Episode 279 - Covid and Civil Liberties
Max and Aaron discuss Neil Gorsuch's statement in a supreme court decision that emergency measures during Covid may have been the greatest peacetime intrusion on American civil liberties in history.
Probability Distribution of the Week: Von Mises-Fisher Distribution and Circular Distributions in General
Links
Max research paper: Algorithms for Multivariate Newton-Raphson for Optimization When the Hessian Matrix is a Constant plus a Diagonal
Business Insider: Supreme Court Justice Neil Gorsuch calls COVID-19 response "the greatest intrusion on civil liberties in peacetime history"
New York Post: Justice Neil Gorsuch blasts COVID response as one of ‘greatest intrusions on civil liberties’
Twitter: Jay Willis: “It’s been 3 years and Neil Gorsuch is still upset that hardware stores could stay open but churches had to scale back a little during a viral pandemic”
Twitter: Ian Millhiser: “Neil Gorsuch claims that Covid public health measures may have been the greatest peacetime intrusions on civil liberties in American history.
Could someone please give this profoundly ignorant man one (1) book on slavery or Jim Crow? https://supremecourt.gov/opinions/22pdf/22-592_5hd5.pdf ”
The Daily Sceptic: After Covid: 12 Challenges for a Shattered World
Wikipedia: Brownsville affair
Daily Mail Online: EXCLUSIVE: First anti-aging pills to hit shelves in 2028, expert predicts - as Silicon Valley races to conquer death
Related Episodes:
Episode 78 - Bayesian Thinking: Flat Earth Priors, The Mises Brothers, and Curb Your Analogy
Episode 251 - Debate: Monarchy vs Democracy
Transcript
Max Sklar: You're listening to the Local Maximum episode 279.
Narration: Time to expand your perspective. Welcome to the Local Maximum. Now here's your host, Max Sklar.
Max: Welcome everyone, welcome! You have reached another Local Maximum. And of course joining today, Aaron, how are you doing?
Aaron: I'm doing well. It's another exciting night for interesting conversations.
Max: Yes. Yes. I'm still getting used to the standing desk. I'm not sure, I think it's a little high a little low. Maybe I should make it a little lower. I don't know. For the three of you watching. Although maybe we have more after the Dictator of Easton episode. Maybe we have more people watching the video. So you never know.
Aaron: Standing desk is too many options. You need down you need to up. Every setting in between is too much.
Max: I'm surprised we didn't get more commentary from the Dictator of Easton episode. I feel like a lot of people watched it and they were probably like, “What the-?” And then didn't respond.
But anyway. Lots of stuff happening today. So we put out the Dictator of Easton episode. I don't think I've spoken to you since then. I put out a recent episode where I talked about proof of stake. I don't know if you've learned anything from that. And then I had open-source software with Max Hal. So that was the business from the past weeks on the Local Maximum recently. So did you get a chance to catch any of those? Which ones have you listened to?
Aaron: Year, so I've listened to all of those except the Dictator of Eastern one. I watched like the first 15 minutes and then I had to take a break and I haven't gone back to it yet.
Max: I actually watched the whole thing. It kind of made it. It was actually perfectly fine unless you're watching it with someone. Definitely watch it with someone, I think that would that will be enjoyable.
All right. Local Maximum labs, some of the research coming along. I have this paper that, I know it's marked up, but I put the the final version online. Algorithms for Multivariate Newton Raphson For Optimization. Rather than me stumbling over the title, let me just explain. It's kind of a… It's basically just solving a linear algebra problem. So if you're an undergrad linear algebra, you want to brush up on those skills, this new paper is kind of a good one for you. But it basically solves a matrix inversion problem, where you have a matrix that's a constant. All the items are constant, plus diagonal. How do you invert that matrix? It's been solved 70 years ago.
But I was trying to use it in a solution to the Bayesian multinomial problem from my paper 10 years ago and I got to write my code. I screwed it up in the paper. And a lot of people who have read that paper from 10 years ago, have asked me like, “Hey, how did you get this?” So I thought I'd put this out and then now I'm going to refresh the 10-year-old paper and try to explain in more detail, what is really going on.
Aaron: Exciting. And I see you've got a link in our show notes here but is it already up on the local maximum website? Or will the link need to be posted there?
Max: No it’s posted on localmaxradio.com/labs and there's also a version on ResearchGate. It's not the type of paper that I would put on Archive, but it's-
Aaron: So a little bit behind-the-scenes podcast making here, you're gonna want to update the date on that to May 2023. You got it as 2022 right now.
Max: Really?
Aaron: At least what I'm looking at the Local Maximum Labs page.
Max: Oh at Local Maximum Lab page. On the paper itself, it says May 2023?
Aaron: I have not clicked through.
Max: Okay, good. Okay, so the PDF that's floating around is fine. It's just the website. I'm not too worried about that. I can fix that. All right, good.
Thanks for letting me know. We've got quite a topic today. And I want to go into maybe a more contentious political topic, but why not? We've done it before and we'll do it again. But I think the big question that has, one of the big questions that’s come up in my circles quite a lot is the idea of, are we living through medical tyranny? What has been the effect of COVID on our civil rights in particular? As stated by Justice Gorsuch, Neil Gorsuch, in a recent decision.
It's an interesting decision and I'm actually not entirely sure what the context of the district decision is. It's an Arizona versus Majorca and apparently, it has something to do with Title 42, which is some immigration law that was kind of emergency put in by the Trump administration during COVID. But actually, so even though he's writing kind of a conservative-ish opinion that would be associated with the right on this decision, I think they're basically also saying, like, “Hey, all of these emergency measures, including the immigration stuff, has got to go.” That's sort of my impression.
Aaron: It really shows what a twisted web current, political alliances is maybe not the right term, but the bundle of beliefs that are stuck together as being Team Red or Team Blue. The fact that if you were to read his opinion on the theory and the merits, it comes across as a very conservative, slash libertarian stance. However, apparently, a lot of Republicans are displeased with the decision because it is essentially ending a tool that was being used to restrict certain immigration or force immigrants seeking asylum in the US to exhaust other alternatives before being allowed in, something that the current Republican Party tends to be in favor of.
Although to be fair, the program, there was not a move by the current administration to strike the program. They may have, in fact, expanded it. So the rhetoric in support of this would very much be something on Team Read but both teams are doing it.
But yeah, it's in a completely different direction than the arguments being made here, which seemed very much Team Red. Not least in the opposition to some of the things done during the pandemic, but in a more general sense as well.
Max: Right. It's never been my contention that this concern about taking away liberties during an emergency is a bad thing. And censorship and losing your free speech is a bad thing. I've never seen that as a position that should be considered, right-wing or conservative, even though it is associated with that. Now, in fact, I think a lot of the things that we're going to read here Robert F, Kennedy would probably agree with quite a bit of it. And he's at what, like 20%, in the Democratic primary right now?
Aaron: He's in- I absolutely expect him to get the same, if not worse treatment than Bernie, in terms of, he may have a strong following, and they will do everything they can to prevent him from making it through the primary phase.
Max: Right. But if you see that happen, that already makes the point. It’s like they had to do it versus-
Oh, my God, I'm sorry about this cough people. I know it's really annoying but no time to edit, I'm sorry.
But yeah, no, I agree with you. It will be an interesting year because all of this will play out literally in the next year. And so yeah, it'll be interesting to see if he takes some of these ideas to the Democratic voters. Not to the party insiders, but to the voters. How many voters will agree with him? And we might be surprised to see a lot more than we think.
So anyway, let's look at what N says after-
Aaron: We've been talking around it, but let's hear some of his actual words.
Max: After and he writes very well. So I summarized some of this later on. And my summary is not as good as his writing. But right here, the first four pages, he goes on and makes the decision and it sounds all like legalese to me.
But then he says, “Look. Since March 2020, we may have experienced the greatest intrusions on civil liberties in the peacetime history of this country.” And that's, that's the statement that a lot of people take issue with and so we'll get into that in a minute.
He continues, “Executive officials across the country issued emergency decrees on a breathtaking scale. Governors and local leaders imposed lockdown orders, forcing people to remain in their homes. They shuttered businesses in schools, public and private. They closed churches, even as they allowed casinos and other favorite businesses to carry on. They threaten violators, not just with civil penalties but with criminal sanctions too. They surveilled church parking lots, recorded license plates, and issued notices warning that attendance at even outdoor surfaces satisfying all state social distancing and hygiene requirements could amount to criminal conduct. They divided cities’ neighborhoods into color-coded zones, forced individuals to fight for freedoms in court on emergency timetables, and then changed their color-coded schemes when defeat in court seemed imminent.”
And by the way, for all of this stuff, he cites actual court cases that were going on through the court system. So it's not like he cited, I don't know, info wars on this report.
Aaron: I was gonna say I was not familiar with the casino case, but it is indeed footnoted in there so he's not pulling that out of nowhere.
Max: And just to save time, he talked a lot about the vaccine mandate and I could talk a lot about my situation in New York City. I lived in New Hampshire at the time, of course. But man, I remember, it was so irrational. I could go into New York City and I'd be indoors for like 30 minutes shopping at a place but they had a coffee stand and as soon as I ordered a cup of coffee, it's like, “Let's see ID, let's see what you had in terms of your vaccinations. Show me your card, show me your dates.” It was just everywhere.
It felt surreal, almost like I was living in a kind of a show me your papers society. And it was actually quite disturbing and it popped up at very strange times. Like I wasn't expecting, I was driving through and I didn't realize I was still in Queens, and it would happen.
And so it was very odd how the Mayor de Blasio, like sold it. And he was like, “Don't you want your free french fries? I got my vaccine, and I got my free french fries.” And it was just total cringe, but it was just what do they think they're trying to accomplish here? In some sense, these were not very smart people.
But I think the best part comes later. Which kind of reminds me of Benjamin Franklin, the quote where he says, “If you want safety instead of liberty, you're gonna get neither.” But he writes at the end, “Doubtless many lessons can be learned from this chapter in our history, and hopefully serious efforts will be made to study it. One lesson might be this. Fear and the desire for safety are powerful forces. They can lead to a clamor for action, almost any action as long as someone does something to address a perceived threat.” And I definitely remember that.
“A leader or an expert who claims he can fix everything if only we do exactly as he says can prove an irresistible force. We do not need to confront a bayonet, we need only a nudge before we willingly abandon the nicety of requiring laws to be adopted by our legislative representatives and accept rules by decree. Along the way, we will proceed to the loss of many cherished civil liberties, the right to worship freely, to debate public policy without censorship, to gather with friends and family, or simply to leave our homes. We may even cheer on those who act to disregard our normal lawmaking processes and forfeit our personal freedoms. Of course, this is no new story. Even the ancients warn that democracies can degenerate towards autocracy in the face of fear.”
I'm actually kind of interested as to what source that is, but I don't have it right in front of me. And then he goes on.
“But maybe we have learned another lesson too. The concentration of power in the hands of so few may be efficient and sometimes popular, but it does not tend toward sound government. However wise one person or his advisers might be, that is no substitute for the wisdom of the whole of the American people that can be tapped in the legislative process. Decisions produced by those who indulge no criticism are rarely as good as those produced after robust and unsensible debate. Decisions announced on the fly are rarely as wise as those that come after careful deliberation. Decisions made by a few often yield unintended consequences that may be avoided when more are consulted. Autocracies have always suffered these defects. Maybe hopefully we have relearned these lessons, too.”
And of course, that kind of reminds me of the debate I did in Episode 51 On monarchy versus democracy. I was like, I gotta use this guy to kind of write some of my notes because it would have kind of helped me argue in favor of democracy for that. Although maybe I didn't quite need it. I felt like I came up with with with some of this stuff on my own.
Aaron: It looks like his reference for the democracies degenerating towards autocracy in the face of fear is in fact, Aristotle's Politics.
Max: Okay. Okay. Very interesting.
Aaron: A true classic.
Max: Yeah. All right, so this guy's read a lot.
What can we say about this before going on to some of the criticisms because this really did strike a chord with me. Now, I understand there are people on Twitter saying, “If this strikes a chord with you, you're a terrible person.”
Aaron: But before we jump to that, there are two thoughts I want to kind of call out that are very much connected here. So right now, it is near impossible. So depending on when you're listening to this, it may be a past crisis, or still a pending crisis, but right now, all the news is talking about the debt ceiling. And it appears that our government is incapable of negotiating a resolution to this quote, unquote, crisis. And this is nothing new.
Max: Haven’t we been here before with like the Tea Party and all that and 2013?
Aaron: But the government appears to be incapable of doing anything effective in any sort of reasonable timeline. And that is exactly. It only makes it more attractive to look to more expeditious alternatives to this form of government. If democracy can’t accomplish it, then maybe we do need to look at more autocratic or more bureaucratic executive operation-type options.
And I think that ties in very closely with what he said about the clamor for action, almost any action as long as someone does something to address a perceived threat. There is a tendency in a moment of crisis, and these are crises of a wide range of variety, that we must do something is axiom A. And axiom B is this is something, therefore, we must do this and without doing any sort of weighing the cost benefits, considering alternatives. It is purely that this is a thing that we could do that is purported to address the issue that we're looking at, therefore, we must do it.
And oftentimes, in a situation, it actually makes things worse but it was a thing we did and so we can point back and say, “Look, we did something. We didn't sit on our hands and do nothing. We took action. And that's why you should vote for us again during the most important election of your lives.”
Max: Yeah. If you remember at the time. I mean, now, we look back and it's sort of, Trump can take some blame for some of this. But if you remember back at the time, he was criticized for being kind of the most reluctant kind of person to do these lockdowns. And so, it's interesting to go back and see how to try to figure out what the right way to write this history is.
And I think, you know. Obviously, I spoke to a lot of libertarians, when I lived in New Hampshire. There was kind of a defeatist attitude sometimes of like, “Oh, history is just gonna be written by people who hate us.” And they're gonna say, “Oh, we took all these actions during COVID. And it helped, and these big meanies complained about it.”
Aaron: Well, there's a fair amount of-
Max: Can I just finish?
I just think you're too pessimistic if you think history is going to be written that way. I think people think that way because they look around at what people are saying now, or what people were saying three years ago, and they can't imagine that things will change. And I just want people to see that the conversation does change over time.
Aaron: Well, and I think that, absolutely the conversation has changed, but I have a black pill take on how it's changing. It's changing, in that the people who were advocating for a lot of these things, two, three years ago, are now saying, “Well, we never actually said that. We were trying to open the schools as quickly as possible.” Or, “We were trying to lift the lockdowns as early as possible.” When they actually were. They are revising-
Max: Is it working though?
Aaron: They've convinced themselves. The question is how many others will be convinced by it?
Max: Very few people actually say, “Oh, you got me. My bad, I shouldn't have done that.”
Aaron: And that raises a huge challenge. I mean, there's all sorts of negative selection effects in politics already. But one of the big things is being branded a flip-flopper. Was it Rami or-?
Max: Sean Terry
Aaron: Yeah, there have been numerous candidates who have been tarred with that brush. And on the one hand, I can understand why it is potentially negative to look at someone who, if you view it as, well they're changing their opinion for what's most expeditious for their own political career. And that is undesirable for me as a voter.
However, we need to find a way to encourage and reward people who, when they hold one opinion and then they are presented with evidence which indicates that they were incorrect and they change their minds, they revise their priors based on the results that they have observed from experimental evidence. We need to have a better way to reward that. This is getting a little bit far afield from what we're talking about here. But I see that as a major problem, not just in politics, but especially in politics. That there is a huge incentive to double down, dig deeper, or simply to deny that you ever said the things that you said. So it's not that that “I was wrong and I learned-”
Max: Even when we can look it up.
Aaron: “I was wrong, I learned new facts, I changed my opinion, my stance on this.” It was, “ I was never wrong. I always said the right thing. And how dare you imply that I could have been wrong in the past?
Max: We oftentimes remember things that way. And I don't know if you've ever changed your position on something and then you and then you look back, and you're like, “Oh, I do not remember holding this view.” Or sometimes it's like, “I remember holding the correct view a lot more strongly than I actually did.” When you look back,
Aaron: Especially when it is a paradigm shift in the way you think about things. Because your brain has literally been reformulated and so you can't put your head back in the mind space that you were in before when you held those previous. So I can understand from kind of a psychology perspective why people might do this. But yeah, when we have the receipts, sometimes literally receipts, and sometimes video or transcript evidence, it's hard to understand why people would continue to push that kind of internal revisionist history of what they said, when they said it.
Max: Yeah. But I think even if we talk about the individuals involved are never gonna apologize or whatever. And I don't know why people are so concerned about this. But I, for some reason, I'm concerned about this. How will this be looked at in the future to people who weren't quite as involved? And I feel like the idea. And there are some actually kind of villainous things in history that have kind of slipped through the cracks and weren't recognized until like much later. But I feel like this is gonna be unpopular in quite a short period of time.
Aaron: I haven't done my research on this. However, the first sentence you read from his opinion mentions greatest intrusion on civil liberties in the peacetime history of this country.
Max: That's one of the controversial things.
Aaron: I'm not getting to that yet but I'm going to talk about what that is not so subtly pointing at is that one of the greatest intrusions on civil liberties during wartime in this country was the internment of Japanese citizens or Japanese residents in the United States. And what I'm wondering about now is how long after they released the Japanese residents from the camps. Was it until there was actually an official apology and admission that what we did was wrong? Because I'm sure in 1945, they did not say, “Oh, yeah, that was wrong. We shouldn't have done that.” They just said, “Okay, what is over? Thank you for your cooperation. You can return to your homes now.” And it was probably decades before there was a full apology.
Max: I just looked it up 1988. Signed into law by Reagan.
Aaron: 40 years to officially recognize that now. Maybe the news and history cycle is accelerated and it'll take less time for any official retraction to happen here. But I'm not optimistic.
Max: Just wait until you learn how long it took for Massachusetts to apologize for the witch trials and hanging and stuff like that.
Aaron: We don't like to talk about that here because I think we may have hung more witches in my town than Salem did.
Max: Oh, really? Yeah. Well, I remember at the end of that, if I read it correctly, and I could be wrong about this. But like one account that I read was like, “Okay, it was good that we got witches and they're gone. But like, we're just gonna stop doing that now.” And then it was like a long time later when they're like, “Oh my god, what was that that happened a long time ago?”
Aaron: I think in this past year. It was either a middle school or high school that as a project got an official post-humous pardon for one of the witches who had still not been pardoned and then got the governor to pardon them. There's still some leftover bits and pieces from that.
Max: Yeah, well, there's a lot of stuff in history that. It's also like the posthumous pardons probably don't happen after the admission of guilt. Some of them are like, “Oh, well, this is something interesting that we can do right now.” So maybe it's a little different.
I'm reminded of how there's something that happened during Teddy Roosevelt where a bunch of black soldiers were dishonorably discharged for something they didn't do. And it was in the 1970s when that was reversed and some of them were still alive.
Aaron: I could be mixing up my stories, but I almost feel like there were rape accusations involved or something.
Max Yeah, it was either that or it was theft or something like that. But yeah, anyway, I don't have time to research this on the fly.
Aaron: We’ll throw it in the show notes.
Max: Right. Okay. So um there was a very good, I know there's a very good episode of that on History That Doesn't Suck, which is a very good American History podcast. We’re on World War I right now. I’m learning all about General Pershing.
Anyway, let's go on. So there are two criticisms of this that I see a lot online. And actually, I think they're both pretty weak. One of them is that this stuff during COVID that happened really wasn't a big deal. And that was the one that I found that was very popular was from @jaywillis. And I'm not going to do a funny voice for the quote that I disagree with. I'm just going to read it.
“It's been three years and Neil Gorsuch is still upset that hardware stores can stay open but churches had to scale back a little during a viral pandemic.”
So basically, this attitude is more like everything happened about how it should. You're complaining about very minor stuff. But to me, it's like. Well, first of all, the characterization here, churches had to scale back a little. I mean, it does seem like if you read the First Amendment to the Constitution of the United States, it's talking about exactly what happened here. And it almost seems like the previous generations had warned exactly about this stuff and so that's what concerns me very much.
And it's also Gorsuch didn't mention hardware stores, he mentioned casinos. So I think that's kind of a different situation where it's like, yeah, it wasn't just the essential stuff. It was basically we're going to pick and choose. And it almost seemed like they were picking, choosing to close places where unofficial narratives might be spread.
Aaron: Well, that combined with the fact that the people who are not moved by this are certainly disproportionately those who plays little or no value on places of worship. And trust me, I have a soft spot in my heart for my atheist friends. Simply because you do not utilize that resource in your life, that it's not an important part of your well-being, doesn't mean that you can write it off as it's not important. It's not really a hardship to prevent people from doing that.
Max: Yeah, yeah. I think that's the attitude of a lot of people who are saying this. Of course, a lot of places of worship did close down on their own.
Aaron: And you mentioned something earlier that made me think a little bit about this. I am disappointed in the lack of civil disobedience. Not that there was none. But I felt like in the America I thought we lived in, I would have expected a lot more. And I hold myself partially to account for that. You were talking about your experience with vaccine passports. And I can count on one hand the number of times that I've had to show somebody my vaccine card.
Max: Outside of New York City I never had to.
Aaron: I’m not so sure that was because I'm in Massachusetts and spending time in New Hampshire and Vermont where things were so much freer. I think it was more that I was subjected to the chilling effect. I didn't go to places and do things that might have required me to do that. And so I basically self-censored in a way that I'm a little disappointed in. And I'm not saying that I should have been running through the streets, looking doorknobs. But that I bought into a lot of the fear and played it safe in a way that I feel like maybe I was overreacting. And I'm disappointed that I didn't push back at least on a principle stance more often even if I didn't actually need to go do these other things.
Max: It was kind of hard to do. If you think about it, maybe this is kind of a lesson. Because if you go back to our shows during those times, and you absolutely should we did get some things right, by the way. But we're concerned about, “Okay, how do you protect yourself and protect your family from this thing that's going on?” And less concerned about, “Yes, society is going to crap but you know, what can we do about that right now?”
Aaron: Yeah, and I had my one little moment of rebellion, which was pushing back a little bit on the mandate at work. But I don't think it had a meaningful effect in the long run.
Max: Yeah, I mean, it's. I feel like at some point, there's just like, I want people to know that there are dissenters. But there's a right time to do it and the wrong time to do it, I guess.
Aaron: That is the big problem with all sorts of forms of dissent and civil disobedience.
Max: It's hard to tell.
Aaron: There are absolutely times where you can point at someone and say what you are doing may be legally defensible and within the bounds of the law and you have the right to do it. But good God, the optics on it are terrible. Why are you making us all look like total douchebags by doing this thing you're doing?
Max: Let me give you an example of something that I feel like I should have done like in Foursquare. People were saying the most ridiculous stuff on Slack. Like I remember people saying on Slack, “I hope we fire the people who are unvaccinated who are working from home too.”
And I'm just like, “Why would you do that?” If they want to be unvaccinated, and they want to work from home, and you have to interact with them because you're working from home, first of all. I should have figured out some pushback on that. But is it my job to police the company Slack and see what everybody says and then respond to all these things at some point. I was like, no, these are all crazy people and I'm going to be out of here soon anyway.
Aaron: I try to have the little voice in the back of my head constantly telling me when I'm on Discord or Slack or whatever that it is not your job to fix these people. You do not need to engage in this argument. In fact, it is highly likely that somebody else will come along and fight this fight. So unless you have a particular relationship with this individual, then maybe dial it back and walk away, and don't let it ruin your day.
But, I mean, if nobody engages them, then it just perpetuates. So it's hard knowing when you really should jump into the fray. And when, for your self-care, your mental well-being, you should disengage.
Max: Yeah. By the way, I agree with what you said about places of worship. And one thing I actually have not mentioned this to you, we have never had a discussion on theology. I mean, certainly not on the show, very lightly in person. That might be an interesting thing to try one day, certainly not on the fly right now. But I'm interested to hear how that conversation would go.
Aaron: This sounds more like the type of conversation to be had, after one or two adult beverages at a Local Maximum Tech retreat.
Max: Well, maybe we should, maybe we should.
All right. So more concerning- We're dancing around the crazier part here.
Aaron: So why are we terrible people?
Max: Right. So of course, the characterization that he writes is most intrusions in civil liberties in peacetime. And then of course, half the responses to that are online are like, “Oh, but what about the internment of the Japanese?” And it's like, in peacetime, I don't even know. But, of course, people bring up slavery and Jim Crow. One of the quotes from Ian Milhiser says, and this stuff gets very infuriating, “Neil Gorsuch claims that COVID public health measures have been the greatest peacetime intrusions on civil liberties in American history. Could someone please give this profoundly ignorant man, one book on slavery or Jim Crow?”
So that whole, that doesn't let land with me, that “profoundly ignorant man.” I have a feeling that Neil Gorsuch knows a lot more than whoever this person is. But look, I do think there is kind of, it is a little dangerous to make a sweeping statement like that, “Most intrusion on civil liberties in peacetime” because then you have to define exactly what counts as an intrusion on civil liberties. What is a civil liberty? How do you account for which is greatest?
Aaron: And I think he could make those arguments, but I agree that now it becomes an argument over semantics. And that is, in this context, I think, a boring and pointless argument which we can burn thousands of tweets on and get nowhere.
Max: Right. So I mean, like when he's talking about, the attacks on freedom of religion and the attacks on freedom of speech, for that matter, which was kind of a public-private partnership. So that is a violation of freedom of speech. How does it compare with other ones? And, again, that's hard to say, I'm sure you could write books on that. I have a feeling that it'll go down in history as worse than some other infamous situations, in terms of free speech. In terms of restricting people from their religious practices, this has got to be the greatest of all time now.
But you know, I kind of agree though, if you're talking about just widespread civil liberties reductions in general, probably Jim Crow has this beat out. I'm pretty sure it does. But again, that's an example from 60 years ago. I can't come up with an example that's less than 60 years ago. And so that kind of still proves the point Neil Gorsuch was making?
Aaron: Yeah, we're talking about three generations here.
Max: Right, right. And of course, then the argument becomes he only cares about white people, even though COVID affected everybody. Anyway-.
Aaron: There was the meme going around during the height of COVID and the lockdowns that our Founding Fathers fought a rebellion for less than this. Which in some ways is true and in some ways, not.
I think it's always instructive to go back and read that section of the Declaration of Independence, which is like, here are the shitty things that King George and the British have done to us and this is why we are set off. And some of those things are lesser, and some of those, I would say, are probably a little bit more severe. But it certainly puts it into the running.
I'm not suggesting that this is a good reason to overthrow the government, but also saying that we should we should put things into perspective here.
Max: Yeah, yeah. So Jeff Tucker has been great on this issue. He's been such a profound anti-COVID regime person. And so he recently wrote something on Daily Skeptic, What Are The 12 Challenges For A Shattered World After COVID? I'm not going to read through all 12 but number one is surveillance and censorship. And I kind of agree that would be my number one too.
Same argument as brought by Gorsuch, which he makes about democracy. If information is bottlenecked and throttled, even the perceived false information, even if it is actually false, I think society has a harder time getting to the truth.
And I think that's what happened here. I think the people in charge convinced themselves that our problem is too many people are spreading false information so therefore, we have to give people the power to suppress information. And then of course, they end up suppressing true information, they end up suppressing information from their political enemies. And it's like, haven't we been warned that this happens every time? Like, you don't have to go back that far. All through our history, back to James Madison, back to Zangger. Probably like from Aristotle and the Bible, too. You'd probably find something like this.
Aaron: Yeah, well, my first thought when you mentioned surveillance was less the suppressing of opinions and and information, but more during the early days, and I don't know how much of this happened in the United States. There were certainly some anecdotal cases of it, but I heard about it happening a lot more in some parts of Europe. It's great to have all sorts of like, not Google Trends, but the mobility data from cell phones.
Max: We were looking at Foursquare.
Aaron: What scared me was when they'd be like, I think it was in parts of France that they had a rule. It was like, well you can go out once a day to exercise and you can't go further than a five-kilometer radius around your home and it can't be for more than 30 minutes or something. And they were using these sources of data to find people who were violating that, someone who went on a run that was six kilometers from his home instead of five kilometers and arresting them.
And that is scary because, now it's over something stupid, but we clearly established that they have the ability to monitor your every move and to take your actions which are ostensibly not actually harming anyone. But because you're doing something that they don't approve of, they can throw you in jail or fine you or otherwise they can pick you out and make your life difficult.
And yeah, we kind of knew that that was something that could happen before. There was a Will Smith movie about how crazy conspiracies. If you imagine if they did this, what was it, Enemy of the State? There's nothing in that movie, pretty much, that is science fiction anymore.
Max: Yeah, yeah. Except I don't think it's. Is the guy who's watching us really Seth Green? I hope not.
Aaron: I think we would prefer that to what the actual answer is.
Max: I actually think you're probably right, you're probably right.
There's so much more that I want to say about this. Oh, but yes, in terms of surveilling people, let's not forget. I’ve had some family members who tried to take their kids to the park or to the beach and the police would come by saying, “Hey, you can't be here. What are you doing here?” I remember in the city, they would lock up the playgrounds, lock up the parks.
You remember, there was a place where they poured sand in a…
Aaron: What is like a skate park?
Max: Yeah, yeah. I remember walking around Brooklyn and one of the parks were all fenced. They brought fences in to fence in the tiny parks that exist between the roads in those little triangles. One of the fences fell over so I walked in and I started playing the song on my iPhone, breaking the law, breaking the law. It was it was kind of fun.
But I remember at the beginning, the Hasidic Jews were breaking off the locks. And at first I was like, ‘Oh, maybe they shouldn't do that. Doesn't look good.” But after a few weeks, I was like, “Yeah, get ‘em.”
There was not so much surveillance, but there was definitely. And New York City had a, especially during the rioting, they make it a pain to go out during the day and it's illegal to go out at night. And so yeah, it was quite restricted. I did feel a little bit like a prisoner to my own home.
Aaron: Well, it's reminiscent of a few administrations ago during one of the various government shutdowns that said “Okay, we’re shutting everything down. But we are going to send out national park workers or public spokespeople to put up barriers around national memorials and monuments to make it clear that you can't use this. You can't come in because the government shutdown. We've expended effort and resources to make things more difficult because we're making a statement here.” And this is a little bit different, but it definitely made that pop back up in my mind.
Max: Well, in this case, it's way worse because a lot of places that are funded, that we're paying tax money for, public funds used for were just shut down. And it's like, well, we don't get reimbursed for that. Forget it. So that's the way it is.
Aaron: No rebates for Zoom school.
Max: Yeah. All right.
So are we ready to get into? That was a good topic already. Are you ready to just get into the probability distribution of the week or do you have anything else to add?
Aaron: Let's move on before I make myself angry and depressed.
Max: All right, segment.
Narrator: And now, the probability distribution of the week.
Max: All right folks, probability distribution of the week. Today, we're going to talk about something. This one's actually a fun one. So we could pair a dark topic before with like a fun distribution because I love this idea of a circular distribution. And we're gonna get to the probability distribution of the week is called the von Mises-Fisher distribution. Von Mises, now remember that's Richard von Mises, not Ludwig von Mises. Made that distinction in Episode 78 on Bayesian thinking,
In the past, we were doing like, “Hey, I want a probability distribution over the real numbers, so I want a probability distribution over positive numbers or something like that.” But now, we want to find the probability distribution around a circle. At some point, maybe it's around the edge of a clock, maybe it's some angle. I want to figure out where on the circle I might be. And so you could build a probability distribution around that. And then, of course, you can expand that to a distribution over a sphere, or a hypersphere in multiple dimensions, if you will. But all these are examples of circular distributions.
So one of the interesting distinctions here is that unlike in real numbers, you really can't have a proper uniform distribution over all real numbers. You can't say, “Oh, every real number is equally likely.”
Aaron: Because of infinity.
Max: You can say that. There are actually objects that kind of look like that and I've talked about that in the past. But it's sort of a little, it's a weird kind of a distribution. It doesn't follow the rules. But in this case, on the circle, you absolutely can make a uniform distribution and it totally makes sense to say… If you make the statement, “I'm picking a random spot on the circle.” Everybody knows what you're talking about. There is no ambiguity there.
Okay, but let's say we want to do something a little bit more fancy than the uniform distribution. What can you do? So there are a couple of possibilities before we get into the main one today. But these possibilities are less than. They're used but they're not as satisfying, I would say. One is the wrapped distribution where it's like, “Okay I have some distribution over all real numbers, let's say like, it's a Laplace distribution like we did last time with normal distribution. I'm just simply going to wrap it around the circle and add up all its components.” You made a face there. You're probably thinking like, “Yeah, you could do that but that kind of sounds a little weird, doesn't it?”
Aaron: A little bit.
The other area is that you can recognize like, this circle actually lives inside a plane, right? And the sphere lives inside a space. So if I can create a probability distribution on the plane, and then restrict it to the circle, I can just use that. So in other words, I can create any normal distribution on the plane that I want. Any mean, any covariance matrix, any standard deviation, that kind of thing, and then take a unit circle, and then be like, “Okay, well, if I confine this distribution to just the circle, then I get something. Then I get what I want.”
And so that is a good strategy as well. But yeah, we want something a little bit more elegant. And it turns out that this particular one, the von Mises distribution, has some good mathematical properties and some good physical properties.
So basically, we have a mean. And we want a distribution that's related to the cosine of the angle between the mean and the point. Now, Aaron, I know not everyone remembers trigonometry that well. So pop quiz, how does the cosine work? No, I'm not gonna do that to you.
So the cosine of the angle of zero is one. So in other words, that's the highest it gets. So if two angles. If the angle is so small that it collapses, and you're basically at the same point in the circle, then you're at one, your highest point. And then if it's 180 degrees difference, it becomes negative one.
So in other words, the cosine of the angle between the mean point and the point where you're at is kind of a good measure of how far that point is from the circular mean. And it's going to be a number that varies between one and negative one, but you could scale that up. You could multiply it by some number so that you could say, “Hey, I want it to be between 100 and minus 100 now” So you could do that as well. And then you're kind of living in a space that's both positive and negative numbers. So you take e to that. You basically take e to the a times the cosine of the angle, and that's your probability distribution.
So for those of you who are glazing over the equations, what does that look like? It essentially just looks like the normal distribution for circles where that mean angle specifies where the center is. That scaling factor, if it's really high, you're really certain that you're near that area of the circle. If it's really low, then you have a higher standard deviation and you could be further away from that circle.
But then there's some more interesting parts of the story. Because not only can the standard deviation-like thing, it's not the real standard deviation, get low, but it can become zero. And when it becomes zero, then you have the uniform distribution. And then it could go negative. And when it goes negative, you actually have like the same distribution at the opposite points in the circle.
So that's kind of interesting, that when you move the standard deviation around, at some point it wraps around to the other side of the circle. So yeah, that's sort of one way to think about the von Mises-Fisher distribution.
I have always wanted to use this in an actual application. I have never gotten to use it but I think it's fascinating. I would like to use it. There’s related topics like spherical statistics, circular mean, look that stuff up. But I feel like, it's probably really good if you have something where you want to separate out what's my angle and what's my distance separately. And then if you want to look at the angle, you could look at something like this von Mises distribution.
It is not typically used. I haven't seen it used in a lot of machine-learning applications, but I feel like it should be. So that's my feeling on this
Aaron is probably the first you're hearing about this. Any thoughts?
Aaron: I mean, when you mentioned circular or spherical applications, the first thing that came to mind was some sort of GPS-related distribution on the surface of the sphere that is the earth applications. I'm not sure what you would do with it in that context, because what… I'm trying to think of something that the distribution of which could be modeled in this way on Earth, but I'm drawing some blanks. But that's the first place it jumps to.
Max: Well, maybe there's some prior over where you are in the earth, that's uniform. And then the posteriors would be where we think you are given your signals from various satellites. So maybe it could be used like something like that. Although, I don't know if it's a conjugate prior so I don't know if it would work for that.
But it could be a good estimate for these kinds of things. Like if I have some type of distribution over the surface of the Earth, that kind of looks a little normal-ish, maybe I can turn it into a Von Mises distribution or estimate it with von Mises distribution. And then I have this really simple way of describing it and transmitting that information. So yeah, I agree. It's a good way to figure out for that kind of application. And for the mapping applications in general.
Aaron: Now, you mentioned we've talked about Richard von Mises in the past. So we know anything interesting about Fisher?
Max: That's a good question. So is this the Fisher? Is that what I want to know about? I think it is. I think it's the famous Ronald Fisher. He was a genius, but he's not my favorite because he was one of the founders of non-Bayesian frequentist statistics. And this is the guy I think who got involved with the smoking campaign that smoking does not cause cancer. But when it comes to probability and statistics, let's face it, he invented a lot of stuff, so I can't just ignore this guy.
Aaron: Yeah, looks like he was involved in the the tobacco studies in the 50s. Interesting.
Max: Yeah, exactly.
Aaron: So this particular distribution was discovered? Established? Not that long ago. I mean, within the last century, I guess.
Max: Yeah. Well, it's very surprising. You'd be surprised that many of these things were. Because when were covariance matrices first discovered, where you could have like a general. There's that guy, Gibbs, who's buried at Yale, he invented the vector notation. And honestly, when was this? Now I'm going to try to look that up. Gibbs’ Inequality, it must be him.
J. William Gibbs, he died 1903. So like in the 1800s, most of the 1800s, we did not even have vector notation. And so there would have been no way to talk about normal distributions. And I think measure theory is like late 1800s, early 1900s, and trying to figure out how to piece these distributions together. So yeah, all of this stuff is surprisingly new, in a lifetime or so. It's not like you're gonna invent new ones so easily.
Aaron: Is this like Josiah Willard Gibbs?
Max: Yeah.
Aaron: Okay, I'm not familiar with his contribution to vector calculus but I have heard physicists mention Gibbs’ Free Energy, which seems like it's a big deal.
Max: Here. As a mathematician, he invented modern vector calculus. When was it invented? 1901 book, Vector Analysis. A couple years before he died.
You really could not have invented, you could not have discovered this stuff in the 19th century. Had to be 20th century, or after. And of course, in the 21st century, we have this context of machine learning, which kind of kind of paints this all in a new light. So we'll see what the influence of that on mathematics as we march through the decades. I don't pretend to know but it certainly has affected our discussion.
Aaron: Very cool.
Max: Yeah. All right. I think that's it for today. We've got an hour into our 20-minute podcast. I was like, “It's gonna be 20 minutes today because we're only going to talk about one topic and then go to the segment so that should do it.” But nope, still an hour no matter what. We'll get there. We'll get there.
All right. Any last thoughts today before we move on?
Aaron: No, just folks, if you've got thoughts on what we discussed earlier, I'm sure many of you do, let us know over on the local.
Max: Yeah, we're gonna settle some scores on this on this COVID stuff.
All right. Have a great week, everyone!
Narrator: That's the show. To support the Local Maximum, sign up for exclusive content and our online community at maximum.locals.com. The Local Maximum is available wherever podcasts are found. If you want to keep up, remember to subscribe on your podcast app. Also check out the website with show notes and additional materials at localmaxradio.com. If you want to contact me, the host, send an email to localmaxradio@gmail.com. Have a great week.
