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Coronavirus and Credibility

paulgraham.com

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Re: Coronavirus and Credibility

#311

Post by sgt101 »

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…

There's a really nasty that is looming in my nightmares. Hurricane season is coming earlier now, due to warming, and the Hurricanes are bigger. And The South is going to be in the thick of the epidemic in mid to late may.

Re: Coronavirus and Credibility

#312

Post by avip »

lliamander wrote: post #301
avip wrote: post #296

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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...

I see one prediction from an actual modern climate scientist. It reads:

"So the climate will continue to change, even if we make maximum effort to slow the growth of carbon dioxide. Arctic sea ice will melt away in the summer season within the next few decades. Mountain glaciers, providing fresh water for rivers that supply hundreds of millions of people, will disappear - practically all of the glaciers could be gone within 50 years. . . Clearly, if we burn all fossil fuels, we will destroy the planet we know . . . We would set the planet on a course to the ice-free state, with sea level 75 metres higher. Climatic disasters would occur continually."

Re: Coronavirus and Credibility

#313

Post by lliamander »

throwaway5752 wrote: post #268
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…

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. I…

> 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.

The consensus regarding climate change (and human's role in it) has been exagerated[0]

[0]https://daviddfriedman.blogspot.com/2014/02/a-climate-falseh...

Re: Coronavirus and Credibility

#314

Post by squarefoot »

ryandrake wrote: post #201
basch wrote: post #196

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>any amount of fact checking in politics don't change political views. That is what I was thinking. Paul is writing as if credibility stems from reality. When in reality, the reverse its true. Fox news is credible, its viewers believe that, and whatever those credible people say, is reality. As long as people keep tuned in only to Fox News, that reality wont shatter. Their credibility exists because of their reach, i…

This is a deliberately built political philosophy, one of the results of Karl Rove's "reality-based community" [1] idea, from over 15 years ago. Whether or not the label was actually coined by Rove is debated, but essentially this idea is that some people lived in a world that was "reality-based" and that others were not limited by reality and thus were better/stronger politicians. In practice, what this means is the…

"like him or hate him, his administration is using it skillfully"

I couldn't agree more.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/trump-recorded-havin...

Not many people could survive this, then become president.

Re: Coronavirus and Credibility

#315

Post by notahacker »

abnry wrote: post #287
AndrewBissell wrote: post #273

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Bear in mind it's not just Fox News which got this pandemic wrong. "It's no worse than the flu," "this won't be a global pandemic," "you don't need to wear a mask unless you are symptomatic or caring for someone who is," and other 100% wrong takes were also pushed by Vox, NYT, WaPo, and even WHO & CDC long past when they should have been.

Which is one of the reasons why I wish we, collectively as a society, would stop blaming the blame game in this crisis. Almost everyone got this wrong.

When and why people got things wrong is also important. People who underestimated COVID-19 in January because evidence of its lethality and r0 were scant are somewhat different from people who downplayed the virus in March because it aligned them with a particular political figure. Similarly, it's a lot easier to sympathise with the epidemiologists who will turn out to have massively overestimated casualties because we took unprecedented action to shut down society to avoid them than the people still organising mass events or the people who have concluded that the disease is best stopped by attacking 5G masts.

Re: Coronavirus and Credibility

#316

Post by AndrewBissell »

garraeth wrote: post #289
drocer88 wrote: post #275

If you're getting your "news" from CNN/Fox/MSNBC, or "gathering evidence" to promote one the two permitted narratives, that's your problem. This is stuff is low effort "Presidential Level Politics" 24x7. Real news died when reporters stopped having to craft a story so that the Associated Press or United Press International picked it up and made it available to the varied local newspapers of America, both liberal and…

Agreed. Unfortunately now it's more like picking a sport team ("Team CNN" or "Team Fox"), or Apple vs/ Google vs/ Microsoft than actually finding, or learning about, facts. Tribalism at it's finest. The only alternative I've found (I'm open to helpful suggestions) is to ignore that noise and read actual briefings and original sources. But, that defeats the point of news being an honest and straight forward source of…

I've found a well-curated Twitter feed of smart sources from various ideological and media camps helps to find interesting and informative info which would otherwise take a great deal of time to find. You do get misinfo and bad takes sometimes, but if you set it up right it's no worse than mainstream sources. Lists are useful as well to avoid Twitter's feed curation algos.

Just specifically for COVID-19, this led me to:

- Pay closer attention to the pandemic in China and request testing for my daughter when she had flu symptoms in late January while traveling (the CDC had no tests, of course)

- Begin using masks and gloves while going to groceries and other stores long before it was in common use and the value of masks had been acknowledged

- Mentally and materially prepare my family for an extended quarantine period long ahead of when the necessity was broadly acknowledged

Re: Coronavirus and Credibility

#317

Post by mooneater »

We as a society are in need of a long-term, detailed collective memory of evidence of credibility.

But that is only useful if credibility is highly valued.

Neither are true of our society today. People both forget what someone said yesterday, or if they remember then they decide it didn't matter that much they were wrong.

Re: Coronavirus and Credibility

#318

Post by Animats »

drocer88 wrote: post #275

If you're getting your "news" from CNN/Fox/MSNBC, or "gathering evidence" to promote one the two permitted narratives, that's your problem. This is stuff is low effort "Presidential Level Politics" 24x7. Real news died when reporters stopped having to craft a story so that the Associated Press or United Press International picked it up and made it available to the varied local newspapers of America, both liberal and…

Each day, you have to read CNN, Fox, Reuters, the Economist, the Center for Disease Control, and some of the better local newspaper sites to figure out what's going on. Ignore what they choose to put on the home page. Even Fox News is not totally out of touch with reality once you get off the home page and ignore the opinion section.

Re: Coronavirus and Credibility

#319

Post by atomashpolskiy »

tigershark wrote: post #265
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.

You seem to be mentally unstable. There is nothing insulting about being skeptical. I have facts to back my statements, can you say the same for yourself?

Re: Coronavirus and Credibility

#320

Post by iron0013 »

AzzieElbab wrote: post #241
ryandrake wrote: post #201

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is a deliberately built political philosophy, one of the results of Karl Rove's "reality-based community" [1] idea, from over 15 years ago. Whether or not the label was actually coined by Rove is debated, but essentially this idea is that some people lived in a world that was "reality-based" and that others were not limited by reality and thus were better/stronger politicians. In practice, what this means is the…

to an outsider, americas left vs right hostility and mutual disrespect are becoming painful to watch. lets make a counter example to they one you provided, does the nyt "create reality" for their readers? they did publish their fare share of dangerously incorrect material about the virus, pandemic, the countermeasures,you name it.

I’m not sure that’s true. Some objective “truth” exists in the world whether it’s noticed and reported correctly or not (the tree falling in the woods), and some news outlets (NYT) report this truth more accurately than others (Fox News). It’s misleading to insist on “both siding” to make a mountain of untruths from one outlet seem to be the same size as a molehill of untruths from the other.
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