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Coronavirus and Credibility

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Re: Coronavirus and Credibility

#851

Post by [deleted] »

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.

[deleted]

Re: Coronavirus and Credibility

#852

Post by concordDance »

surround wrote: post #586
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…

I don’t think “real news” has ever died - it was always dead. The term “Yellow Journalism” has been around since the late 1800s. I don’t think news that tries to push a narrative is useless. You just have to understand the viewpoint that they’re providing. By reading several different conflicting sources, and trying to understand each viewpoint and why they disagree, you can become informed on the issue. The problem…

Reading different sources doesn't help if all news is biased towards trying to report a coherent and easily understood narrative if the world is complicated and nuanced. In which case all you'll get is, to steal an expression, "the nearest common cliche" to the truth.

Re: Coronavirus and Credibility

#853

Post by distant_hat »

squarefoot wrote: post #314
ryandrake wrote: post #201

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is a deliberately built political philosophy, one of the results of Karl Rove's "reality-based community" [1] idea, from over 15 years ago. Whether or not the label was actually coined by Rove is debated, but essentially this idea is that some people lived in a world that was "reality-based" and that others were not limited by reality and thus were better/stronger politicians. In practice, what this means is the…

"like him or hate him, his administration is using it skillfully" I couldn't agree more. https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/trump-recorded-havin... Not many people could survive this, then become president.

When I heard it first I thought Trump had clinched the presidency. People publicly rail against this kind of talk but emotionally look up to people who can not just talk but behave like that. I distinctly noticed women talking more positively about him after it came out.

Re: Coronavirus and Credibility

#854

Post by hedora »

runeks wrote: post #402
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…

> In the background global warming is a much greater threat to human life and has the exact same dynamic with the exact same players. No, global warming has a very different dynamic. With a virus, if you do the right thing and protect yourself, you’re more likely to survive. With global warming, if you get a lot of people to emit less CO2, you might just end up making CO2 emissions cheaper for everyone else.

If you catch coronavirus, you’re roughly twice as likely to die this year as if you didn’t (this is true for most age groups).

Most people have a vanishingly low probability of dying in the next 12 months. They shouldn’t care much if they get it or not, unless they’re worried about the welfare of others.

This seems very similar to CO2 to me, except that global warming affects younger people more, and coronavirus primarily affects older people.

It saddens me that our leaders won’t act to prevent a planetary disaster that will that affect their children and all future generations, but are willing many more times the resources on a comparatively minor crisis that will last at most a year.

Re: Coronavirus and Credibility

#855

Post by concordDance »

adjkant wrote: post #647
umvi wrote: post #570

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> 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? We can either throw our hands up and give up or we can do the best with what we have. So, what percentage of cases do you think are unconfirmed? You can adjust my math with that and see what those rates are. Those numbers still stay scary unless you…

See the report by Imperial: https://www.imperial.ac.uk/media/imperial-college/medicine/m...

Looks like Spain had 6 million infections but only 140 thousand cases. So the actual uncomfirmed rate could be 97%.

Re: Coronavirus and Credibility

#856

Post by Kaiyou »

XorNot wrote: post #151
Kaiyou wrote: post #144

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Define "rare". Based on the ones I know were admitted alone, I'd think they are rather common.

Its because they're not what people want to imagine (hypercompetent ubermenchen who they're outsmarting) but just covering up "mundane" though still devestating crimes.

I wouldn't classify putting LSD in the water supply to be "mundane".

Neither would I classify MK-Ulta that way: "Techniques included the covert administration of high doses of psychoactive drugs (especially LSD) and other chemicals, electroshocks, hypnosis, sensory deprivation, isolation, verbal and sexual abuse, as well as other forms of torture."

Or the releasing of biological weapons (MK-Naomi): "at least three covert techniques for attacking and poisoning crops that had been examined under field conditions."

Or Operation Notherwoods: "to both stage and actually commit acts of terrorism against American military and civilian targets, blaming them on the Cuban government, and using it to justify a war against Cuba."

Or the Tuskegee experiment: "The purpose of this study was to observe the natural history of untreated syphilis; the African American men in the study were only told they were receiving free health care from the Federal government of the United States."

The list goes on and on and on and on.

Re: Coronavirus and Credibility

#857

Post by ben_w »

concordDance wrote: post #850
ben_w wrote: post #847

Earlier quoted context omitted.

At best, that’s “straw Vulcan” rationality. The emotional reaction of a crowd is an important part of any world model. At worst, without all the anxiety you’re opposing, too many people catch it at the same time and the death rate rises to match the hospitalisation rate. When that happens you’re not talking 75 million dead, you’re talking 375 million to 2.25 billion dead depending on which of the enormous range of ho…

5% to 30% of the world dying? Yeah, that's bollocks. At least 80% of people don't even notice they have it (so the BBC has told me today). Only 5% of cases require ICU, let alone 5% of infections (and if Imperial modelling is right that number is far lower). ICU saves at most half of the people who go in based on CDC numbers. I have not seen any modelling by any source of even the slightest repute suggesting a 2 bill…

The ICU is fine (fsvo) if, and only if, everyone doesn’t get it all at the same time.

"""Mississippi currently has the highest COVID-19 hospitalization rate in the nation, at 31 percent, according to states’ health department data gathered by The COVID Tracking Project. """ - https://mississippitoday.org/2020/04/01/mississippi-has-nati...

Re: Coronavirus and Credibility

#858

Post by s1artibartfast »

takeda wrote: post #803
yodsanklai wrote: post #306

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The point is to prevent the medical infrastructure from becoming overwhelmed I think this is clear for most people. I'm not American but I've watched Trump recent talk and they explained this clearly in a way everybody could understand. What they didn't explain though is the post-lockdown strategy. Most likely, in a few weeks, only a small fraction of the US population will be immune, and the problem won't be solve…

The people who are currently sick will either recover or die. Lock down can make the effective R0 below 1. When it is below 1 the disease will die on its own. Of course we would have to be locked for a very long time, but even if we won't wait that long the active infection curve will go down and buy us some time.

The disease will never die out on its own. The question raised is hat are we waiting for and how long are we willing to wait for it.

If the answer is that we are waiting for nothing, perhaps we shouldn't.

If the answer is that we are waiting in lock-down 1-2 years for a vaccine and vaccinations, maybe we shouldn't.

Re: Coronavirus and Credibility

#859

Post by Kaiyou »

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?

Benefits do not have to be economic. It means getting the things you want.

Re: Coronavirus and Credibility

#860

Post by lemming »

WalterBright wrote: post #821
lemming wrote: post #745

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

I'm a passive investor, I don't try to make money by playing the market. But yes, in mid-Feb I moved all my investments from growth funds into conservative ones, and avoided a major haircut.
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