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Covid lesson: trust the public with hard truths

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Re: Covid lesson: trust the public with hard truths

#811

Earlier quoted context omitted.

At least this link says even for first dose it's only 91% and 87%, again, which could be off, yet seems as if it would be accurate. Again, I don't know. What I've learned this year is that statistics can be very unintuitive and I know so little about how they work, that in uncertain times like these, I almost feel reliant on choosing someone to trust who I think understands this stuff better than I.

@nuerow cited nytimes[0] on the 95% estimate in another comment[1]. for the purposes of my argument, the precise number isn’t important, just that it equates to “most”. and incidentally, that’s the shape of most arguments on most things, because we’re embedded in unbounded uncertainty. the most precision we can have about most things is ‘a little’, ‘some’, ‘a bunch’, ‘most’, etc., not something like 54.736%, despite…

I think precision also matters when dealing with large numbers. If it's 60% plus/minus 30%, not such big deal if dealing with 10 people, it'd be either 3, 6, or 9 people, a range of 6 people. But if it's plus/minus 30% when dealing with a population of 100,000,000, that's a range of 60,000,000 people.

That being said, yes, I agree there are many situations where precision doesn't matter that much and that qualifiers work sufficiently to describe the general sense of the situation. I think what actually drove me to write my precision rant was ironically where you stated that "easily" was hyperbole, which I took to mean as you believing it was not an accurate or precise enough description of the actions that might kill the grandma. Perhaps this thread wouldn't have happened if the person wrote "I might possibly kill grandma." I don't say that facetiously—I think these disagreements about the accuracy and precision of our observations of the world can lead to so much conflict, as it has for me in my life.

So, in a way, I'm grateful for you going back and forth with me, as I've learned even more deeply that while other people may seem to use too much or too little precision to me, I may use too much or too little for them.

Re: Covid lesson: trust the public with hard truths

#812

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, when there's a deadly pandemic, some people will need to be quarantined. I liked the bit where 3 million people didn't die, whereas 700k people died here.

There are some things the government just shouldn't be able to do, regardless of the justification. One of those things is locking people in their homes for an indeterminate amount of time.

Only in cages away from their homes?

https://www.cdc.gov/quarantine/aboutlawsregulationsquarantin...

Re: Covid lesson: trust the public with hard truths

#813

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Killing people is an acceptable trade off - you do it every day. Otherwise we’d stop driving, flying or take any risks. You’re appealing to the emotion and doubling down on it. Sure, if you only consider first-order effects from car accidents. A world without easy transportation is a less well off one and one that likely has more people dying/living shorter lives than our present one. Saying that someone dying is b…

Sure, if you only consider first-order effects then 3 million people saved out of 1.4 billion in China is logical. But, shutting down economy, impacting birthrates, inflation, rioting, suicides, taking away precious years of learning from kids, disruption of careers, dating life, college education, loss of sole sources of income, desperation and depression, etc that has been led by authoritarian governments is not wo…

All of those are because we failed to control the virus in the first place. It's a bit less true now with delta, but those things stopped happening in China precisely because their decisive action was so successful.

Re: Covid lesson: trust the public with hard truths

#814
post #761

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Sounds like a decent reason to maybe keep these people separate from the rest of the population Sounds like you're trying very hard to make an abstract point to contradict what happens in practice. > Would you miss a paycheck to protest in the streets? I did, several times. I happen to live in Poland and our government is awful for the last 8 years.

No, it's just the question I originally came into this thread with. Someone brought up "internment of a minority that they distrust" framing it as something that was specific to one side. It occurred to me that people who are unvaccinated fit that classifier, and that I've seen plenty of dehumanization of these people in comments on the internet. I saw your comment as not quite to that level, but along the same lines…

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Re: Covid lesson: trust the public with hard truths

#815

The decision to lie to the public about masks fearing an N95 shortage for healthcare workers has been the biggest disaster in many minds. Ideally the government would have owned up and said: ‘wups we were supposed to be stockpiling these for the last 10 years when this topic came up in a disaster planning scenario (it did), but we didn’t do that and now there is no way we will have enough for many years because indus…

Maybe honesty would have been better, but at the beginning when nobody knew how bad the pandemic was going to be, I'm sure almost everybody would have stockpiled as many of the "better" masks as they could get their hands on.

Re: Covid lesson: trust the public with hard truths

#816
post #551

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, even for young people. Even when you look at the side-effects of the vaccine, they tend to be more common among people who get the virus. For example, myocarditis is several times more common among young people who get CoVID-19 than among young people who get vaccinated.[1] Given that everyone is eventually going to get infected or vaccinated, getting vaccinated probably significantly decreases the risk of myoca…

What about the over hundred million people who have already acquired natural immunity? Do you think they should also take the risk of vaccine side effects even though they already have immunity that is more robust than the vaccine can provide by itself?

1. The risks of vaccination are minuscule, so for most people, there's no reason not to get vaccinated.

2. Some countries treat people with proof of prior infection the same as vaccinated people. I would approach this practically. From what I understand, natural immunity is more variable than vaccine-acquired immunity, so maybe people with low antibody titers should not be treated as immune unless they get vaccinated.

Re: Covid lesson: trust the public with hard truths

#817
post #795

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There was a gun in the house when I was a kid. Explicitly to protect the family against intruders. Number of times intrusions occurred: 0 Number of times the gun went off by accident: 2 Number of times a drunken adult gave the gun, loaded, to a kid: 1

Irresponsibility and negligence are certainly sad but not very good reasons why people should be stripped of the ability to defend themself and their loved ones

They are precisely the best of reasons why people should be stripped of such dangerous things. We don't let average people fly airplanes, neither should we let average people shoot firearms.

Right after evil, incompetence is the next worst thing for handling dangerous tools.

Re: Covid lesson: trust the public with hard truths

#818
post #313

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In my opinion the biggest example of this was the poor mask guidance early on in the pandemic that was subsequently reversed. Zeynep Tufekci had a very good piece in the NYT on this: https://www.nytimes.com/2020/03/17/opinion/coronavirus-face-... The real fear was that there would be a run on masks by the public, making them unavailable for hospital use. Also, at the time, there wasn't clear evidence of the effective…

This matches a lot of my own experience in trying to convince people to take reasonable precautions and get vaccinated. And I was one of the first in line for my age group in my state. You have to do things to build trust first, and you have to be willing to admit that some of the measures taken are farcical and have no basis in science. People will listen to a reasonable, nuanced discussion. They won't listen to som…

> People will listen to a reasonable, nuanced discussion.

Is this actually true in the today's world of social media and 24x7 news cycle? I honestly can't think of anywhere (of any popularity) that still engages in nuanced discussion. Probably because people don't tune in.

Re: Covid lesson: trust the public with hard truths

#819

Earlier quoted context omitted.

@nuerow cited nytimes[0] on the 95% estimate in another comment[1]. for the purposes of my argument, the precise number isn’t important, just that it equates to “most”. and incidentally, that’s the shape of most arguments on most things, because we’re embedded in unbounded uncertainty. the most precision we can have about most things is ‘a little’, ‘some’, ‘a bunch’, ‘most’, etc., not something like 54.736%, despite…

I think precision also matters when dealing with large numbers. If it's 60% plus/minus 30%, not such big deal if dealing with 10 people, it'd be either 3, 6, or 9 people, a range of 6 people. But if it's plus/minus 30% when dealing with a population of 100,000,000, that's a range of 60,000,000 people. That being said, yes, I agree there are many situations where precision doesn't matter that much and that qualifiers…

yes, it’s miscalibrations of risk, but not necessarily numerical imprecision, that prods my reaction. it’s possible to kill grandma, in many different ways, but it’s not probable, unless intentionally reckless or malevolent. risk is inherent to life, and we need to be continually adjusting our risk assessments so that our individual and collective behaviors approach consistency.

Re: Covid lesson: trust the public with hard truths

#820

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think precision also matters when dealing with large numbers. If it's 60% plus/minus 30%, not such big deal if dealing with 10 people, it'd be either 3, 6, or 9 people, a range of 6 people. But if it's plus/minus 30% when dealing with a population of 100,000,000, that's a range of 60,000,000 people. That being said, yes, I agree there are many situations where precision doesn't matter that much and that qualifiers…

yes, it’s miscalibrations of risk, but not necessarily numerical imprecision, that prods my reaction. it’s possible to kill grandma, in many different ways, but it’s not probable, unless intentionally reckless or malevolent. risk is inherent to life, and we need to be continually adjusting our risk assessments so that our individual and collective behaviors approach consistency.

I think the challenge with "easily" "possible" and "probable" is that they are imprecise and often very subjective. One person's "possible" could be another person's "probable."

Looking at stats from Nov 2020 for infection fatality rates[1] (I didn't know the difference among infection fatality rates, case fatality rates, and crude mortality rates until after I had read this[2]), a female over the age of 80 who contracts covid-19 had a 5.759% chance of dying, or approximately a 1 in 17 chance. Is that probable or possible? I suppose it might be relative to one's normal chance of dying. Perhaps her odds of dying from breaking her hip are much higher and therefore much more probable, so covid becomes a possible cause of death. But also, that was for 80 and above, so maybe at 100 the odds are much higher than 1 in 17. However, with new monoclonal antibodies perhaps they're much lower.

I think sometimes I struggle to have conversations on accuracy of risk calculations without getting more precision. Yes, I don't think it needs to go into 4 decimal places, as that precision is very hard to achieve in non-engineering settings as you had mentioned. I also think sometimes words can be way too nebulous and imprecise to bring clarity between two people, as I've done a lot of work with language, emotions, and conflict, and very often (how often is very often?), conflict comes down to different interpretations of the same word.

[1]: https://www.acsh.org/news/2020/11/18/covid-infection-fatalit... [2]: https://ourworldindata.org/mortality-risk-covid

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