[HN Gopher] Coronavirus and Credibility
___________________________________________________________________
Coronavirus and Credibility
Author : Rerarom
Score : 522 points
Date : 2020-04-06 09:39 UTC (13 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (paulgraham.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (paulgraham.com)
| andrewtbham wrote:
| The flip side is all the people that got it right on twitter.
|
| And continue to make insightful predictions:
|
| https://medium.com/@andrewt3000/covid-19-and-hypoxemia-697bc...
| Mc_Big_G wrote:
| Fox _" News"_: https://streamable.com/l8agkx
| spamizbad wrote:
| Honestly if the Iraq war didn't result in media accountability I
| doubt the Coronavirus will either.
| ugh123 wrote:
| Its easy to focus on foxnews and pull all sorts of terrible
| content like that, but a more serious task is to look at a lot of
| the statements and confidence from the medical and scientific
| community early on - things around wearing masks in public and
| its inability to prevent spread, or UV light from the Sun and its
| ability to kill the virus (a popular statement projected by
| several doctors within the media), and several others.
|
| There has been confidence all around from seemingly credible
| sources - acting on too early and thin data about what measures
| were effective or non-effective, many of which have been reversed
| in the last couple of weeks. A lot of this can be attributed to
| all sorts of news organizations (across the spectrum) and their
| push to get both positive and negative coverage out as fast as
| possible at the right time.
| jmull wrote:
| This "everyone is bad" is really off-the-mark.
|
| If, in a fast moving situation, someone tells you something
| based on the best information available at the time coming from
| leading experts, which later turns out to be wrong, that's
| unfortunate.
|
| If someone ignores the leadings experts and the best
| information available at the time and instead tells you what
| they want you to believe for their own political advantage,
| that's despicable.
|
| Drawing those as equivalent just doesn't make sense. No one is
| perfect anywhere on the spectrum, and you can find people who
| are wrong, stupid, or disingenuous everywhere. But on one side
| we have most organizations generally trying to get it right for
| the most part, and on the other, we have organizations trying
| their best to con people, regardless of the consequences.
| seppin wrote:
| > This "everyone is bad" is really off-the-mark.
|
| It's the worst take because it defeats the ability to find a
| solution in the future, if nothing can be trusted nothing can
| be implemented.
| crusso wrote:
| The early talk about wearing masks struck me as particularly
| egregious. We were told: they don't help, you won't put it on
| properly, you'll just get yourself sick using it, you'll have a
| false sense of confidence.
|
| That's what I kept seeing from the experts.
| javagram wrote:
| The advice (CDC/WHO) usually did include a statement that
| someone who was sick should wear a mask.
|
| Of course it doesn't make sense to tell people not to buy a
| box of masks if they aren't sick because then how do you get
| a mask when you wake up coughing without going into the
| pharmacy and spreading it? And all the while through February
| and March evidence was growing that people might be
| infectious for a week or more before they got a cough.
| gamblor956 wrote:
| If experts in the field are getting it wrong, how do you expect
| journalists to get it right?
|
| You're holding them up to unreasonably high standards.
|
| It's simply unfair to compare news organizations like CNN which
| are at least trying to present accurate information (to the
| best of _their_ knowledge) vs channels like Fox News that are
| active and avowed political propaganda engines that have
| admitted to deliberately deceiving their audience for views and
| political gain.
| djaychela wrote:
| From what I'm reading, I think there are still a significant
| minority of people who think this isn't an issue. I've had to
| learn to just walk away from comments on a variety of media where
| comments such as 'psychosomatic', 'less dangerous than the flu
| that kills 50,000 each year', 'patented by the illuminati',
| 'caused by 5G masts', and so on. I ended up deleting my twitter
| account as I dared try to engage with one UK-based journalist who
| was saying that 'they' were destroying the economy to serve their
| own foul needs (everyone under house arrest, total control of
| society, etc). For me, it's just not worth doing this - it's hard
| enough being separated from the people I care about, without
| filling the void with attempts to have a rational discussion with
| people who seem to be divorced from everyday fact.
|
| You would think this would be the reality check that was needed,
| but it's not the case for everyone. I guess that is human
| pyschology writ large, but I'm finding that I just have to watch
| videos and not even look in the comments as it's just a rabbit
| hole of conspiracy theories and people being just plain wrong in
| a lot of places.
| martinko wrote:
| Of all the conspiracy theories out there, the 'caused by 5G
| masts' is the one that confuses me the most. I get the possible
| aversion to 5G, but how does one make the leap from that to it
| causing COVID?
| jl6 wrote:
| Your mistake is assuming people are using reason to come up
| with that theory :)
| klmadfejno wrote:
| Conspiracy theorists have long been depicted as just
| weirdos who think they're smart. They're actually generally
| people who have experienced trauma and are suffering from
| paranoia. Conspiracies validate feelings of distrust. More
| sad than funny.
| rmu09 wrote:
| IMO this is deliberate mis-information, some type of info-
| guerilla, to stir and channel anger against the
| establishment.
| takeda wrote:
| Yep, this also comes packaged with NWO, there is one
| country that actively works on spreading this crap on
| social media, I believe the goal is to weaken Western
| countries by setting up their citizens against their own
| government.
| jpxw wrote:
| I've tried to understand them, their rationale appears
| include:
|
| - 5G occurred at the same time as corona - This is therefore
| "too much of a coincidence"
|
| - 5G kills off things that naturally kill coronavirus
|
| - 5G makes our immune systems weaker
|
| All of which are unfounded of course. But it's important not
| to just reject people's ideas out-of-hand, or to suppress
| them.
| technion wrote:
| The argument all over my facebook feed is that Africa is
| both the only country with no Coronavirus and the only
| country with no 5G. But really, these are the same friends
| arguing for flat earth in a lot of cases.
| ldrndll wrote:
| The number of things wrong with this makes me despair.
|
| 1. Africa is a continent, not a country. 2. Some
| countries in Africa DO have 5G deployments, including my
| home country of South Africa. In the news recently is a
| possible link between BCG vaccinations and reduced
| fatality rates from Covid-19. South Africa has fairly
| high BCG vaccination rates due to the prevalence of TB 3.
| Iran has a severe problem with Covid-19, but no 5G
| deployments.
|
| But as you say, this comes from the same type of crowd
| that believes in all the other bullshit (flat earth,
| vaccinations give you autism, etc.) so you can hardly
| expect an informed response to this.
| Kaiyou wrote:
| Maybe unfounded but it's no like I can't see where they are
| coming from. Neither do I have the ability to refute any of
| those points.
| mindslight wrote:
| My aunt sent me a video asking my opinion (yay?), and I've
| been hearing ominous FUD about "5G" long enough that I
| wanted to see where it was actually coming from. So I
| watched it.
|
| The bit I gleaned was the claim that since 60GHz is
| absorbed by oxygen (haven't checked this, but I'd assume
| similar to 2.4GHz being absorbed by water), it therefore
| interferes with your lungs' ability to intake oxygen. (my
| low-effort analysis: the radio waves won't penetrate your
| skin by more than a few millimeters, and therefore could in
| no way act in your lungs)
|
| The whole narrative was much jumping around making
| connections that would seem plausible if you don't know or
| try to investigate technical details. For example - a
| defense contractor worked on 60GHz gear as well as
| communications for cruise ships -> smoking gun!
|
| I'm sure there was plenty of innuendo that rolled right off
| my back, but makes an emotional impression. My aunt had
| gotten the impression that 5G is 50-60 times the power of a
| microwave oven. I couldn't bring myself to watch the video
| again to find what could possibly be interpreted this way,
| but I'm guessing it was talking about the _frequency_ while
| implying _magnitude_.
| Beltiras wrote:
| For every reasoned answer you give them an avalanche of
| utter bullshit flows forth. This might be one of those rare
| occasions where the solution to bad speech is not more
| speech. The mind of the conspiracy believers is just too
| darned efficient at justifying bad reasoning.
| Kaiyou wrote:
| Alternatively your reasoned answer wasn't as good as you
| think it was.
| Beltiras wrote:
| To the conspiracy minded no answer is good enough.
| filoleg wrote:
| Yes, but to those who are undecided and are on the edge,
| a good answer might pull them to the right side. I know
| for a fact that it happened to me multiple times, when I
| saw a heated argument between two people (mostly on
| technical topics though, not something like corona).
| Kaiyou wrote:
| @Beltiras Or maybe that's just your excuse to not even
| try.
| TwoNineFive wrote:
| I'll clue you in: While some actually believe in the nutty
| conspiracy crap, it's mostly being pushed by anti-Chinese
| racists/nationalists/tribalists. Remember how that 5G tower
| gear is mostly made by Huawei? This is an excuse to attack
| them and how to get others to do it for them. You need to
| understand how plausible deniability is so often used by
| JAQoff deplorables.
| ForHackernews wrote:
| 5G comes from China; coronavirus comes from China.
|
| REALLY JUST A COINCIDENCE!? /s
| bsaul wrote:
| i've been saying "not more dangerous than the flu" before it
| started really going to shxt in europe, because to be honest,
| the epidemic doesn't look _that_ dangerous if you 're in
| general good health, just by looking at the numbers from a
| distance.
|
| The fact that most people seem to not have anything worse than
| a few days of fever (some having even nothing at all), while at
| the same time others simply die very quickly to it makes it a
| very peculiar epidemic. And i think this is the reason why even
| amongst the medical professional i've talked to, they first
| seemed not too worried at all.
|
| As for the number of death, let's not forget the flu kills
| hundreds of thousands of people each year, and that is with
| people getting vaccinated. It made me realize how getting
| vaccinated for the flu as soon as you reach 50 may actually be
| a pretty good idea..
|
| Another thing that i haven't read a lot, is that the WHO have
| been alarming people in the past with previous epidemic (srars,
| mers, ebola, etc), and nothing "special" happened (i suppose
| partly because people correctly dealt with it, but also because
| of the nature of the virus). It actually made me realize how
| the whole world has been completely desensitized to
| catastrophic predictions.
| imgabe wrote:
| Comparing _annual_ death totals for the flu to coronavirus
| deaths over a couple of months is mistake number 1.
|
| Comparing a number that is static from year to year to one
| that is growing exponentially is mistake number 2.
| alacombe wrote:
| and comparing "estimated contamination cases vs associated
| death" to "a known-positive cases vs. associated death" is
| mistake number 3.
|
| CDC data shows 220k known-tested-positive case and 22k
| associated death. The 36 millions case is pulled out of a
| hat. As per these number, seasonal flu kills 10% of the
| known-positive cases.
| pritovido wrote:
| I probably had covid19 in February(in Asia), only in
| retrospect I could differentiate it from the flu.
|
| The main difference was it took the superior part of the
| throat instead of the inferior. Talking with doctors they
| tell me I had all the symptoms.
|
| The problem with it is that at first it is "benign"(I had
| high fever for "just" two days) if your body stops it before
| getting into the lungs. Once it gets there it could be
| nasty(as it produces cytokine storm syndrome there) very
| fast.
|
| So it is very easy to get confident.
|
| Even the flu could get very dangerous is you get it combined
| with something else like a bacteria at the same time.
| azeirah wrote:
| Do you have a source for corona infecting the inferior part
| of your throat rather than the inferior part? I know you
| spoke to doctors, but I find it incredibly difficult to
| find credible sources other than either
|
| incredibly simplified accessible articles on mainstream
| health websites, stating that a symptom is "throat pain"
|
| or having to go through 20 pages of medical research which
| I understand basically nothing of.
| GistNoesis wrote:
| >the epidemic doesn't look that dangerous if you're in
| general good health
|
| I'm not so confident yet. What is still worrying me, is that
| it is not clear about the importance of the initial dose with
| respect to the severity of the outcome.
|
| The disease having a quite slow progression, may mean that if
| you let it spread wildly, suddenly there is a large
| percentage of the population exposed, and this mean that when
| people gets contaminated they receive a high inoculum which
| may bring down even healthy individuals.
| michaelmrose wrote:
| To a degree we deal with catastrophic threats aptly without
| having our responses deadened by past fears never having come
| to fruition regularly. For example we swim knowing that if we
| stop moving we will sink and drown, we drive knowing that a
| slip up we could well die.
|
| We are collectively guilty of many errors in judgement but on
| the whole we show on average not only are we able to mostly
| behave competently in complex situations individually we are
| able collectively to make some systemic changes to decrease
| mortality over the years.
|
| This gives me hope that we take the correct lesson from this
| terrible experience and adjust our individual and collective
| behavior to avoid a re occurrence.
| jimbokun wrote:
| The differences with this coronavirus, as I understand it:
|
| 1. People are often contagious well before showing symptoms,
| making it much harder to track and isolate the people who
| have it.
|
| 2. It is about 10x more deadly than the flu. Could be more
| than that, as it's difficult to extrapolate from the current
| messy data. But I think it's safe to say it is much more
| deadly than the seasonal flu.
|
| So far more people getting it, in a very short period of
| time, and a much higher percentage dying or requiring
| hospitalization, giving us the results we see. Overwhelmed
| health care systems, and death counts that will be much
| higher than seasonal flu without large scale mitigations in
| place.
| nullc wrote:
| Just goes to show that people will continue to ignore an
| exponential trend until it eats _their_ lunch _personally_.
|
| FWIW, totally aside from that, CDC numbers for the "flu" are
| actually a combined "flu and pneumonia", and according to the
| NHS in the UK-- which doesn't bin the same way-- no more than
| 1/3rds of those deaths are due to the flu. Other estimates
| have put the flu well under 10% of flu+pneumonia, though with
| substantial year to year variation:
| https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3827586/
|
| Even if you steadfastly refuse to accept the obvious
| exponential dynamics of contagion in a naive population,
| perhaps the fact that the figures you are reasoning from are
| off by a constant factor of 3 to >10 might cause you to
| reconsider your level of confidence?
| akvadrako wrote:
| > CDC numbers for the "flu" are actually a combined "flu
| and pneumonia"
|
| That's just like Covid though - they are counting everyone
| who dies with the virus even though most have other
| conditions.
| nullc wrote:
| That argument no longer works when we're seeing highly
| infected regions with significant increases in their _all
| cause_ mortality rate, e.g.
| https://reason.com/2020/03/17/italian-daily-death-rate-
| up-20...
| https://www.thejakartapost.com/news/2020/04/01/virus-
| deaths-...
| diryawish wrote:
| Italy's death rates are up 20% when comparing this year's
| average to a typical year's whole average. This way of
| comparing averages may skew the information. In America,
| we have more average daily deaths in the beginning of the
| year than in the middle and end until December. The
| average of January through March will always be higher
| than the yearly average.
| amenod wrote:
| This!
|
| This is the latest data published by the Italian Ministry
| of Health. Looking at the chart on the second page, try
| to ignore the lines (we all know there is an infinite
| amount of ways one can approximate a curve to the dots)
| and just observe the dots. Does this seem like a bad year
| to you? Compared to winter 2016/17?
|
| http://www.salute.gov.it/portale/caldo/SISMG_sintesi_ULTI
| MO....
|
| Also note that all the charts are misleading since they
| don't start with 0 (the effect is exaggerated).
| takeda wrote:
| What are you talking about? The spike started in mid
| March, that's just a single data point on that graph.
| kgwgk wrote:
| "What the official figures don't say. They don't say that
| in March 2020 more than 5.400 people have died in Bergamo
| province, 4.500 of which due to coronavirus. Six times
| more than the previous year."
|
| https://www.ecodibergamo.it/stories/bergamo-
| citta/coronaviru...
|
| Doesn't that seem like a bad year to you?
| akvadrako wrote:
| It does because regional fluctuations don't warrant a
| widespread overreaction.
|
| Overall mortality for Europe is lower than during most
| flu seasons:
|
| https://www.euromomo.eu/
| graeme wrote:
| That's for week 13. I expect france would be higher now.
|
| Week 13 is march 22-28 if I counted right. Deaths lag
| cases. French Coronavirus deaths went from 674 on the
| 22nd, to 2314 on the 28th, to 8078 yesterday april 5th.
|
| I would say your comment is premature.
| takeda wrote:
| Because if no coronavirus this would be rather a good
| year. The December-February looked better than on
| average.
|
| The thing you are missing though is that crisis started
| mid March. It feels like forever (because of shelter at
| home), but it is a very short time and every few days the
| number of cases doubles. Most of that doesn't register on
| graphs that spans multiple years (look at the dates).
| creaghpatr wrote:
| If you lose your job, your lunch is being eaten.
| MrBuddyCasino wrote:
| > Just goes to show that people will continue to ignore an
| exponential trend until it eats their lunch personally.
|
| This. It seems most people are incapable of making
| decisions purely based on what their mind or the math says.
| I kind of get it, it didn't "feel real" in the beginning,
| it was just the mind that went "omg we need to act NOW",
| not the stomach. I suspect this is why the Silicon Valley
| Crowd was so far ahead of the curve - they deal with
| exponential growth more often, and are used to listen to
| just their brains, for better or worse.
| michaelt wrote:
| _> it didn 't "feel real" in the beginning_
|
| Plus, a lot of the interventions don't really make much
| sense if you're the only one doing them.
|
| For example, imagine I'm not worried about my own safety,
| but I am for the safety of others. Staying home and self-
| isolating will help with this _if almost everyone else
| does it_ - but if I start a month early, doing it on my
| own? Negligible benefit.
|
| And of course, much easier to get to work from home at an
| otherwise-non-WFH company once your boss and their boss
| are thinking the same way as you, and they've heard
| Google and Apple are doing the same...
| Juliate wrote:
| Or they work with remote teams around the world,
| including China & Europe, and saw first-hand what was
| coming.
| jannes wrote:
| Every major bank in NYC has trading desks across the
| world, including Asian markets. Shouldn't they have seen
| it coming as well?
| zentiggr wrote:
| Not if their salaries depended on not understanding...
| bsaul wrote:
| I don't think people feared catching the virus at all.
| Exponential dynamics doesn't change anything in your
| response in that situation. I think every winter viruses
| have exponential dynamics as well, and they're not a big
| deal. You catch it, and you get over it..
|
| Actually that's why most public communication for staying
| at home doesn't say "protect yourself", but rather emphasis
| on protecting "others" (aka : people vulnerable). The virus
| is extremely dangerous, but only for a (not that small)
| minority of people. That's a weird one.
| nullc wrote:
| It's still making a large portion of the people who
| aren't dying _extremely ill_.
|
| I think one of the biggest public health communication
| disasters of covid19 is the reliance on mortality as the
| communication endpoint.
|
| It's acceptable for other threats-- like automotive
| accidents-- to speak in terms of mortality because there
| isn't a huge population which is much less exposed to
| dying but still exposed to serious illness. Automotive
| accidents also seriously injure many more people than
| they kill, but not in a way that lends itself to a false
| impression of immunity.
|
| "Death" makes a nice clear warning for the risks of
| driving, and other very bad but not death outcomes are
| just some factor of the death outcomes... it isn't like
| the audience is comparing death rates to population
| numbers then deciding that the death from driving isn't
| worth worrying about just because we didn't also include
| maimed-for-life.
|
| For covid19 we've ended up making many 20 and 30 year
| olds believe that it doesn't threaten them. It does. They
| may not be dying in especially large numbers-- especially
| where either hospitals are not overloaded or where
| they're engaging in the ethically dubious practice of
| triaging younger people ahead of others based purely on
| their age rather than, e.g. response to treatment--, but
| they are still becoming seriously and painfully ill and
| ending up with severe immune system damage -- which takes
| a long time will recover and will result in latent
| mortality --, and for many likely lifelong injury in the
| form of extensive lung scaring.
|
| Infections like influenza are _much_ less contagious--
| with an R0 of 1.3 vs 2 to 3 (an _enormous_ difference)--,
| less deadly, face a population which is at least somewhat
| resistant (in part due to heroic vaccination efforts) and
| which knows how to rapidly create new and effective
| vaccines against it. It 's not really that comparable.
| amenod wrote:
| Curious: what are you basing this on? Do you have some
| statistical data that shows hospitalization rates of
| young people _because of_ (instead of just _with_) corona
| virus?
|
| I myself haven't yet seen any data that would make this
| virus any worse than the flu (which means it's still
| dangerous, just maybe not "everybody-hide-under-the-rock"
| dangerous). Even data from Italy doesn't show mortality
| any higher than previous years.
|
| Do you have links to data that supports what you wrote?
|
| I agree it is a communication disaster though. If I see
| another chart with red line, logarithmic scale, not
| starting from zero or with some approximated (red) curve
| that doesn't specify the formula... :-/
| DanBC wrote:
| > hospitalization rates of young people _because of_
| (instead of just _with_) corona virus?
|
| What do you think the mechanism is here? Why are people
| being hospitalised with covid-19, if it's not covid-19
| causing the hospitalisation?
|
| People under 50 don't spend much time in ITUs on
| ventilators, until covid-19 happens and now the ITUs are
| full of people with covid-19 having air pumped into their
| lungs to push the fluid out.
|
| What's causing that if not covid-19?
| thu2111 wrote:
| That's already well understood.
|
| People are counted in the stats produced by hospitals if
| they have the virus, not if they've been hospitalised
| because of the virus. Literally if someone breaks their
| arm and they're tested positive, that goes into the stats
| for "COVID-19 cases". This is also true if someone dies
| of _anything_ whilst having the virus; they 're recorded
| as a "COVID-19 death".
|
| The statistics here don't tell us what they sound like
| they're telling us. We'd see exactly the same pattern if
| the rules were suddenly changed to require every hospital
| admission to be tested for the common cold in a regular
| year - the number of "cases" and "deaths" would increase
| dramatically every day.
|
| _People under 50 don 't spend much time in ITUs on
| ventilators_
|
| That statement is far too vague. People of all ages spend
| time on ventilators every years, especially during a flu
| outbreak. This is especially true of young children
| (under 5) whom COVID-19 doesn't affect at all! And
| COVID-19 is known to affect very few under 50s; the
| numbers here are so tiny the media can literally write
| entire stories about individual cases.
|
| So what does "people" and "much time" mean in this
| sentence?
|
| You can see some data on deaths from pneumonia by age
| group here:
|
| https://ourworldindata.org/pneumonia#pneumonia-mortality-
| rat...
|
| Of course deaths isn't the same thing as hospitalisation
| as the young are more likely to recover than the old. So
| this data isn't exactly what you're talking about, but
| it's at least quantifiable.
|
| It's not safe to make a claim about this virus without
| comparing it to known values from prior years or
| outbreaks, when comparing the same thing. Every single
| number we're being presented with is presented without
| context and it leads to catastrophic mistakes of
| understanding. Number of positive test increases is shown
| without the number of negative test increases as well
| (i.e. an exponential increase in testing looks like an
| exponential increase in cases), deaths are counted
| without any investigation to decide what caused that
| death and so on.
|
| It's very easy to get a totally misleading impression of
| what's going on. This is likely why in so many parts of
| the world hospitals are now reporting themselves as empty
| for weeks, despite the supposed "exponential growth" that
| should have overwhelmed them by now. In fact in
| Switzerland hospitals are needing to apply for emergency
| funding because the huge drop in patient numbers has
| caused their revenue to dry up.
| DanBC wrote:
| To answer your question ("do people die with covid-19, or
| of it?") with data you might want to read this twitter
| thread. https://twitter.com/ActuaryByDay/status/124686611
| 9597621248
|
| It links to a document from the Intensive Care National
| Audit and Research Centre.
|
| The evidence from actual covid treatment doesn't support
| the "they die with, not of, covid" argument.
| watwut wrote:
| Your theory is that there is surge of broken hands and
| unrelated health issues, but all those people also happen
| to have covid so covid gets blamed? Like, New York and
| Italia and France have to build make-shift hospitals
| cause of broken hands epidemic?
| thu2111 wrote:
| No.
|
| There's clearly a virus spreading. It sends some people
| to hospital. Quite a few viruses do that.
|
| Unlike those, _this_ virus is different in one key way -
| governments have decreed that any death where the virus
| is present is counted as a "virus death", and have
| decreed mass testing to find infections. Consider a virus
| that is not really dangerous but highly infectious, like
| any common cold or flu. Then many people will turn up at
| hospital with it, but in reality their problem is
| something else. With our current data that would look
| like hospitals being flooded in a way never seen before,
| but it'd be a data artifact, not something real.
|
| As for countries having to build makeshift hospitals, two
| things:
|
| 1. _Local_ overloads happen during bad flu seasons too.
| You can find many reports in the past about wards being
| converted, tents being constructed to hold patients on
| the streets from earlier flu pandemics. Arguably making
| quick hospitals to handle that sort of bad flu season
| should be a more common practice.
|
| 2. No country anywhere is experiencing general overload.
| Even in Italy, a few days ago a politician was publicly
| asking why they're sending patients to Germany when in
| nearby Veneto there are hospitals that are 2/3rds empty.
|
| Projections of mass death requiring everyone to shelter-
| in-place are based on the belief that everywhere will "go
| Bergamo" simultaneously at once. That isn't happening,
| it's not even close to happening.
|
| Go investigate and you can find stories of deserted
| hospitals all over the world right now. They've been
| cleared out in anticipation of an imminent surge that
| isn't appearing. That's why Germany and Switzerland can
| take in patients from neighbouring countries - not only
| are there no makeshift hospitals but hospitals need
| financial bailouts because they've having to pay so many
| staff who are basically idled, like many other
| businesses.
|
| Clearly there's a huge mismatch between the global view
| and a small number of local hotspots, and our
| understanding of what's happening is heavily coloured by
| the press.
| JoeAltmaier wrote:
| Thanks for describing exactly what it looks like when
| preparing for a major outbreak. Its measurable, growing
| geometrically without breaking stride, and 6X-10X more
| deadly than anything we can name.
|
| If we succeed at slowing the growth, even stopping it,
| then thank god those hospitals will remain empty.
| thu2111 wrote:
| It is _not_ growing geometrically (or only with a tiny
| multiplier if so). If the feared scenario of exponential
| growth were the case then we 'd see the proportion of
| positive test cases doubling, not just the raw number.
| Right now what's being seen is that if you increase
| testing 10x you find 10x more cases, which is consistent
| with finding something that's at a somewhat steady
| background level.
|
| e.g. here's German data:
|
| https://swprs.files.wordpress.com/2020/03/infizierte-pro-
| tes...
|
| and US data:
|
| https://twitter.com/FScholkmann/status/124612253579368038
| 6
|
| It looks like it doubles every few days because of the
| rapid increase in testing.
|
| Moreover these hospitals are now entering their second
| week of being idled. They should be very busy by now if
| the sick were really growing exponentially - they're
| still mostly empty.
|
| Even in New York you see this:
|
| https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-8173563/Elmhurst
| -ta...
|
| _" New York City's Elmhurst hospital - the 'epicenter of
| the epicenter' - is now receiving fewer patients but they
| are arriving sicker, doctor warns, as he says some come
| in with no symptoms other than diarrhea then test
| positive"_
|
| _" He said testing was surprising and that some people
| show up with a fever and cough but test negative. Others
| who are there for different ailments - like car accident
| victims - end up testing positive."_
|
| New York is supposed to be the epicentre of the outbreak
| yet the most overloaded hospital is now seeing fewer
| patients arrive than before. That's not consistent with
| being at the start of a very long exponential growth
| phase (it obviously can't grow exponentially forever so
| this discussion is only about how long it lasts in that
| phase and where the peak is).
|
| _Edit: got throttled, will reply to Joe here_
|
| Many sources show only the number of positive cases and
| deaths. Here's one that shows total tests performed in
| the USA:
|
| https://covidtracking.com/data/us-daily
|
| On the 5th April 2020 there were 332,308 positive cases
| in the USA. So the halving point was between 29th and
| 30th March (139,061 and 160,530 cases respectively). It
| took about 5 days to double.
|
| On the 5th April 2020 there were 1.42 million negative
| cases. On 29th March 2020 there were 692,290 negatives or
| 48% of the figure today. It took exactly the same amount
| of time to double.
|
| So we can see that number of tests doubled in that time.
| Total tests went from 831,351 (47%) to 1,762,032.
|
| The proportion of positive to negative cases is 18%
| today. On the 29th March it was 16%. A 2% rise, nothing
| even close to doubling. The graph in the tweet I linked
| to shows this visually - a fairly smooth and slow
| increase over time. We think it's spreading exponentially
| because of misuse of data, but all that's actually
| growing exponentially is testing. And yes - that's
| probably why there are now global shortages of reagents
| and other ingredients for tests. You can't keep globally
| doubling demand for tests without eventually hitting
| production limits!
| JoeAltmaier wrote:
| That's pretty glib - its just testing that's increasing?
| Geometrically? With scarcity of test resources in the
| news daily?
|
| Look at the worldwide data, then at the data for pretty
| much every country: https://gisanddata.maps.arcgis.com/ap
| ps/opsdashboard/index.h...
|
| Its geometric growth pretty much any place you look. Now,
| unless testing were proceeding completely uniformly
| across the board, its hard to imagine that explains any
| of this.
| JoeAltmaier wrote:
| Let me reply to the edited comment.
|
| We're not testing the general population. Its testing of
| folks coming to a hospital? Folks who aren't having
| hospitalizing symptoms are not tested at all, and sent
| home to quarantine.
|
| So if tests doubled that means that folks are feeling bad
| at an increased rate. Showing up at a hospital with
| alarming symptoms.
|
| You can finagle the statistics both ways - by ignoring
| what the 'test sample' is and assuming its uniform for
| instance.
| mannykannot wrote:
| > That's not consistent with being at the start of a
| _very long_ exponential growth phase.
|
| This is an example of how you are making straw man
| arguments. No-one is arguing that the growth rate will
| continue to be exponential in the face of effective
| mitigation.
| watwut wrote:
| Frankly, you lie about Italy. Also, we are actually
| closing schools when there is outbreak of flu - few
| schools is enough to get flu under control.
| rjtavares wrote:
| > Do you have some statistical data that shows
| hospitalization rates of young people _because of_
| (instead of just _with_) corona virus?
|
| Doesn't that require a study after the fact? So your
| proposal is to just wait and see?
|
| BTW, how do you explain the unprecedented hospitalization
| and ICU rates in Northern Italy?
|
| As an example, this report from European Society of
| Anaesthesiology[1] mentions:
|
| > The number of intensive care beds in Italy continues to
| change. Initially, there were 500 public intensive care
| (ICU) beds in Lombardy, and 140 private ICU beds.
| However, now there are more than 900.
|
| [1]: https://www.esahq.org/esa-news/analysis-of-
| covid-19-data-on-...
| lbeltrame wrote:
| > BTW, how do you explain the unprecedented
| hospitalization and ICU rates in Northern Italy?
|
| A lot of people aren't tested unless they are severely
| sick, they're just told to stay at home.
|
| When they arrive in the hospital they're already in a
| pretty bad condition, and only then tested. Which means
| that no therapeutic actions are made until patients are
| admitted, with the exception of self-administration of
| paracetamol.
|
| > The number of intensive care beds in Italy continues to
| change. Initially, there were 500 public intensive care
| (ICU) beds in Lombardy, and 140 private ICU beds.
| However, now there are more than 900.
|
| But a lot of ICU beds were slashed in the past 10 years
| due to budget cuts, and we were at 80% capacity when the
| virus hit. If the testing keeps on like this, and we
| can't even palliatively treat patients until they start
| suffering respiratory problems, these problems will
| continue.
| redis_mlc wrote:
| > people will continue to ignore an exponential trend
|
| Every cold and flu grow exponentially.
|
| Not sure what the fixation of HN readers is on the work
| exponential. Although true, using it doesn't add anything
| to analysis of corona virus specifically.
|
| I'd rather talk about the false hope in ventilators, and
| the futility and destruction to our economy by lockdown.
| matwood wrote:
| > Although true, using it doesn't add anything to
| analysis of corona virus specifically.
|
| For many layperson, this is their first experience when
| it really matters. My mom isn't sitting around thinking
| about exponential spread when she gets a cold.
|
| > I'd rather talk about the false hope in ventilators
|
| I agree. Something like 80% of the people who end up on a
| ventilator die. Of course those other 20% are happy one
| was available, but by the time ventilators are being
| discussed it's really too late. Prevention is key.
|
| > futility and destruction to our economy by lockdown
|
| Depends. The economy was going to be hit hard regardless.
| Even if nothing was ever forced closed, the number of
| people sick and the number of overwhelmed hospitals would
| have killed the economy. For example, even before there
| were any official lockdowns in the US, companies I work
| with were already stopping all travel (late February
| timeframe).
| saalweachter wrote:
| We also _do_ take notice when more mundane exponential
| threats crop up -- for instance, the R0 of measles is
| something like 12-18 (compared to a "measly" 2-2.5 for
| the novel coronavirus, or 1.28 for the typical seasonal
| flu), and when it got out of control in a few cities in
| the US last year, it was a Big Deal even though most
| people are vaccinated for it.
| mannykannot wrote:
| > Although true, using it doesn't add anything to
| analysis of corona virus specifically.
|
| The issue of exponential growth is of relevance in
| response to those saying that the number of deaths
| (insert the inplicit 'so far' here) is much less than
| from infuenza (annually.) It is not a 'fixation' to
| expose the irrelevance of that line of thinking.
|
| More generally, the issue is a combination of the facts
| that this virus is significantly more dangerous, for all
| age groups, than at least post- Spanish Flu infuenza; it
| is very readily transmitted; and there is no (or much
| less) herd immunity. When you combine these fact with the
| math of exponential growth, and have establshed the
| doubling rate, you can do some scientific prediction that
| goes beyond "so far it has not been as bad as the flu",
| which is true just so long as it is, and no longer. To do
| that, however, you have to hold more than one idea at a
| time in your head.
| thu2111 wrote:
| The idea that viruses always grow exponentially until
| they reach total saturation of the population comes from
| mathematical models that have never successfully modelled
| any real epidemic, ever. It doesn't come from experience
| of real diseases in nature, many of which were predicted
| by epidemiologists to grow to enormous proportions and
| yet - even in the absence of control measures - that
| isn't what happens.
|
| It seems there are a _ton_ of people right now who are
| enjoying thinking of themselves as intellectually and
| even morally superior to people who are just pointing out
| facts about the statistics gathered so far (which point
| to flu-like levels of danger and properties). I think the
| HN community is especially prone to this because it 's
| full of computer programmers who are used to thinking in
| powers of two; some seem tempted to ascribe near-magical
| wisdom to this familiarity. But nature isn't a computer
| and just saying "exponential growth" over and over will
| eventually make fools of a lot of people, because _it isn
| 't there_.
|
| If this virus was really spreading exponentially, you'd
| expect to see the proportion of positive tests going up
| exponentially as well. But that isn't what is seen. In
| places that report the total number of tests administered
| (some places don't), the proportion of positive tests
| increases sub-exponentially or even hardly at all, coming
| to rest at about 15%, which is roughly the background
| level of coronavirus infections in the population during
| normal times.
|
| It's especially disappointing to see PG fall into the
| trap of blaming politicians. Politicians have in the
| blink of an eye ceded power to a tiny cabal of
| (primarily) epidemiologists. So far they by and large
| _aren 't_ asking questions, instead simply doing whatever
| they're told even if it makes little sense.
|
| But we really need people to start asking those
| scientists difficult questions. Citizens can do it but
| ultimately it only matters when politicians do it.
| Epidemiologists have a track record of absolute failure.
| They failed with Zika, they failed with foot and mouth
| disease, they're failing with CV. Go look at the models
| they produce and weep; some are invalidated the day
| they're published!
|
| This guy is doing a good job of pointing out the many
| errors of modellers:
|
| https://twitter.com/AlexBerenson
|
| There's also some background here:
|
| https://blog.plan99.net/is-epidemiology-
| useful-a4ec54e59569
| michaelmrose wrote:
| Nobody is able to test all or even most of their
| population with tests overwhelmingly concentrated among
| those either likely to be infected or at least exposed
| one would expect the proportion of positive tests to be a
| function of the testing methodology rather than a fiction
| of its prevalence in the population. If for example a
| group is only testing those already experiencing severe
| symptoms and had a 93% positive rate what would it even
| mean for the proportion of positive tests to increase
| exponentially?
|
| What we are supposing is instead that the number of
| people who are presently infected will increase
| exponentially IF we don't adopt measures to decrease the
| spread. This is actually what you saw in the initial
| period and what you would be seeing now if we did nothing
| extraordinary to decrease the spread. If you look at the
| 1918 flu epidemic it ultimately infected 1/3 of the
| population. It is utterly unclear to me why you imagine
| your understanding is better than that of the experts. It
| would seem you yourself are guilty of the same sin you
| ascribe to programmers? From your animus towards the
| profession are you perhaps a manager of same? If so you
| seem to have contracted at least one of their faults.
|
| > politicians have in the blink of an eye ceded power to
| a tiny cabal of (primarily) epidemiologists.
|
| This literally isn't real.
|
| The politicians are indeed at fault for the poor
| response. We cede to them substantial funds and powers to
| both prepare for and response to situations just like
| this. In fact the pentagon prepared a report on literally
| just this exact crisis in 2017 that called out among
| other things a lack of supplies. We opted to do nothing
| of import between now and today. In the crucial early
| days of this crisis instead of instituting effective
| measures we were busy first ignoring reports of it and
| then publicly claiming it is a hoax. If we aren't brave
| and clear sighted enough to even ascribe blame how are we
| to do better next time?
| mannykannot wrote:
| You can get the numbers and do the math yourself, and
| prior to effective mitigation, the growth is exponential.
| There are policies that do have a mitigating effect, _and
| that is the point._ The mitigation of an effect does not
| mean either that it did not exist in the first place, or
| that it is not relevant.
| belltaco wrote:
| >Every cold and flu grow exponentially.
|
| No, that's true only if it's brand new. Immunity for a
| certain strain lasts several years, which means there's a
| level of herd immunity that constraints infection from
| even reaching some of the non-immune folks, hence it's
| hard for it to be exponential.
|
| This is not the case with the 'novel' coronavirus. There
| is no large scale immunity among the population.
| watwut wrote:
| > Every cold and flu grow exponentially.
|
| When it is growing exponentially, they close a few
| schools here and there or stop visits in hospitals. That
| is enough to stop spread, get the R below 1 and making it
| not exponential.
|
| It is simply not true that every cold and flu grows
| exponentially.
| nullc wrote:
| Like soylent green the economy is made of people.
|
| If people are doing well, the economy will likely catch
| up-- weak businesses will fail, new ones will be created.
| It may hurt, may hurt for a while-- but from a purely
| economic perspective this might turn out to be a useful
| reboot. There are going to be a lot of phenomenal
| opportunities in the coming year.
|
| But the economy cannot do well if the people are not.
|
| For a thought experiment, imagine for a moment that we
| didn't need to keep delivering food and power and
| whatnot. It would be possible to simply _pause_ the
| entire economy-- just like contracts that don 't consider
| weekends business days-- in this fictional world we could
| freeze all accounts and all debts and whatnot for a year
| and then do "2020" over again. We can't do this because
| we need to keep a lot of people working to keep food and
| medical care flowing-- but I think the crazy idea is a
| useful illumination that the economy is a shared
| delusion. Whats going on now is only as devastating as we
| allow it to be, but the deaths of millions would be
| devastating (economically and otherwise) regardless of
| what we otherwise want.
| sorisos wrote:
| I wish and hope just pausing the economy is as easy as
| you say. I'm worried though, as the last decades the
| Economy appears to be this unpredictable daemon that
| affects everything and everyone but no one knows how to
| please it.
| ryandrake wrote:
| You can tell that, even today, people (especially the
| media) still don't understand the nature of exponential
| growth.
|
| Every day, there's an article describing the new cases or
| deaths as a "surge". Look for that word: Surge. This word
| implies that the growth is somehow sudden or unexpected,
| whereas every day's actual day-to-day growth was predicted
| pretty accurately months ago. But, if you read the news,
| every day is described as some surprising "surge". I wish
| the media would stop calling every day's number a "surge"
| and start reporting "New coronavirus cases grew at (or
| above or below) the expected rate, doubling every N days."
| isbadawi wrote:
| I've always read "a surge" as synonymous with "an
| increase", which could be expected or unexpected
| depending on the context.
| dboreham wrote:
| Yes, if you click "log scale" on any of the many graph
| sites for almost any region, you see a line that's better
| straight than I could draw freehand.
| vkou wrote:
| Actually, the log scale for infections in pretty much
| every polity has started bending downwards, about a week
| and a half after the lockdowns were put in place.
| matwood wrote:
| > Just goes to show that people will continue to ignore an
| exponential trend until it eats their lunch personally.
|
| Non-math/cs people typically haven't been directly exposed
| to exponential growth. Which, to be fair, can be an
| intuitively hard concept until someone sits down and thinks
| it through. The classic lily pad example is my usual go-to
| way of explaining exponential growth to someone.
|
| I also think a large part of this problem is societies
| overall rejection of science, but that's a different
| discussion.
| diryawish wrote:
| Isn't all flu growth exponential over the season then dies
| down? Apparently Australia had a bad flu season last year:
| https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-7148553/Horror-
| grap...
| FartyMcFarter wrote:
| There's a vaccine for the flu. That makes a huge
| difference, even if the diseases were otherwise just as
| bad as each other.
| alacombe wrote:
| Yes, seasonal flu starts exponentially, but people don't
| understand exponential growth and its limits.
| watwut wrote:
| > i've been saying "not more dangerous than the flu" before
| it started really going to shxt in europe, because to be
| honest, the epidemic doesn't look that dangerous if you're in
| general good health, just by looking at the numbers from a
| distance.
|
| It looks like flu, among other reasons, because popular
| comparison at the time compared all-ages mortality for flu
| (e.g. including old and sick) with healthy-young-person
| mortality of the covid. This very same comparison also
| ignores asymptomatic covid people and does not ignore
| asymptomatic people with flu. So it is twisted in all kind of
| ways.
| bcrosby95 wrote:
| > And i think this is the reason why even amongst the medical
| professional i've talked to, they first seemed not too
| worried at all.
|
| Medical professionals aren't professionals in everything. You
| may have been asking the equivalent a frontend developer for
| advice on writing COBOL for z/OS.
| rconti wrote:
| >i've been saying "not more dangerous than the flu" before it
| started really going to shxt in europe
|
| Have you stopped saying that, or are you still saying it for
| some reason?
|
| >It made me realize how getting vaccinated for the flu as
| soon as you reach 50 may actually be a pretty good idea..
|
| Do you realize, you can, and probably should, get vaccinated
| for the flu each year? And that these vaccines are only a
| 'best guess' for that particular year, so you should get on
| _each_ year?
|
| >It actually made me realize how the whole world has been
| completely desensitized to catastrophic predictions.
|
| I suppose the alternative is to not warn people about
| pandemics and just let them all run wild? I'm sorry if people
| choose to get "desensitized", but these organizations are not
| interested in the politics of whether or not the general
| public will be able to appropriately digest their messages,
| and hence don't ration warnings based on how much we can
| "handle".
| Juliate wrote:
| The flu, even with vaccines, does not overwhelm medical
| personel, facilities and logistics as this does.
|
| And the total death toll, given the current dynamics, is
| already going way way worse than the flu.
| ShorsHammer wrote:
| > the total death toll, given the current dynamics, is
| already going way way worse than the flu
|
| Fully aware of the types that will come out of the woodwork
| for simply saying this, however: no, it's currently still
| not on track for even a mild flu year yet alone a bad one.
|
| A bad year for influenza is about 650,000 deaths worldwide,
| pneumonia deaths are often an aftereffect of the flu and it
| kills 2.5 million on average each year.
|
| SARS-COV-2 has killed 60,000 in 5 months despite having no
| vaccine or known medicinal treatment, mainly due to locally
| overstretched medical resources more than anything else.
|
| It's not even close to being equivalent to a bad flu year
| yet, and that's ignoring the secondary deaths.
| nullc wrote:
| > A bad year for influenza is about
|
| Maybe about tenth your figure, once you exclude non-flu
| pneumonia-- which is about where we are now for covid19.
| Flu death figures are Flu+Pneumonia because they usually
| don't check. Efforts to separate flu from flu + pneumonia
| all result in flu being a small fraction of the total (
| https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3827586/ ).
| xscott wrote:
| The point still holds to compare Covid vs flu+pneumonia
| then. This is some weird No True Scotsman argument you're
| making where it's not the "True Flu" if they had
| pneumonia as well... (likely getting pneumonia because of
| the flu) I doubt the dead people would be comforted by
| such a subtle distinction.
| nullc wrote:
| The CDC's figure is "flu or pneumonia" (non-exclusive).
| The majority of the moralities included in it do not have
| influenza.
| KMag wrote:
| The plus operator here is "and/or" not "and", but I
| presume you must have understood this. The GP's point is
| that flu+pnumonia = (flu) U (non-flu pneumonia). Nobody
| is denying that flu with pneumonia is flu.
| bsaul wrote:
| Agreed, and that's why i changed my mind since i saw what's
| going on in europe.
|
| I just wanted to explain my initial reaction, based on what
| happened in china and by reading various medical people
| give their opinion.
| casefields wrote:
| Yes it does.
|
| 2018: Flu stomps the nation, overwhelming ERs and leaving
| 20 children dead:
| https://www.cnn.com/2018/01/12/health/flu-surveillance-
| cdc/i...
|
| 2013: Flu Outbreak Overwhelms Hospitals:
| https://fox8.com/news/flu-outbreak-overwhelms-area-
| hospitals...
|
| 2017: Hospitals Overwhelmed by Flu Patients Are Treating
| Them in Tents: https://time.com/5107984/hospitals-handling-
| burden-flu-patie...
|
| I still have yet to hear from the medical and nursing
| schools about increasing the number of students for the
| future.
| Lewton wrote:
| Those articles do not in anyway describe situations that
| are close to what we're seeing now in new york, italy,
| france and spain
|
| The flu is still terrible, btw. And I hope this situation
| will increase the vaccination rates for the flu
| Juliate wrote:
| I don't think you picture yet the scale at which we are
| all hit right now...
| pm90 wrote:
| I had a similar experience but I was ignorant about how rapid
| infection rates could overwhelm hospitals and lead to much
| higher mortality rates. In part probably because this stuff
| has never been explained in so much detail before.
| heimidal wrote:
| The part of that most people, including you, seen to miss is
| that this goes way beyond those sick with the virus. The
| strain this virus is putting on healthcare is unlike anything
| the flu does in any given year, even during epidemics in the
| past several decades. That means it will kill people who are
| sick with something else. Pray you don't have a need for an
| ICU bed any time soon.
|
| In the US, the flu kills between 12,000 and 61,000 people
| each year depending on the season. COVID-19 will almost
| certainly reach the low end of that range in between two and
| three days. It went from 100 to more than 9,000 deaths in
| only three weeks.
|
| It's not the flu.
|
| P.S. everyone who can get a flu shot should, every year,
| regardless of age. Herd immunity assists in protecting the
| entire population.
| [deleted]
| gpderetta wrote:
| Yes. In Italy it has already killed twice as many people as
| a normal influenza season.
| elorant wrote:
| I think that a lot of the people who are deniers are afraid of
| the economical consequences from the lockdown because they will
| be hit harder than others. So in their mind they choose to
| underplay the epidemic in order to justify their insecurity.
| nullc wrote:
| Meh. I'm extremely dubious, often in politics we often see
| the public arguing against their own economic self-interest.
| Why should this be any different?
|
| It's tempting to give ignorance and fear a complicated
| explanation couched in the suspicion of greedy forces. It's
| not parsimonious. Plain ignorance and distrust is sufficient.
| jpxw wrote:
| I've also had this issue and I've decided to simply give up on
| these people. In three weeks time, they are going to be eating
| their words anyway.
| rconti wrote:
| You need to walk away from these people entirely. Get rid of
| the conspiracy theorists in your life.
|
| The Twitterverse that generates fake news _feeds_ on the
| controversy generated by stupid opinions. It ascribes value to
| the clicks and responses intentionally stupid content, shouted
| loudly, acquire.
|
| When stupid people only talked to other stupid people IRL, the
| blast radius was limited. When I had a taxi driver spouting
| conspiracy theories, I didn't then take him with me to a party,
| and make all my friends listen to what he said.
| MadSudaca wrote:
| Some humans won't change their mind regardless of how much soft
| evidence they're presented with. This is good because we need
| variability. Evidence might be wrong, or it could be right, but
| following it could turn out to be worse a posteriori.
|
| This idea helps me provide a plausible explanation to some
| behavior I find counterintuitive.
| akvadrako wrote:
| Maybe you should try to explain why something that kills on
| average 450k every year is less serious then something that has
| only ever killed 70k. And not just less serious, but warranting
| several orders of magnitude fewer resources.
|
| It's you who need a reality check.
| jordanpg wrote:
| I think that at least US governments have done a poor job
| explaining the motivation behind the drastic precautionary
| orders. For a brief period, there was much talk of "flattening
| the curve" but I doubt that many people understand how that
| gets us to "deliberately wreck the economy."
|
| This is what people who say it's just flu++ are missing, and I
| am trying to be sympathetic to their lack of knowledge of
| exponential math and how medical services plan and allocate
| their resources. It is the government's job to explain how this
| is _very_ different from the flu and they are utterly failing
| to do so in many cases.
|
| In fact, I suspect that most people believe that the isolation
| policies are to protect individuals' health, ie. to prevent
| even young and healthy people from contracting the virus. And
| based on this false premise, they are right to be annoyed with
| the lockdowns.
|
| This is important because in a week or two, when the grocery
| stores start to empty and the lights start to flicker, the
| rugged individualist-types in the United States are going to
| start asking "why are we doing this, exactly?" And there is
| born civil unrest.
|
| It is the role of state and national governments to answer this
| question and they have not been effective in doing so. We are
| doing this because there are O(10^6) _preventable_ deaths in
| our future. _Not_ because of the danger to any one young
| healthy person.
| redis_mlc wrote:
| > We are doing this because there are O(10^6) preventable
| deaths
|
| That doesn't appear to be true. Almost everybody who goes on
| a ventilator dies. Corona virus will infect as many people as
| any other flu or cold.
|
| So it's a valid question - why do we still have a lockdown?
| lbeltrame wrote:
| > Almost everybody who goes on a ventilator dies.
|
| That wouldn't be a problem if so, to be honest. The problem
| is that a patient usually survives, but it takes 3 weeks in
| the ICU to do so.
| Juliate wrote:
| To slow down the spread and ultimately reduce the number of
| people that will get to go in ICUs, go on a ventilator
| and/or die.
|
| Because those _are_ preventable, if they don't get
| infected.
|
| That, in turn, buys time to medical research & practice to
| mitigate and cure the disease, so that, later, when someone
| vulnerable is infected, we'll know better how to take care
| of them.
| [deleted]
| yodsanklai wrote:
| > This is what people who say it's just flu++ are missing,
| and I am trying to be sympathetic to their lack of knowledge
|
| This is very condescending. There are still a lot of
| unknowns, and there are smart people (for instance [1]) out
| there who think the cure may be worth than the disease. We
| urgently need more data.
|
| [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QUvWaxuurzQ
| jordanpg wrote:
| Reasonable people can certainly disagree about whether the
| cure is worse than the disease.
|
| That said, the world's governments have made a decision to
| react in a certain way, and I maintain that my intuition
| tells me that most people don't understand the real reason
| for the lockdowns.
|
| They think it is to prevent them personally from getting
| sick. That's not really true. The point is to prevent the
| medical infrastructure from becoming overwhelmed so that if
| and when people do become sick, they can be given their
| best shot at recovery.
| yodsanklai wrote:
| > The point is to prevent the medical infrastructure from
| becoming overwhelmed
|
| I think this is clear for most people. I'm not American
| but I've watched Trump recent talk and they explained
| this clearly in a way everybody could understand.
|
| What they didn't explain though is the post-lockdown
| strategy.
|
| Most likely, in a few weeks, only a small fraction of the
| US population will be immune, and the problem won't be
| solved anymore than it was before the lockdown (except
| that the country is stalled). The virus will still be
| there, and there won't be any vaccine. I'd like them to
| think a few steps ahead and tell us what will be their
| plan.
| abstractbarista wrote:
| The flu kills 290,000 to 650,000 per year worldwide according
| to WHO. Today we're still <80k for Corona, and new cases are
| slowing.
| thebruce87m wrote:
| It's not slowing down naturally - we are all on lockdown in
| order to slow it.
| TechBro8615 wrote:
| What's amusing to be is how anyone can look at the incompetence
| of governments across the world, and conclude they'd be capable
| of any kind of organized conspiracy against the general
| population.
| cool_dude85 wrote:
| Things like wholesale NSA data collection were organized
| conspiracies against the population. There are plenty of
| examples, even just considering the US.
| axguscbklp wrote:
| Strange that you got downvoted. NSA collection of American
| data fits any reasonable definition of "conspiracy against
| the population" that I can think of.
| Kaiyou wrote:
| It's always about benefits. Incompetence doesn't cost
| government benefits, so nobody cares. However, if there are
| benefits to be had by organizing a conspiracy against
| whomever, you can bet your money that this will be done.
| Nobody cares for "the greater good" or whatever. It's always
| about personal benefits.
| jrd259 wrote:
| I only wish it was only about benefits, because then it
| would be rational agent. What (economic) benefit does the
| Republican party of the US gain by suppressing gay rights
| or abortion? I can understand wanting to quash unions,
| prevent minorities from voting, remove environmental
| controls (in the short run anyway), or cast doubt on
| opposition media. But who actually gains when e.g. a gay
| couple can't buy a cake?
| distances wrote:
| Indeed! Every time someone mentions "them" running whatever
| conspiracy I'm reminded of the quote "Do you not know, my
| son, with how little wisdom the world is governed?"
|
| Looks like it's already centuries old even, from 1600s
| Sweden:
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Axel_Oxenstierna#Quotation
| notahacker wrote:
| Yep. Actual conspiracies are comparatively banal, and often
| more to do with covering up incompetence than establishing
| new world orders with incredible technological advances. To
| bring up famous examples from the not too distant past, the
| same administration supposedly capable of secretly planting
| demolition charges in busy NYC offices without anyone
| noticing apparently saw it as too risky to secretly plant
| chemical weapons needed to be 'discovered' somewhere in an
| entire country under the control of its military.
| catalogia wrote:
| _All_ theories about what happened on 9 /11/2001, including
| the official _9 /11 Commission Report_, are conspiracy
| theories. They disagree on who the conspirators were, but
| every last theory about it is a conspiracy theory.
| smolder wrote:
| Not in order to give credibility to the idea, but I do
| think it would be easier for a group of conspirators _based
| in the US_ to pull off secret demolition charges than for
| them to plant weapons in a foreign country unnoticed.
| notahacker wrote:
| One theoretical conspiracy involves personnel carrying
| around large explosive charges and drilling holes in
| strategically placed beams on every floor of a
| permanently occupied and secure office building unnoticed
| by any one of thousands of surviving workers. The other
| involves a truck in an area the US is known to be
| conducting military operations unloading stuff at an
| abandoned remote facility and then calling in non-
| conspirators to validate their 'find', and accusing any
| Iraqi who argues the facility had other purposes of
| lying. Not saying there aren't reasons the second
| wouldn't go wrong - from getting ambushed or inspected
| _en route_ to UN weapons inspectors concluding the
| material is unlikely to be of Iraqi origin - but it 's
| not more difficult to plant stuff in a remote location
| than secretly prepare for a controlled demolition of a
| heavily occupied skyscraper.
| analyst74 wrote:
| I used to think conspiracy theories are unrealistic, the
| image of a group of people sitting in a dark room conspiring
| against others just seems ridiculous.
|
| But the older I get, and the more understanding I have over
| how large organizations are ran, the more I realize that
| conspiracies actually do happen, but in much more subtle
| ways.
|
| What actually happens is that over a long periods of time,
| people collaborate with and promote those who think like
| them, with similar biases and incentives. Then when a major
| decision needs to be made, everyone at the table think the
| same way and agree on the same solution. This works even
| across organizations, as people's career are made through
| networks and relationships transcending organizational
| boundaries.
|
| It is difficult to get a group of people to understand
| something when all their salaries depends upon them not
| understanding it.
| ben_w wrote:
| Isn't that called "cronyism" (or "old boys club") rather
| than "conspiracy"?
| analyst74 wrote:
| True, although the term cronyism and old boys club focus
| on the exclusivity of those "elite" circles, rather than
| the impact of their decisions, which looks a lot like
| conspiracy from outside.
|
| Some people end up coming up with conspiracy theories
| based on their outsider observations.
| david_w wrote:
| "What's amusing to be is how anyone can look at the
| incompetence of governments across the world, and conclude
| they'd be capable of any kind of organized conspiracy against
| the general population."
|
| Tell that to the Jews in Deutchland circa 1931...
|
| Tell that to the Kulaks in the Ukraine in 1930
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Holodomor,
|
| Tell that to the educated classes in China under
| Mao;https://www.globalsecurity.org/military/world/china/mao-
| murd...
|
| You see conspiratorial thinking as some kind of bug in the
| thinking of insuffciently skeptical and analytical minds; a
| branch of stupidity. But it's not. It's a self-defense
| mechanism which, like other things considered antiquated and
| ineffcient like borders and control over immigration saves
| people from mass death.
|
| These things don't exist because people are stupid and can't
| reason. They exist because people aren't stupid and do reason
| and then believe in their own mind's creations.
|
| No matter how smart or sophisticated or computer-aided your
| reasoning is, no matter how big your data set becomes, you
| will only match and elucidate upon, but not beat, instincts
| which evolved under real Darwinian pressures which make you
| aware and wary of things which kill en masse.
| AlexandrB wrote:
| The listed examples are conspiracies by the dictionary
| definition - "a group of people acting in harmony to a
| common, illegal end" - but I don't think they're the same
| thing the parent poster was referring to. Conspiracy
| theories generally revolve around some _secret_ action by
| the government or other large organizations, not open
| slaughter. A better example might be COINTELPRO.
| zzzcpan wrote:
| Technically the government itself is a form of conspiracy
| against the general population. But people don't know that,
| even educated people, because political science isn't
| mandatory in higher education. But labeling something as
| conspiracy theory is a useful tool to silence discussions
| about all the evil governments and large organizations do.
| the_af wrote:
| > _Technically the government itself is a form of
| conspiracy against the general population_
|
| "Technically" in which sense? Which political science
| course taught you that? Or are you referring to some
| specific government?
| david_w wrote:
| Right. Conspiracies happen all the time because there are
| plans, which if understood by those upon whom the
| planners wish to enact them, would be rejected by their
| targets.
|
| That describes most plans people have.
|
| So the planners deceive and dissemble. That is how the
| world has always worked.
|
| What's more, it's instinctive knowledge that this is
| happening all the time. Suspicion of those in power is a
| human instinct which, like all instincts, optimizes our
| survival chances under the conditions for which it
| evolved. WRT to political conspiracies, those conditions
| still hold today.
|
| The way to think about conspiracy theories is the same
| way you think about inventors and inventions.
|
| Nature produces inventors (conspiracy minded individuals)
| many of whom produce only harebrained inventions
| ("conspiracy theories" so called) some more who produce
| hit and miss inventions and a few which produce
| inventions which are overwhelming important and matter to
| survival ("Hitler is going to kills us all, we must flee
| right now!" - spoken by a Jew in 1933 Munich).
|
| What this mapping between domains, inventions and
| conspiracies, also implies is that just because someone
| was wrong about one conspiracy doesn't mean they are
| wrong about all conspiracies and their credibility should
| not be automatically bankrupted if they believe one or
| two false conspiracy theories.
|
| I do read _some_ conspiracy theory sites and like to hear
| plausible (non-alien / lizard people) ones because I want
| my mind to at least entertain the idea. It's like panning
| for gold. Most of it is nothing. Once in a while, maybe a
| little taste of something and I retain it dimly awaiting
| future possible supporting evidence.
|
| For example, the "desperate labor shortage" and
| "Americans don't like STEM" meme is a clear conspiracy
| amongst employers and attorneys and their clients to
| control engineering wages and have more of the profits go
| to business owners. I used to not know about that
| "conspiracy theory" then I heard it and wondered if it
| could be true then over time the evidence for it became
| incontravertible.
|
| Just to give one example.
| [deleted]
| claudeganon wrote:
| People can be capable of organizing conspiracies for their
| own self-interest and quite poor (or simply disinterested) in
| coordinating effective action otherwise. This is the story of
| every corrupt institution in history. You have to think
| beyond binary frames.
| pm90 wrote:
| Yes exactly. Most people don't know or care about how
| Governments and Corporations really work. All they see are
| memes and conspiracy theories and latch on to them.
| thombat wrote:
| Like the endless YouTube conspiracy-oriented channels which
| rant about the vast Illuminati/Jewish/Deep-State/whatever
| conspiracy that holds our world in thrall and assassinates
| with impunity, yet somehow can't manage to file a few bogus
| DMCA claims to get the YouTube channels shutdown.
|
| Of course if one tries pointing this out the response is
| sometimes "oh, they're so powerful that they like to mock
| us", but more commonly just to accuse you of being a
| shill/deep-state-agent/whatever.
| catalogia wrote:
| Supposing for the sake of argument that the Illuminati were
| real and you were in charge of it. You know a bunch of
| weirdos on youtube know the truth and are generally
| regarded as cranks. Would you bother concerning yourself
| with them, or would you ignore them since they're pathetic
| and powerless? I'd ignore them.
|
| To be clear, I don't think the Illuminati are real, but I
| don't think your reasoning is sound either.
| thombat wrote:
| An all-encompassing conspiracy orchestrating events
| across the globe, sparing no effort or expense to weave
| us all into an inescable spider's web of connected
| threads, that then says "eh, probably nobody is even
| going to listen to those guys, let's not bother with
| having the intern fire off a few boilerplate take-downs"?
| catalogia wrote:
| Sure, why not? It's obvious _" probably nobody is even
| going to listen to those guys"_ is true...
| smolder wrote:
| The sorts of incentives for organized conspiracy would
| naturally be bigger than the incentives for competence in
| executing ordinary matters of government. However the
| rareness of uncovering organized conspiracies suggests they
| are rarely attempted more than it suggests some
| hypercompetent class of conspirators.
| Kaiyou wrote:
| Define "rare". Based on the ones I know were admitted
| alone, I'd think they are rather common.
| XorNot wrote:
| Its because they're not what people want to imagine
| (hypercompetent ubermenchen who they're outsmarting) but
| just covering up "mundane" though still devestating
| crimes.
| lozf wrote:
| Perhaps they'd all been watching Dr. Drew, who is apparently
| trying to use the DMCA to remove this[0] compilation of him
| downplaying the Coronavirus.
|
| [0]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SKlJlQadZtE
| mercer wrote:
| What's different, I suppose, is that certain types of people
| have a huge platform in the US via Fox News and the like.
|
| In my country, The Netherlands, for the most part people didn't
| really seem to take things seriously, even when our PM told us
| to. All the same kinds of talking points (similar to flu, lots
| of people die from car accidents, etc.).
|
| And so in the first weekend, with some restrictions already in
| place and Italy being in deep trouble, we all went to sit in
| parks and socialize like nothing was wrong.
|
| It was only the week after that things changed. The government
| didn't suddenly enforce a full-on lockdown, but rather it was a
| combination of 1) our PM _imploring_ everyone to change their
| behavior, 2) partial social distancing measures that were
| noticeable (events cancelled, restaurants closed for anything
| but take-out /pick-up), and perhaps 3) a sinking-in of how bad
| things were going elsewhere.
|
| I've been 'immersing' myself in how the media reports things,
| the political debates and press conferences, and the way my
| social circles and people on the streets respond, and so far my
| impression is that there are two crucial factors that have
| resulted in 'proper' behaviour around here, despite the great
| weather: First, as it becomes clear that actual things change
| (limited no. of people in a supermarket, restaurants closed,
| specific public spaces closed when necessary), people realize
| it's not just abstract, and 2) while we are an individualist,
| recalcitrant bunch, we do ultimately have a lot of trust in the
| expertise of our government (whether justified or not).
|
| I'm very interested to see how things develop in the US, and
| quite concerned in particular when it comes to 2.
|
| EDIT: I'll add that personally I think at least initially our
| government was way too laissez-faire about this, and probably
| more so than many other countries in Europe other than the UK
| (and Sweden?). Our PM was/is perhaps too torn between taking
| things seriously and keeping the economy going. Which I suppose
| is exactly what he should be doing as a center-right
| politician.
| zapttt wrote:
| my hot take: this is all because we are engineers designing
| social networks.
|
| think about it. email, twitter, etc. it all works like any
| network protocol meant for machines. it is cheap to spam. there
| is no middle ground between anonymity and spam. each node must
| handle their own peers. etc.
|
| what if it was designed by actual sociologists or people that
| actually deal with human, instead of engineer. one would hope
| in such world tweeter would reduce exposition to all those
| accounts, because people around me that I trust do not engage
| with or outright block them. also I could have means to benefit
| of all that network without rendering all my information to the
| service. etc.
|
| in summary, _we_ are to blame for most of it.
| [deleted]
| edw519 wrote:
| _Instead they just continued to use their ordinary m.o., which,
| as the epidemic has made clear, is to talk confidently about
| things they don 't understand._
|
| Those of us with I.T. managers have been putting up with this
| forever:
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunning%E2%80%93Kruger_effect
| anthony_r wrote:
| It's very simple - skin in the game. Good that PG discovered this
| older-than-humanity principle of evolution.
|
| Heads should be rolling after a large failure like this (not
| necessarily literal heads).
|
| Don't tell me what you think, show me your portfolio.
| FartyMcFarter wrote:
| Boris Johnson has quite a lot of skin in the game now; he
| boasted about shaking hands with coronavirus patients a few
| weeks ago and is now in the hospital.
| jpxw wrote:
| He acquired the infection weeks after the handshake comment.
| It seems unlikely the two events are linked.
| Lewton wrote:
| The incubation period can be two weeks and time to hospital
| is also usually a couple of days after symptom onset. So
| saying it's unlikely seems weird
| polack wrote:
| How do you come to that conclusion? He literally said he
| would _continue_ to shake hands, so why is it unlikely that
| he contained it from shaking hands?
|
| The point is also that if you continue to shake hands it
| doesn't make sense to be careful regarding other ways of
| getting it either. His attitude towards the whole thing
| would make him a prime candidate to the Darwin award if he
| ends up dying.
| guscost wrote:
| This cuts both ways.
| crusso wrote:
| Do people appreciate that denial of the severity of this virus
| came from all political quarters?
|
| Here's one showing the mistakes of left-leaning media I found in
| 2 seconds:
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?time_continue=36&v=wVDPVBZF2Xg
|
| It's just as easy to find supercuts of Pelosi, DeBlasio, and
| other prominent Democrats telling people that they didn't need to
| start social distancing or that the virus wasn't airborne
| contagious.
|
| Bad judgement is a human failing that cuts across party lines. To
| think that this is a long-term credibility problem for only some
| people shows a lack of a healthy diversity of news sources. At
| the end of this, everyone will go back to their teams' dugouts
| and prepare for the next political battle. Nothing will have been
| learned about credibility.
| throwaway32120 wrote:
| That's one of the issues with hyperpartisanship. Everyone
| thinks that people need to be held accountable - as long as
| it's people they already decided were terrible. The truth is
| the response to this pandemic has been poor across the board.
| Go back and read what people were saying in February to see how
| unprepared everyone was.
|
| Bill Gates, for example, is held up as someone who saw this
| coming. However, if you read what he wrote at the end of
| February about what needs to be done to stop the Coronavirus,
| you'll he didn't raise any issues about the way it was being
| handled within the United States, and viewed the main problem
| being the difficulties that poor countries would have handling
| it. Even a few days ago there were almost no leaders calling
| for mass use of face coverings. And there still seem to be very
| few (if any) calling for an implementation of measures like
| those that are successfully combating the virus in South Korea.
| bduerst wrote:
| The video snippet you linked is from January. You can tell
| because it talks about the upcoming Iowa caucus.
|
| This is approximately the time that the first patient tested
| positive in the U.S. The video that OP references goes into
| February and March, so I don't think these are equivalent.
| jacquesm wrote:
| Being wrong and being in charge are different than just being
| wrong. Responsibility should come at a price.
| crusso wrote:
| I'd be all for holding politicians in charge accountable, but
| that's where everyone gets squishy depending upon who they
| support?
|
| One guy's being wrong becomes another guy's "not that big of
| a deal".
|
| By what metric will you measure "being wrong" for this
| COVID-19 pandemic? A super cut of video clips showing a
| reluctance to believe uncertain information coming out of
| China? Death rate compared to other OECD countries? Whether
| or not the great Hydroxychloroquine efficacy debate goes one
| way or another? Whether or not the ban of flights to/from
| China were effective?
| jacquesm wrote:
| When you are not in charge you can say whatever you want,
| it won't kill people. So that's why it matters. It's not
| about who you support. "The Buck Stops Here".
| javagram wrote:
| It did come from all political quarters, however one political
| quarter stayed in denial much longer. Notice how many of the
| clips from your video are from January or early February.
|
| The POTUS was still publicly pushing the coronavirus = flu
| comparison in early March even after we saw what happened in
| Iran and Italy. Remember, he said on February 28 that being
| worried about the coronavirus was "their new hoax" from the
| media and his political opponents, so he himself recognized his
| political opponents were pointing out the severity by late
| February.
|
| Edit: i don't want to get too deep in the politics with this, I
| do agree with your ultimate point that most won't learn from
| this and will simply return to their team's side regardless of
| who got this one more right.
| crusso wrote:
| _however one political quarter stayed in denial much longer_
|
| Now you're splitting hairs. You know who the first politician
| in the USA who was banging the drums in alarm about Wuhan and
| the coronavirus? Tom Cotton. Republican Senator. Do you
| support him now? Does his early conviction of the severity of
| this event put you behind him and everyone who echoed his
| concerns? Are you likewise now opposed to the people who were
| ridiculing him as a conspiracy theorist and fear-monger?
| javagram wrote:
| Tom Cotton was one of the people who were on this and
| warning of it early. So was Steve Bannon. There are others.
| Just because someone has an R by their name doesn't mean
| they're a homogeneous blob.
|
| I think that's great, I don't agree with all their politics
| but they didn't let themselves be blinded by optimism and
| looked at what was actually going on here. And the theory
| that the virus may have accidentally escaped from the lab
| where they were studying bat coronaviruses always seemed
| credible to me (Reminder, the 1977 flu likely escaped from
| a Russian or Chinese lab but this was never admitted
| either).
|
| The political quarter that was in denial was mainly the
| POTUS and those who simply follow whatever the POTUS is
| doing without independent thought (Hannity, etc.) Edit:
| again, he was calling it "their new hoax" so you really
| can't deny that he was behind on this one :-)
| godelski wrote:
| It probably depends who you are taking your information from.
| For example, here is an expert saying that it is just like the
| flu[0] (Linkedin [1]).
|
| The other part, is that we shouldn't expect consensus in
| something like this. Why? Because data is evolving and
| changing. This is in contrast to something like Climate Change
| where we have a large amount of post hoc data/analysis. Here
| the analysis is being done in situ and that is much more
| difficult. It should be unsurprising that opinions change as
| information changes.
|
| [0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lGC5sGdz4kg
|
| [1] https://www.linkedin.com/in/knutmwittkowski
| burke_holland wrote:
| I had this same thought. Here's Pelosi encouraging people to
| come to Chinatown.
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eFCzoXhNM6c
|
| Also, we should be careful about how much we eviscerate people
| on both sides politically during this time. If our leaders are
| too afraid of repercussions to make difficult decisions, they
| may make bad decisions instead.
|
| I'm calling for moratorium on partisan finger-pointing. I think
| we're all in this together, and that's the only way we're
| getting out of it.
| 5cott0 wrote:
| There is still a concerted, coordinated effort to signal boost
| reckless armchair epidemiologists arguing that COVID-19 is "just
| the flu" and the response is destroying the economy for nothing
| and/or a prelude to totalitarian police state.
| jamsb wrote:
| HTTPS isn't supported :(
| collyw wrote:
| Wasn't Elon Musk going to make a website that rated the
| credibility of journalism somehow? What happened to that?
| clouddrover wrote:
| Musk himself has no credibility when it comes to coronavirus.
| He's spent three months demonstrating that he knows nothing
| about it:
|
| https://jalopnik.com/elon-musk-has-played-an-extremely-dange...
| Lewton wrote:
| Musk is still actively downplaying the severity of the
| situation. Recently he's been signal boosting the idea that
| many more people are infected than we think and therefore the
| alarmism is unwarranted
| collyw wrote:
| Considering the amount of testing that is actually being
| done, no one has much ideas of the real number of cases. With
| any luck he will be right but no one really knows.
| danans wrote:
| > With any luck he will be right but no one really knows.
|
| Even he doesn't know if he's right, but apparently that
| doesn't stop him from using his influence to push his hot
| take.
|
| At this point, the only thing that can be claimed with
| confidence is our global ignorance of this pandemic, and
| how much more we have to learn about it.
| lazyjones wrote:
| So what exactly are you saying? 1) he is evil, 2) he is
| wrong?
|
| For 1), it's up to you to judge him based on your perceptions
| (I'd disagree), for 2) you'd need a little more than your gut
| feeling to call him wrong. Germany is testing extensively and
| resulting current estimates are around 1% mortality (WHO
| estimate: 3,4%).
| Lewton wrote:
| He's wrong.
|
| More people being asymptomatic is not a cause for reacting
| less strictly, which is the view being promoted. If more
| people are asymptomatic, that's great news, but it does not
| impact how severely you should lockdown society as the
| DDOS'ing of the health sector is still clearly a problem to
| avoid looking at france, spain and italy. It only means
| that you'll be able to end the lockdown sooner than
| expected
| lazyjones wrote:
| We'll see how Sweden fares in the end. I'm not promoting
| their methods of dealing with the pandemic, but I believe
| the different health systems affect the outcome more.
| Italy has around 1/3 to 1/4 the hospital beds per capita
| of Austria, Germany, South Korea but more than Sweden and
| the USA.
| Lewton wrote:
| Comparing Denmark vs Sweden, it looks like we're
| beginning to see the difference in outcome on the death
| toll and hospitalization rates. Denmarks death toll is
| stabilizing (or at the very least only growing linearly)
| and the amount of people in hospitals with covid-19 has
| been stable for a week [0] (and no not because the
| hospitals are packed)
|
| While Sweden is seemingly continuing the exponential
| trend in both over the past 4-5 days
|
| [0] https://www.sst.dk/da/corona/tal-og-overvaagning the
| chart say "Indlagte patienter med bekraeftet COVID-19 pr.
| dag "
| lazyjones wrote:
| It may be a bit early to say. Social distancing delays
| the infections. It's possible that it kills the virus,
| but unlikely, so people will be infected and possibly die
| later if they aren't immune already. Sweden is not able
| to stop infections at all, their health system is
| guaranteed to be overwhelmed, but survivors will most
| likely be immune and it will be over quickly, one way or
| another, when everyone has been exposed to the virus.
| Lewton wrote:
| Do you think they'll have the stomach to continue with
| the plan once their hospitals are overwhelmed? I'm
| extremely skeptical they won't eventually have to lock
| down harder than Denmark
| lazyjones wrote:
| I am not sure - there's still a chance that we won't
| reach the claimed 50-70% infections for some unknown
| reason, like the weather or some people being more
| resistant. Our (Austrian) chancellor said recently (~2
| weeks ago) that he expects all health systems in the EU
| to become overwhelmed, though currently the outlook seems
| much better (even Italy has been sounding more optimistic
| lately). I don't know what to conclude from this other
| than that the worst possible outcome might not be as
| dramatic as previously thought, so Sweden might just pull
| through with it.
| watwut wrote:
| His idea of credibity and mine are not the same. At minimum, he
| himself is not trustworthy.
| collyw wrote:
| That doesn't mean that the concept is a bad idea, or that he
| won't come up with something that can be demonstarted to be
| trustworthy.
| catalogia wrote:
| I thought that was a joke. The name he proposed for it
| ('Pravda') was certainly a joke.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pravda
| aantthony wrote:
| Haven't heard if that's going ahead.
|
| But I'm working on a similar concept: https://verifact.io which
| will be launching soon
| sixstringtheory wrote:
| Tangential regarding Dr. Drew. I remember watching Loveline on
| MTV and hearing it a bit on radio when I was younger, and
| remember thinking how progressive him and Adam Corolla sounded.
| When I discovered much later that they're still going on
| podcasts, I've tuned in a couple times over the last decade but
| usually wind up cringing or disagreeing. I used to think Adam
| Corolla was mostly funny and made some good points, now I find
| him pretty distasteful. What happened, did they shift in their
| outlooks/politics/behaviors/etc, or did I and I'm just realizing
| how they've always been? It just seems like as I get older, many
| people in the generations ahead of me are getting crazier, and it
| makes me worried that at some point I'm going to lose my grip on
| reality. How does this happen?
| koheripbal wrote:
| I think that may have more to do with how you evolved than how
| they did.
| lone_haxx0r wrote:
| When mainstream media has been pushing pernicious narratives and
| outright lies for many years, I see why people would be skeptic
| about their claims.
|
| Unfortunately, most people don't have the means (technical
| knowledge, time) to appropriately asses the real danger of this
| situation, so they have two options:
|
| - Believe the liars.
|
| - Don't believe the liars.
|
| It turns out, the liars weren't lying this time.
| Juliate wrote:
| Well, it doesn't help much either to put a mainstream
| entertainment persona as the president of the USA.
| [deleted]
| Cookingboy wrote:
| >most people don't have the means (technical knowledge, time)
| to appropriately asses the real danger of this situation,
|
| That's only part of the problem. The real problem is that they
| don't _want_ to do due diligence. It feels much better to
| believe /disbelieve things based on whether they want them too
| be true or not, rather than actually finding out they are true
| or not.
| deepender99 wrote:
| economic crises is also coming...
| simion314 wrote:
| Disappointingly politicians and their supporters pushed the
| narrative into blaming X or Y.
|
| I would politely ask HNers who were in the is just the flu camp
| to reflect (please don't comment, just reflect) why I was wrong,
| what bias or whatever flaw my thinking had and avoid blaming X or
| Y for your mistake. Btw I am not accusing people here, I also was
| not anticipating things to go like this.
| jonnypotty wrote:
| People are being entertained not informed.
| nurettin wrote:
| People don't care about the distinction.
| INGELRII wrote:
| > They didn't realize there was any danger in making false
| predictions.
|
| Is there any danger for them? PG seems to have very idealistic
| view of politics.
|
| As far as I know, any amount of fact checking in politics don't
| change political views.
|
| Will Fox News lose any viewers over this? Politicians may lose
| jobs because bad economy, but will they lose votes because they
| were wrong and ignorant?
|
| H. L. Mencken wrote:
|
| > No one in this world, so far as I know--and I have searched the
| records for years, and employed agents to help me--has ever lost
| money by underestimating the intelligence of the great masses of
| the plain people. Nor has anyone ever lost public office thereby.
| The mistake that is made always runs the other way. Because the
| plain people are able to speak and understand, and even, in many
| cases, to read and write, it is assumed that they have ideas in
| their heads, and an appetite for more. This assumption is a
| folly.
|
| I think there is great Mencken experiment going on. Always
| underestimate public and see how far you can go.
| arkades wrote:
| I think you misread the passage that you quote as supporting
| idealism. The full passage is:
|
| "The answer, I realized, is that they didn't think they could
| get caught. They didn't realize there was any danger in making
| false predictions. These people constantly make false
| predictions, and get away with it, because the things they make
| predictions about either have mushy enough outcomes that they
| can bluster their way out of trouble, or happen so far in the
| future that few remember what they said."
|
| Making a false prediction on the premise that you can bluster
| your way out of it doesn't indicate that they think the false
| prediction doesn't have consequences - it indicates that they
| think the false prediction doesn't have consequences _for
| them_. That they can _get away with it_. It 's "I can say what
| I want, because nothing bad will happen to me personally for
| lying."
|
| I wouldn't call that idealism.
| zJayv wrote:
| From what Mencken book/essay is this quote?
| x509fan wrote:
| 'Notes on Journalism' in the Chicago Tribune (19.09.1926)
| https://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/myl/MenckenNotes.pdf
| dillonmckay wrote:
| Votes will be lost, because people are unnecessarily putting
| themselves and others at risk, and some will die.
| tertius wrote:
| What you're saying is that votes should be lost. Claiming
| that they will be is a stretch.
| a1369209993 wrote:
| Actually, I think what they're saying is that voters will
| die, and therefore reduce the number of available votes.
|
| Edit: and, of course, that this effect will
| dispropotionately affect political tribes whose
| propagandists under-, rather than over-, estimated the
| dangers of covid-19.
| [deleted]
| natmaka wrote:
| Isn't tied to the size of the 'public' (crowd)?
|
| Too few members in the crowd, and the probability for one to
| understand and explain to others remains too low.
|
| Too many of them and the Big Chiefs control the media, and also
| live so high in the Sky nobody seems credible when it comes to
| criticize, moreover all non-official messages are diluted into
| other ones to the point of many being not even emitted because
| the ones understanding the situation know that they will not be
| heard.
| basch wrote:
| >any amount of fact checking in politics don't change political
| views.
|
| That is what I was thinking.
|
| Paul is writing as if credibility stems from reality. When in
| reality, the reverse its true. Fox news is credible, its
| viewers believe that, and whatever those credible people say,
| is reality. As long as people keep tuned in only to Fox News,
| that reality wont shatter. Their credibility exists because of
| their reach, its strength in numbers, its entertainment factor.
| Calling Fox News news and not entertainment is quite a leap.
| Most of what they have to say exists to keep people hooked, not
| to educate them into being more capable of performing civic
| duties. Fox News wants people to vote in a way that benefits
| Fox News, not the voter, and the same principal applies to all
| their coverage of everything. Coronavirus skeptic was a
| contrarian position to take, it divided their people from other
| people. Now that they are divided, they can switch sides and
| still maintain the artificial divide, and keep their viewers
| isolated from "alternate" realities.
|
| This was a really good article by Kara Swisher of ReCode, who
| at the end finally convinces her mom to heed medical warnings
| about being out and about, cant convince her to turn off Fox.
|
| https://www.nytimes.com/2020/03/31/opinion/coronavirus-fox-n...
|
| They can flip a 180 overnight, and the viewers will see it as
| people with "updated information" and continue to cheer them
| on.
|
| https://www.thedailybeast.com/fox-news-stars-sean-hannity-an...
|
| There is the sad irony too, that the demographic who watches
| Fox news is already the most likely to be at risk (age, faith
| over evidence, distrusting of established medicine and
| government) denial not withstanding. Add denial to the mix, and
| youve got a real bad stew.
| amanaplanacanal wrote:
| The problem is that the channel is named "fox news", but they
| have both news shows (which are actually not bad), and
| opinion programming, which is pretty terrible. I suspect most
| people don't really make a distinction between the two.
| seppin wrote:
| Why would you assume they want to? Opinion shows are the
| only thing watched on Fox News, they are the primetime
| lineup. Everything else is filler.
| cortesoft wrote:
| Right, but this might change as people they know start dying.
| It is easy to lie about things happening that don't directly
| affect the people being lied to, but if you personally know
| multiple people killed by the virus, it will be hard to lie
| about it.
| ryandrake wrote:
| This is a deliberately built political philosophy, one of the
| results of Karl Rove's "reality-based community" [1] idea,
| from over 15 years ago. Whether or not the label was actually
| coined by Rove is debated, but essentially this idea is that
| some people lived in a world that was "reality-based" and
| that others were not limited by reality and thus were
| better/stronger politicians. In practice, what this means is
| the Bush administration did not have to believe in and be
| bound by this thing called reality, they _created reality_
| when they acted.
|
| President Trump is just continuing this idea through today.
| Unlike GWB and cronies, Trump and team don't even have to act
| to "create reality", they merely talk and reality instantly
| changes for their followers. It's a powerful tool and like
| him or hate him, his administration is using it skillfully.
|
| 1: https://www.nytimes.com/2004/10/17/magazine/faith-
| certainty-...
| AzzieElbab wrote:
| to an outsider, americas left vs right hostility and mutual
| disrespect are becoming painful to watch. lets make a
| counter example to they one you provided, does the nyt
| "create reality" for their readers? they did publish their
| fare share of dangerously incorrect material about the
| virus, pandemic, the countermeasures,you name it.
| nabla9 wrote:
| This is false equivalency.
|
| When you have to seek to find bad examples from other
| side, and it's the every day modus operandi the other
| side there is no comparison.
| AmericanChopper wrote:
| You could show this comment to anybody from either of the
| general left/right tribes, and they'd think it was true.
| Whether you'd use this reasoning to deride Fox News, or
| CNN (or pretty much any other 'news' organisation), would
| boil down entirely to your tribal affiliation. When I was
| younger, having "critical thinker" or "anti-
| establishment" views would generally lead to the
| conclusion that politicians and mass-media tend to
| lie/mislead to promote whatever their agenda is. Now,
| those same views seem to lead to the conclusion that "the
| politicians and mass-media of the other side tend to
| lie/mislead to promote their agenda, but the politicians
| and mass-media of my side are generally pretty good". I
| think that's pretty sad. But perhaps I'm wrong, perhaps
| things have always been this way, and my perspective has
| simply changed. That said, I don't remember any counter-
| culture icons coming out to endorse career politicians
| who'd accepted millions of dollars from big business
| interests when I was a kid.
| AzzieElbab wrote:
| the two outlets are absolutely equal when it comes to
| making half of the americans view the other half as
| raging lunatics. it is basically this
| https://youtu.be/aFQFB5YpDZE
| seppin wrote:
| Trump is a lunatic, literally. Obama was a smart,
| measured person people didn't like.
|
| There's a difference.
| iron0013 wrote:
| I'm not sure that's true. Some objective "truth" exists
| in the world whether it's noticed and reported correctly
| or not (the tree falling in the woods), and some news
| outlets (NYT) report this truth more accurately than
| others (Fox News). It's misleading to insist on "both
| siding" to make a mountain of untruths from one outlet
| seem to be the same size as a molehill of untruths from
| the other.
| squarefoot wrote:
| "like him or hate him, his administration is using it
| skillfully"
|
| I couldn't agree more.
|
| https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/trump-recorded-
| havin...
|
| Not many people could survive this, then become president.
| jcadam wrote:
| Politicians have survived worse.
| zentiggr wrote:
| I think the factor you missed in relating anything prior to
| the Trump era is the fact that Trump is an obvious,
| completely symptomatic Narcissistic Personality Disorder.
|
| When he is back out of politics, watch for the other
| appointees to not just be replaced due to the change of
| president, but actively canned because they are all cronies
| appointed as a personality cult, and/or as favors to his
| worshipers.
|
| And yes, I'm morbidly curious to imagine what the Trump
| presidential library might wind up containing. I snarkily
| predict that nothing will be approved except
| autobiographies.
| endorphone wrote:
| "Is there any danger for them?"
|
| Fox news dumped Laura Ingraham and Trish Regan. Both were at
| the forefront of claiming it was all a hoax. Dr. Drew has gone
| on a reputation rehabilitation tour apologizing for his prior
| claims.
|
| But those dismissals are a canary in a coal mine. They
| demonstrate that even Fox News has limits.
|
| It is outrageous that anyone -- outside of scam prosperity
| preachers -- advertise on Fox News.
| [deleted]
| xkapastel wrote:
| Did Fox News actually dump Laura Ingraham? I've never heard
| about this. She still seems to be on TV.
| meragrin_ wrote:
| Why are you picking on Fox News? CNN, MSNBC, and others were
| chastising Trump over the China travel ban. They were saying he
| was creating hysteria over nothing. They were dismissing the
| virus at that point.
| endorphone wrote:
| This is the sort of false equivalency that leads to claims
| that they all lie, so it's okay if Fox _egregiously_ lies. We
| see this on HN all the time where someone stomps their feet
| and cries about a news headline that they think doesn 't
| convey just the right slant that they want, ergo it's the
| same as the guy inventing bullshit conspiracy theories on his
| blog.
|
| No, they weren't "chastising" Trump over the China travel ban
| because _there was no China travel ban_. There was a Wuhan
| restriction _only applicable to foreigners_. Thousands of
| Americans were going and coming with no restrictions
| whatsoever. Fly into Wuhan, lick the toilet seats, fly back
| home. Do it the next day.
|
| There was zero screening. Zero containment. Zero listening to
| the pandemic experts.
|
| No, they aren't the same. This revisionist "they were
| dismissing the virus" nonsense is utter horseshit of the
| worst kind. It is a lie of profound ignorance and
| gullibility, or an intentional lie, and both are just as
| obnoxious.
| AndrewBissell wrote:
| The equivalency being drawn by the parent may be wrong, but
| mainstream sources outside Fox News absolutely downplayed
| the seriousness of the virus and helped push the "it's not
| a big deal" perception that we are all now rowing against.
| dragonwriter wrote:
| > but mainstream sources outside Fox News absolutely
| downplayed the seriousness of the virus
|
| That's true, I guess, if you consider OANN to have
| reached the status of "mainstream" with the boost they've
| gotten with their attachment to the current US
| administration.
|
| But, otherwise, show me some specific examples.
| fourmyle wrote:
| You can look on Youtube yourself and see countless
| examples o MSNBC and CNN criticizing the travel ban on
| China because the virus wasn't any more dangerous than
| the flu.
| dragonwriter wrote:
| I actually followed the coverage the first time, and
| where the ban was criticized it was almost entirely for
| being too late for that response to be useful, not
| unwarranted by the severity of the disease. Of course, if
| there really are "countless" examples supporting your
| characterization, it will be easy for you to cite some.
| fourmyle wrote:
| Looks someone else already found a few great examples.
| endorphone wrote:
| You claimed that there were countless videos of "MSNBC
| and CNN criticizing the travel ban on China because the
| virus wasn't any more dangerous than the flu." Which of
| course isn't accurate.
|
| You seek your redemption in some guy[1] listing a tiny
| selection of articles, having nothing to do with the
| partial travel restriction, arguing about the social
| effects. He links either contrarian articles, or articles
| talking about the psychology/sociology.
|
| That you think this proves the case is astonishing. I am
| going to say again that you are either so profoundly
| partisan that the truth doesn't matter, or you are
| logically broken.
|
| It's the classic deflection, and it's absolutely amazing.
| Fox was literally at war with what they saw as the
| "mainstream media hoax" (in lockstep with Trump, of
| course, because they are his state media), claiming that
| they were fear-mongering about the virus. Oh but now, the
| mainstream media actually wasn't at all. They were
| understating it. The cognitive deficiency to seriously
| argue this...
|
| [1] That guy whose post history is littered with claims
| that the response to SARS-CoV-2 is "fear-mongering", and
| who a month ago seriously said that the US response was
| and is the best, of anyone. Their single example being
| that Trump limited air travel from a single region...for
| non-Americans...long after the horse was out of the barn.
|
| Then again, your history has continual COVID denial, such
| as your claim that no hospitals are over capacity. You
| guys are really trying to argue everything simultaneously
| and it must be exhausting.
| s_y_n_t_a_x wrote:
| The China travel ban was ordered on Jan 28th and active
| on Feb 3rd.
|
| The WHO didn't confirm human transmission until Jan
| 25th...
|
| Some of many examples of the media in Jan and Feb:
|
| https://twitter.com/LizRNC/status/1245478539018805251?s=2
| 0
|
| https://www.washingtonpost.com/outlook/2020/01/31/how-
| our-br...
|
| https://www.nytimes.com/2020/02/18/world/europe/coronavir
| us-...
|
| https://www.cnbc.com/2020/02/03/the-flu-has-already-
| killed-1...
|
| https://twitter.com/thedailybeast/status/1225937322694381
| 568
|
| https://twitter.com/washingtonpost/status/122367623706063
| 667...
|
| https://i.imgur.com/43n4HWK.png
|
| EDIT: the mental gymnastics below is real, I'll add more
| examples as I find them, you can choose how wrong they
| got it and if Fox is worse, or when or how each
| individual should apologize... P.S. you guys are nuts,
| everyone was saying "it's less than 2%!!!"
|
| But yeah, us conservatives and the only conservative
| mainstream news channel and our conservative President
| are the source of all of your problems. /s
|
| No it's a tacky political attack in the middle of a
| crisis. Real classy.
| fourmyle wrote:
| It's worth pointing out that Trump gave this order the
| day after or during the impeachment trial when it was
| risky for him to do so.
|
| edit: None of this matters though because orange man bad.
| endorphone wrote:
| Wait, wasn't your "but orange man bad" classic twitter
| response good enough? Why'd you edit it?
|
| "When it was risky for him to do so."
|
| Trump just got a get out of jail free card and absolute
| impunity and immunity to do anything he wanted. Since
| he's fired a number of people in the most brazen display
| of corruption in US history. Risky? There was zero risk.
|
| Yes, orange man is bad. He's historically bad. He is a
| thin-skinned grifter who is positively the worst possible
| person to be in this position.
|
| Oh but look he did an easy, lazy partial, regional
| restriction that accomplished positively nothing. What a
| savior.
| fourmyle wrote:
| So you don't think travel from China should have been
| shutdown until later?
| jshevek wrote:
| I'm ideologically opposed to political conservativism,
| but I sympathize with you. Regarding ideological bias,
| CNN is worse than Fox, but in left leaning communities
| Fox is demonized while CNN gets a pass. Hivemind
| mentalities are frustrating regardless of which group
| engages in it.
| gamblor956 wrote:
| If you would have actually read those articles, you would
| see that the WaPo opinion piece does not actually
| downplay the coronavirus threat at all; it discusses the
| psychology of social panic. The NYT piece discusses how
| _fear_ of coronavirus spread faster than the virus itself
| without any comment on the seriousness of the disease.
|
| The CNBC article does compare the flu to the coronavirus
| and does note the flu has already killed more across the
| US _on an absolute basis_ , but also notes that the
| coronavirus is significantly deadlier than the flu on a
| relative basis. Lenny Bernstein, the opinionist behind
| the second WaPo opinion piece you linked, apologized for
| his cavalier dismissal of the coronavirus in a followup
| opinion piece.
|
| To date, only one person in the entire Fox News
| organization has apologized for getting it wrong on
| coronavirus. Every single other talking head has doubled
| down on downplaying coranavirus, and Fox and Friends is
| still implying that it's all just a second impeachment
| effort.
| [deleted]
| fourmyle wrote:
| I'm sure you read all the articles in 5 minutes but
| either way the mental gymnastics you are going through to
| get around the headlines reading "How our brains make
| coronavirus seem scarier than it is" etc is truly
| impressive.
| endorphone wrote:
| _but mainstream sources outside Fox News absolutely
| downplayed the seriousness of the virus and helped push
| the "it's not a big deal" perception that we are all now
| rowing against._
|
| Yet many, including right here on HN, were claiming
| exactly the opposite: That they were fear mongering,
| inciting panic, etc. It can't be both.
|
| Here's the NYT from February 2nd -
| https://www.nytimes.com/2020/02/02/health/coronavirus-
| pandem...
|
| Feb 9th -
| https://www.nytimes.com/2020/02/09/world/asia/china-
| coronavi...
|
| Zero "downplaying". I recall being quite concerned,
| seeing the argument that is was overblown and just a flu,
| etc, and discounting that as nonsense.
|
| Can you find _an_ article on the NYTimes, MSNBC or
| something that compares it to the flu or the like?
| Absolutely. Those mediums have varied voices with
| different perspectives, quite unlike Fox where the entire
| organization is given marching orders and a narrative
| they must push. The overall perspective among the non-Fox
| mainstream media was very concerned.
|
| When the sea level rises and floods lower Manhattan, I'm
| sure there'll be people saying "Why didn't the media warn
| us? They downplayed the risk!"
| s_y_n_t_a_x wrote:
| > quite unlike Fox where the entire organization is given
| marching orders and a narrative they must push.
|
| Honestly that seems more like the NYTimes or something.
| https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2019/08/new-york-
| times-m...
|
| Do you have proof Fox is like this and other media
| organizations aren't? I'd honestly would like to see it.
|
| We all have access to wikileaks so we should all know
| which organizations were in bed with the DNC (thanks
| dkim!).
| AndrewBissell wrote:
| Bear in mind it's not just Fox News which got this pandemic
| wrong. "It's no worse than the flu," "this won't be a global
| pandemic," "you don't need to wear a mask unless you are
| symptomatic or caring for someone who is," and other 100% wrong
| takes were also pushed by Vox, NYT, WaPo, and even WHO & CDC
| long past when they should have been.
| abnry wrote:
| Which is one of the reasons why I wish we, collectively as a
| society, would stop blaming the blame game in this crisis.
| Almost everyone got this wrong.
| maps7 wrote:
| But they should not have got any of this wrong! Check out
| the TED talk by Bill Gates in 2015. How could any
| journalist worth anything not have had that video in their
| research before publishing articles. Look at how Asian
| countries wear masks. Did the people working in the WHO
| think that was for fashion? The people in spokesperson
| positions have been caught out big time. It's a issue with
| how people are promoted to these positions and an example
| of how society favouring extroverts over introverts is a
| bad idea.
| notahacker wrote:
| _When and why_ people got things wrong is also important.
| People who underestimated COVID-19 in January because
| evidence of its lethality and r0 were scant are somewhat
| different from people who downplayed the virus in March
| because it aligned them with a particular political figure.
| Similarly, it 's a lot easier to sympathise with the
| epidemiologists who will turn out to have massively
| overestimated casualties because we took unprecedented
| action to shut down society to avoid them than the people
| still organising mass events or the people who have
| concluded that the disease is best stopped by attacking 5G
| masts.
| AndrewBissell wrote:
| I look at it a bit differently. If someone's pushing the
| line "just listen to the experts," then it should be
| acknowledged that experts do get it wrong and have
| massively dropped the ball on COVID-19. The signs of how
| lethal and contagious the virus is were there in China for
| anyone to read by early January.
|
| Of course, "experts (in particular _our_ experts) don 't
| know what they're doing" is different from "... and
| therefore you should listen to any yahoo who says it's 5G."
| gamblor956 wrote:
| In hindsight, it is obvious that COVID19 was worse than
| SARS or MERS.
|
| But at the time, especially given China's clampdown on
| information outflow, it didn't appear to be significantly
| different from SARS, which didn't effect the West much,
| or MERS, which had almost no impact outside of the Middle
| East.
|
| But as another commenter noted, the timing matters a lot.
|
| Everyone except Fox News thought _back in January_ that
| COVID19 was going to be big, but based on prior
| coronaviruses not something that would significantly
| impact the West. They 've all done 180s and are pulling
| out the stops to _fix_ their earlier error.
|
| Fox News is still saying that _today_ (i.e., April 6).
| One of their talking heads just said that COVID19 is
| overblown just a few minutes ago.
| acqq wrote:
| > but based on prior coronaviruses not something that
| would significantly impact the West.
|
| If we talk about a lot of media, they simply had the
| priority of making Chinese look bad in any possible way,
| including blaming them for "misinterpreting numbers" and
| ridiculing them for implementing lockdowns or wearing
| masks.
|
| Which just shows how stupid some global agendas are.
| Media don't do that in vaccuum, but they are the
| reflection of the power of the interest groups that want
| to push the agenda.
| Khaine wrote:
| I'm sorry, its not even in hindsight. All you needed to
| do is look at what China was doing. It became very
| apparent that there was a major viral outbreak on-going
| in china around Luna New Year
| seppin wrote:
| Fox News is the only organization that continue to let their
| opinion anchors downplay and politicize the virus well after
| it was clear it was deadly and inevitable.
| gregwebs wrote:
| And also those that called it early should be seen as more
| credible. Chris Martenson was putting out youtube videos in
| January warning about the coming pandemic. He has been
| continually calling for masks as well:
| https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLRgTUN1zz_oeQpnJxpeaE...
|
| People don't have the time to deeply engage in subjects
| themselves to understand what is true. So we take a shortcut of
| uncritically adopting ideas from elsewhere. I see this usually
| play out as the most repeated ideas coming from any direction are
| the ones taken as correct. There is some amount of ranking of
| sources: the New York Times or in some cases a professional
| network is given a higher ranking. But normally none of the
| sources are experts.
| markvdb wrote:
| Paul, you're absolutely right about the corona virus being the
| clearest credibility test fail for these people yet.
|
| But you also write: "These people constantly make false
| predictions, and get away with it, because the things they make
| predictions about either have mushy enough outcomes that they can
| bluster their way out of trouble, or happen so far in the future
| that few remember what they said."
|
| I'm not so sure about that. These politicians and journalists
| have consciously a/b tested their audiences into tribes of
| absolute uncritical loyalty. They feed on anti-intellectualism
| and cheap gut reactions.
|
| At a certain level of responsibility, incompetence becomes
| malice. These people are far beyond that threshold. They will
| soon have the blood of thousands on their hands.
|
| I'm not sure the people of the US will be able to keep them to
| account, but I certainly hope so.
| mapgrep wrote:
| Here are the "journalists" (mostly commentators, actually) in the
| video Paul Graham links:
|
| Sean Hannity (Fox News)
|
| Rush Limbaugh (independent, right wing)
|
| Pete Hegdeth (Fox News)
|
| Lou Dobbs (Fox Business)
|
| Tomi Lahren (Fox News)
|
| Jeanine Pirro (Fox News)
|
| Dr. Marc Siegel (Fox News)
|
| Geraldo Rivera (Fox News)
|
| Laura Ingraham (Fox News)
|
| Jesse Waters (Fox News)
|
| Matt Schlapp (shown on Fox News)
|
| Dr Drew Pinsky (shown on Fox News)
|
| Ed Henry (Fox News)
|
| Ainsley Earhardt (Fox News)
|
| I think it's misleading to call this "a video of TV journalists
| and politicians." It's a video of Fox News journalists and Rush
| Limbaugh and right wing politicians.
| robomartin wrote:
| Sorry, this isn't fair at all and it suffers from the issue that
| is common in politics and political coverage, regardless of
| network: Taking everything out of context.
|
| The video linked in that article is a tour-de-force of out of
| context snippets. Anyone could splice together a video just like
| that one with material from any TV news network or politician,
| from the tip of South America to the extremes of Siberia and
| everything in between.
|
| In many ways, and sadly, PG reveals (perhaps proudly) his own
| bias on this front. This is very much a hit job on Fox News and
| the right. One can't claim intellectual superiority and do this
| at the same time. Sorry.
|
| This isn't to say that Fox News isn't without fault. They are.
| Everyone is. NOBODY understood this well enough to say anything
| intelligent about it. NOBODY, from politicians to doctors and,
| yes, newscasters and celebrities.
|
| What we can say is that nearly everything that was said or
| predicted during the early phases of this thing by almost
| everyone has now been proven wrong by this cruel virus and its
| behavior. That isn't an indication of nefarious intent.
| Ignorance? Yes. Malicious intent? I doubt it. Political battle?
| Yes, likely, sadly...because nobody really understood this thing
| was going to get ugly.
|
| Faulting anyone, from Trump to local officials is, from my
| perspective, intellectually dishonest and counterproductive. This
| is where I have a problem with the media. I am sure the founders
| did not pen the first amendment with the intent of providing
| protection for extreme political alignment in the media. We have,
| somehow, allowed this to happen, and, what is worse, we have not
| come up with a way to curtail it.
|
| Watching US coverage and press conferences is a display of just
| how politically aligned the media has become. Their focus is,
| 24/7, to attack the political party they are not aligned with. In
| order to accomplish this they are more than willing to take
| things out of context, distort reality, fabricate narratives and
| disseminate lies. As someone who works hard to remain as neutral
| as possible, a registered independent who has equal disdain for
| both major parties, this is truly revolting to watch. Sometimes I
| feel like a visitor from another planet watching from an orbiting
| spacecraft while the people below play stupid games to destroy
| each other rather than unite for the benefit of all.
| Unbelievable.
|
| While I agree with most of the observations in this article I
| wish PG had taken the time to find real examples of ignorance
| without resorting to a left-wing hit piece on the right wing by
| using an array of out of context pieces cut together.
|
| While I can't be on a spacecraft orbiting above the US, I can
| take a look at what our approach to COVID-19 looked from other
| parts of the world. For example, SkyNews Australia:
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cdKLx5MhTpk
|
| Dr. Oxiris Barbot, Commissioner of the New York City Department
| of Health herself, was, for some incomprehensible reason, telling
| New Yorkers to just go out, gather, use subways and change
| nothing other than wash their hands and stay home if they were
| sick:
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l2DetEolgOg
|
| And, before someone says "you took that out of context" (I did
| not edit the video so...), here's a full press briefing where she
| goes into clear detail about "no need to do any special
| anything...":
|
| https://youtu.be/NEhLOp7UGNM?t=1659
|
| I mean, this is the Commissioner of the New York City Department
| of Health!!!!
|
| I cued-up the video to her statement so you can see and hear it
| from the horses mouth and confirm what I present above. If
| interested, I urge you to rewind to the start and watch the
| entire press briefing. If you do, you'll hear a bunch of good
| things and a bunch of incomprehensibly bad things, among which
| are: - Just like the normal flu - We
| should relax - We don't think it's going to be as bad as
| it is in other places - We have been ahead of this from
| day one - Go about your lives - Go about your
| business - There has to be prolonged exposure -
| Just wash your hands - There is no need to do anything
| special anything in the community, we want New Yorkers
| to go about their daily lives, ride the subway, ride
| the bus, go see your neighbors - We have the equipment
| - It's not like we are dealing with something we haven't dealt
| with before - We have the ability to address this
| - We have the capacity to keep this contained - Like the
| normal flu
|
| These are not statements made by talking heads in news shows.
| These are the leaders of the US state with the most cases and
| most deaths. They are not taken out of context. And they are
| clearly telling people to, effectively, go out there and get
| infected.
|
| This is the real reason for which places like New York and
| Louisiana are in such trouble. Their leadership failed the
| people. They failed miserably. They were ignorant, political and
| just plain wrong. And they got everyone infected. It's one thing
| to start with a handful of cases. It's quite another to tell
| people to pile into subways, festivals, restaurants and other
| high-traffic public environments and effectively help the virus
| replicate. You then start your odyssey with thousands of cases,
| not a handful, which can't end well.
|
| Either we dismiss this as collective ignorance and excuse it as
| such, or we don't. Yet, other states took it very seriously.
| People took it seriously. The trigger for most was when Trump
| shut down travel from China. That was on January 31st. Love him
| or hate him, an neutral observer would instantly understand this
| was a seriously out of band move and one that could not have been
| taken lightly or unilaterally. That was a very strong signal that
| something was seriously wrong.
|
| For me, that event, added to the R0 data that was coming in, told
| me this was serious and it high likelihood of going way beyond
| China. During the first week of February I bought three months of
| supplies for our family. Various states around the nation started
| to take measures as well. Places like NY and Louisiana, instead,
| decided closing the doors to China was racist and, as if the
| virus cared about political defiance, actually promoted mass
| gatherings and helped the virus spread and infect large numbers
| of people.
|
| Yes, I agree with the general message issued by PG. However, I
| strongly suggest the article needs to be edited in order to
| remove the intellectually dishonest and politically one-sided
| focus. It simply isn't true and it is wrong. There's a very
| direct and well documented link in the video and Twitter record
| of who in the US is directly responsible for hundreds of
| thousands of people getting infected and likely tens of thousands
| to hundreds of thousands of people dying.
|
| This isn't a joke. People are losing partners, mothers, fathers,
| siblings, sons and daughters. Let's not lie or distort the truth
| due to political alignment and effectively join the very group we
| are accusing of being dishonest.
| sjg007 wrote:
| I mean we knew before the pandemic that Fox News has zero
| credibility. We knew that the President has zero credibility. We
| will soon see that austerity promoting economists never had
| credibility either. We will see UBI enabling a massive amount of
| entrepreneurship. We know all of these things and we knew them
| before too. Some people refuse to understand these things because
| their job And perhaps identity depends on not understanding it.
| cityzen wrote:
| I'll be downvote for this but couldn't you say the same thing
| about this epidemic of unprofitable, over-valued "unicorns"
| propped up by VC money?
|
| "The answer, I realized, is that they didn't think they could get
| caught. They didn't realize there was any danger in making false
| predictions. These people constantly make false predictions, and
| get away with it, because the things they make predictions about
| either have mushy enough outcomes that they can bluster their way
| out of trouble, or happen so far in the future that few remember
| what they said."
| 2bitencryption wrote:
| One thing I've had trouble reconciling is the fact that the CDC
| estimates 24k-63k deaths from the flu this flu season[0]
|
| We just passed 10k from covid-19. Only last week a "low"
| estimation of covid deaths this year was 200k. So it seems the
| expectation is there will be many, many more, and we're just at
| the start of all this.
|
| On the other hand, it also seems this week like the infamous
| curve is beginning to flatten, and the epidemic is slowing down.
| Does this contradict the "low" 200k number? Or does the 200k
| number factor this in, and indicates that the "long tail" of the
| disease will be very long and damaging indeed?
|
| Some of the clips show in the video referenced in the article
| actually seem pretty "sane" to me - the one guy saying "I'm not
| worried about getting this illness", another saying for most
| people it will seem just like the flu. Those two statements, as
| far as we know, are not that outlandish, right? I'm certainly not
| worried about myself, and for many people it does seem to be mild
| or asymptomatic?
|
| I don't want to have an "opinion" on this matter, I want to
| interpret the data and understand the truth, Fauci-style.
|
| [0] https://www.cdc.gov/flu/about/burden/preliminary-in-
| season-e...
| analog31 wrote:
| One issue to consider is that the COVID wipes out our ability
| to treat serious flu cases by swamping the hospitals.
| defen wrote:
| The "official" 200k estimate (https://www.medrxiv.org/content/1
| 0.1101/2020.03.27.20043752v...) assumes that China isn't lying
| about their numbers, that Italy's official numbers are correct
| (Even though the death rate in some places there is 5-10x
| higher than normal), that the US will be able to implement
| "lockdowns" as effectively as China did, and that the rate of
| decline of new cases of COVID-19 will match the rate of
| increase before the peak.
|
| I'm not sure any of those assumptions are warranted.
| itronitron wrote:
| The low 200k fatality estimate probably factors in the that the
| curve is flattening.
|
| The current estimate is that 300k people are infected in the
| US. If the number of people infected by Covid-19 doubles every
| week, then in 10 weeks there will be 300 million infected in
| the US. Assuming 1% mortality puts you at 3 million dead.
| cortesoft wrote:
| Doubling each week is not how it happens... as a higher
| percentage of people have or have had the virus, the growth
| rate decreases because there are less people available to
| infect. That is why infection percentage is an s shaped
| curve.
| itronitron wrote:
| I already baked that in by starting with a low infection
| rate (2x per week instead of 2x every 3 days).
| cortesoft wrote:
| Yes, but 90% is an unrealistic infection number no matter
| what you start with. I think most experts had it at
| around 60-70% if we do nothing.
|
| That is not acceptable, either, given the fatality rate
| and the strain it would put on hospitals... but I think
| it is important we try to be accurate.
| analog31 wrote:
| It's an s shaped curve, but we don't know the upper
| magnitude of that curve. A large percentage of the
| population would have to get infected in order to run the
| COVID out of new recruits. If it tops out at 50% of the
| population, that's a disaster.
|
| Forcing the doubling rate to decrease short of hitting that
| point requires something else to happen. South Korea
| clearly did something other than running itself out of
| cannon fodder.
| aledalgrande wrote:
| > as a higher percentage of people have or have had the
| virus, the growth rate decreases because there are less
| people available to infect
|
| That is what you would call "herd immunity" and no, current
| numbers of recovered patients are not even close to have
| it. It doesn't happen like magic like some politician wants
| to make people believe, and current estimations for COVID
| _herd immunity threshold_ are 29%-74% of the community [1].
| Make a count of that on the US population.
|
| [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Herd_immunity#Mechanics
| cortesoft wrote:
| Sure, but the comment I was replying to was suggesting
| that in 10 weeks, 300 million Americans would be
| infected... that is 91% of the population of the United
| States. We aren't going to hit that number.
| aledalgrande wrote:
| The growth is not going to be that much, sure, but
| because we slow it down with isolation, not because the
| immune people stop it from spreading.
| cortesoft wrote:
| Yes... but even if we did nothing, we are unlikely to hit
| 90% infected... 60 to 70% yes, but not 90%.
|
| I am not saying that is ok, or that we should just let it
| run its course... just that saying we will hit 90%
| infection is unrealistic.
| adjkant wrote:
| The thing missing here is that you're looking at deaths without
| looking at number of cases of each. The flu causes the number
| of deaths it does because it infects tens of millions of people
| a year[0]. The death rate is an order of magnitude lower than
| with COVID-19 across every single age bracket. [2]
|
| So when people say things like:
|
| > "I'm not worried about getting this illness"
|
| They are likely not considering that even the younger are
| taking as much as a 1% risk of their life, which is incredibly
| high. Depending on factors like the load on the medical
| community at the time and others, it can get as high as 5% or
| more quite easily as we have seen around the world. Currently
| using only napkin math from the numbers here[1], the death rate
| is currently at just under 4% over all age groups in the US.
|
| Additionally, it is not considering the danger they are putting
| others in by getting it. With the flu at a death rate of 0.2%
| or lower, causing deaths by infecting people is a very small
| risk. Passing it to one person here significantly ups the
| chances of you causing someone else to die.
|
| Finally, flu deaths almost exclusively happen in the
| immunocompromised and elderly, while COVID-19 affects younger
| people a LOT more.[2]
|
| [0] https://www.cdc.gov/flu/about/keyfacts.htm
|
| [1] https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2020/us/coronavirus-
| us-c...
|
| [2]
| https://i.insider.com/5e81f6460c2a6261b1771b05?width=600&for...
| 2bitencryption wrote:
| > They are likely not considering that even the younger are
| taking as much as a 1% risk of their life
|
| I know the numbers are still super fuzzy and it depends on
| who you ask, but at least according to Wikipedia, the US
| fatality rate for ages 20-44 is 0.1-0.2%, not near 1% (though
| certainly at-risk individuals would be higher than the
| average...)
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coronavirus_disease_2019#Progn.
| ..
| adjkant wrote:
| That "as much as" was attempting to account for overloaded
| medical conditions which will raise the rate, though for
| 20-44 it'd be unclear by how much. If we go by that table
| using a 2.3% death rate, that'd already be .3% using a
| naive literal scaling to the death rate for that age group
| for the US currently. But yeah, fuzzy numbers and napkin
| math warning is certainly warranted, I'm nowhere near an
| expert on this.
|
| As mentioned, the flu death rate of 0.1% is overall as well
| - for younger people it is also significantly lower, so the
| increased risk still holds for younger folks. Source [2]
| shows that well.
| abstractbarista wrote:
| Those % you are citing are highly misleading. Because they
| are % of _tested positive_ cases. There 's likely an order of
| magnitude more actual positive cases which have not been
| captured.
| umvi wrote:
| I simply do not believe those figures at all.
|
| How can you even claim an "average death rate" when you don't
| even know how many people were infected, had mild symptoms,
| and recovered without reporting it to anyone?
|
| Of course the numbers will look scary when you only count
| hospitalized people as infected.
| adjkant wrote:
| > How can you even claim an "average death rate" when you
| don't even know how many people were infected, had mild
| symptoms, and recovered without reporting it to anyone?
|
| We can either throw our hands up and give up or we can do
| the best with what we have. So, what percentage of cases do
| you think are unconfirmed? You can adjust my math with that
| and see what those rates are. Those numbers still stay
| scary unless you assume a 90% unconfirmed rate, at which it
| equalizes for young people compared to the flu but is still
| 10x or more for some age groups. The point being, even
| accounting for underreporting this is still much more
| deadly and allowing it to spread like the flu would result
| in many more deaths.
|
| I haven't seen any reliable numbers given about the
| underreporting rate, so if you have seen any that would be
| interesting!
| usaar333 wrote:
| > They are likely not considering that even the younger are
| taking as much as a 1% risk of their life, which is
| incredibly high. Depending on factors like the load on the
| medical community at the time and others, it can get as high
| as 5% or more quite easily as we have seen around the world.
| Currently using only napkin math from the numbers here[1],
| the death rate is currently at just under 4% over all age
| groups in the US.
|
| Those are pretty high numbers. Using a Lancet study (https://
| www.thelancet.com/journals/laninf/article/PIIS1473-3...), IFR
| is just under 0.1% for a 30 something year old.
| Hospitalization rates are at 3.5% (2-7% confidence), so a
| death rate (for 30 year olds) even under a collapsing medical
| systems for younger people is highly unlikely to get close to
| 5%.
|
| All said, a 0.1% death rate is still pretty dangerous and
| catching the disease is something like raising your risk of
| death by 50% in a given year. Lockdowns are still justified
| under those numbers.
|
| > Finally, flu deaths almost exclusively happen in the
| immunocompromised and elderly, while COVID-19 affects younger
| people a LOT more.
|
| Well, and old people even more. Are the relative risk ratios
| actually different for covid vs. flu - or are we just seeing
| the effect of a disease that is 7xish a really bad flu
| season?
|
| (For young children actually, I believe covid outcomes are
| better than flu.)
| umvi wrote:
| > Lockdowns are still justified under those numbers.
|
| And what if the effects of an extended lockdown is a tanked
| ecomony with a 3x increase in suicides for the next decade?
| Is it still justified? Lockdowns are only justified if the
| _only_ variable you are optimizing for is "number of
| covid-19 deaths". Yet there are hundreds of other variables
| that we are ignoring in our quest to minimize that one
| variable. Impossible to tell now, but tanking the economy
| to flatten the curve may end up indirectly killing even
| more people in the long run.
| usaar333 wrote:
| Fair point. In some sense, I share your feelings a bit
| (in a lighter sense). The park closings some Bay Area
| counties are doing (e.g. San Mateo) feel not justified;
| I'm also not sure why the SIP was extended all the way
| into May given the existing downward trajectory. [Looking
| at both Seattle and Iceland, you don't need full-on SIP
| to keep R at 1]
| aianus wrote:
| > All said, a 0.1% death rate is still pretty dangerous and
| catching the disease is something like raising your risk of
| death by 50% in a given year. Lockdowns are still justified
| under those numbers.
|
| 0.1% of the rest of my life is ~3 weeks. The lockdown has
| already cost me more of my life than a confirmed case of
| COVID-19 would (on average).
|
| And the math doesn't get much better the older you get, an
| 85 year old has the same chance of dying of natural causes
| during a 12 month lockdown as he has from actually
| contracting COVID-19.
| usaar333 wrote:
| That is an interesting point and I'm not sure how public
| health officials are treating it. I'm in tech WFH so I
| don't see even half my life being lost from the lockdown
| (maybe 20%), but YMMV.
| maps wrote:
| >Some of the clips show in the video referenced in the article
| actually seem pretty "sane" to me - the one guy saying "I'm not
| worried about getting this illness", another saying for most
| people it will seem just like the flu. Those two statements, as
| far as we know, are not that outlandish, right? I'm certainly
| not worried about myself, and for many people it does seem to
| be mild or asymptomatic?
|
| The flu season is 6 months for ~ 40k deaths.
|
| We are at 10k deaths of covid in the USA. Depending on how you
| measure the 'season' it could be as little as a month in. If we
| keep with these numbers it will surely pass the flu death toll
| for the same time period.
|
| Now also consider that unlike flu, we have no vaccine and the
| virus kills people in the prime of their life just as much as
| the elderly. We also have no idea on the way this virus works.
| We are making assumptions that it will work like a normal flu
| virus. There is anecdotal evidence it resides in people even
| after they have 'recovered', which isn't the same as a normal
| flu or cold. It is certainly something to be concerned with.
| lbeltrame wrote:
| > Now also consider that unlike flu, we have no vaccine and
| the virus kills people in the prime of their life just as
| much as the elderly.
|
| Not with the same rates. This should be kept into account,
| because when lockdowns will be lifted (you will _have_ to at
| some point, even if it 's just to prevent people from
| becoming insane), you won't have a risk of 0, so letting the
| lowest-risk population out first is a goood bet.
|
| > Now also consider that unlike flu, we have no vaccine
|
| But there are drugs in development and in trial. None will
| work miracles, some will not work at all, some will have
| marginal impact, some will have a little more impact. Those
| are the best bets at this point in time.
|
| Waiting out for a vaccine, like many governments are hoping
| for, is irrational IMO, because there's no guarantee that a
| working one will be found - and you can't lock up your
| population for 18 months, even if you don't factor the
| economy in, because people will be destroyed psychologically.
| nostrademons wrote:
| I think this is assuming malice where incompetence may be a more
| likely explanation.
|
| I was in the "it's just a flu" camp through early February, and
| then changed my mind pretty dramatically a few weeks before the
| U.S. (or Hacker News, for that matter) consensus shifted. It
| wasn't that I held an insincere belief beforehand; it's that the
| data initially supports two possible interpretations, and that as
| more data becomes available, "it's just a flu" becomes less
| likely and "this is a serious pandemic that will result in lots
| of life" becomes more likely.
|
| For me, the critical pieces of information were details about
| what the Chinese definitions of "mild", "severe", and "critical"
| cases meant. I'd seen the death rates by age, which had a death
| rate of under 0.2% for people under 50 and it going up to 6-11%
| for > 70. I'd also seen case breakdowns where illnesses were
| described as 80% "mild", 15% "severe", 5% "critical", and 2%
| "death".
|
| A logical conclusion to draw from that is that for 80% of cases,
| it really will be just a flu, an additional 15% would be a really
| sucky flu (pneumonia not requiring hospitalization), and 5% of
| mostly elderly patients require hospitalization.
|
| The information that changed my mind was the clarification that
| 80% mild was broken down into 40% mild (cold symptoms) and 40%
| moderate (walking pneumonia), the 15% of severe cases all
| required hospitalization, and that hospitalization rates were not
| that different (factor of 2x, rather than factor of 30x) between
| young and old people. That and some math about how many
| hospitalizations that is vs. hospital beds available in the U.S,
| and the reports coming out of Italy that made it clear that the
| high death rate was not because of China's air pollution or
| smoking rates (both of which were reasonable hypotheses with the
| data available, particularly the increased male mortality and
| preponderance of smoking among Chinese men).
|
| On a systemic level, it's entirely possible that the decision
| makers simply have not updated their mental models with this new
| information. There are a bunch of cognitive biases why they
| wouldn't: normalcy bias, unwillingness to look at unpleasant
| facts, and commitment bias (once they've publicly stated that
| it's just a flu it's hard to walk that back without looking like
| a fool). There's no need to assume that they're willfully
| spouting bullshit because they know they won't get caught. It's
| entirely possible that they're spouting bullshit because they
| believe it.
| aaron695 wrote:
| I'd like a website recording people telling others to not wear
| masks.
|
| Hold them into account.
| matthewaveryusa wrote:
| This implies that the general population cares to know who is
| swimming naked. The post truth era is the very idea that the
| general public no longer cares about truth. PG is not embracing
| reality if he frames this around Warren Buffet's quote. Basically
| PG is like "hey look at all those naked folks there!!" not
| knowing that he's at a nudist beach.
| jswizzy wrote:
| If you think politicians and journalists are bad wait until you
| see what the experts are saying.
| Dowwie wrote:
| Paul is referring to Fox News:
| https://twitter.com/TheDailyShow/status/1246146713523453957?...
| malandrew wrote:
| What Paul is describing pretty much describes most of the
| mainstream media, regardless of political bias.
|
| If anything, it's the rampant bias that has produced so many
| blindspots.
| theandrewbailey wrote:
| Looks like a lot more outlets got it wrong:
| https://twitter.com/standwithPrager/status/12454088056907694...
| licyeus wrote:
| What's the timeline of media outlets figuring this out? Fox
| was downplaying / claiming this was a hoax as late as March
| 10 [1], whereas other outlets woke up early February (eg, the
| WaPo headline in your screenshot is from Jan 31).
|
| 1 - https://www.washingtonpost.com/lifestyle/media/on-fox-
| news-s...
| e2021 wrote:
| De Blasio was telling people you couldn't get the virus on
| the subway and other nonsense well into March.
| dominotw wrote:
| while those are most blatant examples. There are plenty of
| examples from left wing sites too. All those people seem to
| have simply gone "underground" eg:
| https://twitter.com/rojospinks?lang=en from the famous 'travel
| bans dont' work'.
|
| how do you know hes only referring to right wing websites?
| bcrosby95 wrote:
| Nah, Fox just clutched onto their ignorant statements longer
| than most media companies.
| nimblebill wrote:
| What about the NYC Health Commissioner Oxiris Barbot tweeting
| in February (https://twitter.com/NYCHealthCommr/status/12240431
| 5585253786...):
|
| _As we gear up to celebrate the #LunarNewYear in NYC, I want
| to assure New Yorkers that there is no reason for anyone to
| change their holiday plans, avoid the subway, or certain parts
| of the city because of #coronavirus._
|
| And then again in March (https://twitter.com/NYCHealthCommr/sta
| tus/123429834432909312...):
|
| _Despite this development, New Yorkers remain at low risk for
| contracting #COVID19. As we confront this emerging outbreak, we
| need to separate facts from fear, and guard against stigma and
| panic._
|
| Or the NYC Chair of New York City Council Health Committee
| tweeting
| (https://twitter.com/MarkLevineNYC/status/1226566648729133056):
|
| _In powerful show of defiance of #coronavirus scare, huge
| crowds gathering in NYC 's Chinatown for ceremony ahead of
| annual #LunarNewYear parade. Chants of "be strong Wuhan!"
|
| If you are staying away, you are missing out_
|
| Or Bill de Blasio tweeting
| (https://twitter.com/BilldeBlasio/status/1234648718714036229):
|
| _Since I'm encouraging New Yorkers to go on with your lives +
| get out on the town despite Coronavirus, I thought I would
| offer some suggestions. Here's the first: thru Thurs 3 /5 go
| see "The Traitor" @FilmLinc . If "The Wire" was a true story +
| set in Italy, it would be this film._
|
| Or does it only count when its Fox News?
| beepboopbeep wrote:
| Yes, those are mistakes as well. We don't have to delve into
| whataboutism in order to point out the wrongness of
| something.
| thomas2718 wrote:
| Some days ago I stumbled on this page:
| https://www.unfoxmycablebox.com/. It says that Fox News
| finances itself largely by hidden subscriber fees which are
| part of a cable or satellite TV subscription. It proposes to
| write your provider that you do not want to support Fox News.
| For example, AT&T subscribers pay 24$ per year to Fox News.
|
| What do you think about it?
| Nuzzerino wrote:
| Are you sure? I saw a different video where media outlets of
| all types were saying similar things. The infamous deleted
| "Vox" tweet where they said it would not be a deadly pandemic,
| for one example.
|
| I don't think linking a partisan outlet singling out a partisan
| outlet from the opposite side of the isle is a good way to
| treat this issue. PG apparently doesn't either, and didn't name
| names.
|
| Source: https://i.imgur.com/Tn0UtWT.png
| hangphyr wrote:
| Many news media companies have been engaging in just that,
| trying to point out (hypocritically) where their competitors
| attempted to downplay the threat of the virus. It's not so
| much a problem with news media being wrong, it's a problem
| with most of them skewing towards pundit commentary and
| OP/ED's on the news, rather than just reporting the news.
|
| If the news media blankly reports what is happening, and
| avoided adding layers of interpretation on top of it, their
| reputations would be in better shape right now.
| dominotw wrote:
| > OP/ED's on the news
|
| What the stance of opinion pieces. ppl seem to say opinion
| articles cannot be judged because they are opinions by
| definition. I find that infuriating but i have to bite by
| lip and agree.
|
| eg: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22697313
| throwawaylolx wrote:
| Why focus only on the low-hanging fruits at one end of the
| spectrum? How about all the scientists who made doomsday
| predictions that failed to materialize?
| jacquesm wrote:
| Err on the side of caution works quite well when modelling
| things that are rare but that can have devastating effects.
| throwawaylolx wrote:
| This is a nonsensical approach unless you consider the damage
| caused by overprotective measures such as the rapidly
| increasing number of people who are filling for unemployment
| every day.
| jacquesm wrote:
| Right. So, in your opinion, how many people would you be
| willing to give up for the economy? What ages? Prior
| conditions? What about yourself? Your family?
|
| We've been conditioned over the last 100+ years that life -
| especially life of white people, but never mind that bit -
| is precious. So now, when white people's lives are in
| danger you suddenly want to go all super rational and
| equate lives with paying out unemployment? Good luck with
| that.
| throwawaylolx wrote:
| GDP correlates with life expectancy, so you can't
| separate deaths and economy as if they were behaving in
| isolation from each other like you seem to assume in your
| tantrum.
| jacquesm wrote:
| Yes, they are correlated. But they are not correlated in
| such a way that you're going to be looking the people
| that you've just condemned in the eye. Nor do they have
| voting family members that will remember that when ballot
| time rolls around.
|
| So this utilitarian argument you are making is going to
| be a very difficult one to put across and if you feel
| otherwise about it then it is up to you to stick your
| neck out, I want no part of it, and neither do most
| people. The argument that the handicapped, aging and ill
| should be disposed of has been made before, it didn't end
| well.
| dekhn wrote:
| I'm a biologist and I have no trouble saying with a straight face
| that, as of yet, COVID-19's true health impact has been lower
| than that of a bad year of flu. I don't care about TV commenters-
| by the metric of # of deaths (not potential number of deaths, or
| total cost to the medical system, or impact on economy), COVID-19
| _has_ been less than a bad year of flu.
|
| This isn't to say COVID-19 isn't bad, or doesn't have the
| potential to become worse. Instead it's saying that i'm shocked
| we don't take a preventable disease like annual flu more
| seriously, and that we've internalized the cost of all those
| deaths.
|
| (I know people get really riled up when I say the above. If it
| makes you angry, please take the time to write a cogent, reasoned
| response based on data, not anecdotes or emotions. We know that
| people's anecdotal experience has a strong effect on their
| personal feelings, and that this is an emotionally charged time.)
| standardUser wrote:
| It's an interesting point. The flu is "baked in" to our
| healthcare systems. Just like cancer and heart disease and a
| thousand other ailments that we can accommodate almost all of
| the time. Maybe the end game of this pandemic will be expanding
| our healthcare systems to accommodate the annual surge of
| COVID-19 cases?
|
| But in the meantime, we're stuck with a pandemic that is _not_
| baked in, so while it may be "less bad" in some ways than the
| flu, it is catastrophically worse because no healthcare systems
| are prepared to deal with it.
| dekhn wrote:
| Bad flu years aren't baked into healthcare systems; hospitals
| have to set up tents in parking lots to handle the extra flux
| of patients, _and_ tens to hundreds of thousands of people
| still die.
| akiselev wrote:
| When's the last time the annual flu caused upwards of 50-80%
| ICU occupancy rates in several countries simultaneously?
|
| That's the difference between biology and medicine.
| nickthemagicman wrote:
| The difference is that biologists look at macro data and
| medical professionals look at micro data.
|
| OF course there are a few ICU's with high occupancy rates due
| to the nature of the disease and the intensity with which it
| hits high population areas with older populations.
|
| However, overall on a MACRO level WORLD wide it's no worse
| than a season of the flu.
| dekhn wrote:
| But given the severity and high death rate of flu, shouldn't
| it also have that high level of hospitalization, or perhaps
| covid shouldn't have such a high rate?
|
| It's unclear at this team what purpose super-intensive
| hospitalization for covid serves. That's something we're only
| going to understand in time.
|
| (note, I did my training at a hospital medical center and my
| biology work was health-oriented).
| danans wrote:
| > But given the severity and high death rate of flu,
| shouldn't it also have that high level of hospitalization,
|
| Your question is circular. It assumes that the severity and
| death rate of flu is the same as with COVID19. There's no
| reason to believe that's true at this point.
|
| > or perhaps covid shouldn't have such a high rate?
|
| The hospitalization rate is what it is. People aren't going
| to the hospital with COVID19 for the fun of it. They're
| terribly sick.
| [deleted]
| nickthemagicman wrote:
| Completely agree. The data backs you up as far as
| infections/fatalities.
|
| The rational data is: under 60 with no pre-existing
| conditions..you're basically immune.
|
| This whole thing appears to be a massive fear campaign.
|
| But if you bring up ANYTHING counter to the prevailing
| narrative, you're viciously attacked by people. VICIOUSLY. Like
| you're some sort of murdering child killer.
|
| No one is interested in discussion or thinking about this. They
| just repeat the narrative.
|
| The people I've discussed this with... it's all mantric
| repetitions of 'flatten the curve' of 'social distancing saves
| lives' and people have not looked at the data or anything to
| back this up!
|
| I feel like the average person could be told to wear a dog cone
| to 'stop covid' and we would have a population of people
| walking around with dog cones around their necks.
|
| It's actually disappointing and embarrassing.
| daveguy wrote:
| You may be a biologist, but you are definitely not an
| epidemiologist.
|
| It is at least 10x more lethal and much more contagious. We
| will bear the brunt of it in the US because we didn't take it
| seriously for so long. The only reason we aren't at 2,000+
| deaths per day in the US is because now we are taking it
| seriously. That death rate sustained for a typical flu season
| (4 months) would be 240,000 deaths. This is serious. If we
| never took it seriously the death toll would be well over a
| million. And that is just in the US. Downplaying the severity
| of it will get people killed.
|
| Yes we should take flu more seriously. But that doesn't make
| this not so bad.
| nickthemagicman wrote:
| You're missing context. It's 10x more lethal in CERTAIN
| DEMOGRAPHIC GROUPS.
|
| The data so far shows that it's the same lethality or less in
| people under 60 y.o. with no pre-existing conditions which is
| a huge proportion of the world and it may even be LESS
| because 80% of those tested have NO OR MINOR SYMPTOMS so who
| knows how many have it and haven't been tested!
|
| It's not even remotely serious at all in that population.
|
| Context matters in epidemiology am I incorrect?
| [deleted]
| daveguy wrote:
| No, it's more like 5-10% lethal in certain demographic
| groups. It is 10x as lethal (1% as opposed to 0.1%) in the
| general population. And there has been enough testing in
| some regions to know pretty well. The pandemic is stressing
| hospitals wherever there is a large enough concentration of
| people. The flu just does not do that. Mainly because we
| have vaccines to keep R0 1.2 to 1.3. When we get vaccines
| it may be even less contagious than the flu. But right now
| it is significantly more contagious and significantly more
| deadly.
| dekhn wrote:
| My training was in a hospital medical center and I'm familiar
| with epidemiology. I think most claims about total deaths due
| to covid are uninformed speculation based on incomplete data.
|
| You are making predictions that we have absolutely no
| confidence about. That's not helpful. I'm saying we don't
| have the data to claim what you're claiming.
| lovehashbrowns wrote:
| You're looking at the impact of this virus AFTER we've already
| implemented shelter-in-place measures, banned certain
| international travel, tanked our global economy, attempted to
| prepare hospitals with additional supplies, and we've yet to
| hit the peak, right?
|
| And you're also noting that the US currently has 9,616 recorded
| deaths from COVID-19? Whereas data puts the worst flu season
| since 2010-2011 at 61,000 (2017-2018) deaths over an entire
| year, right? Again, with various provisions to help slow this
| virus already in place?
|
| And you're also noting that hospitalization rates would include
| the regular flu, typical hospital visits that require an ICU,
| AND hospital visits from COVID-19, right?
|
| Sure, I get the point of taking the flu more seriously, and I
| agree 100% with you. But to try to make the point that COVID-19
| has been less bad than a bad year of flu is pretty pointless
| and also misleading. A more appropriate comparison would be to
| go back in time to Dec 2019 and have no countries put anything
| in place and let COVID-19 run wild. But at that point, you're
| sacrificing people just to make a dumb comparison that COVID-19
| isn't much worse than a bad year of flu.
|
| Also it's disingenuous to pick the worst season of flu. Let's
| compare COVID-19 to 2015-2016's 23,000 influenza deaths and see
| how, after all these provisions, we're already at 9,616
| COVID-19 deaths in the US in April.
|
| https://public.tableau.com/profile/jonas.nart#!/vizhome/COVI...
|
| https://www.cdc.gov/flu/about/burden/index.html?CDC_AA_refVa...
| chillacy wrote:
| If the crux of your argument relies on looking at what has
| happened so far without looking at projections into what could
| happen, then I have some stock to sell you. You'll buy at the
| top since the last quarter's earnings were good, right?
| dekhn wrote:
| Can you keep the discussion fact-based?
| jmull wrote:
| Simple numbers tell us the deaths so far from covid-19 have
| been less than an average flu season. But so what?
|
| You're not actually suggesting anything so there's nothing to
| get directly angry about. But since you don't suggest anything,
| you leave it to people to infer what you really mean, and then
| there may be good reason to get angry.
|
| Are you suggesting that we should have treated covid-19 like
| the flu -- although one without a vaccine -- and just went
| about our normal lives? If so, how much faster do you think our
| medical systems would have been overwhelmed and what do you
| think we could have done about that? You can crunch numbers...
| estimate the numbers dead from covid-19 without any curve-
| flattening efforts and the additional dead due to the medical
| system being overwhelmed.
|
| Or are you suggesting something else? We can't read your mind
| over the internet.
| dekhn wrote:
| Hmm, that's a good point. my main point is that we should
| treat flu more seriously (personally I would prefer legally
| mandated vaccines with extremely limited exceptions, and more
| funding into improved vaccines that have a higher
| effectivity).
|
| My second point is about the response to covid. To me it's
| unclear (and it won't be clear to the epidemiologists for a
| few years) whether the reactions we have taken had the
| effects we predicted. Much of what we're doing now, it's
| actually unclear what would have happened if we hadn't has
| social distancing etc, due to the extremely low rate of
| testing.
|
| Another issue is that large numbers of scientists have
| dropped their regular work and are working on covid... most
| of them will not produce useful results (in terms of health
| care) and instead, their daily work is being forgotten. This
| will have long-term consequences for scientific productivity
| without having a large outcome for covid.
|
| I think making predictions on how many people "could have
| died" when we're doing extremely limited testing isn't
| helpful.
| jmull wrote:
| > we should treat flu more seriously
|
| Agreed (though in the US we _do_ have a yearly nation-wide
| vaccination program, imperfect as it is, and largely staff
| and equip hospitals to handle the high-water mark of
| cases).
|
| > I think making predictions on how many people "could have
| died" when we're doing extremely limited testing isn't
| helpful.
|
| I disagree with that. The alternative to making imperfect
| predictions (predictions are imperfect by nature) is to not
| make predictions. Without predictions you can't make
| reasonable decisions to direct your future.
|
| Of course, when your predictions are too far off you can't
| make good decisions to direct your future either, but that
| just suggests you should try to make the best predictions
| you can (hence the science and study of epidemiology), not
| that you shouldn't make predictions.
|
| If you don't make predictions (or you make them based on
| hunches or by other low quality means) you're just throwing
| yourself randomly into the future and are unlikely to get
| good outcomes.
| nickthemagicman wrote:
| Since there's no vaccine...what you're suggesting is a
| perpetual game of Covid whack-a-mole.
|
| We come out of quarantine it blows up again, we go back into
| quarantine.
|
| That's as infeasable solution as this current lockdown
| quarantine.
| dekhn wrote:
| So far most data I've seen shows that people who were
| infected have some immunity. However, it's not clear yet
| what the annual effect of immunity will be - for example,
| we haven't sampled enough people/viruses to know in detail
| whether that immunity persists when the virus mutates.
|
| Epidemiologists are likely to know the answers to these
| sorts of questions in a few years.
| known wrote:
| "You can always count on Americans to do the right thing - after
| they've tried everything else" --Churchill
| underdeserver wrote:
| Remembering predictions and revisiting them is a superpower in
| risk management and decision making.
|
| Superforecasting by Tetlock and Gardner is a good starting point
| if you want to learn this power.
| mellosouls wrote:
| The article seems to be taking a shot at a reasonably easy
| target.
|
| Almost all the talking heads are late Feb/early March. While it
| was clear something was happening "over there", and the fear was
| growing, it wasn't unreasonable _at that point_ to not expect the
| unprecedented situation we are now in - and these people are not
| paid to offer nuance.
|
| I'm not sure this easy soapbox judgement is much more
| constructive than the hacks it pillories.
| tigershark wrote:
| Italy was in full lockdown on the 9th of March, and half the
| country on the 8th. And a lot of politicians were still
| downplaying the virus after that.
| beepboopbeep wrote:
| I'm not sure I understand your point. Are you implying that
| those talking heads are not responsible for the statements they
| made and the repercussions there of?
| Robotbeat wrote:
| It was unreasonable at that point. I'm no epidemiologist, but I
| understood exponential growth at that point to know that,
| because it wasn't being contained (no measures with a
| reasonable chance of containment were being taken at exactly
| the time when they really had to be taken), there was no
| stopping the exponential growth in the near term in the US. And
| especially once it was spreading in Italy, there was just not a
| credible reason to say "it cannot happen here." You should
| mistrust people's judgement in the future on similar such
| topics if they were dismissive of the possibility of this
| happening.
|
| You should update your Bayesian priors about the credibility
| and judgement of those people on topics such as this. And that
| IS constructive.
|
| Doesn't mean that those people are useless, but unless you've
| seen a mea culpa from them, you should look warily on future
| such predictions. You should note to yourself "this person may
| be prone to downplaying some risks and interpreting things
| over-optimistically, with some amount of wishful thinking."
| unreal37 wrote:
| There are two valid points in there, despite how easy a target
| "the media" is.
|
| - People saying things with confidence that they didn't know to
| be true
|
| - This happens all the time but with Coronavirus, the facts
| came to light within days of them saying this
|
| I get what Paul Graham is saying here.
| jpxw wrote:
| Even "reputable" sources like the Financial Times have been
| putting out utter rubbish:
| https://www.ft.com/content/5ff6469a-6dd8-11ea-89df-41bea0557...
|
| My current theory is that we are seeing denial on a mass scale as
| a coping mechanism.
| jshevek wrote:
| This appears paywalled, what did they say? (Is it the "half of
| UK" which is rubbish?)
| buboard wrote:
| As with any model, start with "all models are wrong"
| gadders wrote:
| Why is that rubbish? It was created by a team just as credible
| as that at Imperial College.
| jpxw wrote:
| The Oxford study is based on blatantly, and easily
| demonstrably, bad data. For example it relies on only 1 out
| of every 1000 infections needing hospitalisation. This is not
| supported by any current evidence.
|
| https://www.wired.co.uk/article/coronavirus-infections-
| oxfor...
| gadders wrote:
| Conversely, the lead on the Imperial Study was also in
| charge of modelling for the UK foot and mouth epidemic
| which was found not fit for purpose and resulted in lots of
| livestock being slaughtered unnecessarily. And this is the
| one the UK and other governments seem to be basing their
| approach on.
|
| "He was behind disputed research that sparked the mass
| culling of farm animals during the 2001 epidemic of foot
| and mouth disease, a crisis which cost the country billions
| of pounds.
|
| And separately he also predicted that up to 150,000 people
| could die from bovine spongiform encephalopathy (BSE, or
| 'mad cow disease') and its equivalent in sheep if it made
| the leap to humans. To date there have been fewer than 200
| deaths from the human form of BSE and none resulting from
| sheep to human transmission."
|
| https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2020/03/28/neil-ferguson-
| sc...
| taipan100 wrote:
| To call the Oxford study "utter rubbish" is foolish.
|
| Your "example" of bad data is the only quoted data in that
| article and it doesn't even mean anything since the
| implicit assumption of the Gupta model is that we do not
| know how many asymptomatic cases of COVID exist (even WIRED
| concede this point). Testing in Italy is insufficient to
| tell us this. 1 in 1000 infections requiring
| hospitalisation could be a realistic number if a high
| percentage of infections are asymptomatic.
|
| > we just won't know the true proportion of people who have
| contracted the disease without showing any symptoms, but it
| is likely a much lower number than the Oxford study
| assumes.
|
| Epidemiology is not done by "it is likely much lower than
| the study assumes" since that is pure guess work without
| the tests.
|
| What the Oxford study offers is a strong argument that
| antibody testing is vitally important and nobody is doing
| it.
|
| As I say this is a very long way from utter rubbish.
| jsnell wrote:
| 1/1000 was not realistic when the preprint was published,
| let alone now. It showed that one could fit a bunch of
| curves onto 14 days of data on deaths. Which is true, but
| also utterly unintersting. The reason that sorry excuse
| of a model got so much attention is that the authors did
| not stop there.
|
| They also made the totally unsupported assumption that
| one of the lower end curves matched reality. (That's
| right. They actually made exactly the kind of assumptions
| you're accusing others of, rather than just argue for
| antibody testing).
|
| The problem is that when the study was made, there was a
| lot more data available than just that 14 days of deaths
| from two countries. And a ton of it was totally
| incompatible with their modeling.
|
| Here's some of the conflicting data points as of ten days
| ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22698584
| kgwgk wrote:
| > Testing in Italy is insufficient to tell us this.
|
| It's not about "testing in Italy":
|
| "In Lombardy - despite the region being under lockdown
| since March 9 - more than _one in every 1,000 of the
| entire population_ have already been hospitalised due to
| coronavirus. "
| lbeltrame wrote:
| But we don't know the actual amount of people which were
| _infected_ in Italy, because some of these (a sizable
| percentage) only reported fevers, and perhaps didn 't
| even think about having SARS-CoV-2 in their bodies.
|
| An acquaintance's partner suspects having got it, because
| after _two days_ (two days, not weeks) of very mild fever
| (~37.5C) he was hit by anosmia. An ex-coworker also
| mentioned "a horribly strong fever" with respiratory
| difficulties which lasted just a few days. Yes, anecdata,
| but shows that you can easily miss a large part of the
| infected cases if you only test those hospitalized.
| kgwgk wrote:
| You're missing the point. We know for sure that in
| Lombardy the hospitalisation rate was higher than 1 in
| 1000 people infected.
| xiphias2 wrote:
| The problem is that the WHO was lying multiple times, and other
| organizations parroted those lies as they were afraid of
| confronting the WHO.
|
| Now we are in a stage where there's no good information source
| (except HN comments, though even there we must be selective).
| the_af wrote:
| The WHO was lying? How so?
| e2021 wrote:
| WHO was saying almost until the point that China locked
| down that there was no evidence of human to human
| transmission, even though Taiwan has warned them that had
| strong evidence of this on December 31st 2019.
| the_af wrote:
| That could be a mistake or maybe they considered the
| prior evidence unreliable. "Lying" implies means
| conscious intent to deceive. Why would the WHO
| intentionally lie?
| chvid wrote:
| "No worse than the flu." How could they feel safe saying such
| things?
|
| Because in most health scares historically this has been correct.
| That the danger had been wildly overestimated.
|
| And even now, it is not clear that "we" have a correct estimation
| of the danger.
|
| Recently I read an estimate that 50% of the infected have no
| symptons. I even read another estimate that 90% have no symptons.
| Should the latter be correct then we are overestimating the
| danger and wildly overreacting.
| watwut wrote:
| I think that I would want to see source for "most health scares
| are exaggerated". Because I don't recall that many health
| scares touted by scientists as much as this one and I am not
| young.
|
| The 50% of cases being asymptomatic is what makes it spread so
| easily and overwhelm our healthcare system. It is good news
| with regards to mortality, but the asymptomatic cases were
| predicted to be there by scientists already when it was in
| China only. If you read the reports, the models suggested the
| asymptomatic cases must be there long time ago.
| Retric wrote:
| Anyone saying 90% have no symptoms is simply lying.
|
| China's case fatality rate is over 4% which is likely inflated.
| Dimond Princess tested everyone and has a 12/712 or 1.7% case
| fatality rate with many still in critical condition and the
| majority of positive results showing symptoms and a high
| percentage needing hospitalization.
|
| A wildly optimistic estimate of 1 death per 200 cases x 70%
| infections is over 1 million dead Americans. And that's
| assuming we could provide care for millions of people in
| critical condition.
| known wrote:
| Next version of #CoronaVirus should infect only Politicians;
| Earth will become a better place for Humans;
| zzzeek wrote:
| Might PG have included the critical point of this video is that
| they are all _conservative_ voices? Right, that would be too
| "divisive".
| pjscott wrote:
| The voices on this particular video are all conservative
| because it's a clip from the Daily Show, not an unbiased
| sample, and _of course_ they 're going to mainly pick on the
| other side. People on the right are making similar lists of
| grievances against left-wing media, and if you looked
| exclusively at those, you'd get the impression that downplaying
| the coronavirus is a _liberal_ thing.
|
| (My own pet interpretation is that political news reporting is
| a circus, reality-adjacent at best, and most journalists leave
| you worse-informed for having listened to them regardless of
| their party affiliation.)
| hkai wrote:
| Flu in the US: 0.13-0.28% mortality [1]
|
| Covid-19 in China: 0.50-0.66% mortality [2, 3]
|
| I mean from numbers it is indeed not much worse than flu, but we
| don't know the potential extra deaths caused by running out of
| ICU beds.
|
| [1] https://www.cdc.gov/flu/about/burden/past-seasons.html
|
| [2] https://www.bmj.com/content/369/bmj.m1327
|
| [3]
| https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2020.03.05.20031773v...
| kgwgk wrote:
| If you're giving the CFR for flu as deaths/symptomatic you
| should do the same for COVID-19: 1.23% to 1.53%. That's a
| factor of seven worse.
|
| When you consider as well that everyone is susceptible and you
| may have infection rates well over the 5-15% you get for flu
| it's at least an order of magnitude worse.
| leereeves wrote:
| And that's with a century of research and experience treating
| serious cases of influenza, and none for Covid-19.
|
| Covid-19 is serious, but the major crisis right now is that
| it's new, and the medical system is struggling to adapt.
| fiftyfifty wrote:
| Exactly, we have both vaccines and ani-virals to use against
| the flu and the death rate is still that high? We've got
| neither of those things for Covid-19 to date...
| Animats wrote:
| _" These people constantly make false predictions, and get away
| with it, because the things they make predictions about either
| have mushy enough outcomes that they can bluster their way out of
| trouble, or happen so far in the future that few remember what
| they said."_
|
| Neither of which applies this time.
|
| Here's a project for someone who works in the video space. Start
| with a Trump speech. As soon as he says something demonstrably
| false, the image freezes and a loud buzzer sounds. The picture of
| Trump shrinks and moves to a corner of the screen. Then the
| correct information appears, possibly including a contradictory
| clip from Trump. After that, the main video resumes.
|
| Advanced version: do this in real time with machine learning.
|
| Now that would get you hits on Youtube.
| shard972 wrote:
| You just did
| maitredusoi wrote:
| This is because nobody is an epidemiologist over-night. So now
| you will be able to discard any proposition from those kind of
| people, those one who are trying so hard to be smart, but that
| obviously can't become over-night ;)
| redthrow wrote:
| Avoiding news [1] and people who don't bet on their prediction
| [2] go a long way.
|
| [1] https://www.gwern.net/docs/culture/2010-dobelli.pdf
|
| [2]
| https://www.econlib.org/archives/2016/01/i_changed_my_mi.htm...
| stevetodd wrote:
| Liberalism and conservatism are essentially religions--there are
| core fundamental beliefs to them and a community surrounding it.
| Rejecting the political party is not just rejecting beliefs but
| also rejecting family, friends, and social structure. The battle
| has become so much more about red vs blue, left vs right, that
| principles and facts are no longer relevant. The vitriol and lack
| civility in the current political environment all but guaranteed
| this outcome.
|
| Fox News is deeply wrong, but we should all look inward to our
| own behavior and if we've been unkind or unrespectful, we should
| take responsibility for creating this situation. Do you really
| think that yelling at, shaming, or embarrassing people will get
| them to change? I don't think research supports that position.
| choward wrote:
| > Liberalism and conservatism are essentially religions
|
| I somewhat agree but I would argue that it's the Democratic and
| Republican parties that are religions, not the philosophies
| themselves. They both are fine on their own just like religious
| philosophies.
|
| It's the people who basically form a cult, give it a name, and
| interpret the philosophies that are the problem. It becomes all
| about growing your cult to be bigger than the other cults so
| you have more power. To get people interested you attack the
| other side instead of having intelligent debates. They operate
| within there own echo chambers.
|
| Most media companies pick a side and then attack the other
| side. People like watching other people get very emotional so
| that leads to more viewers. It's why there are so many
| "reality" shows.
| devy wrote:
| Fox News deserves class-action lawsuit for their lies and the
| damages it caused for making people who watched their news
| disregarding the social distancing rules.
|
| https://news.yahoo.com/fox-news-reportedly-fears-early-11453...
| hi41 wrote:
| Honest question here. I am not an American but watching the
| scene.
|
| Fox News also pointed out several things that the left media
| wrong.
|
| 1. Washingtonpost telling in early Feb that public should be
| wary of government asking for a shutdown. The video showed that
| Bill Maher wanted the pandemic so that Trump gets ousted.
|
| 2. Fox News also pointed inaccuracies in npr's article.
|
| Looks like each side is blaming the other.
|
| How do you tell which side aid correct. The left too wants to
| destroy Trump's reputation. Left is a hateful group which wants
| to bury the right.
| qznc wrote:
| There is plenty of sites to track predictions:
| https://www.metaculus.com http://longbets.org
| http://www.knewthenews.com https://predictionbook.com
|
| I try to record predictions I find in the news. Most statements
| by politicians and journalists are too vague though. You need to
| get from "more people will die from COVID-19" to "more than
| 1.000.000 people will die from COVID-19 before May according to
| worldometers.info".
| smsm42 wrote:
| Predictions on random internet sites are cheap, worth thing you
| risk is losing a little money or some imaginary Internet
| points. Politicians are in a situation where their predictions
| can cost lives, they are forced to make them - and in most
| cases, they have no information and no ability to make any
| proper analysis of the situation. So they just do what they've
| done most of their professional lives - they bullshit away.
| watwut wrote:
| Yep. But I think the same happen with all kind of crisises. The
| past history shows, that lying or being incredibly wrong does not
| have any negative impact on a pundit or or politician or whole
| classes of commentary journalist.
|
| It seem to be more of systematic issue then just individual.
| m0zg wrote:
| Well, if that's the standard now, then the entirety of the US
| press is not credible: https://i.imgur.com/HGcoZco.png
| zzzcpan wrote:
| Mass media doesn't emphasize credentials of journalists or any
| credibility for that matter, in other words it is never
| credible. It's better understood in terms of propaganda, like
| your link is an example of manufactured consent.
| buboard wrote:
| Pg should write about what seems to be the real epidemic in
| america: politics. When people politicize a chemical compound ,
| you know things are dangerously wrong
| throwaway5752 wrote:
| In the background global warming is a much greater threat to
| human life and has the _exact same dynamic_ with the _exact same
| players_. There is also zero introspection - the people who were
| wrong about covid-19 are simply denying they said what they said.
| The truly scary part is they are getting away with it in real
| time, and changing a large populations ' memory of contemporary
| events. I realize it's hard to remember further back with the
| enormous amount of information we're all bombarded with, but you
| can just go back to 2005 and see Larry Kudlow (Dir. NEC) just as
| wrong about economic policy and the depth of the financial crisis
| (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Larry_Kudlow#Economy) but here he
| is again. Consider Navarro vis a vis trade. I don't think anyone
| will learn anything, and for smart enough people, that needs to
| be the lesson.
| concordDance wrote:
| COVID-19 just isn't that important on the global scale.
|
| Car accidents last year almost certainly cost way more QALYs*
| than COVID-19 will this year (particularly if Imperial College
| in their 13th report is right about how badly undercounted the
| case numbers are).
|
| * Car accidents affect most ages and health levels relatively
| equally, while COVID-19 mostly kills the old and infirm who are
| unhealthy, with poor quality of life and have few years left.
| ryguytilidie wrote:
| You guys are still doing this..?
| concordDance wrote:
| 1.3 million people a year killed by car crashes, biased
| moderately towards the young (around 3 to 1 is comparing a
| 30 year old and a 60 year old).
|
| In contrast, COVID-19 has a fatality rate that looks
| roughly like the normal yearly death rate for the UK (so
| you'd expect as many people to die at least partially of
| COVID-19 as of every other cause combined this year)...
| Making it around 50 million people killed if everyone got
| it (many won't) and if the world age distribution matched
| the UK.
|
| But the average person killed by COVID-19 is a lot closer
| to death. Even if you just go by age the actuarial tables
| put for remaining life years, those killed will average a
| fifth as many years as those killed by car accidents.
|
| Hmm
|
| Ok, maybe COVID-19 WILL cause more QALY loss after all. But
| it's certainly not entirely clearcut.
|
| Particularly if Imperial is right about >15% of Spain
| having already been infected (which would imply a MUCH
| lower death rate than that commonly reported given that
| Spain has only recorded 13 thousand deaths and has already
| passed their peak), in which case cars last year might
| still "win".
| [deleted]
| umvi wrote:
| Heck, _tobacco_ is a greater threat to human life than
| covid-19. How many millions die every year, year after year,
| because of tobacco?
| ed_balls wrote:
| vehicles killed more than WW2. Coal kills more than
| Chernobyl, but our instincts are bad in assessing risks like
| that.
| lliamander wrote:
| So what do we do about all of the doom and gloom climate
| predictions of the past that failed to materialize[0]?
|
| If something has changed about either the science or the media
| reporting of scientific results, what evidence do lay folk have
| that this is the case?
|
| [0] https://tofspot.blogspot.com/2010/10/goosey-goosey-
| gander.ht...
| moultano wrote:
| How about you look at what they actually predicted?
| https://www.carbonbrief.org/analysis-how-well-have-
| climate-m...
| lliamander wrote:
| That's a useful start. I'll definitely dig into this.
|
| The question still stands as to why, even if the problem
| lay with journalists/media rather than scientists, is why
| did they get it so wrong?
|
| Also, if I as lay person am going to be getting my
| information from sources like NYT and National Geographic
| instead of IPCC reports directly, have they fixed the
| problems that led to the erroneous reporting?
| moultano wrote:
| A list of cherry picked quotes from a motivated
| contrarian is not evidence that they "got it so wrong."
| lliamander wrote:
| That the media have (with some regularity) promoted the
| most catastrophic predictions, predictions that were
| subsequently falsified, is not exactly news.
| moultano wrote:
| If your only experience of how the media has covered
| climate change is through posts like the one you linked,
| then you'll naturally come to that conclusion, but I
| don't think it has any basis in reality.
| acqq wrote:
| > if I as lay person am going to be getting my
| information from sources like NYT and National Geographic
|
| If you'd like to have better understanding of any topic
| you have to learn to improve your critical thinking
| capabilities. The media simply print different "opinions"
| and "statements" and even mark them as such. You have to
| learn that the media never reflect the truth, the way
| they are used to cover almost any topic. They are simply
| the reflections of the power of those who do the
| influence. Big corporations (or organizations having
| immense funding) have big influence even when it is not
| obvious to the "lay person".
|
| From the media side, how it typically work is that the
| "debate" and the "controversy" sell (more ads, more
| readers, more viewers). So very often they would give as
| much attention to one person representing the conclusion
| 95% of all world scientist as to another person
| representing a set of fringe "contrarians" financed by
| some NGO's which are actually financed by some
| corporations whose interest is to promote that view:
|
| https://www.amazon.com/Merchants-Doubt-Handful-
| Scientists-Ob...
| [deleted]
| runeks wrote:
| > In the background global warming is a much greater threat to
| human life and has the exact same dynamic with the exact same
| players.
|
| No, global warming has a very different dynamic. With a virus,
| if you do the right thing and protect yourself, you're more
| likely to survive. With global warming, if you get a lot of
| people to emit less CO2, you might just end up making CO2
| emissions cheaper for everyone else.
| VWWHFSfQ wrote:
| That's a very reductive and defeatist way to view the
| problem, and potential solution. The reality is there is no
| silver bullet. Emissions have to be reduced by means of an
| energy revolution. Sure, some will benefit in the short term.
| But everyone will benefit in the long term.
| marcosdumay wrote:
| Hum... The GP seems to be talking about Global Warming
| denialists, and the dynamics of how they communicate with
| people. This one is the same.
|
| But yes, Global Warming has the bad quality that it is
| completely not obvious how to solve it. There is an entirely
| different dynamic at the side that accepts it for settling on
| a solution... and what is more disturbing, R&D and science
| are mostly neglected there too, even by the academics so
| prone on applying science to predict the problem.
| sjg007 wrote:
| Umm it is pretty obvious how you "solve" global warming and
| that is to reduce greenhouse gas emissions.
| cortesoft wrote:
| So what should we do?
| vkou wrote:
| Carbon taxes, and protectionist trade tariffs against
| countries who don't adopt carbon taxes.
|
| Make non-compliance painful enough, and the defectors will
| fall in line.
| banads wrote:
| >Make non-compliance painful enough, and the defectors
| will fall in line.
|
| Maybe they don't, or maybe in the end that's all too
| little too late, which is why I'd suggest adding
| adaptation initiatives to your list.
| vkou wrote:
| We're going to have to turn to adaptation initiatives
| even if we go net-zero-carbon tomorrow - that's kind of
| baked into our future planning at this point.
| jfrankamp wrote:
| The United States military could best be used to fight this
| by destroying (with warning) global fossil fuel
| infrastructure that wasn't voluntarily closed, bit by bit
| with a decade long schedule. The announcement alone would
| prompt a massive shift in energy production, use,
| investment etc. Our own legacy infrastructure would also
| have to be on the list. Call it a Paris accord with teeth.
|
| It will never happen, because collectively we don't believe
| the cost of climate change is greater than the cost of
| leveling the landscape of incentives to reduce emissions +
| reducing emissions. The US could unilaterally leverage its
| remaining military lead to enact global change.
| tlrobinson wrote:
| That sounds like a good way to start World War III.
| WalterBright wrote:
| Trying to retroactively excoriate people for under reacting to
| a crisis is a little unfair. Nobody knew how this would play
| out, and going off half-cocked at every threat that appears,
| and there are a lot of them, is destructive.
| lliamander wrote:
| > exact same dynamic with the exact same players.
|
| There are some who might be in the climate skeptics/deniers
| camp who were concerned about coronavirus[0]
|
| [0] https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2020/03/why-some-early-
| maga-...
| mirimir wrote:
| Yes, for sure. You have experts who admit that they aren't
| sure, and then say what the evidence seems to show. And you
| have bloviators who spew BS, based on some more or less hidden
| agenda.
|
| But about global climate change, it's crucial to keep in mind
| that it's just one aspect of human population growth and
| "economic development". Another huge impact is increasingly
| intensive and extensive land use, plus pollution with excess
| nutrients and toxic chemicals, which leads to loss of
| biodiversity and species extinctions.
|
| Indeed, it's possible that COVID-19 and other zoonotic
| diseases, such as HIV and ebola virus disease (EVD), are also
| consequences of increasingly intensive and extensive land use.
| That might seem ironic, but it's just how ecosystems work.
| eanzenberg wrote:
| And they both use the same scare statistics. (covid) 2 million
| Americans will die. (global warming) If we don't stop emitting
| CO2 the world will collapse by 2030.
| jnbiche wrote:
| Two million was at the very high end of only a very few
| models (one?).
|
| That said, Italy is at the top of their curve (hopefully,
| apparently) with 16,000 deaths. However, their excess deaths
| this past month (compared to baseline for March) are
| extremely high, and equal almost as many deaths as the
| official Covid-19 death toll. According to at least some
| Italian demographers and epidemiologists, it's likely most of
| those deaths are due to Covid-19 and were uncounted. But
| let's say that only half of those deaths were Covid-19, and
| that the curve turns out to be relatively balanced, as with
| most epidemics that don't come in waves. If that's the case,
| Italy will see around 50,000 deaths from Covid-19. Spain will
| likely see around the same proportion of Covid deaths.
|
| If the US were to experience a similar proportion of deaths,
| we'd be at around 500,000 deaths. I don't think we'll see
| nearly so many deaths from Covid-19 _now_ but in early March,
| it just wasn 't clear. It's not 2 million, but my point here
| is that this was a model that likely turned out high, but it
| was within the same order of magnitude. And again, I'm using
| the actual deaths that have occurred in Italy at the top of
| the curve to make that estimate. It's possible that both the
| curve will suddenly drop precipitously, and that most of
| those excess deaths were caused by some other phenomenon, but
| it's highly unlikely based on behavior of past respiratory
| pandemics.
|
| Many more models people have discussed have predicted
| anywhere from 48,000 to (most commonly) around 200,000 deaths
| in the US from Covid-19. I think we'll probably end up around
| the 50,000 death figure, and that's with us shutting down our
| economy. I think it could have easily been much, much more
| (although probably nowhere near 2 million) if we had carried
| on business as usual (and could still end up like that if
| we're not careful).
|
| So complain that the media latched on to the most dire model,
| that's OK. I agree the media sensationalizes. "If it bleeds,
| it leads".
|
| But don't complain about the model itself. Those papers are
| always very clear about the degree of uncertainty.
|
| I don't know of any serious scientist who is predicting
| global collapse by 2030 from global warming. Do you have
| someone specific in mind?
| thelean12 wrote:
| You're exaggerating, which is just as bad.
|
| NYT reported that "200,000 to 1.7 million" people _could_ die
| on March 13th [1]. Most of those calculations had to do with
| the fact that the hospital system would get overwhelmed at
| some point, compounding the deaths.
|
| None of that is "scare statistics". It's useful modeling.
|
| I think what you consider to be "scare statistics" is more
| lack of education. Similar to how people saw the Trump win as
| meaning "The media/polls were wrong! They had Clinton winning
| at 85%! They can't be trusted!". When in reality, flipping a
| coin and getting 3 heads in a row is all it takes for Trump
| to win. Or rolling a standard 6-sided die and correctly
| guessing the number _once_. It suddenly doesn 't sound
| outlandish.
|
| [1] https://www.nytimes.com/2020/03/13/us/coronavirus-deaths-
| est...
|
| Edit: The downvotes are concerning. If you have a problem
| with my argument, please respond.
| jnbiche wrote:
| Exactly. Both the media and the anti-media/anti-expert
| crowd both have a poor understanding of probability and
| confidence intervals.
|
| With the media, I think it's sometimes intentional and not
| ignorance, as a ploy to get clicks.
|
| With the anti-media, anti-expert crowd, I have to believe
| it's usually simple ignorance.
| thelean12 wrote:
| Mostly agree. Some media is certainly better than others.
| The NYT article I linked has a very responsible title
| (IMO) of "Worst-Case Estimates for U.S. Coronavirus
| Deaths".
|
| It clearly says that the estimates they're about to talk
| about are _worst-case_ and _estimates_.
| alacombe wrote:
| Do you realize that if the media write "could die", readers
| will interpret it as "will die" ?
| thelean12 wrote:
| If you actually read the NYT article, it's really hard to
| come out of it thinking "1.7 million people will die".
| This is because of a few reasons:
|
| 1. They have a good, responsible title.
|
| 2. They bury the 1.7 million number a bit so you're
| forced to at least understand some of it.
|
| 3. They talk about how and why the estimates will change
| over time:
|
| >"When people change their behavior," said Lauren
| Gardner, an associate professor at the Johns Hopkins
| Whiting School of Engineering who models epidemics,
| "those model parameters are no longer applicable," so
| short-term forecasts are likely to be more accurate.
| _"There is a lot of room for improvement if we act
| appropriately."_
|
| I see no reason why this article shouldn't have been
| posted in its current form.
|
| Of course, as you get further away from good sources of
| news, you're going to get less responsible reporting. NYT
| is an example of very high quality reporting.
|
| CNN at the time probably had a breaking news line item on
| TV of "1.7 million could die". This would be
| irresponsible.
|
| Fox News at the time probably had a breaking news line
| item on TV of "It's just the flu". This would be
| irresponsible.
|
| And that's certainly a problem.
| robomartin wrote:
| > In the background global warming is a much greater threat to
| human life and has the exact same dynamic with the exact same
| players
|
| Oh, please, enough already!
|
| Global warming is nowhere near to what a virus can do. This
| thing could have killed half the population of this planet in
| weeks had nobody done a thing about it.
|
| The comparison is nonsensical on many fronts. Perhaps the most
| significant of them is the reality of climate change: We cannot
| do a thing about it. Period. We cannot change it. We cannot
| reverse it. We cannot magically fix it in fifty years.
|
| This is already well understand by the scientific community.
| Researchers don't get out there and expose it because they
| would instantly destroy their careers, lose grants and
| generally ruin their lives. It's a truly dishonest and damaging
| feedback loop driven by ideology, money and politics.
|
| All you need to do in order to understand this reality is
| analyze ice core atmospheric sample data. That's it. It's that
| simple. Calculate the rate of change with CO2 increasing and
| decreasing. Write down those numbers.
|
| Then realize this is what would happen if humanity left earth
| next Monday. It would take somewhere around 50,000 years for
| CO2 to decrease by 100 ppm.
|
| We cannot accelerate this rate of change by 1000x without
| likely killing all life on earth. We can't. It would require
| such vast amounts of energy and resources that it might even be
| beyond what's available on this planet.
|
| In other words, everyone is lying: Climate change deniers are
| nuts and those who claim we can fix it within even a few
| generations and just as crazy. The entire thing has become
| politicized beyond all comprehension. Science has left the
| building.
|
| So, no. Let's focus on pandemics, they are far more likely to
| wipe us out than the entire "save the planet" fantasy.
| Trasmatta wrote:
| > This thing could have killed half the population of this
| planet in weeks had nobody done a thing about it.
|
| What? No, there's not a single credible model that predicts
| that this virus could have wiped out half the population,
| even with 0 mitigation efforts. Such a virus _is_ a
| possibility, but it certainly wasn 't this one.
| robomartin wrote:
| You clearly haven't done the math.
|
| EDIT 1: Even if my statement is off and the number is 10%
| to 25% --pick a number, any number-- it is still more
| serious than the fantasies we have been choosing to focus
| on.
|
| The calculation must also include the massive mortality
| rate that would result from the collapse of all supply
| chains, medical systems, transportation, etc. People with
| "minor" medical conditions would die on the streets
| everywhere. The virus would kill indirectly by destroying
| society. Think it through. If the world did nothing the
| loss of life would be massive.
|
| EDIT 2: Imagine a world without hospitals (at scale),
| doctors, nurses, transportation, factories, food, water,
| medicine, power, gas, petroleum.
|
| You are focusing on direct mortality from the virus while
| ignoring that, without any mitigation at all, it would
| absolutely destroy society.
|
| Look at what happened in Italy. Now shut down all hospitals
| and remove all mitigation. Get the picture? Now, go do the
| math on that scenario. A scenario where people die from
| strokes, heart attacks, infections from cuts, appendicitis,
| diabetes (no drugs), hypertension, tooth infections, etc.
| sgt101 wrote:
| There's a really nasty that is looming in my nightmares.
| Hurricane season is coming earlier now, due to warming, and the
| Hurricanes are bigger. And The South is going to be in the
| thick of the epidemic in mid to late may.
| nradov wrote:
| Yes that's a real risk. The current consensus forecast is for
| a slightly above average hurricane season. In a few months we
| may have thousands of people evacuated into shelters.
| sgt101 wrote:
| Obviously the US Administration is urgently planning and
| preparing for this?
| maps7 wrote:
| > but here he is again
|
| what do you mean by this?
| yters wrote:
| I like how all our problems get tied to global warming these
| days. Certainly boosts the theory's credibility.
| throwaway294 wrote:
| PARTITION I OF II
|
| It's time to drive a stake through the heart of this climate
| change alarmism, to kill off this dangerous monster forever. We
| can do a good job just in this little post.
|
| Everything here is from just common sense or good references.
|
| Overview
|
| There is:
|
| >ALARMIST CLAIM: Extra CO2 from current human activities will
| soon cause significant extra warming and, thus, _climate
| change,_ a _climate crisis,_ etc.
|
| In one word, this claim is nonsense.
|
| In simple terms:
|
| (A) There is no serious evidence that CO2 from human activities
| at anything like probable concentrations will have any
| significant effect on the temperature or climate of the earth.
|
| (B) The warming of maybe 0.9 F since year 1900 cannot have been
| caused by CO2.
|
| (C) Human life was long burdened with nonsense from bad
| information, superstition, ignorance, and fear, but slowly
| science provided high quality information and means to reject
| the nonsense. The ALARMIST CLAIM is taking us back to the
| nonsense.
|
| (D) Proposed efforts to respond to the ALARMIST CLAIM by
| reducing CO2 are from massively wasteful, strongly destructive,
| a shot in the gut of standards of living, economic contraction,
| and maybe to disasterous world wide economic depression and
| global nuclear WWIII.
|
| There is some very good news:
|
| >To respond to the ALARMIST CLAIM, there is NOTHING to do.
| NOTHING.
|
| In music, the easiest note to play is just the rest -- make no
| sound. For responding to the ALARMIST CLAIM, the situation is
| similar: Do NOTHING and because there is nothing good to do.
|
| The rest of this note is in three parts:
|
| (I) Debunking
|
| (II) Additional Points
|
| (III) Alarmist Threats
|
| (I) Debunking
|
| Yes, CO2 is a _greenhouse gas_ , but it is a long logical path
| from there to any claims of a significant effect.
|
| We can debunk the ALARMIST CLAIM in just two easy steps, (I.1)
| from the historical data and (I.2) from the physics, next:
|
| (I.1) Data from History
|
| There is NOTHING in the climate history from the present back
| to about 1 million years ago that supports the ALARMIST CLAIM;
| there is NOTHING in that history that can support a claim that
| anything like realistic concentrations of CO2 from human
| activities will have any significant effect on temperatures.
| NOTHING. Here we give details in (i) -- (iii):
|
| (i) For the ice core records going back ~1 million years, yes,
| both temperatures and CO2 concentrations went both up and down.
|
| BUT, if we just look carefully at the big graph of that ice
| core record in Al Gore's movie (I assume the graph is
| essentially correct) and other graphs of that ice core data
| elsewhere, with high irony that graph totally destroys the
| ALARMIST CLAIM and Gore's claim from that graph: Gore badly
| misread the graph. The main point is that in the graph there is
| an 800 year delay; CO2 concentrations changed 800 years AFTER
| the temperature changes, from whatever cause.
|
| Specifically: (a) When temperatures started increasing, from
| whatever cause, CO2 concentrations were LOW, not high. (b)
| About 800 years later CO2 concentrations were HIGH, from
| increased biological activity from the higher temperatures. (c)
| When temperatures started to fall, from whatever cause, CO2
| concentrations were still HIGH, not low. (d) The HIGH CO2
| concentrations did not keep the temperatures from falling. (e)
| Once the temperatures fell, about 800 years later so did CO2
| concentrations. Net, CO2 did not cause the higher temperatures
| or keep the higher temperatures from falling.
|
| (ii) In the last 2000 years we had the Medieval Warm Period and
| the Little Ice Age, and there is not even a suggestion that CO2
| concentration changes caused either.
|
| (iii) Starting in the 1940s and through about 1970, we actually
| had some significant cooling, but in those years CO2 from human
| activities -- WWII, pulling out of the Great Depression, and
| the economic boom after WWII -- increased. So, with the
| additional CO2 from human activities, we got COOLING, not
| warming.
|
| Net, there is NO data from the historical record that supports
| the claim that higher concentrations of CO2 will cause higher
| temperatures.
|
| (I.2) Theory from Physics
|
| Yes, CO2 is a _greenhouse_ gas. The absorption spectrum is at
|
| https://webbook.nist.gov/cgi/cbook.cgi?Spec=C124389&Index=0&...
|
| So, CO2 absorbs in three narrow bands, one for each of bending,
| stretching, and twisting of the molecule, out in the infrared.
|
| No, Tom Friedman of the NYT: CO2 does not absorb sunlight, and
| anyone can confirm this by looking at a source of CO2, e.g.,
| exhaling or the bubbles from soda pop, and simply observing
| that the CO2 is not visible and does not cast a shadow.
|
| Since the historical record can't support the ALARMIST CLAIM,
| to support the claim we would have to rely on the theory from
| physics, the absorption spectrum of CO2, and computation.
|
| Well, the computations were done by dozens of teams, and the
| results are summarized in
|
| http://www.energyadvocate.com/gc1.jpg
|
| Net, as in this graph, nearly all the results predicted rapid,
| significant increases in temperatures soon. Well, the time of
| predicted increases came and went years ago with no sign of
| anything like the predicted increases.
|
| In science, when predictions are made and found to be false, we
| junk the science.
|
| No doubt, the failures in that graph are some of the worst in
| all the history of science. GOOD science, e.g., the hunt for
| and finding the Higgs boson at the LHC (Large Hadron Collider),
| the observations that confirmed the predictions of black holes,
| many other confirmed predictions of special and general
| relativity, the A-bomb, the H-bomb, the design of the Hubble
| telescope, to the quantum mechanics in semi-conductors that are
| the core of current digital electronics, the science was just
| rock solid.
|
| We are just awash in super solid science, and the global
| warming computations in that graph are just a humiliation as
| anything scientific and just sick.
|
| In summary of (I.1) -- (I.2):
|
| > For the ALARMIST CLAIM, there is no scientific support.
|
| (II) Additional Points
|
| There is the video documentary _The Great Global Warming
| Swindle_ at
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=52Mx0_8YEtg
|
| (II.1) Big Changes Since 2000 Years Ago
|
| That documentary argues that the Medieval Warm Period and the
| Little Ice Age were caused by variations in the rates of sun
| spots. More sun spots increase the solar wind which, from more
| links in a causal chain, in the end slows cloud formation and
| has a net warming effect.
|
| Similarly, fewer sun spots can cause cooling.
|
| (II.2) Warming Since Year 1900
|
| In the video we can see the remarks of MIT Professor R. Lindzen
| that from "good theoretical reasons" any warming we might be
| getting now, e.g., maybe an increase in temperature of 0.9 F
| from year 1900 to the present, cannot be from CO2.
|
| (II.3) Too Many Climate Scientists
|
| Professor Lindzen also explains that there was suddenly an
| increase in funding for climate science from a hundred or so
| million dollars a year to over one billion dollars a year,
| funding that didn't just buy off the climate scientists but
| HIRED climate alarmists pretending to be climate scientists,
| maybe 10 times more alarmists than real scientists.
| throwaway294 wrote:
| PARTITION II OF II
|
| (III) Alarmist Threats
|
| The alarmists are proposing actions that are severe threats:
|
| (III.1) Big Mistakes
|
| For the issue of the ALARMIST CLAIM and quite generally, if
| we are willing to go forward with big disruptive, risky
| changes without good evidence, then we are leaving ourselves
| open to nonsense from bad information, superstition,
| ignorance, and fear and neglecting the science that provided
| high quality information and means to reject the nonsense,
| leaving ourselves open to some of the biggest mistakes in all
| of civilization.
|
| Here we mention two such mistakes:
|
| (III.1.1) Chinese Medicine
|
| A current example of such mistakes is killing off the
| rhinoceroses to get their horns for use in Chinese medicine.
|
| (III.1.2) Bloody Mayan Charlatans
|
| Another such mistake is from page 76 of
|
| Susan Milbrath, _Star Gods of the Maya: Astronomy in Art,
| Folklore, and Calendars (The Linda Schele Series in Maya and
| Pre-Columbian Studies),_ ISBN-13 978-0292752269, University
| of Texas Press, 2000.
|
| with
|
| > Indeed, blood sacrifice is required for the sun to move,
| according to Aztec cosmology (Durian 1971:179; Sahaguin 1950
| - 1982, 7:8).
|
| That is, the Mayan charlatans killed people to pour their
| blood on a rock to keep the sun moving across the sky. No
| doubt the sun actually did keep moving across the sky.
|
| If from the ALARMIST CLAIM we go forward with the alarmist
| proposals (see below), then we will be making a mistake as
| big, dangerous, and irrational as in (III.1.1) the Chinese
| medicine and (III.1.2) the Mayans.
|
| (III.2) Costs
|
| (III.2.1) Replacing Current Fossil Fueled Equipment
|
| The climate alarmists would force us to replace fossil fueled
| vehicles and to replace building heating with electric
| powered equipment.
|
| The vehicles they would force us to replace include cars,
| trucks, farm tractors, big earth moving equipment,
| locomotives, and ships.
|
| The climate alarmists would force us to replace fossil fueled
| electric power generation with wind, solar, etc.
|
| Emergency electric generators are most easily powered with
| fossil fuels -- natural gas, gasoline, or Diesel oil -- and
| would be difficult and expensive to replace with anything
| that would please the climate alarmists.
|
| (III.2.2) Unreliable Renewables
|
| Electric power from wind and solar needs huge, expensive
| batteries and can still be unreliable and cause power
| instabilities on an electric grid. The instabilities and
| protecting against them would be expensive. Electric rates
| would stand to go up significantly.
|
| (III.2.3) Green New Deal
|
| As in
|
| https://cei.org/blog/how-much-will-green-new-deal-cost-
| your-...
|
| the Green New Deal is estimated to cost $90+ trillion.
|
| That much spending would massively disrupt the whole US
| economy and, indirectly but significantly, nearly all the
| economies of the world.
|
| (III.3) Standard of Living
|
| The costs of the proposals of the climate alarmists would
| devastate the standard of living in the US.
|
| As in the video documentary _The Great Global Warming
| Swindle_ , the effects on poor countries, e.g., essentially
| all of Africa trying to develop their economies, would stop
| their progress and push them back in time.
|
| (III.4) World Economic Stability
|
| The proposals of the climate alarmists would so disrupt the
| economies of the world so strongly that the world economy
| could go unstable leading to WWIII and, then, global nuclear
| war.
|
| Warning
|
| It appears that now the sun is entering the part of the 11
| year or so sunspot cycle with fewer sun spots. So, we are in
| line for a few years of cooling. So, don't believe a claim of
| the global warming alarmists that their efforts caused the
| cooling.
|
| Main Conclusion
|
| At this point, continuing with entertaining the ALARMIST
| CLAIM is just nonsense, expensive, destructive, dangerous
| nonsense.
| klenwell wrote:
| This is a topic near and dear to Philip Tetlock's heart and
| something he pragmatically tries to address in books like
| Superforecasting and the Good Judgment Open project (which
| unfortunately seems to be becoming less open over time). It's
| also a preoccupation of his Twitter feed:
|
| https://twitter.com/PTetlock
|
| On the subject of predictions and credibility, when the
| question "what's your brilliant startup idea" comes up, one of
| my half-joking responses: an ESPN site for CNBC and other cable
| news sites where talking heads spend all data talking about the
| prediction performance of other talking heads and making
| predictions about future prediction performance of those
| talking heads.
| pdonis wrote:
| _> In the background global warming is a much greater threat to
| human life_
|
| Before making such a confident statement, I would recommend re-
| reading this particular statement in pg's essay...
|
| "These people constantly make false predictions, and get away
| with it, because the things they make predictions about either
| have mushy enough outcomes that they can bluster their way out
| of trouble, or happen so far in the future that few remember
| what they said."
|
| ...and consider how it applies to all the people who have made
| confident predictions over the years regarding global warming.
| FabHK wrote:
| Your response is quite remarkable. PG's article contrasts 1)
| the careful predictions of experts, who study an issue in
| depth their entire life and pronounce on it carefully based
| on scientific models, with 2) the remarks of politically
| motivated hacks that seek to distract from the consensus for
| their own political agenda, often with remarkable (but
| unjustified) confidence.
|
| PG warns against 2), the hacks, and points out that here we
| can see how utterly wrong they are, because the time frame is
| so short.
|
| Now, GP points out that something similar happens regarding
| climate change, with 1') climate scientists and 2') climate
| change denial, and you take PG's warning against facile hacks
| (ie 2') and apply it to 1'), the climate scientists and
| experts? That's quite some nerve.
| leereeves wrote:
| You're misrepresenting what GP said. They didn't say
| "experts", they said:
|
| > all the people who have made confident predictions over
| the years regarding global warming.
|
| You can't deny that most of the people speaking publicly,
| and by far the loudest people, are not experts, they are
| politicians, journalists, and filmmakers. (And tech
| entrepreneurs...) Many of those have predicted disasters
| that never happened.
|
| But judging by the downvotes, I guess that's an
| inconvenient truth.
| bad_user wrote:
| No, it is the scientists that have predicted the
| disaster, with an overwhelming consensus, hence the
| downvotes.
| leereeves wrote:
| No, journalists and politicians are misrepresenting what
| the IPCC says. The IPCC are not alarmists, and they
| aren't predicting "The world is going to end in 12
| years."
|
| The actual report is far more balanced. Yes, they are
| predicting some negative consequences, alongside
| potential benefits and measures for adapation and
| mitigation.
|
| https://www.ipcc.ch/site/assets/uploads/2018/02/ar5_wgII_
| spm...
| roenxi wrote:
| GP was incorrect in taking a position that global warming
| was not a threat. The actual threat of COVID is going to be
| much lower than global warming, COVID is either going to be
| temporary or in the long term settle to look a lot like all
| the other diseases we put up with. Climate change could be
| a legitimate crisis at some point.
|
| However, directionally speaking, they have an excellent
| point that people who predict the future are very common in
| the climate lobby; and within that group people who
| correctly predict the future are going to be rare. It is
| not a lobby made up of scientists because there aren't that
| many.
| avip wrote:
| Could you share some of these confident predictions regarding
| global warming?
| ggreer wrote:
| Here's an AP article from 31 years ago[1].
|
| > A senior U.N. environmental official says entire nations
| could be wiped off the face of the Earth by rising sea
| levels if the global warming trend is not reversed by the
| year 2000.
|
| ...
|
| > The most conservative scientific estimate that the
| Earth's temperature will rise 1 to 7 degrees in the next 30
| years, said Brown.
|
| Since that article was published, atmospheric CO2 has gone
| from 355ppm to 410ppm (a 15% increase). Global surface
| temperature has risen 0.6degC since 1989 (1.1degF). Sea
| level has risen by 8 centimeters.
|
| I realize the UN official wasn't a scientist or an expert,
| but neither are many of the people quoted in articles about
| climate change today. Global warming is a bad thing, but
| it's not as bad as a lot of media & activists are
| portraying it. It's not an existential risk.
|
| 1. https://apnews.com/bd45c372caf118ec99964ea547880cd0
| int_19h wrote:
| This sounds like it refers to various island nations in
| the Pacific, which are, indeed, under existential thread
| from global warming and the associated sea level rise.
| lliamander wrote:
| Confident predictions regarding climate change over the
| past 100 or so years[0]
|
| [0] https://tofspot.blogspot.com/2010/10/goosey-goosey-
| gander.ht...
| avip wrote:
| I see _one_ prediction from an actual modern climate
| scientist. It reads:
|
| "So the climate will continue to change, even if we make
| maximum effort to slow the growth of carbon dioxide.
| Arctic sea ice will melt away in the summer season within
| the next few decades. Mountain glaciers, providing fresh
| water for rivers that supply hundreds of millions of
| people, will disappear - practically all of the glaciers
| could be gone within 50 years. . . Clearly, if we burn
| all fossil fuels, we will destroy the planet we know . .
| . We would set the planet on a course to the ice-free
| state, with sea level 75 metres higher. Climatic
| disasters would occur continually."
| jshevek wrote:
| > _I see one prediction from an actual modern climate
| scientist._
|
| The original conversation was regarding _all_ public
| statements, not scientists. This is more about
| journalists than scientists.
|
| > _...and consider how it applies to all the people who
| have made confident predictions over the years regarding
| global warming._
| avip wrote:
| Who cares what journalists say? IPCC and nasa reports are
| publicly available and use plain language anyone can
| read.
| jshevek wrote:
| > _Who cares what journalists say? IPCC and nasa reports
| are publicly available and use plain language anyone can
| read._
|
| Investigating geological or ecological truth is one
| thing, investigating causes and consequences for
| widespread ignorance and bad policy decisions is another.
| You and I are approaching this from different angles.
| Unfortunately, journalists have power to shape our
| society. I would argue that as a group, they have more
| power than scientists.
| lliamander wrote:
| > I see one prediction from an actual modern climate
| scientist.
|
| That's a nice "No True Scotsman" right there. Unless, of
| course, you can give me a non-arbitrary reason why Dr.
| David Barber of the University of Manitoba speaking in
| 2008 is a "pre-modern" climate scientist, whereas Dr.
| James Hansen of NASA writing in 2009 is a "modern"
| climate scientist.
| jshevek wrote:
| That's a good point. The conversation is about a history
| of irresponsible public statements, but the evidence for
| this history is dismissed with:
|
| > _actual modern climate scientist_
|
| With this rhetorical technique, it could be impossible to
| provide evidence. Who gets to decide what makes a climate
| scientist 'modern'? Disregarding alleged 'non-modern'
| climate scientists is the last thing we should do when
| discussing prior decades of alarmism.
| avip wrote:
| The quote's from a newspaper. However, I did your job
| (again) digging into that man's _actual_ predictions, and
| he was wrong not once.
| lliamander wrote:
| > The quote's from a newspaper.
|
| Is the quote a fabrication?
|
| > However, I did your job (again) digging into that man's
| actual predictions, and he was wrong not once.
|
| How magnanimous of you. Care to provide a link since you
| already did the work?
|
| Also, you've failed to provide a clarification for what
| you mean by "modern" scientist.
|
| You put the sole blame for these false predictions in the
| lap of journalists if you want, but is it still a
| problem? If not, what changed? And if the bright folks at
| NYT and National Geographic can get it so wrong, what
| hope do the rest of us have?
| outworlder wrote:
| I've seen this game played countless times.
|
| "Sources?"
|
| Then you do the job of googling for them. Retrieve a few
| relevant sources.
|
| And they proceed to shoot them down, even moving
| goalposts if necessary. They might come back with their
| own confirmation biased sources.
|
| This instance is even more egregious. There is a growing
| mountain of evidence for climate change. Multiple books,
| across multiple disciplines, can and have been written.
| Numerous peer reviewed papers.
|
| What's more infuriating is that you don't need climate
| scientists to corroborate climate change. Because it's
| not a prediction anymore, climate has been changing
| already. Disciplines as diverse as geology and biology
| can detect the effects. If you want to do projections,
| sure, biologists may not be able to help. But if you want
| to see the effects today, they certainly can.
|
| With such an enormous pile of data, I can't believe this
| is a legitimate discussion.
| tstrimple wrote:
| > With such an enormous pile of data, I can't believe
| this is a legitimate discussion.
|
| Much like flat earthers, climate deniers seem to have
| attached their identity to this claim rather than viewing
| the data with any objectivity.
| moultano wrote:
| Sure, David Barber was off by a bit in that particular
| sentence, but arctic sea ice minima are now _half_ of
| their historical values, and dropping. It is true, that
| in complex dynamic systems, predictions have to have wide
| error bars, but he was way less wrong than the charlatans
| who claim this isn 't a problem or isn't a trend.
|
| https://climate.nasa.gov/vital-signs/arctic-sea-ice/
| lliamander wrote:
| I have every confidence that David Barber is an honest
| scientist doing his best to apply rigorous science to an
| inherently complicated system.
|
| The objection here is that we live in a media environment
| which continually emphasizes one end of that error bar.
| So long as we live in that sort of environment claims of
| catastrophic consequences are going to be taken with a
| degree of skepticism.
| moultano wrote:
| Why would your beliefs about the "media environment"
| influence your view of the reports from scientific
| bodies? The claims of catastrophic consequences are
| coming straight from the literature. You can't explain
| those away by waving your hands and saying "the media."
| jshevek wrote:
| Here is a decent place to start [for anyone truly unaware
| of the history of bad climate predictions]:
|
| https://www.bing.com/search?q=bad%20climate%20predictions
| [deleted]
| moosey wrote:
| You are comparing subjective predictions and mathematically
| modeled predictions. They are not the same thing.
|
| We have enormous amounts of mathematical modelling and a vast
| history of information about our atmospheric history. Using
| this, we can make inferences about what is likely to happen
| due to climate change.
|
| If I were to just make a rando statement about what will
| happen when climate change comes, that's different.
|
| Learning to separate the two is an important tool.
| moultano wrote:
| If you actually look at what those predictions have been,
| you'll find that they're pretty consistently on the mark.
| https://www.carbonbrief.org/analysis-how-well-have-
| climate-m...
| throwaway5752 wrote:
| Central America (https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/eye-of-
| the-storm/fifth-...), Syria (https://www.sciencedirect.com/sc
| ience/article/pii/S096262981...), Australia (https://en.wikip
| edia.org/wiki/2019%E2%80%9320_Australian_bus...), and Alaska
| https://www.worldwildlife.org/stories/sockeye-salmon-and-
| cli... might beg to differ, among others.
|
| It is happening now. It's happening in line with predictions
| by IPCC. It gets pretty bad. I can't help what people have
| said that has been wrong, but the world is measurably and
| visibly warming and that itself was denied for a long time.
| Very nearly 100% of experts in this field agree it's
| happening, have agreed for quite a while, and think the
| impact will be dire and potentially irreversible in the
| timeframe of human lifetimes. It feels like the zoonotic
| coronavirus situation played out over 50 years, rather than
| the 15 or so since SARS. Epidemiologists told everyone for a
| decade and a half this would happen, but here we are. A large
| group of experts in another field is telling us a similar
| thing with similar urgency. That's my only point.
| jshevek wrote:
| Your reply, while valid in isolation, isn't a meaningful
| response to the parent post. There is no single "global
| warming prediction", there have been thousands. The parent
| was speaking to those, not whichever one ends up being
| closest to the truth.
|
| >> _consider how it applies to all the people who have made
| confident predictions over the years regarding global
| warming._
| mempko wrote:
| There have been thousands of predictions, but only a
| subset of them have consensus. The IPCC is that consensus
| across varying stakeholders. It's looking like the
| consensus has been too conservative with it's predictions
| and that's the scary part.
| shakermakr wrote:
| Science and proof is not based on consensus. It's not a
| vote. A best bet. Until then we should of course act
| towards the most probable act and cause but remain
| healthy in our skepticism of the effect of global warming
| and our faith in computer modeling of inherently chaotic
| systems.
| rriepe wrote:
| I see this sentiment a lot. It seems really obvious to me
| that no, science _is_ actually about consensus now. If
| you disagree, you 're shunned and labeled "dangerous."
|
| Maybe this is in conflict with what science _should_ be.
| But it 's also definitely what science is now.
| d_burfoot wrote:
| Do you even read these papers before posting? Here's what
| the Syria paper actually concludes:
|
| > In light of the above we can now return to our main
| questions: is there clear and reliable evidence that
| climate change-related drought in Syria was a contributory
| factor in the onset of the country's civil war?; and, if
| and where yes, was it as significant a contributory factor
| as is claimed in the existing academic and expert
| literature? On each step of the claimed causal chain, our
| answers are no. We find that there is no clear and reliable
| evidence that anthropogenic climate change was a factor in
| northeast Syria's 2006/07-2008/09 drought; we find that,
| while the 2006/07-2008/09 drought in northeast Syria will
| have contributed to migration, this migration was not on
| the scale claimed in the existing literature, and was, in
| all probability, more caused by economic liberalisation
| than drought; and we find that there is no clear and
| reliable evidence that drought-related migration was a
| contributory factor in civil war onset. In our assessment,
| there is thus no good evidence to conclude that global
| climate change-related drought in Syria was a contributory
| causal factor in the country's civil war.
| lliamander wrote:
| > Very nearly 100% of experts in this field agree it's
| happening, have agreed for quite a while, and think the
| impact will be dire and potentially irreversible in the
| timeframe of human lifetimes.
|
| The consensus regarding climate change (and human's role in
| it) has been exagerated[0]
|
| [0]https://daviddfriedman.blogspot.com/2014/02/a-climate-
| falseh...
| yardie wrote:
| You really posted a link to some random blog post, not a
| peer reviewed journal, not even an expert on the subject?
| In the year 2020? I'm not even sure where to start
| because there is just... not enough here to even.. oh
| forget it.
| lliamander wrote:
| Here you go pal[0]
|
| [0]https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s11191-013-9
| 647-9
|
| edit: added missing word.
| tfehring wrote:
| Here's the passage from that paper that explains the 0.3%
| figure from the abstract:
|
| _From publication and citation data, Anderegg et al.
| (2010) selected 908 of 1,372 climate researchers, defined
| as scientists who had published at least twenty climate
| papers and had either signed petitions opposing or
| supporting the IPCC's positions or had co-authored IPCC
| reports. Of these, 97-98 % endorsed the standard
| definition that ''anthropogenic greenhouse gases have
| been responsible for 'most' of the 'unequivocal' warming
| of the Earth's average global temperature over the second
| half of the twentieth century''(p. 12107). The standard
| definition of the consensus in Anderegg et al. (2010) is
| less imprecise than that of Cook et al. (2013). Yet, like
| Cook et al. (2013), Anderegg et al.(2010) did not seek to
| determine how many researchers considered this global
| warming to be actually or potentially damaging enough to
| require a climate policy._
|
| _Such surveys are often cited as demonstrating a near-
| unanimous scientific consensus infavor of a climate
| policy, when they never ask any question about whether
| and to what extent the anthropogenic component in recent
| warming might be dangerous or about whether a ''climate
| policy'' should be adopted in attempted mitigation of
| future warming. Nevertheless, Cook et al. (2013), after a
| subjective review of only the abstracts of 11,944 papers
| on climate change which ''matched the topics 'global
| climate change' or 'global warming''' (p. 1), conclude
| that 97.1 % of those that expressed an opinion endorsed
| the hypothesis as defined in their introduction (i.e.,the
| standard definition). However, 66.4 % percent of the
| abstracts had expressed no position. Thus, 32.6 % of the
| entire sample, or 97.1 % of the 33.6 % who had expressed
| an opinion, were said to be in agreement with the
| standard definition. However, inspection of the authors'
| own data file showed that they had themselves categorized
| only 64 abstracts, just 0.5 % of the sample, as endorsing
| the standard definition. Inspection shows only 41 of the
| 64 papers, or 0.3 % of the sample of 11,944 papers,
| actually endorsed that definition._
|
| I had a little bit of trouble parsing that text alone,
| but the underlying data was easier to digest - here's the
| breakdown of analyzed papers by "level of endorsement of
| the climate consensus", from Table 1 of that same paper:
| Endorsement level
| Abstracts % of All Abstracts --------------------
| ----------------------------------------------- ---------
| ------------------ Explicit, quantified
| endorsement (standard definition of consensus) 64
| 0.54% Actually endorsing the standard
| definition upon inspection 41
| 0.34% Explicit, unquantified endorsement
| 922 7.72% Implicit endorsement
| 2910 24.36% No Position
| 7930 66.39% Expression of uncertainty
| 40 0.33% Implicit rejection
| 54 0.45% Explicit, unquantified
| rejection 15
| 0.13% Explicit, quantified rejection
| 9 0.08% Total
| 11944 100.00%
|
| The 0.3% from the abstract refers to the 0.34% of papers
| that provide "explicit, quantified" endorsement of the
| consensus that "anthropogenic greenhouse gases have been
| responsible for 'most' of the 'unequivocal' warming of
| the Earth's average global temperature over the second
| half of the twentieth century". But the majority of
| abstracts neither endorsed nor rejected that consensus,
| while the vast majority (97.1%) of those expressing an
| opinion either explicitly or implicitly endorsed the
| consensus view.
|
| This doesn't strike me as a particularly strong
| refutation to throwaway5752's claim.
| rsanek wrote:
| Thank you for the well-written reply & inclusion of the
| table. I think my question from here would be, what does
| a paper taking 'no position' really mean? I perceive
| there to be a significant difference between, we have
| considered both sides but at this time will not endorse
| nor reject vs. we didn't even consider taking a position
| because it was irrelevant to what we are studying.
|
| I think the implication in your reply is that it's more
| of the latter, but if it turns out to be more of the
| former, I think there needs to be a huge asterisk
| attached to the 97% number.
| lliamander wrote:
| The question here is whether that 97% accept that humans
| are the _main_ cause of global warming, which is arguably
| not supported by the evidence presented in the Cook
| paper.
|
| To quote Friedman in a follow-up post:
|
| > My objection was that the 97% figure lumped together
| categories 1-3, when only category 1 fitted Cook's "main
| cause." Categories 2 and 3 were papers saying or implying
| that human action was a cause--"contributed to" in the
| language of the example. Category 1 contained 64 papers,
| or 1.6%, not 97%.[0]
|
| Which does not mean that there isn't a large consensus
| that humans are the primary cause of global warming. What
| we can infer is:
|
| 1. The Cook paper is not evidence of that consensus
|
| 2. That Cook himself is perhaps not a reliable source.
|
| [0]https://daviddfriedman.blogspot.com/2014/03/john-
| cooks-respo...
| yardie wrote:
| Well don't hold back now. If you read the article, I
| can't because it's paywalled, then present the evidence
| here, in this forum.
| lliamander wrote:
| That's exactly what the Friedman blog post was for. If
| you weren't willing to read it there I see no reason to
| think you would read it here.
| leereeves wrote:
| Searching for the title will usually find a free copy.
|
| https://www.cfa.harvard.edu/~wsoon/myownPapers-d/LegatesS
| oon...
| yardie wrote:
| I got this instead https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Surveys_
| of_scientists%27_views...
|
| Which points to a 2016 study [0] refuting Tol's claim
| that the majority of climate scientists have not reached
| a consensus.
|
| [0] https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1088/1748-9326/
| 11/4/04...
| admax88q wrote:
| Your source is a random blogspot.com who claims that
| there's ambiguity because they consider the term "caused
| by" to be ambiguous.
|
| I stopped reading there.
| lliamander wrote:
| David Friedman is an economist at Santa Clara University.
|
| The argument relates not to climate science itself, but
| to the methodology on study measuring the consensus of
| climate scientists. It's pretty easy to follow.
| PaulDavisThe1st wrote:
| David Friedman is a well known libertarian and sometime
| anarchocapitalist whose moral and political philosophy is
| notably at odds with the concepts invoked by those who
| call for large action to tackle climate change.
|
| The fact that he's smart doesn't change the conflict of
| outlooks.
| lliamander wrote:
| He happens to believe (or accepts) the IPCC findings, he
| just disagrees about the economic implications, which is
| his prerogative.
| PaulDavisThe1st wrote:
| That's not at odds with what I wrote.
|
| What mattered was the original description of him as "an
| economist at ..." which effectively neuters his very
| public positions on things like coordinated action w.r.t.
| climate change. He's absolutely entitled to his beliefs,
| but shouldn't be cited as if "oh wow, an ECONOMIST at
| SANTA CLARA says this, so ..."
| lliamander wrote:
| The fact that he's an economist at a respectable
| institution means that he's eminently qualified to
| comment the economic impacts of climate policy.
|
| But of course, this has nothing to do with the subject of
| the blog post, which is whether Cook paper asserting that
| "97% agree that humans are the primary cause of global
| warming" is at best a misleading application of
| statistics.
|
| There is no need to have a particular background in
| climatology to understand whether the Cook paper was
| methodological sound, just a background in statistics.
| The argument Friedman advances is quite straight-forward,
| and you are welcome address the argument rather than try
| to disqualify him as a source.
| [deleted]
| pdonis wrote:
| _> Very nearly 100% of experts in this field agree it 's
| happening_
|
| None of these "experts" have a track record of correct
| predictions that justifies taking their current predictions
| seriously. Remember we are not talking about the fact that
| the climate changes: yes, it does, it always has, and it
| always will (unless at some point in the distant future we
| learn how to control it accurately). We are talking about
| the dire predictions of catastrophe that have been made to
| try to justify spending many trillions of dollars on CO2
| mitigation. Those predictions have never come true.
|
| _> Epidemiologists told everyone for a decade and a half
| this would happen, but here we are._
|
| To know whether these were useful predictions, we would
| need to know more details. Did they predict _when_ it would
| happen? Did they predict how it would spread? A prediction
| that "this will happen, some time in the future" is not
| very useful. AFAIK no epidemiologists were making
| predictions much more precise than that.
|
| Looking at the actual frequency of epidemics of various
| sizes in the past, we might very roughly estimate that we
| will have one serious enough to involve a significant
| portion of health care resources once every decade or so.
| But you don't have to be an epidemiologist to do that; you
| just have to do the simplest possible extrapolation of the
| data. We had H1N1 about 10 years ago, and SARS about 18
| years ago. That's still not a very strong prediction, but
| it would seem to be as good a basis for public policy
| discussion (which is to say, a fairly weak one but not
| negligible) as anything more complicated that has come from
| epidemiologists.
| MattRix wrote:
| >A prediction that "this will happen, some time in the
| future" is not very useful
|
| Yes it is, if taken seriously.
| pdonis wrote:
| What does "taken seriously" mean? We don't even know that
| from a prediction that vague.
|
| If the prediction is "we can expect a serious epidemic
| once every 10 years", then we have something definite
| that we can plan for, or at least discuss the costs of
| planning for. There's no way to discuss the costs of
| planning for "this will happen, some time in the future"
| without more detail.
| majormajor wrote:
| Seems like the only correct response to that level of
| prediction is increasing investment in studying the
| problem.
|
| Which has largely happened in a lot of areas...
|
| except for the people who think the correct response is
| to _ignore_ any prediction that isn 't perfectly
| specific?
| yongjik wrote:
| These days, I consider anyone saying "[the climate]
| always has [changed], and it always will" as immediately
| disqualified for having any worthwhile opinion on the
| climate.
|
| Climate _is_ a serious issue. It 's time we stopped
| entertaining these people.
| div wrote:
| The only sensible stance to take. All these trolls have
| to do is be obstructionist, see
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Merchants_of_Doubt
| torpfactory wrote:
| Just a friendly reminder that the consensus estimates
| about climate change have been reasonably accurate. Not
| perfect but decent enough as decision making tools. See
| for example the IPCC report from 1990:
|
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/IPCC_First_Assessment_Rep
| ort
|
| There have certainly been very dramatic (all overly well
| reported) warnings representing a minority of researchers
| which have not been accurate. These should not invalidate
| the whole lot of predictions.
| SpicyLemonZest wrote:
| Sure. And while opinion polls are lagging, almost
| everyone in decision-making positions is on board with
| the minimal predictions in this report. (Even a lot of
| people normally considered climate change deniers are on
| board - according to Wikipedia, the report doesn't rule
| out that climate change is largely driven by natural
| variability!)
| pdonis wrote:
| _> the minimal predictions in this report_
|
| Those minimal predictions don't justify spending
| trillions of dollars on CO2 mitigation. They basically
| say "the climate is going to change, so be ready to deal
| with it".
| pdonis wrote:
| _> the IPCC report from 1990_
|
| Which overpredicted the warming that has occurred from
| 1990 to now (though its predictions overall were
| certainly much milder than the catastrophic ones that are
| being trumpeted as reasons to spend trillions of dollars
| on CO2 mitigation).
|
| Not to mention that there have been four more assessment
| reports since then (and the sixth is in the works now),
| and the more alarmist ones (in particular the third and
| fourth) are the ones that climate change alarmists are
| basing their predictions of catastrophe on. (Even though
| the fifth report actually backed off in some respects,
| particularly in admitting--though as obliquely as
| possible--that the climate model predictions were not
| matching the data.)
| torpfactory wrote:
| Yes, but it's not like the 1990 model was massively wrong
| or something. The (now historical) observations are
| riding the lower end of the predicted range from 1990,
| but even the low estimates still predict a 3C temperature
| rise by the end of the century. All models are wrong and
| some are useful. Even a 3C rise would be pretty bad. Just
| because some of the 6 or 7C predictions (high end of
| range) don't appear to be coming true we should just
| ignore the rest of the models?
| shakermakr wrote:
| Science isn't consensus! Proof isn't determined by "very
| nearly 100% of scientists agree". Just ask Copernicus.
|
| We don't vote on scientific proof. Yes evidence leads us to
| believe climate change is happening, but why and predicting
| it's trajectory and effect should be met with scientific
| standards not scaremongering and "CLIMATE DENIER"
| hyperbole.
|
| If the pursuit of scientific rigour and fact has taught us
| anything over our history it's that skepticism and
| challenging the status quo is necessary and should be
| welcomed. In today's climate debate it it's nothing but
| derided.
| sfkdjf9j3j wrote:
| I think you're not reading his comment in good faith.
| He's clearly not suggesting that whether or not something
| is true is decided by a vote of scientists. He's saying
| that the people who are most familiar with the science
| overwhelmingly believe that the evidence suggests that
| global warming is in fact real.
|
| Further, people are wise to be skeptical or even
| dismissive of climate denialist claims because there is a
| long history of politically motivated people making
| deliberately but subtly specious arguments for it. Given
| both the overwhelming consensus and the glut of
| misinformation, it makes sense to filter it with a very
| high bar.
| throwaway5752 wrote:
| You are right. It is decided because not only do almost
| 100% of climate scientists agree, but there in
| indisputable proof of the basic method of action (CO2,
| CH4, H20 greenhouse effects) and we can measure that
| effect in the lab and then correlated it to measured
| climate change that normalized for various known climate
| cycles. The consensus in the fields is driven by the
| overwhelming evidence of the multidisciplinary field
| results, experiments, and modeling.
|
| The benefit of science (reproducibility, falsifiability)
| has been hacked by commercial interests. This isn't even
| in dispute (Heartland, IER, many others). Groups that
| dispute climate change are all funded by CO2 emitters and
| the results are coordinated by enormous lobbying and
| donation campaigns.
|
| Flat earth proponents are not operating within a
| scientific framework of doubt and proof, and neither are
| climate change deniers.
| [deleted]
| graeme wrote:
| This happened over a longer timescale with the Iraq War too.
| Pretty much everyone who was right remained marginal. Those who
| were prominently wrong became more prominent.
| nradov wrote:
| Barack Obama wasn't exactly marginal.
| AndrewBissell wrote:
| Obama lucked out that he didn't have to cast an actual vote
| on the Iraq War due to vicissitudes of his congressional
| career; based on how he actually governed and the
| allegiances he has demonstrated, we can reasonably guess he
| would have voted in favor. He also cemented our endless
| imperial interventionism in the broader Middle East
| including with an absolutely disastrous campaign in Libya.
| And, just like George W. Bush and his lackeys, paid zero
| price for it.
| fsagx wrote:
| It is true that Obama was not yet in the senate for the
| original Iraq war vote, so we can only speculate what his
| vote would have been.
|
| Support for the war among his peer moderate Democrats in
| the senate was near unanimous: Joe Lieberman, Joe Biden,
| Hillary Clinton and John Kerry all voted in favor. It's not
| unfair to assume he would have as well.
| https://progressive.org/op-eds/clinton-s-iraq-war-vote-
| still...
|
| https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/fact-
| checker/wp/2013/09/...
|
| https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2020/feb/17/joe-
| bi...
|
| http://www.msnbc.com/msnbc/joe-lieberman-iraq-war
|
| His withdrawal of forces from Iraq for which many give him
| credit was on the schedule of the Status of Forces
| Agreement negotiated by the Bush Administration before he
| took office. It would likely have happened the same under a
| McCain administration.
|
| He bears 100% of the responsibility for the shit-show that
| happened in Libya.
|
| The US policies that prolonged and worsened the Syrian
| civil war were birthed under his watch as well. The "we're
| fighting ISIS" while simultaneously arming anti-government
| Al-Qaeda-aligned groups was a recipe for disaster.
|
| Obama "surged" to double US troop levels in Afghanistan
| shortly after taking office. Also from this era: The drone
| assassination program. Lots of extra killing, to no lasting
| effect.
|
| https://www.wired.com/2012/09/surge-report-card/
|
| https://www.thebureauinvestigates.com/stories/2017-01-17/ob
| a...
|
| Let's not pretend that Obama was in any way but
| rhetorically anti-war.
| graeme wrote:
| The post was specifically talking about media commentators.
|
| I do agree that Obama's position helped him in 2008 re:
| clinton. But politicians are judged on deeds as well as
| written opinion. But in the media sphere, most of the
| prominently wrong got promoted.
| standardUser wrote:
| I've been amazed at how eager people have been to stake out and
| defend firm positions regarding this pandemic. We know this is an
| unprecedented global crisis with no good analogies, and we know
| that new information comes to light literally every single day.
| But instead of acknowledging this and taking a patient and
| flexible approach, we have everyone from the president on down
| taking hard positions about how this will play out, when it will
| end, how many people will die, what will happen after it ends and
| so on.
|
| Even under the best possible conditions, humans are famously bad
| at predicting the future. Why then, when faced with a situation
| that is riddled with known unknowns, are so many people so eager
| to declare they know the future? And how do these fabricated
| declarations help us in any way? They only serve to obscure how
| truly in the dark we are about our current predicament.
| s9w wrote:
| But both sides are irrationally being confident. The doomsdayers
| at least as much as the "flu-bros". I think it's fair to
| challenge the massive interventions being taken and the economic
| damage.
| gadders wrote:
| I think the issue is that Faucci, Imperial College in the UK,
| are (as they should) optimising for a single function - to
| minimise deaths. However, if we followed this approach for road
| traffic, no car would be allowed to travel further than 10
| miles per hour.
|
| Someone needs to take an economic look at the Corona
| minimisation strategies. We do this already for other policy
| areas (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Value_of_life). Does the
| economic impact divided by the Value of Life look in line with
| other areas?
| lazyjones wrote:
| Yes, we also need to get used to dealing with uncertainty in
| assessments, predictions, computer models. Media are far too
| prone to blowing unlikely extreme possibilities out of
| proportion, when we need to see the whole range of possible
| outcomes clearly.
| Juliate wrote:
| That would be ignoring the extent of the economic/societal
| damage that is caused by the disease itself, would there not be
| any intervention to try to control the spread and its
| consequences on the medical infrastructure as well as all the
| other ones.
|
| The problem with this kind of situation is that, unless you
| take action when it feels too early, all you will have at the
| end are your tears and saying "it was too late".
| Lewton wrote:
| > But both sides are irrationally being confident.
|
| Being "doomsdayer" does not necessarily mean confidence in the
| situation. It's more about accepting that overreacting is much
| more desirable than underreacting when facing something
| exponential where you're constantly 2 weeks behind knowing what
| the reality is
| BaronSamedi wrote:
| > accepting that overreacting is much more desirable
|
| I wish that were true but it is not. It is entirely possible
| to take actions that make a bad situation worse. The
| consequences of an economic shutdown, for example, are
| unknown. The worst case of global depression and supply chain
| disruption is just as bad as the virus itself, if not more
| so. I do not know how one makes good decisions in a situation
| of highly uncertain knowledge and severe consequences.
|
| I think we are in "less bad" territory, i.e. how do we
| balance multiple considerations such that while not leading
| to any outcome that could be considered "good", is at least
| not catastrophic. I don't envy those who have to make such
| decisions.
| Lewton wrote:
| When you're in a situation where the severity of the
| outcome doubles every 4 days and you do not have clear
| information about where the curve will break, underreacting
| will result in extremely bad outcomes much much much more
| often than overreacting
|
| For a simplified example just compare the cost of taking
| actions that make you break the curve 4 days too early with
| the situation where you break the curve 4 days too late
| generalpass wrote:
| > When you're in a situation where the severity of the
| outcome doubles every 4 days and you do not have clear
| information about where the curve will break,
| underreacting will result in extremely bad outcomes much
| much much more often than overreacting
|
| > For a simplified example just compare the cost of
| taking actions that make you break the curve 4 days too
| early with the situation where you break the curve 4 days
| too late
|
| But does it seem that implausible that cooler heads might
| find a solution that doesn't cost at least $20 trillion?
| [deleted]
| Lewton wrote:
| It seems obvious that the US could have handled it so
| much better and cheaper if they had not kept ignoring the
| situation in China and then Italy (which made Europe wake
| up)
|
| But even in the situation the US is now, doing something,
| anything, now. Might still be a lot better than the
| alternative
| claudeganon wrote:
| The problem with much of the challenges to the massive
| interventions is that they might not have been necessary if
| countries like the US had a competent and urgent response when
| the crisis first emerged. But they didn't, and you can't go
| back in time, so the choices are lockdown or let masses on
| masses of people dies and overwhelm several vital services.
| ChuckMcM wrote:
| The less you know, the more confident you are in believing what
| you are saying is accurate.
|
| It has been my experience that as I learned more, my statements
| became more and more equivocal until these days I tend to think
| more about various probabilities of what might be correct. I miss
| the surety of youthful opinion.
| smsm42 wrote:
| I agree that we have huge amount of talking heads around with
| zero skin in the game and zero consequences when they are wrong,
| but I disagree covid-19 pandemics changed anything. There are
| literally dozens of politicians who have been disastrously wrong
| and gave advice in public which is diametrically opposite to what
| should have been, and suffered absolutely no consequences. And
| everybody's reaction to this is as tribal as it has ever been -
| if it's my tribe, "he may be wrong this once but it's an
| understandable mistake", if it's the opposing tribe, "yet another
| proof these vile creatures is literally the worst scum of
| humanity". Nothing changed. All tribes of American politics, at
| least, that I can see, are happily turning the epidemics into the
| fodder for their tribal causes, as they did with everything else
| before that.
| maxerickson wrote:
| Yeah, this "oh wow, look at that" reaction to the particular
| media personalities in the clip is borderline hilarious.
| rayuela wrote:
| Totally agree with this. This is something you can clearly see
| in Trump's approval rating, which just reached the highest
| levels of his entire tenure [1]. Things are only getting more
| polarizing, but the really scary thing is that this admin's
| approval rating climbs the worse things get and it is worrying
| to see this incentive structure :(
| jonnycoder wrote:
| I don't agree with you that it's scary that the admin's
| approval rating climbs. If anything it's positive news.
| People close to me, particularly females, who previously were
| anti-Trump have been changing their tune and some are
| considering voting for him in upcoming election for the level
| of leadership and openness since the covid19 stuff started.
| That's the opposite of polarization, at least anecdotally.
| tekkk wrote:
| That's insane. Shouldn't it be the opposite as he famously
| called it a hoax and so on? Disregarding whatever nonsense
| he has said on many past occasions. Oh well. In this case
| I'd only quote George Carlin here: "The public sucks".
| smsm42 wrote:
| > he famously called it a hoax
|
| He did not. If you read it in some news article, please
| do yourself a favor and do not use this news source
| anymore. If somebody of your friends told you that,
| please keep loving them as friends but accept anything
| they say with a grain of salt as they may be more
| gullible than you thought.
|
| What Trump actually said is that his opponents suggestion
| that he doesn't do enough to counter the epidemic is the
| next hoax (previous one obviously being, in his opinion,
| the impeachment proceedings). This is somewhat unusual
| application of word "hoax", as "hoax" usually refers to
| false statement of fact, and whether Trump is doing a
| good job is not a fact but an opinion, which you can
| disagree with but it can't be "hoax". What he obviously
| meant is that his opponents unjustifiedly accuse him of
| doing poor job, and he expressed it in the usual Trumpian
| manner, sacrificing precision for expressiveness. What he
| didn't ever say is that the epidemic itself is a "hoax"
| and everybody that told you he did, unfortunately, lied
| to you, either knowingly (because they hate Trump and
| think it's ok to sacrifice the truth for the noble goal
| of getting rid of Trump, somehow thinking when they do
| it, as opposed to Trump doing it, it's ok) or unknowingly
| (being deceived by the former kind).
|
| This is one of the examples of how tribal things are. All
| Trump says is available in transcripts. Not many -
| especially from the opposing tribe - bother to read them
| and actually know what he says before forming (or,
| rather, confirming the pre-existing) opinion on the
| matter.
|
| You can get the words e.g. here:
| https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/trump-coronavirus-
| rally-re... - I choose a source that is not in Trump's
| tribe so that there was no doubt their conclusion that
| Trump didn't say coronavirus is a hoax is not tribally
| motivated.
| standardUser wrote:
| There has been a lot written on this in the last week. The
| consensus is that Trump has received a historically tiny
| increase in approval rating when compared to other presidents
| in moments of crisis, and that this bump has all but
| disappeared already. Trump's post inauguration "bump" was
| similarly brief and mild.
| chickenpotpie wrote:
| Comparing this to 9/11, which in the end will most likely
| taken far less American lives, it really is a tiny
| increase. George Bush's approval rating went up about 30%.
| Trump's moved a single digit amount.
| thereyougo wrote:
| If everyone talks only based on facts on TV, the world will be a
| better place, but they're also won't be that many different news
| channels.
|
| You see... This shows care about the rating, and keep us
| informed. In times like this, when people are watching the news
| 24/7 they must find people who can talk and give their opinion.
| In many cases, the information appear to be wrong.
| sagichmal wrote:
| pg saying something like this without a touch of irony is just
| (chef's kiss)
| lazyjones wrote:
| Does pg never watch the news? Or did he just forget that "no
| worse than the flu" was the general tone until late February in
| pretty much all 'western' media and even MDs?
|
| E.g.
|
| https://www.health.com/condition/infectious-diseases/coronav...
|
| https://www.mdmag.com/medical-news/the-fear-of-the-corona-vi...
| (kudos for correcting/updating later...)
|
| Seems a bit one-sided to get so excited about wrong predictions
| by the Fox/alt-right/MAGA bubble on account of one viral video.
| maest wrote:
| Not "western", but "American". Both your sources are US based
| (and cite the CDC).
|
| The WHO has been warning about the coronavirus for ages.
| lazyjones wrote:
| I live in Europe and can confirm that it was similar here.
| E.g. German state media quoting a head physician:
| https://www.br.de/nachrichten/bayern/schwabinger-chefarzt-
| co...
|
| (literally saying in the title it's not more dangerous than
| the flu)
|
| Also, the WHO posted this on Twitter in January, draw your
| own conclusions:
| https://twitter.com/WHO/status/1217043229427761152
| thombat wrote:
| When WHO relayed the Chinese belief/hope of "no clear
| evidence of human-to-human transmission" (Jan 14) there
| were only 40 identified cases, mostly with plausible links
| to the presumed origin at the market. It should be read as
| "widespread action not yet justified" rather than "no need
| to worry at all, ever"
| jshevek wrote:
| The WHO emphasized the lack of evidence for human-human
| transmission on Jan 14.
| s_y_n_t_a_x wrote:
| And didn't confirm transmission until Jan 25th.
| buboard wrote:
| There were sober voices on twitter, no neef to follow the
| mainstream. Thanks to @balajis, some of us were well prepared
| mehrdadn wrote:
| Since this is about _watching_ the news, it 'd be nice if you
| could share clips from (say) CNN or MSNBC carrying a similar
| message, confidence, and tone.
| lazyjones wrote:
| Here's the Guardian:
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aerq4byr7ps
|
| ... just older people with underlying conditions dying ...
| etc.
| mehrdadn wrote:
| Are you joking? She says a _heck_ of a lot more than that.
| Her tone is _extremely_ cautious and she 's extremely clear
| that we know very little about this virus, she's describing
| the _current_ situation of who is dying rather than making
| baseless predictions about who will die in the future, and
| all she 's saying in that one sentence is that for the
| _current_ situation, "you have to put it into context".
| Meanwhile you have snarky Fox News folks spewing "the media
| mob is telling you the sky is falling down" and " _at
| worst_ this is like the flu " and "this is the best time to
| fly" etc. And she even literally tells you "this one is
| scary..." and tries to explain what about it is scary. Are
| these glaring difference not obvious or do you just ignore
| everything except the 1 sentence you can cherry-pick out of
| context?
| lazyjones wrote:
| You should look at the video again. Her tone is calming
| and reassuring and she is saying it's scary because it is
| NEW. Are you deliberately trying to misinterpret it?
| qqqwerty wrote:
| This video was published on January 23rd. At that point,
| China had less than 1k confirmed cases and less than 30
| deaths. I agree with the sibling commenter, this was a
| very reasoned and factual video, especially considering
| the information that was public at the time.
| mehrdadn wrote:
| No, I'm trying to point out everything you're ignoring,
| which fundamentally affects the meaning of the message
| coming across. Like right now when you just ignored the
| rest of my comment. I'm not gonna put more effort into
| this though, since it's clear you're not going to see
| what you don't intend to see.
| lazyjones wrote:
| I'm only ignoring the fact that you're more obsessed with
| Fox News' well-known snarkiness and presentation than
| with the fact that at the time, considering Coronavirus
| relatively harmless was not a lie or even uncommon
| opinion among most media, all along the spectrum.
| robocat wrote:
| That is from Jan 23, 2020... when everyone was clueless as
| to the consequences so she didn't predict those.
|
| Everything else is spot on, and it is still mostly older
| people with underlying conditions dying. She says the death
| rate is 2%: no pretending that it would be like a normal
| flu season.
|
| I just can't see how you can cherry-pick a single thing out
| of that reporting to criticise, even given it was done on
| January 23rd!
| paulgb wrote:
| There's a difference between health writers writing in nuanced
| tones about the unknowns back in February (and sure, they got
| some things wrong, but they were going on the best information
| at the time), and talking heads on TV going on nothing but
| their own self-confidence and prior political beliefs telling
| people they'd be fine.
| jacquesm wrote:
| I don't know if he was watching the news or not but here on HN
| that was the predominant spirit and some incorrigibles still
| hold to that mantra.
| seemslegit wrote:
| If the politicians and media outlets editors who downplayed
| coronavirus in February predicted they could say it, get a lead
| time on the market and prep time for themselves and those with
| access to better data and estimates and not generally end up in
| worse shape politically and economically than if they admitted
| the full severity at the beginning and be right about all those
| things, are their predictions still bad ?
| nickthemagicman wrote:
| I would love to see a project that does fear sentiment analysis
| of news media sources.
|
| I go to NY Times or Fox news and it's seems like so much fear
| based reporting.
|
| I go to NPR or BBC and it seems much more level headed.
|
| Would love to have an objective measurement of fear based
| sentiment analysis of news sources.
| eanzenberg wrote:
| At the time, if you believed Chinese data, and the WHO, then you
| should have concluded this was no worse than the flu.
| xster wrote:
| Media: China's gone mad full dystopia, welding people shut
| inside their apartments, stopping trains, removing people of
| all their freedoms.
|
| Media: tis but a cough.
| robomartin wrote:
| Sorry, this isn't fair at all and it suffers from the issue that
| is common in politics and political coverage, regardless of
| network: Taking everything out of context.
|
| The video linked in that article is a tour-de-force of out of
| context snippets. Anyone could splice together a video just like
| that one with material from any TV news network or politician,
| from the tip of South America to the extremes of Siberia and
| everything in between.
|
| In many ways, and sadly, PG reveals (perhaps proudly) his own
| bias on this front. This is very much a hit job on Fox News and
| the right. One can't claim intellectual superiority and do this
| at the same time. Sorry.
|
| This isn't to say that Fox News isn't without fault. They are.
| Everyone is. NOBODY understood this well enough to say anything
| intelligent about it. NOBODY, from politicians to doctors and,
| yes, newscasters and celebrities.
|
| What we can say is that nearly everything that was said or
| predicted during the early phases of this thing by almost
| everyone has now been proven wrong by this cruel virus and its
| behavior. That isn't an indication of nefarious intent.
| Ignorance? Yes. Malicious intent? I doubt it. Political battle?
| Yes, likely, sadly...because nobody really understood this thing
| was going to get ugly.
|
| Faulting anyone, from Trump to local officials is, from my
| perspective, intellectually dishonest and counterproductive. This
| is where I have a problem with the media. I am sure the founders
| did not pen the first amendment with the intent of providing
| protection for extreme political alignment in the media. We have,
| somehow, allowed this to happen, and, what is worse, we have not
| come up with a way to curtail it.
|
| Watching US coverage and press conferences is a display of just
| how politically aligned the media has become. Their focus is,
| 24/7, to attack the political party they are not aligned with. In
| order to accomplish this they are more than willing to take
| things out of context, distort reality, fabricate narratives and
| disseminate lies. As someone who works hard to remain as neutral
| as possible, a registered independent who has equal disdain for
| both major parties, this is truly revolting to watch. Sometimes I
| feel like a visitor from another planet watching from an orbiting
| spacecraft while the people below play stupid games to destroy
| each other rather than unite for the benefit of all.
| Unbelievable.
|
| While I agree with most of the observations in this article I
| wish PG had taken the time to find real examples of ignorance
| without resorting to a left-wing hit piece on the right wing by
| using an array of out of context pieces cut together.
|
| While I can't be on a spacecraft orbiting above the US, I can
| take a look at what our approach to COVID-19 looked from other
| parts of the world. For example, SkyNews Australia:
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cdKLx5MhTpk
|
| Dr. Oxiris Barbot, Commissioner of the New York City Department
| of Health herself, was, for some incomprehensible reason, telling
| New Yorkers to just go out, gather, use subways and change
| nothing other than wash their hands and stay home if they were
| sick:
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l2DetEolgOg
|
| And, before someone says "you took that out of context" (I did
| not edit the video so...), here's a full press briefing where she
| goes into clear detail about "no need to do any special
| anything...":
|
| https://youtu.be/NEhLOp7UGNM?t=1659
|
| I mean, this is the Commissioner of the New York City Department
| of Health!!!!
|
| I cued-up the video to her statement so you can see and hear it
| from the horses mouth and confirm what I present above. If
| interested, I urge you to rewind to the start and watch the
| entire press briefing. If you do, you'll hear a bunch of good
| things and a bunch of incomprehensibly bad things, among which
| are: - Just like the normal flu - We
| should relax - We don't think it's going to be as bad as
| it is in other places
|
| We have been ahead of this from day one * Go about your lives *
| Go about your business * There has to be prolonged exposure *
| Just wash your hands * There is no need to do anything special
| anything in the community, we want New Yorkers to go about their
| daily lives, ride the subway, ride the bus, go see your neighbors
| * We have the equipment * It's not like we are dealing with
| something we haven't dealt with before * We have the ability to
| address this * We have the capacity to keep this contained * Like
| the normal flu
| jerkstate wrote:
| I think that the video linked is unnecessarily partisan. Lots of
| politicians and media of all mainstream ideologies got this
| wrong. At the same time, plenty of woke progressives were telling
| us that the US/China travel ban was racist and unnecessary on Jan
| 31, and are now saying that it wasnt done soon enough. Plenty of
| conservative-leaning news outlets and politicians were sounding
| the alarm bells since January as well. Lets be honest, lots of
| public figures screwed this up, and it does your credibility no
| good to engage in partisan blame games instead of either just
| shutting up or working towards realistic solutions that keep us
| safe and prosperous at the same time as respecting our
| constitutional freedoms (in the USA). The world deserves better.
| theschwa wrote:
| This is likely the case, but can you site some sources?
| jerkstate wrote:
| Here are a few examples:
| https://www.nationalreview.com/2020/04/coronavirus-
| pandemic-...
|
| I should be clear, I have no love for windbags like Hannity
| and Limbaugh but when you want to talk about credibility, you
| should have at least a modicum of self-awareness of your
| tribal alignment.
| atomashpolskiy wrote:
| I commented on this earlier, and my karma is sinking due to all
| the crazy people downvoting each one of my comments in that
| thread.
|
| To all of these people and anyone sincerely interested in the
| topic I'd like to post an interview with Dr John P.A. Ioannidis,
| a professor of medicine and professor of epidemiology and
| population health, as well as professor by courtesy of biomedical
| data science at Stanford University School of Medicine, professor
| by courtesy of statistics at Stanford University School of
| Humanities and Sciences, and co-director of the Meta-Research
| Innovation Center at Stanford (METRICS) at Stanford University,
| that hopefully sheds the light on the true amount of fear-
| mongering and plain stupidity in the media right now:
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d6MZy-2fcBw
|
| Here are some of his thoughts in written form:
|
| https://www.statnews.com/2020/03/17/a-fiasco-in-the-making-a...
|
| As you may see, he is much more reserved about the subject than
| many of the people in the comments to this submission.
|
| What does this have to do with PG's blog post? Well, PG's post is
| blatant and dogmatic witch-blaming, while the people, that he is
| blaming, may actually be right. And they definitely have the
| right to express their opinion on the subject.
| fulafel wrote:
| Aren't these just cult leaders? They'll just explain away the
| outcome as a new surprise conspiracy.
| 99_00 wrote:
| If mitigation works it will look like the virus was over-hyped
| and was never a real threat because death tolls will be low.
| burtonator wrote:
| My father-in-law doesn't believe in evolution. He also believes
| in a ton of other crazy conspiracy theories.
|
| Now, every time he talks about something political, I make it
| clear his opinions are not welcome in this family and that until
| he can stop spreading disinformation he's sitting at the
| intellectual kids table.
|
| The evidence for evolution is overwhelming. If he can't get this
| basic scientific fact correct then he's almost certainly wrong
| about everything else. At best everything he argues should be
| held with a massive red flag.
|
| If you're scientifically illiterate you don't get to participate
| in society.
| GregarianChild wrote:
| G. Orwell, _In Front Of Your Nose_ [1]:
|
| "To see what is in front of one's nose needs a constant struggle.
| One thing that helps toward it is to keep a diary, or, at any
| rate, to keep some kind of record of one's opinions about
| important events. Otherwise, when some particularly absurd belief
| is exploded by events, one may simply forget that one ever held
| it. Political predictions are usually wrong. But even when one
| makes a correct one, to discover why one was right can be very
| illuminating. In general, one is only right when either wish or
| fear coincides with reality."
|
| [1] https://www.orwellfoundation.com/the-orwell-
| foundation/orwel...
| randallsquared wrote:
| > _Now that we 've seen the results, let's remember what we saw,
| because this is the most accurate test of credibility we're ever
| likely to have._
|
| No, this is a terrible test of credibility. Journalists and
| politicians often go the other way, amplifying the danger, or
| outrage, or worry. Taking the outside view, it's overwhelmingly
| likely that any forecasted pandemic or disaster doesn't happen;
| we almost always get sky-is-falling predictions and then nothing
| really seems to happen from the perspective of most viewers or
| readers. Swine flu, bird flu, ebola, zika, on and on: these have
| previously in media-market memory been hyped as global
| catastrophes in the making, and then they turn into localized
| awfulness. This time, there were many more people than previously
| who seemed willing to espouse the outside view that this would
| probably blow over, and it seems incredibly ironic that _this
| time_ , it didn't go away, and now those same categories of
| people who have been previously criticized for fear mongering are
| being lambasted for not fear mongering enough...
| DanBC wrote:
| > we almost always get sky-is-falling predictions and then
| nothing really seems to happen from the perspective of most
| viewers or readers. Swine flu, bird flu, ebola, zika, on and
| on: these have previously in media-market memory been hyped as
| global catastrophes in the making, and then they turn into
| localized awfulness
|
| ...because WHO and those local regions spend considerable time
| and effort preventing catastrophe.
| thewindowmovie wrote:
| There were enough actual data and evidence out there to
| conclude this was actually a pandemic. Whole cities and
| countries were being shutdown and ICUs under strain when these
| people were going on TV encouraging people to travel. It is
| well known that some of this host work for a channel which is
| biased towards the president and that seem to have affected how
| they covered the news rather than based on available evidence.
| Jugurtha wrote:
| Not enough to remember. The shit we have seen must end careers
| and throw to jail.
|
| We could be more tolerant if said "predictions" were in late
| December or early January. Persisting mid March? That's a threat
| to national security, endangering the health and economy of a
| _nation_. This should be up there considering the scale of the
| misinformation encouraging people to be a danger.
|
| Terrorism is the use of violence to instore a climate of fear,
| sap morale, and win especially when inferior in number and means.
|
| This is symmetrical: the use of words to instore a climate of
| confidence, boost morale and conduct to imprudence by using
| vastly superior media means to shape the behavior of people.
|
| Someone should count all the damage this has done in terms of
| lives, of livelihoods, of GDP, of wasted resources, and make them
| pay. People get to pull this shit because there are no
| consequences for a catch phrase on Fox news, and all the
| braggadocio and tough guy talk must be accounted for.
|
| One of the cases where being or feigning to be an idiot shouldn't
| save someone.
| nostromo wrote:
| This image I saw on Twitter really sums up his point well:
|
| https://pbs.twimg.com/media/EUvf_SmUUAEMRiR?format=jpg&name=...
| yters wrote:
| I totally agree, and we need to hold all sides accountable, not
| just the favorite bugbear.
|
| Thing is, there are credible voices taking a counter perspective,
| and they should be heard and given blame (and praise) for their
| accuracy in prediction.
| sharker8 wrote:
| I agree that there was a certain amount of "nobody's going to
| watch this tape" going on in the heads of the incorrect
| prognosticators. But I also think that there's a strong 'in group
| out group' effect. It goes something like this: Whether I'm wrong
| or not, this is the 'approved solution' of the network I am on.
| And whether I'm wrong or right, we can rewrite this later with a
| little help from our friends. In their world, while its not OK to
| state inaccuracies, it is OK to state inaccuracies in support of
| some dogma like "the economy must go on". That is why we now see
| messaging coming from the right saying "this will be over, and
| the question when it ends will be who killed the economy to save
| a few people". And that version of the story is enough to
| vindicate any previous inaccurate statements for the audience
| these speakers care about.
| flr03 wrote:
| If it was not Paul Graham this would never has made it to HN
| front page, but ok... One of his point is that people should not
| talk about things they don't know about. So maybe he should start
| applying that to himself first (and maybe this to myself right
| now). The question is, how do you define the threshold of
| expertise require before you start talking about a subject?
|
| The concepts of truth, credibility, ethics, deontology that he
| vaguely puts the finger onto. Those are complex topics, still
| being studied and will be forever.
|
| Blaming journalist and politics, why not, I guess some of them
| deserve it, but my neighbour could have done the same analysis
| after couple of pints at the pub.
| ag56 wrote:
| No, his point was people shouldn't talk with _absolute
| confidence_ about things they don't know about.
|
| Usually in everyday life we hint at our confidence level with
| the language we use: 'might', 'probably', etc. These people
| have trained themselves not to do that, which they previously
| have gotten away with.
| tertius wrote:
| As an immigrant, and I'm sure many foreigners would agree,
| this is extremely American.
|
| People, gentile people, who use "might" and "probably" are
| weak intellectuals by American standards. They are cast
| aside, especially in media, because they cannot give definite
| answers. This is science and science doesn't sell.
|
| Politicians and media types are sales-people.
|
| This really depends on the family and milieu you grew up
| around and are engaged with generally in life.
| swiley wrote:
| This is actually career advice I was given as a kid by an
| engineer at a nuclear power plant: "don't give the
| impression that you're uncertain during discussions even if
| you are." I remember thinking "isn't it literally your job
| to be uncertain?" That _really_ bothered me and I'm
| reasonably sure I wasn't wrong to be bothered.
| rsynnott wrote:
| Three Mile Island?
| vernie wrote:
| That absolute confidence is what makes them popular with
| their audience and they will suffer no consequences as a
| result.
| brain5ide wrote:
| What needs to be noted clearly here I think is that he says
| it's something more than Dunning Kruger overconfidence but
| rather an absolute con-man level gamble they are taking as they
| don't seem to have a downside on this bet. And I guess we have
| a perfect moment to start providing that downside.
| danans wrote:
| > Blaming journalist and politics, why not, I guess some of
| them deserve it, but my neighbour could have done the same
| analysis after couple of pints at the pub.
|
| They absolutely deserve the blame more than your neighbor,
| because they have a power of influence ~10e6 times greater than
| your neighbor at the pub. They chose to use that influence to
| back a narrative to support their political inclinations amid
| an emergency. The responsible thing to have said is: "We don't
| know what the severity of this will be, but we'll report things
| as we find out from authorities."
| DrNuke wrote:
| More worringly, this epidemic is also destroying the layer of
| benevolent hypocrisy that kept globalisation together among young
| people worldwide: the Chinese virus, the Italian siesta, the
| Northern stinginess, the British take it on the chin, the
| American insurance or die, and so on are the latent prejudices
| now rubbing salt into wounds and adding insults to injuries. It
| will be extremely difficult to have that utopian, dreamy
| benevolence back soon.
| skrebbel wrote:
| Not to take anything away from the greater point, but I like that
| this is basically Paul Graham's way of making a YouTube comment.
| bitminer wrote:
| Paul Graham has the insight granted by hindsight of 3 weeks to 6
| weeks of facts and evidence. The video cited shows clips from
| January, February, March, only one as late as March 15.
|
| And he uses the undefined and unusual phrase "false predictions".
| What, please, is a true prediction?
|
| The purpose of these commentators is not news, it is
| entertainment. The fact they are talking through their ass is
| part of their attraction. It is all bullshit and viewers know it.
| As does Paul Graham:
|
| > Instead they just continued to use their ordinary m.o., which,
| as the epidemic has made clear, is to talk confidently about
| things they don't understand.
|
| Paul Grahams' analysis is also subject to the same critique:
|
| > let's remember what we saw, because this is the most accurate
| test of credibility we're ever likely to have.
| abstractbarista wrote:
| Honestly, it actually hasn't been materially worse than the flu
| yet. So this article's premise is basically worthless.
|
| We have 70k dead as of 3/6/2020 and it's already slowing. The flu
| kills between 290,000 and 650,000 worldwide yearly, according to
| the WHO.
|
| The actual "damage" this virus has "caused", which the flu
| doesn't, is the economic shock of everyone being forced at once
| to not go out and spend. We have rightly done this to save the
| weaker among us, at the great expense of the masses' financial
| future.
| javagram wrote:
| Your comparison doesn't make sense, the same measures we are
| using to save lives from coronavirus also stop the spread of
| the flu. For instance in Hong Kong the flu season ended 3
| months early because they began social distancing in January to
| protect themselves from coronavirus.
|
| The difference is the flu is much less deadly than coronavirus
| when you catch it. The only reason flu deaths are higher for
| the year at the moment is because the flu is already spread
| worldwide starting every year in flu season, which begins
| around September/October in the northern hemisphere, whereas
| Coronavirus didn't even emerge in humans till late
| November/December, was highly localized to one region of China
| and transmission out of china was slowed by a dramatic lockdown
| of 750 million chinese citizens and travel restrictions placed
| by external countries in January.
|
| The video Paul Graham references includes many examples of
| people saying they aren't worried about the disease and that
| even if they catch it there's no reason to be worried, in
| reality we are seeing plenty of relatively healthy people who
| would not have been killed by flu dying from the disease.
| eisa01 wrote:
| It's not common for the flu to overload the healthcare system
| as you've seen in several places across the world. The reason
| it hasn't been worse is that people have acted and started to
| stay at home before the government issued orders
|
| Not sure when it last happened, 1918?
| bvinc wrote:
| In what metric is it slowing?
| nojvek wrote:
| We have 70k dead as of 3/6/2020 and it's already slowing. One
| would definitely have to take 70k number with a grain of salt.
| There are many deaths that have gone unreported because there
| weren't enough testing kits. Many countries aren't reporting
| deaths because their government wants to save face. Iran comes
| to mind.
|
| What's different about this virus is in just a span of a few
| months it has claimed 70k deaths. At the rate people are dying,
| if we just let it run its course without any social distancing
| (like flu runs its course), we could have millions of deaths.
|
| COVID-19 is ~10X deadlier than flu looking at the current
| numbers.
|
| If we just let the economy go as is, with our healthcare
| overwhelmed and >1% of our population dying, that would be
| terrible. I don't know if I want to live in such a heartless
| world. Remember even young people are dying albeit at a lower
| rate.
|
| One of my friends who did get COVID-19 explained that its not
| like a regular flu. The feeling of having a brick on your chest
| and not being able to breath is real. It really tires you and
| brings your worst fears to life. The worst 2 weeks of his life.
|
| That is not a description of regular flu ^
| mooneater wrote:
| We as a society are in need of a long-term, detailed collective
| memory of evidence of credibility.
|
| But that is only useful if credibility is highly valued.
|
| Neither are true of our society today. People both forget what
| someone said yesterday, or if they remember then they decide it
| didn't matter that much they were wrong.
| rsgalloway wrote:
| Here's an article from Mar 26 in the NEJM where Fauci writes that
| C19 may be no worse than a severe flu season:
|
| "If one assumes that the number of asymptomatic or minimally
| symptomatic cases is several times as high as the number of
| reported cases, the case fatality rate may be considerably less
| than 1%. This suggests that the overall clinical consequences of
| Covid-19 may ultimately be more akin to those of a severe
| seasonal influenza (which has a case fatality rate of
| approximately 0.1%)"
|
| https://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMe2002387
|
| Anthony S. Fauci, M.D., H. Clifford Lane, M.D., and Robert R.
| Redfield, M.D.
| heimidal wrote:
| Your choice of clipping that sentence is _incredibly_
| disingenuous.
|
| The actual quote is "This suggests that the overall clinical
| consequences of Covid-19 may ultimately be more akin to those
| of a severe seasonal influenza (which has a case fatality rate
| of approximately 0.1%) or a pandemic influenza (similar to
| those in 1957 and 1968) rather than a disease similar to SARS
| or MERS, which have had case fatality rates of 9 to 10% and
| 36%, respectively."
|
| They are not saying COVID-19 is the same as a flu, they are
| saying its mortality rate is closer to a bad flu year than to
| SARS or MERS. And that's only half of the story -- they go on
| to say that the rate it is spreading is what is truly worrying
| even if the mortality rate is low.
|
| Please stop spreading disinformation.
| jshevek wrote:
| Your quote is better than theirs, but your criticism
| ('incredibly disingenuous', 'spreading disinformation') is
| hyperbolic and assumes bad faith.
|
| Edit: This would be true even if they didn't provide a link
| to the source, which they did.
| argonaut wrote:
| While this does seem like an attack on those who claim Covid-19
| is not going to be as bad as the prevailing sentiment and the
| prevailing media view, let's not forget that the prevailing
| sentiment 1-2 months ago was that Covid-19 would not be a big
| deal (in the West). I'm seeing many of the same people who
| pronounced Covid-19 would not be a big deal, doing a full 180 and
| attacking those who are pronouncing Covid-19 to be less dangerous
| than expected.
| michaelt wrote:
| Shouldn't 'prevailing media sentiment' be an _output_ of the
| journalism process, rather than an _input_?
| drummer wrote:
| Roussel et al., "SARS-CoV-2: fear versus data.", Int J Antimicrob
| Agents. 2020 Mar 19:105947, "Under these
| conditions, there does not seem to be a significant difference
| between the mortality rate of SARS-CoV-2 in OECD countries and
| that of common coronaviruses (kh2 test, P=0.11). Of course, the
| major flaw in this study is that the percentage of deaths
| attributable to the virus is not determined, but this is the case
| for all studies reporting respiratory virus infections, including
| SARS-CoV-2." "Under these conditions, and all other
| things being equal, SARS-CoV-2 infection cannot be described as
| being statistically more severe than infection with other
| coronaviruses in common circulation." "Finally, in
| OECD countries, SARS-CoV-2 does not seem to be deadlier than
| other circulating viruses."
|
| https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/32201354
| thaunatos wrote:
| > "Under these conditions, there does not seem to be a
| significant difference between the mortality rate of SARS-CoV-2
| in OECD countries and that of common coronaviruses (kh2 test,
| P=0.11). Of course, the major flaw in this study is that the
| percentage of deaths attributable to the virus is not
| determined, but this is the case for all studies reporting
| respiratory virus infections, including SARS-CoV-2."
|
| > "Under these conditions, and all other things being equal,
| SARS-CoV-2 infection cannot be described as being statistically
| more severe than infection with other coronaviruses in common
| circulation."
|
| > "Finally, in OECD countries, SARS-CoV-2 does not seem to be
| deadlier than other circulating viruses."
| lbeltrame wrote:
| Note that this study is from Didier Raoult's group, the same
| doctor who brought out the (controversial, because not enough
| data at this point) claims on cloroquine - while I have no
| interest in defending or criticizing the work, some may want to
| keep this in mind.
| jshevek wrote:
| That style of quotation renders terribly on mobile. Preserving
| line width isn't helpful for non-code quotes. You can use ">"
| and wrap the quoted text with italicizing asterisks.
| Theodores wrote:
| Victim blaming!
|
| We need to tell our HN moderator what CSS rules need to be
| changed to get this to work on all devices. Plus when adding
| a comment the syntax for the markdown should be given.
| leetcrew wrote:
| it's for code, not block quotes of english. wrapping is off
| by design.
| jshevek wrote:
| My intention is to inform, not to blame. :)
|
| Otherwise, I agree with your suggestion [of providing more
| guidance on the reply screen] Until a better solution is
| implemented, would you help spread the word when you see
| code quotes used this way?
|
| Edit: I'm not sure that modifying the presentation of code
| quotes fully solves the problem, as we still benefit from
| having two types of quotes, wrap and nowrap.
| vonmoltke wrote:
| This particular quote renders badly on the desktop as well.
| danans wrote:
| > The answer, I realized, is that they didn't think they could
| get caught. They didn't realize there was any danger in making
| false predictions.
|
| There was no danger to _them_ , and a lot of the same old hay to
| be made from the faithful in the meantime. The problem is that
| the "meantime" didn't last long enough, and now many of their
| faithful are instead fearful.
| formalsystem wrote:
| Taleb elaborates on this idea quite a bit. Opinions are
| irrelevant, what matters is your position. Opinions are useless
| without a downside.
|
| For example, don't tell me that you think Microsoft is a good or
| bad company. Tell me how many shares of Microsoft you own or how
| you're shorting Microsoft.
| madads wrote:
| Disappointing to see that MSM and more disappointing that even
| here there are not more people questioning the data and
| situation.
|
| Also, where did the free thinking go? Not ostracising everyone
| that has a different view than the current world narrative.
|
| There are dozens of sme in virus-related fields that are voicing
| the opposite of what govs and msm are saying. This is a great
| lesson for us all.
|
| Let's see it dismantle our current "ways of living". Time for
| something new!
| [deleted]
| dntbnmpls wrote:
| > What struck me about it was not just how mistaken they seemed,
| but how daring.
|
| Really paul? You are struck by how wrong journalists and
| politicians are? They exist to lie and push an agenda. You've
| written in the past about the shady aspects of the news industry.
| And I seriously doubt you harbored any positive views of
| politicians.
|
| > These people constantly make false predictions, and get away
| with it, because the things they make predictions about either
| have mushy enough outcomes that they can bluster their way out of
| trouble, or happen so far in the future that few remember what
| they said.
|
| They make false predictions and get away with it because their
| agenda and the agenda of their fans/supporters line up. This is
| true of the fox side and the cnn/msnbc side. Have you forgotten
| about the predictions of yellowcake? The predictions of a short
| war in iraq? Remember mission accomplished? What about the
| predictions of a Hillary victory? What about all the predictions
| about trump/russia collusion? What about all the predictions that
| trump would be tossed from office/resign/jailed/etc?
|
| > And the tide has just gone out like never before.
|
| No paul. They've all been shamelessly naked sun bathing on the
| beach for everyone to see. It's not like they are hiding their
| bias.
|
| > Now that we've seen the results, let's remember what we saw,
|
| I doubt it. Just like people seem to have forgotten what a hack
| trevor noah is. In just the last few years, if people cared about
| being lied to, everything from Rolling Stones, NYTimes, WaPo, Fox
| news, CNN, MSNBC, NBC, CBS, etc would be out of business.
|
| Brian Williams lied at NBC and then got a job at MSNBC. Isn't
| that nice?
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brian_Williams#Controversies
|
| I hate to say it but your post seemed more like an attempt to win
| political points rather than expressing disappointment in the
| news industry since you were already fairly skeptical of the news
| industry to begin with.
|
| http://paulgraham.com/submarine.html
| jacquesm wrote:
| Paul is off by a mile and a half on this one. They weren't
| worried about getting caught. At all. The thing they would be
| worried about is whether or not getting caught would have
| consequences. And if there is anything that you could have
| learned from the last three years then it is that lying to the
| public carries no consequences at all.
| exo762 wrote:
| They were on a good trajectory of being put of the business by
| Youtube. But than "authoritative sources" came.
| jacquesm wrote:
| "Group captain, I'm afraid I can't follow your banter, sir"
|
| "Bally Jerry...pranged his kite right in the how's yer
| father...hairy blighter, dicky-birdied, feathered back on his
| Sammy, took a waspy, flipped over on his Betty Harper's and
| caught his can in the Bertie."
| maps7 wrote:
| I don't think the author is off at all. Sounds spot on to me.
| jacquesm wrote:
| Here is the relevant passage:
|
| "The answer, I realized, is that they didn't think they could
| get caught. They didn't realize there was any danger in
| making false predictions. These people constantly make false
| predictions, and get away with it, because the things they
| make predictions about either have mushy enough outcomes that
| they can bluster their way out of trouble, or happen so far
| in the future that few remember what they said.
|
| An epidemic is different. It falsifies your predictions
| rapidly and unequivocally."
|
| Paul believes that this is all about the quality of the
| predictions, and about the perps getting caught. That's
| nonsense. Nobody, and I really mean that, nobody has been
| held accountable for the longest time about the quality of
| their predictions. Or even the quality of their work. Mushy,
| exact or otherwise. These people have absolutely nothing to
| fear from the quality of their work product, and their hand
| in that, being held accountable. It just won't happen.
|
| We have 100's of miles of video tape by now documenting
| falsehoods spoken by officials. The consequences: nil.
| Nothing. Zip, Nada, etc.
|
| And as long as that is the case, as long as there are no
| consequences this shit will continue.
| jjtheblunt wrote:
| Daringfireball holds people accountable all the time, in
| particular for wrong prognostications. It's semi hilarious,
| in that it's relieving.
| jacquesm wrote:
| And what consquences does that have? As in, did anybody
| lose their job, go to jail or faced some other stiff
| penalty? If not then it doesn't count.
|
| In NL a minister resigned because he got caught in a lie.
| Imagine that. It wasn't even a big one, it is just that
| that is unacceptable here. I'm sure they lie all the
| time, it is just that getting _caught_ is enough to do
| you in. So not a perfect system by a long shot but it
| does the job.
| jjtheblunt wrote:
| Totally agree with the question. _Maybe_ the discredited
| journalists get less prominent as they are discredited,
| but I wonder the same as you asked.
| maps7 wrote:
| The article doesn't disagree with that. Here's the relevant
| parts:
|
| "An event like this is thus a uniquely powerful way of
| taking people's measure."
|
| and
|
| "Now that we've seen the results, let's remember what we
| saw, because this is the most accurate test of credibility
| we're ever likely to have. I hope."
| jacquesm wrote:
| Sorry, but no. There have been thousands if not tens of
| thousands of such testable events over the last couple of
| years and in not even a single case has this led to
| repercussions against those that lied. Nobody's measure
| has been taken in a way that they cared about.
|
| We can record this one and likely it won't make any
| difference either. It's just whose team you are on now,
| not about whether there is anything truthful being said.
| maps7 wrote:
| What are you apologizing for? You could list some of the
| testable events if you want. When you have them listed
| reread the article and compare against it. Let me know
| how you get on.
| banads wrote:
| >if there is anything that you could have learned from the last
| three years then it is that lying to the public carries no
| consequences at al
|
| If you study history, you realize thats been a thing for much
| more than just 3 years...
|
| https://youtu.be/VGdWIwiVMF4
| andruby wrote:
| At least Regan was able to admit that he was wrong (even if
| he didn't admit he was lying). I wonder if Trump has ever
| admitted to being wrong.
| techbio wrote:
| "As of today there are x,y00,000 cases and n,000 deaths reported
| due to coronavirus--here to discuss the new numbers is political
| correspondent Not A. Statistician."
| drocer88 wrote:
| If you're getting your "news" from CNN/Fox/MSNBC, or "gathering
| evidence" to promote one the two permitted narratives, that's
| your problem. This is stuff is low effort "Presidential Level
| Politics" 24x7. Real news died when reporters stopped having to
| craft a story so that the Associated Press or United Press
| International picked it up and made it available to the varied
| local newspapers of America, both liberal and conservative. The
| old CNN that actually did news, not talk show shenanigans
| reminiscent of old school Howard Stern, is missed.
| asciimike wrote:
| WaitButWhy's "The Story of Us"
| (https://waitbutwhy.com/2019/08/story-of-us.html), in
| particular "The Sick Giant"
| (https://waitbutwhy.com/2020/01/sick-giant.html), provides a
| really good explanation of what might be going on here.
| zelon88 wrote:
| If anything, with the rise of targeted advertising and
| paywalls, this kind of thing was encouraged. Why write articles
| hoping they get picked up on their merits when you can just
| pitch partisan articles to partisan people and get the desired
| home-run every single time?
| twomoretime wrote:
| You're right. And I'd add that modern journalism has
| effectively become activist journalism across the board. Modern
| journalists are primarily ideologues - and that is the origin
| of the partisan spin on almost every single news outlet,
| especially online.
|
| This is also why credibility in media is at all time lows. Most
| people are politically moderate and they're waking up to the
| inescapable spin. This behavior is also dangerous because it
| provides some justification for the infamous "enemy of the
| people" quote. But I think partisan reporting has become so
| commonplace in the industry that most journalists don't realise
| what they're doing - either that or they believe the end
| justifies the means. But when the means back away at the
| credibility that reporting must be based on, you are destroying
| your institution and possibly taking society with you.
| JeremyNT wrote:
| There are still plenty of real news outlets, they just aren't
| on TV. You can pull up the Reuters web site, spend a few
| minutes reading the front page, and come out with more actual
| information than somebody who spent all day watching CNN.
| titzer wrote:
| > Real news died when reporters stopped having to craft a story
|
| Or stopped fact-checking--you know, doing your homework. Real
| journalists used to interview _one person at a time_ , ask them
| direct questions, call them on their bullshit, and fact check
| them in real-time. Nowadays what passes as journalism is to put
| two people from different "sides" on at the same time and watch
| them fling crap at each other. Or put two people from the same
| "side" on to have them take turns ripping someone _else_ to
| shreds.
|
| Frankly, it's disgusting. I have literally felt myself close to
| vomiting while watching TV these days. The fact the people on
| TV new wears suits and business attire is the worst irony; all
| they do is fling mudwrestling now. Just another one of the
| present debasement of all things past good and wholesome.
| garraeth wrote:
| Agreed. Unfortunately now it's more like picking a sport team
| ("Team CNN" or "Team Fox"), or Apple vs/ Google vs/ Microsoft
| than actually finding, or learning about, facts. Tribalism at
| it's finest.
|
| The only alternative I've found (I'm open to helpful
| suggestions) is to ignore that noise and read actual briefings
| and original sources.
|
| But, that defeats the point of news being an honest and
| straight forward source of a summary. And it takes a lot of
| time. And doesn't always end in rewarding information
| (lies/bias in original sources exist too - eg: watching hours
| upon hours of live impeachment hearings was full of lies/half-
| truths/obfuscation coming from all sides).
| hhs wrote:
| > Unfortunately now it's more like picking a sport team
|
| Indeed, what's being provided is infotainment / soft news.
| [0]
|
| [0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Infotainment
| mrfusion wrote:
| I've been sorting reddit comments by controversial. There's a
| lot of junk sure, but it's you also get away from people
| parroting the standard lines and sometimes get some unique
| insight.
| AndrewBissell wrote:
| I've found a well-curated Twitter feed of smart sources from
| various ideological and media camps helps to find interesting
| and informative info which would otherwise take a great deal
| of time to find. You do get misinfo and bad takes sometimes,
| but if you set it up right it's no worse than mainstream
| sources. Lists are useful as well to avoid Twitter's feed
| curation algos.
|
| Just specifically for COVID-19, this led me to:
|
| - Pay closer attention to the pandemic in China and request
| testing for my daughter when she had flu symptoms in late
| January while traveling (the CDC had no tests, of course)
|
| - Begin using masks and gloves while going to groceries and
| other stores long before it was in common use and the value
| of masks had been acknowledged
|
| - Mentally and materially prepare my family for an extended
| quarantine period long ahead of when the necessity was
| broadly acknowledged
| alexilliamson wrote:
| It sometimes feels like there is the perception that
| twitter is worthless and devoid of meaningful information,
| but like you I've been increasingly relying on it for news.
| I'm not sure where else you can collect so many different
| perspectives on any given piece of news. Overtime, you
| learn how many grains of salt to take with each person in
| your timeline, and you get a sense of their personal
| biases. And if you can brush off the trolls, it's
| instructive to read the arguments that happen in the
| replies.
|
| The way I use twitter, it serves the same purpose as hacker
| news, but with a much broader scope.
| smsm42 wrote:
| > It sometimes feels like there is the perception that
| twitter is worthless and devoid of meaningful information
|
| My feeling has been there are nuggets of really good and
| really up-to-date information there, and there are some
| threads that are extremely informative, but signal-to-
| noise ratio is in general extremely close to zero and the
| hostility of the surrounding environment is unbelievably
| terrible.
| throwaway294 wrote:
| A BIG advantage of Twitter is that get to hear from the
| persons themselves totally without filtering by the
| media. Maybe you do or don't like what some public figure
| who posts on Twitter says, but at least DO get just what
| THEY said.
| dewy wrote:
| I've resisted Twitter for a long time, but this would be
| the only reason I could see myself becoming a user.
|
| In the past I've had a hard time finding people to follow
| with a high enough signal to noise ratio (or who don't
| flood my feed with a new tweet about their cat every 5
| mins). Do you have any tips for picking sources? Or
| choosing when to fill them? And how do you stay on top of
| the flood of information?
| raphlinus wrote:
| For covid-19 I've curated this list:
|
| https://twitter.com/i/lists/1239639611694911489
|
| All the people on it are serious experts. I've also left
| out some people who are worth listening to, but have a
| political bias or express a lot of emotion (it's hard not
| to be angry).
|
| I spend way too much time getting up to speed, but (a)
| there's a lot of stuff I find interesting (I studied
| molecular and cell bio a bit during my Masters), and (b)
| would rather err on the side of over-learning than being
| misinformed.
|
| If you want secondary sources rather than primary, try
| STAT news. They've been excellent.
|
| The quality of discussion in other fora (including HN)
| has been quite disappointing.
| sroussey wrote:
| Agreed. I'd also add selling stocks when they were hitting
| highs.
| pengaru wrote:
| Relevant: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rUDP6e5N9gw
| throwaway5752 wrote:
| I think the Tory/Labor division that existed in the newspapers,
| and the way that dynamic changed in the Rupert Murdoch era (htt
| ps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rupert_Murdoch#Activities_in_t...)
| should be studied in light of emerging polarization you're
| discussing in the US. Creates a self-reinforcing news duopoly
| that is very persistent and harmful. I suspect that as people
| look back on the end of Great Britain that we are living
| through and how it has fallen as a global power it will be
| interesting to see how media driven internal division was a
| factor.
| Animats wrote:
| Each day, you have to read CNN, Fox, Reuters, the Economist,
| the Center for Disease Control, and some of the better local
| newspaper sites to figure out what's going on. Ignore what they
| choose to put on the home page. Even Fox News is not totally
| out of touch with reality once you get off the home page and
| ignore the opinion section.
| enraged_camel wrote:
| >> CNN/Fox/MSNBC
|
| One of those is not like the other two.
|
| CNN and MSNBC may not be as high quality as WaPo/NYTimes in
| terms of depth and quality of journalism, but they also don't
| maliciously and cynically and shamelessly lie to their viewers.
| Reedx wrote:
| Do you think the Red Sox are not like the Yankees?
|
| They're just different teams playing the same game.
|
| Fans always defend their team and vilify the other. Always.
| With every dispute they're able to convince themselves it's
| the other side that are the cheaters. They can't both be
| right, but yet each side feels equally certain of their
| position.
| enraged_camel wrote:
| On the contrary, not only is this type of "both sideism"
| incredibly harmful to healthy political discourse (because
| it discourages engagement and breeds cynicism), both sides
| are not in fact equal, or even similar.
|
| There are always bad apples, but you just need to look at
| how they are treated (e.g. whether they are rewarded or
| punished).
| Reedx wrote:
| Dismissing it as "both sideism" just allows mediocrity to
| thrive. On both sides, as it happens. It's an endless
| loop of "they're the problem, not us". Deflecting any
| responsibility and avoiding self-reflection. Nothing
| changes or improves as a result.
|
| Why not demand better on all fronts? None of the
| aforementioned media are doing grade A work.
| 9HZZRfNlpR wrote:
| I'm not an American and far from Trumps target audience but
| the CNN is bad as Fox. I have them both on TV. It truly is a
| kettle and pot situation, I believe so many Americans have
| grown so deeply into either culture that unfortunately you
| can't comprehend it anymore.
| mapgrep wrote:
| Every single journalist in the video Paul Graham linked was
| on Fox News/Fox Business.
| exo762 wrote:
| Could that be caused by the fact that compilation authors
| are clearly on Dem side? Trump's travel ban was called
| racist by whom?
|
| (I'm also an outsider.)
| kube-system wrote:
| Late-night satire shows are not politically unbiased, nor
| do they attempt to be. They cater to their audience, the
| same way those who they satirize do.
| jcadam wrote:
| The video appears that it was put together by the folks
| at The Daily Show. You really think they went looking for
| clips from the "other side?"
| kingaillas wrote:
| Is the a similar video with other news stations and their
| similarly incorrect reporting?
| bduerst wrote:
| Should be easy to do if it's as equivalent as you're
| assuming, no?
| 9HZZRfNlpR wrote:
| Right, but I expressed my opinion on your political
| divide and newspapers, not PG's links.
| s_y_n_t_a_x wrote:
| The NYC health commissioner was saying to go outside and
| take the subway Feb 7th, 4 days after Trump's China ban
| went into effect.
|
| https://twitter.com/tomselliott/status/124353918902040166
| 4?s...
|
| Literally everyone was saying it's not as bad as the Flu.
| I don't see why we're playing the blame game in the peak
| of things.
|
| I could definitely tell you WHO (China) is to blame, but
| now isn't the time.
|
| Also:
|
| https://twitter.com/LizRNC/status/1245478539018805251?s=2
| 0
|
| https://www.washingtonpost.com/outlook/2020/01/31/how-
| our-br...
|
| https://www.nytimes.com/2020/02/18/world/europe/coronavir
| us-...
|
| https://www.cnbc.com/2020/02/03/the-flu-has-already-
| killed-1...
|
| https://twitter.com/thedailybeast/status/1225937322694381
| 568
|
| https://twitter.com/washingtonpost/status/122367623706063
| 667...
|
| https://twitter.com/RealJamesWoods/status/124526211463933
| 952...
|
| https://i.imgur.com/43n4HWK.png
| cvlasdkv wrote:
| I'm curious as to why you think China is to blame for
| American politicians ignoring precautions and
| prioritizing their own wealth over the well-being of
| their citizens?
| BeetleB wrote:
| I'm a Pepsi guy. It always annoys me when someone offers me a
| Pepsi and then gives me Coke. I can tell, and I don't drink
| it.
|
| People don't get my attitude. "How can you even tell the
| difference?" they say. "It's pretty much the same!"
|
| This is because when your favorite soda is Mountain Dew, you
| can barely tell the difference between Coke and Pepsi.
| They're both a heck of a lot different from Mtn Dew, and
| there's only the tiniest difference between Pepsi and Coke
| when you contrast with Fanta, Mtn Dew, Sprite, 7Up, etc.
|
| (I'm not making this up merely as an argument - the above is
| my reality, and yes, people do say that to me).
|
| When you get accustomed to good quality journalism (which
| WaPo isn't), the differences between CNN and Fox are
| miniscule. When you consider all the news topics out there,
| and all the diverse perspectives on them out there, you'll
| see that CNN and Fox more or less cover the same tiny
| fraction of topics. Sure, if your world consists of only that
| tiny fraction, then the differences between CNN and Fox seem
| stark.
|
| I think a more concise way to put it is: If you assign 100%
| to the universal set of topics/opinions, then perhaps Fox is
| at 2% and CNN at 3%. Sure, CNN is 50% better than Fox, but
| from a whole picture standpoint it's really only a 1% delta
| between the two.
| realtalk_sp wrote:
| > When you get accustomed to good quality journalism (which
| WaPo isn't), the differences between CNN and Fox are
| miniscule.
|
| This false equivalency just refuses to die huh?
| nyczomg wrote:
| LOL.
|
| I don't have time to compile the numerous examples of CNN
| maliciously, cynically, and shamelessly to their users, so
| I'll just post my favorite example:
|
| https://twitter.com/wikileaks/status/787749117502119936?lang.
| ..
|
| Chris Cuomo looking into the camera, and telling America it
| is illegal for them to go to wikileaks. But it's ok, the
| media is exempted from that and they'll make sure to tell you
| ALL of the important information you need to know.
|
| Sorry, but give me a break. Not only do they lie, they try to
| scare you into not informing yourself.
| pacomerh wrote:
| I don't disagree with your CNN comment, but the severity,
| consistency and magnitude of F-NEWS's lies doesn't compete
| with anyone tbh. They're on their own category.
| augustt wrote:
| Exactly - I'm not sure how anyone can say with a straight
| face that the Dijon-mustard-tan-suit-latte-salute network
| has ever been anything but the #1 producer of bullshit on
| TV.
| surround wrote:
| I don't think "real news" has ever died - it was always dead.
| The term "Yellow Journalism" has been around since the late
| 1800s.
|
| I don't think news that tries to push a narrative is useless.
| You just have to understand the viewpoint that they're
| providing. By reading several different conflicting sources,
| and trying to understand each viewpoint and why they disagree,
| you can become informed on the issue.
|
| The problem is, many people would rather take the easy route
| and treat every issue as if it were black and white. This
| opinion is right, that opinion is wrong. This news outlet is
| right, this news outlet is wrong.
| kingaillas wrote:
| It's the effects of the free market on journalism. The drive
| for profit means boosting ad revenue which in turns requires
| drawing an audience... actual journalism isn't profitable
| enough.
| 0x8BADF00D wrote:
| Making a correct prediction is difficult. Especially if you see
| something the vast majority of people don't see. It takes quite a
| bit of risk to make a contrarian prediction, which is why the
| payouts are higher if the contrarian prediction comes true.
| andy_ppp wrote:
| I agree with the sentiment, however I think the apparent problems
| with Trump and politicians in general around this will not be
| that they got caught talking bullshit, it's that voters don't
| care because we've started supporting sides like they are
| football teams rather than being thoroughly critical of their
| actions. I'm not even sure a million people dying would lead to
| disorganised, slow and stupid government being at fault according
| to the people and in fact the higher the toll I'd guess the less
| likely accountability is to happen.
| yibg wrote:
| I think one of the issues here is incentive. Politicians'
| incentives don't always align with those of the population. In
| this case they can put out a strong warning and start acting with
| lockdowns etc or say everything is fine.
|
| If they say everything is fine, then either 1) things are, in
| which case they look good after the fact for remaining calm or 2)
| things go south and they can deflect and point to other countries
| that are in the same boat.
|
| If on the other hand they warn of incoming disaster and lock
| things down, still one of two things happen. 1) everything is
| indeed fine and they get destroyed for crashing the economy. or
| 2) the economy gets locked down and the pandemic isn't so severe.
| But the damage to the economy is still there and there will be no
| higher death count that could've happened to compare against. In
| this case they probably won't get much credit either.
|
| So it seems to them then start acting early brings no benefits
| and only downsides.
| deepaksurti wrote:
| >> Instead they just continued to use their ordinary m.o.,
|
| m.o. = modus operandi
| atomashpolskiy wrote:
| What a ridiculous zeal.
|
| Hardly anyone at this point is arguing that there actually is an
| issue. After all, flu is still a dangerous illness, esp. for
| certain groups of people, so even plainly calling this COVID
| thing "just a flu" is not equivalent to saying that it's not an
| issue. It's your framing of the phrase "just a flu", that makes
| it look like some kind of heresy or insult.
|
| And, most importantly, why do you call out only journalists and
| politicians, while there are many perferctly credible people, -
| first of all, medical experts, - who keep saying, that the scale
| of panic is dumb? How about doing some reading and fact-checking
| before crying wolf?
| paulgb wrote:
| "just the flu" to me implies that we can treat it like the flu,
| i.e. go about life as usual and stay home if we catch it. It
| seems beyond obvious at this point that that's not the case.
| (Hopefully soon there will be a vaccine and it will become the
| case.)
| atomashpolskiy wrote:
| But it literally is a strain of flu. And staying at home,
| sleeping and drinking a lot of water is exactly what the
| majority of people who contracted COVID are doing at the
| moment. Or do you believe that there are 1.3 million people
| in hospitals or cemeteries right now?
| paulgb wrote:
| > Or do you believe that there are 1.3 million people in
| hospitals or cemeteries right now?
|
| No, but I believe that in contrast to the flu, there are
| millions of healthy people (rightly) staying home right
| now.
|
| Are you saying that the lockdowns are unwarranted?
| atomashpolskiy wrote:
| I'm not in the position to make such statements, but
| there is quite a number of medical professionals, who say
| exactly this: massive lockdowns of general population
| aren't necessary.
|
| As for me, I personally believe that the medicine is
| worse than the disease in this case. We can be quite
| certain at this point that there will be lots of
| casualties from the economical disruption, and whether
| the unconstrained virus could have caused more suffering
| is a question to be answered.
| paulgb wrote:
| > but there is quite a number of medical professionals,
| who say exactly this: massive lockdowns of general
| population aren't necessary
|
| Who?
| atomashpolskiy wrote:
| Consider this your homework. Google hasn't shutdown yet.
| paulgb wrote:
| Congratulations on finding a way to turn not having
| evidence to back up your argument into being
| condescending.
| atomashpolskiy wrote:
| I just don't think you are seriously asking for
| information, because there is shitload on the Web
| already, but rather mocking me (judging by your one-
| worded response, which is rude). But in case I'm wrong,
| here's a nice collection of links to begin with, updated
| daily: https://swprs.org/a-swiss-doctor-on-covid-19/
| Scroll to the bottom for most recent updates.
| nullc wrote:
| > But it literally is a strain of flu.
|
| No, it literally is not. The flu is caused by influenza.
| Covid19 is caused by sars-cov-2, a relative of SARS-CoV
| which caused SARS ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Severe_ac
| ute_respiratory_syndr... ). It is also a (more distant)
| relative of HCoV-OC43 which is one of the many viruses that
| cause the cold.
|
| The problems that influenza and sars-cov-2 cause for us are
| pretty different: Influenza mutates fairly quickly so we're
| not able to stop it completely with our otherwise highly
| effective vaccines, while even though they mutate
| comparatively much slower we don't have any effective drug
| treatments for coronaviruses: Some are not dangerous enough
| to have been economically interesting to develop treatments
| for while others were stopped by non-drug interventions
| (like the sick people dying too quickly and the detection
| of fever before the virus was highly communicable).
| atomashpolskiy wrote:
| I was saying that this is yet another virus strain that
| causes flu-like illness, i.e. cold with fever, etc. Leave
| your pedantry for someone else.
| nullc wrote:
| I tend to reserve it for people who use "x is literally
| y" as the totality of their argument. :P
| atomashpolskiy wrote:
| You see, only a few months ago for the majority of people
| the word "flu" was a perferctly fine umbrella term for
| all of these viruses, including multiple coronaviruses.
| Now everyone is an expert virusologist with rigorous
| fervor for miniscule details. This is silly and drives us
| into the wrong direction, because the actual illness is
| not very different (it's a fact), but the amount of
| attention payed to it leads to huge overreaction. Oh,
| it's a relative of SARS, god forbid, oh my god, we're all
| going to die! Bullshit.
| tigershark wrote:
| No, it isn't. The flu doesn't require hospitalisation in
| 15-20% of the cases and doesn't have a mortality rate of
| 1% _in the best case_. Please stop spreading
| misinformation.
| atomashpolskiy wrote:
| https://www.icelandreview.com/ask-ir/whats-the-status-of-
| cov...
|
| 27,000 samples
|
| 1,500 confirmed
|
| 37 hospitalized (2%)
|
| 460 recovered
|
| Here's the official stats from Iceland. How would you
| comment these numbers?
| tigershark wrote:
| What I have to comment? We know what is the death rate in
| Germany, France, Spain, Italy, South Korea. 1500 cases is
| ridiculously low to take any conclusion, they are far
| behind the curve.
| atomashpolskiy wrote:
| Who is "we"? Actual scientists say the opposite: most
| numbers are meaningless and misleading, because we don't
| know, how wide the virus has spread. Are you that lazy-
| minded to not even try to check the links that I have
| provided?
| Symmetry wrote:
| Interestingly there's a variant that attacks dogs that's
| a bit more severe and people _have_ actually developed a
| vaccine for that variant. Well, it might also be that it
| 's a lot easier, regulations wise, to develop a vaccine
| for dogs than for humans. It works great but your dog has
| to have a booster every year or two to keep full
| immunity.
| atomashpolskiy wrote:
| A vaccine has already been developed for cats. It turned
| out vaccinated cats suffer greater from the nCov due to
| increased reaction from the immune system.
| [deleted]
| rsynnott wrote:
| > But it literally is a strain of flu
|
| Eh? No, it is not. Who told you this? Whoever it was, stop
| listening to them. Bloody hell.
| atomashpolskiy wrote:
| As this comment seems to be controversial, and I'm getting many
| downvotes, I'd like to provide a couple of links for anyone
| interested in the topic.
|
| John Ioannidis MD of Stanford University:
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d6MZy-2fcBw
|
| Knut Wittkowski, for twenty years head of The Rockefeller
| University's Department of Biostatistics, Epidemiology, and
| Research Design:
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lGC5sGdz4kg
|
| A collection of fact-checked links to public statements and
| critical research about COVID-19, updated DAILY (scroll to
| bottom for the most recent additions):
|
| https://swprs.org/a-swiss-doctor-on-covid-19/
| tigershark wrote:
| It's an insult. Covid-19 is in the best case 30 times as deadly
| as the flu while being twice as contagious. Calling it just a
| flu and downplaying it is actively causing thousands of deaths.
| atomashpolskiy wrote:
| You seem to be mentally unstable. There is nothing insulting
| about being skeptical. I have facts to back my statements,
| can you say the same for yourself?
| nxp wrote:
| _Yes Minister_ , on how to respond to a crisis:
| Sir Richard Wharton: "In stage one, we say nothing is going to
| happen." Sir Humphrey Appleby: "Stage two, we say
| something may be about to happen,
| but we should do nothing about it." Sir Richard
| Wharton: "In stage three, we say that maybe we should do
| something about it, but there's
| nothing we can do." Sir Humphrey Appleby: "Stage four,
| we say maybe there was something we could have done,
| but it's too late now."
|
| Remember that _Yes Minister_ is a manual for politicians, not a
| comedy.
| ksec wrote:
| Video Link Below.
|
| https://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/tv/news/cor...
| rahidz wrote:
| Stage four requires admitting guilt, it should be "We've always
| known we should've done something about it, but (opposing
| political party) didn't let us!"
| nickff wrote:
| That back-and-forth is between two bureaucrats, who are
| talking about how to obstruct politicians. One of the core
| premises of "Yes Minister" is that the bureaucracy holds the
| real power in government, somewhat similar to the idea of a
| 'deep state', though the show existed long before that phrase
| was coined.
| AlexandrB wrote:
| This seems to undermine the point at the end of the GP
| comment:
|
| > Remember that Yes Minister is a manual for politicians,
| not a comedy.
|
| It seems like the deep state was (more) right on this one
| and the politicians are/were the ones trying to downplay
| the danger and generally mislead.
| jacquesm wrote:
| The proper name for the deep state is civil service
| employees and they generally tend to be right on a lot of
| stuff _because they 've been at it for decades_ rather
| than a couple of weeks to months. The whole idea that
| some politician lands in a chair and starts making policy
| by their lonesome is laughable.
| dmix wrote:
| > The proper name for the deep state is civil service
| employees
|
| It's funny how that has become the new explanation/softer
| excuse. I remember when "Deep State" was used to describe
| groups like the Koch Brothers and similar power brokers
| well before it was adopted by the right-leaning popular
| media to describe the puppet masters of the
| 'establishment' on the other side. Now it's spun as an
| attack on simple 'civil servants'...
|
| I guess it means whatever people want it to mean,
| depending on the context of your ideology or position on
| the matter.
| Symbiote wrote:
| The episode in question is episode 6 of series 1 of Yes,
| Prime Minister "A Victory for Democracy". Highly
| recommended!
| bigfudge wrote:
| The point of YM is that civil servants and ministers are
| interdependent, rather than a 'deep state' in the trumpian
| conspiracy theory sense.
| tannhaeuser wrote:
| I've had this idea for some time already where if you post
| something news-like, you should attach a link to your sources,
| like "citation needed" for non-Wikipedia text. I know that sounds
| bland and like basic journalistic practice - but it is not, nor
| should be followed by professional/accredited journalists who of
| course need to be able to protect their sources and publish on
| their own site; it's intended for social media only. The idea is
| to get people used to look for a badge or some such at the bottom
| of a text that, when absent, immediately should ring a bell and
| put people on alert. Basically, it adds a "who said this" or _cui
| bono_ dimension to every published text on aggregator sites
| unless it appears on a dedicated site.
|
| Maybe we could have a competition for graphic artists and award a
| prize for the best icon or visual idiom for this?
| brain5ide wrote:
| How is that different from what happens now with links being
| added?
|
| Also, journalists (or let's call them news media agencies)
| often abuse this by reporting of "claims by this" on the topic
| rather than the topic and in that way refusing any iota of
| responsibility for what they put on the spotlight.
| tannhaeuser wrote:
| I guess technically it's not different, but if used in a
| visually consistent way and followed widely, it could help
| critical thinking and add awareness to the fact that there
| are interested parties and spinsters behind most published
| material, rather than invite a habit of passive
| consumption/believing text just because it appears on shiny
| digital or printed media.
| btilly wrote:
| There is nothing about what has happened that should surprise
| anyone who has read the book _Superforecasting_.
|
| It explains that we naturally trust people who sound smart, well-
| informed, and CONFIDENT. We don't want to hear uncertainty,
| probabilities, or the other signs of someone who thinks in a
| careful quantitative way. We want to accept a cognitively simple
| answer, then move on. This is what we find comfortable.
|
| However this is a good way to select people who are terrible at
| making actual predictions. They appear to predict, but often with
| sufficient weasel words that it is hard afterwards to say whether
| it was violated. (The book gives real examples.) But if you put
| them in a setting where they can be tested, they perform worse
| than uninformed monkeys. And the part of the future that they are
| worst at predicting is _exactly_ what they were supposed to be
| experts at!
|
| The book _Superforecasting_ walks through how this was
| demonstrated, and the discovery that there are people you will
| never see on CNN or Fox news who are really good at forecasting.
| A fact that is extremely interesting to various TLA agencies (one
| of whom paid for the research in question).
|
| The long and short of it? Bayes' Theorem actually works in the
| real world. The revolution that started with quants on wall
| street, analytics in baseball and Nate Silver in politics is
| still ongoing.
|
| When you are done with the book and have processed it, hopefully
| you will understand why the author said in response to an
| audience question after a talk, _Here's my long-term prediction
| for Long Now. When the Long Now audience of 2515 looks back on
| the audience of 2015, their level of contempt for how we go about
| judging political debate will be roughly comparable to the level
| of contempt we have for the 1692 Salem witch trials._
|
| Hopefully the contempt that some of us have for how talking heads
| in January and February of 2020 dismissed Coronavirus is a step
| on the path to that future.
| maps7 wrote:
| Based on your comment I went to buy Superforecasting on
| Audible. When I browsed to it I saw I already bought it on
| 29-04-19. Time to listen to it.
| thoughtstheseus wrote:
| Great book. Also check out The Signal and the Noise by Nate
| Silver.
| renewiltord wrote:
| This is why these last few weeks on the market have been
| wonderful. If you can predict ( _including_ accounting for the
| supposed irrationality) then you make money. Otherwise you lose
| money.
|
| If you had a prediction of how things would get hit w/ virus,
| there was so much money to be made. I watched but my timing was
| a bit off and I did not commit the majority of my wealth.
| That's a pity and speaks to my true estimate of the danger
| whereas a friend of mine pulled out completely of all long-term
| holdings in mid Feb so we know he believed.
| bo1024 wrote:
| There is some really interesting interplay here between
| forecasting and decisionmaking. (Taleb would have a lot to say
| here, along the lines of "forecasters are poor.") Maybe it
| makes sense that forecasts should be measured, but decisions
| should be, well, decisive.
|
| A good Bayesian should be able to make confident decisions
| based on information available at the moment, while
| acknowledging that lack of information is leading to suboptimal
| decisions.
|
| For example, a leader can be absolutely confident that shelter-
| in-place is the best decision based on the available
| information, while acknowledging that there is missing
| information that would drastically change this assessment.
| pjscott wrote:
| Fundamentally, decision-making is what predictions are _for_.
| We mainly care about information to guide our actions. There
| are some interesting implications of this for how we should
| do research.
|
| https://www.gwern.net/Research-criticism#beliefs-are-for-
| act...
|
| A recent example: people have been talking about clinical
| trials for coronavirus vaccine candidates. In those you want
| to minimize the bad things that happen to the people in the
| study, and also get a working vaccine rolled out to the world
| as quickly as possible. Therefore you might want to accept
| unusually low levels of certainty that the vaccine is safe,
| or ramp up trial size faster than usual, because the world is
| on fire and every day of delay is terrible. For other
| vaccines with smaller expected benefits, slow-and-cautious
| might be the way to go. In both cases it's a matter of
| balancing expected risks with rewards as your probability
| estimates change over time.
| jgrahamc wrote:
| Most humans have a really hard time with exponential processes.
| They are hard for them to spot and truly understand. So when
| something goes 1, 2, 4, 8 they see it as linear and when it's
| doubling with larger numbers they suddenly get it. And then it's
| too late.
| Someone wrote:
| 1, 2, 4, 8 isn't that different from 1, 3, 5, 7.
|
| You need more sample points, larger multipliers, or prior
| expectation of seeing an exponential curve to see that as
| exponential growth.
| dntbnmpls wrote:
| > 1, 2, 4, 8 isn't that different from 1, 3, 5, 7.
|
| What? The former is exponential and the latter is linear.
| They are the definition of different.
|
| The 30th number in the first series is 536870912.
|
| The 30th number in the second series is 59.
| ash wrote:
| > [1, 2, 4, 8] is exponential and [1, 3, 5, 7] is linear.
|
| You can't say just from 4 data points. Real data is noisy.
| Imagine each number is +-1.
| nullc wrote:
| To be fair, people-- even experts (checkout the first 538
| survey of experts) and authorities-- have happily
| pretended covid19's behavior was linear even when the
| linear fit was _many_ sigma away from the measurements...
|
| I agree that it's worthwhile intuition in many cases, but
| really not here and even people equipt with both the data
| and the mathematical expertise to use it there have also
| made many bad calls on this.
| silexia wrote:
| Excellent point Paul! How can we actually do a better job of
| keeping track of credibility? There are so many talking heads
| that it is hard to remember who said what and who is or is not
| credible. You almost would need a Black Mirror style AR
| credibility score floating in view?
| clairity wrote:
| you have to hone your bs meter by making lots of mistakes.
| incidentally, that's life in a nutshell.
| david_w wrote:
| Meanwhile, elsewhere in the world, Sweden puts into practice what
| they only speculate about:
|
| https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2020/04/covid-19-and-swedis...
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