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A case for ending lockdown

ryankemper.io

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Re: A case for ending lockdown

#61

Post by ryankemper »

JadeNB wrote: post #5
ryankemper wrote: post #2

If it's not obvious, I wrote this. The intent is to be a fairly comprehensive coverage of what we know about COVID-19 and what it means for our policy. Note that the article is written from a US-based perspective although I suspect it's relevant to a broader audience. In general, I believe that the case against lockdown has been highly stigmatized and thus many people have not been exposed to a convincing argument of…

Having, as you suggested, skipped just to the TL;DR, this bit jumped out at me as something that we very much don't know is true, and that it's dangerous to assume is true without proof: > Once you get sick, you can’t get sick again for a long time. Eventually you might be able to get sick again, but it will not be very bad. When enough people have gotten sick and then gotten better, the sickness can’t spread any mor…

https://gitlab.com/ryankemper/writings/-/commit/9071eebf0964...

Typo fixed! I think I've found at least 15 typos total now. Oops...

Re: A case for ending lockdown

#62

Post by cjhopman »

cjhopman wrote: post #60
uniqueid wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I still trust HN content more than other sites. The average age here is probably a decade older than Reddit, and people here value rationality, even if we sometimes fail to exhibit it.

That's a good point. The stated goals or objectives or values of a community or collective actually do have significant impact on the behavior of that community. It's too bad that HN generally doesn't recognize that when looking at things like Google's "Don't be evil".

As an example, Amazon is fairly well-known in the industry as having a set of principles and with the fact that those are often described as having been weaponized to support people's positions. I actually think that weaponization of principles or slogans or mottos is not uncommon. Different principles, though, have different flexibility on how far they can be used to justify things (i.e "focus on the user" has different flexibility than "move fast and break things" or "don't be evil").

Re: A case for ending lockdown

#63

Post by ryankemper »

cjhopman wrote: post #53
cjhopman wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm sorry but I can't take serious something that claims to take an impartial look at all the evidence related to the lockdown but then tries its damnedest to present all possible negatives it could without doing the same for positives. For example, there's clear evidence that the lockdown has decreased lives lost to traffic accidents but that appears nowhere here. And then when actually looking at it, it's full of p…

Here's more random stream of consciousness about this: > Pareto Mitigation: An evidence-based approach I love how this uses "evidence-based" as a dogwhistle followed by proposing an approach without providing any sort of evidence about the efficacy of the approach. > Those who have lost their jobs tend to be those workers who are in a lower socio-economic bracket and have jobs that do not allow one to “work from home…

Well, being the author I am certainly biased, but I don't think you've wasted your time :)

Thanks for the feedback. I think the dog-whistle part is quite true. I will need to circle back and add citations where I can. Particularly given that one of the thematic elements is that the lockdown is not based upon evidence.

> There seems to be excessive use of bolding random segments of sentences. I don't know if this is just a stylistic thing, but ¯\_(ツ)_/¯.

I was worried about this being distracting. I think particularly bolding segments within a sentence is definitely distracting, so I will (eventually) try to clean that up.

> On suicides, it seems like most of the argument should be verifiable from data (i.e. by its claims, we should be able to see an actual increase in suicide deaths). Is that data not available yet?

As far as I know it's not, but I'm not entirely sure where to go looking for weekly suicide data. I've only been able to find data over much longer intervals. This is where being an actual expert would probably help! :P

> this is clearly a plea to the emotions of a specific subset of the population

Just to bite of a piece of this before I conclude here, I personally think that a shift to censorship on such a wide scale is absolutely something to raise a bit of moral panic about. The new usage of the term "disinformation" has hit a point of Orwellian double-speak.

Re: A case for ending lockdown

#64

Post by dang »

williamstein wrote: post #17
ryankemper wrote: post #2

If it's not obvious, I wrote this. The intent is to be a fairly comprehensive coverage of what we know about COVID-19 and what it means for our policy. Note that the article is written from a US-based perspective although I suspect it's relevant to a broader audience. In general, I believe that the case against lockdown has been highly stigmatized and thus many people have not been exposed to a convincing argument of…

I found a typo: "incredible stess" --> "incredible stress". This is well written. Thank you. It's wrong that this post is currently flagged.

We turned off the flags. I haven't read the article, but it seems thoughtful enough, and the thread substantive enough, to count as on topic here.

Re: A case for ending lockdown

#65

Post by ryankemper »

cjhopman wrote: post #57
cjhopman wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm sorry but I can't take serious something that claims to take an impartial look at all the evidence related to the lockdown but then tries its damnedest to present all possible negatives it could without doing the same for positives. For example, there's clear evidence that the lockdown has decreased lives lost to traffic accidents but that appears nowhere here. And then when actually looking at it, it's full of p…

> Specifically, once the proportion of recovered in the population reaches 1/(1-R_0), there are no longer enough vectors (infectable indviduals) remaining for a serious outbreak to occur. It’s worth noting that this is the same principle that vaccination relies upon; vaccination is just an artificial way to build immunity without having to undergo a full infection. I should learn to never read anything from random pe…

I'm sure you're getting weary at this point, but I really need your help understanding what you're saying here, because to me it seems supremely untrue.

First, `1/1-R_0`. This is exactly what Wikipedia says: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Herd_immunity#Mechanics

And it makes intuitive sense that once you infect > The idea that vaccination and epidemics need the same percent of immunity is completely 100% wrong. An active epidemic is going to infect way more people before dying out than the simple, naive herd immunity calculation will give you. In fact, while an r0 of 2 indicates that you get herd immunity with just 50% of the population, a typical active epidemic with the same r0 would infect 80+% before dying out.

This doesn't make any sense to me. Vaccination is just an artificial way to build immunity. So I don't understand your active epidemic point at all. Or put another way, as the proportion of % recovered goes up, we start approaching the eventual limit where `1/1-R_0`->1. That is to say, in your example we start with R_0 = 2, then as people recover that value slowly starts decreasing until it hits 1 at the herd immunity threshold. It's not clear to me what the discrepancy you're detecting is here.

Re: A case for ending lockdown

#66

Post by dang »

uniqueid wrote: post #43
sethc2 wrote: post #22

Why was this flagged? I don’t even necessarily agree with the author’s arguments and conclusion, and honestly I have no clue what to think with all the information I hear that is constantly changing from the various tribes. But when something gets flagged simply because he advocates for ending the lockdown, I go from thinking the lockdown is probably necessary and trust the decision is made for reasons I don’t unders…

This is not a great place to start... > I’m a software / site reliability engineer > based out of Santa Barbara, California. Given the stakes, we should have a preference for Coronavirus articles written by experts. It's fine for authors to trash the WHO or to disagree with the government, but they should have the chops if the rest of us are going to upvote them. I'm disappointed with the HN community. The past few w…

There have also been many articles by experts. I'd be careful about making general conclusions based on what you remember, because most of us are far more likely to notice and remember the things we disliked (https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...).

More importantly, though, there may be a misunderstanding about what HN is. It's an internet watercooler, the purpose of which is gratifying curiosity and having curious conversation. Inevitably that involves dabbling, speculating, and getting things wrong. That's part of what people do when they converse. Does that have downsides, especially in a crisis? Of course it does. But I don't think it would be a solution to try to stop the community from hammering this out.

More here:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22578300

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22973700

Re: A case for ending lockdown

#67

Post by ryankemper »

cjhopman wrote: post #53
cjhopman wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm sorry but I can't take serious something that claims to take an impartial look at all the evidence related to the lockdown but then tries its damnedest to present all possible negatives it could without doing the same for positives. For example, there's clear evidence that the lockdown has decreased lives lost to traffic accidents but that appears nowhere here. And then when actually looking at it, it's full of p…

Here's more random stream of consciousness about this: > Pareto Mitigation: An evidence-based approach I love how this uses "evidence-based" as a dogwhistle followed by proposing an approach without providing any sort of evidence about the efficacy of the approach. > Those who have lost their jobs tend to be those workers who are in a lower socio-economic bracket and have jobs that do not allow one to “work from home…

> This is maybe the strangest section. Why does this just talk about a hero culture related to real scientists? Do we think that people are more likely to think some nerdy scientist is a hero rather than our heroic manly president? This seems like it should be a point in support of lockdown to me (tbh, it seems like it shouldn't be a point at all, it's just an attempt to discredit experts).

Sorry to bombard you with replies, but I realized I never addressed this.

I think you might have a different idea of what "hero" means, basically all I meant is that we tend to elevate these figures (Fauci in this case) up as "heroes" and therefore act like they are infallible and thus you cannot express an opinion that contradicts them. That is what I was arguing against.

It's not about "hero" in the sense of, like, what a young child would imagine a hero is. So in the sense I'm using it, people totally do view the "nerdy scientist" (Fauci) as a hero. And I understand why they do.

> This seems like it should be a point in support of lockdown to me (tbh, it seems like it shouldn't be a point at all, it's just an attempt to discredit experts)

No, it's not discrediting them, it's just saying: evaluate policies and statements on their merits, not based on simply who said them.

I hope that makes sense.

Thanks again for all your thoughtful feedback. You clearly put time into it (and a good bit of frustration, understandably :P)

Re: A case for ending lockdown

#68

Post by dang »

cjhopman wrote: post #45
uniqueid wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is not a great place to start... > I’m a software / site reliability engineer > based out of Santa Barbara, California. Given the stakes, we should have a preference for Coronavirus articles written by experts. It's fine for authors to trash the WHO or to disagree with the government, but they should have the chops if the rest of us are going to upvote them. I'm disappointed with the HN community. The past few w…

> I'm disappointed with the HN community. The past few weeks, most of the medical articles to hit the front page have been written by dabblers. Honestly, that shouldn't be surprising. AFAICT, the only way in which the HN community exceeds some random subreddit is in thinking highly of itself. HN itself combined with hckrnews.com provides an okay enough ui and mix of random interesting articles that makes it still bea…

The HN community doesn't think anything. It's a collection of millions of people. Some of those people think highly of HN, while others think poorly of it and are not shy about saying so, including on this site. I'd caution against making generalizations based on what you happen to notice here, because it's mostly the things we dislike (for example, people thinking too highly of themselves) which stick in our memory and our craw.

https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...

Re: A case for ending lockdown

#69

Post by ryankemper »

new_realist wrote: post #58
ryankemper wrote: post #2

If it's not obvious, I wrote this. The intent is to be a fairly comprehensive coverage of what we know about COVID-19 and what it means for our policy. Note that the article is written from a US-based perspective although I suspect it's relevant to a broader audience. In general, I believe that the case against lockdown has been highly stigmatized and thus many people have not been exposed to a convincing argument of…

Do you think that your experience of looking for a job in the middle of the lockdown might have introduced subconscious bias into your argument?

No, not at all. I quit my job of my own volition, and have several years of living expenses in liquid financial assets. Most people are not that lucky.

Additionally, the two companies that I had narrowed the search down to did not freeze hiring. Pretty lucky, since tons of companies did, although I constrained my search to remote jobs only so that's probably why.

I accepted a job offer and start soon, actually.

That being said, I do think that the general experience of being jobless during this has made me more sympathetic of those that truly lost their jobs than I otherwise would have. Which is not to say that I wouldn't have been sympathetic, I absolutely would have, but the fact that I had to deal with COBRA and other fun artifacts definitely made things a bit more tangible for me.

Excellent point/question.

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