6 ms·

It is currently the leasing cause of death in the US, I feel like there is legitimate reason for concern, if not alarm. No, it’s not going to kill 5% of the pop

It is currently the leasing cause of death in the US, I feel like there is legitimate reason for concern, if not alarm. No, it’s not going to kill 5% of the population, especially not if hospitals remain at or below capacity. But give it time and people will become less cautious Regardless of government orders, especially months from now when cold and flu season start back up. So things are mostly still “fine”, despite 80k+ deaths, but that is not guaranteed to hold.

umanwizard 6y ago
I never said COVID-19 is not serious, so I’m not sure what this has to do with my comment. I think it’s a cause for concern, yes — and the current reaction is miles beyond what can reasonably be described as “concern”. I think heart disease — the #2 cause of death in the US — is serious too, but I still don’t think sensationalism and panic about it is helpful.
- ceejayoz 6y ago
  What’s the R0 value for heart disease? They’re entirely different beasts.
  - umanwizard 6y ago
    Heart disease isn’t contagious, so the R_0 is zero. Can you explain what this has to do with my comment?
    - danharaj 6y ago
      One risk is self limiting whereas the other is self propagating with unknown long term consequences.
      - arcticbull 6y ago
        This is quintessentially the human propensity to fear the new/unknown more than the known. Over your life 3,500,000 people will die in car accidents in the US, 6,000,000 will die of the flu. 7,000,000 will die of opioid overdoses. Each of these has serious, long-term consequences. We shouldn't panic, we should make decisive decisions based on the best information we have, and we should seek to reject fear-driven reactions just because something's new and scary. R_0 really isn't relevant, we're all in all of these together.
        danharaj 6y ago
        As I have mentioned in another thread, when you're dealing with an extreme process with exponential growth and a large absence of information, """"fear"""", also known as respecting your fucking ignorance, is most rational. Even if after the fact it looks like the pandemic didn't have catastrophic long term effects, it was still rational to be extremely cautious. Car accidents don't have the potential to collapse society. A car crash has a chance to cause other crashes but that correlation dies off exponentially fast over relatively small time and distance scales. A pandemic in our modern connected world is basically scale invariant without mitigations. With exponential phenomena, if you wait for evidence of extreme downside it'll already be too late. The absence of evidence is not evidence of absence. You can't wait, you have to act on your ignorance. This is not "panic". Rationality is not just about reasoning about what you know, it's about reasoning about what you don't know as well. In typical, mundane processes you can act on ignorance by collecting evidence. In extreme, self-propagating processes, one needs to apply the rationality of ignorance: extreme value theory and the statistics of extreme distributions.
    - ceejayoz 6y ago
      The point: If heart disease was contagious, we’d probably treat that with what you’re describing as “panic” too. Your comment compares apples to oranges. Heart disease has no way to grow exponentially. COVID deaths can.
      - umanwizard 6y ago
        If heart disease were contagious the panic would be justified because it would way more people than COVID-19.
        ceejayoz 6y ago
        The the panic over COVID is justified, as it has already exceeded heart disease for the #1 spot… and it’s contagious.
- kweinber 6y ago
  Heart disease is the leading cause of death because heart stoppage is the definition of death and the “default” value when the actual cause of death is unknown. Marking cardiac arrest as cause of death is like filling in the blank with “died by not living anymore”. Therefore it is not a meaningful stat to say the heart disease is the #1 or #2 cause of death. I cringe when that is used by fitness gurus to justify their videos or when scientific discussions are derailed by making the comparison.
  - umanwizard 6y ago
    Sure. Replace that with the third, fourth, or fifth cause of death, and my point is the same.
    - kweinber 6y ago
      Not really. You’d have to replace it with the third, fourth, and fifth COMBINED. Since your point is that Coronavirus concerns are overblown, you might want to reconsider it.
- davidw 6y ago
  I've settled on "healthy fear" as my view of the proper reaction. Panic isn't helpful and you can't sustain it. Disregard is just plain stupid - it's a lethal disease that messes up a lot of young and healthy people pretty seriously.
  - umanwizard 6y ago
    > it's a lethal disease that messes up a lot of young and healthy people pretty seriously. What definitions of “a lot” (using actual numbers, not anecdotes) and “messes up” are you using here?
api 6y ago
It's amazing how grossly irrational we are about risk. We just spent two decades being terrified of terrorism, giving up hard won civil rights and spending trillions on needless wars. Terrorism never even approached the damage caused by a damn bat virus. 9/11 killed about 2000 people and caused a tiny fraction of the economic damage, and that was by orders of magnitude the largest terror attack. Same goes for random mass shootings, serial killers, most drugs (except maybe fentanyl), street crime, and so on. It makes more sense to be alarmed about this than any of those things, yet many of the same voices that were in utter panic over that stuff are dismissive of this.
- GordonS 6y ago
  Yep, Bruce Schneier has written some interesting articles over the years about this - how people perceive risks like terrorism as high, despite the reality. Ultimately it seems to be about what fits the government's narrative, more than anything else. Whatever they can use to spread fear is something they perceive as good - it deflects from real issues at home, and can be used to justify otherwise dubious actions (e.g. having a populace scared of terrorism was the perfect situation for invading Iraq).
  - kyboren 6y ago
    I think rather it is ultimately about fear; governments merely exploit fear to push their policies. To be clear, I nearly entirely agree with you. I just think that government narratives are not the ultimate source of this irrationality. The ultimate source is fear. Another classic example: Few people fear dying in a car accident, but many people fear dying a plane crash, despite the relative probabilities being skewed entirely in the other direction. This irrationality is not part of any government narrative, it is simply fueled by fear. Humans are terrible at rationally evaluating risks and, especially when trained by the media they consume, fear the dumbest things (dying in a mass shooting vs. dying in a police shooting, plane crashes vs. car crashes, immigrants vs. other community members, brain-eating amoebas vs. swimming pools, etc. etc.).
    - GordonS 6y ago

umanwizard 6y ago

I never said COVID-19 is not serious, so I’m not sure what this has to do with my comment. I think it’s a cause for concern, yes — and the current reaction is miles beyond what can reasonably be described as “concern”. I think heart disease — the #2 cause of death in the US — is serious too, but I still don’t think sensationalism and panic about it is helpful.

ceejayoz 6y ago
What’s the R0 value for heart disease? They’re entirely different beasts.
- umanwizard 6y ago
  Heart disease isn’t contagious, so the R_0 is zero. Can you explain what this has to do with my comment?
  - danharaj 6y ago
    One risk is self limiting whereas the other is self propagating with unknown long term consequences.
    - arcticbull 6y ago
      This is quintessentially the human propensity to fear the new/unknown more than the known. Over your life 3,500,000 people will die in car accidents in the US, 6,000,000 will die of the flu. 7,000,000 will die of opioid overdoses. Each of these has serious, long-term consequences. We shouldn't panic, we should make decisive decisions based on the best information we have, and we should seek to reject fear-driven reactions just because something's new and scary. R_0 really isn't relevant, we're all in all of these together.
      - danharaj 6y ago
        As I have mentioned in another thread, when you're dealing with an extreme process with exponential growth and a large absence of information, """"fear"""", also known as respecting your fucking ignorance, is most rational. Even if after the fact it looks like the pandemic didn't have catastrophic long term effects, it was still rational to be extremely cautious. Car accidents don't have the potential to collapse society. A car crash has a chance to cause other crashes but that correlation dies off exponentially fast over relatively small time and distance scales. A pandemic in our modern connected world is basically scale invariant without mitigations. With exponential phenomena, if you wait for evidence of extreme downside it'll already be too late. The absence of evidence is not evidence of absence. You can't wait, you have to act on your ignorance. This is not "panic". Rationality is not just about reasoning about what you know, it's about reasoning about what you don't know as well. In typical, mundane processes you can act on ignorance by collecting evidence. In extreme, self-propagating processes, one needs to apply the rationality of ignorance: extreme value theory and the statistics of extreme distributions.
  - ceejayoz 6y ago
    The point: If heart disease was contagious, we’d probably treat that with what you’re describing as “panic” too. Your comment compares apples to oranges. Heart disease has no way to grow exponentially. COVID deaths can.
    - umanwizard 6y ago
      If heart disease were contagious the panic would be justified because it would way more people than COVID-19.
      - ceejayoz 6y ago
        The the panic over COVID is justified, as it has already exceeded heart disease for the #1 spot… and it’s contagious.
kweinber 6y ago
Heart disease is the leading cause of death because heart stoppage is the definition of death and the “default” value when the actual cause of death is unknown. Marking cardiac arrest as cause of death is like filling in the blank with “died by not living anymore”. Therefore it is not a meaningful stat to say the heart disease is the #1 or #2 cause of death. I cringe when that is used by fitness gurus to justify their videos or when scientific discussions are derailed by making the comparison.
- umanwizard 6y ago
  Sure. Replace that with the third, fourth, or fifth cause of death, and my point is the same.
  - kweinber 6y ago
    Not really. You’d have to replace it with the third, fourth, and fifth COMBINED. Since your point is that Coronavirus concerns are overblown, you might want to reconsider it.
davidw 6y ago
I've settled on "healthy fear" as my view of the proper reaction. Panic isn't helpful and you can't sustain it. Disregard is just plain stupid - it's a lethal disease that messes up a lot of young and healthy people pretty seriously.
- umanwizard 6y ago
  > it's a lethal disease that messes up a lot of young and healthy people pretty seriously. What definitions of “a lot” (using actual numbers, not anecdotes) and “messes up” are you using here?

api 6y ago

It's amazing how grossly irrational we are about risk. We just spent two decades being terrified of terrorism, giving up hard won civil rights and spending trillions on needless wars. Terrorism never even approached the damage caused by a damn bat virus. 9/11 killed about 2000 people and caused a tiny fraction of the economic damage, and that was by orders of magnitude the largest terror attack. Same goes for random mass shootings, serial killers, most drugs (except maybe fentanyl), street crime, and so on. It makes more sense to be alarmed about this than any of those things, yet many of the same voices that were in utter panic over that stuff are dismissive of this.

GordonS 6y ago
Yep, Bruce Schneier has written some interesting articles over the years about this - how people perceive risks like terrorism as high, despite the reality. Ultimately it seems to be about what fits the government's narrative, more than anything else. Whatever they can use to spread fear is something they perceive as good - it deflects from real issues at home, and can be used to justify otherwise dubious actions (e.g. having a populace scared of terrorism was the perfect situation for invading Iraq).
- kyboren 6y ago
  I think rather it is ultimately about fear; governments merely exploit fear to push their policies. To be clear, I nearly entirely agree with you. I just think that government narratives are not the ultimate source of this irrationality. The ultimate source is fear. Another classic example: Few people fear dying in a car accident, but many people fear dying a plane crash, despite the relative probabilities being skewed entirely in the other direction. This irrationality is not part of any government narrative, it is simply fueled by fear. Humans are terrible at rationally evaluating risks and, especially when trained by the media they consume, fear the dumbest things (dying in a mass shooting vs. dying in a police shooting, plane crashes vs. car crashes, immigrants vs. other community members, brain-eating amoebas vs. swimming pools, etc. etc.).
  - GordonS 6y ago