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Coronavirus and Credibility

paulgraham.com

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Re: Coronavirus and Credibility

#661

Post by mirimir »

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…

Yes, for sure. You have experts who admit that they aren't sure, and then say what the evidence seems to show. And you have bloviators who spew BS, based on some more or less hidden agenda.

But about global climate change, it's crucial to keep in mind that it's just one aspect of human population growth and "economic development". Another huge impact is increasingly intensive and extensive land use, plus pollution with excess nutrients and toxic chemicals, which leads to loss of biodiversity and species extinctions.

Indeed, it's possible that COVID-19 and other zoonotic diseases, such as HIV and ebola virus disease (EVD), are also consequences of increasingly intensive and extensive land use. That might seem ironic, but it's just how ecosystems work.

Re: Coronavirus and Credibility

#662

Post by catalogia »

thombat wrote: post #619
catalogia wrote: post #338

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Supposing for the sake of argument that the Illuminati were real and you were in charge of it. You know a bunch of weirdos on youtube know the truth and are generally regarded as cranks. Would you bother concerning yourself with them, or would you ignore them since they're pathetic and powerless? I'd ignore them. To be clear, I don't think the Illuminati are real, but I don't think your reasoning is sound either.

An all-encompassing conspiracy orchestrating events across the globe, sparing no effort or expense to weave us all into an inescable spider's web of connected threads, that then says "eh, probably nobody is even going to listen to those guys, let's not bother with having the intern fire off a few boilerplate take-downs"?

Sure, why not? It's obvious "probably nobody is even going to listen to those guys" is true...

Re: Coronavirus and Credibility

#663

Post by int_19h »

ggreer wrote: post #640
avip wrote: post #296

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Could you share some of these confident predictions regarding global warming?

Here's an AP article from 31 years ago[1]. > A senior U.N. environmental official says entire nations could be wiped off the face of the Earth by rising sea levels if the global warming trend is not reversed by the year 2000. ... > The most conservative scientific estimate that the Earth’s temperature will rise 1 to 7 degrees in the next 30 years, said Brown. Since that article was published, atmospheric CO2 has gone…

This sounds like it refers to various island nations in the Pacific, which are, indeed, under existential thread from global warming and the associated sea level rise.

Re: Coronavirus and Credibility

#664

Post by javagram »

crusso wrote: post #615
javagram wrote: post #562

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It did come from all political quarters, however one political quarter stayed in denial much longer. Notice how many of the clips from your video are from January or early February. The POTUS was still publicly pushing the coronavirus = flu comparison in early March even after we saw what happened in Iran and Italy. Remember, he said on February 28 that being worried about the coronavirus was “their new hoax” from th…

however one political quarter stayed in denial much longer Now you're splitting hairs. You know who the first politician in the USA who was banging the drums in alarm about Wuhan and the coronavirus? Tom Cotton. Republican Senator. Do you support him now? Does his early conviction of the severity of this event put you behind him and everyone who echoed his concerns? Are you likewise now opposed to the people who were…

Tom Cotton was one of the people who were on this and warning of it early. So was Steve Bannon. There are others. Just because someone has an R by their name doesn’t mean they’re a homogeneous blob.

I think that’s great, I don’t agree with all their politics but they didn’t let themselves be blinded by optimism and looked at what was actually going on here. And the theory that the virus may have accidentally escaped from the lab where they were studying bat coronaviruses always seemed credible to me (Reminder, the 1977 flu likely escaped from a Russian or Chinese lab but this was never admitted either).

The political quarter that was in denial was mainly the POTUS and those who simply follow whatever the POTUS is doing without independent thought (Hannity, etc.) Edit: again, he was calling it “their new hoax” so you really can’t deny that he was behind on this one :-)

Re: Coronavirus and Credibility

#665

Post by gpderetta »

heimidal wrote: post #46
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…

The part of that most people, including you, seen to miss is that this goes way beyond those sick with the virus. The strain this virus is putting on healthcare is unlike anything the flu does in any given year, even during epidemics in the past several decades. That means it will kill people who are sick with something else. Pray you don't have a need for an ICU bed any time soon. In the US, the flu kills between 12…

Yes. In Italy it has already killed twice as many people as a normal influenza season.

Re: Coronavirus and Credibility

#666

Post by cortesoft »

aledalgrande wrote: post #654
cortesoft wrote: post #652

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sure, but the comment I was replying to was suggesting that in 10 weeks, 300 million Americans would be infected... that is 91% of the population of the United States. We aren't going to hit that number.

The growth is not going to be that much, sure, but because we slow it down with isolation, not because the immune people stop it from spreading.

Yes... but even if we did nothing, we are unlikely to hit 90% infected... 60 to 70% yes, but not 90%.

I am not saying that is ok, or that we should just let it run its course... just that saying we will hit 90% infection is unrealistic.

Re: Coronavirus and Credibility

#667

Post by pjscott »

bo1024 wrote: post #544
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…

There is some really interesting interplay here between forecasting and decisionmaking. (Taleb would have a lot to say here, along the lines of "forecasters are poor.") Maybe it makes sense that forecasts should be measured, but decisions should be, well, decisive. A good Bayesian should be able to make confident decisions based on information available at the moment, while acknowledging that lack of information is l…

Fundamentally, decision-making is what predictions are for. We mainly care about information to guide our actions. There are some interesting implications of this for how we should do research.

https://www.gwern.net/Research-criticism#beliefs-are-for-act...

A recent example: people have been talking about clinical trials for coronavirus vaccine candidates. In those you want to minimize the bad things that happen to the people in the study, and also get a working vaccine rolled out to the world as quickly as possible. Therefore you might want to accept unusually low levels of certainty that the vaccine is safe, or ramp up trial size faster than usual, because the world is on fire and every day of delay is terrible. For other vaccines with smaller expected benefits, slow-and-cautious might be the way to go. In both cases it's a matter of balancing expected risks with rewards as your probability estimates change over time.

Re: Coronavirus and Credibility

#668

Post by moultano »

lliamander wrote: post #651
moultano wrote: post #481

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A list of cherry picked quotes from a motivated contrarian is not evidence that they "got it so wrong."

That the media have (with some regularity) promoted the most catastrophic predictions, predictions that were subsequently falsified, is not exactly news.

If your only experience of how the media has covered climate change is through posts like the one you linked, then you'll naturally come to that conclusion, but I don't think it has any basis in reality.

Re: Coronavirus and Credibility

#669

Post by cortesoft »

itronitron wrote: post #482
cortesoft wrote: post #457

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Doubling each week is not how it happens... as a higher percentage of people have or have had the virus, the growth rate decreases because there are less people available to infect. That is why infection percentage is an s shaped curve.

I already baked that in by starting with a low infection rate (2x per week instead of 2x every 3 days).

Yes, but 90% is an unrealistic infection number no matter what you start with. I think most experts had it at around 60-70% if we do nothing.

That is not acceptable, either, given the fatality rate and the strain it would put on hospitals... but I think it is important we try to be accurate.

Re: Coronavirus and Credibility

#670

Post by cvlasdkv »

s_y_n_t_a_x wrote: post #449
mapgrep wrote: post #341

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.…

I'm curious as to why you think China is to blame for American politicians ignoring precautions and prioritizing their own wealth over the well-being of their citizens?
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