Performance Anxiety
Performance Anxiety
Philly Fighting COVID, Dunning-Kruger, GameStop, Anthony Levandowski, and Pizza Robots
Philly Fighting COVID
I live in Philadelphia. It’s a great place to live for a lot of people, many of whom look like me. It’s also the nation’s poorest major city, with significant crime, poverty, and wealth inequality. One of the good things Philadelphia does have, however, is a robust health system - we have top tier hospitals, medical schools, and access to care. So, which of these venerated institutions did Philly tap to lead the COVID-19 vaccination charge?
Yet when it came time to set up the city’s first and largest coronavirus mass vaccination site, officials turned to the start-up Philly Fighting COVID, a self-described “group of college kids” with minimal health-care experience.
You have got to be kidding me. No pun intended. So who are these clowns?
Just a few weeks ago, Philly Fighting COVID was receiving glowing coverage from the likes of NBC’s “Today.” The group had a compelling story: Doroshin, a graduate student at Drexel University, helped orchestrate an effort to use 3-D printers to make free face shields for hospital workers at the start of the pandemic. By summer, he and his friends were running their own pop-up testing sites citywide.
But as Philadelphia magazine reported, the group’s “executive team” lacked anyone with a medical degree or advanced degree in public health. Doroshin himself listed a résumé that included stints teaching a high school film class, producing videos of people longboarding and practicing parkour, and founding a nonprofit that, according to Philadelphia magazine, “mostly consisted of a meme-heavy Twitter account, some minor community lobbying, and a fundraiser with a $50,000 goal that netted $684.”
Can. We. Stop. With. The. Twenty-Something. Founders. Please. I am sorry but a city that sports nine medical schools should not be giving contracts to young white kids with zero medical experience.
It somehow gets worse, because not only were they turning away seniors who showed up with appointments to get vaccinated, but the founder was seen stealing doses from the vaccination site:
A registered nurse who volunteered with the group categorized it as a “disaster of an operation.” Katrina Lipinsky told the Philadelphia Inquirer and WHYY that she wasn’t asked for her medical credentials before she began administering vaccine doses, and that plenty of unused doses were left over after seniors were turned away on Saturday. She alleged that she saw Doroshin place between 10 and 15 of those doses in his bag and take them with him when he left.
The 22-year-old CEO attended a small gathering with friends that night, according to WHYY, and a photo that circulated on Snapchat appeared to show him “getting ready to administer an unspecified syringe” to an individual in a private home.
As a resident of the city I am, of course, frothing mad about this, but the blame lies with our public health officials and political leaders. How on earth did a person like this get within a mile of COVID-19 vaccines? How was his organization given city contracts to administer tests in poor neighborhoods, which it ghosted on? How did it take this long for city health officials to notice?
Update: yesterday the founder went on the TODAY Show to admit that he gave vaccines to friends:
Doroshin defended his decision to inject his friends, despite not being a registered nurse. He told TODAY’s Stephanie Gosk that he administered four doses which had been left over and were about to expire. Doroshin maintained he and his group made calls looking people at high risk who qualified for a shot but could not find anyone.
Uh huh. Also, apparently PFC got the doses by simply filling out a form?
The group never signed a contract with the city before receiving vaccine doses, because, health department spokesman James Garrow said, the city did not receive federal funds to distribute the doses. Instead, the city requires only that organizations fill out an interest form before receiving and distributing the vaccine, he said.
Aaaaaand they were billing insurance companies for the free vaccines the city gave them, with the founder telling employees they were going to get rich:
PFC also started billing insurance companies for the vaccines, despite receiving them for free. Doroshin defended that decision, as well, claiming that the donations the group was receiving were not enough to cover the costs of running the vaccination clinics.
However, reporting from WHYY and Billy Penn has since indicated Doroshin embellished his resumé and always planned to make a profit. A former volunteer at PFC told the news outlets that Doroshin openly bragged about using the opportunity to become a millionaire.
Hopefully the city will learn its lesson from this debacle and, I don’t know, let experienced medical professionals with city contracts handle the vaccine rollout? I don’t know.
Dunning-Kruger
In 1999, David Dunning and Justin Kruger published a paper on performance bias. In a nutshell, how we view our competence at something can impact how we predict we will perform. The better we are at something, the theory goes, the more we’ll underestimate our performance. Critically - this is what journalists and pop scientists like to cite - the worse we are at something, the more we’ll overestimate our performance. “Dumb people don’t realize they’re dumb!” shouted to the rafters.
Well, it turns out the Dunning-Kruger effect may not be real. First off, it was never intended as a tool to describe other people:
The most important mistake people make about the Dunning-Kruger effect, according to Dr. Dunning, has to do with who falls victim to it. “The effect is about us, not them,” he wrote to me. “The lesson of the effect was always about how we should be humble and cautious about ourselves.” The Dunning-Kruger effect is not about dumb people. It’s mostly about all of us when it comes to things we are not very competent at.
This seems reasonable. It was intended, one of the authors claims, as a tool to help us be more aware of our shortcomings. Okay! But there are problems with the theory:
The two papers, by Dr. Ed Nuhfer and colleagues, argued that the Dunning-Kruger effect could be replicated by using random data. “We all then believed the [1999] paper was valid,” Dr. Nuhfer told me via email. “The reasoning and argument just made so much sense. We never set out to disprove it; we were even fans of that paper.”
…oh. Yeah, that’s not good. Using random numbers plugged into a computer program produced results similar to the ones Dunning and Kruger observed in their 1999 study. To make matters worse, increasing measurement error - a common problem in psychological studies, since human brains are frustratingly unreliable - made the effect more pronounced:
“Scores of books, articles, and chapters highlight the problem with measurement error and attenuated effects,” Patrick McKnight wrote to me. In his simulation with random measurements, the so-called Dunning-Kruger effect actually becomes more visible as the measurement error increases. “We have no instance in the history of scientific discovery,” he continued, “where a finding improves by increasing measurement error. None.”
So it turns out the academic theory thousands of scientists and journalists have cited for decades to explain The Dumbs Being Dumb is itself based on bad, poorly-understood data. How about that.
GameStop
I did not want to write about GameStop again this week. I really didn’t. In fact, if you want a finance explainer on the last few days go read Matt Levine. Elon Musk makes an appearance, because of course he does.
Everything is stupid. You may recall that last week I said:
So uh, what happens now? Some of the bigger investors, including at least one of Cohen’s allies, are getting out of the stock, thinking it’s likely at its peak. WSB posters are trying to push it higher. Shorts are continuing to bet on the company’s failure.
It turns out that “what happens now” is Elon Musk tweets about the stock and it goes to $350 per share. The $100 prediction I wrote about when the stock was at $40 seems so quaint, a gentle whisper from a bygone era.
That brings me to today (or yesterday, since you’re reading this on Friday) and the news that RobinHood was preventing its retail - normal people - investors from buying any more options or shares of the meme stocks, including GameStop. They could still sell and close out their positions, but they couldn’t create any new ones. If this sounds kind of like market manipulation to you, that’s because it probably is? If RobinHood had halted trading of the stocks entirely, we might say okay, they’re giving it a day or two to cool off - and RobinHood has the right to restrict which securities can trade on its platform. However, by only preventing buys and allowing selling, the question becomes - who is on the other end of those trades?
The answer, is, of course, the same hedge funds that the Redditors and other meme investors have spent the last week railing against. The very people who were the target of this entire stock pump. Is any of this legal? Who knows! One Congresswoman doesn’t seem to think so:
Also, from the article quoted by Tlaib:
According to a popup on the app's homepage, 56 percent of all Robinhood users own at least some GameStop stock. They are now unable to freely trade it; the app is only allowing users to close out their positions, meaning they can sell it but not buy more.
56 percent! Seems bad! RobinHood users certainly seem to think so:
They may be trying to replicate the heroic efforts of the Chinese schoolchildren who got their homework app delisted with bad ratings, but in reality RobinHood may have much bigger problems to deal with if it continues to engage in what sure seems like market manipulation with investment banks and hedge funds who were taking a bath on their short positions. Is any of this legal? Will anyone be punished? Will Redditors overthrow capitalism? Stay tuned!
Anthony Levandowski
Remember this guy? The former Google engineer who stole a bunch of trade secrets, got caught, and was ordered to pay a 9-figure penalty and go to jail for 18 months? Well, Peter Thiel got him a pardon:
Outgoing U.S. President Donald Trump pardoned Anthony Levandowski, saving the engineer from more than a year in prison for stealing trade secrets from his former employer Alphabet Inc.’s Waymo.
I haven’t written about the Trump pardons yet, mostly because I’m waiting for journalists to do the hard work. One downside to being a scam blogger and not an investigative reporter is I can’t spend months researching a story to find out what really happened. So if I write about a story right after it breaks, I end up with egg on my face, like when I speculated about Luckin Coffee and the WSJ wrote a comprehensive piece two months later.
This is a lot of words to say I am going to write about the pardons in a bit to let the reporters do their jobs. Levandowski’s pardon, however, is almost certainly a favor Trump granted a handful of Silicon Valley bros, because there is no universe in which Trump knows who the former Google engineer is:
The White House noted that Levandowski’s sentencing judge called him a “brilliant, groundbreaking engineer that our country needs.”
“Mr. Levandowski has paid a significant price for his actions and plans to devote his talents to advance the public good,” the White House added in its statement.
Levandowski was ordered to pay $179 million dollars back to Google, and he’s currently suing both Waymo and Uber to avoid it, claiming they owe him billions.
Oh, and he hadn’t actually gone to jail yet, despite being sentenced in August, because the judge had granted a reprieve until the pandemic was over. Cool.
Pizza Robots
I wrote about some unfortunate attempts at pizza automation last year. Well, good news! A company from Seattle has made a pizza robot that impressed people at CES this year, so we may be one step closer to robot pizza, if that’s a thing people want. Also, the founders of the company are careful to note they aren’t seeking to replace workers:
Wood said the robot is not intended to take jobs away, but meant to support restaurants and workers in delivery and carry out.
"It’s a 'co-bot' where people still work alongside the machine,” Wood said.
A co-bot. I feel better already!
Short Cons
NY Times - “Of the existing 18.5 million Bitcoin, around 20 percent — currently worth around $140 billion — appear to be in lost or otherwise stranded wallets…”
The Markup - “Despite policies banning “militia content,” Google and Facebook both accepted ads for merchandise affiliated with a far-right militia group, the Three Percenters, over the past few months…”
NBC News - “Mackey is accused of using Twitter to mislead voters into casting their ballots via text. Mackey was involved in numerous group direct messages, including one with the name “War Room,””
Europol - “EMOTET has been one of the most professional and long lasting cybercrime services out there. First discovered as a banking Trojan in 2014, the malware evolved into the go-to solution for cybercriminals over the years.”
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