Reviews

As Leis do Contágio - Como Surgem e Desaparecem os Fenómenos Virais by Adam Kucharski

capacitorofflux's review against another edition

challenging hopeful informative reflective slow-paced

3.5

gothwin's review against another edition

5.0

This was a fascinating read. Some potential readers should note that this is largely about how all sorts of things spread from biological viruses to computer viruses to ideas to stories to memes. It focuses on maths and statistics (although not particularly heavily and this should not put off mathsphobes) rather than biology. A topical read, unfortunately.

lpm100's review against another edition

5.0

Strained reasoning, but with some interesting insights.
Reviewed in the United States on January 2, 2021
Disclosure:

1. I had purchased this book because I wanted to get some new insights into the nature of disease transmission as a result of the Ongoing Coronavirus Hysteria.

2. Coronavirus was not quite the focus of this book, but there was some interesting peripheral information.

If you were interested in information specifically about coronavirus, this book can only serve as a companion to some current periodicals that are being published about that disease. (I have in mind Alex Berenson books.)
*******

There is just so much going on in this book that is hard to keep track of it, and I would suggest that this is one of those books that you might read once and then put down and pick up a year later and read again. (Or take copious notes the first time around.)

The prose is certainly very easy to read/nonfatty and it would not take too much reading time to reread this whole book.
*******

We do learn some things

1. New terms and concepts:

-Descriptive versus mechanistic methods.

-Models are not evidence, and predictions are not data (p.141).

-If you've seen one pandemic, you've seen one pandemic (p.3)

-"Fake news" can mean more than one thing: clickbait/conspiracy theories/misinformation/disinformation (p. 204)

-"Spark/growth/peak/decline" are the terms that are used in epidemiology to describe growth of a disease, and they are directly analogous to those used in microbiology to describe bacterial growth. (Lag / log / stationary / decay).

2. Great (but forgotten) names of major contributors.

Ronald Ross--responsible for figuring out about the distribution patterns of malaria. (And just as an example of how great the thinking was: he has no idea of the mechanism of action of the disease.).

William Kermack- responsible for building sundry mathematical modeling tools--and he only started working on this after he was blinded and could not do experimental work later.

3. The goal of people who spread misinformation on the internet is not to spread it to the maximum number of people, but instead for it to reach a person that is visible to many other people. (The easiest way to get people to believe that vaccines cause autism was not to repeat it a million times, but just to make sure that Pamela "Airhead" Anderson believed it. And the rest was a done deal.)

4. The 80/20-Pareto rule (80% of outcomes result from 20% of all causes (or inputs for any given event.) works in epidemiology, as well.
*******

I do have some problems with the way that Kucharski overextends his theoretical apparatus to situations that aren't quite analogous to Epidemiology.

-As when he applies the same treatment to violence (in places like Chicago) as to disease Epidemiology.

The author seems to assume that everybody in the situations is genetically the same thing.

Places like Kingston, Jamaica/ South Africa, Detroit / Chicago / Atlanta / St Louis all have huge amounts of crime, and they are also very full of black people.

In the same way that it doesn't make any sense to discuss the behavior of the pathogen independent of a host, it doesn't make any sense to discuss some behavior that really does have to come through a biological substrate: violence is not going to spread through Chinese / Japanese people in the same way that it spreads through jamaicans, because they are just genetically not the same thing.

-And as when he equates the 2008 US housing bubble to other panics, and then tries to use disease transmission models to explain them.
*******
A lot of philosophical questions.

1. Once some government somewhere knows that an idea can spread in certain ways, is it such a bad idea for them to stop it?

For example: The Chinese government is very aware that the internet can create a bunch of hysteria and also churches / mosques/ Falun Gong meetings are places where people can meet each other and then repurpose those meetings into some political movement. And so, the Public Security Bureau is all over those types of meetings. (The author does, in fact, get around to discussing the Chinese case. Page 197.)

And, after reading this, it's not that they don't have a logical/ empirical case for behaving in the way that they do.

The stupidity of the vaccine – autism link could never have caught on in China, but it did catch on in the United States with damage and spillover effects that are huge and ongoing.

2. If somebody studied malaria susceptibility in two populations (one black/one Chinese), he would get very different ideas about the susceptibility of the population/"R value" of the disease.

And the reason why would be a mystery until he realized that because of sickle cell trait a lot of black people have lower receptiveness to malaria.

In that case, is "R" only an empirical value /impossible to generalize/ situational?

3. In the case that you have a government with a huge, slow, lumbering bureaucracy for a government (let's choose the United States as an example), what can you really expect them to be able to do about preventing a spark of disinformation from starting a forest fire of fake news?

There is the example of all of the many millions of dollars that were spent in Chicago trying to stop spreads of gang violence.

And even after one year of all of that effort and all of those man hours-- they only stopped around 35 shootings and 5 homicides in Chi-Raq. (Oops! Sorry, I mean "Chicago." p.128)

4. When can/can't you reinterpret everything as an issue of public health?

The author gets into some strange efforts to define gun violence as a "public health menace." (You know, kind of the way that abortion is redefined as "reproductive health.") And he, in so many words, says what all left-wing intellectuals ALWAYS AND EVERYWHERE do which is: "Well, they do such and such in Europe and so why can't/ shouldn't it be that way in the United States?"

5. Given that what you read in the newspapers is somewhere between 90 and 100% untrue, what is the best way to filter out fake news?

-Maybe rely only on non mainstream sources?

-Maybe just not bother about the news at all, and assume that if something is important that it will find its way to your ears? (NN Taleb does this, and I can say that it is quite tiring to pick up a newspaper and have to go through it with such a fine tooth comb because so little of the information is accurate.).

-Maybe only deal with treatments that are in excess of 700 words? (>The length of New York "Fake News" Times?)

*******
Most germane (in the opinion of this reviewer) points from each chapter:

1. Basics of epidemiology as it was discovered just over a century ago.

2. Somewhat strained analogizing between financial hysteria (such as tulip mania), and poorly understood financial products (such as in the 2008 Real Estate Cris) and transmission of diseases (such as HIV and gonorrhea). These things are connected in that they have vectors, networks and contagion.

3. Transmission of diseases is better explained by movement of vectors between space rather than imagining that the disease itself moves over all space universally. (In that case, San Francisco is further than China geographically, but much closer in terms of vector space than Barbados... Which is the opposite.) Speculation on the way that social contagions can be minimized by modifying the behavior of vectors.

4. Attempts to model shootings in a place such as Chicago using epidemiological apparatus. Study of a program that tried to use certain techniques to stop shootings by treating them as a public health issue.

5. Observations on the techniques of people that try to find ways to broadcast their message, viewed in terms of epidemiological concepts.

6. Observations about hackers / computer virus coders choosing different vectors / mechanisms of action in order to deliver their virus payload. (Stuxnet. WannaCry. Mirai.)

7. The direction of viruses is trackable over time/space based on changes in the genetic code. (It is cheaper and easier than it ever has been to sequence viruses.) The electronization of things such as medical records / GPS movements / license plates make it such that it is extremely easy to be found and extremely difficult to not be found.

8. Recapitulation, conclusion, and speculation about the future direction that these unrelated threads could take. (Unrelated threads: banking crisis / gun violence / opioid use / computer viruses / diseases / privacy)

Conclusions:

1. In some sense, much "new" here is old: Mark Twain has said before (a century or so ago) that "a lie can travel halfway around the world while the truth is still putting on its shoes."

Thomas Sowell has written one chapter in a book about "fictitious persons." He gave the examples of Clarence Thomas and Herbert Hoover, each of whom has a character that is created by journalists and historians by sheer force of repetition (p.203).

2. It's pretty safe to say that the Internet is just a tool to facilitate what already happens very naturally: the spread of panic and misinformation.

Verdict: Recommended

plantonic_friendships's review against another edition

3.0

Used math and research to explain (or at least discuss) contagion. Not just in relation to flu/disease, but also in finances, influence, internet, etc.

It was interesting, but definitely not a beach read.

remocpi's review against another edition

4.0

Estoy en el alero con este libro. Por un lado, es una lectura interesantísima. Bueno, no una. Varias decenas, y eso es a la vez virtud y defecto. Virtud por lo obvio de encontrar un montón de temas interesantes. Defecto porque el autor manifiesta en sus declaraciones (y en el título del libro) haber encontrado un hilo conductor para todas las cosas de las que nos habla, un sustrato común, un principio subyacente compartido. Pero en realidad lo que hace es ir seleccionando temas y encajarlos a golpe de pelvis en su línea argumental, peguen o no. Nos habla de epidemias, claro, y nos cuenta un montón de cosas interesantes, desde la historia de la epidemiología como ciencia (que ya habíamos visto en Contagio, obra maestra) y siendo el autor matemático trabajando en epidemiología no puede resistirse a contarnos algo el modelo SIR, por supuesto. Muy interesante. Pero luego habla de la misma dinámica de epidemias cuando dice que los bostezos se contagian, o cuando habla del contagio financiero de las instituciones bancarias de la crisis de 2008. Los bancos en 2008 ya tenían en libros miles de operaciones entre ellos cuando petó Lehman, y el impago de Lehman llevó por un lado a la pérdida directa de dinero de todos aquellos bancos a los que Lehman les debía dinero además de la pérdida de confianza de unos bancos en otros (nadie sabía quién era el siguiente que podía petar, lo de Lehman era absolutamente imprevisible) y esa falta de confianza casi llegó a paralizar el sistema bancario mundial. Nada que ver con un modelo epidemiológico de contagios. Pero el autor lo encaja. A martillazos, si es necesario:

When multiple banks invest in the same asset, it creates a potential route of transmission between them. If a crisis hits and one bank starts selling off its assets, it will affect all the other firms who hold[...]

. Y sin embargo siempre tiene una historia interesante en la recámara:

Financial Times journalist John Authers visited a Manhattan branch of Citibank during his lunch break. He wanted to move some cash out of his account. Some of his money was covered by government deposit insurance, but only up to a limit; if Citibank collapsed too, he’d lose the rest. He wasn’t the only one who’d had this idea. ‘At Citi, I found a long queue, all well-dressed Wall Streeters,’ he later wrote.[92] ‘They were doing the same as me.’ The bank staff helped him open additional accounts in the name of his wife and children, reducing his risk. Authers was shocked to discover they’d been doing this all morning. ‘I was finding it a little hard to breathe. There was a bank run happening, in New York’s financial district. The people panicking were the Wall Streeters who best understood what was going on.’ Should he report what was happening? Given the severity of the crisis, Authers decided it would only make the situation worse. ‘Such a story on the FT’s front page might have been enough to push the system over the edge.’ His counterparts at other newspapers came to the same conclusion, and the news went uncovered.

Lo mismo con las modas, como ya postuló sin pruebas el amigo Malcolm Gladwell en The Tipping Point.

‘Some general principles are similar to how disease spreads through populations, for instance more social individuals being more likely to encounter and adopt new behaviours, and socially central individuals can act as “keystones” or “super-spreaders” in the diffusion of information.’

También encaja en esta teoría epidemiológica el aumento de la violencia por barrios. incluyendo la hipótesis de las ventanas rotas, que se usó para atajar la violencia en Nueva York en los 90:

Consideren un edificio con una ventana rota. Si la ventana no se repara, los vándalos tenderán a romper unas cuantas más. Finalmente, quizás hasta irrumpan en el edificio; y, si está abandonado, es posible que lo ocupen ellos y que prendan fuego dentro.
O consideren una acera o una banqueta: se acumula algo de basura; pronto, más basura se va acumulando; con el tiempo, la gente acaba dejando bolsas de basura de restaurantes de comida rápida o hasta asaltando coches.

De nuevo, postular que esto sigue el mismo modelo de propagación me parece un salto abismal. Por no hablar de que en los siguientes dos capítulos mete en este modelo el estudio de cómo se formaban las protestas callejeras en Irak durante la ocupación norteamericana, que terminó dependiendo de si había o no puestos de kebabs en la splazas (la historia es interesantísima, la analogía con una epidemia es mala). O peor aún, la adopción de los diagramas de Feynman como herramienta matemática en los físicos teóricos:

The spread of Feynman diagrams appears analogous to a very slowly spreading disease,’ the researchers noted.

¿En serio? Todas y cada una de las tecnologías/aparatos/ideas que se adoptan en una sociedad tienen forma de sigmoide. Llamar a eso "contagio" es de nuevo llevar el libro por los pelos haciéndolo seguir una línea argumental que no siempre es aplicable. En fin.
Hay muchísimas historias más, todas ellas fantásticas, que como único problema tienen que no encajan realmente en la línea argumental del autor, que las embute con cierta violenta intelectual en las categorías en las que cree que van. Pero que siguen siendo interesantísimas.
Al final reconozco que he disfrutado con la lectura a pesar de que le reprocho al autor ser víctima del síndrome de Gladwell (suprascrito), e intentar juntar cien historias geniales bajo un hilo conductor que claramente no comparten. Lo interesante de las historias por sí mismas lo compensa.

nocto's review against another edition

4.0

With this year going how it's going (*waves hands*) I thought this might be a hastily rushed out book about biological contagion. And that is still something I was up for reading, but it was actually published in February 2020, and so must have been written before the whole great plague of the 2020s began. And it's all about the maths of contagion, which is right up my street. The subject matter branches out far beyond disease and includes lots of things like the spread of internet memes and computer viruses which, 2020 being what it is (*waves hands again*), kind of feels a bit off-topic even though it's not. But I found it all fascinating, and a wider view of the mathematics is very welcome.

One of the cases discussed here that really blows my mind is how violence can be considered as something contagious - victims of it can turn into perpetrators (sometimes as a quick revenge thing, but often after many many years have passed) - and how we as as society can try to 'vaccinate' against that happening is a really interesting topic. To me this shows how maths, an academic abstract tool, can inform real changes in people's lives. A really good read which gives you loads to think about. I can also recommend looking Adam Kucharski up on Twitter where he's often got a wide angle, long term, very considered take on aspects of our current pandemic which is a good antidote to a lot of current media.

chaseledin's review against another edition

Kucharski's The Rules of Contagion is perhaps nicely and equally poorly timed in its release, amidst the COVID-§9 global pandemic. The text offers insight into contemporary sources of contagion, first, using simple and accessible language to demonstrate the utility and effectiveness of epidemiological approaches to disease pandemics, including ebola, HIV, and influenza. In the latter half of the book, Kucharski attempts to tie disease pathology into economic, behavioural, psychological and technological analyses, extrapolating epidemiological knowledge into formative societal structures and historical events (e.g. the 2008 financial crisis). Most notable about this latter half is the author's delineation of social media contagion, carefully balancing both the benefits and dangers of online contagion - "going viral" on social media vs. computer viruses. Largely, the book broaches a huge range of epistemological assertions, placing it firmly in the domain of popular science. The book lost steam around chapter three, despite an attempt to create a wide-ranging theory of contagion: as some other reviews have aptly noted, the latter section feels more like a confirmation and reiteration of contagion - its own sort of doctoral "case studies" following the juicy theory. Hence readers invested in the evolving COVID-19 pandemic will be especially drawn to chapters 1-2, and enthusiasts of pandemics, medical historians, epidemiologists and other pop-science readers might find the book as a whole interesting as a ruminative, though small, addition to academic scholarship on global networks, virality, social media and the Internet.

martha_schwalbe's review against another edition

4.0

Interesting book about not only disease but ideas too.

ciarasawey's review against another edition

5.0

A really interesting book. This had been on my reading list for a while but the pandemic made me realise that I should probably read it sooner! I love how this book wasn’t just limited to disease spread, I learnt so much about how contagion applies to other fields, which allowed me to take on a lot of new perspectives.

enidsorko's review against another edition

3.0

I picked this up during an Audible sale. It was an enjoyable listen- I liked many of the points the author made, and many of the stories he told were very interesting, such as the reason the 1918 pandemic is called the Spanish Flu is due to Spain being the only place willing to publish actual numbers about cases, and how the founder of Buzzfeed got his interest in how things go viral. I thought the idea of talking about things other than disease as being contagious was an interesting spin. It did bog down a bit towards the end for me.