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Coronavirus and Credibility

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Re: Coronavirus and Credibility

#911

Post by kyuudou »

throwaway32120 wrote: post #678
_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…

That's one of the issues with hyperpartisanship. Everyone thinks that people need to be held accountable - as long as it's people they already decided were terrible. The truth is the response to this pandemic has been poor across the board. Go back and read what people were saying in February to see how unprepared everyone was. Bill Gates, for example, is held up as someone who saw this coming. However, if you read w…

It's also one of the issues with a bipartisan system designed to stay that way - one side eternally blames the other for being evil incarnate and how their side's excrement has no olfactory emission. It's conducive to this hyperpartisanship and I really agree with some of the founding fathers of the US that political parties should be forbidden because of the types of dramatic intrigue that result, which hurt people the most during times such as now. I just call them both the War Party now because that's what they are.

Re: Coronavirus and Credibility

#912

Post by marcosdumay »

hanspeter wrote: post #837
dagurp wrote: post #730

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not obvious how to do that

Not on a global scale but on a national it's very obvious.

The only thing that matters is the global result, and the only policies that we know how they work at global scale are the ones that we know that they do not work.

There is an incredible lack of actual social and political scientists discussing those policies, and the few economists that are there seem focused on hitting known bad policies (what is easy to understand, since politicians keep pushing them).

Re: Coronavirus and Credibility

#913

Post by endorphone »

fourmyle wrote: post #894
endorphone wrote: post #523

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You claimed that there were countless videos of "MSNBC and CNN criticizing the travel ban on China because the virus wasn't any more dangerous than the flu." Which of course isn't accurate. You seek your redemption in some guy[1] listing a tiny selection of articles, having nothing to do with the partial travel restriction, arguing about the social effects. He links either contrarian articles, or articles talking abo…

Did the news about the death counts flattening and missing projections by a lot today bum you out? I can’t imagine having my identity so wrapped in Trump losing the election that I would be hoping for hundreds of thousand dead and the failure of the American health care system. Enjoy the next 4 years of the Trump administration.

"I can’t imagine having my identity so wrapped in Trump losing the election that I would be hoping for hundreds of thousand dead and the failure of the American health care system"

No one celebrates the extraordinary and unending failures of this administration. We protest it. We argue against it. We see a horrendous rise of idiocracy as people celebrate their own incredible ignorance and hate.

That it's bad for you doesn't make it "good" for us.

If a miracle cure was discovered today and not a single extra person died, that will never undo the raw criminality, and total, complete incompetence of the Trump administration.

That Jared Kushner has a role greater than mail room is a fucking travesty. Hey, but what about her emails, right?

"Did the news about the death counts flattening and missing projections by a lot today bum you out?"

Social distancing works. This surprises positively no one. Your orange buffoon, however, wants to stop social distancing. Maybe there's some miracle snake oil he can pitch and everything will be great again.

Go back to Twitter. Go back to your insular echo chamber. Your trolling, copy-paste noise just makes you look like a clown here.

Re: Coronavirus and Credibility

#914

Post by btilly »

btilly wrote: post #866
bo1024 wrote: post #773

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> No. A good Bayesian should be able to come to decisions like, "I am 70% confident that Osama bin Laden is in that compound." That's not a decision though. That's an assessment, what I would put in the same category as predictions. A decision would be whether or not to bomb the compound. Your post seems to miss my point, that predictions and decisions are very different and one can be uncertain about predictions whi…

You are right that I had not paid close attention to decisions. I see no particular reason why Bayesians should be better at being decisive. They should make better judgments given the available information. But they are not necessarily any better at making decisions and moving on.

Expanding on this, the skill of figuring out the odds of bin Laden being in the compound is unrelated to the skill of figuring out how to handle both outcomes, and whether that is a worthwhile risk to take.

So a good Bayesian can inform a good decision maker, but the Bayesian is not necessarily a good decision maker.

Similarly in the book, one of the superforecasters made the point that listening to well-informed experts who might be bad at making decisions was very useful. Because the expert really did have a good grasp of the current situation and could explain it clearly, which was a great starting place for the Bayesian who lacked background. Preparing background and making predictions are both required, but the combination of skills need not start in the same brain.

Re: Coronavirus and Credibility

#915

Post by endorphone »

fourmyle wrote: post #896
dmode wrote: post #840

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What travel ban ? 400k people traveled from China after the ban. Trump said as of 2 weeks back that everything will be open by Easter. Everyday he downplays the virus and peddle misinformation. How anyone can define a completely unhinged and unethical person, whose direct actions is resulting in thousands of deaths is beyond me

Obama didn’t replenish the stockpile of medical supplies used after H1N1 do you blame him too? How far are we going to be under projected death counts for Covid? A factor of 1000? Either what this administration did worked or it was a hoax you pick. You might want to look into mental help early in anticipation for Trump carrying 48 states in November. Maybe actually move to Canada this time?

"How far are we going to be under projected death counts for Covid? A factor of 1000?"

What do you think the projection was?

The US has tragically seen 12,242 deaths (which is an undercount, but it's the authoritative number right now). There are over a thousand deaths a day adding onto that.

Did someone predict 12 million deaths? No, they didn't.

The absolute worst-case projection was 2 million deaths if there were zero reduction steps taken. Maybe you haven't noticed, but society is basically shut down. The spread has dramatically slowed. With extreme social distancing the US is on target for 100,000-200,000 deaths. This is a good thing relative to much more dire outcomes possible. Note that this happened at the state level with zero federal leadership. Quite contrary, with constant federal pushback.

Not sure where your "factor of 1000" nonsense comes from. I assume from the echo chambers where you're fed your pablum.

Re: Coronavirus and Credibility

#916

Post by travisporter »

raphlinus wrote: post #479
dewy wrote: post #399

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've resisted Twitter for a long time, but this would be the only reason I could see myself becoming a user. In the past I've had a hard time finding people to follow with a high enough signal to noise ratio (or who don't flood my feed with a new tweet about their cat every 5 mins). Do you have any tips for picking sources? Or choosing when to fill them? And how do you stay on top of the flood of information?

For covid-19 I've curated this list: https://twitter.com/i/lists/1239639611694911489 All the people on it are serious experts. I've also left out some people who are worth listening to, but have a political bias or express a lot of emotion (it's hard not to be angry). I spend way too much time getting up to speed, but (a) there's a lot of stuff I find interesting (I studied molecular and cell bio a bit during my Mast…

Thank you so much for this! I recently got into Twitter and following local news in an effort to stay informed but boy do the comments enrage/scare me. It’s just crazy how tribal things have gotten. Is there any end of this sort of division in sight? Every year I think it will get better but it doesn’t.

Re: Coronavirus and Credibility

#917

Post by jMyles »

atomashpolskiy wrote: post #875
jMyles wrote: post #740

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The ironic part is that Ioannidis has been a hero on HN for a long time now - I imagine that's where you discovered him, as I did. And it's not just him - his colleagues Eran Bendavid and Jay Bhattacharya, who are presently conducting the first large-scale antibody test have also had a more sober tone. And David Katz. And Frank Ulrich Montgomery. And Albert Ko. I mean, I understand that somebody disagree with the mat…

+1 And thanks for /r/PrepareInsteadOfPanic, good stuff!

No problem; it's been keeping me sane as well. :-)

Where'd you find out about it? Did I tell you?

Re: Coronavirus and Credibility

#918

Post by mnl »

jfrankamp wrote: post #907
mnl wrote: post #702

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wow... So the military of the state that has contributed most to the global cumulative CO2 emissions (25%) can "solve" the problem with indiscriminate attacks and war crimes everywhere else now. Fascinating. Are people forgetting about this practice of thinking about their idea at least for 30 seconds before starting to type?

Targeting unoccupied fossil fuel infrastructure on an announced schedule is indiscriminate? War crimes for killing an oil derrick? That is fascinating to me. We know the Paris accord cannot work without enforcement. It is economically disadvantageous to go first. As I said, it will never happen. We don't take the threat seriously, we don't believe it is an existential threat.

Well, it happens to be both things. I have no doubt that you will find international criminal law fascinating, you just have to google it.

Re: Coronavirus and Credibility

#919

Post by drummer »

vonmoltke wrote: post #266
jshevek wrote: post #247

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That style of quotation renders terribly on mobile. Preserving line width isn't helpful for non-code quotes. You can use ">" and wrap the quoted text with italicizing asterisks.

This particular quote renders badly on the desktop as well.

I'm sorry guys but it seems HN styled the quotes like that by itself. I did not add any markup.

Re: Coronavirus and Credibility

#920

Post by atomashpolskiy »

jMyles wrote: post #917
atomashpolskiy wrote: post #875

Earlier quoted context omitted.

+1 And thanks for /r/PrepareInsteadOfPanic, good stuff!

No problem; it's been keeping me sane as well. :-) Where'd you find out about it? Did I tell you?

No, I just checked your profile. Pity that there are so few followers, you got some interesting links there. It's crazy how everything is in the open, but almost everyone acts like it does not exist (not only with corona, but also in general). Keep it up, brother!
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