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Coronavirus and Credibility

paulgraham.com

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Re: Coronavirus and Credibility

#611

Post by ed_balls »

umvi wrote: post #557
throwaway5752 wrote: post #208

In the background global warming is a much greater threat to human life and has the exact same dynamic with the exact same players . There is also zero introspection - the people who were wrong about covid-19 are simply denying they said what they said. The truly scary part is they are getting away with it in real time, and changing a large populations' memory of contemporary events. I realize it's hard to remember f…

Heck, tobacco is a greater threat to human life than covid-19. How many millions die every year, year after year, because of tobacco?

vehicles killed more than WW2. Coal kills more than Chernobyl, but our instincts are bad in assessing risks like that.

Re: Coronavirus and Credibility

#612

Post by acqq »

gamblor956 wrote: post #511
AndrewBissell wrote: post #321

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I look at it a bit differently. If someone's pushing the line "just listen to the experts," then it should be acknowledged that experts do get it wrong and have massively dropped the ball on COVID-19. The signs of how lethal and contagious the virus is were there in China for anyone to read by early January. Of course, "experts (in particular our experts) don't know what they're doing" is different from "... and ther…

In hindsight, it is obvious that COVID19 was worse than SARS or MERS. But at the time, especially given China's clampdown on information outflow, it didn't appear to be significantly different from SARS, which didn't effect the West much, or MERS, which had almost no impact outside of the Middle East. But as another commenter noted, the timing matters a lot. Everyone except Fox News thought back in January that COVID…

> but based on prior coronaviruses not something that would significantly impact the West.

If we talk about a lot of media, they simply had the priority of making Chinese look bad in any possible way, including blaming them for "misinterpreting numbers" and ridiculing them for implementing lockdowns or wearing masks.

Which just shows how stupid some global agendas are. Media don't do that in vaccuum, but they are the reflection of the power of the interest groups that want to push the agenda.

Re: Coronavirus and Credibility

#613

Post by lbeltrame »

redis_mlc wrote: post #113
jordanpg wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think that at least US governments have done a poor job explaining the motivation behind the drastic precautionary orders. For a brief period, there was much talk of "flattening the curve" but I doubt that many people understand how that gets us to "deliberately wreck the economy." This is what people who say it's just flu++ are missing, and I am trying to be sympathetic to their lack of knowledge of exponential ma…

> We are doing this because there are O(10^6) preventable deaths That doesn't appear to be true. Almost everybody who goes on a ventilator dies. Corona virus will infect as many people as any other flu or cold. So it's a valid question - why do we still have a lockdown?

> Almost everybody who goes on a ventilator dies.

That wouldn't be a problem if so, to be honest. The problem is that a patient usually survives, but it takes 3 weeks in the ICU to do so.

Re: Coronavirus and Credibility

#614

Post by ChuckMcM »

The less you know, the more confident you are in believing what you are saying is accurate.

It has been my experience that as I learned more, my statements became more and more equivocal until these days I tend to think more about various probabilities of what might be correct. I miss the surety of youthful opinion.

Re: Coronavirus and Credibility

#615

Post by crusso »

javagram wrote: post #562
_wwz4 wrote: post #548

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 c…

It did come from all political quarters, however one political quarter stayed in denial much longer. Notice how many of the clips from your video are from January or early February. The POTUS was still publicly pushing the coronavirus = flu comparison in early March even after we saw what happened in Iran and Italy. Remember, he said on February 28 that being worried about the coronavirus was “their new hoax” from th…

however one political quarter stayed in denial much longer

Now you're splitting hairs. You know who the first politician in the USA who was banging the drums in alarm about Wuhan and the coronavirus? Tom Cotton. Republican Senator. Do you support him now? Does his early conviction of the severity of this event put you behind him and everyone who echoed his concerns? Are you likewise now opposed to the people who were ridiculing him as a conspiracy theorist and fear-monger?

Re: Coronavirus and Credibility

#616

Post by chickenpotpie »

standardUser wrote: post #428
rayuela wrote: post #295

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Totally agree with this. This is something you can clearly see in Trump's approval rating, which just reached the highest levels of his entire tenure [1]. Things are only getting more polarizing, but the really scary thing is that this admin's approval rating climbs the worse things get and it is worrying to see this incentive structure :(

There has been a lot written on this in the last week. The consensus is that Trump has received a historically tiny increase in approval rating when compared to other presidents in moments of crisis, and that this bump has all but disappeared already. Trump's post inauguration "bump" was similarly brief and mild.

Comparing this to 9/11, which in the end will most likely taken far less American lives, it really is a tiny increase. George Bush's approval rating went up about 30%. Trump's moved a single digit amount.

Re: Coronavirus and Credibility

#617

Post by BeetleB »

enraged_camel wrote: post #323
drocer88 wrote: post #275

If you're getting your "news" from CNN/Fox/MSNBC, or "gathering evidence" to promote one the two permitted narratives, that's your problem. This is stuff is low effort "Presidential Level Politics" 24x7. Real news died when reporters stopped having to craft a story so that the Associated Press or United Press International picked it up and made it available to the varied local newspapers of America, both liberal and…

>> CNN/Fox/MSNBC One of those is not like the other two. CNN and MSNBC may not be as high quality as WaPo/NYTimes in terms of depth and quality of journalism, but they also don't maliciously and cynically and shamelessly lie to their viewers.

I'm a Pepsi guy. It always annoys me when someone offers me a Pepsi and then gives me Coke. I can tell, and I don't drink it.

People don't get my attitude. "How can you even tell the difference?" they say. "It's pretty much the same!"

This is because when your favorite soda is Mountain Dew, you can barely tell the difference between Coke and Pepsi. They're both a heck of a lot different from Mtn Dew, and there's only the tiniest difference between Pepsi and Coke when you contrast with Fanta, Mtn Dew, Sprite, 7Up, etc.

(I'm not making this up merely as an argument - the above is my reality, and yes, people do say that to me).

When you get accustomed to good quality journalism (which WaPo isn't), the differences between CNN and Fox are miniscule. When you consider all the news topics out there, and all the diverse perspectives on them out there, you'll see that CNN and Fox more or less cover the same tiny fraction of topics. Sure, if your world consists of only that tiny fraction, then the differences between CNN and Fox seem stark.

I think a more concise way to put it is: If you assign 100% to the universal set of topics/opinions, then perhaps Fox is at 2% and CNN at 3%. Sure, CNN is 50% better than Fox, but from a whole picture standpoint it's really only a 1% delta between the two.

Re: Coronavirus and Credibility

#618

Post by dmix »

jacquesm wrote: post #510
AlexandrB wrote: post #426

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This seems to undermine the point at the end of the GP comment: > Remember that Yes Minister is a manual for politicians, not a comedy. It seems like the deep state was (more) right on this one and the politicians are/were the ones trying to downplay the danger and generally mislead.

The proper name for the deep state is civil service employees and they generally tend to be right on a lot of stuff because they've been at it for decades rather than a couple of weeks to months. The whole idea that some politician lands in a chair and starts making policy by their lonesome is laughable.

> The proper name for the deep state is civil service employees

It's funny how that has become the new explanation/softer excuse. I remember when "Deep State" was used to describe groups like the Koch Brothers and similar power brokers well before it was adopted by the right-leaning popular media to describe the puppet masters of the 'establishment' on the other side. Now it's spun as an attack on simple 'civil servants'...

I guess it means whatever people want it to mean, depending on the context of your ideology or position on the matter.

Re: Coronavirus and Credibility

#619

Post by thombat »

catalogia wrote: post #338
thombat wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Like the endless YouTube conspiracy-oriented channels which rant about the vast Illuminati/Jewish/Deep-State/whatever conspiracy that holds our world in thrall and assassinates with impunity, yet somehow can't manage to file a few bogus DMCA claims to get the YouTube channels shutdown. Of course if one tries pointing this out the response is sometimes "oh, they're so powerful that they like to mock us", but more comm…

Supposing for the sake of argument that the Illuminati were real and you were in charge of it. You know a bunch of weirdos on youtube know the truth and are generally regarded as cranks. Would you bother concerning yourself with them, or would you ignore them since they're pathetic and powerless? I'd ignore them. To be clear, I don't think the Illuminati are real, but I don't think your reasoning is sound either.

An all-encompassing conspiracy orchestrating events across the globe, sparing no effort or expense to weave us all into an inescable spider's web of connected threads, that then says "eh, probably nobody is even going to listen to those guys, let's not bother with having the intern fire off a few boilerplate take-downs"?

Re: Coronavirus and Credibility

#620

Post by andruby »

banads wrote: post #589
jacquesm wrote: post #442

Paul is off by a mile and a half on this one. They weren't worried about getting caught. At all. The thing they would be worried about is whether or not getting caught would have consequences. And if there is anything that you could have learned from the last three years then it is that lying to the public carries no consequences at all.

>if there is anything that you could have learned from the last three years then it is that lying to the public carries no consequences at al If you study history, you realize thats been a thing for much more than just 3 years... https://youtu.be/VGdWIwiVMF4

At least Regan was able to admit that he was wrong (even if he didn’t admit he was lying). I wonder if Trump has ever admitted to being wrong.
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