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

Coronavirus and Credibility

paulgraham.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

541–550 of 968 posts

Re: Coronavirus and Credibility

#541

Post by yibg »

I think one of the issues here is incentive. Politicians' incentives don't always align with those of the population. In this case they can put out a strong warning and start acting with lockdowns etc or say everything is fine.

If they say everything is fine, then either 1) things are, in which case they look good after the fact for remaining calm or 2) things go south and they can deflect and point to other countries that are in the same boat.

If on the other hand they warn of incoming disaster and lock things down, still one of two things happen. 1) everything is indeed fine and they get destroyed for crashing the economy. or 2) the economy gets locked down and the pandemic isn't so severe. But the damage to the economy is still there and there will be no higher death count that could've happened to compare against. In this case they probably won't get much credit either.

So it seems to them then start acting early brings no benefits and only downsides.

Re: Coronavirus and Credibility

#542

Post by throwawaylolx »

jacquesm wrote: post #506
throwawaylolx wrote: post #495

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is a nonsensical approach unless you consider the damage caused by overprotective measures such as the rapidly increasing number of people who are filling for unemployment every day.

Right. So, in your opinion, how many people would you be willing to give up for the economy? What ages? Prior conditions? What about yourself? Your family? We've been conditioned over the last 100+ years that life - especially life of white people, but never mind that bit - is precious. So now, when white people's lives are in danger you suddenly want to go all super rational and equate lives with paying out unemploy…

GDP correlates with life expectancy, so you can't separate deaths and economy as if they were behaving in isolation from each other like you seem to assume in your tantrum.

Re: Coronavirus and Credibility

#543

Post by usaar333 »

adjkant wrote: post #424
2bitencryption wrote: post #396

One thing I've had trouble reconciling is the fact that the CDC estimates 24k-63k deaths from the flu this flu season[0] We just passed 10k from covid-19. Only last week a "low" estimation of covid deaths this year was 200k. So it seems the expectation is there will be many, many more, and we're just at the start of all this. On the other hand, it also seems this week like the infamous curve is beginning to flatten,…

The thing missing here is that you're looking at deaths without looking at number of cases of each. The flu causes the number of deaths it does because it infects tens of millions of people a year[0]. The death rate is an order of magnitude lower than with COVID-19 across every single age bracket. [2] So when people say things like: > "I'm not worried about getting this illness" They are likely not considering that e…

> They are likely not considering that even the younger are taking as much as a 1% risk of their life, which is incredibly high. Depending on factors like the load on the medical community at the time and others, it can get as high as 5% or more quite easily as we have seen around the world. Currently using only napkin math from the numbers here[1], the death rate is currently at just under 4% over all age groups in the US.

Those are pretty high numbers. Using a Lancet study (https://www.thelancet.com/journals/laninf/article/PIIS1473-3...), IFR is just under 0.1% for a 30 something year old. Hospitalization rates are at 3.5% (2-7% confidence), so a death rate (for 30 year olds) even under a collapsing medical systems for younger people is highly unlikely to get close to 5%.

All said, a 0.1% death rate is still pretty dangerous and catching the disease is something like raising your risk of death by 50% in a given year. Lockdowns are still justified under those numbers.

> Finally, flu deaths almost exclusively happen in the immunocompromised and elderly, while COVID-19 affects younger people a LOT more.

Well, and old people even more. Are the relative risk ratios actually different for covid vs. flu - or are we just seeing the effect of a disease that is 7xish a really bad flu season?

(For young children actually, I believe covid outcomes are better than flu.)

Re: Coronavirus and Credibility

#544

Post by bo1024 »

btilly wrote: post #378

There is nothing about what has happened that should surprise anyone who has read the book Superforecasting . It explains that we naturally trust people who sound smart, well-informed, and CONFIDENT. We don't want to hear uncertainty, probabilities, or the other signs of someone who thinks in a careful quantitative way. We want to accept a cognitively simple answer, then move on. This is what we find comfortable. How…

There is some really interesting interplay here between forecasting and decisionmaking. (Taleb would have a lot to say here, along the lines of "forecasters are poor.") Maybe it makes sense that forecasts should be measured, but decisions should be, well, decisive.

A good Bayesian should be able to make confident decisions based on information available at the moment, while acknowledging that lack of information is leading to suboptimal decisions.

For example, a leader can be absolutely confident that shelter-in-place is the best decision based on the available information, while acknowledging that there is missing information that would drastically change this assessment.

Re: Coronavirus and Credibility

#545

Post by alacombe »

imgabe wrote: post #77
bsaul wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

i've been saying "not more dangerous than the flu" before it started really going to shxt in europe, because to be honest, the epidemic doesn't look that dangerous if you're in general good health, just by looking at the numbers from a distance. The fact that most people seem to not have anything worse than a few days of fever (some having even nothing at all), while at the same time others simply die very quickly to…

Comparing annual death totals for the flu to coronavirus deaths over a couple of months is mistake number 1. Comparing a number that is static from year to year to one that is growing exponentially is mistake number 2.

and comparing "estimated contamination cases vs associated death" to "a known-positive cases vs. associated death" is mistake number 3.

CDC data shows 220k known-tested-positive case and 22k associated death. The 36 millions case is pulled out of a hat. As per these number, seasonal flu kills 10% of the known-positive cases.

Re: Coronavirus and Credibility

#546

Post by javagram »

abstractbarista wrote: post #531

Honestly, it actually hasn't been materially worse than the flu yet. So this article's premise is basically worthless. We have 70k dead as of 3/6/2020 and it's already slowing. The flu kills between 290,000 and 650,000 worldwide yearly, according to the WHO. The actual "damage" this virus has "caused", which the flu doesn't, is the economic shock of everyone being forced at once to not go out and spend. We have right…

Your comparison doesn’t make sense, the same measures we are using to save lives from coronavirus also stop the spread of the flu. For instance in Hong Kong the flu season ended 3 months early because they began social distancing in January to protect themselves from coronavirus.

The difference is the flu is much less deadly than coronavirus when you catch it. The only reason flu deaths are higher for the year at the moment is because the flu is already spread worldwide starting every year in flu season, which begins around September/October in the northern hemisphere, whereas Coronavirus didn’t even emerge in humans till late November/December, was highly localized to one region of China and transmission out of china was slowed by a dramatic lockdown of 750 million chinese citizens and travel restrictions placed by external countries in January.

The video Paul Graham references includes many examples of people saying they aren’t worried about the disease and that even if they catch it there’s no reason to be worried, in reality we are seeing plenty of relatively healthy people who would not have been killed by flu dying from the disease.

Re: Coronavirus and Credibility

#547

Post by smsm42 »

tekkk wrote: post #441
jonnycoder wrote: post #398

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't agree with you that it's scary that the admin's approval rating climbs. If anything it's positive news. People close to me, particularly females, who previously were anti-Trump have been changing their tune and some are considering voting for him in upcoming election for the level of leadership and openness since the covid19 stuff started. That's the opposite of polarization, at least anecdotally.

That's insane. Shouldn't it be the opposite as he famously called it a hoax and so on? Disregarding whatever nonsense he has said on many past occasions. Oh well. In this case I'd only quote George Carlin here: "The public sucks".

> he famously called it a hoax

He did not. If you read it in some news article, please do yourself a favor and do not use this news source anymore. If somebody of your friends told you that, please keep loving them as friends but accept anything they say with a grain of salt as they may be more gullible than you thought.

What Trump actually said is that his opponents suggestion that he doesn't do enough to counter the epidemic is the next hoax (previous one obviously being, in his opinion, the impeachment proceedings). This is somewhat unusual application of word "hoax", as "hoax" usually refers to false statement of fact, and whether Trump is doing a good job is not a fact but an opinion, which you can disagree with but it can't be "hoax". What he obviously meant is that his opponents unjustifiedly accuse him of doing poor job, and he expressed it in the usual Trumpian manner, sacrificing precision for expressiveness. What he didn't ever say is that the epidemic itself is a "hoax" and everybody that told you he did, unfortunately, lied to you, either knowingly (because they hate Trump and think it's ok to sacrifice the truth for the noble goal of getting rid of Trump, somehow thinking when they do it, as opposed to Trump doing it, it's ok) or unknowingly (being deceived by the former kind).

This is one of the examples of how tribal things are. All Trump says is available in transcripts. Not many - especially from the opposing tribe - bother to read them and actually know what he says before forming (or, rather, confirming the pre-existing) opinion on the matter.

You can get the words e.g. here: https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/trump-coronavirus-rally-re... - I choose a source that is not in Trump's tribe so that there was no doubt their conclusion that Trump didn't say coronavirus is a hoax is not tribally motivated.

Re: Coronavirus and Credibility

#548

Post by _wwz4 »

Do people appreciate that denial of the severity of this virus came from all political quarters?

Here's one showing the mistakes of left-leaning media I found in 2 seconds: https://www.youtube.com/watch?time_continue=36&v=wVDPVBZF2Xg

It's just as easy to find supercuts of Pelosi, DeBlasio, and other prominent Democrats telling people that they didn't need to start social distancing or that the virus wasn't airborne contagious.

Bad judgement is a human failing that cuts across party lines. To think that this is a long-term credibility problem for only some people shows a lack of a healthy diversity of news sources. At the end of this, everyone will go back to their teams' dugouts and prepare for the next political battle. Nothing will have been learned about credibility.

Re: Coronavirus and Credibility

#549

Post by jjtheblunt »

jacquesm wrote: post #517
maps7 wrote: post #508

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think the author is off at all. Sounds spot on to me.

Here is the relevant passage: "The answer, I realized, is that they didn't think they could get caught. They didn't realize there was any danger in making false predictions. These people constantly make false predictions, and get away with it, because the things they make predictions about either have mushy enough outcomes that they can bluster their way out of trouble, or happen so far in the future that few remembe…

Daringfireball holds people accountable all the time, in particular for wrong prognostications. It's semi hilarious, in that it's relieving.

Re: Coronavirus and Credibility

#550

Post by robomartin »

Trasmatta wrote: post #535
robomartin wrote: post #522

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> In the background global warming is a much greater threat to human life and has the exact same dynamic with the exact same players Oh, please, enough already! Global warming is nowhere near to what a virus can do. This thing could have killed half the population of this planet in weeks had nobody done a thing about it. The comparison is nonsensical on many fronts. Perhaps the most significant of them is the reality…

> This thing could have killed half the population of this planet in weeks had nobody done a thing about it. What? No, there's not a single credible model that predicts that this virus could have wiped out half the population, even with 0 mitigation efforts. Such a virus is a possibility, but it certainly wasn't this one.

You clearly haven't done the math.

EDIT 1: Even if my statement is off and the number is 10% to 25% --pick a number, any number-- it is still more serious than the fantasies we have been choosing to focus on.

The calculation must also include the massive mortality rate that would result from the collapse of all supply chains, medical systems, transportation, etc. People with "minor" medical conditions would die on the streets everywhere. The virus would kill indirectly by destroying society. Think it through. If the world did nothing the loss of life would be massive.

EDIT 2: Imagine a world without hospitals (at scale), doctors, nurses, transportation, factories, food, water, medicine, power, gas, petroleum.

You are focusing on direct mortality from the virus while ignoring that, without any mitigation at all, it would absolutely destroy society.

Look at what happened in Italy. Now shut down all hospitals and remove all mitigation. Get the picture? Now, go do the math on that scenario. A scenario where people die from strokes, heart attacks, infections from cuts, appendicitis, diabetes (no drugs), hypertension, tooth infections, etc.

Post reply on HN