5 ms·

It's also a great demonstration that it's really hard to get people to believe that something they can't see is real. Coronavirus cases have been growing stabl

by svara 7y ago

It's also a great demonstration that it's really hard to get people to believe that something they can't see is real. Coronavirus cases have been growing stably and predictably for weeks. Epidemiologists (and not only they) saw it coming. No panic would have been necessary if calm, decisive action had been taken early on. But somehow the panic seems to be necessary. Normalcy bias is real. These past weeks have been really instructive about collective human behavior, and have me really worried about our ability as a species to address climate change.

avip 7y ago
Otoh you see collaborations s.a China sending medical aid to Italy, which makes me feel maybe we do deserve to survive after all.
- whatshisface 7y ago
  To someone who can understand abstract concepts like "the future," the behavior of world leaders can seem terrifyingly callous, irresponsible, incompetent and maybe even malicious. However when the nasty package shows up on their doorsteps, they can function normally, at least if they're part of a functioning society.
- shoo 7y ago
  We're still only demonstrating ability to react to a sudden media-worthy crisis that is putting people (including decision makers) at a very minor risk of death in the very short term. For climate change, we need to demonstrate the ability to proactively avoid a creeping catastrophe that will occur in the medium-long term, where the harm may not happen to current decision makers, but will instead happen to other people who don't get a vote in the decision today, and isn't media worthy since nothing is really changing ("outlook remains bleak").
deleted 7y ago
[deleted]
hn_throwaway_99 7y ago
> No panic would have been necessary if calm, decisive action had been taken early on. I disagree. Shutting down major portions of the economy, and the resultant economic damage, would have been quite severe regardless of when it was implemented. Not saying there wouldn't have been less panic, but broad quarantines would have caused a lot of panic in any case.
- lukifer 7y ago
  What's more insidious: if we had acted drastically to prevent pandemic, no one would have felt any sting, and it might reduce the motivation to take drastic action the next time. I listened to Richard Mueller's "Physics for Future Presidents" podcast course, and he presents an interesting conundrum: say you're the mayor of a small town, and a seismologist approaches you with a report of a 15% chance of a devastating earthquake next Tuesday, recommending a citywide evacuation. Being a responsible mayor, you do so, despite the cost and displeasure of your constituents. On Tuesday, no earthquake occurs, and the town repopulates. This happens ten more times over several years, and still no earthquakes (after all, each occurrence is only a 15% chance). Sure enough, another Tuesday, another 15% prediction, and citizens are getting frustrated. As the mayor: do you order another evacuation, especially if it's costing you significant resources and political capital? How can you tell the difference between getting lucky on the numbers, and a bad seismologist? Even if the data is accurate, how do you not succumb to the temptation to play the odds? If there's any silver lining to our failure to prevent the pandemic, it's that maybe we'll take the problem more seriously on the next pandemic, perhaps one with a much higher fatality rate.
lukifer 7y ago
I don't disagree, but to play devil's advocate: the problem with "trust the experts, despite contradiction of everyday experience", is that it opens a massive attack vector for moral hazard / perverse incentives, for those who seek to profit or gain power from leveraging expertise (whether real or perceived). History is replete with data points where the experts were wrong (bloodletting) or dishonest (Iraq invasion). Laypeople are stuck with a "trust your mechanic" problem, of not having the knowledge to assess which experts are trustworthy. It's easy to mock anti-vaxxers, climate denialists, et al; while an honest inquiry leaves room for nuance, those issues seem to have definitive answers, where reality correlates closely with the so-called consensus. But at the same time, the knee-jerk anti-science reactions should be viewed through a lens of general declining social trust in institutions. Even though those particular issues may be the wrong fields of combat, there's a subconscious sense in which everyday people feel lied to for decades by "experts". Now we're stuck in a boy-who-cried-wolf situation, where the actual experts who are honest brokers and have their shit together aren't being taken seriously. Trust is hard-won and easily lost, and there are massive downstream effects to corruption in truth-finding/sense-making institutions.
- svara 7y ago
  You make a great point. Now how do we fix it? To your 15% chance of disaster example from your other comment: I think what you need is a population where a large fraction of people understand where those 15% come from. Edit: I also want to point out that I didn't find your examples that convincing. Bloodletting was a seriously long time ago, and is unlikely to affect anyone today. Iraq was a purely political issue, and didn't have a scientific angle.
manfredo 7y ago
Don't confuse disagreement on the severity of its consequences with disbelief in the phenomenon itself. For the coronavirus, it's an infection with a mortality rate ~20x higher[1] than the flu concentrated among people older than working age. If we want to reduce as much loss of life as possible then yeah we should shut down the country. But it doesn't present a threat to the long term success of society (heck, a cynic might even point out that retirees dying in greater numbers will make social security more affordable), and so many do conclude that decisive action is unwarranted. 1. The most in-depth writeup I've found reports a fatality rate of ~5x higher after more widespread testing: https://www.economist.com/graphic-detail/2020/03/12/how-deadly-is-the-new-coronavirus https://www.economist.com/graphic-detail/2020/03/12/how-dead...
- svara 7y ago
  The view you are suggesting works, in the sense that it is logically consistent. However, I very much doubt that this is the calculation that went through very many people's heads, say, 3 weeks ago. I think proof of this is that in all places that have substantial outbreaks, containment measures are getting heavier and heavier with increasing numbers of cases. If that's what you were going to do anyway, then the sum cost (in money, time, human effort) would have been lower if you had started earlier. This is because exponential growth with a factor of 1.33 is still manageable if you have 10 cases, but turns into an overwhelming tsunami if you have 10000.

by svara 7y ago

avip 7y ago

Otoh you see collaborations s.a China sending medical aid to Italy, which makes me feel maybe we do deserve to survive after all.

whatshisface 7y ago
To someone who can understand abstract concepts like "the future," the behavior of world leaders can seem terrifyingly callous, irresponsible, incompetent and maybe even malicious. However when the nasty package shows up on their doorsteps, they can function normally, at least if they're part of a functioning society.
shoo 7y ago
We're still only demonstrating ability to react to a sudden media-worthy crisis that is putting people (including decision makers) at a very minor risk of death in the very short term. For climate change, we need to demonstrate the ability to proactively avoid a creeping catastrophe that will occur in the medium-long term, where the harm may not happen to current decision makers, but will instead happen to other people who don't get a vote in the decision today, and isn't media worthy since nothing is really changing ("outlook remains bleak").

deleted 7y ago

[deleted]

hn_throwaway_99 7y ago

> No panic would have been necessary if calm, decisive action had been taken early on. I disagree. Shutting down major portions of the economy, and the resultant economic damage, would have been quite severe regardless of when it was implemented. Not saying there wouldn't have been less panic, but broad quarantines would have caused a lot of panic in any case.

lukifer 7y ago
What's more insidious: if we had acted drastically to prevent pandemic, no one would have felt any sting, and it might reduce the motivation to take drastic action the next time. I listened to Richard Mueller's "Physics for Future Presidents" podcast course, and he presents an interesting conundrum: say you're the mayor of a small town, and a seismologist approaches you with a report of a 15% chance of a devastating earthquake next Tuesday, recommending a citywide evacuation. Being a responsible mayor, you do so, despite the cost and displeasure of your constituents. On Tuesday, no earthquake occurs, and the town repopulates. This happens ten more times over several years, and still no earthquakes (after all, each occurrence is only a 15% chance). Sure enough, another Tuesday, another 15% prediction, and citizens are getting frustrated. As the mayor: do you order another evacuation, especially if it's costing you significant resources and political capital? How can you tell the difference between getting lucky on the numbers, and a bad seismologist? Even if the data is accurate, how do you not succumb to the temptation to play the odds? If there's any silver lining to our failure to prevent the pandemic, it's that maybe we'll take the problem more seriously on the next pandemic, perhaps one with a much higher fatality rate.

lukifer 7y ago

I don't disagree, but to play devil's advocate: the problem with "trust the experts, despite contradiction of everyday experience", is that it opens a massive attack vector for moral hazard / perverse incentives, for those who seek to profit or gain power from leveraging expertise (whether real or perceived). History is replete with data points where the experts were wrong (bloodletting) or dishonest (Iraq invasion). Laypeople are stuck with a "trust your mechanic" problem, of not having the knowledge to assess which experts are trustworthy. It's easy to mock anti-vaxxers, climate denialists, et al; while an honest inquiry leaves room for nuance, those issues seem to have definitive answers, where reality correlates closely with the so-called consensus. But at the same time, the knee-jerk anti-science reactions should be viewed through a lens of general declining social trust in institutions. Even though those particular issues may be the wrong fields of combat, there's a subconscious sense in which everyday people feel lied to for decades by "experts". Now we're stuck in a boy-who-cried-wolf situation, where the actual experts who are honest brokers and have their shit together aren't being taken seriously. Trust is hard-won and easily lost, and there are massive downstream effects to corruption in truth-finding/sense-making institutions.

svara 7y ago
You make a great point. Now how do we fix it? To your 15% chance of disaster example from your other comment: I think what you need is a population where a large fraction of people understand where those 15% come from. Edit: I also want to point out that I didn't find your examples that convincing. Bloodletting was a seriously long time ago, and is unlikely to affect anyone today. Iraq was a purely political issue, and didn't have a scientific angle.

manfredo 7y ago

Don't confuse disagreement on the severity of its consequences with disbelief in the phenomenon itself. For the coronavirus, it's an infection with a mortality rate ~20x higher[1] than the flu concentrated among people older than working age. If we want to reduce as much loss of life as possible then yeah we should shut down the country. But it doesn't present a threat to the long term success of society (heck, a cynic might even point out that retirees dying in greater numbers will make social security more affordable), and so many do conclude that decisive action is unwarranted. 1. The most in-depth writeup I've found reports a fatality rate of ~5x higher after more widespread testing: https://www.economist.com/graphic-detail/2020/03/12/how-deadly-is-the-new-coronavirus https://www.economist.com/graphic-detail/2020/03/12/how-dead...

svara 7y ago
The view you are suggesting works, in the sense that it is logically consistent. However, I very much doubt that this is the calculation that went through very many people's heads, say, 3 weeks ago. I think proof of this is that in all places that have substantial outbreaks, containment measures are getting heavier and heavier with increasing numbers of cases. If that's what you were going to do anyway, then the sum cost (in money, time, human effort) would have been lower if you had started earlier. This is because exponential growth with a factor of 1.33 is still manageable if you have 10 cases, but turns into an overwhelming tsunami if you have 10000.