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> 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 th

by 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.

by s9w 6y ago

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.