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Coronavirus and Credibility

paulgraham.com

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Re: Coronavirus and Credibility

#231

Post by stevetodd »

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.

Re: Coronavirus and Credibility

#232

Post by qznc »

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".

Re: Coronavirus and Credibility

#233

Post by bcrosby95 »

bsaul wrote: post #10
djaychela wrote: post #5

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'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…

> 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.

Re: Coronavirus and Credibility

#234

Post by beepboopbeep »

mellosouls wrote: post #229

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 t…

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?

Re: Coronavirus and Credibility

#235

Post by smsm42 »

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.

Re: Coronavirus and Credibility

#236

Post by thomas2718 »

Dowwie wrote: post #207

Paul is referring to Fox News: https://twitter.com/TheDailyShow/status/1246146713523453957?...

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?

Re: Coronavirus and Credibility

#237

Post by Symmetry »

nullc wrote: post #114
atomashpolskiy wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

> 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_acute_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:…

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.

Re: Coronavirus and Credibility

#238

Post by Robotbeat »

mellosouls wrote: post #229

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 t…

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."

Re: Coronavirus and Credibility

#239

Post by smsm42 »

qznc wrote: post #232

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".

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.

Re: Coronavirus and Credibility

#240

Post by rjtavares »

amenod wrote: post #119
nullc wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 illne…

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…

> 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-...

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