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Coronavirus and Credibility

paulgraham.com

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Re: Coronavirus and Credibility

#371

Post by outworlder »

lliamander wrote: post #325
avip wrote: post #312

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> I see one prediction from an actual modern climate scientist. That's a nice "No True Scotsman" right there. Unless, of course, you can give me a non-arbitrary reason why Dr. David Barber of the University of Manitoba speaking in 2008 is a "pre-modern" climate scientist, whereas Dr. James Hansen of NASA writing in 2009 is a "modern" climate scientist.

I've seen this game played countless times.

"Sources?"

Then you do the job of googling for them. Retrieve a few relevant sources.

And they proceed to shoot them down, even moving goalposts if necessary. They might come back with their own confirmation biased sources.

This instance is even more egregious. There is a growing mountain of evidence for climate change. Multiple books, across multiple disciplines, can and have been written. Numerous peer reviewed papers.

What's more infuriating is that you don't need climate scientists to corroborate climate change. Because it's not a prediction anymore, climate has been changing already. Disciplines as diverse as geology and biology can detect the effects. If you want to do projections, sure, biologists may not be able to help. But if you want to see the effects today, they certainly can.

With such an enormous pile of data, I can't believe this is a legitimate discussion.

Re: Coronavirus and Credibility

#372

Post by Retric »

chvid wrote: post #346

"No worse than the flu." How could they feel safe saying such things? Because in most health scares historically this has been correct. That the danger had been wildly overestimated. And even now, it is not clear that "we" have a correct estimation of the danger. Recently I read an estimate that 50% of the infected have no symptons. I even read another estimate that 90% have no symptons. Should the latter be correct…

Anyone saying 90% have no symptoms is simply lying.

China’s case fatality rate is over 4% which is likely inflated. Dimond Princess tested everyone and has a 12/712 or 1.7% case fatality rate with many still in critical condition and the majority of positive results showing symptoms and a high percentage needing hospitalization.

A wildly optimistic estimate of 1 death per 200 cases x 70% infections is over 1 million dead Americans. And that’s assuming we could provide care for millions of people in critical condition.

Re: Coronavirus and Credibility

#373

Post by [deleted] »

lliamander wrote: post #253
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...

[deleted]

Re: Coronavirus and Credibility

#374

Post by e2021 »

the_af wrote: post #302
xiphias2 wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

WHO was saying almost until the point that China locked down that there was no evidence of human to human transmission, even though Taiwan has warned them that had strong evidence of this on December 31st 2019.

Re: Coronavirus and Credibility

#375

Post by rahidz »

nxp wrote: post #276

Yes Minister , on how to respond to a crisis: Sir Richard Wharton: “In stage one, we say nothing is going to happen.” Sir Humphrey Appleby: “Stage two, we say something may be about to happen, but we should do nothing about it.” Sir Richard Wharton: “In stage three, we say that maybe we should do something about it, but there’s nothing we can do.” Sir Humphrey Appleby: “Stage four, we say maybe there was something we…

Stage four requires admitting guilt, it should be "We've always known we should've done something about it, but (opposing political party) didn't let us!"

Re: Coronavirus and Credibility

#376

Post by [deleted] »

admax88q wrote: post #364
lliamander wrote: post #313

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

[deleted]

Re: Coronavirus and Credibility

#377

Post by jacquesm »

lazyjones wrote: post #31

Does pg never watch the news? Or did he just forget that "no worse than the flu" was the general tone until late February in pretty much all 'western' media and even MDs? E.g. https://www.health.com/condition/infectious-diseases/coronav... https://www.mdmag.com/medical-news/the-fear-of-the-corona-vi... (kudos for correcting/updating later...) Seems a bit one-sided to get so excited about wrong predictions by the Fox/…

I don't know if he was watching the news or not but here on HN that was the predominant spirit and some incorrigibles still hold to that mantra.

Re: Coronavirus and Credibility

#378

Post by btilly »

There is nothing about what has happened that should surprise anyone who has read the book Superforecasting.

It explains that we naturally trust people who sound smart, well-informed, and CONFIDENT. We don't want to hear uncertainty, probabilities, or the other signs of someone who thinks in a careful quantitative way. We want to accept a cognitively simple answer, then move on. This is what we find comfortable.

However this is a good way to select people who are terrible at making actual predictions. They appear to predict, but often with sufficient weasel words that it is hard afterwards to say whether it was violated. (The book gives real examples.) But if you put them in a setting where they can be tested, they perform worse than uninformed monkeys. And the part of the future that they are worst at predicting is exactly what they were supposed to be experts at!

The book Superforecasting walks through how this was demonstrated, and the discovery that there are people you will never see on CNN or Fox news who are really good at forecasting. A fact that is extremely interesting to various TLA agencies (one of whom paid for the research in question).

The long and short of it? Bayes' Theorem actually works in the real world. The revolution that started with quants on wall street, analytics in baseball and Nate Silver in politics is still ongoing.

When you are done with the book and have processed it, hopefully you will understand why the author said in response to an audience question after a talk, Here’s my long-term prediction for Long Now. When the Long Now audience of 2515 looks back on the audience of 2015, their level of contempt for how we go about judging political debate will be roughly comparable to the level of contempt we have for the 1692 Salem witch trials.

Hopefully the contempt that some of us have for how talking heads in January and February of 2020 dismissed Coronavirus is a step on the path to that future.

Re: Coronavirus and Credibility

#379

Post by nyczomg »

enraged_camel wrote: post #323
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…

>> CNN/Fox/MSNBC One of those is not like the other two. CNN and MSNBC may not be as high quality as WaPo/NYTimes in terms of depth and quality of journalism, but they also don't maliciously and cynically and shamelessly lie to their viewers.

LOL.

I don't have time to compile the numerous examples of CNN maliciously, cynically, and shamelessly to their users, so I'll just post my favorite example:

https://twitter.com/wikileaks/status/787749117502119936?lang...

Chris Cuomo looking into the camera, and telling America it is illegal for them to go to wikileaks. But it's ok, the media is exempted from that and they'll make sure to tell you ALL of the important information you need to know.

Sorry, but give me a break. Not only do they lie, they try to scare you into not informing yourself.

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