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Coronavirus and Credibility

paulgraham.com

361–370 of 968 posts

Re: Coronavirus and Credibility

#361
G. Orwell, In Front Of Your Nose [1]:

"To see what is in front of one's nose needs a constant struggle. One thing that helps toward it is to keep a diary, or, at any rate, to keep some kind of record of one's opinions about important events. Otherwise, when some particularly absurd belief is exploded by events, one may simply forget that one ever held it. Political predictions are usually wrong. But even when one makes a correct one, to discover why one was right can be very illuminating. In general, one is only right when either wish or fear coincides with reality."

[1] https://www.orwellfoundation.com/the-orwell-foundation/orwel...

Re: Coronavirus and Credibility

#362
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.

As with any model, start with “all models are wrong”

Re: Coronavirus and Credibility

#363

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...

How about you look at what they actually predicted? https://www.carbonbrief.org/analysis-how-well-have-climate-m...

Re: Coronavirus and Credibility

#364

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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...

Your source is a random blogspot.com who claims that there's ambiguity because they consider the term "caused by" to be ambiguous.

I stopped reading there.

Re: Coronavirus and Credibility

#366

At the time, if you believed Chinese data, and the WHO, then you should have concluded this was no worse than the flu.

Media: China's gone mad full dystopia, welding people shut inside their apartments, stopping trains, removing people of all their freedoms.

Media: tis but a cough.

Re: Coronavirus and Credibility

#367
post #246

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…

If you actually look at what those predictions have been, you'll find that they're pretty consistently on the mark. https://www.carbonbrief.org/analysis-how-well-have-climate-m...

Re: Coronavirus and Credibility

#368
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

None of these "experts" have a track record of correct predictions that justifies taking their current predictions seriously. Remember we are not talking about the fact that the climate changes: yes, it does, it always has, and it always will (unless at some point in the distant future we learn how to control it accurately). We are talking about the dire predictions of catastrophe that have been made to try to justify spending many trillions of dollars on CO2 mitigation. Those predictions have never come true.

> Epidemiologists told everyone for a decade and a half this would happen, but here we are.

To know whether these were useful predictions, we would need to know more details. Did they predict when it would happen? Did they predict how it would spread? A prediction that "this will happen, some time in the future" is not very useful. AFAIK no epidemiologists were making predictions much more precise than that.

Looking at the actual frequency of epidemics of various sizes in the past, we might very roughly estimate that we will have one serious enough to involve a significant portion of health care resources once every decade or so. But you don't have to be an epidemiologist to do that; you just have to do the simplest possible extrapolation of the data. We had H1N1 about 10 years ago, and SARS about 18 years ago. That's still not a very strong prediction, but it would seem to be as good a basis for public policy discussion (which is to say, a fairly weak one but not negligible) as anything more complicated that has come from epidemiologists.

Re: Coronavirus and Credibility

#369
I agree that there was a certain amount of "nobody's going to watch this tape" going on in the heads of the incorrect prognosticators. But I also think that there's a strong 'in group out group' effect. It goes something like this: Whether I'm wrong or not, this is the 'approved solution' of the network I am on. And whether I'm wrong or right, we can rewrite this later with a little help from our friends. In their world, while its not OK to state inaccuracies, it is OK to state inaccuracies in support of some dogma like "the economy must go on". That is why we now see messaging coming from the right saying "this will be over, and the question when it ends will be who killed the economy to save a few people". And that version of the story is enough to vindicate any previous inaccurate statements for the audience these speakers care about.

Re: Coronavirus and Credibility

#370
post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The Oxford study is based on blatantly, and easily demonstrably, bad data. For example it relies on only 1 out of every 1000 infections needing hospitalisation. This is not supported by any current evidence. https://www.wired.co.uk/article/coronavirus-infections-oxfor...

To call the Oxford study "utter rubbish" is foolish. Your "example" of bad data is the only quoted data in that article and it doesn't even mean anything since the implicit assumption of the Gupta model is that we do not know how many asymptomatic cases of COVID exist (even WIRED concede this point). Testing in Italy is insufficient to tell us this. 1 in 1000 infections requiring hospitalisation could be a realistic…

> Testing in Italy is insufficient to tell us this.

It's not about "testing in Italy":

"In Lombardy – despite the region being under lockdown since March 9 – more than one in every 1,000 of the entire population have already been hospitalised due to coronavirus."

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