Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Coronavirus and Credibility

paulgraham.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

811–820 of 968 posts

Re: Coronavirus and Credibility

#811

Post by belorn »

Pils wrote: post #757
smsm42 wrote: post #547

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> he famously called it a hoax He did not. If you read it in some news article, please do yourself a favor and do not use this news source anymore. If somebody of your friends told you that, please keep loving them as friends but accept anything they say with a grain of salt as they may be more gullible than you thought. What Trump actually said is that his opponents suggestion that he doesn't do enough to counter th…

Here's the quote from the Snopes article: > Now the Democrats are politicizing the coronavirus. You know that, right? Coronavirus. They’re politicizing it. We did one of the great jobs. You say, ‘How’s President Trump doing?’ They go, ‘Oh, not good, not good.’ They have no clue. They don’t have any clue. They can’t even count their votes in Iowa, they can’t even count. No they can’t. They can’t count their votes. > O…

Lets go directly to polifact then:

https://www.politifact.com/factchecks/2020/mar/17/instagram-...

"The video makes it seem like Trump is calling the disease itself a hoax, which he hasn’t done. The words are Trump’s, but the editing is Biden’s."

"Trump’s comments feed into a conspiracy theory that claims Democrats and the media are fabricating the threat of COVID-19 to hurt the economy and, by extension, the president’s re-election chances. And the president appeared to downplay the threat of the virus at several points in recent weeks.

But the Biden campaign’s ad is misleading. It’s an example of what the Washington Post calls "splicing," or "editing together disparate videos" that "fundamentally alters the story that is being told."

Re: Coronavirus and Credibility

#813

Post by xenyal »

s_y_n_t_a_x wrote: post #809
xenyal wrote: post #795

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thanks for the links. It seems that the response went along the following timeline according to my understanding: 1. Dec. 30 - Doctors from the first few cases have analyzed the samples and discover how similar the new virus is to SARS. Officials tell them not to spread information to the public about the virus. 2. Dec. 31 - China tells WHO about new virus (not that they know much at this point) 3. Jan. 1 - Provincia…

The parts that matter are Jan 11th to the 30th. > Jan. 11–17: Important prescheduled CCP meeting held in Wuhan. During that time, the Wuhan Health Commission insists there are no new cases. > Jan. 14: WHO announces Chinese authorities have seen "no clear evidence of human-to-human transmission of the novel coronavirus." > Jan. 20: The first case announced in South Korea. Zhong Nanshan, a top Chinese doctor who is hel…

Where in this timeline do you see evidence that information their healthcare system had suggesting how severe COVID-19 was, was being intentionally covered up? I just see how unfortunate it is that they realized COVID-19's severity too late, else the Wuhan residents who left prior to the lockdown would not have been able to travel as freely as they did.

Re: Coronavirus and Credibility

#814

Post by a_tractor »

jrd259 wrote: post #348
Kaiyou wrote: post #139

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's always about benefits. Incompetence doesn't cost government benefits, so nobody cares. However, if there are benefits to be had by organizing a conspiracy against whomever, you can bet your money that this will be done. Nobody cares for "the greater good" or whatever. It's always about personal benefits.

I only wish it was only about benefits, because then it would be rational agent. What (economic) benefit does the Republican party of the US gain by suppressing gay rights or abortion? I can understand wanting to quash unions, prevent minorities from voting, remove environmental controls (in the short run anyway), or cast doubt on opposition media. But who actually gains when e.g. a gay couple can't buy a cake?

>But who actually gains when e.g. a gay couple can't buy a cake?

The Christian baker who did not want to bake them a cake, but who was being compelled by the state to act against his personal religious beliefs?

Who loses when the gay couple can just go to another baker, one who doesn't let his/her religious beliefs get in the way of business? What did they hope to gain by ignoring every other baker in town who was willing to bake their cake, shopping around until they found a baker who refused them? Was it ever about a cake or rather about using gay rights as weapon to attack Christians?

Re: Coronavirus and Credibility

#815

Post by moultano »

leereeves wrote: post #783
nl wrote: post #723

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why would you link to the fifth edition of the report instead of the (complete) sixth edition or the in progress work now?[1] Of course the IPCC doesn't predict the world is going to end in 12 years. That's a strawman - I'm sure you can find someone who has predicted the world will end in 12 years, but that isn't the disaster people are concerned about. Instead, they collect five key "reasons for concern" by "using t…

I don't think the sixth edition of the assessment report is complete. It's "AR6 Climate Change 2021" so I assume it will be released next year. But if it's available somewhere, let me know. "The world is going to end in 12 years..." is a recent famous quote by a prominent Democrat. I'm surprised you haven't heard it. Personally, I bought into the climate alarmism about 30 years ago, and my skepticism is based on seei…

>The world is going to end in 12 years..." " is a recent famous quote by a prominent Democrat.

This isn't true, and you should probably cut whatever source told it to you out of your life. The world is going to end if we don't take action within 12 years, which is the gist of what the IPCC report says.

Re: Coronavirus and Credibility

#816

Post by Reedx »

LiquidSky wrote: post #789
Reedx wrote: post #390

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do you think the Red Sox are not like the Yankees? They're just different teams playing the same game. Fans always defend their team and vilify the other. Always. With every dispute they're able to convince themselves it's the other side that are the cheaters. They can't both be right, but yet each side feels equally certain of their position.

>They can't both be right But that also doesn't mean, as you and so many imply with these kind of statements, that both sides are wrong. It can be the case that one side is, in fact, correct, or less at fault than the other. It's a fallacy that in a dispute both sides are always equally wrong, or that the answer is always exactly in the middle.

Yes, that's not what I was implying though (or at least didn't mean to). I meant they can't both be right all the time. The point being that fans think their side is always right and the other always wrong. When the reality is their side is sometimes right and sometimes wrong.

Certainly in any specific dispute one may be correct. Or both partially correct. Or both wrong. And one may be better or worse than the other in sum.

Re: Coronavirus and Credibility

#817

Post by JPKab »

alpha_squared wrote: post #800
jeffdavis wrote: post #749

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"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 g…

> ...someone on TV (probably DeBlasio or Cuomo) saying that public schools were not going to close. This was specifically because many of those students would go hungry since they rely on food programs at school. Without those programs, many students have little to eat at home. It's a little disingenuous to represent it in another light. If anything, it highlights yet another weakness in our society.

The weakness is that those kids are still being raised by losers who can't bother to feed their offspring.

Food is dirt cheap. Grew up in poor schools with mostly free lunch recipients. Parents were mostly shit bags who spent money on typical crap you'd expect.

The idea that it's anything more structural than culturally dysfunctional idiots not investing time in cooking for their kids because it's less work to let the school do it is wishful thinking.

Re: Coronavirus and Credibility

#819

Post by Non24Throw »

umvi wrote: post #570
adjkant wrote: post #424

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The thing missing here is that you're looking at deaths without looking at number of cases of each. The flu causes the number of deaths it does because it infects tens of millions of people a year[0]. The death rate is an order of magnitude lower than with COVID-19 across every single age bracket. [2] So when people say things like: > "I'm not worried about getting this illness" They are likely not considering that e…

I simply do not believe those figures at all. How can you even claim an "average death rate" when you don't even know how many people were infected, had mild symptoms, and recovered without reporting it to anyone? Of course the numbers will look scary when you only count hospitalized people as infected.

You’re touching on what this whole thing is.

It’s rushed and woefully incomplete data enabling media companies to write apocalyptic headlines without exposing themselves to any legal liability. They have a fiduciary duty to their shareholders, so that’s what they’re doing.

I think to most people with a background in statistics it’s very easy to tell how bad the data is at a glance. It’s downright blatant. They don’t have a platform though, because in this media climate your platform is only as big as your level of sensationalism and hysteria.

There are multiple factors skewing the data toward coronavirus appearing more deadly than it actually is. It’s new and sudden, so there wasn’t a lot of infrastructure in place for testing. It’s causing a rush on hospitals. Combine those and you have one massive shortage of testing. You obviously want to care for the most critically ill first, so globally, only the most sick get tested, and only the cases most likely to be fatal are even represented in these numbers everyone is seeing.

Then they take wildly differing medical, economic and political environments all over the world, and merge all the data as if it’s equal. In many cases, in addition to the inadequate testing, that data is only as accurate as their governing bodies want it to be.

Do we really believe there are 5x as many cases in the US as in China?

Do we really believe there were only 5,000 cases in India?

Do we really believe the virus is 10x as likely to be fatal in Italy as compared to Germany?

Take the “confirmed cases” number and just add a zero, and you might be closer to the reality of what’s going on out there.

People are simply blind to the difference between “confirmed cases” and “cases”.

It’s very unfortunate that this nomenclature has a natural tendency to make “confirmed cases” feel like it must be more accurate, and also unfortunate that the term “cases” could only ever be an approximation. But those labels were chosen carefully and for a good reason, and they represent very, very different things.

Re: Coronavirus and Credibility

#820

Post by a_tractor »

seppin wrote: post #627
jmull wrote: post #414

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Your argument against this valid criticism that the current consensus is wrong about what sources can be trusted to be authoritative is an appeal to consequences which relies entirely on reductio ad absurdum.

The alternative to "something we thought we could trust and rely on but wow they really got it wrong and won't admit it" isn't "now we have nothing", its "now we need to hold these people accountable or find something else." It means that blind, unthinking trust in authority is what got us here. It means reevaluating your assumptions, not the end of the world. Doubling down simply because you can't imagine what the world would be like without CNN or the NYT is ridiculous.

Post reply on HN