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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 comment
by 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 agoOf 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 agoYour mistake is assuming people are using reason to come up with that theory :)
- klmadfejno 7y agoConspiracy 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 agoIMO this is deliberate mis-information, some type of info-guerilla, to stir and channel anger against the establishment.
- takeda 7y agoYep, this also comes packaged with NWO, there is one country that actively works on spreading this crap on social media, I believe the goal is to weaken Western countries by setting up their citizens against their own government.
- jpxw 7y agoI’ve tried to understand them, their rationale appears include: - 5G occurred at the same time as corona - This is therefore “too much of a coincidence” - 5G kills off things that naturally kill coronavirus - 5G makes our immune systems weaker All of which are unfounded of course. But it’s important not to just reject people’s ideas out-of-hand, or to suppress them.
- technion 7y agoThe argument all over my facebook feed is that Africa is both the only country with no Coronavirus and the only country with no 5G. But really, these are the same friends arguing for flat earth in a lot of cases.
- ldrndll 7y agoThe number of things wrong with this makes me despair. 1. Africa is a continent, not a country. 2. Some countries in Africa DO have 5G deployments, including my home country of South Africa. In the news recently is a possible link between BCG vaccinations and reduced fatality rates from Covid-19. South Africa has fairly high BCG vaccination rates due to the prevalence of TB 3. Iran has a severe problem with Covid-19, but no 5G deployments. But as you say, this comes from the same type of crowd that believes in all the other bullshit (flat earth, vaccinations give you autism, etc.) so you can hardly expect an informed response to this.
- Beltiras 7y agoFor every reasoned answer you give them an avalanche of utter bullshit flows forth. This might be one of those rare occasions where the solution to bad speech is not more speech. The mind of the conspiracy believers is just too darned efficient at justifying bad reasoning.
- Kaiyou 7y agoAlternatively your reasoned answer wasn't as good as you think it was.
- TwoNineFive 7y agoI'll clue you in: While some actually believe in the nutty conspiracy crap, it's mostly being pushed by anti-Chinese racists/nationalists/tribalists. Remember how that 5G tower gear is mostly made by Huawei? This is an excuse to attack them and how to get others to do it for them. You need to understand how plausible deniability is so often used by JAQoff deplorables.
- ForHackernews 7y ago5G comes from China; coronavirus comes from China. REALLY JUST A COINCIDENCE!? /s
- bsaul 7y agoi've been saying "not more dangerous than the flu" before it started really going to shxt in europe, because to be honest, the epidemic doesn't look that dangerous if you're in general good health, just by looking at the numbers from a distance. The fact that most people seem to not have anything worse than a few days of fever (some having even nothing at all), while at the same time others simply die very quickly to it makes it a very peculiar epidemic. And i think this is the reason why even amongst the medical professional i've talked to, they first seemed not too worried at all. As for the number of death, let's not forget the flu kills hundreds of thousands of people each year, and that is with people getting vaccinated. It made me realize how getting vaccinated for the flu as soon as you reach 50 may actually be a pretty good idea.. Another thing that i haven't read a lot, is that the WHO have been alarming people in the past with previous epidemic (srars, mers, ebola, etc), and nothing "special" happened (i suppose partly because people correctly dealt with it, but also because of the nature of the virus). It actually made me realize how the whole world has been completely desensitized to catastrophic predictions.
- nullc 7y agoJust goes to show that people will continue to ignore an exponential trend until it eats their lunch personally. FWIW, totally aside from that, CDC numbers for the "flu" are actually a combined "flu and pneumonia", and according to the NHS in the UK-- which doesn't bin the same way-- no more than 1/3rds of those deaths are due to the flu. Other estimates have put the flu well under 10% of flu+pneumonia, though with substantial year to year variation: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3827586/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3827586/ Even if you steadfastly refuse to accept the obvious exponential dynamics of contagion in a naive population, perhaps the fact that the figures you are reasoning from are off by a constant factor of 3 to >10 might cause you to reconsider your level of confidence?
- MrBuddyCasino 7y ago> Just goes to show that people will continue to ignore an exponential trend until it eats their lunch personally. This. It seems most people are incapable of making decisions purely based on what their mind or the math says. I kind of get it, it didn't "feel real" in the beginning, it was just the mind that went "omg we need to act NOW", not the stomach. I suspect this is why the Silicon Valley Crowd was so far ahead of the curve - they deal with exponential growth more often, and are used to listen to just their brains, for better or worse.
- jpxw 7y agoI’ve also had this issue and I’ve decided to simply give up on these people. In three weeks time, they are going to be eating their words anyway.
- MadSudaca 7y agoSome humans won’t change their mind regardless of how much soft evidence they’re presented with. This is good because we need variability. Evidence might be wrong, or it could be right, but following it could turn out to be worse a posteriori. This idea helps me provide a plausible explanation to some behavior I find counterintuitive.
- TechBro8615 7y agoWhat's amusing to be is how anyone can look at the incompetence of governments across the world, and conclude they'd be capable of any kind of organized conspiracy against the general population.
- pm90 7y agoYes exactly. Most people don’t know or care about how Governments and Corporations really work. All they see are memes and conspiracy theories and latch on to them.
- thombat 7y agoLike the endless YouTube conspiracy-oriented channels which rant about the vast Illuminati/Jewish/Deep-State/whatever conspiracy that holds our world in thrall and assassinates with impunity, yet somehow can't manage to file a few bogus DMCA claims to get the YouTube channels shutdown. Of course if one tries pointing this out the response is sometimes "oh, they're so powerful that they like to mock us", but more commonly just to accuse you of being a shill/deep-state-agent/whatever.
- catalogia 7y agoSupposing for the sake of argument that the Illuminati were real and you were in charge of it. You know a bunch of weirdos on youtube know the truth and are generally regarded as cranks. Would you bother concerning yourself with them, or would you ignore them since they're pathetic and powerless? I'd ignore them. To be clear, I don't think the Illuminati are real, but I don't think your reasoning is sound either.
- thombat 7y agoAn all-encompassing conspiracy orchestrating events across the globe, sparing no effort or expense to weave us all into an inescable spider's web of connected threads, that then says "eh, probably nobody is even going to listen to those guys, let's not bother with having the intern fire off a few boilerplate take-downs"?
- elorant 7y agoI think that a lot of the people who are deniers are afraid of the economical consequences from the lockdown because they will be hit harder than others. So in their mind they choose to underplay the epidemic in order to justify their insecurity.
- nullc 7y agoMeh. I'm extremely dubious, often in politics we often see the public arguing against their own economic self-interest. Why should this be any different? It's tempting to give ignorance and fear a complicated explanation couched in the suspicion of greedy forces. It's not parsimonious. Plain ignorance and distrust is sufficient.
- akvadrako 7y agoMaybe you should try to explain why something that kills on average 450k every year is less serious then something that has only ever killed 70k. And not just less serious, but warranting several orders of magnitude fewer resources. It's you who need a reality check.
- jordanpg 7y agoI think that at least US governments have done a poor job explaining the motivation behind the drastic precautionary orders. For a brief period, there was much talk of "flattening the curve" but I doubt that many people understand how that gets us to "deliberately wreck the economy." This is what people who say it's just flu++ are missing, and I am trying to be sympathetic to their lack of knowledge of exponential math and how medical services plan and allocate their resources. It is the government's job to explain how this is very different from the flu and they are utterly failing to do so in many cases. In fact, I suspect that most people believe that the isolation policies are to protect individuals' health, ie. to prevent even young and healthy people from contracting the virus. And based on this false premise, they are right to be annoyed with the lockdowns. This is important because in a week or two, when the grocery stores start to empty and the lights start to flicker, the rugged individualist-types in the United States are going to start asking "why are we doing this, exactly?" And there is born civil unrest. It is the role of state and national governments to answer this question and they have not been effective in doing so. We are doing this because there are O(10^6) preventable deaths in our future. Not because of the danger to any one young healthy person.
- redis_mlc 7y ago> We are doing this because there are O(10^6) preventable deaths That doesn't appear to be true. Almost everybody who goes on a ventilator dies. Corona virus will infect as many people as any other flu or cold. So it's a valid question - why do we still have a lockdown?
- Juliate 7y agoTo slow down the spread and ultimately reduce the number of people that will get to go in ICUs, go on a ventilator and/or die. Because those _are_ preventable, if they don't get infected. That, in turn, buys time to medical research & practice to mitigate and cure the disease, so that, later, when someone vulnerable is infected, we'll know better how to take care of them.
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- zapttt 7y agomy hot take: this is all because we are engineers designing social networks. think about it. email, twitter, etc. it all works like any network protocol meant for machines. it is cheap to spam. there is no middle ground between anonymity and spam. each node must handle their own peers. etc. what if it was designed by actual sociologists or people that actually deal with human, instead of engineer. one would hope in such world tweeter would reduce exposition to all those accounts, because people around me that I trust do not engage with or outright block them. also I could have means to benefit of all that network without rendering all my information to the service. etc. in summary, we are to blame for most of it.
- mercer 7y agoWhat's different, I suppose, is that certain types of people have a huge platform in the US via Fox News and the like. In my country, The Netherlands, for the most part people didn't really seem to take things seriously, even when our PM told us to. All the same kinds of talking points (similar to flu, lots of people die from car accidents, etc.). And so in the first weekend, with some restrictions already in place and Italy being in deep trouble, we all went to sit in parks and socialize like nothing was wrong. It was only the week after that things changed. The government didn't suddenly enforce a full-on lockdown, but rather it was a combination of 1) our PM imploring everyone to change their behavior, 2) partial social distancing measures that were noticeable (events cancelled, restaurants closed for anything but take-out/pick-up), and perhaps 3) a sinking-in of how bad things were going elsewhere. I've been 'immersing' myself in how the media reports things, the political debates and press conferences, and the way my social circles and people on the streets respond, and so far my impression is that there are two crucial factors that have resulted in 'proper' behaviour around here, despite the great weather: First, as it becomes clear that actual things change (limited no. of people in a supermarket, restaurants closed, specific public spaces closed when necessary), people realize it's not just abstract, and 2) while we are an individualist, recalcitrant bunch, we do ultimately have a lot of trust in the expertise of our government (whether justified or not). I'm very interested to see how things develop in the US, and quite concerned in particular when it comes to 2. EDIT: I'll add that personally I think at least initially our government was way too laissez-faire about this, and probably more so than many other countries in Europe other than the UK (and Sweden?). Our PM was/is perhaps too torn between taking things seriously and keeping the economy going. Which I suppose is exactly what he should be doing as a center-right politician.
- lozf 7y agoPerhaps they'd all been watching Dr. Drew, who is apparently trying to use the DMCA to remove this[0] compilation of him downplaying the Coronavirus. [0]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SKlJlQadZtE https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SKlJlQadZtE
- rconti 7y agoYou need to walk away from these people entirely. Get rid of the conspiracy theorists in your life. The Twitterverse that generates fake news feeds on the controversy generated by stupid opinions. It ascribes value to the clicks and responses intentionally stupid content, shouted loudly, acquire. When stupid people only talked to other stupid people IRL, the blast radius was limited. When I had a taxi driver spouting conspiracy theories, I didn't then take him with me to a party, and make all my friends listen to what he said.
- abstractbarista 7y agoThe flu kills 290,000 to 650,000 per year worldwide according to WHO. Today we're still <80k for Corona, and new cases are slowing.
- thebruce87m 7y agoIt’s not slowing down naturally - we are all on lockdown in order to slow it.