Coronavirus and Credibility • Hacker News Board

Re: Coronavirus and Credibility

#821

Post by WalterBright » Tue, Apr 07, 2020, 3:44 AM UTC

lemming wrote: post #745

WalterBright wrote: post #690

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 al…

> Yes they did

If it was all so obvious, the stock market would have dumped weeks before it did.

Did you sell in early February? Did you take out shorts on the market? Why not?

Re: Coronavirus and Credibility

#822

Post by marcosdumay » Tue, Apr 07, 2020, 3:49 AM UTC

lutorm wrote: post #807

marcosdumay wrote: post #582

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hum... The GP seems to be talking about Global Warming denialists, and the dynamics of how they communicate with people. This one is the same. But yes, Global Warming has the bad quality that it is completely not obvious how to solve it. There is an entirely different dynamic at the side that accepts it for settling on a solution... and what is more disturbing, R&D and science are mostly neglected there too, even by…

It's entirely not obvious how to best solve the coronavirus situation either, though.

On the short term, I will disagree. And we are all living on the short term now. The only thing that works is isolating people.

On the long term, it's even worse, nobody seems to have any idea what to do. But we are doing the opposite than we are doing with Global Warming, we are heavily funding the kinds of research that may solve the problem. All of those kinds.

Re: Coronavirus and Credibility

#823

Post by pdonis » Tue, Apr 07, 2020, 3:52 AM UTC

TheOtherHobbes wrote: post #778

pdonis wrote: post #707

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 y…

> During the ice age transitions "deal with" more or less meant "survive - barely."

That's how humans have lived for almost all of human history; only in the last couple of centuries have a significant number of humans been able to have a standard of living much above bare subsistence.

> The economy needs to change

The economy is always changing, just like the climate. We certainly need people to be inventing new technologies and creating wealth; that's how the economy changes in response to changing conditions and changing needs.

What we do not need is a bunch of draconian centrally controlled policies that will do more harm than good, based on invalid alarmist predictions.

> The change can be planned and strategised intelligently

Nobody knows how to do that on a global scale. No such planning and strategizing has succeeded in the past. To use your phrase, reality has always kicked the ass of such planning and strategizing.

Fortunately, we do not need a central authority planning and strategizing everything. What we need is to do common sense things to make our society and economy more robust, and give people the tools they need to adapt to change in whatever way seems best to them given the unique conditions of their own lives, instead of having policies dictated to them from the top down.

There's a story that a Soviet minister of something or other was visiting London and asked some UK government official who was in charge of the daily supply of bread to the city. He was utterly unable to fathom the answer, which was "nobody". Central planners just can't get it through their heads that central planning doesn't work.

Re: Coronavirus and Credibility

#824

Post by bonzojim » Tue, Apr 07, 2020, 4:13 AM UTC

The covid19 is

the same old scam just like global warming, it's bleeding heart Democrats at work spewing thier lies, it's just another virus that's be actually killing less than all the other flu's known and getting rid of the weak and free'ing up hospital beds, a little quicker than ordinary pneumonia already does. Climate change be which is natural is fine, been happening for millions of years, man has poisoned the earth for only 200 years and the earth is doing ok with carbon emmisions from natural occurences for Milenia. No need to think man is so powerful to hurt this planet we share, it's all bull crap and know they feel the need to ruin the economy with liberal based media causing mass hysteria and general public panic to oust a republican president that the powerful left doesn't want in office come November. More people are dying from run of the mill influenza strands leading to pneumonia than covid19 just at a slower rate, 500,000 a year worldwide vs covid19 at current time 75,000 and it's on a downslope as I type only possibly peaking as high as 200,000, if that. Don't believe the hype, I'm surprised we haven't heard from Al and tipper gore about the virus on top of the bill crap global warming scam that they now refer to as climate change

Re: Coronavirus and Credibility

#825

Post by mellosouls » Tue, Apr 07, 2020, 4:15 AM UTC

beepboopbeep wrote: post #234

mellosouls wrote: post #229

The article seems to be taking a shot at a reasonably easy target. Almost all the talking heads are late Feb/early March. While it was clear something was happening "over there", and the fear was growing, it wasn't unreasonable at that point to not expect the unprecedented situation we are now in - and these people are not paid to offer nuance. I'm not sure this easy soapbox judgement is much more constructive than t…

I'm not sure I understand your point. Are you implying that those talking heads are not responsible for the statements they made and the repercussions there of?

No, I believe that's obvious, that people with good sense already know these paid opinion-shouters are to be taken with a pinch of salt at best, and that it doesn't help to attack them on a point at which (for once), they might be given some leeway for lacking insight.

Re: Coronavirus and Credibility

#826

Post by gbpz » Tue, Apr 07, 2020, 4:16 AM UTC

robomartin wrote: post #484

Sorry, this isn't fair at all and it suffers from the issue that is common in politics and political coverage, regardless of network: Taking everything out of context. The video linked in that article is a tour-de-force of out of context snippets. Anyone could splice together a video just like that one with material from any TV news network or politician, from the tip of South America to the extremes of Siberia and e…

Thanks for the sanity. This site is slowly devolving into reddit with out of context political videos that, while they certainly carry merit, lack a holistic view of the time period and the media opinion of the time.

Re: Coronavirus and Credibility

#827

Post by AndrewBissell » Tue, Apr 07, 2020, 4:16 AM UTC

gamblor956 wrote: post #511

AndrewBissell wrote: post #321

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I look at it a bit differently. If someone's pushing the line "just listen to the experts," then it should be acknowledged that experts do get it wrong and have massively dropped the ball on COVID-19. The signs of how lethal and contagious the virus is were there in China for anyone to read by early January. Of course, "experts (in particular our experts) don't know what they're doing" is different from "... and ther…

In hindsight, it is obvious that COVID19 was worse than SARS or MERS. But at the time, especially given China's clampdown on information outflow, it didn't appear to be significantly different from SARS, which didn't effect the West much, or MERS, which had almost no impact outside of the Middle East. But as another commenter noted, the timing matters a lot. Everyone except Fox News thought back in January that COVID…

"especially given China's clampdown on information outflow"

Come on. By late December, China's response was so drastic (including when measured against all previous coronavirus outbreaks) that the question of "suppressing" information about it was completely moot.

The CDC completely dropped the ball on this. Yes, in part because Trump slashed their pandemic response budget, but they did a piss-poor job even for the resources at their disposal.

Fox News and Trump being a source of constant disinformation and incompetence is, to me, kind of a constant of the universe. The same ought not to be true of the rest of our institutions, and yet it seems that it is.

Re: Coronavirus and Credibility

#828

Post by mellosouls » Tue, Apr 07, 2020, 4:19 AM UTC

Robotbeat wrote: post #238

mellosouls wrote: post #229

The article seems to be taking a shot at a reasonably easy target. Almost all the talking heads are late Feb/early March. While it was clear something was happening "over there", and the fear was growing, it wasn't unreasonable at that point to not expect the unprecedented situation we are now in - and these people are not paid to offer nuance. I'm not sure this easy soapbox judgement is much more constructive than t…

It was unreasonable at that point. I'm no epidemiologist, but I understood exponential growth at that point to know that, because it wasn't being contained (no measures with a reasonable chance of containment were being taken at exactly the time when they really had to be taken), there was no stopping the exponential growth in the near term in the US. And especially once it was spreading in Italy, there was just not…

To be clear, these people have no credibility with me already - but your confidence in hindsight as to the obviousness of the current predicament in late Feb/early March is not one I share.

Re: Coronavirus and Credibility

#829

Post by mellosouls » Tue, Apr 07, 2020, 4:21 AM UTC

unreal37 wrote: post #242

mellosouls wrote: post #229

The article seems to be taking a shot at a reasonably easy target. Almost all the talking heads are late Feb/early March. While it was clear something was happening "over there", and the fear was growing, it wasn't unreasonable at that point to not expect the unprecedented situation we are now in - and these people are not paid to offer nuance. I'm not sure this easy soapbox judgement is much more constructive than t…

There are two valid points in there, despite how easy a target "the media" is. - People saying things with confidence that they didn't know to be true - This happens all the time but with Coronavirus, the facts came to light within days of them saying this I get what Paul Graham is saying here.

Agree, but it's all pretty obvious the first point. It's what they are paid to do. There's no insight there and no credit for originality in writing an article pointing that out.

I'd be more impressed if he proposed a workable mechanism for actually holding them to account.

Re: Coronavirus and Credibility

#830

Post by brokenmachine » Tue, Apr 07, 2020, 4:35 AM UTC

bonzojim wrote: post #824

The covid19 is the same old scam just like global warming, it's bleeding heart Democrats at work spewing thier lies, it's just another virus that's be actually killing less than all the other flu's known and getting rid of the weak and free'ing up hospital beds, a little quicker than ordinary pneumonia already does. Climate change be which is natural is fine, been happening for millions of years, man has poisoned the…

I'll feed the troll...

US https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/country/us/

Worldwide https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/

Look at those "Total Deaths" charts, and you're seriously claiming we're on a downslope.