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Coronavirus and Credibility

paulgraham.com

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Re: Coronavirus and Credibility

#261

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…

> 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-...

Re: Coronavirus and Credibility

#262

Post by takeda »

amenod wrote: post #153
diryawish wrote: post #117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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_ULTIMO.... Also note that all the charts ar…

What are you talking about? The spike started in mid March, that's just a single data point on that graph.

Re: Coronavirus and Credibility

#263

Post by jshevek »

Theodores wrote: post #258
jshevek wrote: post #247

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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.

Re: Coronavirus and Credibility

#264

Post by takeda »

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/

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).

Re: Coronavirus and Credibility

#265

Post by tigershark »

atomashpolskiy wrote: post #65

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 cal…

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.

Re: Coronavirus and Credibility

#266

Post by vonmoltke »

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.

This particular quote renders badly on the desktop as well.

Re: Coronavirus and Credibility

#267

Post by tigershark »

atomashpolskiy wrote: post #137
nullc wrote: post #114

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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:…

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.

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.

Re: Coronavirus and Credibility

#268

Post by throwaway5752 »

pdonis wrote: post #246
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…

> 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 t…

Central America (https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/eye-of-the-storm/fifth-...), Syria (https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S096262981...), Australia (https://en.wikipedia.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.

Re: Coronavirus and Credibility

#269

Post by nradov »

graeme wrote: post #249
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…

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.

Barack Obama wasn't exactly marginal.

Re: Coronavirus and Credibility

#270

Post by klenwell »

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…

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.

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