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A Global Pandemic is NOT A BLACK SWAN. As matter of FACT, it was predicted by Taleb and according to him it is a WHITE SWAN. The true problem here is the so ca

A Global Pandemic is NOT A BLACK SWAN. As matter of FACT, it was predicted by Taleb and according to him it is a WHITE SWAN. The true problem here is the so called Risk "experts" do not understand Risk, and that is the core problem.

toomuchtodo 7y ago
The CDC had a pandemic team, they were let go. California had a reserve of ventilators, which were liquidated due to “budget reasons”. The problem isn’t risk experts; the problem is that government representatives elected have no domain expertise nor leadership fortitude to put domain experts into the driver’s seat when the situation dictates. China, for all its failings, gets this right. Their leadership is more STEM and less lawyers and politicians.
- briandear 7y ago
  > The CDC has a pandemic team, they were let go. Can we please stop parroting that distortion of the facts? https://www.factcheck.org/2020/03/dems-misconstrue-trump-budget-remarks/ https://www.factcheck.org/2020/03/dems-misconstrue-trump-bud... > China, for all its failings, gets this right. Their leadership is more STEM and less lawyers and politicians. You don't know anything about China's leadership. They're all politicians. Not a decision gets made without it being vetted ideologically -- ideology always comes first. And we should look at the timelines from China before saying they "got it right."[1] [1] https://www.nationalreview.com/the-morning-jolt/chinas-devastating-lies/ https://www.nationalreview.com/the-morning-jolt/chinas-devas...
  - kens 7y ago
    >> The CDC has a pandemic team, they were let go. >Can we please stop parroting that distortion of the facts? I'm not a fan of fact-checker battles but Snopes says "Claim: The Trump administration fired the U.S. pandemic response team in 2018 to cut costs. True." https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/trump-fire-pandemic-team/ https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/trump-fire-pandemic-team/
    - meow1032 7y ago
      There's no battle, both links say pretty much the same thing.
    - TMWNN 7y ago
      briandear is right and toomuchtodo is wrong. (He's even wrong in the way he was wrong.) One would think reading only the Snopes article, or the Twitter thread (!) the piece is based on, that to save money (or because the Trump administration hates science, or something) the entire "US Pandemic Response Team" agency was eliminated and everyone in a large DC office building was fired. Actually reading the contemporary NBC News https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/politics-news/tom-bossert-trump-s-homeland-security-adviser-resign-n864321 https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/politics-news/tom-bossert-t... and Washington Post https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/to-your-health/wp/2018/05/10/top-white-house-official-in-charge-of-pandemic-response-exits-abruptly/ https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/to-your-health/wp/2018/0... articles the Snopes piece cites in the body, they seem to have been a handful of people in one team in the National Security Council (not CDC, contrary to what toomuchtodo claims) hierarchy, that the new National Security Advisor reassigned to related agencies, as part of a desire to have his own hierarchical structure. Ziemer resigned because he wanted to keep his team the way it was. COVID19 was not a surprise; that is, it was known to exist in China some time before the first cases appeared in the US. It is not unreasonable for a government to assemble a team to respond to something like a pandemic as needed, as opposed to having people dedicated solely to the purpose and nothing else. And that's exactly what the US did, implementing the ban on non-American travelers who'd been to China in late January, among other things. You may or may not agree with this. But please don't claim that this is somehow prima facie proof of the Trump administration's malfeasance/evilness. PS - No, Trump did not "cut the CDC budget" either. https://apnews.com/d36d6c4de29f4d04beda3db00cb46104 https://apnews.com/d36d6c4de29f4d04beda3db00cb46104 PPS - Trump was not acquitted in the Senate until February 5. Thought experiment: What do you think would have happened if he had implemented the only thing that would have 100% kept COVID19 out of the US, completely shut down all borders (including with Canada) before January 15, the day "patient zero" entered Seattle from Wuhan? (The WHO was still stating that person-to-person contact for COVID19 did not seem to be occurring.)
      - 7y ago
  - meow1032 7y ago
    Your link suggests that the statement is true, but you probably already know that and are posting in a bad faith effort to mislead people.
- rapind 7y ago
  There's a populist war on expertise. Arguably justified when fake expertise is available for hire. Think big tobacco paying for studies (expertise) to say smoking doesn't cause lung cancer. When this becomes rampant, eventually there's a public trust issue.
  - pm90 7y ago
    Experts should not be expected to side either way on morality. Much like technology, expertise is neither good nor bad, it’s just what it is. Furthermore, I seriously doubt that there is anything close to a “populist” war on expertise. The US public has had a somewhat adversarial relationship with Science throughout its history (possibly because College is not considered mandatory, but that’s me speculating). The lack of education and the unrelenting advertisement infrastructure around climate denial is probably what has painted scientists especially in a bad light.
    - CydeWeys 7y ago
      > Furthermore, I seriously doubt that there is anything close to a “populist” war on expertise. Um, what? Look no further than the manufactured controversy over climate science, or evolution.
- maxerickson 7y ago
  China spent 3-4 weeks covering up evidence of human to human transmission of the virus (Singapore started screening travelers Jan 3 due to a pneumonia cluster in Wuhan; China started acting Jan 22...). That's not getting it right, it's a different type of shit show.
  - deleted 7y ago
    [deleted]
  - bigfudge 7y ago
    Something doesn’t stack up here. If China’s response is such a shit show why don’t they have widespread transmission around the country? The US and Europe have had more warning than Chinese regions, but have been far less effective at managing the disease.
    - maxerickson 7y ago
      Their reaction to the massive outbreak has been effective. My point is that they reacted the second half of January, after trying to cover up the outbreak for weeks/months. If the local and regional officials had acted effectively in late December, there might not be a global pandemic.
- david_w 7y ago
  This is not true: The CDC had a pandemic team, they were let go. It's just not factually accurate. Hate who you want, but don't ascribe political malfaesance where there is none. The politicization of this pandemic is a disease itself. Culpability lies with China for covering it up and possibly with their practices at their biowarfare labs. We should all eat fewer bats, too.
  - NopeNotToday 7y ago
    > Culpability lies with China for covering it up Sure, China did some bad things and shares some blame. That said, we did figure out China was lying in January, but did nothing nothing for the next six weeks (besides an ineffective travel "ban"). We have some culpability as well.
    - david_w 7y ago
      Right but the culpability is 99.9999% with the virus. I don't blame Obama I don't blame Trump. I don't blame Congress. I don't blame Italy. I blame a virus. Our response to it, so far as it deviated from a hypothetical perfect 10, is not relevant. It's a virus.
      - david_w 7y ago
        Just for the record, every single time I make a post even mildly criticizing China in any thread, it gets downvoted almost immediately.
        dang 7y ago
        Most people who do that are posting nationalistic flamebait whether they mean to or not, and the majority of readers here do not want flamewars on the site. https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&query=by%3Adang%20nationalistic&sort=byDate&type=comment https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que... I'm afraid that your post upthread (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22834681 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22834681) is an example. We don't need that sort of low-information, high-indignation arguing on inflammatory topics.
bumby 7y ago
I think the problem is how we look at risk in the context of our cognitive biases. Although given a long enough timeline a pandemic is all but guaranteed, on a annual or election cycle it scores pretty low on the probability scale. Our gauge of the severity may have been misrepresented due to the once-in-a-century nature of this event. Juxtapose that with issues that people face in the immediate term like budget shortfalls, service disruptions creating disgruntled electorates, etc. I think it's easy for powers-to-be to convince themselves to gut preparations for a pandemic in favor of more 'guaranteed-to-happen' short term crises. Combining poor risk assessments with a recency bias can incentivize these kinds of decisions.
- _curious_ 7y ago
  Interesting perspective. It's as though the gov (read: we/us) have become distracted by the "risk" of a lot of the day to day social issues and minutiae at the expense of the real threats.
AriaMinaei 7y ago
Exactly. This is the furthest thing from a black swan. A global pandemic was always a matter of when, not if (still is). That, by definition, is not a black swan. Plus, we in EU/NA had plenty of notice since January to prepare, and we chose to bury our head in the sand instead. Prominent people call this a black swan just to deflect responsibility, and perhaps to get a bit of bailout money on the side.
- david_w 7y ago
  But ArialMinaei there's not that much more they could have done. It still would have had 20x the mortality rate of the usual flu strain and it still would have had an RO of 3 or 4. Once something that fits those parameters is loosed on the world, the rest is a fait accompli- we're going into social distancing, lockdown, whatever it's being called. Yes respirators and masks, I know, but the previous administration had gone through the same thing on a smaller scale and stockpiles were not replenished possibly because experts said it won't happen again for a while (I am giving the previous administration the benefit of the doubt here.. I don't know why they didn't replace those items). The point here is, there's not that much that even had all information been available, and masks, and respirators, the world could have done. It's literally a force of nature that humans have a limited ability to deal with instantly. I am not defending any political or public policy department past or present. I am just stating the obvious. Everything else is 20/20 hindsight aimed at the margins of effectiveness, so why go there ?
  - PaulDavisThe1st 7y ago
    c.f. South Korea. c.f. Germany c.f. Canada even ... c.f. California. These are all jurisdictions that took early, effective, widespread action that have resulted in dramatically lower rates of cases and deaths.
    - david_w 7y ago
      Yeah those three nations are not that different from each other relative to the spread that exists between them and other nations. https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/covid-daily-cases-trajectory-per-million?country=CAN+USA+DEU https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/covid-daily-cases-traject... If you look at who has the LEAST per million (absolute number of cases are worse than useless and what most statisitic sites are showing) it's not nations usually associated with good governance, ahem... So what's going on. It's traffic. Flights into a nation, and especially flights from China. The nations with the best per capita numbers are low-air-traffic nations, per capita, so Belize, South Africa, Thailand, Andorra places like that. So mystery solved. The difference between the US and Germany, the best of the "developed" nations, is not that big at all. For a long time, weeks and weeks, it's been mid 700s for BOTH nations. I am not sure where the very latest data is getting we're at 100 per million now, but still they're comparable in the larger scheme of things.
bwb 7y ago
my fault, updated to say high risk event.

toomuchtodo 7y ago

The CDC had a pandemic team, they were let go. California had a reserve of ventilators, which were liquidated due to “budget reasons”. The problem isn’t risk experts; the problem is that government representatives elected have no domain expertise nor leadership fortitude to put domain experts into the driver’s seat when the situation dictates. China, for all its failings, gets this right. Their leadership is more STEM and less lawyers and politicians.

briandear 7y ago
> The CDC has a pandemic team, they were let go. Can we please stop parroting that distortion of the facts? https://www.factcheck.org/2020/03/dems-misconstrue-trump-budget-remarks/ https://www.factcheck.org/2020/03/dems-misconstrue-trump-bud... > China, for all its failings, gets this right. Their leadership is more STEM and less lawyers and politicians. You don't know anything about China's leadership. They're all politicians. Not a decision gets made without it being vetted ideologically -- ideology always comes first. And we should look at the timelines from China before saying they "got it right."[1] [1] https://www.nationalreview.com/the-morning-jolt/chinas-devastating-lies/ https://www.nationalreview.com/the-morning-jolt/chinas-devas...
- kens 7y ago
  >> The CDC has a pandemic team, they were let go. >Can we please stop parroting that distortion of the facts? I'm not a fan of fact-checker battles but Snopes says "Claim: The Trump administration fired the U.S. pandemic response team in 2018 to cut costs. True." https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/trump-fire-pandemic-team/ https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/trump-fire-pandemic-team/
  - meow1032 7y ago
    There's no battle, both links say pretty much the same thing.
  - TMWNN 7y ago
    briandear is right and toomuchtodo is wrong. (He's even wrong in the way he was wrong.) One would think reading only the Snopes article, or the Twitter thread (!) the piece is based on, that to save money (or because the Trump administration hates science, or something) the entire "US Pandemic Response Team" agency was eliminated and everyone in a large DC office building was fired. Actually reading the contemporary NBC News https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/politics-news/tom-bossert-trump-s-homeland-security-adviser-resign-n864321 https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/politics-news/tom-bossert-t... and Washington Post https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/to-your-health/wp/2018/05/10/top-white-house-official-in-charge-of-pandemic-response-exits-abruptly/ https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/to-your-health/wp/2018/0... articles the Snopes piece cites in the body, they seem to have been a handful of people in one team in the National Security Council (not CDC, contrary to what toomuchtodo claims) hierarchy, that the new National Security Advisor reassigned to related agencies, as part of a desire to have his own hierarchical structure. Ziemer resigned because he wanted to keep his team the way it was. COVID19 was not a surprise; that is, it was known to exist in China some time before the first cases appeared in the US. It is not unreasonable for a government to assemble a team to respond to something like a pandemic as needed, as opposed to having people dedicated solely to the purpose and nothing else. And that's exactly what the US did, implementing the ban on non-American travelers who'd been to China in late January, among other things. You may or may not agree with this. But please don't claim that this is somehow prima facie proof of the Trump administration's malfeasance/evilness. PS - No, Trump did not "cut the CDC budget" either. https://apnews.com/d36d6c4de29f4d04beda3db00cb46104 https://apnews.com/d36d6c4de29f4d04beda3db00cb46104 PPS - Trump was not acquitted in the Senate until February 5. Thought experiment: What do you think would have happened if he had implemented the only thing that would have 100% kept COVID19 out of the US, completely shut down all borders (including with Canada) before January 15, the day "patient zero" entered Seattle from Wuhan? (The WHO was still stating that person-to-person contact for COVID19 did not seem to be occurring.)
    - 7y ago
- meow1032 7y ago
  Your link suggests that the statement is true, but you probably already know that and are posting in a bad faith effort to mislead people.
rapind 7y ago
There's a populist war on expertise. Arguably justified when fake expertise is available for hire. Think big tobacco paying for studies (expertise) to say smoking doesn't cause lung cancer. When this becomes rampant, eventually there's a public trust issue.
- pm90 7y ago
  Experts should not be expected to side either way on morality. Much like technology, expertise is neither good nor bad, it’s just what it is. Furthermore, I seriously doubt that there is anything close to a “populist” war on expertise. The US public has had a somewhat adversarial relationship with Science throughout its history (possibly because College is not considered mandatory, but that’s me speculating). The lack of education and the unrelenting advertisement infrastructure around climate denial is probably what has painted scientists especially in a bad light.
  - CydeWeys 7y ago
    > Furthermore, I seriously doubt that there is anything close to a “populist” war on expertise. Um, what? Look no further than the manufactured controversy over climate science, or evolution.
maxerickson 7y ago
China spent 3-4 weeks covering up evidence of human to human transmission of the virus (Singapore started screening travelers Jan 3 due to a pneumonia cluster in Wuhan; China started acting Jan 22...). That's not getting it right, it's a different type of shit show.
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
- bigfudge 7y ago
  Something doesn’t stack up here. If China’s response is such a shit show why don’t they have widespread transmission around the country? The US and Europe have had more warning than Chinese regions, but have been far less effective at managing the disease.
  - maxerickson 7y ago
    Their reaction to the massive outbreak has been effective. My point is that they reacted the second half of January, after trying to cover up the outbreak for weeks/months. If the local and regional officials had acted effectively in late December, there might not be a global pandemic.
david_w 7y ago
This is not true: The CDC had a pandemic team, they were let go. It's just not factually accurate. Hate who you want, but don't ascribe political malfaesance where there is none. The politicization of this pandemic is a disease itself. Culpability lies with China for covering it up and possibly with their practices at their biowarfare labs. We should all eat fewer bats, too.
- NopeNotToday 7y ago
  > Culpability lies with China for covering it up Sure, China did some bad things and shares some blame. That said, we did figure out China was lying in January, but did nothing nothing for the next six weeks (besides an ineffective travel "ban"). We have some culpability as well.
  - david_w 7y ago
    Right but the culpability is 99.9999% with the virus. I don't blame Obama I don't blame Trump. I don't blame Congress. I don't blame Italy. I blame a virus. Our response to it, so far as it deviated from a hypothetical perfect 10, is not relevant. It's a virus.
    - david_w 7y ago
      Just for the record, every single time I make a post even mildly criticizing China in any thread, it gets downvoted almost immediately.
      - dang 7y ago
        Most people who do that are posting nationalistic flamebait whether they mean to or not, and the majority of readers here do not want flamewars on the site. https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&query=by%3Adang%20nationalistic&sort=byDate&type=comment https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que... I'm afraid that your post upthread (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22834681 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22834681) is an example. We don't need that sort of low-information, high-indignation arguing on inflammatory topics.

bumby 7y ago

I think the problem is how we look at risk in the context of our cognitive biases. Although given a long enough timeline a pandemic is all but guaranteed, on a annual or election cycle it scores pretty low on the probability scale. Our gauge of the severity may have been misrepresented due to the once-in-a-century nature of this event. Juxtapose that with issues that people face in the immediate term like budget shortfalls, service disruptions creating disgruntled electorates, etc. I think it's easy for powers-to-be to convince themselves to gut preparations for a pandemic in favor of more 'guaranteed-to-happen' short term crises. Combining poor risk assessments with a recency bias can incentivize these kinds of decisions.

_curious_ 7y ago
Interesting perspective. It's as though the gov (read: we/us) have become distracted by the "risk" of a lot of the day to day social issues and minutiae at the expense of the real threats.

AriaMinaei 7y ago

Exactly. This is the furthest thing from a black swan. A global pandemic was always a matter of when, not if (still is). That, by definition, is not a black swan. Plus, we in EU/NA had plenty of notice since January to prepare, and we chose to bury our head in the sand instead. Prominent people call this a black swan just to deflect responsibility, and perhaps to get a bit of bailout money on the side.

david_w 7y ago
But ArialMinaei there's not that much more they could have done. It still would have had 20x the mortality rate of the usual flu strain and it still would have had an RO of 3 or 4. Once something that fits those parameters is loosed on the world, the rest is a fait accompli- we're going into social distancing, lockdown, whatever it's being called. Yes respirators and masks, I know, but the previous administration had gone through the same thing on a smaller scale and stockpiles were not replenished possibly because experts said it won't happen again for a while (I am giving the previous administration the benefit of the doubt here.. I don't know why they didn't replace those items). The point here is, there's not that much that even had all information been available, and masks, and respirators, the world could have done. It's literally a force of nature that humans have a limited ability to deal with instantly. I am not defending any political or public policy department past or present. I am just stating the obvious. Everything else is 20/20 hindsight aimed at the margins of effectiveness, so why go there ?
- PaulDavisThe1st 7y ago
  c.f. South Korea. c.f. Germany c.f. Canada even ... c.f. California. These are all jurisdictions that took early, effective, widespread action that have resulted in dramatically lower rates of cases and deaths.
  - david_w 7y ago
    Yeah those three nations are not that different from each other relative to the spread that exists between them and other nations. https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/covid-daily-cases-trajectory-per-million?country=CAN+USA+DEU https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/covid-daily-cases-traject... If you look at who has the LEAST per million (absolute number of cases are worse than useless and what most statisitic sites are showing) it's not nations usually associated with good governance, ahem... So what's going on. It's traffic. Flights into a nation, and especially flights from China. The nations with the best per capita numbers are low-air-traffic nations, per capita, so Belize, South Africa, Thailand, Andorra places like that. So mystery solved. The difference between the US and Germany, the best of the "developed" nations, is not that big at all. For a long time, weeks and weeks, it's been mid 700s for BOTH nations. I am not sure where the very latest data is getting we're at 100 per million now, but still they're comparable in the larger scheme of things.

bwb 7y ago

my fault, updated to say high risk event.