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YouTube removed a viral video of two doctors calling for an end to quarantine

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Re: YouTube removed a viral video of two doctors calling for an end to quarantine

#61
post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is really a non-argument, as the WHO is also comprised of "doctors". The belief of dishonesty could be applied both ways.

In can go both ways, that's right, which is why we tend to trust the larger collection of people who have also done more to verify and support their claims. Two doctors in a YouTube video with anecdotal evidence that contradicts what the rest of the medical establishment says doesn't bode well for their believability.

True honest belief backed by data that is hard to disprove. We have a million cases and 55k deaths even with shutdowns. Is it that hard to figure out the rest?

Re: YouTube removed a viral video of two doctors calling for an end to quarantine

#62
This edges a little close to state media. Of course it’s not the same, but if the guiding philosophy is ‘we cannot trust the public with certain information, for it’s own good’, then we’ve adopted whatever the hell they do in non-free countries.

Very bad precedent, very Un-American.

Edit: As an arrogant American, I forgot to consider that this might be a global Youtube policy.

Re: YouTube removed a viral video of two doctors calling for an end to quarantine

#63
post #29
post #26

Here's a useful twitter thread that talks about mistakes these doctors made: https://twitter.com/CT_Bergstrom/status/1254481543759683584?... > What they did was simple: they looked at the fraction of patients who tested positive for #COVID19 at the clinics they own. They found 340 out of 5213 tests were postive, about 6.6% > Then they assume the same fraction of the whole population are infected.

That was an obvious error in their reasoning. Not surprising, though. Idiotic (and, yes, such an error IS idiotic) fumbling with statistics is displayed on a daily basis. It doesn't matter what 'side' you are on: idiots abound. Doomer fallacies: Charts showing exponential growth of positives, without taking into account the exponential growth of tests... Flu-Bro fallacies: Antibody surveys that don't take into accoun…

Yes I have historically found many doctors to not understand basic statistics, which has somewhat surprised me.

Re: YouTube removed a viral video of two doctors calling for an end to quarantine

#64
post #5
post #2

It's still live at this link (at the time of posting): https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/politics/dr-erickson-covid-19...

This version contains an important piece at the end, additional 3 minutes: https://youtube.com/watch?v=cmjYRJXKixY

Agreed. These people own several urgent care clinics and are suffering financially. I don't understand how much they understand about how misleading they are being (they could be foolish enough to believe their own mistakes) but it is clear that they are suffering financially and are trying to figure out a way to stay afloat.

Re: YouTube removed a viral video of two doctors calling for an end to quarantine

#65
post #26

Here's a useful twitter thread that talks about mistakes these doctors made: https://twitter.com/CT_Bergstrom/status/1254481543759683584?... > What they did was simple: they looked at the fraction of patients who tested positive for #COVID19 at the clinics they own. They found 340 out of 5213 tests were postive, about 6.6% > Then they assume the same fraction of the whole population are infected.

Thank you, logged in to upvote this. These docs are committing basic errors. 6.6% infected has to be wrong. That just shows we're not testing enough to see the true, much lower, number. It's also biased because we're not randomly sampling--instead we're testing people that are already showing symptoms. Then when that inflated number goes in the denominator, it makes it look like the fatality rate is much lower.

How can this not be intentional?

Re: YouTube removed a viral video of two doctors calling for an end to quarantine

#66
post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Elon’s response since the beginning has been way off, “The coronavirus panic is dumb” (March 6). I guess he doesn’t want to learn from his mistakes. It’s somewhat incredible to see how the “just the flu” crowd doubled down on their views despite the failure of containment in NYC (and high death tolls overseas in the UK and elsewhere) making it clear how many more people would have died if their plan of just letting t…

> It’s somewhat incredible to see how the “just the flu” crowd doubled down on their views The same exact accusation is being made by the other side towards the "doomers". That the doomsday crows is doubling down because they can't admit their fault. I'm not siding with anyone here, just noticing.

In case of the "doomers", there are strong psychological elements at play. Lockdowns are not fun and have an obvious cost to the economy and to people. Lives and companies and future plans are being ruined at an astonishing rate.

In order to reconcile that, you have to justify the lockdowns, and one way of doing that is to shout from the top of your lungs that if we hadn't gone into lockdown, everyone would be dead, dead, dead.

The truth of the matter is probably incredibly complicated. Yes, some lockdown measures have an effect, but we don't actually know which ones are most effective, which measures gives us the best bang for the buck, and which measures are useless and therefore harmful in the long run.

So any places that have less severe lockdown measures than what the doomers are advocating, and that are seeing decent results at stopping the spread, those places are a threat to the doomer side of the argument, and therefore those places have to fail.

And that's on top of the fact that statistics is hard, and everyone is spouting bullshit every other way, myself included.

Re: YouTube removed a viral video of two doctors calling for an end to quarantine

#67
post #29
post #26

Here's a useful twitter thread that talks about mistakes these doctors made: https://twitter.com/CT_Bergstrom/status/1254481543759683584?... > What they did was simple: they looked at the fraction of patients who tested positive for #COVID19 at the clinics they own. They found 340 out of 5213 tests were postive, about 6.6% > Then they assume the same fraction of the whole population are infected.

That was an obvious error in their reasoning. Not surprising, though. Idiotic (and, yes, such an error IS idiotic) fumbling with statistics is displayed on a daily basis. It doesn't matter what 'side' you are on: idiots abound. Doomer fallacies: Charts showing exponential growth of positives, without taking into account the exponential growth of tests... Flu-Bro fallacies: Antibody surveys that don't take into accoun…

> One thing you can count on, though: You will usually get a downvote on Hacker News if you deviate from the mainstream.

Previously you were in a discussion with me arguing with great confidence that the virus outbreak would be a distant memory in two months. I just looked it up; it was 61 days ago.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22434499

You were using terms like "chicken littles" then. I'm all for reading different viewpoints, but if you're going to throw around insults like "doomer", you're not likely to get a civilised discussion going.

Re: YouTube removed a viral video of two doctors calling for an end to quarantine

#68
post #8

Elon Musk appears to like what they said as well: https://mobile.twitter.com/elonmusk/status/12544950502282608...

Man, the comments on this thread on twitter are awful. People are actually upset that Twitter didn’t remove this tweet or ban Elon’s account.

What is the world coming to that people are so afraid of opinions that they don’t agree with?

Re: YouTube removed a viral video of two doctors calling for an end to quarantine

#69
I wonder why Google's decision-makers decided to censor stuff that doesn't follow WHO guidelines. Is it because they actually care about the mass of the population? Is it because they want to minimize the economic damage caused by the crisis? Is it because they're scared to get sick themselves? Is it because they want to avoid possible legal liability? Is it due to political pressure on them? Is it because they want to exploit the crisis for reasons of politics and social engineering? Some combination of the above?

Re: YouTube removed a viral video of two doctors calling for an end to quarantine

#70

This edges a little close to state media. Of course it’s not the same, but if the guiding philosophy is ‘we cannot trust the public with certain information, for it’s own good’, then we’ve adopted whatever the hell they do in non-free countries. Very bad precedent, very Un-American. Edit: As an arrogant American, I forgot to consider that this might be a global Youtube policy.

No, it edges closer to Youtube being a publisher that controls or curates the content that is available on their platform.
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