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Elon Musk appears to like what they said as well: https://mobile.twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1254495050228260865 https://mobile.twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1254

Elon Musk appears to like what they said as well: https://mobile.twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1254495050228260865 https://mobile.twitter.com/elonmusk/status/12544950502282608...

javagram 6y ago
Elon’s response since the beginning has been way off, “The coronavirus panic is dumb” (March 6). I guess he doesn’t want to learn from his mistakes. It’s somewhat incredible to see how the “just the flu” crowd doubled down on their views despite the failure of containment in NYC (and high death tolls overseas in the UK and elsewhere) making it clear how many more people would have died if their plan of just letting the virus rip through the entire country had been enacted in March. Regarding the removal of the video from YouTube, i don’t like this. Even though it’s clearly wrong, and is being used to push for something bad, YouTube exercising this type of censorship over legal content worries me.
- amiantos 6y ago
  I'm not really a fan of the idea that any person (or company) can be compelled to give a platform to someone (or something) they don't want to. Freedom of speech doesn't guarantee you a soapbox, and it certainly doesn't guarantee you the right to someone else's soapbox. It sounds like a strictly emotional argument to suggest that YouTube doesn't have the right to decide what is or isn't allowed on their platform, and it breaks down under any sort of scrutiny. There are all sorts of other "legal" things that you, yourself, would likely draw the line on. To some extent I think using the word "censorship" is disingenuous here as well. No one is censoring this video, they can post the video on their own website wherever they please. Just because you can't post the video on someone else's website doesn't mean you are being censored.
  - javagram 6y ago
    The (dictionary) definition of censorship does include private institutions censoring. For instance, if private libraries remove a book from their shelves because they dislike the contents, that’s absolutely censorship. It’s YouTube’s legal right to remove this, but I do recognize that the more YouTube exercises censorship and editorial judgment over the content, the more likely they are to remove content I like and agree with as well, so that is what concerns me. And I also wonder if removing this specific video might do more harm than good, because it lets the authors cry out that the establishment is censoring them and helps promote their conspiracy-theory-level thinking. In certain cases speech suppression can be very effective, but since powerful elements of US society (e.g. Fox News) are engaging in motivated reasoning to agree with the contents of this video, it could provide an additional plank to convince those who aren’t capable of evaluating the scientific arguments themselves.
  - drak0n1c 6y ago
    You can criticize a company's behavior while recognizing it is their right to do what they are doing. We do it all the time with other industries. Critiques of hiring/firing decisions, environmental practices, poor customer service, bad products, etc. It is not unreasonable to dislike the trend of a company named "YouTube" increasingly favoring large state-sponsored and corporate organizations both in hard policy and soft algorithms.
- s9w 6y ago
  > It’s somewhat incredible to see how the “just the flu” crowd doubled down on their views The same exact accusation is being made by the other side towards the "doomers". That the doomsday crows is doubling down because they can't admit their fault. I'm not siding with anyone here, just noticing.
  - javagram 6y ago
    Yes, I find that even more bizarre. The “just the flu” crowd clearly put down their stakes with death predictions for a no-mitigation scenario that were greatly exceeded by the actual high-mitigation scenario we experienced over the last 1.5 months. For instance, here is Elon claiming on march 18 that by the end of April, the USA would have followed the same pattern as China and cases would have dropped to near zero. https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1240483296347181057?s=20 https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1240483296347181057?s=20 (Never mind that china achieved this by a massive shutdown and quarantine regime stricter than any US state has done). His prediction was way off but he doesn’t seem to have learned.
  - henrikschroder 6y ago
    In case of the "doomers", there are strong psychological elements at play. Lockdowns are not fun and have an obvious cost to the economy and to people. Lives and companies and future plans are being ruined at an astonishing rate. In order to reconcile that, you have to justify the lockdowns, and one way of doing that is to shout from the top of your lungs that if we hadn't gone into lockdown, everyone would be dead, dead, dead. The truth of the matter is probably incredibly complicated. Yes, some lockdown measures have an effect, but we don't actually know which ones are most effective, which measures gives us the best bang for the buck, and which measures are useless and therefore harmful in the long run. So any places that have less severe lockdown measures than what the doomers are advocating, and that are seeing decent results at stopping the spread, those places are a threat to the doomer side of the argument, and therefore those places have to fail. And that's on top of the fact that statistics is hard, and everyone is spouting bullshit every other way, myself included.
- drummer 6y ago
  Elon is a good critical thinker and saw from the very beginning that the response to COVID-19 was way out of proportion. Lots of other scientists and doctors saw from the very beginning that COVID-19 was not worse than the flu, most of whom have been censored again and again. There's even a paper published about it early in March showing the new corona virus is not worse than the ones before [1]. So Elon is being proven correct again and this is not the first time this happens. [1] Roussel et al., “SARS-CoV-2: fear versus data.”, Int J Antimicrob Agents. 2020 Mar 19:105947, https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/32201354 https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/32201354 “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.”
  - javagram 6y ago
    Your quoted paper is 5 weeks old, as shown by the excerpt “ compared with less than 4000 deaths for SARS-CoV-2 at the time of writing.” Now, today, we are at 50,000 confirmed COVID-19 deaths just in the USA, and an analysis of excess mortality data already shows that a significant % of COVID-19-related deaths are not included in that count. This is with a massive mitigation campaign and nationwide social distancing. The only place where the virus seems to have established itself is in NYC (20% of people infected according to a recent study) where we have seen incredible death tolls and overwhelmed morgues. (Edit, needless to say, none of the 4 common cold coronaviruses do this, ever.)
    - drummer 6y ago
      The data presented by the two doctors is fresh, and shows exactly what the paper says. COVID-19 is not worse than the flu.
- manfredo 6y ago
  Calling COVID-19 "just the flu" is certainly wrong, but it's still fair to draw comparisons between the two. The latest projected death estimate for the US is 60-80k, down from an original estimate of 100-240k. We're about a week past the peak death rate and the total death count is approaching 60k, so the revised estimate was likely too optimistic probably closer to 100k is more realistic. By comparison 80k people died of the flu last winter in the US (last winter was higher than the average flu season, average is apparently closer to 40-60k). 600k die annually of cancer, on average, as another point of comparison. Even if the current estimate is undercounting by half, COVID-19 will still have killed 2x as many people as last flu season. It's inherently speculative to compare against the death toll of what would have happened without a total economic shutdown. Figures ranging from 1-2 million have been tossed around here on HN. NPR ran a story with a claim of 1.3 million. However the experiences of countries that did not adopt distancing restrictions or adopted much less drastic ones, including denser and more populated ones like Japan, are not seeing anything close to these death rates. We'll be able to glean better information once testing becomes more widespread and comparisons can be made more reliably, but the 10-20x increase in deaths without social distancing that was initially claimed doesn't seem to be happening. It's not "just the flu", its "just 3-4x deadlier than the flu, and spreads twice as fast". How scared are people of the flu? How scared are people of COVID-19? The latter is way more than 3 to 4 times larger than the former. If you asked people in 2019 "If we sacrifice 25% of the economy and make 25 million people unemployed, then we can stop a virus that will probably kill ~4x as many people as the last flu season[1]. Should we do it?" How many people would say yes? Probably not very many. Phrase the same question differently: "If we sacrifice 25% of the economy and make 25 million people unemployed, then we can halve cancer deaths for this year. Should we do it?" Again, people would balk at this. This is why the coronavirus panic is dumb in a lot of people's views. People are experiencing fear that is orders of magnitude off from the actual threat. Much in the same vein that people fear shark attacks when they are incredibly rare. 1. This is assuming a death toll of a quarter million, all of which are prevented in this scenario by economic shutdown. In reality, we'd only be saving the delta between the deaths with the shutdown and without.
kelchm 6y ago
Man, the comments on this thread on twitter are awful. People are actually upset that Twitter didn’t remove this tweet or ban Elon’s account. What is the world coming to that people are so afraid of opinions that they don’t agree with?
- James_Henry 6y ago
  I think I can understand a bit why people are afraid of this type of content. First note that this video is more than just "opinions that they don't agree with" as the doctors are claiming and framing as fact some blatantly false ideas (like their statistical nonsense where they extrapolate their testing data to get a .03 IFR). Now note that a lot of people are using this video to justify their desire to not social distance. I know older at-risk people who are using this video to try and convince other older at-risk people to stop social distancing. What if some of those at-risk people were people you cared about? Then you might be afraid about these opinions. Whether the answer is calling on Twitter and Youtube to curate people's tweets and videos, I'm not sure (and I want to believe the answer is no, but I'm very much not sure that it is).

Elon Musk appears to like what they said as well: https://mobile.twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1254495050228260865 https://mobile.twitter.com/elonmusk/status/12544950502282608...

javagram 6y ago

Elon’s response since the beginning has been way off, “The coronavirus panic is dumb” (March 6). I guess he doesn’t want to learn from his mistakes. It’s somewhat incredible to see how the “just the flu” crowd doubled down on their views despite the failure of containment in NYC (and high death tolls overseas in the UK and elsewhere) making it clear how many more people would have died if their plan of just letting the virus rip through the entire country had been enacted in March. Regarding the removal of the video from YouTube, i don’t like this. Even though it’s clearly wrong, and is being used to push for something bad, YouTube exercising this type of censorship over legal content worries me.

amiantos 6y ago
I'm not really a fan of the idea that any person (or company) can be compelled to give a platform to someone (or something) they don't want to. Freedom of speech doesn't guarantee you a soapbox, and it certainly doesn't guarantee you the right to someone else's soapbox. It sounds like a strictly emotional argument to suggest that YouTube doesn't have the right to decide what is or isn't allowed on their platform, and it breaks down under any sort of scrutiny. There are all sorts of other "legal" things that you, yourself, would likely draw the line on. To some extent I think using the word "censorship" is disingenuous here as well. No one is censoring this video, they can post the video on their own website wherever they please. Just because you can't post the video on someone else's website doesn't mean you are being censored.
- javagram 6y ago
  The (dictionary) definition of censorship does include private institutions censoring. For instance, if private libraries remove a book from their shelves because they dislike the contents, that’s absolutely censorship. It’s YouTube’s legal right to remove this, but I do recognize that the more YouTube exercises censorship and editorial judgment over the content, the more likely they are to remove content I like and agree with as well, so that is what concerns me. And I also wonder if removing this specific video might do more harm than good, because it lets the authors cry out that the establishment is censoring them and helps promote their conspiracy-theory-level thinking. In certain cases speech suppression can be very effective, but since powerful elements of US society (e.g. Fox News) are engaging in motivated reasoning to agree with the contents of this video, it could provide an additional plank to convince those who aren’t capable of evaluating the scientific arguments themselves.
- drak0n1c 6y ago
  You can criticize a company's behavior while recognizing it is their right to do what they are doing. We do it all the time with other industries. Critiques of hiring/firing decisions, environmental practices, poor customer service, bad products, etc. It is not unreasonable to dislike the trend of a company named "YouTube" increasingly favoring large state-sponsored and corporate organizations both in hard policy and soft algorithms.
s9w 6y ago
> It’s somewhat incredible to see how the “just the flu” crowd doubled down on their views The same exact accusation is being made by the other side towards the "doomers". That the doomsday crows is doubling down because they can't admit their fault. I'm not siding with anyone here, just noticing.
- javagram 6y ago
  Yes, I find that even more bizarre. The “just the flu” crowd clearly put down their stakes with death predictions for a no-mitigation scenario that were greatly exceeded by the actual high-mitigation scenario we experienced over the last 1.5 months. For instance, here is Elon claiming on march 18 that by the end of April, the USA would have followed the same pattern as China and cases would have dropped to near zero. https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1240483296347181057?s=20 https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1240483296347181057?s=20 (Never mind that china achieved this by a massive shutdown and quarantine regime stricter than any US state has done). His prediction was way off but he doesn’t seem to have learned.
- henrikschroder 6y ago
  In case of the "doomers", there are strong psychological elements at play. Lockdowns are not fun and have an obvious cost to the economy and to people. Lives and companies and future plans are being ruined at an astonishing rate. In order to reconcile that, you have to justify the lockdowns, and one way of doing that is to shout from the top of your lungs that if we hadn't gone into lockdown, everyone would be dead, dead, dead. The truth of the matter is probably incredibly complicated. Yes, some lockdown measures have an effect, but we don't actually know which ones are most effective, which measures gives us the best bang for the buck, and which measures are useless and therefore harmful in the long run. So any places that have less severe lockdown measures than what the doomers are advocating, and that are seeing decent results at stopping the spread, those places are a threat to the doomer side of the argument, and therefore those places have to fail. And that's on top of the fact that statistics is hard, and everyone is spouting bullshit every other way, myself included.
drummer 6y ago
Elon is a good critical thinker and saw from the very beginning that the response to COVID-19 was way out of proportion. Lots of other scientists and doctors saw from the very beginning that COVID-19 was not worse than the flu, most of whom have been censored again and again. There's even a paper published about it early in March showing the new corona virus is not worse than the ones before [1]. So Elon is being proven correct again and this is not the first time this happens. [1] Roussel et al., “SARS-CoV-2: fear versus data.”, Int J Antimicrob Agents. 2020 Mar 19:105947, https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/32201354 https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/32201354 “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.”
- javagram 6y ago
  Your quoted paper is 5 weeks old, as shown by the excerpt “ compared with less than 4000 deaths for SARS-CoV-2 at the time of writing.” Now, today, we are at 50,000 confirmed COVID-19 deaths just in the USA, and an analysis of excess mortality data already shows that a significant % of COVID-19-related deaths are not included in that count. This is with a massive mitigation campaign and nationwide social distancing. The only place where the virus seems to have established itself is in NYC (20% of people infected according to a recent study) where we have seen incredible death tolls and overwhelmed morgues. (Edit, needless to say, none of the 4 common cold coronaviruses do this, ever.)
  - drummer 6y ago
    The data presented by the two doctors is fresh, and shows exactly what the paper says. COVID-19 is not worse than the flu.
manfredo 6y ago
Calling COVID-19 "just the flu" is certainly wrong, but it's still fair to draw comparisons between the two. The latest projected death estimate for the US is 60-80k, down from an original estimate of 100-240k. We're about a week past the peak death rate and the total death count is approaching 60k, so the revised estimate was likely too optimistic probably closer to 100k is more realistic. By comparison 80k people died of the flu last winter in the US (last winter was higher than the average flu season, average is apparently closer to 40-60k). 600k die annually of cancer, on average, as another point of comparison. Even if the current estimate is undercounting by half, COVID-19 will still have killed 2x as many people as last flu season. It's inherently speculative to compare against the death toll of what would have happened without a total economic shutdown. Figures ranging from 1-2 million have been tossed around here on HN. NPR ran a story with a claim of 1.3 million. However the experiences of countries that did not adopt distancing restrictions or adopted much less drastic ones, including denser and more populated ones like Japan, are not seeing anything close to these death rates. We'll be able to glean better information once testing becomes more widespread and comparisons can be made more reliably, but the 10-20x increase in deaths without social distancing that was initially claimed doesn't seem to be happening. It's not "just the flu", its "just 3-4x deadlier than the flu, and spreads twice as fast". How scared are people of the flu? How scared are people of COVID-19? The latter is way more than 3 to 4 times larger than the former. If you asked people in 2019 "If we sacrifice 25% of the economy and make 25 million people unemployed, then we can stop a virus that will probably kill ~4x as many people as the last flu season[1]. Should we do it?" How many people would say yes? Probably not very many. Phrase the same question differently: "If we sacrifice 25% of the economy and make 25 million people unemployed, then we can halve cancer deaths for this year. Should we do it?" Again, people would balk at this. This is why the coronavirus panic is dumb in a lot of people's views. People are experiencing fear that is orders of magnitude off from the actual threat. Much in the same vein that people fear shark attacks when they are incredibly rare. 1. This is assuming a death toll of a quarter million, all of which are prevented in this scenario by economic shutdown. In reality, we'd only be saving the delta between the deaths with the shutdown and without.

kelchm 6y ago

Man, the comments on this thread on twitter are awful. People are actually upset that Twitter didn’t remove this tweet or ban Elon’s account. What is the world coming to that people are so afraid of opinions that they don’t agree with?

James_Henry 6y ago
I think I can understand a bit why people are afraid of this type of content. First note that this video is more than just "opinions that they don't agree with" as the doctors are claiming and framing as fact some blatantly false ideas (like their statistical nonsense where they extrapolate their testing data to get a .03 IFR). Now note that a lot of people are using this video to justify their desire to not social distance. I know older at-risk people who are using this video to try and convince other older at-risk people to stop social distancing. What if some of those at-risk people were people you cared about? Then you might be afraid about these opinions. Whether the answer is calling on Twitter and Youtube to curate people's tweets and videos, I'm not sure (and I want to believe the answer is no, but I'm very much not sure that it is).