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Coronavirus and Credibility

paulgraham.com

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Re: Coronavirus and Credibility

#711

Post by divbzero »

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…

> 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.

Almost any interview with Robert Shiller is a striking counter example to these smart confident sounding people who aren’t actually good at making predictions. When speaking Shiller does not sound very confident at all and you need to know his background and history and remind yourself to pay attention to what he’s saying.

Re: Coronavirus and Credibility

#712

Post by cies »

jshevek wrote: post #345
avip wrote: post #336

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Who cares what journalists say? IPCC and nasa reports are publicly available and use plain language anyone can read.

> Who cares what journalists say? IPCC and nasa reports are publicly available and use plain language anyone can read. Investigating geological or ecological truth is one thing, investigating causes and consequences for widespread ignorance and bad policy decisions is another. You and I are approaching this from different angles. Unfortunately, journalists have power to shape our society. I would argue that as a grou…

Sadly journalists seem even more in the pocket of big biz than scientists.

Re: Coronavirus and Credibility

#713

Post by pdonis »

bad_user wrote: post #675
leereeves wrote: post #643

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're misrepresenting what GP said. They didn't say "experts", they said: > all the people who have made confident predictions over the years regarding global warming. You can't deny that most of the people speaking publicly, and by far the loudest people, are not experts, they are politicians, journalists, and filmmakers. (And tech entrepreneurs...) Many of those have predicted disasters that never happened. But ju…

No, it is the scientists that have predicted the disaster, with an overwhelming consensus, hence the downvotes.

> it is the scientists that have predicted the disaster, with an overwhelming consensus

No, they haven't. The IPCC reports are political documents, not scientific documents. One key fact that shows this: the Summary for Policymakers is written and published before any of the Working Group reports, and the Working Group reports then have to be edited and massaged to be consistent with what the Summary for Policymakers says. A true scientific report with scientific predictions would be the other way around: first you would write, review, and publish the scientific analysis and predictions, and then you would write, review, and publish the policy recommendations.

Re: Coronavirus and Credibility

#714

Post by atomashpolskiy »

rsynnott wrote: post #671
atomashpolskiy wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But it literally is a strain of flu. And staying at home, sleeping and drinking a lot of water is exactly what the majority of people who contracted COVID are doing at the moment. Or do you believe that there are 1.3 million people in hospitals or cemeteries right now?

> But it literally is a strain of flu Eh? No, it is not. Who told you this? Whoever it was, stop listening to them. Bloody hell.

I was using the word "flu" in the broader sense. People commonly refer to virus-caused colds as simply flu. So what I was trying to say was that this is yet another virus that causes "flu".

Re: Coronavirus and Credibility

#715

Post by jnbiche »

thelean12 wrote: post #497
jnbiche wrote: post #487

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Exactly. Both the media and the anti-media/anti-expert crowd both have a poor understanding of probability and confidence intervals. With the media, I think it's sometimes intentional and not ignorance, as a ploy to get clicks. With the anti-media, anti-expert crowd, I have to believe it's usually simple ignorance.

Mostly agree. Some media is certainly better than others. The NYT article I linked has a very responsible title (IMO) of "Worst-Case Estimates for U.S. Coronavirus Deaths". It clearly says that the estimates they're about to talk about are worst-case and estimates .

True, I should have qualified that with "most" or "much" media. I agree there are still some responsible outlets out there.

Re: Coronavirus and Credibility

#716

Post by pgsbathhouse2 »

Reedx wrote: post #390
enraged_camel wrote: post #323

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>> 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.

Do you think the Red Sox are not like the Yankees? They're just different teams playing the same game. Fans always defend their team and vilify the other. Always. With every dispute they're able to convince themselves it's the other side that are the cheaters. They can't both be right, but yet each side feels equally certain of their position.

"I'm the most correct because I don't care about anything and trivialize important matters to just differences of opinion!"

Re: Coronavirus and Credibility

#717

Post by jliptzin »

AndrewBissell wrote: post #316
garraeth wrote: post #289

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Agreed. Unfortunately now it's more like picking a sport team ("Team CNN" or "Team Fox"), or Apple vs/ Google vs/ Microsoft than actually finding, or learning about, facts. Tribalism at it's finest. The only alternative I've found (I'm open to helpful suggestions) is to ignore that noise and read actual briefings and original sources. But, that defeats the point of news being an honest and straight forward source of…

I've found a well-curated Twitter feed of smart sources from various ideological and media camps helps to find interesting and informative info which would otherwise take a great deal of time to find. You do get misinfo and bad takes sometimes, but if you set it up right it's no worse than mainstream sources. Lists are useful as well to avoid Twitter's feed curation algos. Just specifically for COVID-19, this led me…

Would you mind sharing the twitter handles you recommend following?

Re: Coronavirus and Credibility

#718

Post by pdonis »

leereeves wrote: post #682
bad_user wrote: post #675

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, it is the scientists that have predicted the disaster, with an overwhelming consensus, hence the downvotes.

No, journalists and politicians are misrepresenting what the IPCC says. The IPCC are not alarmists, and they aren't predicting "The world is going to end in 12 years." The actual report is far more balanced. Yes, they are predicting some negative consequences, alongside potential benefits and measures for adapation and mitigation. https://www.ipcc.ch/site/assets/uploads/2018/02/ar5_wgII_spm...

> journalists and politicians are misrepresenting what the IPCC says.

And the IPCC Summary for Policymakers itself misrepresents what the actual science says. All of the caveats, disclaimers, hedges, and so forth in the scientific working group reports (and even more so the caveats, disclaimers, hedges, etc. in the actual peer-reviewed papers on which the working group reports are based) are ignored in the Summary for Policymakers. The policy recommendations are already determined and published before the scientific working group reports are released.

So there are actually three levels of misrepresentation involved: first the IPCC WG reports misrepresent the actual primary sources; then the IPCC SPM misrepresents the WG reports; then journalists and politicians misrepresent the IPCC SPM. At each stage the predictions get more alarmist and the recommendations get more draconian.

Re: Coronavirus and Credibility

#719

Post by InfiniteBeing »

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…

Democrats were upset about Trump's travel restrictions.

The epicenter in the United States in in New York.

This is what was happening in NY.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r_uNKatrJgw&feature=emb_logo

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=emyNXZ8v8sY&feature=emb_logo

Re: Coronavirus and Credibility

#720

Post by jeremyjh »

iron0013 wrote: post #320
AzzieElbab wrote: post #241

Earlier quoted context omitted.

to an outsider, americas left vs right hostility and mutual disrespect are becoming painful to watch. lets make a counter example to they one you provided, does the nyt "create reality" for their readers? they did publish their fare share of dangerously incorrect material about the virus, pandemic, the countermeasures,you name it.

I’m not sure that’s true. Some objective “truth” exists in the world whether it’s noticed and reported correctly or not (the tree falling in the woods), and some news outlets (NYT) report this truth more accurately than others (Fox News). It’s misleading to insist on “both siding” to make a mountain of untruths from one outlet seem to be the same size as a molehill of untruths from the other.

Bothsiding feels so mature though. Look at those petty little onesiders! Don't they know bothsides are the same!?
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