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An update on a pre-registered result about the coronavirus

kalzumeus.com

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Re: An update on a pre-registered result about the coronavirus

#121

Post by Klonoar »

aikinai wrote: post #57
lalaland1125 wrote: post #45

This article frankly sounds like the rambling of a crazy person with all of the attempts of secrecy and defensiveness. > A distant secondary consideration, but a real one, was that choosing to publish could bring down heavy sanctions, through predictable pathways. Why is the author afraid of "sanctions" in a first world democracy with strong freedom of speech protections? A much more interesting and useful article wo…

> Why is the author afraid of "sanctions" in a first world democracy with strong freedom of speech protections? A much more interesting and useful article would be an examination of the authors exact fears and why he feels afraid of publishing publically in Japan. I completely agree. Where is all this weird expectation of political persecution in Japan coming from? Both from Patrick and a lot of comments in this thre…

I lived and worked there for many years, and at one point came up against this. It absolutely does exist, especially if you're leaning into journalism territory.

I also (briefly) worked with Patrick in a past life and have no reason to believe he's overselling it... though the writing style could be trimmed quite a bit.

Re: An update on a pre-registered result about the coronavirus

#122

Post by BerislavLopac »

robocat wrote: post #118
BerislavLopac wrote: post #89

> There are few conspiracies in the world. There are many systems with complicated decision-making processes, internal data flows, and incentive structures for actors within them. The second sentence here is absolutely correct, but it directly contradicts the first one. Because a "conspiracy" is nothing more than having a group of those actors, with aligned incentives, coordinating to work together while hiding that…

I disagree. The second sentence is about uncoordinated actors making decisions, without anyone conspiring together. The emergent behaviour may look like a conspiracy, which is what he is pointing out.

What is the difference between "looking like a conspiracy" and "being a conspiracy"?

Re: An update on a pre-registered result about the coronavirus

#123

Post by SkyMarshal »

SpicyLemonZest wrote: post #106
SkyMarshal wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I still don't really fully understand the rationale behind the cloak and dagger "hash of report" business. I didn’t read every word of it but got the sense there were political and/or Japanese cultural sensitivities why he didn’t initially feel comfortable with a full public, attributed release.

I think you're being a bit too accommodating. McKenzie does have a flair for the dramatic; he did the same thing with Tether where there really was no reason he couldn't just say what he thought when he thought it. At the same time, yeah, it seems very plausible that a white guy in Japan announcing the Japanese pandemic response is run by fools would face blowback for it.

>At the same time, yeah, it seems very plausible that a white guy in Japan announcing the Japanese pandemic response is run by fools would face blowback for it.

Haha, yeah pretty much that. And any blowback may also have been directed at his employer, Stripe. So there was certainly cause for caution.

That said, I don't think recognizing in late March that this virus spreads faster and is harder to control than previous similar ones was much of a leap of insight, and the article does seem a little too self-congratulatory over that.

Having that realization back in January is evidence of foresight, but late March not so much. But maybe the situation was different in Japan and merits it, dunno.

Re: An update on a pre-registered result about the coronavirus

#124

Post by twblalock »

seemslegit wrote: post #44

There is no way Japan's faux-success is due solely or even dominantly to asymptomatic cases, they had to be turning a blind eye to symptomatic ones as well and attributing them to pneumonia, flu etc. The fact that the reported rates began rising only after the Tokyo Olympics were announced cancelled is almost a USSR-era farce. Japan has a leading hospital-bed-per-capita capacity in the OECD which could help them conc…

Then where are the overwhelmed hospitals? Where are the bodies?

Re: An update on a pre-registered result about the coronavirus

#125

Post by SpicyLemonZest »

ceejayoz wrote: post #110
SpicyLemonZest wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sorry, what's the accidental experiment here? The article doesn't suggest any cities in 1918 were doing testing or contact tracing - they couldn't have been, because they didn't even know that the flu was a virus at the time. And I'm not seeing anything about a general closure of non-essential businesses either. I certainly wouldn't dispute that closing schools and banning public gatherings were good moves.

> The article doesn't suggest any cities in 1918 were doing testing or contact tracing - they couldn't have been, because they didn't even know that the flu was a virus at the time. That's silly. They didn't know it was a virus. They certainly knew it was communicable. Contact tracing is entirely possible; we were doing that in the 1800s. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1854_Broad_Street_cholera_outb...

Testing in the modern sense was impossible as a matter of science.

Modern contact tracing could in principle have been done, but it's my understanding that it wasn't. The kind of tracing in the Broad Street outbreak is very different - cholera mostly doesn't spread from person to person, so John Snow had to figure out only where each of the victims spent their time and not an exponential sized web of people they went out drinking with.

Re: An update on a pre-registered result about the coronavirus

#126

Post by joe_the_user »

ohazi wrote: post #95

Most of this seemed blindingly obvious to me and my peers (in the US) at the time that Patrick tweeted his hashes. Several of the replies to his tweets correctly guessed the topic, and most came to similar conclusions. Anybody with half a brain knew what was going on. Maybe Japanese culture really is "different" and things really did need to be done this way, but I find myself agreeing with other comments here that t…

Yeah, making a secret prediction seems only justified when your position is in the extreme minority and when it contains fairly surprising and/or specific claims. When your claim is just supporting a "strong minority viewpoint", doing so secretly ridiculous.

Re: An update on a pre-registered result about the coronavirus

#127

Post by jmeister »

aikinai wrote: post #57
lalaland1125 wrote: post #45

This article frankly sounds like the rambling of a crazy person with all of the attempts of secrecy and defensiveness. > A distant secondary consideration, but a real one, was that choosing to publish could bring down heavy sanctions, through predictable pathways. Why is the author afraid of "sanctions" in a first world democracy with strong freedom of speech protections? A much more interesting and useful article wo…

> Why is the author afraid of "sanctions" in a first world democracy with strong freedom of speech protections? A much more interesting and useful article would be an examination of the authors exact fears and why he feels afraid of publishing publically in Japan. I completely agree. Where is all this weird expectation of political persecution in Japan coming from? Both from Patrick and a lot of comments in this thre…

The Ghosn saga was an eye-opener for a lot of people:

https://www.cnbc.com/amp/2020/01/27/carlos-ghosn-warns-forei...

Re: An update on a pre-registered result about the coronavirus

#128

Post by NateEag »

BerislavLopac wrote: post #122
robocat wrote: post #118

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I disagree. The second sentence is about uncoordinated actors making decisions, without anyone conspiring together. The emergent behaviour may look like a conspiracy, which is what he is pointing out.

What is the difference between "looking like a conspiracy" and "being a conspiracy"?

The actors' intent.

Actual conspiracies involve deceit, misdirection, and ill will.

"Never attribute to malice that which can adequately be explained by incompetence."

It's not a perfect rule, but it is a helpful idea to keep in mind.

Re: An update on a pre-registered result about the coronavirus

#129

Post by seemslegit »

twblalock wrote: post #124
seemslegit wrote: post #44

There is no way Japan's faux-success is due solely or even dominantly to asymptomatic cases, they had to be turning a blind eye to symptomatic ones as well and attributing them to pneumonia, flu etc. The fact that the reported rates began rising only after the Tokyo Olympics were announced cancelled is almost a USSR-era farce. Japan has a leading hospital-bed-per-capita capacity in the OECD which could help them conc…

Then where are the overwhelmed hospitals? Where are the bodies?

They're not overwhelmed yet because they have capacity (NYC hospitals are struggling but are not over capacity either), deaths happen all the time especially in a country with aging population like Japan and are just not counted as covid19, like the author says it will probably be visible in excess deaths statistics once those are published.

Re: An update on a pre-registered result about the coronavirus

#130

Post by toyg »

aikinai wrote: post #42
EE84M3i wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

One theory is that people are dying but it hasn't been discovered yet because of people staying inside. see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kodokushi Having just ridden the Yamanote today though, it's unreal how empty it is.

I doubt there's much overlap in people who have so little human contact that no one knows they're dead and people who catch viruses that are still present in only a tiny fraction of the population. Oh, and a third condition that these people be such recluses that they don't even call a doctor when deathly ill.

Dude, you're talking about the country that christened the hikikomori phenomenon...
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