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Coronavirus and Credibility

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Re: Coronavirus and Credibility

#771

Post by xenyal »

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…

Out of curiosity, and because I'm a Canadian out of the loop with respect to American news networks, how can there be news being at ends with each other? That's something I have difficulty putting into perspective (referring to the Team CNN vs Team Fox comparison)

Re: Coronavirus and Credibility

#772

Post by Gibbon1 »

dmitryminkovsky wrote: post #768

I've got a sort of morbid fascination with the COVID denial scene on Twitter. Every few days I check out this guy Bill Mitchell (@mitchellvii, 500k+ followers), and it's been interesting to see how he's adapted. This tweet captures it well: https://twitter.com/classiclib3ral/status/124681200696072601... Not sure if Paul is looking at this kind of thing, but from this essay I'm not sure he really grasps how fractured…

You'd probably like this. Compare.

New York Mayor Bill de Blasio on Mar 2nd.

https://twitter.com/germanrlopez/status/1247210000155643904/...

San Francisco Mayor London Breed on Mar 2nd.

https://twitter.com/germanrlopez/status/1247210000155643904/...

Re: Coronavirus and Credibility

#773

Post by bo1024 »

btilly wrote: post #697
bo1024 wrote: post #544

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

A good Bayesian should be able to make confident decisions based on information available at the moment... No. A good Bayesian should be able to come to decisions like, "I am 70% confident that Osama bin Laden is in that compound." While the Bayesian next says, "I am only 50% confident that Osama bin Laden is in that compound." With both knowing that there is a difference of opinion, but no disagreement on basic fact…

> No. A good Bayesian should be able to come to decisions like, "I am 70% confident that Osama bin Laden is in that compound."

That's not a decision though. That's an assessment, what I would put in the same category as predictions. A decision would be whether or not to bomb the compound.

Your post seems to miss my point, that predictions and decisions are very different and one can be uncertain about predictions while being certain about decisions. For example, I completely agree with this:

> It is very rare for a good Bayesian to be absolutely confident of any prediction.

Here's a simple example to think through the difference. You have a sophisticated weather model that predicts 40% chance of rain today. You hate getting wet, so you take your umbrella. In fact, you would take your umbrella even if the chance were only 10%.

So you are really uncertain about whether it's going to rain (your forecast), but absolutely certain that taking your umbrella is the optimal decision given the information at hand.

Re: Coronavirus and Credibility

#774

Post by s_y_n_t_a_x »

xenyal wrote: post #769
s_y_n_t_a_x wrote: post #710

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because China covered it up and misled the experts.

Actually, China was thought to have covered it up because the whistleblower originally sent a message[1] to a WeChat group of his, telling group members that 7 people from the wet markets had been diagnosed with SARS. The government had no idea what it was and I'm sure nobody in the world knew what it was at the time, hence how it's a novel virus. [1]: https://mmbiz.qpic.cn/mmbiz_jpg/jvumSxUR3OrjfcgXFibaich6y6Z6...

You're leaving out a lot of details and what a spin that was.

The Chinese government was informed and chose to cover it up.

https://www.axios.com/timeline-the-early-days-of-chinas-coro...

https://nypost.com/2020/02/29/china-officials-knew-of-corona...

https://www.vox.com/2020/2/10/21124881/coronavirus-outbreak-...

https://www.npr.org/sections/goatsandsoda/2020/02/08/8037667...

Re: Coronavirus and Credibility

#775

Post by bo1024 »

pjscott wrote: post #667
bo1024 wrote: post #544

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Yes, exactly. For example, I would think there would be immense value right now in sampling totally random subsets of the population and testing whether they've had COVID-19 in the past. This is the kind of information that could radically change decisions about when to release stay-at-home orders.

Re: Coronavirus and Credibility

#776

Post by jmckib »

nl wrote: post #763
jmckib wrote: post #694

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can cherry-pick different opinions from all over the spectrum. For example, Tucker Carlson took the virus pretty seriously early on, but he was one of the only voices on Fox News to do so. Views on the left have been more mixed. At least that's been my observation, but I don't watch TV news; I just read about what's on it. I've been getting my news from WaPo and WSJ, both of which took the virus seriously from th…

Yes - it seems like Tucker Carlson was the person who convinced Trump to change his mind[1] and he deserves credit for it. I wonder what it was that convinced him when many of the people he deals with day-to-day were of the complete opposite view? [1] https://www.thedailybeast.com/tucker-carlsons-monologue-prom...

As much as I disagree with almost everything Carlson says, I have to give him credit for going against the grain on this and a few other issues in the past. Lindsey Graham also deserves some credit for calling up Trump and trying to convince him to take this situation more seriously. There's something to be said for the strategy of kowtowing to Trump most of the time so that he will still listen to you when it really counts. That strategy shouldn't be necessary with a competent leader, but here we are.

Re: Coronavirus and Credibility

#777

Post by chimprich »

pdonis wrote: post #534
SpicyLemonZest wrote: post #471

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sure. And while opinion polls are lagging, almost everyone in decision-making positions is on board with the minimal predictions in this report. (Even a lot of people normally considered climate change deniers are on board - according to Wikipedia, the report doesn't rule out that climate change is largely driven by natural variability!)

> the minimal predictions in this report Those minimal predictions don't justify spending trillions of dollars on CO2 mitigation. They basically say "the climate is going to change, so be ready to deal with it".

This is a false economy. Several studies have demonstrated that it is cheaper to avert climate change than to deal with the effects.

Switching to low- and zero-carbon fuels, achieving greater efficiencies and so on, is expensive, but still a lot cheaper than e.g. moving coastal cities or engineering mega-projects to combat flooding, dealing with huge numbers of migrants, dealing with massive changes in agriculture, worse natural disasters, and so on.

Plus even if you deal with the effects for decades, your problem has not gone away. The situation is worse, and the planet is still heating.

Re: Coronavirus and Credibility

#778

Post by TheOtherHobbes »

pdonis wrote: post #707
roenxi wrote: post #674

Earlier quoted context omitted.

GP was incorrect in taking a position that global warming was not a threat. The actual threat of COVID is going to be much lower than global warming, COVID is either going to be temporary or in the long term settle to look a lot like all the other diseases we put up with. Climate change could be a legitimate crisis at some point. However, directionally speaking, they have an excellent point that people who predict th…

> The actual threat of COVID is going to be much lower than global warming, COVID is either going to be temporary or in the long term settle to look a lot like all the other diseases we put up with. Climate change could be a legitimate crisis at some point. I think you are conflating two different possible meanings of the term "threat". Climate change is likely to be much more of a "threat" than COVID-19 in the sense…

You're conflating a lot of different points there.

Most obvious is the definition of "deal with." During the ice age transitions "deal with" more or less meant "survive - barely."

If you're happy for humanity to "survive - barely" for the next couple of centuries, then perhaps you have a point.

But our definition of humanity is much richer and more interesting than it was at the end of the Younger Dryas some 14,000 years ago.

Now a reasonable definition of "deal with" is "survive without losing significant acquired knowledge or skill."

That's a much bigger ask when survival-critical choke points are all on the line, which include food production, water supply, and the loss of key living and working space on the coastlines are all on the line. And that's not even considering the general inhabitability of inland areas that will become increasingly prone to storms, floods, forest fires, tornadoes, and so on.

We can already see this happening. Denying it is a form of delusion, in very stark and literal terms.

In fact the political problem we're dealing with is a cult-like mindset that considers "the economy" more real than the physical environment it exists in.

The bottom line is that "the economy" is a quasi-religious political construct, while the real world is... the real world. The economy needs to change, because otherwise reality will kick its ass whether it likes it or not.

The change can be planned and strategised intelligently as an immediate priority, or it can be suicidally chaotic, with huge unplanned loss of acquired knowledge and future potential.

Those are the two extremes on offer. There are no others.

COVID-19 is a handy dry run. We'll see how we do.

Re: Coronavirus and Credibility

#779

Post by moultano »

balnaphone wrote: post #743
moultano wrote: post #367

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 predicti…

You aren't giving any indication in what you've written that you've read and understood the article.

Re: Coronavirus and Credibility

#780

Post by xscott »

KMag wrote: post #625
xscott wrote: post #181

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

What's really happening is that some people are trying to compare deaths from Covid-19 to deaths from the typical flu/pneumonia season. Nitpicking about what is or isn't the flu really doesn't matter, what matters (to me at least) is how many more deaths Covid-19 is causing than normal "flu/common cold/pneumonia/whatever" deaths which happen every year.
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