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Coronavirus and Credibility

• deepaksurti 7y ago
  >> Instead they just continued to use their ordinary m.o., m.o. = modus operandi
• jgrahamc 7y ago
  Most 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.
  • Someone 7y ago
    1, 2, 4, 8 isn’t that different from 1, 3, 5, 7. You need more sample points, larger multipliers, or prior expectation of seeing an exponential curve to see that as exponential growth.
    • dntbnmpls 7y ago
      > 1, 2, 4, 8 isn’t that different from 1, 3, 5, 7. What? The former is exponential and the latter is linear. They are the definition of different. The 30th number in the first series is 536870912. The 30th number in the second series is 59.
      • ash 7y ago
        > [1, 2, 4, 8] is exponential and [1, 3, 5, 7] is linear. You can't say just from 4 data points. Real data is noisy. Imagine each number is ±1.
        • nullc 7y ago
          To be fair, people-- even experts (checkout the first 538 survey of experts) and authorities-- have happily pretended covid19's behavior was linear even when the linear fit was many sigma away from the measurements... I agree that it's worthwhile intuition in many cases, but really not here and even people equipt with both the data and the mathematical expertise to use it there have also made many bad calls on this.
• silexia 7y ago
  Excellent 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?
  • clairity 7y ago
    you have to hone your bs meter by making lots of mistakes. incidentally, that's life in a nutshell.
• djaychela 7y ago
  From 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.
  • martinko 7y ago
    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?
    • jl6 7y ago
      Your mistake is assuming people are using reason to come up with that theory :)
      • klmadfejno 7y ago
        Conspiracy theorists have long been depicted as just weirdos who think they're smart. They're actually generally people who have experienced trauma and are suffering from paranoia. Conspiracies validate feelings of distrust. More sad than funny.
    • rmu09 7y ago
      IMO this is deliberate mis-information, some type of info-guerilla, to stir and channel anger against the establishment.
• anthony_r 7y ago
  It'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.
  • FartyMcFarter 7y ago
    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.
    • jpxw 7y ago
      He acquired the infection weeks after the handshake comment. It seems unlikely the two events are linked.
      • Lewton 7y ago
        The incubation period can be two weeks and time to hospital is also usually a couple of days after symptom onset. So saying it's unlikely seems weird
      • polack 7y ago
        How do you come to that conclusion? He literally said he would _continue_ to shake hands, so why is it unlikely that he contained it from shaking hands? The point is also that if you continue to shake hands it doesn't make sense to be careful regarding other ways of getting it either. His attitude towards the whole thing would make him a prime candidate to the Darwin award if he ends up dying.
• collyw 7y ago
  Wasn't Elon Musk going to make a website that rated the credibility of journalism somehow? What happened to that?
  • aantthony 7y ago
    Haven’t heard if that’s going ahead. But I’m working on a similar concept: https://verifact.io https://verifact.io which will be launching soon
  • Lewton 7y ago
    Musk is still actively downplaying the severity of the situation. Recently he's been signal boosting the idea that many more people are infected than we think and therefore the alarmism is unwarranted
    • lazyjones 7y ago
      So what exactly are you saying? 1) he is evil, 2) he is wrong? For 1), it's up to you to judge him based on your perceptions (I'd disagree), for 2) you'd need a little more than your gut feeling to call him wrong. Germany is testing extensively and resulting current estimates are around 1% mortality (WHO estimate: 3,4%).
      • Lewton 7y ago
        He's wrong. More people being asymptomatic is not a cause for reacting less strictly, which is the view being promoted. If more people are asymptomatic, that's great news, but it does not impact how severely you should lockdown society as the DDOS'ing of the health sector is still clearly a problem to avoid looking at france, spain and italy. It only means that you'll be able to end the lockdown sooner than expected
        • lazyjones 7y ago
          We'll see how Sweden fares in the end. I'm not promoting their methods of dealing with the pandemic, but I believe the different health systems affect the outcome more. Italy has around 1/3 to 1/4 the hospital beds per capita of Austria, Germany, South Korea but more than Sweden and the USA.
• simion314 7y ago
  Disappointingly politicians and their supporters pushed the narrative into blaming X or Y. I would politely ask HNers who were in the is just the flu camp to reflect (please don't comment, just reflect) why I was wrong, what bias or whatever flaw my thinking had and avoid blaming X or Y for your mistake. Btw I am not accusing people here, I also was not anticipating things to go like this.
• jonnypotty 7y ago
  People are being entertained not informed.
  • nurettin 7y ago
    People don't care about the distinction.
• s9w 7y ago
  But both sides are irrationally being confident. The doomsdayers at least as much as the "flu-bros". I think it's fair to challenge the massive interventions being taken and the economic damage.
  • lazyjones 7y ago
    Yes, we also need to get used to dealing with uncertainty in assessments, predictions, computer models. Media are far too prone to blowing unlikely extreme possibilities out of proportion, when we need to see the whole range of possible outcomes clearly.
  • Juliate 7y ago
    That would be ignoring the extent of the economic/societal damage that is caused by the disease itself, would there not be any intervention to try to control the spread and its consequences on the medical infrastructure as well as all the other ones. The problem with this kind of situation is that, unless you take action when it feels too early, all you will have at the end are your tears and saying "it was too late".
  • Lewton 7y ago
    > But both sides are irrationally being confident. Being "doomsdayer" does not necessarily mean confidence in the situation. It's more about accepting that overreacting is much more desirable than underreacting when facing something exponential where you're constantly 2 weeks behind knowing what the reality is
    • BaronSamedi 7y ago
      > accepting that overreacting is much more desirable I wish that were true but it is not. It is entirely possible to take actions that make a bad situation worse. The consequences of an economic shutdown, for example, are unknown. The worst case of global depression and supply chain disruption is just as bad as the virus itself, if not more so. I do not know how one makes good decisions in a situation of highly uncertain knowledge and severe consequences. I think we are in "less bad" territory, i.e. how do we balance multiple considerations such that while not leading to any outcome that could be considered "good", is at least not catastrophic. I don't envy those who have to make such decisions.
• underdeserver 7y ago
  Remembering predictions and revisiting them is a superpower in risk management and decision making. Superforecasting by Tetlock and Gardner is a good starting point if you want to learn this power.
• jpxw 7y ago
  Even “reputable” sources like the Financial Times have been putting out utter rubbish: https://www.ft.com/content/5ff6469a-6dd8-11ea-89df-41bea055720b https://www.ft.com/content/5ff6469a-6dd8-11ea-89df-41bea0557... My current theory is that we are seeing denial on a mass scale as a coping mechanism.
  • gadders 7y ago
    Why is that rubbish? It was created by a team just as credible as that at Imperial College.
    • jpxw 7y ago
      The Oxford study is based on blatantly, and easily demonstrably, bad data. For example it relies on only 1 out of every 1000 infections needing hospitalisation. This is not supported by any current evidence. https://www.wired.co.uk/article/coronavirus-infections-oxford-study-immunity https://www.wired.co.uk/article/coronavirus-infections-oxfor...
      • gadders 7y ago
        Conversely, the lead on the Imperial Study was also in charge of modelling for the UK foot and mouth epidemic which was found not fit for purpose and resulted in lots of livestock being slaughtered unnecessarily. And this is the one the UK and other governments seem to be basing their approach on. "He was behind disputed research that sparked the mass culling of farm animals during the 2001 epidemic of foot and mouth disease, a crisis which cost the country billions of pounds. And separately he also predicted that up to 150,000 people could die from bovine spongiform encephalopathy (BSE, or ‘mad cow disease’) and its equivalent in sheep if it made the leap to humans. To date there have been fewer than 200 deaths from the human form of BSE and none resulting from sheep to human transmission." https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2020/03/28/neil-ferguson-scientist-convinced-boris-johnson-uk-coronavirus-lockdown-criticised/ https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2020/03/28/neil-ferguson-sc...
      • taipan100 7y ago
        To call the Oxford study "utter rubbish" is foolish. Your "example" of bad data is the only quoted data in that article and it doesn't even mean anything since the implicit assumption of the Gupta model is that we do not know how many asymptomatic cases of COVID exist (even WIRED concede this point). Testing in Italy is insufficient to tell us this. 1 in 1000 infections requiring hospitalisation could be a realistic number if a high percentage of infections are asymptomatic. > we just won’t know the true proportion of people who have contracted the disease without showing any symptoms, but it is likely a much lower number than the Oxford study assumes. Epidemiology is not done by "it is likely much lower than the study assumes" since that is pure guess work without the tests. What the Oxford study offers is a strong argument that antibody testing is vitally important and nobody is doing it. As I say this is a very long way from utter rubbish.
• watwut 7y ago
  Yep. But I think the same happen with all kind of crisises. The past history shows, that lying or being incredibly wrong does not have any negative impact on a pundit or or politician or whole classes of commentary journalist. It seem to be more of systematic issue then just individual.
• m0zg 7y ago
  Well, if that's the standard now, then the entirety of the US press is not credible: https://i.imgur.com/HGcoZco.png https://i.imgur.com/HGcoZco.png
  • zzzcpan 7y ago
    Mass media doesn't emphasize credentials of journalists or any credibility for that matter, in other words it is never credible. It's better understood in terms of propaganda, like your link is an example of manufactured consent.
• lazyjones 7y ago
  Does pg never watch the news? Or did he just forget that "no worse than the flu" was the general tone until late February in pretty much all 'western' media and even MDs? E.g. https://www.health.com/condition/infectious-diseases/coronavirus-worse-than-flu https://www.health.com/condition/infectious-diseases/coronav... https://www.mdmag.com/medical-news/the-fear-of-the-corona-virus-and-the-reality-of-the-flu https://www.mdmag.com/medical-news/the-fear-of-the-corona-vi... (kudos for correcting/updating later...) Seems a bit one-sided to get so excited about wrong predictions by the Fox/alt-right/MAGA bubble on account of one viral video.
  • mehrdadn 7y ago
    Since this is about watching the news, it'd be nice if you could share clips from (say) CNN or MSNBC carrying a similar message, confidence, and tone.
    • lazyjones 7y ago
      Here's the Guardian: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aerq4byr7ps https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aerq4byr7ps ... just older people with underlying conditions dying ... etc.
      • mehrdadn 7y ago
        Are you joking? She says a heck of a lot more than that. Her tone is extremely cautious and she's extremely clear that we know very little about this virus, she's describing the current situation of who is dying rather than making baseless predictions about who will die in the future, and all she's saying in that one sentence is that for the current situation, "you have to put it into context". Meanwhile you have snarky Fox News folks spewing "the media mob is telling you the sky is falling down" and "at worst this is like the flu" and "this is the best time to fly" etc. And she even literally tells you "this one is scary..." and tries to explain what about it is scary. Are these glaring difference not obvious or do you just ignore everything except the 1 sentence you can cherry-pick out of context?
• fulafel 7y ago
  Aren't these just cult leaders? They'll just explain away the outcome as a new surprise conspiracy.
• flr03 7y ago
  If it was not Paul Graham this would never has made it to HN front page, but ok... One of his point is that people should not talk about things they don't know about. So maybe he should start applying that to himself first (and maybe this to myself right now). The question is, how do you define the threshold of expertise require before you start talking about a subject? The concepts of truth, credibility, ethics, deontology that he vaguely puts the finger onto. Those are complex topics, still being studied and will be forever. Blaming journalist and politics, why not, I guess some of them deserve it, but my neighbour could have done the same analysis after couple of pints at the pub.
  • ag56 7y ago
    No, his point was people shouldn't talk with _absolute confidence_ about things they don't know about. Usually in everyday life we hint at our confidence level with the language we use: 'might', 'probably', etc. These people have trained themselves not to do that, which they previously have gotten away with.
    • tertius 7y ago
      As an immigrant, and I'm sure many foreigners would agree, this is extremely American. People, gentile people, who use "might" and "probably" are weak intellectuals by American standards. They are cast aside, especially in media, because they cannot give definite answers. This is science and science doesn't sell. Politicians and media types are sales-people. This really depends on the family and milieu you grew up around and are engaged with generally in life.
      • swiley 7y ago
        This is actually career advice I was given as a kid by an engineer at a nuclear power plant: “don’t give the impression that you’re uncertain during discussions even if you are.” I remember thinking “isn’t it literally your job to be uncertain?” That really bothered me and I’m reasonably sure I wasn’t wrong to be bothered.
• DrNuke 7y ago
  More worringly, this epidemic is also destroying the layer of benevolent hypocrisy that kept globalisation together among young people worldwide: the Chinese virus, the Italian siesta, the Northern stinginess, the British take it on the chin, the American insurance or die, and so on are the latent prejudices now rubbing salt into wounds and adding insults to injuries. It will be extremely difficult to have that utopian, dreamy benevolence back soon.
• argonaut 7y ago
  While this does seem like an attack on those who claim Covid-19 is not going to be as bad as the prevailing sentiment and the prevailing media view, let's not forget that the prevailing sentiment 1-2 months ago was that Covid-19 would not be a big deal (in the West). I'm seeing many of the same people who pronounced Covid-19 would not be a big deal, doing a full 180 and attacking those who are pronouncing Covid-19 to be less dangerous than expected.
  • michaelt 7y ago
    Shouldn't 'prevailing media sentiment' be an output of the journalism process, rather than an input?
• madads 7y ago
  Disappointing to see that MSM and more disappointing that even here there are not more people questioning the data and situation. Also, where did the free thinking go? Not ostracising everyone that has a different view than the current world narrative. There are dozens of sme in virus-related fields that are voicing the opposite of what govs and msm are saying. This is a great lesson for us all. Let’s see it dismantle our current “ways of living”. Time for something new!
• dntbnmpls 7y ago
  > What struck me about it was not just how mistaken they seemed, but how daring. Really paul? You are struck by how wrong journalists and politicians are? They exist to lie and push an agenda. You've written in the past about the shady aspects of the news industry. And I seriously doubt you harbored any positive views of politicians. > These people constantly make false predictions, and get away with it, because the things they make predictions about either have mushy enough outcomes that they can bluster their way out of trouble, or happen so far in the future that few remember what they said. They make false predictions and get away with it because their agenda and the agenda of their fans/supporters line up. This is true of the fox side and the cnn/msnbc side. Have you forgotten about the predictions of yellowcake? The predictions of a short war in iraq? Remember mission accomplished? What about the predictions of a Hillary victory? What about all the predictions about trump/russia collusion? What about all the predictions that trump would be tossed from office/resign/jailed/etc? > And the tide has just gone out like never before. No paul. They've all been shamelessly naked sun bathing on the beach for everyone to see. It's not like they are hiding their bias. > Now that we've seen the results, let's remember what we saw, I doubt it. Just like people seem to have forgotten what a hack trevor noah is. In just the last few years, if people cared about being lied to, everything from Rolling Stones, NYTimes, WaPo, Fox news, CNN, MSNBC, NBC, CBS, etc would be out of business. Brian Williams lied at NBC and then got a job at MSNBC. Isn't that nice? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brian_Williams#Controversies https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brian_Williams#Controversies I hate to say it but your post seemed more like an attempt to win political points rather than expressing disappointment in the news industry since you were already fairly skeptical of the news industry to begin with. http://paulgraham.com/submarine.html http://paulgraham.com/submarine.html
• andy_ppp 7y ago
  I agree with the sentiment, however I think the apparent problems with Trump and politicians in general around this will not be that they got caught talking bullshit, it's that voters don't care because we've started supporting sides like they are football teams rather than being thoroughly critical of their actions. I'm not even sure a million people dying would lead to disorganised, slow and stupid government being at fault according to the people and in fact the higher the toll I'd guess the less likely accountability is to happen.
• atomashpolskiy 7y ago
  What a ridiculous zeal. Hardly anyone at this point is arguing that there actually is an issue. After all, flu is still a dangerous illness, esp. for certain groups of people, so even plainly calling this COVID thing "just a flu" is not equivalent to saying that it's not an issue. It's your framing of the phrase "just a flu", that makes it look like some kind of heresy or insult. And, most importantly, why do you call out only journalists and politicians, while there are many perferctly credible people, - first of all, medical experts, - who keep saying, that the scale of panic is dumb? How about doing some reading and fact-checking before crying wolf?
  • paulgb 7y ago
    "just the flu" to me implies that we can treat it like the flu, i.e. go about life as usual and stay home if we catch it. It seems beyond obvious at this point that that's not the case. (Hopefully soon there will be a vaccine and it will become the case.)
    • atomashpolskiy 7y ago
      But it literally is a strain of flu. And staying at home, sleeping and drinking a lot of water is exactly what the majority of people who contracted COVID are doing at the moment. Or do you believe that there are 1.3 million people in hospitals or cemeteries right now?
      • paulgb 7y ago
        > Or do you believe that there are 1.3 million people in hospitals or cemeteries right now? No, but I believe that in contrast to the flu, there are millions of healthy people (rightly) staying home right now. Are you saying that the lockdowns are unwarranted?
        • atomashpolskiy 7y ago
          I'm not in the position to make such statements, but there is quite a number of medical professionals, who say exactly this: massive lockdowns of general population aren't necessary. As for me, I personally believe that the medicine is worse than the disease in this case. We can be quite certain at this point that there will be lots of casualties from the economical disruption, and whether the unconstrained virus could have caused more suffering is a question to be answered.
• tannhaeuser 7y ago
  I've had this idea for some time already where if you post something news-like, you should attach a link to your sources, like "citation needed" for non-Wikipedia text. I know that sounds bland and like basic journalistic practice - but it is not, nor should be followed by professional/accredited journalists who of course need to be able to protect their sources and publish on their own site; it's intended for social media only. The idea is to get people used to look for a badge or some such at the bottom of a text that, when absent, immediately should ring a bell and put people on alert. Basically, it adds a "who said this" or cui bono dimension to every published text on aggregator sites unless it appears on a dedicated site. Maybe we could have a competition for graphic artists and award a prize for the best icon or visual idiom for this?
  • brain5ide 7y ago
    How is that different from what happens now with links being added? Also, journalists (or let's call them news media agencies) often abuse this by reporting of "claims by this" on the topic rather than the topic and in that way refusing any iota of responsibility for what they put on the spotlight.
    • tannhaeuser 7y ago
      I guess technically it's not different, but if used in a visually consistent way and followed widely, it could help critical thinking and add awareness to the fact that there are interested parties and spinsters behind most published material, rather than invite a habit of passive consumption/believing text just because it appears on shiny digital or printed media.
• deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
• INGELRII 7y ago
  > They didn't realize there was any danger in making false predictions. Is there any danger for them? PG seems to have very idealistic view of politics. As far as I know, any amount of fact checking in politics don't change political views. Will Fox News lose any viewers over this? Politicians may lose jobs because bad economy, but will they lose votes because they were wrong and ignorant? H. L. Mencken wrote: > No one in this world, so far as I know—and I have searched the records for years, and employed agents to help me—has ever lost money by underestimating the intelligence of the great masses of the plain people. Nor has anyone ever lost public office thereby. The mistake that is made always runs the other way. Because the plain people are able to speak and understand, and even, in many cases, to read and write, it is assumed that they have ideas in their heads, and an appetite for more. This assumption is a folly. I think there is great Mencken experiment going on. Always underestimate public and see how far you can go.
  • dillonmckay 7y ago
    Votes will be lost, because people are unnecessarily putting themselves and others at risk, and some will die.
    • deleted 7y ago
      [deleted]
    • tertius 7y ago
      What you're saying is that votes should be lost. Claiming that they will be is a stretch.
      • a1369209993 7y ago
        Actually, I think what they're saying is that voters will die, and therefore reduce the number of available votes. Edit: and, of course, that this effect will dispropotionately affect political tribes whose propagandists under-, rather than over-, estimated the dangers of covid-19.
        • 7y ago
• markvdb 7y ago
  Paul, you're absolutely right about the corona virus being the clearest credibility test fail for these people yet. But you also write: "These people constantly make false predictions, and get away with it, because the things they make predictions about either have mushy enough outcomes that they can bluster their way out of trouble, or happen so far in the future that few remember what they said." I'm not so sure about that. These politicians and journalists have consciously a/b tested their audiences into tribes of absolute uncritical loyalty. They feed on anti-intellectualism and cheap gut reactions. At a certain level of responsibility, incompetence becomes malice. These people are far beyond that threshold. They will soon have the blood of thousands on their hands. I'm not sure the people of the US will be able to keep them to account, but I certainly hope so.
• aaron695 7y ago
  I'd like a website recording people telling others to not wear masks. Hold them into account.
• maitredusoi 7y ago
  This is because nobody is an epidemiologist over-night. So now you will be able to discard any proposition from those kind of people, those one who are trying so hard to be smart, but that obviously can't become over-night ;)
• randallsquared 7y ago
  > Now that we've seen the results, let's remember what we saw, because this is the most accurate test of credibility we're ever likely to have. No, this is a terrible test of credibility. Journalists and politicians often go the other way, amplifying the danger, or outrage, or worry. Taking the outside view, it's overwhelmingly likely that any forecasted pandemic or disaster doesn't happen; we almost always get sky-is-falling predictions and then nothing really seems to happen from the perspective of most viewers or readers. Swine flu, bird flu, ebola, zika, on and on: these have previously in media-market memory been hyped as global catastrophes in the making, and then they turn into localized awfulness. This time, there were many more people than previously who seemed willing to espouse the outside view that this would probably blow over, and it seems incredibly ironic that this time, it didn't go away, and now those same categories of people who have been previously criticized for fear mongering are being lambasted for not fear mongering enough...
  • thewindowmovie 7y ago
    There were enough actual data and evidence out there to conclude this was actually a pandemic. Whole cities and countries were being shutdown and ICUs under strain when these people were going on TV encouraging people to travel. It is well known that some of this host work for a channel which is biased towards the president and that seem to have affected how they covered the news rather than based on available evidence.
  • DanBC 7y ago
    > we almost always get sky-is-falling predictions and then nothing really seems to happen from the perspective of most viewers or readers. Swine flu, bird flu, ebola, zika, on and on: these have previously in media-market memory been hyped as global catastrophes in the making, and then they turn into localized awfulness ...because WHO and those local regions spend considerable time and effort preventing catastrophe.
    • randallsquared 7y ago
      Yes, they did (along with, in many cases, considerable external aid from other NGOs, etc). However, from a height, it looks somewhat similar to how China's response to Wuhan prevented catastrophe... It didn't fully prevent it, but that was hard to know two months ago for most of the talking heads PG was calling out.
• Jugurtha 7y ago
  Not enough to remember. The shit we have seen must end careers and throw to jail. We could be more tolerant if said "predictions" were in late December or early January. Persisting mid March? That's a threat to national security, endangering the health and economy of a nation. This should be up there considering the scale of the misinformation encouraging people to be a danger. Terrorism is the use of violence to instore a climate of fear, sap morale, and win especially when inferior in number and means. This is symmetrical: the use of words to instore a climate of confidence, boost morale and conduct to imprudence by using vastly superior media means to shape the behavior of people. Someone should count all the damage this has done in terms of lives, of livelihoods, of GDP, of wasted resources, and make them pay. People get to pull this shit because there are no consequences for a catch phrase on Fox news, and all the braggadocio and tough guy talk must be accounted for. One of the cases where being or feigning to be an idiot shouldn't save someone.
• david_w 7y ago
  Meanwhile, elsewhere in the world, Sweden puts into practice what they only speculate about: https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2020/04/covid-19-and-swedish-exception-bruce-bawer/ https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2020/04/covid-19-and-swedis...
  • cma 7y ago
    > Now, if I were the suspicious type, I might suggest that Sweden’s coronavirus policy was, from the very beginning, formulated with this endgame in mind: the weeding out of aged and infirm Swedes in order to free up residences, welfare benefits, and Lebensraum generally (pardon my French) for Muslim immigrants Read a real source instead of this nazi garbage
• matthewaveryusa 7y ago
  This implies that the general population cares to know who is swimming naked. The post truth era is the very idea that the general public no longer cares about truth. PG is not embracing reality if he frames this around Warren Buffet's quote. Basically PG is like "hey look at all those naked folks there!!" not knowing that he's at a nudist beach.
• thereyougo 7y ago
  If everyone talks only based on facts on TV, the world will be a better place, but they're also won't be that many different news channels. You see... This shows care about the rating, and keep us informed. In times like this, when people are watching the news 24/7 they must find people who can talk and give their opinion. In many cases, the information appear to be wrong.
• edw519 7y ago
  Instead they just continued to use their ordinary m.o., which, as the epidemic has made clear, is to talk confidently about things they don't understand. Those of us with I.T. managers have been putting up with this forever: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunning%E2%80%93Kruger_effect https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunning%E2%80%93Kruger_effect
• hkai 7y ago
  Flu in the US: 0.13-0.28% mortality [1] Covid-19 in China: 0.50-0.66% mortality [2, 3] I mean from numbers it is indeed not much worse than flu, but we don't know the potential extra deaths caused by running out of ICU beds. [1] https://www.cdc.gov/flu/about/burden/past-seasons.html https://www.cdc.gov/flu/about/burden/past-seasons.html [2] https://www.bmj.com/content/369/bmj.m1327 https://www.bmj.com/content/369/bmj.m1327 [3] https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2020.03.05.20031773v2 https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2020.03.05.20031773v...
  • leereeves 7y ago
    And that's with a century of research and experience treating serious cases of influenza, and none for Covid-19. Covid-19 is serious, but the major crisis right now is that it's new, and the medical system is struggling to adapt.
    • fiftyfifty 7y ago
      Exactly, we have both vaccines and ani-virals to use against the flu and the death rate is still that high? We've got neither of those things for Covid-19 to date...
  • kgwgk 7y ago
    If you’re giving the CFR for flu as deaths/symptomatic you should do the same for COVID-19: 1.23% to 1.53%. That’s a factor of seven worse. When you consider as well that everyone is susceptible and you may have infection rates well over the 5-15% you get for flu it’s at least an order of magnitude worse.
• rsgalloway 7y ago
  Here's an article from Mar 26 in the NEJM where Fauci writes that C19 may be no worse than a severe flu season: "If one assumes that the number of asymptomatic or minimally symptomatic cases is several times as high as the number of reported cases, the case fatality rate may be considerably less than 1%. This suggests that the overall clinical consequences of Covid-19 may ultimately be more akin to those of a severe seasonal influenza (which has a case fatality rate of approximately 0.1%)" https://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMe2002387 https://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMe2002387 Anthony S. Fauci, M.D., H. Clifford Lane, M.D., and Robert R. Redfield, M.D.
  • heimidal 7y ago
    Your choice of clipping that sentence is incredibly disingenuous. The actual quote is “This suggests that the overall clinical consequences of Covid-19 may ultimately be more akin to those of a severe seasonal influenza (which has a case fatality rate of approximately 0.1%) or a pandemic influenza (similar to those in 1957 and 1968) rather than a disease similar to SARS or MERS, which have had case fatality rates of 9 to 10% and 36%, respectively.” They are not saying COVID-19 is the same as a flu, they are saying its mortality rate is closer to a bad flu year than to SARS or MERS. And that’s only half of the story — they go on to say that the rate it is spreading is what is truly worrying even if the mortality rate is low. Please stop spreading disinformation.
    • jshevek 7y ago
      Your quote is better than theirs, but your criticism ('incredibly disingenuous', 'spreading disinformation') is hyperbolic and assumes bad faith. Edit: This would be true even if they didn't provide a link to the source, which they did.
• guscost 7y ago
  This cuts both ways.
• Dowwie 7y ago
  Paul is referring to Fox News: https://twitter.com/TheDailyShow/status/1246146713523453957?s=19 https://twitter.com/TheDailyShow/status/1246146713523453957?...
  • Nuzzerino 7y ago
    Are you sure? I saw a different video where media outlets of all types were saying similar things. The infamous deleted "Vox" tweet where they said it would not be a deadly pandemic, for one example. I don't think linking a partisan outlet singling out a partisan outlet from the opposite side of the isle is a good way to treat this issue. PG apparently doesn't either, and didn't name names. Source: https://i.imgur.com/Tn0UtWT.png https://i.imgur.com/Tn0UtWT.png
    • hangphyr 7y ago
      Many news media companies have been engaging in just that, trying to point out (hypocritically) where their competitors attempted to downplay the threat of the virus. It's not so much a problem with news media being wrong, it's a problem with most of them skewing towards pundit commentary and OP/ED's on the news, rather than just reporting the news. If the news media blankly reports what is happening, and avoided adding layers of interpretation on top of it, their reputations would be in better shape right now.
      • dominotw 7y ago
        > OP/ED's on the news What the stance of opinion pieces. ppl seem to say opinion articles cannot be judged because they are opinions by definition. I find that infuriating but i have to bite by lip and agree. eg: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22697313 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22697313
  • malandrew 7y ago
    What Paul is describing pretty much describes most of the mainstream media, regardless of political bias. If anything, it's the rampant bias that has produced so many blindspots.
• throwaway5752 7y ago
  In the background global warming is a much greater threat to human life and has the exact same dynamic with the exact same players. There is also zero introspection - the people who were wrong about covid-19 are simply denying they said what they said. The truly scary part is they are getting away with it in real time, and changing a large populations' memory of contemporary events. I realize it's hard to remember further back with the enormous amount of information we're all bombarded with, but you can just go back to 2005 and see Larry Kudlow (Dir. NEC) just as wrong about economic policy and the depth of the financial crisis (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Larry_Kudlow#Economy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Larry_Kudlow#Economy) but here he is again. Consider Navarro vis a vis trade. I don't think anyone will learn anything, and for smart enough people, that needs to be the lesson.
  • pdonis 7y ago
    > In the background global warming is a much greater threat to human life Before making such a confident statement, I would recommend re-reading this particular statement in pg's essay... "These people constantly make false predictions, and get away with it, because the things they make predictions about either have mushy enough outcomes that they can bluster their way out of trouble, or happen so far in the future that few remember what they said." ...and consider how it applies to all the people who have made confident predictions over the years regarding global warming.
    • throwaway5752 7y ago
      Central America (https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/eye-of-the-storm/fifth-straight-year-of-central-american-drought-helping-drive-migration/ https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/eye-of-the-storm/fifth-...), Syria (https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0962629816301822 https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S096262981...), Australia (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2019%E2%80%9320_Australian_bushfire_season https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2019%E2%80%9320_Australian_bus...), and Alaska https://www.worldwildlife.org/stories/sockeye-salmon-and-climate-change https://www.worldwildlife.org/stories/sockeye-salmon-and-cli... might beg to differ, among others. It is happening now. It's happening in line with predictions by IPCC. It gets pretty bad. I can't help what people have said that has been wrong, but the world is measurably and visibly warming and that itself was denied for a long time. Very nearly 100% of experts in this field agree it's happening, have agreed for quite a while, and think the impact will be dire and potentially irreversible in the timeframe of human lifetimes. It feels like the zoonotic coronavirus situation played out over 50 years, rather than the 15 or so since SARS. Epidemiologists told everyone for a decade and a half this would happen, but here we are. A large group of experts in another field is telling us a similar thing with similar urgency. That's my only point.
• andrewtbham 7y ago
  The flip side is all the people that got it right on twitter. And continue to make insightful predictions: https://medium.com/@andrewt3000/covid-19-and-hypoxemia-697bc8a19bae https://medium.com/@andrewt3000/covid-19-and-hypoxemia-697bc...
• jamsb 7y ago
  HTTPS isn't supported :(
• known 7y ago
  "You can always count on Americans to do the right thing - after they've tried everything else" --Churchill
• mellosouls 7y ago
  The article seems to be taking a shot at a reasonably easy target. Almost all the talking heads are late Feb/early March. While it was clear something was happening "over there", and the fear was growing, it wasn't unreasonable at that point to not expect the unprecedented situation we are now in - and these people are not paid to offer nuance. I'm not sure this easy soapbox judgement is much more constructive than the hacks it pillories.
  • beepboopbeep 7y ago
    I'm not sure I understand your point. Are you implying that those talking heads are not responsible for the statements they made and the repercussions there of?
    • mellosouls 7y ago
      No, I believe that's obvious, that people with good sense already know these paid opinion-shouters are to be taken with a pinch of salt at best, and that it doesn't help to attack them on a point at which (for once), they might be given some leeway for lacking insight.
  • Robotbeat 7y ago
    It was unreasonable at that point. I'm no epidemiologist, but I understood exponential growth at that point to know that, because it wasn't being contained (no measures with a reasonable chance of containment were being taken at exactly the time when they really had to be taken), there was no stopping the exponential growth in the near term in the US. And especially once it was spreading in Italy, there was just not a credible reason to say "it cannot happen here." You should mistrust people's judgement in the future on similar such topics if they were dismissive of the possibility of this happening. You should update your Bayesian priors about the credibility and judgement of those people on topics such as this. And that IS constructive. Doesn't mean that those people are useless, but unless you've seen a mea culpa from them, you should look warily on future such predictions. You should note to yourself "this person may be prone to downplaying some risks and interpreting things over-optimistically, with some amount of wishful thinking."
• known 7y ago
  Next version of #CoronaVirus should infect only Politicians; Earth will become a better place for Humans;
• stevetodd 7y ago
  Liberalism and conservatism are essentially religions—there are core fundamental beliefs to them and a community surrounding it. Rejecting the political party is not just rejecting beliefs but also rejecting family, friends, and social structure. The battle has become so much more about red vs blue, left vs right, that principles and facts are no longer relevant. The vitriol and lack civility in the current political environment all but guaranteed this outcome. Fox News is deeply wrong, but we should all look inward to our own behavior and if we’ve been unkind or unrespectful, we should take responsibility for creating this situation. Do you really think that yelling at, shaming, or embarrassing people will get them to change? I don’t think research supports that position.
  • choward 7y ago
    > Liberalism and conservatism are essentially religions I somewhat agree but I would argue that it's the Democratic and Republican parties that are religions, not the philosophies themselves. They both are fine on their own just like religious philosophies. It's the people who basically form a cult, give it a name, and interpret the philosophies that are the problem. It becomes all about growing your cult to be bigger than the other cults so you have more power. To get people interested you attack the other side instead of having intelligent debates. They operate within there own echo chambers. Most media companies pick a side and then attack the other side. People like watching other people get very emotional so that leads to more viewers. It's why there are so many "reality" shows.
• qznc 7y ago
  There is plenty of sites to track predictions: https://www.metaculus.com https://www.metaculus.com http://longbets.org http://longbets.org http://www.knewthenews.com http://www.knewthenews.com https://predictionbook.com https://predictionbook.com I try to record predictions I find in the news. Most statements by politicians and journalists are too vague though. You need to get from "more people will die from COVID-19" to "more than 1.000.000 people will die from COVID-19 before May according to worldometers.info".
  • smsm42 7y ago
    Predictions on random internet sites are cheap, worth thing you risk is losing a little money or some imaginary Internet points. Politicians are in a situation where their predictions can cost lives, they are forced to make them - and in most cases, they have no information and no ability to make any proper analysis of the situation. So they just do what they've done most of their professional lives - they bullshit away.
• smsm42 7y ago
  I agree that we have huge amount of talking heads around with zero skin in the game and zero consequences when they are wrong, but I disagree covid-19 pandemics changed anything. There are literally dozens of politicians who have been disastrously wrong and gave advice in public which is diametrically opposite to what should have been, and suffered absolutely no consequences. And everybody's reaction to this is as tribal as it has ever been - if it's my tribe, "he may be wrong this once but it's an understandable mistake", if it's the opposing tribe, "yet another proof these vile creatures is literally the worst scum of humanity". Nothing changed. All tribes of American politics, at least, that I can see, are happily turning the epidemics into the fodder for their tribal causes, as they did with everything else before that.
  • rayuela 7y ago
    Totally agree with this. This is something you can clearly see in Trump's approval rating, which just reached the highest levels of his entire tenure [1]. Things are only getting more polarizing, but the really scary thing is that this admin's approval rating climbs the worse things get and it is worrying to see this incentive structure :(
    • jonnycoder 7y ago
      I don't agree with you that it's scary that the admin's approval rating climbs. If anything it's positive news. People close to me, particularly females, who previously were anti-Trump have been changing their tune and some are considering voting for him in upcoming election for the level of leadership and openness since the covid19 stuff started. That's the opposite of polarization, at least anecdotally.
      • tekkk 7y ago
        That's insane. Shouldn't it be the opposite as he famously called it a hoax and so on? Disregarding whatever nonsense he has said on many past occasions. Oh well. In this case I'd only quote George Carlin here: "The public sucks".
• drummer 7y ago
  Roussel et al., “SARS-CoV-2: fear versus data.”, Int J Antimicrob Agents. 2020 Mar 19:105947, “Under these conditions, there does not seem to be a significant difference between the mortality rate of SARS-CoV-2 in OECD countries and that of common coronaviruses (χ2 test, P=0.11). Of course, the major flaw in this study is that the percentage of deaths attributable to the virus is not determined, but this is the case for all studies reporting respiratory virus infections, including SARS-CoV-2.” “Under these conditions, and all other things being equal, SARS-CoV-2 infection cannot be described as being statistically more severe than infection with other coronaviruses in common circulation.” “Finally, in OECD countries, SARS-CoV-2 does not seem to be deadlier than other circulating viruses.” https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/32201354 https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/32201354
  • jshevek 7y ago
    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.
    • Theodores 7y ago
      Victim blaming! We need to tell our HN moderator what CSS rules need to be changed to get this to work on all devices. Plus when adding a comment the syntax for the markdown should be given.
      • jshevek 7y ago
        My intention is to inform, not to blame. :) Otherwise, I agree with your suggestion [of providing more guidance on the reply screen] Until a better solution is implemented, would you help spread the word when you see code quotes used this way? Edit: I'm not sure that modifying the presentation of code quotes fully solves the problem, as we still benefit from having two types of quotes, wrap and nowrap.
      • leetcrew 7y ago
        it's for code, not block quotes of english. wrapping is off by design.
• lone_haxx0r 7y ago
  When mainstream media has been pushing pernicious narratives and outright lies for many years, I see why people would be skeptic about their claims. Unfortunately, most people don't have the means (technical knowledge, time) to appropriately asses the real danger of this situation, so they have two options: - Believe the liars. - Don't believe the liars. It turns out, the liars weren't lying this time.
  • Cookingboy 7y ago
    >most people don't have the means (technical knowledge, time) to appropriately asses the real danger of this situation, That's only part of the problem. The real problem is that they don't want to do due diligence. It feels much better to believe/disbelieve things based on whether they want them too be true or not, rather than actually finding out they are true or not.
  • Juliate 7y ago
    Well, it doesn't help much either to put a mainstream entertainment persona as the president of the USA.
  • deleted 7y ago
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• deleted 7y ago
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• techbio 7y ago
  “As of today there are x,y00,000 cases and n,000 deaths reported due to coronavirus—here to discuss the new numbers is political correspondent Not A. Statistician.”
• drocer88 7y ago
  If you're getting your "news" from CNN/Fox/MSNBC, or "gathering evidence" to promote one the two permitted narratives, that's your problem. This is stuff is low effort "Presidential Level Politics" 24x7. Real news died when reporters stopped having to craft a story so that the Associated Press or United Press International picked it up and made it available to the varied local newspapers of America, both liberal and conservative. The old CNN that actually did news, not talk show shenanigans reminiscent of old school Howard Stern, is missed.
  • garraeth 7y ago
    Agreed. Unfortunately now it's more like picking a sport team ("Team CNN" or "Team Fox"), or Apple vs/ Google vs/ Microsoft than actually finding, or learning about, facts. Tribalism at it's finest. The only alternative I've found (I'm open to helpful suggestions) is to ignore that noise and read actual briefings and original sources. But, that defeats the point of news being an honest and straight forward source of a summary. And it takes a lot of time. And doesn't always end in rewarding information (lies/bias in original sources exist too - eg: watching hours upon hours of live impeachment hearings was full of lies/half-truths/obfuscation coming from all sides).
    • AndrewBissell 7y ago
      I've found a well-curated Twitter feed of smart sources from various ideological and media camps helps to find interesting and informative info which would otherwise take a great deal of time to find. You do get misinfo and bad takes sometimes, but if you set it up right it's no worse than mainstream sources. Lists are useful as well to avoid Twitter's feed curation algos. Just specifically for COVID-19, this led me to: - Pay closer attention to the pandemic in China and request testing for my daughter when she had flu symptoms in late January while traveling (the CDC had no tests, of course) - Begin using masks and gloves while going to groceries and other stores long before it was in common use and the value of masks had been acknowledged - Mentally and materially prepare my family for an extended quarantine period long ahead of when the necessity was broadly acknowledged
• nxp 7y ago
  Yes Minister, on how to respond to a crisis: Sir Richard Wharton: “In stage one, we say nothing is going to happen.” Sir Humphrey Appleby: “Stage two, we say something may be about to happen, but we should do nothing about it.” Sir Richard Wharton: “In stage three, we say that maybe we should do something about it, but there’s nothing we can do.” Sir Humphrey Appleby: “Stage four, we say maybe there was something we could have done, but it’s too late now.” Remember that Yes Minister is a manual for politicians, not a comedy.
  • rahidz 7y ago
    Stage four requires admitting guilt, it should be "We've always known we should've done something about it, but (opposing political party) didn't let us!"
    • nickff 7y ago
      That back-and-forth is between two bureaucrats, who are talking about how to obstruct politicians. One of the core premises of "Yes Minister" is that the bureaucracy holds the real power in government, somewhat similar to the idea of a 'deep state', though the show existed long before that phrase was coined.
      • AlexandrB 7y ago
        This seems to undermine the point at the end of the GP comment: > Remember that Yes Minister is a manual for politicians, not a comedy. It seems like the deep state was (more) right on this one and the politicians are/were the ones trying to downplay the danger and generally mislead.
        • jacquesm 7y ago
          The proper name for the deep state is civil service employees and they generally tend to be right on a lot of stuff because they've been at it for decades rather than a couple of weeks to months. The whole idea that some politician lands in a chair and starts making policy by their lonesome is laughable.
• sixstringtheory 7y ago
  Tangential regarding Dr. Drew. I remember watching Loveline on MTV and hearing it a bit on radio when I was younger, and remember thinking how progressive him and Adam Corolla sounded. When I discovered much later that they're still going on podcasts, I've tuned in a couple times over the last decade but usually wind up cringing or disagreeing. I used to think Adam Corolla was mostly funny and made some good points, now I find him pretty distasteful. What happened, did they shift in their outlooks/politics/behaviors/etc, or did I and I'm just realizing how they've always been? It just seems like as I get older, many people in the generations ahead of me are getting crazier, and it makes me worried that at some point I'm going to lose my grip on reality. How does this happen?
  • koheripbal 7y ago
    I think that may have more to do with how you evolved than how they did.
• Animats 7y ago
  "These people constantly make false predictions, and get away with it, because the things they make predictions about either have mushy enough outcomes that they can bluster their way out of trouble, or happen so far in the future that few remember what they said." Neither of which applies this time. Here's a project for someone who works in the video space. Start with a Trump speech. As soon as he says something demonstrably false, the image freezes and a loud buzzer sounds. The picture of Trump shrinks and moves to a corner of the screen. Then the correct information appears, possibly including a contradictory clip from Trump. After that, the main video resumes. Advanced version: do this in real time with machine learning. Now that would get you hits on Youtube.
  • shard972 7y ago
    You just did
• sagichmal 7y ago
  pg saying something like this without a touch of irony is just (chef's kiss)
• seemslegit 7y ago
  If the politicians and media outlets editors who downplayed coronavirus in February predicted they could say it, get a lead time on the market and prep time for themselves and those with access to better data and estimates and not generally end up in worse shape politically and economically than if they admitted the full severity at the beginning and be right about all those things, are their predictions still bad ?
• 99_00 7y ago
  If mitigation works it will look like the virus was over-hyped and was never a real threat because death tolls will be low.
• mooneater 7y ago
  We as a society are in need of a long-term, detailed collective memory of evidence of credibility. But that is only useful if credibility is highly valued. Neither are true of our society today. People both forget what someone said yesterday, or if they remember then they decide it didn't matter that much they were wrong.
• ugh123 7y ago
  Its easy to focus on foxnews and pull all sorts of terrible content like that, but a more serious task is to look at a lot of the statements and confidence from the medical and scientific community early on - things around wearing masks in public and its inability to prevent spread, or UV light from the Sun and its ability to kill the virus (a popular statement projected by several doctors within the media), and several others. There has been confidence all around from seemingly credible sources - acting on too early and thin data about what measures were effective or non-effective, many of which have been reversed in the last couple of weeks. A lot of this can be attributed to all sorts of news organizations (across the spectrum) and their push to get both positive and negative coverage out as fast as possible at the right time.
  • jmull 7y ago
    This "everyone is bad" is really off-the-mark. If, in a fast moving situation, someone tells you something based on the best information available at the time coming from leading experts, which later turns out to be wrong, that's unfortunate. If someone ignores the leadings experts and the best information available at the time and instead tells you what they want you to believe for their own political advantage, that's despicable. Drawing those as equivalent just doesn't make sense. No one is perfect anywhere on the spectrum, and you can find people who are wrong, stupid, or disingenuous everywhere. But on one side we have most organizations generally trying to get it right for the most part, and on the other, we have organizations trying their best to con people, regardless of the consequences.
    • seppin 7y ago
      > This "everyone is bad" is really off-the-mark. It's the worst take because it defeats the ability to find a solution in the future, if nothing can be trusted nothing can be implemented.
      • a_tractor 7y ago
        Your argument against this valid criticism that the current consensus is wrong about what sources can be trusted to be authoritative is an appeal to consequences which relies entirely on reductio ad absurdum. The alternative to "something we thought we could trust and rely on but wow they really got it wrong and won't admit it" isn't "now we have nothing", its "now we need to hold these people accountable or find something else." It means that blind, unthinking trust in authority is what got us here. It means reevaluating your assumptions, not the end of the world. Doubling down simply because you can't imagine what the world would be like without CNN or the NYT is ridiculous.
• mapgrep 7y ago
  Here are the "journalists" (mostly commentators, actually) in the video Paul Graham links: Sean Hannity (Fox News) Rush Limbaugh (independent, right wing) Pete Hegdeth (Fox News) Lou Dobbs (Fox Business) Tomi Lahren (Fox News) Jeanine Pirro (Fox News) Dr. Marc Siegel (Fox News) Geraldo Rivera (Fox News) Laura Ingraham (Fox News) Jesse Waters (Fox News) Matt Schlapp (shown on Fox News) Dr Drew Pinsky (shown on Fox News) Ed Henry (Fox News) Ainsley Earhardt (Fox News) I think it's misleading to call this "a video of TV journalists and politicians." It's a video of Fox News journalists and Rush Limbaugh and right wing politicians.
• throwawaylolx 7y ago
  Why focus only on the low-hanging fruits at one end of the spectrum? How about all the scientists who made doomsday predictions that failed to materialize?
  • jacquesm 7y ago
    Err on the side of caution works quite well when modelling things that are rare but that can have devastating effects.
    • throwawaylolx 7y ago
      This is a nonsensical approach unless you consider the damage caused by overprotective measures such as the rapidly increasing number of people who are filling for unemployment every day.
      • jacquesm 7y ago
        Right. So, in your opinion, how many people would you be willing to give up for the economy? What ages? Prior conditions? What about yourself? Your family? We've been conditioned over the last 100+ years that life - especially life of white people, but never mind that bit - is precious. So now, when white people's lives are in danger you suddenly want to go all super rational and equate lives with paying out unemployment? Good luck with that.
        • throwawaylolx 7y ago
          GDP correlates with life expectancy, so you can't separate deaths and economy as if they were behaving in isolation from each other like you seem to assume in your tantrum.
          • jacquesm 7y ago
            Yes, they are correlated. But they are not correlated in such a way that you're going to be looking the people that you've just condemned in the eye. Nor do they have voting family members that will remember that when ballot time rolls around. So this utilitarian argument you are making is going to be a very difficult one to put across and if you feel otherwise about it then it is up to you to stick your neck out, I want no part of it, and neither do most people. The argument that the handicapped, aging and ill should be disposed of has been made before, it didn't end well.
• chvid 7y ago
  "No worse than the flu." How could they feel safe saying such things? Because in most health scares historically this has been correct. That the danger had been wildly overestimated. And even now, it is not clear that "we" have a correct estimation of the danger. Recently I read an estimate that 50% of the infected have no symptons. I even read another estimate that 90% have no symptons. Should the latter be correct then we are overestimating the danger and wildly overreacting.
  • Retric 7y ago
    Anyone saying 90% have no symptoms is simply lying. China’s case fatality rate is over 4% which is likely inflated. Dimond Princess tested everyone and has a 12/712 or 1.7% case fatality rate with many still in critical condition and the majority of positive results showing symptoms and a high percentage needing hospitalization. A wildly optimistic estimate of 1 death per 200 cases x 70% infections is over 1 million dead Americans. And that’s assuming we could provide care for millions of people in critical condition.
  • watwut 7y ago
    I think that I would want to see source for "most health scares are exaggerated". Because I don't recall that many health scares touted by scientists as much as this one and I am not young. The 50% of cases being asymptomatic is what makes it spread so easily and overwhelm our healthcare system. It is good news with regards to mortality, but the asymptomatic cases were predicted to be there by scientists already when it was in China only. If you read the reports, the models suggested the asymptomatic cases must be there long time ago.
• zzzeek 7y ago
  Might PG have included the critical point of this video is that they are all conservative voices? Right, that would be too "divisive".
  • pjscott 7y ago
    The voices on this particular video are all conservative because it's a clip from the Daily Show, not an unbiased sample, and of course they're going to mainly pick on the other side. People on the right are making similar lists of grievances against left-wing media, and if you looked exclusively at those, you'd get the impression that downplaying the coronavirus is a liberal thing. (My own pet interpretation is that political news reporting is a circus, reality-adjacent at best, and most journalists leave you worse-informed for having listened to them regardless of their party affiliation.)
• redthrow 7y ago
  Avoiding news [1] and people who don't bet on their prediction [2] go a long way. [1] https://www.gwern.net/docs/culture/2010-dobelli.pdf https://www.gwern.net/docs/culture/2010-dobelli.pdf [2] https://www.econlib.org/archives/2016/01/i_changed_my_mi.html https://www.econlib.org/archives/2016/01/i_changed_my_mi.htm...
• buboard 7y ago
  Pg should write about what seems to be the real epidemic in america: politics. When people politicize a chemical compound , you know things are dangerously wrong
• eanzenberg 7y ago
  At the time, if you believed Chinese data, and the WHO, then you should have concluded this was no worse than the flu.
  • xster 7y ago
    Media: China's gone mad full dystopia, welding people shut inside their apartments, stopping trains, removing people of all their freedoms. Media: tis but a cough.
• GregarianChild 7y ago
  G. Orwell, In Front Of Your Nose [1]: "To see what is in front of one's nose needs a constant struggle. One thing that helps toward it is to keep a diary, or, at any rate, to keep some kind of record of one's opinions about important events. Otherwise, when some particularly absurd belief is exploded by events, one may simply forget that one ever held it. Political predictions are usually wrong. But even when one makes a correct one, to discover why one was right can be very illuminating. In general, one is only right when either wish or fear coincides with reality." [1] https://www.orwellfoundation.com/the-orwell-foundation/orwell/essays-and-other-works/in-front-of-your-nose/ https://www.orwellfoundation.com/the-orwell-foundation/orwel...
• nostromo 7y ago
  This image I saw on Twitter really sums up his point well: https://pbs.twimg.com/media/EUvf_SmUUAEMRiR?format=jpg&name=large https://pbs.twimg.com/media/EUvf_SmUUAEMRiR?format=jpg&name=...
• sharker8 7y ago
  I agree that there was a certain amount of "nobody's going to watch this tape" going on in the heads of the incorrect prognosticators. But I also think that there's a strong 'in group out group' effect. It goes something like this: Whether I'm wrong or not, this is the 'approved solution' of the network I am on. And whether I'm wrong or right, we can rewrite this later with a little help from our friends. In their world, while its not OK to state inaccuracies, it is OK to state inaccuracies in support of some dogma like "the economy must go on". That is why we now see messaging coming from the right saying "this will be over, and the question when it ends will be who killed the economy to save a few people". And that version of the story is enough to vindicate any previous inaccurate statements for the audience these speakers care about.
• btilly 7y ago
  There is nothing about what has happened that should surprise anyone who has read the book Superforecasting. It explains that we naturally trust people who sound smart, well-informed, and CONFIDENT. We don't want to hear uncertainty, probabilities, or the other signs of someone who thinks in a careful quantitative way. We want to accept a cognitively simple answer, then move on. This is what we find comfortable. However this is a good way to select people who are terrible at making actual predictions. They appear to predict, but often with sufficient weasel words that it is hard afterwards to say whether it was violated. (The book gives real examples.) But if you put them in a setting where they can be tested, they perform worse than uninformed monkeys. And the part of the future that they are worst at predicting is exactly what they were supposed to be experts at! The book Superforecasting walks through how this was demonstrated, and the discovery that there are people you will never see on CNN or Fox news who are really good at forecasting. A fact that is extremely interesting to various TLA agencies (one of whom paid for the research in question). The long and short of it? Bayes' Theorem actually works in the real world. The revolution that started with quants on wall street, analytics in baseball and Nate Silver in politics is still ongoing. When you are done with the book and have processed it, hopefully you will understand why the author said in response to an audience question after a talk, Here’s my long-term prediction for Long Now. When the Long Now audience of 2515 looks back on the audience of 2015, their level of contempt for how we go about judging political debate will be roughly comparable to the level of contempt we have for the 1692 Salem witch trials. Hopefully the contempt that some of us have for how talking heads in January and February of 2020 dismissed Coronavirus is a step on the path to that future.
  • maps7 7y ago
    Based on your comment I went to buy Superforecasting on Audible. When I browsed to it I saw I already bought it on 29-04-19. Time to listen to it.
    • thoughtstheseus 7y ago
      Great book. Also check out The Signal and the Noise by Nate Silver.
  • 7y ago
• Mc_Big_G 7y ago
  Fox "News": https://streamable.com/l8agkx https://streamable.com/l8agkx
• spamizbad 7y ago
  Honestly if the Iraq war didn't result in media accountability I doubt the Coronavirus will either.
• 5cott0 7y ago
  There is still a concerted, coordinated effort to signal boost reckless armchair epidemiologists arguing that COVID-19 is "just the flu" and the response is destroying the economy for nothing and/or a prelude to totalitarian police state.
• 2bitencryption 7y ago
  One thing I've had trouble reconciling is the fact that the CDC estimates 24k-63k deaths from the flu this flu season[0] We just passed 10k from covid-19. Only last week a "low" estimation of covid deaths this year was 200k. So it seems the expectation is there will be many, many more, and we're just at the start of all this. On the other hand, it also seems this week like the infamous curve is beginning to flatten, and the epidemic is slowing down. Does this contradict the "low" 200k number? Or does the 200k number factor this in, and indicates that the "long tail" of the disease will be very long and damaging indeed? Some of the clips show in the video referenced in the article actually seem pretty "sane" to me - the one guy saying "I'm not worried about getting this illness", another saying for most people it will seem just like the flu. Those two statements, as far as we know, are not that outlandish, right? I'm certainly not worried about myself, and for many people it does seem to be mild or asymptomatic? I don't want to have an "opinion" on this matter, I want to interpret the data and understand the truth, Fauci-style. [0] https://www.cdc.gov/flu/about/burden/preliminary-in-season-estimates.htm https://www.cdc.gov/flu/about/burden/preliminary-in-season-e...
  • itronitron 7y ago
    The low 200k fatality estimate probably factors in the that the curve is flattening. The current estimate is that 300k people are infected in the US. If the number of people infected by Covid-19 doubles every week, then in 10 weeks there will be 300 million infected in the US. Assuming 1% mortality puts you at 3 million dead.
    • cortesoft 7y ago
      Doubling each week is not how it happens... as a higher percentage of people have or have had the virus, the growth rate decreases because there are less people available to infect. That is why infection percentage is an s shaped curve.
      • itronitron 7y ago
        I already baked that in by starting with a low infection rate (2x per week instead of 2x every 3 days).
• dekhn 7y ago
  I'm a biologist and I have no trouble saying with a straight face that, as of yet, COVID-19's true health impact has been lower than that of a bad year of flu. I don't care about TV commenters- by the metric of # of deaths (not potential number of deaths, or total cost to the medical system, or impact on economy), COVID-19 has been less than a bad year of flu. This isn't to say COVID-19 isn't bad, or doesn't have the potential to become worse. Instead it's saying that i'm shocked we don't take a preventable disease like annual flu more seriously, and that we've internalized the cost of all those deaths. (I know people get really riled up when I say the above. If it makes you angry, please take the time to write a cogent, reasoned response based on data, not anecdotes or emotions. We know that people's anecdotal experience has a strong effect on their personal feelings, and that this is an emotionally charged time.)
  • standardUser 7y ago
    It's an interesting point. The flu is "baked in" to our healthcare systems. Just like cancer and heart disease and a thousand other ailments that we can accommodate almost all of the time. Maybe the end game of this pandemic will be expanding our healthcare systems to accommodate the annual surge of COVID-19 cases? But in the meantime, we're stuck with a pandemic that is not baked in, so while it may be "less bad" in some ways than the flu, it is catastrophically worse because no healthcare systems are prepared to deal with it.
    • dekhn 7y ago
      Bad flu years aren't baked into healthcare systems; hospitals have to set up tents in parking lots to handle the extra flux of patients, and tens to hundreds of thousands of people still die.
  • akiselev 7y ago
    When's the last time the annual flu caused upwards of 50-80% ICU occupancy rates in several countries simultaneously? That's the difference between biology and medicine.
    • 7y ago
• standardUser 7y ago
  I've been amazed at how eager people have been to stake out and defend firm positions regarding this pandemic. We know this is an unprecedented global crisis with no good analogies, and we know that new information comes to light literally every single day. But instead of acknowledging this and taking a patient and flexible approach, we have everyone from the president on down taking hard positions about how this will play out, when it will end, how many people will die, what will happen after it ends and so on. Even under the best possible conditions, humans are famously bad at predicting the future. Why then, when faced with a situation that is riddled with known unknowns, are so many people so eager to declare they know the future? And how do these fabricated declarations help us in any way? They only serve to obscure how truly in the dark we are about our current predicament.
• nickthemagicman 7y ago
  I would love to see a project that does fear sentiment analysis of news media sources. I go to NY Times or Fox news and it's seems like so much fear based reporting. I go to NPR or BBC and it seems much more level headed. Would love to have an objective measurement of fear based sentiment analysis of news sources.
• jerkstate 7y ago
  I think that the video linked is unnecessarily partisan. Lots of politicians and media of all mainstream ideologies got this wrong. At the same time, plenty of woke progressives were telling us that the US/China travel ban was racist and unnecessary on Jan 31, and are now saying that it wasnt done soon enough. Plenty of conservative-leaning news outlets and politicians were sounding the alarm bells since January as well. Lets be honest, lots of public figures screwed this up, and it does your credibility no good to engage in partisan blame games instead of either just shutting up or working towards realistic solutions that keep us safe and prosperous at the same time as respecting our constitutional freedoms (in the USA). The world deserves better.
  • theschwa 7y ago
    This is likely the case, but can you site some sources?
    • jerkstate 7y ago
      Here are a few examples: https://www.nationalreview.com/2020/04/coronavirus-pandemic-conservative-and-liberal-pundits-underestimated-threat/ https://www.nationalreview.com/2020/04/coronavirus-pandemic-... I should be clear, I have no love for windbags like Hannity and Limbaugh but when you want to talk about credibility, you should have at least a modicum of self-awareness of your tribal alignment.
• skrebbel 7y ago
  Not to take anything away from the greater point, but I like that this is basically Paul Graham's way of making a YouTube comment.
• formalsystem 7y ago
  Taleb elaborates on this idea quite a bit. Opinions are irrelevant, what matters is your position. Opinions are useless without a downside. For example, don't tell me that you think Microsoft is a good or bad company. Tell me how many shares of Microsoft you own or how you're shorting Microsoft.
• jacquesm 7y ago
  Paul is off by a mile and a half on this one. They weren't worried about getting caught. At all. The thing they would be worried about is whether or not getting caught would have consequences. And if there is anything that you could have learned from the last three years then it is that lying to the public carries no consequences at all.
  • exo762 7y ago
    They were on a good trajectory of being put of the business by Youtube. But than "authoritative sources" came.
    • jacquesm 7y ago
      "Group captain, I'm afraid I can't follow your banter, sir" "Bally Jerry...pranged his kite right in the how's yer father...hairy blighter, dicky-birdied, feathered back on his Sammy, took a waspy, flipped over on his Betty Harper's and caught his can in the Bertie."
  • maps7 7y ago
    I don't think the author is off at all. Sounds spot on to me.
    • jacquesm 7y ago
      Here is the relevant passage: "The answer, I realized, is that they didn't think they could get caught. They didn't realize there was any danger in making false predictions. These people constantly make false predictions, and get away with it, because the things they make predictions about either have mushy enough outcomes that they can bluster their way out of trouble, or happen so far in the future that few remember what they said. An epidemic is different. It falsifies your predictions rapidly and unequivocally." Paul believes that this is all about the quality of the predictions, and about the perps getting caught. That's nonsense. Nobody, and I really mean that, nobody has been held accountable for the longest time about the quality of their predictions. Or even the quality of their work. Mushy, exact or otherwise. These people have absolutely nothing to fear from the quality of their work product, and their hand in that, being held accountable. It just won't happen. We have 100's of miles of video tape by now documenting falsehoods spoken by officials. The consequences: nil. Nothing. Zip, Nada, etc. And as long as that is the case, as long as there are no consequences this shit will continue.
• nostrademons 7y ago
  I think this is assuming malice where incompetence may be a more likely explanation. I was in the "it's just a flu" camp through early February, and then changed my mind pretty dramatically a few weeks before the U.S. (or Hacker News, for that matter) consensus shifted. It wasn't that I held an insincere belief beforehand; it's that the data initially supports two possible interpretations, and that as more data becomes available, "it's just a flu" becomes less likely and "this is a serious pandemic that will result in lots of life" becomes more likely. For me, the critical pieces of information were details about what the Chinese definitions of "mild", "severe", and "critical" cases meant. I'd seen the death rates by age, which had a death rate of under 0.2% for people under 50 and it going up to 6-11% for > 70. I'd also seen case breakdowns where illnesses were described as 80% "mild", 15% "severe", 5% "critical", and 2% "death". A logical conclusion to draw from that is that for 80% of cases, it really will be just a flu, an additional 15% would be a really sucky flu (pneumonia not requiring hospitalization), and 5% of mostly elderly patients require hospitalization. The information that changed my mind was the clarification that 80% mild was broken down into 40% mild (cold symptoms) and 40% moderate (walking pneumonia), the 15% of severe cases all required hospitalization, and that hospitalization rates were not that different (factor of 2x, rather than factor of 30x) between young and old people. That and some math about how many hospitalizations that is vs. hospital beds available in the U.S, and the reports coming out of Italy that made it clear that the high death rate was not because of China's air pollution or smoking rates (both of which were reasonable hypotheses with the data available, particularly the increased male mortality and preponderance of smoking among Chinese men). On a systemic level, it's entirely possible that the decision makers simply have not updated their mental models with this new information. There are a bunch of cognitive biases why they wouldn't: normalcy bias, unwillingness to look at unpleasant facts, and commitment bias (once they've publicly stated that it's just a flu it's hard to walk that back without looking like a fool). There's no need to assume that they're willfully spouting bullshit because they know they won't get caught. It's entirely possible that they're spouting bullshit because they believe it.
• robomartin 7y ago
  Sorry, this isn't fair at all and it suffers from the issue that is common in politics and political coverage, regardless of network: Taking everything out of context. The video linked in that article is a tour-de-force of out of context snippets. Anyone could splice together a video just like that one with material from any TV news network or politician, from the tip of South America to the extremes of Siberia and everything in between. In many ways, and sadly, PG reveals (perhaps proudly) his own bias on this front. This is very much a hit job on Fox News and the right. One can't claim intellectual superiority and do this at the same time. Sorry. This isn't to say that Fox News isn't without fault. They are. Everyone is. NOBODY understood this well enough to say anything intelligent about it. NOBODY, from politicians to doctors and, yes, newscasters and celebrities. What we can say is that nearly everything that was said or predicted during the early phases of this thing by almost everyone has now been proven wrong by this cruel virus and its behavior. That isn't an indication of nefarious intent. Ignorance? Yes. Malicious intent? I doubt it. Political battle? Yes, likely, sadly...because nobody really understood this thing was going to get ugly. Faulting anyone, from Trump to local officials is, from my perspective, intellectually dishonest and counterproductive. This is where I have a problem with the media. I am sure the founders did not pen the first amendment with the intent of providing protection for extreme political alignment in the media. We have, somehow, allowed this to happen, and, what is worse, we have not come up with a way to curtail it. Watching US coverage and press conferences is a display of just how politically aligned the media has become. Their focus is, 24/7, to attack the political party they are not aligned with. In order to accomplish this they are more than willing to take things out of context, distort reality, fabricate narratives and disseminate lies. As someone who works hard to remain as neutral as possible, a registered independent who has equal disdain for both major parties, this is truly revolting to watch. Sometimes I feel like a visitor from another planet watching from an orbiting spacecraft while the people below play stupid games to destroy each other rather than unite for the benefit of all. Unbelievable. While I agree with most of the observations in this article I wish PG had taken the time to find real examples of ignorance without resorting to a left-wing hit piece on the right wing by using an array of out of context pieces cut together. While I can't be on a spacecraft orbiting above the US, I can take a look at what our approach to COVID-19 looked from other parts of the world. For example, SkyNews Australia: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cdKLx5MhTpk https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cdKLx5MhTpk Dr. Oxiris Barbot, Commissioner of the New York City Department of Health herself, was, for some incomprehensible reason, telling New Yorkers to just go out, gather, use subways and change nothing other than wash their hands and stay home if they were sick: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l2DetEolgOg https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l2DetEolgOg And, before someone says "you took that out of context" (I did not edit the video so...), here's a full press briefing where she goes into clear detail about "no need to do any special anything...": https://youtu.be/NEhLOp7UGNM?t=1659 https://youtu.be/NEhLOp7UGNM?t=1659 I mean, this is the Commissioner of the New York City Department of Health!!!! I cued-up the video to her statement so you can see and hear it from the horses mouth and confirm what I present above. If interested, I urge you to rewind to the start and watch the entire press briefing. If you do, you'll hear a bunch of good things and a bunch of incomprehensibly bad things, among which are: - Just like the normal flu - We should relax - We don't think it's going to be as bad as it is in other places We have been ahead of this from day one • Go about your lives • Go about your business • There has to be prolonged exposure • Just wash your hands • There is no need to do anything special anything in the community, we want New Yorkers to go about their daily lives, ride the subway, ride the bus, go see your neighbors • We have the equipment • It's not like we are dealing with something we haven't dealt with before • We have the ability to address this • We have the capacity to keep this contained • Like the normal flu
• atomashpolskiy 7y ago
  I commented on this earlier, and my karma is sinking due to all the crazy people downvoting each one of my comments in that thread. To all of these people and anyone sincerely interested in the topic I'd like to post an interview with Dr John P.A. Ioannidis, a professor of medicine and professor of epidemiology and population health, as well as professor by courtesy of biomedical data science at Stanford University School of Medicine, professor by courtesy of statistics at Stanford University School of Humanities and Sciences, and co-director of the Meta-Research Innovation Center at Stanford (METRICS) at Stanford University, that hopefully sheds the light on the true amount of fear-mongering and plain stupidity in the media right now: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d6MZy-2fcBw https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d6MZy-2fcBw Here are some of his thoughts in written form: https://www.statnews.com/2020/03/17/a-fiasco-in-the-making-as-the-coronavirus-pandemic-takes-hold-we-are-making-decisions-without-reliable-data/ https://www.statnews.com/2020/03/17/a-fiasco-in-the-making-a... As you may see, he is much more reserved about the subject than many of the people in the comments to this submission. What does this have to do with PG's blog post? Well, PG's post is blatant and dogmatic witch-blaming, while the people, that he is blaming, may actually be right. And they definitely have the right to express their opinion on the subject.
  • jMyles 7y ago
    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 matter of how to interpret a situation in which available data is thin, but throughout this thread, I'm seeing a lot of people denigrate anybody who is taking a more cautious approach instead of fanning the flames of panic. Let's try to stay science-based here, if we can do that.
    • atomashpolskiy 7y ago
      +1 And thanks for /r/PrepareInsteadOfPanic, good stuff!
• bitminer 7y ago
  Paul Graham has the insight granted by hindsight of 3 weeks to 6 weeks of facts and evidence. The video cited shows clips from January, February, March, only one as late as March 15. And he uses the undefined and unusual phrase "false predictions". What, please, is a true prediction? The purpose of these commentators is not news, it is entertainment. The fact they are talking through their ass is part of their attraction. It is all bullshit and viewers know it. As does Paul Graham: > Instead they just continued to use their ordinary m.o., which, as the epidemic has made clear, is to talk confidently about things they don't understand. Paul Grahams' analysis is also subject to the same critique: > let's remember what we saw, because this is the most accurate test of credibility we're ever likely to have.
• danans 7y ago
  > The answer, I realized, is that they didn't think they could get caught. They didn't realize there was any danger in making false predictions. There was no danger to them, and a lot of the same old hay to be made from the faithful in the meantime. The problem is that the "meantime" didn't last long enough, and now many of their faithful are instead fearful.
• gregwebs 7y ago
  And also those that called it early should be seen as more credible. Chris Martenson was putting out youtube videos in January warning about the coming pandemic. He has been continually calling for masks as well: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLRgTUN1zz_oeQpnJxpeaEkFimDeepqyWf https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLRgTUN1zz_oeQpnJxpeaE... People don't have the time to deeply engage in subjects themselves to understand what is true. So we take a shortcut of uncritically adopting ideas from elsewhere. I see this usually play out as the most repeated ideas coming from any direction are the ones taken as correct. There is some amount of ranking of sources: the New York Times or in some cases a professional network is given a higher ranking. But normally none of the sources are experts.
• robomartin 7y ago
  Sorry, this isn't fair at all and it suffers from the issue that is common in politics and political coverage, regardless of network: Taking everything out of context. The video linked in that article is a tour-de-force of out of context snippets. Anyone could splice together a video just like that one with material from any TV news network or politician, from the tip of South America to the extremes of Siberia and everything in between. In many ways, and sadly, PG reveals (perhaps proudly) his own bias on this front. This is very much a hit job on Fox News and the right. One can't claim intellectual superiority and do this at the same time. Sorry. This isn't to say that Fox News isn't without fault. They are. Everyone is. NOBODY understood this well enough to say anything intelligent about it. NOBODY, from politicians to doctors and, yes, newscasters and celebrities. What we can say is that nearly everything that was said or predicted during the early phases of this thing by almost everyone has now been proven wrong by this cruel virus and its behavior. That isn't an indication of nefarious intent. Ignorance? Yes. Malicious intent? I doubt it. Political battle? Yes, likely, sadly...because nobody really understood this thing was going to get ugly. Faulting anyone, from Trump to local officials is, from my perspective, intellectually dishonest and counterproductive. This is where I have a problem with the media. I am sure the founders did not pen the first amendment with the intent of providing protection for extreme political alignment in the media. We have, somehow, allowed this to happen, and, what is worse, we have not come up with a way to curtail it. Watching US coverage and press conferences is a display of just how politically aligned the media has become. Their focus is, 24/7, to attack the political party they are not aligned with. In order to accomplish this they are more than willing to take things out of context, distort reality, fabricate narratives and disseminate lies. As someone who works hard to remain as neutral as possible, a registered independent who has equal disdain for both major parties, this is truly revolting to watch. Sometimes I feel like a visitor from another planet watching from an orbiting spacecraft while the people below play stupid games to destroy each other rather than unite for the benefit of all. Unbelievable. While I agree with most of the observations in this article I wish PG had taken the time to find real examples of ignorance without resorting to a left-wing hit piece on the right wing by using an array of out of context pieces cut together. While I can't be on a spacecraft orbiting above the US, I can take a look at what our approach to COVID-19 looked from other parts of the world. For example, SkyNews Australia: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cdKLx5MhTpk https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cdKLx5MhTpk Dr. Oxiris Barbot, Commissioner of the New York City Department of Health herself, was, for some incomprehensible reason, telling New Yorkers to just go out, gather, use subways and change nothing other than wash their hands and stay home if they were sick: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l2DetEolgOg https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l2DetEolgOg And, before someone says "you took that out of context" (I did not edit the video so...), here's a full press briefing where she goes into clear detail about "no need to do any special anything...": https://youtu.be/NEhLOp7UGNM?t=1659 https://youtu.be/NEhLOp7UGNM?t=1659 I mean, this is the Commissioner of the New York City Department of Health!!!! I cued-up the video to her statement so you can see and hear it from the horses mouth and confirm what I present above. If interested, I urge you to rewind to the start and watch the entire press briefing. If you do, you'll hear a bunch of good things and a bunch of incomprehensibly bad things, among which are: - Just like the normal flu - We should relax - We don't think it's going to be as bad as it is in other places - We have been ahead of this from day one - Go about your lives - Go about your business - There has to be prolonged exposure - Just wash your hands - There is no need to do anything special anything in the community, we want New Yorkers to go about their daily lives, ride the subway, ride the bus, go see your neighbors - We have the equipment - It's not like we are dealing with something we haven't dealt with before - We have the ability to address this - We have the capacity to keep this contained - Like the normal flu These are not statements made by talking heads in news shows. These are the leaders of the US state with the most cases and most deaths. They are not taken out of context. And they are clearly telling people to, effectively, go out there and get infected. This is the real reason for which places like New York and Louisiana are in such trouble. Their leadership failed the people. They failed miserably. They were ignorant, political and just plain wrong. And they got everyone infected. It's one thing to start with a handful of cases. It's quite another to tell people to pile into subways, festivals, restaurants and other high-traffic public environments and effectively help the virus replicate. You then start your odyssey with thousands of cases, not a handful, which can't end well. Either we dismiss this as collective ignorance and excuse it as such, or we don't. Yet, other states took it very seriously. People took it seriously. The trigger for most was when Trump shut down travel from China. That was on January 31st. Love him or hate him, an neutral observer would instantly understand this was a seriously out of band move and one that could not have been taken lightly or unilaterally. That was a very strong signal that something was seriously wrong. For me, that event, added to the R0 data that was coming in, told me this was serious and it high likelihood of going way beyond China. During the first week of February I bought three months of supplies for our family. Various states around the nation started to take measures as well. Places like NY and Louisiana, instead, decided closing the doors to China was racist and, as if the virus cared about political defiance, actually promoted mass gatherings and helped the virus spread and infect large numbers of people. Yes, I agree with the general message issued by PG. However, I strongly suggest the article needs to be edited in order to remove the intellectually dishonest and politically one-sided focus. It simply isn't true and it is wrong. There's a very direct and well documented link in the video and Twitter record of who in the US is directly responsible for hundreds of thousands of people getting infected and likely tens of thousands to hundreds of thousands of people dying. This isn't a joke. People are losing partners, mothers, fathers, siblings, sons and daughters. Let's not lie or distort the truth due to political alignment and effectively join the very group we are accusing of being dishonest.
• abstractbarista 7y ago
  Honestly, it actually hasn't been materially worse than the flu yet. So this article's premise is basically worthless. We have 70k dead as of 3/6/2020 and it's already slowing. The flu kills between 290,000 and 650,000 worldwide yearly, according to the WHO. The actual "damage" this virus has "caused", which the flu doesn't, is the economic shock of everyone being forced at once to not go out and spend. We have rightly done this to save the weaker among us, at the great expense of the masses' financial future.
  • javagram 7y ago
    Your comparison doesn’t make sense, the same measures we are using to save lives from coronavirus also stop the spread of the flu. For instance in Hong Kong the flu season ended 3 months early because they began social distancing in January to protect themselves from coronavirus. The difference is the flu is much less deadly than coronavirus when you catch it. The only reason flu deaths are higher for the year at the moment is because the flu is already spread worldwide starting every year in flu season, which begins around September/October in the northern hemisphere, whereas Coronavirus didn’t even emerge in humans till late November/December, was highly localized to one region of China and transmission out of china was slowed by a dramatic lockdown of 750 million chinese citizens and travel restrictions placed by external countries in January. The video Paul Graham references includes many examples of people saying they aren’t worried about the disease and that even if they catch it there’s no reason to be worried, in reality we are seeing plenty of relatively healthy people who would not have been killed by flu dying from the disease.
  • eisa01 7y ago
    It's not common for the flu to overload the healthcare system as you've seen in several places across the world. The reason it hasn't been worse is that people have acted and started to stay at home before the government issued orders Not sure when it last happened, 1918?
  • bvinc 7y ago
    In what metric is it slowing?
  • 7y ago
• yibg 7y ago
  I think one of the issues here is incentive. Politicians' incentives don't always align with those of the population. In this case they can put out a strong warning and start acting with lockdowns etc or say everything is fine. If they say everything is fine, then either 1) things are, in which case they look good after the fact for remaining calm or 2) things go south and they can deflect and point to other countries that are in the same boat. If on the other hand they warn of incoming disaster and lock things down, still one of two things happen. 1) everything is indeed fine and they get destroyed for crashing the economy. or 2) the economy gets locked down and the pandemic isn't so severe. But the damage to the economy is still there and there will be no higher death count that could've happened to compare against. In this case they probably won't get much credit either. So it seems to them then start acting early brings no benefits and only downsides.
• crusso 7y ago
  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 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 contagious. Bad judgement is a human failing that cuts across party lines. To think that this is a long-term credibility problem for only some people shows a lack of a healthy diversity of news sources. At the end of this, everyone will go back to their teams' dugouts and prepare for the next political battle. Nothing will have been learned about credibility.
  • jacquesm 7y ago
    Being wrong and being in charge are different than just being wrong. Responsibility should come at a price.
    • crusso 7y ago
      I'd be all for holding politicians in charge accountable, but that's where everyone gets squishy depending upon who they support? One guy's being wrong becomes another guy's "not that big of a deal". By what metric will you measure "being wrong" for this COVID-19 pandemic? A super cut of video clips showing a reluctance to believe uncertain information coming out of China? Death rate compared to other OECD countries? Whether or not the great Hydroxychloroquine efficacy debate goes one way or another? Whether or not the ban of flights to/from China were effective?
      • jacquesm 7y ago
        When you are not in charge you can say whatever you want, it won't kill people. So that's why it matters. It's not about who you support. "The Buck Stops Here".
        • crusso 7y ago
• yters 7y ago
  I totally agree, and we need to hold all sides accountable, not just the favorite bugbear. Thing is, there are credible voices taking a counter perspective, and they should be heard and given blame (and praise) for their accuracy in prediction.
• ChuckMcM 7y ago
  The less you know, the more confident you are in believing what you are saying is accurate. It has been my experience that as I learned more, my statements became more and more equivocal until these days I tend to think more about various probabilities of what might be correct. I miss the surety of youthful opinion.
• burtonator 7y ago
  My father-in-law doesn't believe in evolution. He also believes in a ton of other crazy conspiracy theories. Now, every time he talks about something political, I make it clear his opinions are not welcome in this family and that until he can stop spreading disinformation he's sitting at the intellectual kids table. The evidence for evolution is overwhelming. If he can't get this basic scientific fact correct then he's almost certainly wrong about everything else. At best everything he argues should be held with a massive red flag. If you're scientifically illiterate you don't get to participate in society.
• 0x8BADF00D 7y ago
  Making a correct prediction is difficult. Especially if you see something the vast majority of people don’t see. It takes quite a bit of risk to make a contrarian prediction, which is why the payouts are higher if the contrarian prediction comes true.
• sjg007 7y ago
  I mean we knew before the pandemic that Fox News has zero credibility. We knew that the President has zero credibility. We will soon see that austerity promoting economists never had credibility either. We will see UBI enabling a massive amount of entrepreneurship. We know all of these things and we knew them before too. Some people refuse to understand these things because their job And perhaps identity depends on not understanding it.
• cityzen 7y ago
  I'll be downvote for this but couldn't you say the same thing about this epidemic of unprofitable, over-valued "unicorns" propped up by VC money? "The answer, I realized, is that they didn't think they could get caught. They didn't realize there was any danger in making false predictions. These people constantly make false predictions, and get away with it, because the things they make predictions about either have mushy enough outcomes that they can bluster their way out of trouble, or happen so far in the future that few remember what they said."
• devy 7y ago
  Fox News deserves class-action lawsuit for their lies and the damages it caused for making people who watched their news disregarding the social distancing rules. https://news.yahoo.com/fox-news-reportedly-fears-early-114530961.html https://news.yahoo.com/fox-news-reportedly-fears-early-11453...
  • hi41 7y ago
    Honest question here. I am not an American but watching the scene. Fox News also pointed out several things that the left media wrong. 1. Washingtonpost telling in early Feb that public should be wary of government asking for a shutdown. The video showed that Bill Maher wanted the pandemic so that Trump gets ousted. 2. Fox News also pointed inaccuracies in npr’s article. Looks like each side is blaming the other. How do you tell which side aid correct. The left too wants to destroy Trump’s reputation. Left is a hateful group which wants to bury the right.
• deepender99 7y ago
  economic crises is also coming...
• jswizzy 7y ago
  If you think politicians and journalists are bad wait until you see what the experts are saying.
• corpMaverick 7y ago
  In case you didn't click. The video is unsurprisingly Fox News. A disinformation machine. It just got very real. They aren't protecting anyone's interests at this point and they can get many people killed, including the same oligarchs that benefit by it.
• WalterBright 7y ago
  "this is the most accurate test of credibility we're ever likely to have" I doubt it. Getting one random prediction right doesn't confer credibility. Getting several right becomes more interesting.
• unexaminedlife 7y ago
  That's not even enough. We need their own words, coming from their own mouths, to be available online forever (compiled and meticulously categorized). If I tell someone that a news anchor has a terrible history of stating falsehoods, why should they believe me? I need to have a URL where I can go to obtain ALL of an individual's public statements about things, and rigorous details as to why the things they said were false. Ideally it would be available via a decentralized source. AND ideally a crowd-sourced platform so anyone can contribute. Also we need the government to define different TYPES of news. Opinion-based and fact-based. Fact-based obviously will be held to extremely high standards, but the hope would be they would be rewarded for it in the market.
• linuxhansl 7y ago
  +1000 > Now that we've seen the results, let's remember what we saw, because this is the most accurate test of credibility we're ever likely to have. I have very little hope here. Collective memory does not seem to last more than a year. The cynic in me believes that once toilet paper is available in pre-corona quantities again, we'll forget about the harmful mis-predictions. And if recent history is an accurate indicator, then I'm afraid folks are still going to get away with lies and false predictions (not to even speak of harmful actions.)
• jeffdavis 7y ago
  I feel like, rather than coming together, people are just backing into their partisan corners again. This is really not a partisan thing. It looks like California and Texas are making better choices than NY or Florida. Trump was too slow to act on testing, but was criticized for acting too quickly with the travel bans. The most credible and forward-thinking leaders on pandemics include George W Bush[1] and Arnold Schwarzenegger[2]; and their best-laid plans crumbled under later Democratic administrations. Credibility is a funny thing. For some things, people are very credible but still drop the ball in big ways. Honestly it's just hard to know how someone is going to act in a major disaster. I would have guessed that if anyone were to overreact on a Chinese virus pandemic, it would be Trump. And people that are highly competent during normal situations might start behaving strangely and lose credibility quickly during more interesting times (like lying about masks not helping ordinary people). There isn't a magic team of scientists that has all the answers. There is a science to pandemics, but there's a fair amount of guesswork, as well, especially when China was hiding so much information. Politicians need to make decisions based on incomplete information. So do doctors, for that matter. So let's have some humility and realize that a lot of formerly-credible people are also in the process of screwing this up. It's not just the shoot-from-the-hip politicians. [1] https://georgewbush-whitehouse.archives.gov/homeland/pandemic-influenza.html https://georgewbush-whitehouse.archives.gov/homeland/pandemi... [2] https://www.politico.com/states/california/story/2020/03/31/schwarzenegger-shortsighted-for-california-to-defund-pandemic-stockpile-he-built-1269954 https://www.politico.com/states/california/story/2020/03/31/...
  • est 7y ago
    > especially when China was hiding so much information Or the media rarely report any information because it's Chinese? Search for covid-19 papers published in Jan, Feb most of them were from China. Some of the data directly contradicts with Chinese CDC numbers.
• grappler 7y ago
  Frankly, those of us on the blue side have a pretty good track record. Not perfect, but pretty good. Then, there is Red America. Let's not kid ourselves with some kind of equivalence: “oh, both sides have this issue”. It's not remotely close. Sure, Trump is bad and his sycophants in the media are bad. But they are symptoms. The disease is the people who put them there and have been keeping them there, by not holding them to account: Red America.
• InfiniteBeing 7y ago
  There are numerous examples of people on both sides of the political spectrum comparing this virus to the flu and downplaying the severity, but then the switch was flipped. At times I've believed that this virus was an absolutely terrible virus, and at other times I've believed that things were overblown. I've read and seen interviews of more calm and rational experts and think that perhaps the original claims were more correct, or at least the response by governments are more damaging than the virus itself. In the end this virus' run may end up not being worse or not much worse than a flu season of a certain level of severity as initially thought, but the future consequences on our rights and liberties by media induced panic and state authoritarian measures might be long lasting. I really don't want to see certain people calling others fascists, nazis and communists in the future after seeing what they've supported during our current times. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-pcQFTzck_c&feature=emb_logo https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-pcQFTzck_c&feature=emb_logo
• hanoz 7y ago
  > Now that we've seen the results, let's remember what we saw, because this is the most accurate test of credibility we're ever likely to have. I hope. PG obviously has better things to do than watch as much current affairs punditry as me, because people verifiably fail such credibility tests all the time, there just aren't enough of us keeping a tally, and the interviewers don't go out out their way to pick the pundits up on it because they're all part of the same circus.
  • mirimir 7y ago
    ... or part of the kayfabe.[0] 0) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22796845 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22796845
• miguelmota 7y ago
  Seems like in today's age most of the content display on TV news is purely for entertainment purposes, or "infotainment" so to speak. More eyeballs means more ad revenue. Anger is a stronger emotion than love so news outlets like Fox News love to stir up drama to keep attracting their base viewers.
• strangattractor 7y ago
  VC's do it all the time.
• dmitryminkovsky 7y ago
  I've got a sort of morbid fascination with the COVID denial scene on Twitter. Every few days I check out this guy Bill Mitchell (@mitchellvii, 500k+ followers), and it's been interesting to see how he's adapted. This tweet captures it well: https://twitter.com/classiclib3ral/status/1246812006960726018?s=21 https://twitter.com/classiclib3ral/status/124681200696072601... Not sure if Paul is looking at this kind of thing, but from this essay I'm not sure he really grasps how fractured the media consumption landscape is at the moment. The tide hasn't come out from under many, if any, of these people. Their position is as strong as ever. They have their own moons, their own oceans and their own tides.
  • Gibbon1 7y ago
    You'd probably like this. Compare. New York Mayor Bill de Blasio on Mar 2nd. https://twitter.com/germanrlopez/status/1247210000155643904/photo/1 https://twitter.com/germanrlopez/status/1247210000155643904/... San Francisco Mayor London Breed on Mar 2nd. https://twitter.com/germanrlopez/status/1247210000155643904/photo/2 https://twitter.com/germanrlopez/status/1247210000155643904/...
    • dmitryminkovsky 7y ago
      Wow I'm based in New York so I've been on the Bill de Blasio beat and totally missed London Breed. She nailed it. Holy moly. Big ups to London Breed! (Were those supposed to be two different links?)
      • Gibbon1 7y ago
        I tried to make them two different links, one to Blasio and the Other to Breed. Didn't work. I feel some of the difference might be due to California's experience with fires and earthquakes. The politicians have a habit of listening and acting on what public safety officials tell them. And the public tends understand. For instance last year they started shutting off the power during high wind events. They aren't happy with PGE but no ones been calling for the politicians heads over it.
• MarkMc 7y ago
  Lots of people here are pointing to Philip Tetlock's book Superforecasting which describes these forecasting problems, and also a more rigorous, scientific approach to forecasting. Interestingly, Tetlock's 'superforecasters' predict a 30% chance of more than 350,000 coronavirus deaths in the US: https://goodjudgment.io/covid/dashboard/ https://goodjudgment.io/covid/dashboard/ This is up from 17% on March 21
• threepio 7y ago
  783 comments and no one noticed Warren Buffett's name was misspelled?
  • kgwgk 7y ago
    Probably most of us didn't bother to read the thing we're commenting on...
• bonzojim 7y ago
  The covid19 is the same old scam just like global warming, it's bleeding heart Democrats at work spewing thier lies, it's just another virus that's be actually killing less than all the other flu's known and getting rid of the weak and free'ing up hospital beds, a little quicker than ordinary pneumonia already does. Climate change be which is natural is fine, been happening for millions of years, man has poisoned the earth for only 200 years and the earth is doing ok with carbon emmisions from natural occurences for Milenia. No need to think man is so powerful to hurt this planet we share, it's all bull crap and know they feel the need to ruin the economy with liberal based media causing mass hysteria and general public panic to oust a republican president that the powerful left doesn't want in office come November. More people are dying from run of the mill influenza strands leading to pneumonia than covid19 just at a slower rate, 500,000 a year worldwide vs covid19 at current time 75,000 and it's on a downslope as I type only possibly peaking as high as 200,000, if that. Don't believe the hype, I'm surprised we haven't heard from Al and tipper gore about the virus on top of the bill crap global warming scam that they now refer to as climate change
  • brokenmachine 7y ago
    I'll feed the troll... US https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/country/us/ https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/country/us/ Worldwide https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/ https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/ Look at those "Total Deaths" charts, and you're seriously claiming we're on a downslope.
• thesaint 7y ago
  What global warming?
• esel2k 7y ago
  But without protecting these politicians here - over here in Europe we were more strict and did not play it down as much. What I have missed from the medical and country leaders is 1-a median age of deaths 2-death statistic that showed symptoms according to corona. Just stating infection number doesn’t mean anything. For me the homework is not only on the political side but also to the medical side to present the right statistics - even if it might be ethically borderline. Because only when the threat is defined to economy, healthcare system and danger for specific groups then you can do a clear data-driven decision.
• lazybreather 7y ago
  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.
• classified 7y ago
  > ...to talk confidently about things they don't understand. Oh, the irony!
• codeproject 7y ago
  We, science-oriented people, should be doing something about it. We have the power and resources. Politicians are only part of the problem. The ignorant voters is the major issue here. There was the weapon of mass destruction propaganda which precedes the Iraq war. Now powerful but ignorant people failed to stop the coronavirus even though there were stark examples from china. And we have even a greater challenge ahead, which we can’t afford to fail again. There are 220,000 people working for the video industry which has an annual income of 25 billion dollars. How many people are employed to educate people about the big issue ahead like protection of habitat? Back in the early 2010s, I did a project which is trying to interest people In keeping track of politician statements and assign scores to their credibility. Unfortunately, I can’t find anyone to invest in such a project. I just knew back then if we don’t change the status quo, the media would lose credibility. Unfortunately, I was proven right. The “ fake news “ becomes the big news back at the 2016 election. I am still paying the big daddy to keep the website registered so that I can brag a little.