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Coronavirus and Credibility

paulgraham.com

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Re: Coronavirus and Credibility

#621

Post by vkou »

banads wrote: post #583
vkou wrote: post #467

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Carbon taxes, and protectionist trade tariffs against countries who don't adopt carbon taxes. Make non-compliance painful enough, and the defectors will fall in line.

>Make non-compliance painful enough, and the defectors will fall in line. Maybe they don't, or maybe in the end that's all too little too late, which is why I'd suggest adding adaptation initiatives to your list.

We're going to have to turn to adaptation initiatives even if we go net-zero-carbon tomorrow - that's kind of baked into our future planning at this point.

Re: Coronavirus and Credibility

#622

Post by burtonator »

My father-in-law doesn't believe in evolution. He also believes in a ton of other crazy conspiracy theories.

Now, every time he talks about something political, I make it clear his opinions are not welcome in this family and that until he can stop spreading disinformation he's sitting at the intellectual kids table.

The evidence for evolution is overwhelming. If he can't get this basic scientific fact correct then he's almost certainly wrong about everything else. At best everything he argues should be held with a massive red flag.

If you're scientifically illiterate you don't get to participate in society.

Re: Coronavirus and Credibility

#623

Post by renewiltord »

btilly wrote: post #378

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. How…

This is why these last few weeks on the market have been wonderful. If you can predict (including accounting for the supposed irrationality) then you make money. Otherwise you lose money.

If you had a prediction of how things would get hit w/ virus, there was so much money to be made. I watched but my timing was a bit off and I did not commit the majority of my wealth. That's a pity and speaks to my true estimate of the danger whereas a friend of mine pulled out completely of all long-term holdings in mid Feb so we know he believed.

Re: Coronavirus and Credibility

#624

Post by analyst74 »

ben_w wrote: post #328
analyst74 wrote: post #299

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I used to think conspiracy theories are unrealistic, the image of a group of people sitting in a dark room conspiring against others just seems ridiculous. But the older I get, and the more understanding I have over how large organizations are ran, the more I realize that conspiracies actually do happen, but in much more subtle ways. What actually happens is that over a long periods of time, people collaborate with a…

Isn’t that called “cronyism” (or “old boys club”) rather than “conspiracy”?

True, although the term cronyism and old boys club focus on the exclusivity of those "elite" circles, rather than the impact of their decisions, which looks a lot like conspiracy from outside.

Some people end up coming up with conspiracy theories based on their outsider observations.

Re: Coronavirus and Credibility

#625

Post by KMag »

xscott wrote: post #181
nullc wrote: post #149

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> A bad year for influenza is about Maybe about tenth your figure, once you exclude non-flu pneumonia-- which is about where we are now for covid19. Flu death figures are Flu+Pneumonia because they usually don't check. Efforts to separate flu from flu + pneumonia all result in flu being a small fraction of the total ( https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3827586/ ).

The point still holds to compare Covid vs flu+pneumonia then. This is some weird No True Scotsman argument you're making where it's not the "True Flu" if they had pneumonia as well... (likely getting pneumonia because of the flu) I doubt the dead people would be comforted by such a subtle distinction.

The plus operator here is "and/or" not "and", but I presume you must have understood this. The GP's point is that flu+pnumonia = (flu) U (non-flu pneumonia). Nobody is denying that flu with pneumonia is flu.

Re: Coronavirus and Credibility

#626

Post by lbeltrame »

kgwgk wrote: post #370
taipan100 wrote: post #140

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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."

But we don't know the actual amount of people which were infected in Italy, because some of these (a sizable percentage) only reported fevers, and perhaps didn't even think about having SARS-CoV-2 in their bodies.

An acquaintance's partner suspects having got it, because after two days (two days, not weeks) of very mild fever (~37.5C) he was hit by anosmia. An ex-coworker also mentioned "a horribly strong fever" with respiratory difficulties which lasted just a few days. Yes, anecdata, but shows that you can easily miss a large part of the infected cases if you only test those hospitalized.

Re: Coronavirus and Credibility

#627

Post by seppin »

jmull wrote: post #414
ugh123 wrote: post #329

Its easy to focus on foxnews and pull all sorts of terrible content like that, but a more serious task is to look at a lot of the statements and confidence from the medical and scientific community early on - things around wearing masks in public and its inability to prevent spread, or UV light from the Sun and its ability to kill the virus (a popular statement projected by several doctors within the media), and seve…

This "everyone is bad" is really off-the-mark. If, in a fast moving situation, someone tells you something based on the best information available at the time coming from leading experts, which later turns out to be wrong, that's unfortunate. If someone ignores the leadings experts and the best information available at the time and instead tells you what they want you to believe for their own political advantage, tha…

> This "everyone is bad" is really off-the-mark.

It's the worst take because it defeats the ability to find a solution in the future, if nothing can be trusted nothing can be implemented.

Re: Coronavirus and Credibility

#628

Post by augustt »

pacomerh wrote: post #599
nyczomg wrote: post #379

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 importan…

I don't disagree with your CNN comment, but the severity, consistency and magnitude of F-NEWS's lies doesn't compete with anyone tbh. They're on their own category.

Exactly - I'm not sure how anyone can say with a straight face that the Dijon-mustard-tan-suit-latte-salute network has ever been anything but the #1 producer of bullshit on TV.

Re: Coronavirus and Credibility

#629

Post by JoeAltmaier »

thu2111 wrote: post #195
JoeAltmaier wrote: post #194

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thanks for describing exactly what it looks like when preparing for a major outbreak. Its measurable, growing geometrically without breaking stride, and 6X-10X more deadly than anything we can name. If we succeed at slowing the growth, even stopping it, then thank god those hospitals will remain empty.

It is not growing geometrically (or only with a tiny multiplier if so). If the feared scenario of exponential growth were the case then we'd see the proportion of positive test cases doubling, not just the raw number. Right now what's being seen is that if you increase testing 10x you find 10x more cases, which is consistent with finding something that's at a somewhat steady background level. e.g. here's German data:…

Let me reply to the edited comment.

We're not testing the general population. Its testing of folks coming to a hospital? Folks who aren't having hospitalizing symptoms are not tested at all, and sent home to quarantine.

So if tests doubled that means that folks are feeling bad at an increased rate. Showing up at a hospital with alarming symptoms.

You can finagle the statistics both ways - by ignoring what the 'test sample' is and assuming its uniform for instance.

Re: Coronavirus and Credibility

#630

Post by lovehashbrowns »

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…

You're looking at the impact of this virus AFTER we've already implemented shelter-in-place measures, banned certain international travel, tanked our global economy, attempted to prepare hospitals with additional supplies, and we've yet to hit the peak, right?

And you're also noting that the US currently has 9,616 recorded deaths from COVID-19? Whereas data puts the worst flu season since 2010-2011 at 61,000 (2017-2018) deaths over an entire year, right? Again, with various provisions to help slow this virus already in place?

And you're also noting that hospitalization rates would include the regular flu, typical hospital visits that require an ICU, AND hospital visits from COVID-19, right?

Sure, I get the point of taking the flu more seriously, and I agree 100% with you. But to try to make the point that COVID-19 has been less bad than a bad year of flu is pretty pointless and also misleading. A more appropriate comparison would be to go back in time to Dec 2019 and have no countries put anything in place and let COVID-19 run wild. But at that point, you're sacrificing people just to make a dumb comparison that COVID-19 isn't much worse than a bad year of flu.

Also it's disingenuous to pick the worst season of flu. Let's compare COVID-19 to 2015-2016's 23,000 influenza deaths and see how, after all these provisions, we're already at 9,616 COVID-19 deaths in the US in April.

https://public.tableau.com/profile/jonas.nart#!/vizhome/COVI...

https://www.cdc.gov/flu/about/burden/index.html?CDC_AA_refVa...

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