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If this current situation has taught me anything it is that the internet is a mush of armchair garbage and it’s overwhelming to decipher- yes even what I’m typi

by tjr225 7y ago

If this current situation has taught me anything it is that the internet is a mush of armchair garbage and it’s overwhelming to decipher- yes even what I’m typing now. The whole thing has me desperate to ignore everyone and read a book. What a joke; to think we are all somehow experts.

arunbahl 7y ago
Unclear if you read the article and are voicing disagreement with it, but Scott Aaronson is in fact defending armchair epidemiology.
- tjr225 7y ago
  I did read the article. I'm exhausted by both sides.
deleted 7y ago
[deleted]
threatofrain 7y ago
Most people don't have a <relationship> with an expert, so they are still left out on their own, having to decipher the world as it comes. When you don't have relationships with a technical community, there's no interesting anchor to stop you from gyrating with the news of the day.
naringas 7y ago
I agree, I still cannot make up my mind about masks... It seems like "back in the day" people trusted the experts, becuase well, there weren't many alternatives (?); but now thanks to the internet everyone can google for a while and feel like they have a worthwhile opinion. It seems like now it's possible to find an expert (and/or data) to justify any opinion. I am not saying this is bad, but that it's just different. The game has changed.
- Gibbon1 7y ago
  After rolling things around my current thought is, what if this isn't the last rodeo? What if there is another outbreak? Because there will be. Of 'something' but we don't know what that will be. Seems to me then what you want to a robust set of responses that do not require people to make decisions based on god knows what. Because in the future you don't know ahead of time what's going to be helpful and what won't be. What you want to public to do is reflexively anything that might help. And then later tell them what measures they can back off on. Not the other way around.
- btilly 7y ago
  I agree, I still cannot make up my mind about masks.. What's so hard about masks? That's one area that experts seem pretty consistent on, and what they say makes sense. It is slightly complicated but not contradictory. Wearing a mask doesn't do that much to prevent you from getting sick. But it does a lot to prevent you from getting others sick. If there is a limited supply of masks, the best people to give them to are people are at high likelihood of being sick and come face to face with lots of people who get sick easily. Which is to say medical staff. If there were masks to go around, we'd want everyone wearing them as a precaution. So that you're not getting people sick even if you don't yet know that you are sick. Some countries, like Taiwan, already make enough masks that they can actually do that. The USA does not. In time we should fix that. Can you find anyone whose expertise is generally respected who says something that disagrees with what I just said?
gentleman11 7y ago
I worry about this in software development. There are so many “experts” posting blogs about whatever is on their mind, and the tide of common wisdom gets caught up in it. Eg, everybody, everywhere said that NodeJS has amazing performance for high io workloads. If you look at benchmarks however, the nodejs systems cannot keep up with older tech, so now the argument is “we use it because it’s a nice environment, not for performance.” I am trying to focus on textbooks now, but with so much self publishing I think that it is only a temporary strategy
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
fragmede 7y ago
The mush is because we don't actually know, and we're all afraid to admit it. Like, does this thing confer a lasting immunity upon those who survive? We have educated guesses, and can draw some inferences, and cite statistics and cases from countries at each other, but until it's 6-months later and we have incontrovertible proof, it's mush dancing around the honest answer to many of the questions floating around is: We don't know. The second problem is that we're clearly terrible at collectively digesting new information uniformly. New information is evolving our understanding and things said a week or months ago no longer reflect our current understanding. But not everyone's subscribed to the same newsletter, so we're not on the same page. Back in January, based on SARS and MERS, and how much that affected the western world, the comparison to the flu was apt. Was. It's not longer January and that comparison is bad and is liable to get you branded a right-wing capitalism-death-cultist. There's no way to read only what's changed, so either to get into the muck and drink from the firehose, or defer to experts, some of whom are actually paid to deal with this. Go read a book, the muck'll be here waiting for you when you get back. When you do, ask the experts, when you get back and update your knowledge correspondingly.

by tjr225 7y ago

arunbahl 7y ago

Unclear if you read the article and are voicing disagreement with it, but Scott Aaronson is in fact defending armchair epidemiology.

tjr225 7y ago
I did read the article. I'm exhausted by both sides.

deleted 7y ago

[deleted]

threatofrain 7y ago

Most people don't have a <relationship> with an expert, so they are still left out on their own, having to decipher the world as it comes. When you don't have relationships with a technical community, there's no interesting anchor to stop you from gyrating with the news of the day.

naringas 7y ago

I agree, I still cannot make up my mind about masks... It seems like "back in the day" people trusted the experts, becuase well, there weren't many alternatives (?); but now thanks to the internet everyone can google for a while and feel like they have a worthwhile opinion. It seems like now it's possible to find an expert (and/or data) to justify any opinion. I am not saying this is bad, but that it's just different. The game has changed.

Gibbon1 7y ago
After rolling things around my current thought is, what if this isn't the last rodeo? What if there is another outbreak? Because there will be. Of 'something' but we don't know what that will be. Seems to me then what you want to a robust set of responses that do not require people to make decisions based on god knows what. Because in the future you don't know ahead of time what's going to be helpful and what won't be. What you want to public to do is reflexively anything that might help. And then later tell them what measures they can back off on. Not the other way around.
btilly 7y ago
I agree, I still cannot make up my mind about masks.. What's so hard about masks? That's one area that experts seem pretty consistent on, and what they say makes sense. It is slightly complicated but not contradictory. Wearing a mask doesn't do that much to prevent you from getting sick. But it does a lot to prevent you from getting others sick. If there is a limited supply of masks, the best people to give them to are people are at high likelihood of being sick and come face to face with lots of people who get sick easily. Which is to say medical staff. If there were masks to go around, we'd want everyone wearing them as a precaution. So that you're not getting people sick even if you don't yet know that you are sick. Some countries, like Taiwan, already make enough masks that they can actually do that. The USA does not. In time we should fix that. Can you find anyone whose expertise is generally respected who says something that disagrees with what I just said?

gentleman11 7y ago

I worry about this in software development. There are so many “experts” posting blogs about whatever is on their mind, and the tide of common wisdom gets caught up in it. Eg, everybody, everywhere said that NodeJS has amazing performance for high io workloads. If you look at benchmarks however, the nodejs systems cannot keep up with older tech, so now the argument is “we use it because it’s a nice environment, not for performance.” I am trying to focus on textbooks now, but with so much self publishing I think that it is only a temporary strategy

deleted 7y ago
[deleted]

fragmede 7y ago

The mush is because we don't actually know, and we're all afraid to admit it. Like, does this thing confer a lasting immunity upon those who survive? We have educated guesses, and can draw some inferences, and cite statistics and cases from countries at each other, but until it's 6-months later and we have incontrovertible proof, it's mush dancing around the honest answer to many of the questions floating around is: We don't know. The second problem is that we're clearly terrible at collectively digesting new information uniformly. New information is evolving our understanding and things said a week or months ago no longer reflect our current understanding. But not everyone's subscribed to the same newsletter, so we're not on the same page. Back in January, based on SARS and MERS, and how much that affected the western world, the comparison to the flu was apt. Was. It's not longer January and that comparison is bad and is liable to get you branded a right-wing capitalism-death-cultist. There's no way to read only what's changed, so either to get into the muck and drink from the firehose, or defer to experts, some of whom are actually paid to deal with this. Go read a book, the muck'll be here waiting for you when you get back. When you do, ask the experts, when you get back and update your knowledge correspondingly.