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Coronavirus and Credibility

paulgraham.com

831–840 of 968 posts

Re: Coronavirus and Credibility

#831

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.

Yes, of course they had reasons. It's not obvious what to do in a disaster.

But did people die because of that decision? Probably. Maybe a lot.

Tough calls. It comes down to who made those tough calls earlier. And that's not a partisan thing, or a smart/dumb thing.

Plenty of bad decisions to go around, but we probably shouldn't lay the blame to thick anywhere. Because it's chaos and people are adapting and changing in real time.

Look at someone like Newsom. One minute he's the mayor of SF, the next he's the governor of 40M people and he has to shut down the state to slow down the virus. I guarantee he's going to be a different person in 12 months.

Re: Coronavirus and Credibility

#832

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.

> This was specifically because many of those students would go hungry since they rely on food programs at school.

California schools pretty much immediately set up daily meal pickup when they closed (often, for anyone under 18 at any school site.) And this was already happening when they said that.

Re: Coronavirus and Credibility

#833

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> ...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.

Yes, of course they had reasons. It's not obvious what to do in a disaster. But did people die because of that decision? Probably. Maybe a lot. Tough calls. It comes down to who made those tough calls earlier. And that's not a partisan thing, or a smart/dumb thing. Plenty of bad decisions to go around, but we probably shouldn't lay the blame to thick anywhere. Because it's chaos and people are adapting and changing i…

> Look at someone like Newsom. One minute he's the mayor of SF, the next he's the governor of 40M people

“The next minute” is off by something more than 6 orders of magnitude.

You kind of skipped over ~4.2 million minutes he spent as Lieutenant Governor between those jobs.

Re: Coronavirus and Credibility

#834

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I’ve been sorting reddit comments by controversial. There’s a lot of junk sure, but it’s you also get away from people parroting the standard lines and sometimes get some unique insight.

That's an interesting idea. I need to try this too!

Re: Coronavirus and Credibility

#835

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It’s an insult. Covid-19 is in the best case 30 times as deadly as the flu while being twice as contagious. Calling it just a flu and downplaying it is actively causing thousands of deaths.

You seem to be mentally unstable. There is nothing insulting about being skeptical. I have facts to back my statements, can you say the same for yourself?

You didn’t post any fact. Only a meaningless link to Iceland numbers. Thanks for insinuating that I’m mentally unstable by the way. That is certainly a very stable and mature behaviour.

Re: Coronavirus and Credibility

#836
post #467

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So what should we do?

Carbon taxes, and protectionist trade tariffs against countries who don't adopt carbon taxes. Make non-compliance painful enough, and the defectors will fall in line.

For a lot of countries it’s either emit pollution and feed people or don’t and let lots of people starve. Do you think your privileged life worth more than someone from third world who can barely afford to eat?

Re: Coronavirus and Credibility

#838
post #638

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You’re missing the point. We know for sure that in Lombardy the hospitalisation rate was higher than 1 in 1000 people infected.

We do not know the Lombardy hospitalisation rate because we do not have an accurate count of how many people have been infected in Lombardy. To get such a count we would need 100% serological testing which has not been done. We know how many were infected at the time of testing but the whole point of the Oxford model is that we do not know how many have been infected, not shown symptoms, and recovered. Once again, th…

We don’t know the Lombardy hospitalisation rate.

We definitely know it’s higher than 1 in 1000.

Unless you all think that the number of people infected may be higher than the number of people.

Re: Coronavirus and Credibility

#839

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is the sort of false equivalency that leads to claims that they all lie, so it's okay if Fox egregiously lies. We see this on HN all the time where someone stomps their feet and cries about a news headline that they think doesn't convey just the right slant that they want, ergo it's the same as the guy inventing bullshit conspiracy theories on his blog. No, they weren't "chastising" Trump over the China travel b…

The equivalency being drawn by the parent may be wrong, but mainstream sources outside Fox News absolutely downplayed the seriousness of the virus and helped push the "it's not a big deal" perception that we are all now rowing against.

Completely disagree. The Fox news and related contingent and their response was drastically different than the other side. For example, SF declared an emergency in February and everyone was working from home since early March. While Florida had no such order till last week

Re: Coronavirus and Credibility

#840

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wait, wasn't your "but orange man bad" classic twitter response good enough? Why'd you edit it? "When it was risky for him to do so." Trump just got a get out of jail free card and absolute impunity and immunity to do anything he wanted. Since he's fired a number of people in the most brazen display of corruption in US history. Risky? There was zero risk. Yes, orange man is bad. He's historically bad. He is a thin-sk…

So you don't think travel from China should have been shutdown until later?

What travel ban ? 400k people traveled from China after the ban. Trump said as of 2 weeks back that everything will be open by Easter. Everyday he downplays the virus and peddle misinformation. How anyone can define a completely unhinged and unethical person, whose direct actions is resulting in thousands of deaths is beyond me
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