A thing not addressed
Was it the cost benefit of less people dying or our entire health system collapsing and causing massive more deaths.
Fine, I'll run a regression analysis but it won't make you happy
161–170 of 341 posts
Re: Fine, I'll run a regression analysis but it won't make you happy
#162I don't know about other countries but in Austria nurses were highly incentivized to report deaths immediately following a vaccination or weeks after an infection has passed as a covid death in the sense of national statistics. I would not be surprised if this "nudging" of on the ground reports over the course of the pandemic has rendered the data around covid deaths unreliable.
In the US, deaths within 28 days of a positive covid test were counted as a covid death, unless they were vaccinated, in which case they also had to be sick (IIRC). So our data about how many lives vaccination saved is really corrupt, the unvaccinated count higher than it should be.
On top of that there was also monetary incentive for hospitals to add covid as a cause of death for anyone who died.
Re: Fine, I'll run a regression analysis but it won't make you happy
#163Earlier 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’m not convinced by the argument in your second paragraph. It actually makes it seem like arbitrary means exactly “based on judgment or choice” if it can be replaced so easily with “a wide range of”. How was the “wide range” chosen, if not arbitrarily?
It means something like "any randomly chosen manipulation is possible", or "so many possibilities that I don't feel like listing them, anything you can think of will probably work".
Re: Fine, I'll run a regression analysis but it won't make you happy
#164>> This wasn’t intended as any sort of super-duper hot take, and I pared the post down to avoid having too much of an attack surface. It is intended to shame Republicans. What other possible reason is there to tie death rates to political party? So yes it was a hot take. You planted a lightning rod. Making something like vaccination a political issue does everyone a disservice.
It also shames Democrats to an extent because they were more likely to support restrictions before the vaccines.
Re: Fine, I'll run a regression analysis but it won't make you happy
#165Re: Fine, I'll run a regression analysis but it won't make you happy
#166Earlier quoted context omitted.
Considering the incredibly close vote margins that carried 2016, Nate had one of the most accurate models of interpreting poll data available.
Or he got lucky, as next time he wasn’t even close in his predictions
By "not even close" do you mean he called 48 states correctly?
Re: Fine, I'll run a regression analysis but it won't make you happy
#167I don't know about other countries but in Austria nurses were highly incentivized to report deaths immediately following a vaccination or weeks after an infection has passed as a covid death in the sense of national statistics. I would not be surprised if this "nudging" of on the ground reports over the course of the pandemic has rendered the data around covid deaths unreliable.
In the US, deaths within 28 days of a positive covid test were counted as a covid death, unless they were vaccinated, in which case they also had to be sick (IIRC). So our data about how many lives vaccination saved is really corrupt, the unvaccinated count higher than it should be. On top of that there was also monetary incentive for hospitals to add covid as a cause of death for anyone who died.
Could you source those claims please? I don't mean to come off as critical, I'm just curious to read the stated rationale.
Re: Fine, I'll run a regression analysis but it won't make you happy
#168It was a hard thing to broach at the time without people frothing at the mouth about how I must be anti vaccine or something: Has there been any attempt to calculate the cost-benefit of all the various measures and how extreme we should go with them? I’m guessing it’s hard to quantify and compare. A lot of things like general depression, isolation, kids missing half a year of school, etc. can’t really be evaluated ag…
Most people don't even know how to mentally frame the problem. It's the number of life years lost that matters, not the number of lives, e.g. the death of a child with their whole life before them is worse than the death of an elderly person who's already on deaths door. Current statitics focus solely on number of deaths rather than expected years of life lost so we can't even make a fair assessment of the trade-offs…
Most people don't even know how to mentally frame the problem.
This is ironic in a comment otherwise concerned with death rates.
The risk of disablement is much higher, as is the risk of sequelae.
Re: Fine, I'll run a regression analysis but it won't make you happy
#169Earlier quoted context omitted.
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".
In fact, I just had cause to use the term again, which prompted me to return here to describe my usage a little bit more.
I was documenting a configuration file, and noted that one particular value was chosen "arbitrarily". What I meant by that (and what I am reasonably confident that my audience would understand) is that my choice of that value was not influenced by any other concerns - I did not have to make sure it matched some other value in the file (or in another configuration value), or that it conformed to some enumeration of permitted or significant values.
So - yes, I was technically stating that the value was "the result of a judgement or choice", but _much more strongly_ I was stressing the fact that (personal) judgement was the _only_ factor in the selection, not conformance to other prior values, rules, or restrictions. So - not purely random, but in some sense "closer" to random than to pre-determined.
I agree with you here (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37731820) that entirely throwing away the meaning of the word "arbitrary" and making it a synonym for "random" would not be useful - but I don't think that's what's proposed. Arbitrary is (and, I believe, always has been) a word which stresses the importance of choice and judgement - but sometimes that means "strongly considered judgement was applied here to select the optimal option", and other times it can mean "any selection which you choose is probably satisfactory here - there are no hidden constraints, rules, or requirements".
Re: Fine, I'll run a regression analysis but it won't make you happy
#170It was a hard thing to broach at the time without people frothing at the mouth about how I must be anti vaccine or something: Has there been any attempt to calculate the cost-benefit of all the various measures and how extreme we should go with them? I’m guessing it’s hard to quantify and compare. A lot of things like general depression, isolation, kids missing half a year of school, etc. can’t really be evaluated ag…
I think that's kind of with the benefit of hindsight though. In 2020 we really didn't know if this stuff would kill everyone or just be a nuisance/deadly if you're vulnerable.
We did know by April at least (IIRC basically right after that cruise ship docked). Wikipedia for example [0] had CFR stats broken down by age group showing it was basically a nuisance to people under 50 and only breaking 1% mortality for people over 60 (i.e. it didn't affect children or the working population, so closing schools was known at the time to be a stupid idea. IIRC Fox News were pointing this out at the time), and IIRC at the time the CDC was estimating ~30% asymptomatic cases, so an even lower IFR.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=COVID-19&oldid=94...