Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Covid lesson: trust the public with hard truths

nature.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

471–480 of 837 posts

Re: Covid lesson: trust the public with hard truths

#471

Post by timr »

notahacker wrote: post #425
timr wrote: post #343

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> People were dying from self-administered HCQ as a supposed prophylactic Yes, "people are dying" is the favored rallying cry for any number of poorly considered, knee-jerk reactions to unfortunate events. It's a big country. People die from lots of things every day, including a staggering number of people who die from overdoses from innocuous medications. A surprising number of these people poison themselves with su…

> and we shouldn't engage in censorship of factual information because "people are dying". It's not 'censorship of factual information' for a private service to choose to put health warnings against or delete fact free claims of HCQ as a miracle cure. Indeed "healthy living" supplement hucksters are ridiculed and kicked off platforms on a regular basis, even when some of the claims they make about "healthy living" ha…

> It's not 'censorship of factual information' for a private service to choose to put health warnings against or delete fact free claims of HCQ as a miracle cure.

I'm not going to get into the "it isn't censorship if it's a private company" debate. That's a facile argument. Silencing of speech is wrong. Full stop. I'm not debating semantics. If the only way you can rebut an argument is by silencing it, then you lose the debate. Get better at defending your beliefs in the marketplace of ideas.

Regarding "factual information": if 2020-21 should have taught you anything about actual science (vs. The Science (tm)), it is the importance of humility. Today's "scientific fact" is tomorrow's misinformation. We've seen this time and again throughout the pandemic -- except that one side is always less than forthright than the other about the times when their preferred facts are wrong.

AI bots and armies of low-wage employees at Facebook and Twitter are useless as arbiters of scientific truth. And science, as a process, depends on the ability of unpopular opinions to exist and be debated. Because sometimes, they're right.

Your desire to "protect people" against information that you deem to be dangerous is only as good as your ability to know what is dangerous. And the masses are finding out about this Dangerous Misinformation anyway, so it's not like the tactics are working. The two major accomplishments of this strategy appear to be:

1) making the censors look like fools on a regular basis, and

2) hardening the opposition and mistrust by the people being censored to the point where you are engaged in all-out war.

So if your goal was destroying trust and confidence in medical authority, and increasing partisan polarization, while hardening ~half the population into rigid ideological positions, mazeltov. The experiment was a success.

Re: Covid lesson: trust the public with hard truths

#472

Post by adevx »

lamontcg wrote: post #107
zz865 wrote: post #92

One problem is there really is some risk with the vaccine. At a population level its best if everyone takes the vaccine - there are huge benefits, but unfortunately a small minority gets hurt. Its best if everyone else gets vaccinated except for me. Of course when everyone wants to be that exception the vaccination doesn't stop community spread so people get sick. The problem is the hard truth of "take the risk becau…

But there's a bigger risk with the virus. The selfish calculus should also be to get vaccinated.

That is a sweeping generalisation. Covid19 targets a very select group disproportionately, being young and healthy changes the risk dynamics significantly.

Re: Covid lesson: trust the public with hard truths

#473

Post by hackingforfun »

iammisc wrote: post #407
betterunix2 wrote: post #302

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That was done in response to concerns that Trump was trying to push the FDA to approve the vaccines faster to serve his own political ambitions: https://www.cnn.com/2020/09/03/politics/white-house-fda-coro... https://apnews.com/article/donald-trump-business-mark-meadow... Moreover, Gov. Newsom's statements did not say that the vaccines were unsafe; he simply said that he was establishing an independent panel of scien…

Since the inception of the FDA, when else have state governments independently verified drugs like this? It is clearly a signal that one ought not to trust the FDA. Is it any surprise that large cohorts of the democratic party (namely, their non-white cohorts) do not want to get the drug? I am not surprised. > "Get the shot if you want to." That is exactly what any sane person should say. Trump is pro-vaccine. He has…

I think you make a good point here that someone can be pro-vaccine while being against a mandate. I hadn't thought of it that way. I don't really see many Republicans going out of their way recommending vaccines though, either. Trump got his in secret initially.

Re: Covid lesson: trust the public with hard truths

#474

Post by notahacker »

sjwalter wrote: post #455
notahacker wrote: post #234

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Apart from anything else, this is pretty much what most health authorities did on most theories about COVID. Lots of people chose to listen to other high profile figures who claimed certainty instead...

> this is pretty much what most health authorities did on most theories about COVID I guess we're living in alternate realities. The world I'm living in, the biggest celebrity doctor in the USA has repeatedly lied about natural immunity (which is robust, durable, and superior to vaccine immunity in every study published to date), for just one example, and continues to push unnecessary vaccines on people who don't nee…

I'm living in the reality where health authorities saying "we are trialling this, although until more is known we recommend not..." is generally taken as evidence that the politicians promoting the "cure" must be right, authorities saying "at present there is no evidence" or changing their recommendations is seen as evidence of their untrustworthiness and a reality where the people who have been consistently, loudly wrong have big fanbases in some cases precisely because they stick to their guns even in the face of overwhelming evidence.

Haven't paid particular attention to your favourite celebrity doctor in your country so I'm not sure whether he's said anything particularly outrageous or whether you are simply denying the present scientific consensus that natural immunity to COVID appears to wane, but then again, you appear to have experienced extreme difficulty in parsing the word "most" in my post...

Re: Covid lesson: trust the public with hard truths

#475

Post by clairity »

Natsu wrote: post #393
clairity wrote: post #381

Earlier quoted context omitted.

'just follow the rules'... that's exactly how we get the blind unreasonableness we're seeing everywhere. you need to examine your assumption that masks are doing anything at all in most common situations, and then consider what's actually reasonable vs. what you've rationalized yourself into. humility is missing in your thrust to convince others of your correctness.

I think you meant to reply to someone else, because you're quoting words that I didn't write. If I was running things, I would tell people that they have no power to punish anyone whatsoever and design the Covid rules with that in mind, making them focused entirely on helping people instead of controlling them.

> "If I was running things, I would tell people that they have no power to punish anyone whatsoever and design the Covid rules with that in mind, making them focused entirely on helping people instead of controlling them."

to be fair, i agree that we should avoid punishing people for making different risk calculations, and resultant choices, because as a population, it's advantageous to have a variety of strategies employed simultaneously to any potential catastrophe. folks who are trying to coerce a singular "right" approach are literally wrong in their meta-approach.

however, the phrasing of your initial comment fails to recognize that a range of responses could be entirely valid, and suggests 'helping' people find the one right and true way. the better phrasing and intention is to admit that many approaches can simultaneously be valuable, and focus less on being right. being humble is recognizing that no one of us (or even a group) ever has perfect and complete information, and that we should act compassionately and acceptingly towards our fellow humans in light of this truth.

yes, we should share information with each other, but we should also accept that people will actualize that information differently because we're each touching different parts of the elephant[0] and are acting in accordance with our different senses.

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blind_men_and_an_elephant

Re: Covid lesson: trust the public with hard truths

#476

Post by autoexec »

titzer wrote: post #468
cjsplat wrote: post #378

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> there was never data that said "masks don't work for the public" Actually there was plenty of data saying that masks don't work for the public. For example, https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal... And there are many others - that was just an easy one I found today. Some similar studies even showed an increase in flu transmission among the subject population wearing masks. There were plenty o…

IMHO it was just a stupid call, because in the face of conflicting data, it would have been a better default option to recommend masks. That's easier to walk back than "oops, we were lying because we don't trust you rubes enough not to hoard, even when explicitly instructed not to hoard." In the beginning of the pandemic I, with effectively zero sewing skills, made a cloth mask out of spare clothing. They could have…

I agree. Wanting to keep supplies to healthcare workers wouldn't have even been all that hard. Thanks to the horrific amount of consolidation in retail they could have gone to only a handful of major players like amazon and walmart and said "Please pull these masks off of shelves and help us save them for healthcare workers" and that would have kept them out of the hands of the vast majority of the population. A few might have tried ordering them from overseas or spent hours trying to get them from random places online hoping that they were getting the real thing and not overpriced knockoffs, but most people were not going to do that, especially if the reasons they shouldn't were communicated to them.

Claiming the masks are useless to the public but critical for healthcare workers made no sense. I mean, I think most people would accept that putting just about anything in front of your gaping virus-spewing face holes would have some benefit. Health agencies have pushed for things like the vampire cough/sneeze for ages to reduce the spread of all kinds of things, although the crook of your elbow is hardly a panacea.

I think either way we'd have ended up with a bunch of dumb or selfish people who refused to put a mask on, and there were already plenty of people distrustful of the CDC and WHO but they sure didn't do themselves any favors.

Re: Covid lesson: trust the public with hard truths

#477

Post by kingaillas »

ajkdhcb2 wrote: post #290
hackingforfun wrote: post #264

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Yet sick Chinese people were free to spread over the world for months with no response except down-playing it. > When politicians knowingly lie to everyone's faces and take harmful actions against the people, pushing toward a more authoritarian society at every opportunity, how can you have any trust and not wonder about conspiracies? Wouldn't pushing toward a more authoritarian society been not allowing sick Chine…

Doing health checks and restricting foreign nationals arriving from specific high risk areas is not extreme at all, that has been done plenty of times. I don't think it is comparable at all to the unprecedented restrictions that become normal in the last 1-2 years. >Do you think it would have been OK to implement restrictions at the start of the pandemic, just not now? Yes. In the beginning nobody knew how dangerous…

> In the beginning nobody knew how dangerous the virus was, so risk management should have been much more strict.

That won't work. Right now we have a pretty good idea of how dangerous the virus is, and plenty of US citizens don't want to participate the risk management of wearing a mask or even vaccinating. Hell many governors are outright forbidding vaccine mandates. Those same people aren't going to go along with strict risk management when the risk is unknown.

Re: Covid lesson: trust the public with hard truths

#478

Post by whimsicalism »

yissp wrote: post #451
whimsicalism wrote: post #400

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The government cannot easily quickly ban the buying/selling of a certain thing like that. Just not how it works, far too slow moving.

They were able to completely shut down entire sectors of the economy pretty quickly quickly.

States did that, and still not on the timescales we are discussing.

Re: Covid lesson: trust the public with hard truths

#479

Post by renewiltord »

ars wrote: post #333
larkost wrote: post #201

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is a complete mischaracterization, and bordering on a lie at this point. She was very specific about not taking it because President Trump said so (rightly, given Trump's history of promoting improving treatments). But you don't have to take my work for it, read her's: "If Dr. Fauci, the doctors, tell us that we should take it, I'll be the first in line to take it. But if Donald Trump tells us we should take it,…

Your characterization is even more misleading than theirs. Do you seriously think Trump created the vaccine himself and it didn't go through the FDA and scientists or anything else? The mere existence of the vaccine should be enough for her but no if Trump said something she won't take it.

This is an English subtlety. There is an implied negation of the other condition and an implied independence.

“If my wife tells me to eat cauliflower I will. If you tell me to, I won’t.”

A literal interpretation is that if you tell me to eat cauliflower I will avoid cauliflower altogether. The natural English interpretation translates to “Your endorsement of cauliflower will mean nothing to my choice of action”. Funny, eh?

Re: Covid lesson: trust the public with hard truths

#480

Post by TheCoelacanth »

nokcha wrote: post #258
teh_infallible wrote: post #180

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ironically, those PHDs you trust are the most hesitant

That study turned out to be based on unreliable self-reported education level: https://coronavirus.quora.com/Is-it-true-that-PhDs-are-the-m...

When the study authors themselves say that the results should be taken with a grain of salt because they used a "novel sampling methodology", that's usually a sign that you want to take the results with a grain of salt.
Post reply on HN