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Coronavirus and Credibility

paulgraham.com

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Re: Coronavirus and Credibility

#921

Post by smsm42 »

tekkk wrote: post #861
smsm42 wrote: post #547

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 th…

I see. It feels quite funny though to be so specific about the ramblings of a man, who clearly says whatever comes to his mind without further thought. He might as well have said it and nothing would change. Definitely though there is a difference, and I should have probably worded myself a little differently. But it's quite hard to adhere to a high level of truthfulness when the other side clearly has no regard for…

> It feels quite funny though to be so specific about the ramblings of a man,

He either said it's a hoax or he didn't. In this case, he didn't. If you don't care what he rambles about, that's fine, but then don't say he said something he didn't as a proof to some point, as if it were a well-known fact.

> He might as well have said it and nothing would change

But he did not. So don't say he did. It's a lie. It's not ok for Trump to lie, why it's ok for somebody else to lie about Trump?

> But it's quite hard to adhere to a high level of truthfulness when the other side clearly has no regard for it.

So far the side that says the facts don't actually matter and whether he said what you claim he said or not is immaterial seems to be you. I think allowing yourself to disregard the truth because "the other side is doing it anyway" is not a right way to do things.

Re: Coronavirus and Credibility

#922

Post by smsm42 »

Pils wrote: post #757
smsm42 wrote: post #547

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 th…

Here's the quote from the Snopes article: > Now the Democrats are politicizing the coronavirus. You know that, right? Coronavirus. They’re politicizing it. We did one of the great jobs. You say, ‘How’s President Trump doing?’ They go, ‘Oh, not good, not good.’ They have no clue. They don’t have any clue. They can’t even count their votes in Iowa, they can’t even count. No they can’t. They can’t count their votes. > O…

> it should be beyond question that Trump is downplaying the severity of the coronavirus in the last few sentences.

He may have downplayed the severity, but it's light years away from claiming it's a "hoax". One can reasonably debate whether he did the former, but the latter is flat out lie. It's not ok to lie, even about Trump. There's a huge difference between choosing how to react to coronavirus (a lot of people were unsure initially how severe it is) and flatly denying it is happening. It's OK to argue that Trump was wrong on his chosen reaction, but it's not ok to lie that he called it a "hoax".

> It follows that the "hoax" is referring to the opposition party making a mountain out of molehill.

The "hoax" was about the claim that he did poor job handling the coronavirus. He thinks he did great job and his opponents are wrong. Not about that coronavirus epidemics doesn't exist.

> Which is fine and good!

What is not fine and not good is that people are ok with lying as long as it hurts the other tribe and helps theirs. Not ok at all. It's not a matter of "interpretation", it's a matter of twisting facts to the point where it becomes outright falsity.

Re: Coronavirus and Credibility

#923

Post by WalterBright »

lemming wrote: post #860
WalterBright wrote: post #821

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Yes they did If it was all so obvious, the stock market would have dumped weeks before it did. Did you sell in early February? Did you take out shorts on the market? Why not?

I'm a passive investor, I don't try to make money by playing the market. But yes, in mid-Feb I moved all my investments from growth funds into conservative ones, and avoided a major haircut.

Congratulations, you are smarter than I am and smarter than Wall Street.

But my point still stands - if it was obvious to people, the market would have dumped earlier than mid-Feb.

Re: Coronavirus and Credibility

#924

Post by hota_mazi »

RonanTheGrey wrote: post #897
augustt wrote: post #793

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The "both sides bad" mantra is really just lazy. The false equivalence between the validity of whatever DJT says and what critics say have let even basic decency be thrown out the window, let alone facts.

> The "both sides bad" mantra is really just lazy. "Fox News is TEH EVILZZ AND CNN/CBS/NBC/MY HOLY LOVE ARE TEH ANGELZZ" is really lazy. Refusing to recognize how the other news outlets aren't bastions of honorable reporting is really lazy. Refusing to recognize that none of them -- any of them, not one -- have the public's (e.g. YOUR) best interest in mind, is really lazy. Somewhere deep down you know that but there…

> "Fox News is TEH EVILZZ AND CNN/CBS/NBC/MY HOLY LOVE ARE TEH ANGELZZ" is really lazy.

Now you are being downright dishonest. Nobody said either of these things but it's demonstrably true that Fox News often publishes unverified propaganda while CNN routinely has scientists and solid source surveys to support their points.

Re: Coronavirus and Credibility

#925

Post by s_y_n_t_a_x »

xenyal wrote: post #813
s_y_n_t_a_x wrote: post #809

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The parts that matter are Jan 11th to the 30th. > Jan. 11–17: Important prescheduled CCP meeting held in Wuhan. During that time, the Wuhan Health Commission insists there are no new cases. > Jan. 14: WHO announces Chinese authorities have seen "no clear evidence of human-to-human transmission of the novel coronavirus." > Jan. 20: The first case announced in South Korea. Zhong Nanshan, a top Chinese doctor who is hel…

Where in this timeline do you see evidence that information their healthcare system had suggesting how severe COVID-19 was, was being intentionally covered up? I just see how unfortunate it is that they realized COVID-19's severity too late, else the Wuhan residents who left prior to the lockdown would not have been able to travel as freely as they did.

They knew how bad it was and downplayed it until it spread to the world.

Dr. Birx confirmed that they misled the experts:

https://twitter.com/RealSaavedra/status/1245138898772045824?...

> I think the medical community interpreted the Chinese data as that this was serious but smaller than anyone expected,

> Because I think probably we were missing a significant amount of the data.

Re: Coronavirus and Credibility

#926

Post by axguscbklp »

seppin wrote: post #607
AzzieElbab wrote: post #415

Earlier quoted context omitted.

the two outlets are absolutely equal when it comes to making half of the americans view the other half as raging lunatics. it is basically this https://youtu.be/aFQFB5YpDZE

Trump is a lunatic, literally. Obama was a smart, measured person people didn't like. There's a difference.

Obama killed civilians overseas and presided over massive NSA surveillance of US citizens. Trump also kills civilians overseas and presides over massive NSA surveillance of US citizens, but that doesn't make it any better that Obama did it.

Re: Coronavirus and Credibility

#927

Post by jshevek »

drummer wrote: post #919
vonmoltke wrote: post #266

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

The markup which causes that formatting is easy to do on accident, as it is just whitespace:

Text after a blank line that is indented by two or more spaces is reproduced verbatim. (This is intended for code.)

https://news.ycombinator.com/formatdoc

Re: Coronavirus and Credibility

#928

Post by throwaway294 »

Fjolsvith wrote: post #889
throwaway294 wrote: post #569

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A BIG advantage of Twitter is that get to hear from the persons themselves totally without filtering by the media. Maybe you do or don't like what some public figure who posts on Twitter says, but at least DO get just what THEY said.

This. The slanted editorializing and purposefully misconstrued out-of-context quoting by the media long ago turned me off.

My response some years ago was just to turn the mainstream media (MSM) off. On paper they can't compete with Charmin, and on the Internet they are useless for wrapping dead fish heads. Some of their material is worse than just misleading and down to manipulative, deceptive, dangerous, and even destructive. I don't want even to hear the MSM and, then, have to debunk them or risk being influenced. I hope the Internet enables some replacements, many more outlets but focused on smaller audiences.

Re: Coronavirus and Credibility

#929

Post by krn320 »

gpderetta wrote: post #665
heimidal wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The part of that most people, including you, seen to miss is that this goes way beyond those sick with the virus. The strain this virus is putting on healthcare is unlike anything the flu does in any given year, even during epidemics in the past several decades. That means it will kill people who are sick with something else. Pray you don't have a need for an ICU bed any time soon. In the US, the flu kills between 12…

Yes. In Italy it has already killed twice as many people as a normal influenza season.

Looking at this shows completely different story: https://www.euromomo.eu/

January 2017 was much worse overall in Europe, it's not even comparable.

Re: Coronavirus and Credibility

#930

Post by lazybreather »

I see much of the discussion is directed towards left-right narrative. There is an issue of false pretense in the media which everyone agrees to. Then why make it a left-right conversation instead of staying right on the matter at hand? It doesn't get anywhere if the argument is about who started it first or who did it more. That's besides the whole point. And then people from each group point out individual comments someone from the opposite group made. If we have a pyramid of "importance", the discussion just spirals into the bottom and just brings in more and more nonsense. Let's stop it here. I remember PG talking about 'labels' in one of his posts. It is very relevant here. The issue quickly gets into a trivial fight between groups who labelled themselves. And for whatever reasons want to stay labelled the rest of their lives. Which is demeaning to the very life one has.
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