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Coronavirus and Credibility

paulgraham.com

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Re: Coronavirus and Credibility

#251

Post by x509fan »

zJayv wrote: post #220
INGELRII wrote: post #82

> 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…

From what Mencken book/essay is this quote?

'Notes on Journalism' in the Chicago Tribune (19.09.1926) https://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/myl/MenckenNotes.pdf

Re: Coronavirus and Credibility

#252

Post by lone_haxx0r »

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.

Re: Coronavirus and Credibility

#253

Post by lliamander »

throwaway5752 wrote: post #208

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 f…

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...

Re: Coronavirus and Credibility

#254

Post by beepboopbeep »

nimblebill wrote: post #224
Dowwie wrote: post #207

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

What about the NYC Health Commissioner Oxiris Barbot tweeting in February ( https://twitter.com/NYCHealthCommr/status/122404315585253786... ): 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/NYCHealthCo…

Yes, those are mistakes as well. We don't have to delve into whataboutism in order to point out the wrongness of something.

Re: Coronavirus and Credibility

#255

Post by tigershark »

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…

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.

Re: Coronavirus and Credibility

#256

Post by fiftyfifty »

leereeves wrote: post #178
hkai wrote: post #175

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...

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.

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...

Re: Coronavirus and Credibility

#257

Post by jshevek »

heimidal wrote: post #205
rsgalloway wrote: post #204

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…

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…

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.

Re: Coronavirus and Credibility

#258

Post by Theodores »

jshevek wrote: post #247
drummer wrote: post #244

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 (χ2 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…

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.

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.

Re: Coronavirus and Credibility

#259

Post by graeme »

akvadrako wrote: post #168
nullc wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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: https://www.euromomo.eu/

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.

Re: Coronavirus and Credibility

#260

Post by Cookingboy »

lone_haxx0r wrote: post #252

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.

>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.

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