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Coronavirus and Credibility

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Re: Coronavirus and Credibility

#741

Post by RonanTheGrey »

AmericanChopper wrote: post #460
nabla9 wrote: post #382

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is false equivalency. When you have to seek to find bad examples from other side, and it's the every day modus operandi the other side there is no comparison.

You could show this comment to anybody from either of the general left/right tribes, and they’d think it was true. Whether you’d use this reasoning to deride Fox News, or CNN (or pretty much any other ‘news’ organisation), would boil down entirely to your tribal affiliation. When I was younger, having “critical thinker” or “anti-establishment” views would generally lead to the conclusion that politicians and mass-med…

The downvotes on your post demonstrate the left-leaning nature of this site. It's discouraging frankly. The thousands of conversations that occur daily on this site, without emotion or incident; but insult "the other side"'s politicians or news outlets as being biased? Downvote hell

Yes, CNN and the like are just as bad as Fox news. The sooner you folks recognize that, the sooner we can have decent conversations about emotional issues. Both sides are bad. Neither is better. No, they aren't. Stop it. Blame them BOTH for getting us to this point so that we can leave them in the dark past, and we all over here can talk like adults while they sit over there and bicker, mutually accusing each other of racism and Nazism or whatever today's 5 minute hate happens to be.

WE DO NOT NEED THEM! Either of them! There is a whole universe of conversation that is not occurring because BOTH SIDES are refusing to engage in it, because if you did, you would realize -- tada -- you don't need them. And they can't have that. Viewership and income would drop.

Neither is incentivized with your best interest. And the sooner we collectively start to see it the better.

Re: Coronavirus and Credibility

#742

Post by [deleted] »

lliamander wrote: post #261
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…

> exact same dynamic with the exact same players. There are some who might be in the climate skeptics/deniers camp who were concerned about coronavirus[0] [0] https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2020/03/why-some-early-maga-...

[deleted]

Re: Coronavirus and Credibility

#743

Post by balnaphone »

moultano wrote: post #367
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…

If you actually look at what those predictions have been, you'll find that they're pretty consistently on the mark. https://www.carbonbrief.org/analysis-how-well-have-climate-m...

There is no quantification of the predictive power of any of these models presented in the linked-to article.

In fact it appears highly misleading, since they directly contrast (a) data from 1970-2017, with (b) a model written in 1973 predicting out to 2016, and (c) a model written in 2013 that can be compared to the data up until 2017.

So for this "pretty consistently on the mark" model, it only encompasses predictions for the years 2014-2017, based on observations from 2013. Many ARMA-type regression models do that well, since on average each year is mostly similar to the previous one.

In short, this doesn't support the credibility of this body of work.

Re: Coronavirus and Credibility

#744

Post by lliamander »

moultano wrote: post #657
lliamander wrote: post #644

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have every confidence that David Barber is an honest scientist doing his best to apply rigorous science to an inherently complicated system. The objection here is that we live in a media environment which continually emphasizes one end of that error bar. So long as we live in that sort of environment claims of catastrophic consequences are going to be taken with a degree of skepticism.

Why would your beliefs about the "media environment" influence your view of the reports from scientific bodies? The claims of catastrophic consequences are coming straight from the literature. You can't explain those away by waving your hands and saying "the media."

> Why would your beliefs about the "media environment" influence your view of the reports from scientific bodies?

If the media present bold predictions intended to reflect the views of scientific bodies, and those predictions fail to come to pass, then we have reason to doubt at least one node in the flow of information. It could be that the media incorrectly portrayed scientific results, or it could be that the scientific model upon which the prediction was based was flawed.

For instance, when the NYT says in 1978:

> An international team of specialists has concluded from eight indexes of climate that there is no end in sight to the cooling trend of the last 30 years, at least in the Northern Hemisphere.

Clearly the statement has been proven false. But why was this false statement made? Is the problem with the NYT, or the international team of specialists?

That's the problem with the media environment, because it's not always clear (certainly not to the lay person) when the media is representing their sources faithfully.

> The claims of catastrophic consequences are coming straight from the literature.

There are a few things one needs to sort out:

1. What are the actual expected range of consequences stated in the literature?

2. What is the confidence with which the literature expects these consequences?

3. What are the necessary interventions to prevent these consequences (if they can be prevented)?

4. How do the costs of the interventions compare with the consequences?

It's actually quite hard for a lay-person to sort out. The IPCC reports are a good place to start, but still very dense for most people. Also, every seemingly erudite critic of those reports is viciously attacked as a bad faith actor.

Re: Coronavirus and Credibility

#745

Post by lemming »

WalterBright wrote: post #690
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…

Trying to retroactively excoriate people for under reacting to a crisis is a little unfair. Nobody knew how this would play out, and going off half-cocked at every threat that appears, and there are a lot of them, is destructive. Nobody likes to be wrong, and people always try to rewrite history so they were right all along. Rush Limbaugh made hay by hanging democrats with clips of their previous statements, and Jon…

Nobody knew how this would play out

Yes they did, because most of the people we're talking about had real time examples going on while they were denying there was a problem. In Italy, they could have looked at what happened in China, but chose not to. You could perhaps forgive that, possibly they thought that population density, smoking rates or other demographics made a huge difference. But Spain has no excuse at all because they literally had an example of an (for all intents an purposes) identical country right on their doorstep and still chose to ignore it. My wife is Spanish so I followed a lot of the reactions there and they were flat out ridiculous. Similarly with the e.g. the US - did they really think the virus was going to act differently there than in other parts of the world?

Re: Coronavirus and Credibility

#746

Post by rpiguy »

ryguytilidie wrote: post #594
concordDance wrote: post #590

Earlier quoted context omitted.

COVID-19 just isn't that important on the global scale. Car accidents last year almost certainly cost way more QALYs* than COVID-19 will this year (particularly if Imperial College in their 13th report is right about how badly undercounted the case numbers are). * Car accidents affect most ages and health levels relatively equally, while COVID-19 mostly kills the old and infirm who are unhealthy, with poor quality of…

You guys are still doing this..?

Being rational? Yes. This is not smallpox. This isn’t even MERS from a mortality perspective. It’s real, rapid-spreading, and terrifying in how it kills those few who succumb, but people need balanced perspective. All they are getting is impending doom reported on television 24/7 and it’s nothing but.

The future is bright. The 1918 Spanish Flu was followed by the roaring 20s!

Re: Coronavirus and Credibility

#747

Post by thombat »

catalogia wrote: post #662
thombat wrote: post #619

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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...

Why not? Because what evil puppet-master settles for "probably ok" when a slight extra effort buys certainty.

Re: Coronavirus and Credibility

#748

Post by gred »

garraeth wrote: post #289
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…

Agreed. Unfortunately now it's more like picking a sport team ("Team CNN" or "Team Fox"), or Apple vs/ Google vs/ Microsoft than actually finding, or learning about, facts. Tribalism at it's finest. The only alternative I've found (I'm open to helpful suggestions) is to ignore that noise and read actual briefings and original sources. But, that defeats the point of news being an honest and straight forward source of…

My approach is to include one or two news sources from the "other team" in my daily news diet.

It adds a nice grain of salt for when I read "my team's" news.

Re: Coronavirus and Credibility

#749

Post by jeffdavis »

javagram wrote: post #664
crusso wrote: post #615

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

"The political quarter that was in denial was mainly the POTUS and those who simply follow whatever the POTUS is doing without independent thought"

How did you come to that conclusion? What about the Democrats in New York, which is the epicenter of the virus outbreak right now (certainly the US and probably the world)? I remember hearing someone on TV (probably DeBlasio or Cuomo) saying that public schools were not going to close.

Re: Coronavirus and Credibility

#750

Post by jmull »

drummer wrote: post #244

Roussel et al., “SARS-CoV-2: fear versus data.”, Int J Antimicrob Agents. 2020 Mar 19:105947, “Under these conditions, there does not seem to be a significant difference between the mortality rate of SARS-CoV-2 in OECD countries and that of common coronaviruses (χ2 test, P=0.11). Of course, the major flaw in this study is that the percentage of deaths attributable to the virus is not determined, but this is the case…

Please everyone disregard this quite disingenuous misinformation.

This paper does simple math: attributed deaths / "confirmed cases" in "OECD" countries (not China) from January 1 to March 2. It includes such happy data points a "Spain: 123 confirmed cases, 0 deaths", which is horrifically, horrifically misleading. Johns Hopkins has Spain as 136,675 cases and 13,341 deaths at the time I write this.

For the sake of the poster's soul I hope this is a bot gone unintentionally awry and not a real person posting this.

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