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Fine, I'll run a regression analysis but it won't make you happy

natesilver.net

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Re: Fine, I'll run a regression analysis but it won't make you happy

#71

Post by brianpan »

SilverBirch wrote: post #8

I think the funny thing is that Nate can be a flippant twit on Twitter but has totally fallen for it in critiques of him. Essentially this article is “a bunch of people baselessly speculated about an assertion I made, so I’m going to spend lots of time proving something they don’t care about”

"Bunch of people" doesn't seem like a good characterization considering he's at least partially responding to Martin Kulldorff, a professor of medicine and biostatistician at Harvard and a co-author of the GBD.

Re: Fine, I'll run a regression analysis but it won't make you happy

#72

Post by sieste »

sokoloff wrote: post #23
bugglebeetle wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Covid is now here to stay, ranking somewhere in severity between the common cold, flu or pneumonia. I know it’s ideologically motivated, but it’s surprising people just bold-faced lie about the impact of COVID, when the stats are there for everyone to see. In the US, COVID is on track to kill ~200K people this year: https://covid.cdc.gov/covid-data-tracker The cold and flu will not kill anywhere near this number, p…

Is that tracking deaths from COVID or deaths with COVID? I have doubts that the numbers are not overstated (by how much, I'm not sure). Looking at CDC data for excess deaths from Jan through July 2023*, excess deaths have averaged around 1.7%. Deaths reported as being due to COVID are running at 2.7%. Annualizing and turning the data back to excess deaths, that means of the ~200K people that "COVID is on track to kil…

The death from/with covid distinction is only relevant here if there is a systematic difference in over/under reporting of covid deaths between red and blue states. If it's a constant bias regardless of state, it would not change the conclusion of the article. And it could only change the conclusion of the article directionally if covid deaths in red states are significantly overreported compared to blue states.

Re: Fine, I'll run a regression analysis but it won't make you happy

#73

Post by scubbo »

PheonixPharts wrote: post #57
KerrAvon wrote: post #2

This is all fine, but the focus on deaths is sort of missing the larger societal problem. The COVID devastation is also about long COVID, and even people who had COVID but either recovered “fully” or never displayed symptoms. None of this is over, and we are so, so fucked. edit: Which is to say: The Great Barrington Declaration was wrong directionally as well. We really needed to optimize to eliminate COVID as much a…

> None of this is over, and we are so, so fucked. I love doom more than the average person, by what I would say is a quite significant margin... but I don't see this at all. I've had covid at least twice, including some awful symptoms a month after recovery that had me convinced I had long covid as well... a few months later (now years) not so much. While I do know many people of who have lost loved ones from Covid,…

> I don't know anyone, or know anyone who knows anyone who has any serious "long-covid" symptoms.

You are fortunate. I know several who have those symptoms (ranging in age from my own - mid-30's - to my parents' - early 60's), and have had several friends relate their own observations of loved-ones. If Long Covid isn't real, there's an astonishingly-coincidental prevalence of fatigue and impaired cognition from some other source, which is correlated with those who (from my own observations) took less precautions regarding Covid and/or who caught it more often.

I recognize the irony of responding to your anecdata with my own. No, I don't have any hard data to provide - though given the partisanship observed in the reporting of COVID _itself_, I have somewhat lost faith in the availability of trustworthy data about public health.

Re: Fine, I'll run a regression analysis but it won't make you happy

#74

Post by [deleted] »

diogenes4 wrote: post #63
staticfloat wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, that’s what it means for me. I’ve never heard someone use the word arbitrary to mean anything other than “a random choice”, or even “a poorly thought-out choice”. My professors in grad school explicitly discouraged use of that word anywhere in technical writing, as they felt it would immediately give the reader the impression that the actions taken in the research were not thought through. Example: “This new tec…

> I’ve never heard someone use the word arbitrary to mean anything other than “a random choice”, or even “a poorly thought-out choice”. That's shocking, I use it to mean "the result of a judgement or decision" about a dozen times a day, such as "it's not random, it's arbitrary". I had no clue people had an alternative definition for it. I'm even more surprised that otherwise ostensibly-educated people have no clue ab…

[deleted]

Re: Fine, I'll run a regression analysis but it won't make you happy

#75

Post by Racing0461 »

KerrAvon wrote: post #2

This is all fine, but the focus on deaths is sort of missing the larger societal problem. The COVID devastation is also about long COVID, and even people who had COVID but either recovered “fully” or never displayed symptoms. None of this is over, and we are so, so fucked. edit: Which is to say: The Great Barrington Declaration was wrong directionally as well. We really needed to optimize to eliminate COVID as much a…

[flagged]

Re: Fine, I'll run a regression analysis but it won't make you happy

#76

Post by scubbo »

diogenes4 wrote: post #60
burkaman wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think the word "arbitrary" is currently undergoing any change, it hasn't been used the way you use it in like 400+ years.

Wait, so what does arbitrary mean to you if not "the result of a judgement or choice"? Is it just a synonym for random to you?

Seconding, here, that I've almost-always heard arbitrary/arbitrarily to mean (slightly differently than the sibling commenter) "able to be chosen freely, without any loss of generality"; though, yes, I have also heard your usage of "by personal judgement, disregarding established rules or convention".

Re: Fine, I'll run a regression analysis but it won't make you happy

#77

Post by newZWhoDis »

b112 wrote: post #32
noirbot wrote: post #3

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I haven't read the specifics of the GBD, but isn't some of the "it was clearly quackery" confounded by: 1. In 2020 especially, and even now, the specifics of long covid and other side effects, as compared to other downsides of lockdowns on mental health/delayed treatments are hard to predict? We don't have the counterfactual of what would have been the 3-5-10 year implications of a multi-year lockdown. 2. Does the ge…

The problem is, even lockdowns weren't lockdowns. There were endless people who had to work, just to keep water, power, food flowing. And those people needed transportation. And past 2 weeks, transportation means parts for vehicles, maintenance, gas, oil, and food means transportation and food processors and.... It was a good idea at the time, but doomed to fail.

Where I come from, “good ideas doomed to fail” are called “bad ideas”

Re: Fine, I'll run a regression analysis but it won't make you happy

#78

Post by Hammershaft »

onthecanposting wrote: post #37
SilverBirch wrote: post #8

I think the funny thing is that Nate can be a flippant twit on Twitter but has totally fallen for it in critiques of him. Essentially this article is “a bunch of people baselessly speculated about an assertion I made, so I’m going to spend lots of time proving something they don’t care about”

Typical narcissist. I'll always think of Nate Silver as the bedraggled man with a mid-range stare on election night 2016. Silver's utility is limited to knowing what the establishment talking points are.

Considering the incredibly close vote margins that carried 2016, Nate had one of the most accurate models of interpreting poll data available.

Re: Fine, I'll run a regression analysis but it won't make you happy

#79

Post by sokoloff »

sieste wrote: post #72
sokoloff wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is that tracking deaths from COVID or deaths with COVID? I have doubts that the numbers are not overstated (by how much, I'm not sure). Looking at CDC data for excess deaths from Jan through July 2023*, excess deaths have averaged around 1.7%. Deaths reported as being due to COVID are running at 2.7%. Annualizing and turning the data back to excess deaths, that means of the ~200K people that "COVID is on track to kil…

The death from/with covid distinction is only relevant here if there is a systematic difference in over/under reporting of covid deaths between red and blue states. If it's a constant bias regardless of state, it would not change the conclusion of the article. And it could only change the conclusion of the article directionally if covid deaths in red states are significantly overreported compared to blue states.

GP was claiming COVID was on track to kill ~200K in the US this year *

If that's the case, it seems reasonable to compare that claim to the total excess deaths in the country. Nothing to do with red or blue states.

* - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37729830

Re: Fine, I'll run a regression analysis but it won't make you happy

#80

Post by School-Cotton »

loeg wrote: post #49
cptskippy wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think it very much depends on where you live. Rural America returned to normal a long time ago. Many cities, like San Francisco and Atlanta, have not and are still feeling the effects to varying degrees.

Urban American returned to normal a few months later than Rural America, but we're talking like, April 2022. SF is still suffering from some dynamics that started during COVID but it's not like there are still lockdowns or compulsory masking or anything like that.

> we're talking like, April 2022

Masks were mandated on the subway in New York until September 2022. I'd consider this to not be "normality".

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