Coronavirus and Credibility • Hacker News Board

Re: Coronavirus and Credibility

#441

Post by tekkk » Mon, Apr 06, 2020, 8:11 PM UTC

jonnycoder wrote: post #398

rayuela wrote: post #295

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Totally agree with this. This is something you can clearly see in Trump's approval rating, which just reached the highest levels of his entire tenure [1]. Things are only getting more polarizing, but the really scary thing is that this admin's approval rating climbs the worse things get and it is worrying to see this incentive structure :(

I don't agree with you that it's scary that the admin's approval rating climbs. If anything it's positive news. People close to me, particularly females, who previously were anti-Trump have been changing their tune and some are considering voting for him in upcoming election for the level of leadership and openness since the covid19 stuff started. That's the opposite of polarization, at least anecdotally.

That's insane. Shouldn't it be the opposite as he famously called it a hoax and so on? Disregarding whatever nonsense he has said on many past occasions. Oh well. In this case I'd only quote George Carlin here: "The public sucks".

Re: Coronavirus and Credibility

#442

Post by jacquesm » Mon, Apr 06, 2020, 8:11 PM UTC

Paul is off by a mile and a half on this one. They weren't worried about getting caught. At all. The thing they would be worried about is whether or not getting caught would have consequences. And if there is anything that you could have learned from the last three years then it is that lying to the public carries no consequences at all.

Re: Coronavirus and Credibility

#443

Post by maps » Mon, Apr 06, 2020, 8:11 PM UTC

2bitencryption wrote: post #396

One thing I've had trouble reconciling is the fact that the CDC estimates 24k-63k deaths from the flu this flu season[0] We just passed 10k from covid-19. Only last week a "low" estimation of covid deaths this year was 200k. So it seems the expectation is there will be many, many more, and we're just at the start of all this. On the other hand, it also seems this week like the infamous curve is beginning to flatten,…

>Some of the clips show in the video referenced in the article actually seem pretty "sane" to me - the one guy saying "I'm not worried about getting this illness", another saying for most people it will seem just like the flu. Those two statements, as far as we know, are not that outlandish, right? I'm certainly not worried about myself, and for many people it does seem to be mild or asymptomatic?

The flu season is 6 months for ~ 40k deaths.

We are at 10k deaths of covid in the USA. Depending on how you measure the 'season' it could be as little as a month in. If we keep with these numbers it will surely pass the flu death toll for the same time period.

Now also consider that unlike flu, we have no vaccine and the virus kills people in the prime of their life just as much as the elderly. We also have no idea on the way this virus works. We are making assumptions that it will work like a normal flu virus. There is anecdotal evidence it resides in people even after they have 'recovered', which isn't the same as a normal flu or cold. It is certainly something to be concerned with.

Re: Coronavirus and Credibility

#444

Post by [deleted] » Mon, Apr 06, 2020, 8:12 PM UTC

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…

[deleted]

Re: Coronavirus and Credibility

#445

Post by danans » Mon, Apr 06, 2020, 8:12 PM UTC

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…

> Blaming journalist and politics, why not, I guess some of them deserve it, but my neighbour could have done the same analysis after couple of pints at the pub.

They absolutely deserve the blame more than your neighbor, because they have a power of influence ~10e6 times greater than your neighbor at the pub. They chose to use that influence to back a narrative to support their political inclinations amid an emergency. The responsible thing to have said is: "We don't know what the severity of this will be, but we'll report things as we find out from authorities."

Re: Coronavirus and Credibility

#446

Post by dekhn » Mon, Apr 06, 2020, 8:12 PM UTC

chillacy wrote: post #440

dekhn wrote: post #400

I'm a biologist and I have no trouble saying with a straight face that, as of yet, COVID-19's true health impact has been lower than that of a bad year of flu. I don't care about TV commenters- by the metric of # of deaths (not potential number of deaths, or total cost to the medical system, or impact on economy), COVID-19 has been less than a bad year of flu. This isn't to say COVID-19 isn't bad, or doesn't have the…

If the crux of your argument relies on looking at what has happened so far without looking at projections into what could happen, then I have some stock to sell you. You'll buy at the top since the last quarter's earnings were good, right?

Can you keep the discussion fact-based?

Re: Coronavirus and Credibility

#447

Post by jmull » Mon, Apr 06, 2020, 8:13 PM UTC

dekhn wrote: post #400

I'm a biologist and I have no trouble saying with a straight face that, as of yet, COVID-19's true health impact has been lower than that of a bad year of flu. I don't care about TV commenters- by the metric of # of deaths (not potential number of deaths, or total cost to the medical system, or impact on economy), COVID-19 has been less than a bad year of flu. This isn't to say COVID-19 isn't bad, or doesn't have the…

Simple numbers tell us the deaths so far from covid-19 have been less than an average flu season. But so what?

You're not actually suggesting anything so there's nothing to get directly angry about. But since you don't suggest anything, you leave it to people to infer what you really mean, and then there may be good reason to get angry.

Are you suggesting that we should have treated covid-19 like the flu -- although one without a vaccine -- and just went about our normal lives? If so, how much faster do you think our medical systems would have been overwhelmed and what do you think we could have done about that? You can crunch numbers... estimate the numbers dead from covid-19 without any curve-flattening efforts and the additional dead due to the medical system being overwhelmed.

Or are you suggesting something else? We can't read your mind over the internet.

Re: Coronavirus and Credibility

#448

Post by moultano » Mon, Apr 06, 2020, 8:13 PM UTC

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.

Sure, David Barber was off by a bit in that particular sentence, but arctic sea ice minima are now half of their historical values, and dropping. It is true, that in complex dynamic systems, predictions have to have wide error bars, but he was way less wrong than the charlatans who claim this isn't a problem or isn't a trend.

https://climate.nasa.gov/vital-signs/arctic-sea-ice/

Re: Coronavirus and Credibility

#449

Post by s_y_n_t_a_x » Mon, Apr 06, 2020, 8:13 PM UTC

mapgrep wrote: post #341

9HZZRfNlpR wrote: post #335

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not an American and far from Trumps target audience but the CNN is bad as Fox. I have them both on TV. It truly is a kettle and pot situation, I believe so many Americans have grown so deeply into either culture that unfortunately you can't comprehend it anymore.

Every single journalist in the video Paul Graham linked was on Fox News/Fox Business.

The NYC health commissioner was saying to go outside and take the subway Feb 7th, 4 days after Trump's China ban went into effect.

https://twitter.com/tomselliott/status/1243539189020401664?s...

Literally everyone was saying it's not as bad as the Flu. I don't see why we're playing the blame game in the peak of things.

I could definitely tell you WHO (China) is to blame, but now isn't the time.

Also:

https://twitter.com/LizRNC/status/1245478539018805251?s=20

https://www.washingtonpost.com/outlook/2020/01/31/how-our-br...

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/02/18/world/europe/coronavirus-...

https://www.cnbc.com/2020/02/03/the-flu-has-already-killed-1...

https://twitter.com/thedailybeast/status/1225937322694381568

https://twitter.com/washingtonpost/status/122367623706063667...

https://twitter.com/RealJamesWoods/status/124526211463933952...

https://i.imgur.com/43n4HWK.png

Re: Coronavirus and Credibility

#450

Post by azeirah » Mon, Apr 06, 2020, 8:13 PM UTC

pritovido wrote: post #83

bsaul wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

i've been saying "not more dangerous than the flu" before it started really going to shxt in europe, because to be honest, the epidemic doesn't look that dangerous if you're in general good health, just by looking at the numbers from a distance. The fact that most people seem to not have anything worse than a few days of fever (some having even nothing at all), while at the same time others simply die very quickly to…

I probably had covid19 in February(in Asia), only in retrospect I could differentiate it from the flu. The main difference was it took the superior part of the throat instead of the inferior. Talking with doctors they tell me I had all the symptoms. The problem with it is that at first it is "benign"(I had high fever for "just" two days) if your body stops it before getting into the lungs. Once it gets there it could…

Do you have a source for corona infecting the inferior part of your throat rather than the inferior part? I know you spoke to doctors, but I find it incredibly difficult to find credible sources other than either

incredibly simplified accessible articles on mainstream health websites, stating that a symptom is "throat pain"

or having to go through 20 pages of medical research which I understand basically nothing of.