Making Meaning of a Death Count by Walking in a Cemetery

Posted on Published by Eugene Eric Kim

A few weeks ago, I wrote about my attempts to make sense of death counts. Yesterday, my friend, Joe Mathews, wrote about his own brilliantly simple way to do the same: he took a walk in a cemetery.

Joe chose to walk in the original Forest Lawn in Los Angeles. As he explains:

Since Forest Lawn opened here 114 years ago, in 1906, it has interred 340,000 souls on this property. Under current projections, the United States will experience 340,000 COVID deaths by sometime in January, 10 months after the March lockdowns began.

…

Such statistics are sobering and tragic. They also reflect a fundamental human failure: We experience individual death intensely, but struggle to recognize death in the aggregate. That’s why we can more forcefully rally together in response to one death—like the police killing of George Floyd—than in response to escalating numbers of COVID deaths scrolling across our screens.

Our myopia is why we need cemeteries right now, and not just as places to bury our dead.

Read the whole piece. There’s lots of good stuff about the history of Forest Lawn and of some of the folks who are buried there. And go take a walk through a cemetery. I’ve never walked any of the cemeteries in Colma, as Joe suggested for Bay Area folks, but the Mountain View Cemetery in Oakland is a peaceful place to walk and think.

A Quick Note on Probability and Strategy

Posted on Published by Eugene Eric Kim

As folks continue to monitor the presidential elections, I think it’s worth revisiting an important truth about probability and strategy.

If someone is given a 90 percent chance of winning something, that means if you replay the same scenario 100 times, that person wins on average 90 times.

Ninety is not 100. When you only get to play that scenario once, and the person favored to win 90 percent of the time loses, that doesn’t necessarily mean that the probabilities were wrong, and it doesn’t necessarily mean that the strategies that resulted in a loss were wrong either. They all could have been wrong, but it requires much deeper analysis to evaluate that.

If there’s a silver lining to the last two presidential elections, it’s that we’re collectively learning this in a very visceral way. The better we understand this, the better we’re able to make strategic decisions and prepare ourselves for different outcomes. It’s not just true in presidential elections, it’s true in business, and it’s true in life.

Professional poker players understand this. (I highly recommend Maria Konnikova’s The Biggest Bluff for more on what we could learn from professional poker players on strategy and decision-making.) Bill Belichik understands this. Nate Silver and the good folks at Five Thirty Eight are constantly trying to explain this to the rest of us. It’s very human not to understand this, but it’s helpful to keep trying.