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Coronavirus and Credibility

paulgraham.com

91–100 of 968 posts

Re: Coronavirus and Credibility

#91

> 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 o…

Votes will be lost, because people are unnecessarily putting themselves and others at risk, and some will die.

Re: Coronavirus and Credibility

#92
post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> 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.

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-...

Re: Coronavirus and Credibility

#93

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…

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.

Re: Coronavirus and Credibility

#94

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…

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.

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

Re: Coronavirus and Credibility

#95

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…

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.

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.

Re: Coronavirus and Credibility

#96
post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"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.)

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?

> 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?

Re: Coronavirus and Credibility

#97
post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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%).

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

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.

Re: Coronavirus and Credibility

#98

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…

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.

Re: Coronavirus and Credibility

#99
post #47

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, deo…

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.

Re: Coronavirus and Credibility

#100

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…

Shouldn't 'prevailing media sentiment' be an output of the journalism process, rather than an input?
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