepts to help people improve their reasoning and decision-making in their own lives, their careers, their relationships, etc.
Originally, I envisioned this project as being about giving people knowledge. Like, “Here is the five-step process you should go through to figure out whether your action is net positive,” or, “Here is a list of the top 10 most common cognitive biases that impact our decision-making.” My assumption was that having that knowledge would equip people to make better decisions and so on.
It’s so often the case that when you try to describe a thing you were wrong about in the past, it seems kind of obvious, but if you think about the people you’ve seen online who know a lot of cognitive biases and logical fallacies, and you just ask yourself, “Do these people tend to be really self-reflective?” — I don’t think they usually do, for the most part.
The people I see who talk a lot about people engaging in cognitive biases and fallacies prefer to point out those biases and fallacies in other people. That’s how they wield that knowledge.
Even when you’re motivated to try to improve your own reasoning and decision-making, just having the knowledge itself isn’t all that effective. The bottleneck is more like wanting to notice the things that you’re wrong about, wanting to see the ways in which your decisions have been imperfect in the past, and wanting to change it. And so I just started shifting my focus more to the motivation to see things clearly, instead of the knowledge and education part of it.
<h4>Dylan Matthews</h4>
You talk about how our identities — thinking of ourselves as part of the liberal or conservative team, or the Christian team, or the feminist team — can make it harder to be a good scout. It makes everything feel more soldier-like, more adversarial, and can cause you to dismiss evidence because it’s inconvenient or embrace evidence that’s not very good because it helps your position.
Then at the end of the book you encourage people to think about being a “scout” as their identity. Isn’t there a danger that it will cause some of the same problems? Mightn’t self-proclaimed scouts be less likely to critique each other or be more smug about critiques from outsiders than if they didn’t see themselves as a unified community?
<h4>Julia Galef</h4>
The trick is choosing the things you’re going to pride yourself on strategically, so that the things that you’re rewarding yourself for, with pride or satisfaction, and the things that the people around you are rewarding you for, are things that are actually helpful for seeing the world clearly.
If you’re priding yourself on, say, “always having the right answer,” that’s an unhelpful kind of identity to have. That sort of thing is going to just incentivize you away from noticing when you’re not right. But if you define your identity carefully, and pride yourself instead on your ability to admit when you’re wrong, and on your ability to distinguish between different levels of certainty in your beliefs, then the incentives line up.
That kind of identity makes these kinds of habits and tools much easier to pick up and sustain because you’re actually feeling good when you use them instead of feeling bad that you proved yourself wrong.
<h4>Dylan Matthews</h4>
I’m a little skeptical that’s enough. Part of why I ask is we’re both part of the effective altruism community, which prides itself on using reason and evidence carefully in trying to figure out ways to do charity better, or improve government policy. Those are attributes to be proud of, but because I think of myself as an effective altruist I sometimes catch myself getting defensive or irrationally annoyed when other EAs are criticized.
Just to give a concrete example, <a href="https://www.slowboring.com/p/slate-star-codex">there was a news cycle</a> a few months ago about Scott Alexander, an effective altruist and writer you and I both like. I saw some critical coverage of him, and had some problems with the coverage on the substance, but I also felt this instinctive response of, “No, Scott’s a good guy, Scott’s one of us, we gotta protect Scott.”
That’s a bad impulse, and it honestly really scares me. How do you make sure that you’re not engaging in that kind of confirmation bias when you’re building out your scout identity?
<h4>Julia Galef</h4>
Let me ask you, how do you feel in those instances, when you do actually admit to yourself, “This point in defense of EA or whatever tribe I’m in actually doesn’t hold up,” or, “This critique of EA makes some good points”? In those moments, how do you feel?
<h4>Dylan Matthews</h4>
I feel sort of stressed briefly. But then … I think it over. And if I’m comfortable with the conclusion I come to, I can come to a kind of peace with it. Say I read something saying that effective altruists don’t take the idea of fighting for <a href="https://philpapers.org/rec/GOMTFO-2">structural change to government</a> seriously enough. I think, “Okay, they have a point. But structural change is really hard.” So I can integrate that critique into my old way of thinking. That brings me a kind of peace, when I can reconcile them.
<h4>Julia Galef</h4>
That’s pretty similar to my experience, too. I have a chapter in the book on how to make yourself more receptive to unpleasant or inconvenient truth, or things that might be true.
[My] advice is, before you try to think about whether the thing is true, first imagine that it is true, and then ask yourself, how bad would that be? What would I do? This certainly applies to real-world decision-making in tough situations like <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steven_Callahan">Steven Callahan</a> [a sailor who was stuck on a raft in the Atlantic Ocean for 76 straight days]. He had to make plans for what he would do if the worst-case scenario happened. Just the making of the plans themselves can be kind of comforting. It won’t necessarily make the bad possibility palatable, but it can at least make it tolerable enough that you’re willing to think clearly about it, and consider if it’s true.
I think the same principle applies in the slightly less dramatic example of reading criticism of your tribe on the internet. Sometimes if I’m reading criticism and I’m feeling stressed out and defensive, and I notice that I’m reaching for rebuttals of it, I will just stop and imagine, “What if I found out that this critique was actually solid? How bad would that be?”
What I realized in that moment is, “I guess that would be okay. It’s happened before, and wasn’t the end of the world. Here’s what I would say on Twitter in response to the article, here’s how I would acknowledge that they made a good point.” This happens just in a few seconds in my head.
But just going through that exercise of, “How bad would it be?” and picturing the outcome often makes me realize, “Okay, it’d be fine. It’d be fine if this turned out to not support my side.” And then once I reached that state of acceptance, then I’m able to actually think about whether or not it’s justified.
 
 
source <a href="https://www.vox.com/future-perfect/22410374/julia-galef-book-scout-mindset-interview-think">https://www.vox.com/future-perfect/22410374/julia-galef-book-scout-mindset-interview-think</a>

vox The book that changed how I think about thinking

I’ve learned more about how to think and reason well from Julia Galef than from almost anyone. Galef, a writer, researcher, and podcaster,...

Voters already love technology. They don’t need anti-China messaging to get there.

In his address to the joint session of Congress on April 28, President Joe Biden made the case for reinvigorating the government’s role in technological investment, laying out a vision for what you could call “<a href="https://www.vox.com/2021/4/28/22408111/winners-and-losers-biden-joint-session-speech">progressive tech optimism</a>”: the idea that government investment in tech is the path forward to solving Democratic priorities like the climate crisis and developing treatments for illnesses like Alzheimer’s, diabetes, and cancer.
The president’s vision for the role of technology was striking given that both Republicans and Democrats have become incensed by the behavior of different big tech companies and their founders — from Amazon’s treatment of its workers and Twitter’s decision to ban former President Donald Trump. But while both sides of the aisle have been critical of tech companies lately, tech optimism resonates strongly with voters, according to a <a href="https://www.filesforprogress.org/datasets/2021/4/dfp-vox-endless-frontier-splits.pdf">new poll with Data for Progress (DFP) and Vox</a>.
The poll, conducted between April 16 and 19, surveyed 1,138 likely voters. It found 80 percent of respondents agreed with the relatively anodyne statement: “Technology is generally a force for good,” and then, when given both tech optimist and tech pessimist messages, voters again agreed that tech is a force for good.
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Seventy-one percent of likely voters agreed with the tech-optimist statement: “Technology is generally a force for good. Large tech companies have provided innovations like vaccines, electric vehicles, bringing down the cost of batteries that store green energy, vegetarian meat options, and other ways that have improved our quality of life.” Only 19 percent agreed with the tech-pessimist statement: “Technology is generally a force for bad. Large tech companies are bad for workers, inequality, and democracy. The technological innovations they produce are not worth the cost.”
Republicans, perhaps scarred by the wave of tech companies that banned Trump and some of his allies from their platforms, are more likely to agree with the tech-pessimist statement: 30 percent of Republicans as opposed to only 12 percent of Democrats. Still, 59 percent of Republicans agreed with the tech-optimist message along with 78 percent of Democrats.
Traditionally, presidents of both parties have argued in favor of pursuing new technological advancements by citing America’s need to remain “first” in the world. And in their fight for increased funding for technological research and development, Democrats have repeatedly highlighted China as a growing adversary. This new survey data suggests specific appeals about the danger any one country poses to dominance are likely unnecessary in garnering public support.
Bipartisan messaging pitting the US’s future against China’s <a href="https://www.vox.com/22350402/biden-infrastructure-plan-foreign-policy-china">has taken root</a>. In his joint address, Biden warned that “China and other countries are closing in fast” as he urged Congress to increase public investments in research and development.
He’s not alone in this.
The Endless Frontier Act, a bill championed by Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer, seeks to “bolster US technology research and development efforts in a bid to address Chinese competition,” Reuters’ David Shepardson <a href="https://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-china-technology/u-s-senate-panel-to-hold-hearing-on-tech-bill-to-combat-china-idUSKBN2BU3A8">reported</a>. Schumer himself has repeatedly warned of the threat the Chinese Communist Party poses as he urges his colleagues to support the legislation — in one <a href="https://www.democrats.senate.gov/newsroom/press-releases/majority-leader-schumer-senator-young-and-representatives-khanna-and-gallagher-introduce-endless-frontier-act-with-12-bipartisan-senators-and-5-representatives-to-dramatically-increase-us-investment-and-leadership-in-science-and-tech-innovation-strengthen-economic-and-national-security-and-keep-the-us-strategically-competitive-with-china-and-other-countries">statement</a>, he references China three times.
Some <a href="https://twitter.com/DecampDave/status/1387587048601706496?s=20">commentators</a> have <a href="https://twitter.com/JordanUhl/status/1387808873571045376?s=20">criticized</a> the rise in this oppositional rhetoric, pointing to the attacks on AAPI people over the past year; <a href="https://twitter.com/rokwon/status/1387849289527795713?s=20">author R.O. Kwon</a> called Biden’s remarks before Congress “absolutely fucking terrifying.” Trump has been widely excoriated for referring to Covid-19 as the “China virus” or “Kung flu” — rhetoric which may have fueled the flames of anti-Asian sentiment over the last year — and these critics feel Democrats’ language isn’t helping matters.
In the new poll, DFP and Vox tested whether this focus on China was necessary to build public support for new technological investments. Respondents were divided into two groups: In the first, respondents were told that increasing public investment in science and tech would help in “maintaining our competitive edge over China.” In the second, they were told it would help in “maintaining our competitive edge over Europe.” Support for the anti-China message was nearly indistinguishable from the anti-Europe one.
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The study found 66 percent of respondents agreed that the US should “invest more in scientific and technological innovations” when they were told it would help the nation compete with China and 67 percent agreed with that statement when they were told it would help the nation compete with Europe. Looking at the partisan split, Republicans and Democrats are actually more motivated (4 percentage points and 2 percentage points, respectively) by competition with Europe.
In pursuit of drumming up public support for public investments in R&D, voters may be motivated by the desire to maintain American hegemony, but specific references to China do not appear to increase support for the policies.
But, as Vox’s Ella Nilsen and Alex Ward <a href="https://www.vox.com/22350402/biden-infrastructure-plan-foreign-policy-china">report</a>, Democrats’ anti-China rhetoric may not be about convincing the public but rather a way to get Republican elected officials on board:
<blockquote>
“The best way to enact a progressive agenda is to use China [as a] threat,” a Democratic congressional aide told Vox.
The theory that America is at its best when it’s united against a common adversary can motivate members of both parties, especially using the idea that the US will lose its competitive edge or cede ground to another country. Indeed, one of the few things both parties can agree on is the need to compete with China.
</blockquote>
 
 
source <a href="https://www.vox.com/2021/5/3/22410304/technology-poll-research-and-development-biden-china-joint-address">https://www.vox.com/2021/5/3/22410304/technology-poll-research-and-development-biden-china-joint-address</a>

vox Voters already love technology. They don’t need anti-China messaging to get there.

In his address to the joint session of Congress on April 28, President Joe Biden made the case for reinvigorating the government’s role in t...

Are we really in for a summer of love? A post-vaccine dating investigation.

<div><img class="ff-og-image-inserted" src="https://cdn.vox-cdn.com/thumbor/pvtiEWuxF59eQGPRFv2P3xJheIs=/0x0:4092x2142/fit-in/1200x630/cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_asset/file/22478518/GettyImages_1222218688.jpg" /></div>
“I’m excited to go a bit buck wild and feel so much safer,” says Elena, a recently vaccinated college student. “Just go on a lot of dates, make out with some guys, nothing serious.”
The 20-year-old Salt Lake City resident, who asked that her last name be withheld to protect her privacy, is ready to make up for lost time in her romantic life. She did some app dating during the pandemic, but Covid-19 was a constant presence, with several of her dates later telling her they’d been exposed (though she never caught the coronavirus). During quarantine, Elena spent time rehashing missed chances in her love life. “I was just thinking, ‘When I’m out of this, I’m going to make the most of every opportunity,’” she says.
In Manhattan, Marc Hernandez, a bartender at the cocktail bar Ampersand, says that even at 50 percent capacity, the scene — “which has always been one for first dates” — is already feeling like its pre-Covid days. “That gets me thinking that the summer is going to be a little wild,” he says.
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<aside><q>“When I’m out of this, I’m going to make the most of every opportunity”</q></aside>
</div>
“<a href="https://www.refinery29.com/en-us/go-off-sis-season-4-jessica-franklin">Shot girl summer</a>.” “<a href="https://twitter.com/GrillmoreSlim/status/1379184293138857986">Vaxxed and waxed</a>.” The “whoring 20s.” As the US becomes increasingly inoculated and the weather continues to warm, the number of Americans who are ready to date is on the rise: A <a href="https://morningconsult.com/return-to-socializing/">Morning Consult survey</a> for the week ending April 25 found that 53 percent of adults feel “comfortable” dating right now, <a href="https://www.businessinsider.com/men-feel-more-comfortable-dating-in-the-pandemic-than-women-2021-4">up 9 percent</a> from the last week in March (although women still feel less comfortable than men). Everyone from <a href="https://twitter.com/andrewyang/status/1382326738097741827">Andrew Yang</a> to the bidet company Tushy — which is maintaining a herd-immunity countdown clock at <a href="https://go.redirectingat.com/?id=66960X1516588&xs=1&url=https%3A%2F%2Fhellotushy.com%2Fpages%2Fcan-we-eat-ass-yet&referrer=vox.com&sref=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.vox.com%2Fthe-goods%2F22410017%2Fdating-post-vaccine-kinsey-relationships-hookups" rel="sponsored nofollow noopener" target="_blank" has-subtag="true" data-cdata='{"subtag_max_length":50,"subtag_delim_length":3,"subtag_key":"xcust","subtag_query_data":{"id":"66960X1516588","xs":"1","url":"https://hellotushy.com/pages/can-we-eat-ass-yet","referrer":"vox.com","sref":"https://www.vox.com/the-goods/22410017/dating-post-vaccine-kinsey-relationships-hookups","xcust":"___vx__p_22174058__m_m-placeholder__s_s-placeholder__t_w__c_c-placeholder__r_r-placeholder__d_d-placeholder"},"encode_subtag":false}'>CanIEatAssYet.com</a> — are building anticipation for a hedonistic release of pent-up sexual energy.
“<a href="https://www.insider.com/hot-vaxx-summer-pandemic-horniness-is-coming-blissful-release-2021-3">Hot vax summer is coming</a>,” Insider proclaimed in March. “<a href="https://nypost.com/2021/04/08/nyc-singles-ready-for-2021s-slutty-summer-of-casual-sex/">NYC singles ready for ‘slutty summer’ of casual sex</a>,” screamed the New York Post. Clearly, many are ready to throw themselves back into the social melee. “<a href="https://www.webmd.com/lung/news/20200615/how-to-cope-when-covid-steals-loving-touch-hugs">Touch starvation</a>” is real, and it can increase stress, depression, and anxiety. But after a year of such intense isolation, fear, suffering, and grief — and as the pandemic continues to rage across many parts of the world — the answer to how people will try to make up for lost time and lost touch is more complex than the orgiastic fantasy hawked by <a href="https://www.vox.com/the-goods/22334165/brands-post-pandemic-advertising">Suitsupply</a>.
According to psychologist <a href="https://kinseyinstitute.org/about/profiles/agesselman.php">Amanda Gesselman</a>, associate director for research at Indiana University’s <a href="https://kinseyinstitute.org/about/index.php">Kinsey Institute</a>, the pandemic has motivated American singles to look for partners rather than casual sex. While “there will [certainly] be people having the time of their lives” when it’s safe to do so, Gesselman says, “we actually found that people are less interested in no-strings-attached sex than they used to be.” In a recent Kinsey Institute <a href="https://blogs.iu.edu/kinseyinstitute/2021/04/21/new-study-on-post-pandemic-sex/">study on post-pandemic sex</a> (conducted in partnership with Cosmopolitan and Esquire), which surveyed 2,000 Americans between the ages of 18 and 45, more than half — 52 percent — of singles said they want to find a committed relationship post-pandemic, while about only one in 10 said they’re looking for no-strings-attached sex.
“That was a bit lower than we expected, considering everyone’s locked up and has been for a year,” Gesselman says. That said, as most people have spent more than a year worrying about infection and thinking about how to protect themselves from germs, she reasons the mindset “might be extending to sex with unfamiliar partners.”
<div class="c-float-left">
<aside><q>“We actually found that people are less interested in no-strings-attached sex than they used to be”</q></aside>
</div>
Ilana Dunn, co-host of the dating podcast <a href="https://open.spotify.com/show/1WbueOKKqctpjJGcgdNfyW">Seeing Other People</a>, says she’s been hearing similar feedback from listeners and friends. “Everyone’s like, ‘Yeah, of course, I’m going to get really drunk and go wild for like, a week. Because we need to do that. But my goal is to find someone.’” In an Instagram poll that received more than 1,000 responses, Dunn says she was surprised to see 88 percent say that as people get vaccinated and the world opens up, they feel more inclined to look for something serious, while 52 percent said they’ll be open to hookups once they’re vaccinated.
Gesselman believes the pandemic has pushed many people to be more introspective about what they want in their lives, particularly <a href="https://www.vox.com/first-person/22169447/coronavirus-pandemic-2020-young-adulthood-twenties">younger adults</a>. “When you’re in your mid-20s and you have your entire future ahead of you, and then you just sat through an entire year of social isolation and halted progress, it really makes you think about the things you want in your life,” she says. “I think a lot of people are thinking more towards what would make their future the best rather than what would be good short-term gratification.”
Meanwhile, condom companies are cautiously hopeful demand for their products will continue to grow along with the vaccinated portion of the US population. Male contraceptives saw a 2.5 percent uptick in sales at the beginning of April, according to Ken DeBaene, <a href="http://www.lifestyles.com/">LifeStyles’</a> vice president of sales in the Americas, who says he’s “optimistic this is a return to more normalized consumption levels.” (Between late March and mid-April, the sexual wellness industry overall saw a 4 percent sales bump.) LifeStyles is looking at returns to employment in the hospitality and service industries, as well as colleges’ fall opening plans, to help anticipate demand, DeBaene added.
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At <a href="https://go.redirectingat.com/?id=66960X1516588&xs=1&url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.mylola.com%2F&referrer=vox.com&sref=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.vox.com%2Fthe-goods%2F22410017%2Fdating-post-vaccine-kinsey-relationships-hookups" rel="sponsored nofollow noopener" target="_blank" has-subtag="true" data-cdata='{"subtag_max_length":50,"subtag_delim_length":3,"subtag_key":"xcust","subtag_query_data":{"id":"66960X1516588","xs":"1","url":"https://www.mylola.com/","referrer":"vox.com","sref":"https://www.vox.com/the-goods/22410017/dating-post-vaccine-kinsey-relationships-hookups","xcust":"___vx__p_22174058__m_m-placeholder__s_s-placeholder__t_w__c_c-placeholder__r_r-placeholder__d_d-placeholder"},"encode_subtag":false}'>LOLA</a>, a feminine care and sexual wellness company, chief marketing officer Monica Belsito says both “self-play and partner play” have been prevalent this year, with the brand seeing a 40 percent spike in lubricant sales and a record number of preorders for its new vibrator. However, as vaccinations of younger populations increase, the company “expects STI protection to steadily increase, creating a demand spike in condoms this summer and fall.”
Many people are also searching for a historical precedent that can shed light on what awaits us in the post-Covid recovery period, from the Roaring ’20s — when the nation indulged after the ravages of World War I and the 1918 pandemic — to 1967’s Summer of Love, when tens of thousands of young people gathered in San Francisco to listen to rock ’n’ roll, experiment with sex and drugs, and protest the Vietnam War.
“If you look at the middle to late 1960s as an opening up after a period of considerable repression in the ’50s, I think the parallel is not unreasonable,” says historian <a href="https://www.dennismcnally.com/">Dennis McNally</a>, who also worked as a publicist for the Grateful Dead. However, he points to the FDA’s 1960 approval of the first birth control pill as a key influence in the sexual liberation movement that climaxed that summer. Even after <a href="https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/katebubacz/miami-spring-break-parties-curfew-covid">seeing the hordes</a> of spring breakers that descended upon Miami in March, before vaccines were widely available to younger adults, McNally isn’t convinced the vigilant “pandemic safety” mindset will be banished with vaccines. “The message of all of this is that reality is dangerous, which is a very repressive lesson, and it’s going to take a while, I think, to unlearn that lesson and be able to go out and relax,” he says.
As for the Roaring ’20s comparison <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/dec/21/epidemiologist-1918-flu-pandemic-roaring-20s-post-covid">often attributed</a> to social epidemiologist Dr. Nicholas Christakis, the timeline he’s laid out doesn’t predict a pendulum swing away from the risk aversion of the present moment until 2024, when vaccines will have been distributed around the world and there’s been more of a recovery from some of the pandemic’s economic devastation. He sees this summer as having the potential to offer “a taste of the past and a hope for the future,” Christakis recently told <a href="https://www.npr.org/2021/04/17/987865318/life-in-the-roaring-2020s-young-people-prepare-to-party-reclaim-lost-pandemic-ye">NPR</a>.
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<aside><q>“People go on a date and nobody knows how to talk about anything besides Covid”</q></aside>
</div>
Gesselman and Dunn also cite lingering pandemic-induced social anxiety as another obstacle to a bacchanal this summer. “A lot of people didn’t date last year, and I keep hearing from our listeners that people go on a date and nobody knows how to talk about anything besides Covid, and it’s not leading to good date conversations,” Dunn says. And in Gesselman’s research, one of the top fears respondents have cited is not having the ability to protect their own mental health as they reemerge from quarantine. “It seems like people’s biggest concern is when life opens back up and they’re finally able to pursue these connections, ‘What if I get rejected or things go wrong? What happens if disappointment strikes?’” Gesselman says.
Elena, the college student who’s excited to get back to more carefree dating, is also wary of <a href="https://www.vox.com/the-goods/22336425/summer-2021-post-pandemic-vaccine-hot-girl">the expectations</a> she and many of her peers are putting on this post-vaccine summer. “I do think people have very, very high expectations, because you kind of need to live your entire life that’s been put on hold for the past year all in this summer, and if they’re not met it’s going to be tough,” she says. “But I think for the most part, people are really down to do anything.”
 
 
source <a href="https://www.vox.com/the-goods/22410017/dating-post-vaccine-kinsey-relationships-hookups">https://www.vox.com/the-goods/22410017/dating-post-vaccine-kinsey-relationships-hookups</a>