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Coronavirus and Credibility

paulgraham.com

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Re: Coronavirus and Credibility

#301

Post by lliamander »

avip wrote: post #296
pdonis wrote: post #246

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

Could you share some of these confident predictions regarding global warming?

Confident predictions regarding climate change over the past 100 or so years[0]

[0] https://tofspot.blogspot.com/2010/10/goosey-goosey-gander.ht...

Re: Coronavirus and Credibility

#302

Post by the_af »

xiphias2 wrote: post #43
jpxw wrote: post #22

Even “reputable” sources like the Financial Times have been putting out utter rubbish: https://www.ft.com/content/5ff6469a-6dd8-11ea-89df-41bea0557... My current theory is that we are seeing denial on a mass scale as a coping mechanism.

The problem is that the WHO was lying multiple times, and other organizations parroted those lies as they were afraid of confronting the WHO. Now we are in a stage where there's no good information source (except HN comments, though even there we must be selective).

The WHO was lying? How so?

Re: Coronavirus and Credibility

#303

Post by atomashpolskiy »

tigershark wrote: post #267
atomashpolskiy wrote: post #137

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

https://www.icelandreview.com/ask-ir/whats-the-status-of-cov...

27,000 samples

1,500 confirmed

37 hospitalized (2%)

460 recovered

Here's the official stats from Iceland. How would you comment these numbers?

Re: Coronavirus and Credibility

#305

Post by seemslegit »

If the politicians and media outlets editors who downplayed coronavirus in February predicted they could say it, get a lead time on the market and prep time for themselves and those with access to better data and estimates and not generally end up in worse shape politically and economically than if they admitted the full severity at the beginning and be right about all those things, are their predictions still bad ?

Re: Coronavirus and Credibility

#306

Post by yodsanklai »

jordanpg wrote: post #203
yodsanklai wrote: post #115

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> This is what people who say it's just flu++ are missing, and I am trying to be sympathetic to their lack of knowledge This is very condescending. There are still a lot of unknowns, and there are smart people (for instance [1]) out there who think the cure may be worth than the disease. We urgently need more data. [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QUvWaxuurzQ

Reasonable people can certainly disagree about whether the cure is worse than the disease. That said, the world's governments have made a decision to react in a certain way, and I maintain that my intuition tells me that most people don't understand the real reason for the lockdowns. They think it is to prevent them personally from getting sick. That's not really true. The point is to prevent the medical infrastructu…

> The point is to prevent the medical infrastructure from becoming overwhelmed

I think this is clear for most people. I'm not American but I've watched Trump recent talk and they explained this clearly in a way everybody could understand.

What they didn't explain though is the post-lockdown strategy.

Most likely, in a few weeks, only a small fraction of the US population will be immune, and the problem won't be solved anymore than it was before the lockdown (except that the country is stalled). The virus will still be there, and there won't be any vaccine. I'd like them to think a few steps ahead and tell us what will be their plan.

Re: Coronavirus and Credibility

#307

Post by qqqwerty »

lazyjones wrote: post #107
mehrdadn wrote: post #102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Are you joking? She says a heck of a lot more than that. Her tone is extremely cautious and she's extremely clear that we know very little about this virus, she's describing the current situation of who is dying rather than making baseless predictions about who will die in the future, and all she's saying in that one sentence is that for the current situation, "you have to put it into context". Meanwhile you have sna…

You should look at the video again. Her tone is calming and reassuring and she is saying it's scary because it is NEW. Are you deliberately trying to misinterpret it?

This video was published on January 23rd. At that point, China had less than 1k confirmed cases and less than 30 deaths. I agree with the sibling commenter, this was a very reasoned and factual video, especially considering the information that was public at the time.

Re: Coronavirus and Credibility

#308

Post by vernie »

ag56 wrote: post #99
flr03 wrote: 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.

That absolute confidence is what makes them popular with their audience and they will suffer no consequences as a result.

Re: Coronavirus and Credibility

#310

Post by jshevek »

avip wrote: post #296
pdonis wrote: post #246

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

Could you share some of these confident predictions regarding global warming?

Here is a decent place to start [for anyone truly unaware of the history of bad climate predictions]:

https://www.bing.com/search?q=bad%20climate%20predictions

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