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Tribalism comes for pandemic science

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Re: Tribalism comes for pandemic science

#21

Post by Kiro »

salmon30salmon wrote: post #2

This is so very disheartening. I will speak only for the United States, as I am not familiar enough with other countries to comment. Not only is this impacting nearly every single person in the country, it is ruining the financial situation of over 40m people, primarily concentrated within the most financially vulnerable. This is because leaders on the left and right have refused to respond to new data, and are worki…

In Sweden it's the opposite: the right wants lockdown and the left opposes it.

Re: Tribalism comes for pandemic science

#22

Post by xamuel »

pjc50 wrote: post #17

The people who said that lockdown needed to be limited in length because people couldn't take it for long were right. Unfortunately, due to not understanding exponentials, many advocated for starting the lockdown later : hence the UK's delayed lockdown and therefore highest death toll in Europe. The people advocating for "herd immunity" never addressed the death rate; a death rate of even 0.5% in the UK would be thre…

What does that 287k include? Presumably just positive test cases? Probably there are far more undiagnosed infections that didn't require hospitalization. If the IFR was really 14% like your numbers suggest, we would see politicians putting themselves in submarines, lol. That's almost halfway to black plague IFR. The CDC's recent data suggests an actual IFR of well below 1%.

Re: Tribalism comes for pandemic science

#23

Post by salmon30salmon »

ColanR wrote: post #12
rootusrootus wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If we could just convince the hoaxers that wearing masks in public is not emasculating, and convince the doomers that we need to flatten the curve rather than attempt to completely contain the virus, we could go back to something bordering on normal life pretty quickly while we waited for vaccines to come along and kill off the virus altogether. And then we would be prepared to react to the next pandemic, too.

I think that the root problem that needs to be addressed is that to a lot of people, scientists and the media appear to put politics before truth. The recent hydroxychloroquine is an obvious example [1]; The Lancet should never have published something with data so obviously questionable, and the media should not have picked it up so immediately as political ammunition. But the result is that the media appears to be…

This happened again today, with Washington Post publishing an article based on a study that was submitted to Nature on March 22, 2020. They used this old data (2 months ago is old in this case) to claim that the lockdown saved millions upon millions of lives. To be that disingenuous can't be accidental, I am afraid. And I am normally a fan of WaPo

Re: Tribalism comes for pandemic science

#24

Post by JPKab »

Question:

Has anyone here changed their mind about COVID19 in a major way as the data has become more complete?

Just wondering. I have sensed in myself tribalistic tendencies of not changing my mind when the data changes. I'm trying hard to look at myself and recognize it and experiment with different thoughts.

I find myself bouncing between thinking we have overreacted to then thinking that my perception of an overreaction is paradoxical because we did lock down and have contained the virus' damage to some extent. I'm trying hard to be super open-minded about the data, and recognizing that I'm just a simple primate whose brain doesn't want to expend energy and resorts to bias to conserve it.

Re: Tribalism comes for pandemic science

#25

Post by luckylion »

salmon30salmon wrote: post #6
rootusrootus wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If we could just convince the hoaxers that wearing masks in public is not emasculating, and convince the doomers that we need to flatten the curve rather than attempt to completely contain the virus, we could go back to something bordering on normal life pretty quickly while we waited for vaccines to come along and kill off the virus altogether. And then we would be prepared to react to the next pandemic, too.

Exactly. We need some humility in people. It is okay to admit that this is (thankfully!) not as bad as we thought, but it is still bad. It will still kill a lot of people. We need to take it seriously, but not as seriously as we feared. The doomers need to have the humility to admit that, and the hoaxers need to have the humility to admit that it is worse than the seasonal flu. Again, I fear people don't realize that…

> the hoaxers need to have the humility to admit that it is worse than the seasonal flu.

I don't believe any significant number actually thinks that, it's their counter to "everybody will die, the science is settled". They will aim for something on the opposite extreme, that is a pretty common reaction.

Imho: if you don't try to convince them that an asteroid is about to crash into earth, but instead tell them that lots of people are scared to death of an asteroid crashing into earth, they'll have a much easier time saying "okay, sure, I don't want them to be scared, I can wear a mask when I go shopping, I guess".

> Again, I fear people don't realize that this isn't a game. This is disastrously bad and getting worse every. single. day.

Where you live, maybe. Where I live, we haven't had a case in 10 days in the county of 330k people, we've had laughably low deaths to begin with, the curve was pretty much flattened the moment we went into constraints ... and we still have mandatory masks with no end in sight, and our local government still does not go back to normal mode, the trash is still getting picked up on irregular schedules etc.

It's neither disastrous here, and it's not getting worse. But a lot of people are still scared out of their mind. And we need to help them to breathe and calm down, and tell them that it was scary, but that it's okay to go back outside. And at some point we'll have to tell them that they need to go back outside because we can't keep society running around them without them.

Re: Tribalism comes for pandemic science

#26

Post by throwawaysea »

Not to sound alarmist, but recent events have felt like the early warning of a pending collapse of our country. When I saw healthcare workers and officials abandon logic, reason, and evidence to put their weight behind justifying recent mass protests, I really lost a lot of faith. These protests obviously will result in thousands more deaths (much larger in number than unjust police-involved deaths). This is no longer about losing faith in institutions alone, but really about losing faith in fellow citizens who are willfully burying their heads in the sand and willfully acting in bad faith nearly all the time. Of course, there is plenty of blame to hand out for all sides, going back well before recent events and well before COVID-19 itself.

My question for HN: what has happened to past societies when they reach this point, where emotions and tribalism cause all sides to hate each other, to talk past each other, to hold each other to unequal standards, to use every last loophole/technicality to win through bad faith means, etc.? Have any such societies de-escalated from there to a point of stability again?

Re: Tribalism comes for pandemic science

#27

Post by deadwing0 »

JPKab wrote: post #24

Question: Has anyone here changed their mind about COVID19 in a major way as the data has become more complete? Just wondering. I have sensed in myself tribalistic tendencies of not changing my mind when the data changes. I'm trying hard to look at myself and recognize it and experiment with different thoughts. I find myself bouncing between thinking we have overreacted to then thinking that my perception of an overr…

I'm in the same boat as you. It's exhausting to try to avoid these tendencies. How comfy it must be to give in and accept them with no further thought.

The most frustrating times are those moments when I fear I'll never root out all of my biases or tribalistic tendencies and become an enlightened human. But onward and upward, eh?

Re: Tribalism comes for pandemic science

#28

Post by jamesrcole »

salmon30salmon wrote: post #2

This is so very disheartening. I will speak only for the United States, as I am not familiar enough with other countries to comment. Not only is this impacting nearly every single person in the country, it is ruining the financial situation of over 40m people, primarily concentrated within the most financially vulnerable. This is because leaders on the left and right have refused to respond to new data, and are worki…

> the left says "lockdown lockdown lockdown"

of course that hasn’t really been the case over the last week or so.

Re: Tribalism comes for pandemic science

#29

Post by manfredo »

Kiro wrote: post #21
salmon30salmon wrote: post #2

This is so very disheartening. I will speak only for the United States, as I am not familiar enough with other countries to comment. Not only is this impacting nearly every single person in the country, it is ruining the financial situation of over 40m people, primarily concentrated within the most financially vulnerable. This is because leaders on the left and right have refused to respond to new data, and are worki…

In Sweden it's the opposite: the right wants lockdown and the left opposes it.

It's interesting why this isn't the case in the US, too. Conservatives in the US are much older, and the people in the at-risk age groups are disproportionately Republican. Yet they oppose the lockdown. Liberals, who are the ones being laid off and bearing the economic brunt of the lockdown while being at much lower risk to their own health support it.

Re: Tribalism comes for pandemic science

#30

Post by reddog »

Whenever science and politics intersect, science loses. If science is studying something apolitical like the metabolism of water bear or a quasar burst from a distant galaxy it’s fine. Throw politics in the mix and the waters become muddied very quickly when funding and reputational concerns motivate and corrupt a delicate process.

Politics is like Lennie who wants to pet the rabbits. Science is like the rabbits.

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