Coronavirus and Credibility
paulgraham.com
Coronavirus and Credibility
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Re: Coronavirus and Credibility
#2>> Instead they just continued to use their ordinary m.o.,
m.o. = modus operandi
Re: Coronavirus and Credibility
#3Most humans have a really hard time with exponential processes. They are hard for them to spot and truly understand. So when something goes 1, 2, 4, 8 they see it as linear and when it's doubling with larger numbers they suddenly get it. And then it's too late.
Re: Coronavirus and Credibility
#4Excellent point Paul! How can we actually do a better job of keeping track of credibility? There are so many talking heads that it is hard to remember who said what and who is or is not credible. You almost would need a Black Mirror style AR credibility score floating in view?
Re: Coronavirus and Credibility
#5From what I'm reading, I think there are still a significant minority of people who think this isn't an issue. I've had to learn to just walk away from comments on a variety of media where comments such as 'psychosomatic', 'less dangerous than the flu that kills 50,000 each year', 'patented by the illuminati', 'caused by 5G masts', and so on. I ended up deleting my twitter account as I dared try to engage with one UK-based journalist who was saying that 'they' were destroying the economy to serve their own foul needs (everyone under house arrest, total control of society, etc). For me, it's just not worth doing this - it's hard enough being separated from the people I care about, without filling the void with attempts to have a rational discussion with people who seem to be divorced from everyday fact.
You would think this would be the reality check that was needed, but it's not the case for everyone. I guess that is human pyschology writ large, but I'm finding that I just have to watch videos and not even look in the comments as it's just a rabbit hole of conspiracy theories and people being just plain wrong in a lot of places.
Re: Coronavirus and Credibility
#6It's very simple - skin in the game. Good that PG discovered this older-than-humanity principle of evolution.
Heads should be rolling after a large failure like this (not necessarily literal heads).
Don't tell me what you think, show me your portfolio.
Re: Coronavirus and Credibility
#7Wasn't Elon Musk going to make a website that rated the credibility of journalism somehow? What happened to that?
Re: Coronavirus and Credibility
#8It's very simple - skin in the game. Good that PG discovered this older-than-humanity principle of evolution. Heads should be rolling after a large failure like this (not necessarily literal heads). Don't tell me what you think, show me your portfolio.
Boris Johnson has quite a lot of skin in the game now; he boasted about shaking hands with coronavirus patients a few weeks ago and is now in the hospital.
Re: Coronavirus and Credibility
#9From what I'm reading, I think there are still a significant minority of people who think this isn't an issue. I've had to learn to just walk away from comments on a variety of media where comments such as 'psychosomatic', 'less dangerous than the flu that kills 50,000 each year', 'patented by the illuminati', 'caused by 5G masts', and so on. I ended up deleting my twitter account as I dared try to engage with one UK…
Of all the conspiracy theories out there, the 'caused by 5G masts' is the one that confuses me the most. I get the possible aversion to 5G, but how does one make the leap from that to it causing COVID?
Re: Coronavirus and Credibility
#10From what I'm reading, I think there are still a significant minority of people who think this isn't an issue. I've had to learn to just walk away from comments on a variety of media where comments such as 'psychosomatic', 'less dangerous than the flu that kills 50,000 each year', 'patented by the illuminati', 'caused by 5G masts', and so on. I ended up deleting my twitter account as I dared try to engage with one UK…
i've been saying "not more dangerous than the flu" before it started really going to shxt in europe, because to be honest, the epidemic doesn't look that dangerous if you're in general good health, just by looking at the numbers from a distance.
The fact that most people seem to not have anything worse than a few days of fever (some having even nothing at all), while at the same time others simply die very quickly to it makes it a very peculiar epidemic. And i think this is the reason why even amongst the medical professional i've talked to, they first seemed not too worried at all.
As for the number of death, let's not forget the flu kills hundreds of thousands of people each year, and that is with people getting vaccinated. It made me realize how getting vaccinated for the flu as soon as you reach 50 may actually be a pretty good idea..
Another thing that i haven't read a lot, is that the WHO have been alarming people in the past with previous epidemic (srars, mers, ebola, etc), and nothing "special" happened (i suppose partly because people correctly dealt with it, but also because of the nature of the virus). It actually made me realize how the whole world has been completely desensitized to catastrophic predictions.