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Coronavirus and Credibility

paulgraham.com

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Re: Coronavirus and Credibility

#401

Post by klmadfejno »

jl6 wrote: post #13
martinko wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Of all the conspiracy theories out there, the 'caused by 5G masts' is the one that confuses me the most. I get the possible aversion to 5G, but how does one make the leap from that to it causing COVID?

Your mistake is assuming people are using reason to come up with that theory :)

Conspiracy theorists have long been depicted as just weirdos who think they're smart. They're actually generally people who have experienced trauma and are suffering from paranoia. Conspiracies validate feelings of distrust. More sad than funny.

Re: Coronavirus and Credibility

#402

Post by runeks »

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 and has the exact same dynamic with the exact same players.

No, global warming has a very different dynamic. With a virus, if you do the right thing and protect yourself, you’re more likely to survive. With global warming, if you get a lot of people to emit less CO2, you might just end up making CO2 emissions cheaper for everyone else.

Re: Coronavirus and Credibility

#403

Post by thelean12 »

eanzenberg wrote: post #359
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…

And they both use the same scare statistics. (covid) 2 million Americans will die. (global warming) If we don't stop emitting CO2 the world will collapse by 2030.

You're exaggerating, which is just as bad.

NYT reported that "200,000 to 1.7 million" people could die on March 13th [1]. Most of those calculations had to do with the fact that the hospital system would get overwhelmed at some point, compounding the deaths.

None of that is "scare statistics". It's useful modeling.

I think what you consider to be "scare statistics" is more lack of education. Similar to how people saw the Trump win as meaning "The media/polls were wrong! They had Clinton winning at 85%! They can't be trusted!". When in reality, flipping a coin and getting 3 heads in a row is all it takes for Trump to win. Or rolling a standard 6-sided die and correctly guessing the number once. It suddenly doesn't sound outlandish.

[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2020/03/13/us/coronavirus-deaths-est...

Edit: The downvotes are concerning. If you have a problem with my argument, please respond.

Re: Coronavirus and Credibility

#404

Post by moosey »

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…

You are comparing subjective predictions and mathematically modeled predictions. They are not the same thing.

We have enormous amounts of mathematical modelling and a vast history of information about our atmospheric history. Using this, we can make inferences about what is likely to happen due to climate change.

If I were to just make a rando statement about what will happen when climate change comes, that's different.

Learning to separate the two is an important tool.

Re: Coronavirus and Credibility

#405

Post by nickff »

rahidz wrote: post #375
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!"

That back-and-forth is between two bureaucrats, who are talking about how to obstruct politicians. One of the core premises of "Yes Minister" is that the bureaucracy holds the real power in government, somewhat similar to the idea of a 'deep state', though the show existed long before that phrase was coined.

Re: Coronavirus and Credibility

#406

Post by VWWHFSfQ »

runeks wrote: post #402
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 and has the exact same dynamic with the exact same players. No, global warming has a very different dynamic. With a virus, if you do the right thing and protect yourself, you’re more likely to survive. With global warming, if you get a lot of people to emit less CO2, you might just end up making CO2 emissions cheaper for everyone else.

That's a very reductive and defeatist way to view the problem, and potential solution. The reality is there is no silver bullet. Emissions have to be reduced by means of an energy revolution. Sure, some will benefit in the short term. But everyone will benefit in the long term.

Re: Coronavirus and Credibility

#407

Post by standardUser »

I've been amazed at how eager people have been to stake out and defend firm positions regarding this pandemic. We know this is an unprecedented global crisis with no good analogies, and we know that new information comes to light literally every single day. But instead of acknowledging this and taking a patient and flexible approach, we have everyone from the president on down taking hard positions about how this will play out, when it will end, how many people will die, what will happen after it ends and so on.

Even under the best possible conditions, humans are famously bad at predicting the future. Why then, when faced with a situation that is riddled with known unknowns, are so many people so eager to declare they know the future? And how do these fabricated declarations help us in any way? They only serve to obscure how truly in the dark we are about our current predicament.

Re: Coronavirus and Credibility

#408

Post by kgwgk »

hkai wrote: post #175

Flu in the US: 0.13-0.28% mortality [1] Covid-19 in China: 0.50-0.66% mortality [2, 3] I mean from numbers it is indeed not much worse than flu, but we don't know the potential extra deaths caused by running out of ICU beds. [1] https://www.cdc.gov/flu/about/burden/past-seasons.html [2] https://www.bmj.com/content/369/bmj.m1327 [3] https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2020.03.05.20031773v...

If you’re giving the CFR for flu as deaths/symptomatic you should do the same for COVID-19: 1.23% to 1.53%. That’s a factor of seven worse.

When you consider as well that everyone is susceptible and you may have infection rates well over the 5-15% you get for flu it’s at least an order of magnitude worse.

Re: Coronavirus and Credibility

#409

Post by d_burfoot »

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…

Do you even read these papers before posting? Here's what the Syria paper actually concludes:

> In light of the above we can now return to our main questions: is there clear and reliable evidence that climate change-related drought in Syria was a contributory factor in the onset of the country's civil war?; and, if and where yes, was it as significant a contributory factor as is claimed in the existing academic and expert literature? On each step of the claimed causal chain, our answers are no. We find that there is no clear and reliable evidence that anthropogenic climate change was a factor in northeast Syria's 2006/07–2008/09 drought; we find that, while the 2006/07–2008/09 drought in northeast Syria will have contributed to migration, this migration was not on the scale claimed in the existing literature, and was, in all probability, more caused by economic liberalisation than drought; and we find that there is no clear and reliable evidence that drought-related migration was a contributory factor in civil war onset. In our assessment, there is thus no good evidence to conclude that global climate change-related drought in Syria was a contributory causal factor in the country's civil war.

Re: Coronavirus and Credibility

#410

Post by nickthemagicman »

I would love to see a project that does fear sentiment analysis of news media sources.

I go to NY Times or Fox news and it's seems like so much fear based reporting.

I go to NPR or BBC and it seems much more level headed.

Would love to have an objective measurement of fear based sentiment analysis of news sources.

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