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:
Coronavirus and Credibility
161–170 of 968 posts
Re: Coronavirus and Credibility
#162Earlier 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…
> 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 ahea…
> 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...
Re: Coronavirus and Credibility
#163Earlier quoted context omitted.
"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.or…
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.
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.
Re: Coronavirus and Credibility
#164Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
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.
Alternatively your reasoned answer wasn't as good as you think it was.
Re: Coronavirus and Credibility
#165Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
Alternatively your reasoned answer wasn't as good as you think it was.
To the conspiracy minded no answer is good enough.
Re: Coronavirus and Credibility
#166Earlier quoted context omitted.
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?
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.
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.
Re: Coronavirus and Credibility
#167Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
Alternatively your reasoned answer wasn't as good as you think it was.
@Beltiras
Or maybe that's just your excuse to not even try.
Re: Coronavirus and Credibility
#168Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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-...
It does because regional fluctuations don't warrant a widespread overreaction.
Overall mortality for Europe is lower than during most flu seasons:
Re: Coronavirus and Credibility
#169Earlier 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…
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...
There's a vaccine for the flu. That makes a huge difference, even if the diseases were otherwise just as bad as each other.
Re: Coronavirus and Credibility
#170From 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…
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.