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Meanwhile in Germany ppl are complaining that the government's response is too drastic and that the danger is way overblown. There other day I was literally to

Meanwhile in Germany ppl are complaining that the government's response is too drastic and that the danger is way overblown. There other day I was literally told that all the measures that were taken probably don't work because the infections were already getting less days before they came into effect. I'm sometimes confused how far apart the general opinion on platforms such as hn is compared to people you encounter in real life.

apexalpha 6y ago
If you do it right the virus and the consequences will be invisible to people. It is very hard to convince people of the possible effects of something they can't feel, see or experience directly. See the whole climate change inaction. Which is basically a pandemic that we DO have a warning for, years and years in advance. It's getting even worse now in my country because the media got tired of Covid and switched to BLM. Making the virus feel even more distant and invisible.
- bamboozled 6y ago
  I noticed this too, the news is the news, and I guess it's ordered chronologically and not necessarily importance. Not saying BLM protests aren't important exactly, but what happened to climate change, corona virus?
  - gameswithgo 6y ago
    and an insane president (both usa and brazil) we have a lit of big problems and no ability to make progress on any because the majority or congress backs the insane president and even the most innocent of ideas becomes political immediately. masks? fascism! insane president has a good idea on accident? liberals hate it to spite him. :(
blensor 6y ago
I never thought that I could ever take that standpoint but I now believe that the most effective weapon against a global pandemic (apart from a vaccine) is fear. It's visible in most countries I followed, as soon as the fear that is purported by the governments and the media takes root the numbers start to drop earlier than they should given the lockdown measures. Simply because many of the social distancing measures are adopted by the populace as soon as fear spreads.
- saiya-jin 6y ago
  I hate to say it, but seems to be some logic to your statements. I come from fearful place, almost completely missed by covid, went to complete lockdown as soon as stuff started happening in western europe, much quicker than any of those countries. Western european countries which were much slower with initial reaction were having massive spikes, some are just now getting out of the worst (ie UK). US is another example with its 'brilliant' current leadership. Brazil is actually another one, the president seems since beginning like the worst you can get in democracy, pure corrupt evil (until next one comes I guess).
  - rmbyrro 6y ago
    That's because we were seeing massive dips in other diseases in the months prior. There is an official determination from the State-level government in Brazil to consider all deaths as COVID unless a doctor can prove otherwise. By the way, they aren't testing all patients against COVID.
- clairity 6y ago
  fear also makes people drink bleach. it's not some unmitigated good. fear can bring awareness of danger, but then (assuming it's not a literal imminent threat, like a tiger) we need to switch to rational thinking to weigh risks and consider options. we can't stay consumed in fear and expect good things to happen.
  - tonyedgecombe 6y ago
    Good luck getting my parents to make a rational decision, everything they do is driven by emotion.
rayiner 6y ago
The level of medical care available in Germany is drastically different than Brazil. The infant mortality rate in Brazil, for example, is five times higher than in Germany.
- dghughes 6y ago
  Even the infant mortality of the USA (6 per 1000) is double that of Germany (3 per 1000).
  - werbel 6y ago
    Your comment sounds like it's an exceptional achievement that in Germany the value is half of the USA. When in fact it's the US that's embarrassingly low on the list: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_infant_and_under-five_mortality_rates https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_infant_an... Let's skip the top countries like those in Scandinavia, Japan, Singapore, Germany and Switzerland. Belarus, Latvia, Lithuania, Poland, Serbia, Bosnia and Herzegovina are all above USA.
- rmbyrro 6y ago
  As a famous economist has said, Brazil is like "Belindia": Belgium and India in the same country. Deeply heterogeneous society, unfortunately. If you don't take this into consideration, you risk saying something really apart from reality when it comes to Brazil...
xoa 6y ago
>I'm sometimes confused how far apart the general opinion on platforms such as hn is compared to people you encounter in real life. Really? If anything I'd think HN of all places should be used to this class of problem, because it's endemic in much of tech particularly IT/devops, and we have arguably one of the more recent biggest and most well known cases of it ever: the Y2K effort. That was a massive industry wide problem that, in a rare case, also got significant media attention. And it was solved thanks to an utterly enormous level of effort. Hundreds of thousands if not millions or more of man years were put into going through decades of by definition crufty-as-hell code that maybe nobody had looked at in ages or had any recent mental model of and hunting for and fixing date issues. Sometimes permanently, sometimes through delay hacks ("let's consider 00-20 to be the 2000s, 30-99 to be the 90s" for example). Then there had to be lots of testing and dry runs leading up to the switch. And it mostly worked! There really were major problems, but they mostly came up in testing. The deadline was hit, it was a huge success. And the public result? It became the butt of jokes and a "cautionary story in overhyping a nothing burger" etc for the next decade at least. The general takeaway for the public seemed to be not "we solved this potential catastrophe thanks for a huge effort" but "we spent a ton of money and time and worry over something that didn't do anything!" The basic issue of problems where the success scenario is essentially "nothing happens" but the failure scenario is huge costs is definitely hard to square with human psychology. Prediction vs reaction requires expertise in the subject that of course not everyone can possibly have, which in turn means non-experts must be able to identify and trust actual experts and institutions, with all the fuzziness and further issues that can bring. Arguably the ideal for Security, IT, ops, health, and many other areas is that they're mostly like air: noticeable primarily in their absence or degradation. If it's a particularly nice day and environment and the air is extra fresh we might take note of that as we first encounter it, and perhaps reflect at times how we feel more energized and clear headed then normal, but it's human nature to quickly let that fade into the background, and a significant amount of pollution or quality degradation is also something that can become omnipresent and looked over if it's not to the level of actual pain/breathing issues. I don't know if there is any real formula for that beyond the hard work of institution building, with trust hard to gain and taking long time periods but fairly easily squandered. Even that may not be enough in the face of short term expediency and profit. Experiences like being treated as a cost-center and screaming into the void about security threats that we can see coming down the track from ages away and know have the risk of major costs are probably all too common here :(.
squarefoot 6y ago
> I'm sometimes confused how far apart the general opinion on platforms such as hn is compared to people you encounter in real life. This is normal; HN is a technical oriented community of people who know how and where to look for information, then able to dismiss the usual bullshit. It's very unlikely we'll find a Covid-19 negationist or a flat earther over here, for example. Just nitpicking, I got your point and agree with it.
- rmbyrro 6y ago
  The vast majority of people out there are not flat earthers. I wouldn't consider this as evidence that people in HN are better than others. Getting information is not thinking freely. I can get the best information possible, but if I don't know how to think for myself without subconscious external influences, I'm not a free thinker. In my opinion, only someone thinking freely could consider in better shape. Seeing how many biased and wrong statements are being made only on this thread tells me HN is not a golden pot of free thinkers...

apexalpha 6y ago

If you do it right the virus and the consequences will be invisible to people. It is very hard to convince people of the possible effects of something they can't feel, see or experience directly. See the whole climate change inaction. Which is basically a pandemic that we DO have a warning for, years and years in advance. It's getting even worse now in my country because the media got tired of Covid and switched to BLM. Making the virus feel even more distant and invisible.

bamboozled 6y ago
I noticed this too, the news is the news, and I guess it's ordered chronologically and not necessarily importance. Not saying BLM protests aren't important exactly, but what happened to climate change, corona virus?
- gameswithgo 6y ago
  and an insane president (both usa and brazil) we have a lit of big problems and no ability to make progress on any because the majority or congress backs the insane president and even the most innocent of ideas becomes political immediately. masks? fascism! insane president has a good idea on accident? liberals hate it to spite him. :(

blensor 6y ago

I never thought that I could ever take that standpoint but I now believe that the most effective weapon against a global pandemic (apart from a vaccine) is fear. It's visible in most countries I followed, as soon as the fear that is purported by the governments and the media takes root the numbers start to drop earlier than they should given the lockdown measures. Simply because many of the social distancing measures are adopted by the populace as soon as fear spreads.

saiya-jin 6y ago
I hate to say it, but seems to be some logic to your statements. I come from fearful place, almost completely missed by covid, went to complete lockdown as soon as stuff started happening in western europe, much quicker than any of those countries. Western european countries which were much slower with initial reaction were having massive spikes, some are just now getting out of the worst (ie UK). US is another example with its 'brilliant' current leadership. Brazil is actually another one, the president seems since beginning like the worst you can get in democracy, pure corrupt evil (until next one comes I guess).
- rmbyrro 6y ago
  That's because we were seeing massive dips in other diseases in the months prior. There is an official determination from the State-level government in Brazil to consider all deaths as COVID unless a doctor can prove otherwise. By the way, they aren't testing all patients against COVID.
clairity 6y ago
fear also makes people drink bleach. it's not some unmitigated good. fear can bring awareness of danger, but then (assuming it's not a literal imminent threat, like a tiger) we need to switch to rational thinking to weigh risks and consider options. we can't stay consumed in fear and expect good things to happen.
- tonyedgecombe 6y ago
  Good luck getting my parents to make a rational decision, everything they do is driven by emotion.

rayiner 6y ago

The level of medical care available in Germany is drastically different than Brazil. The infant mortality rate in Brazil, for example, is five times higher than in Germany.

dghughes 6y ago
Even the infant mortality of the USA (6 per 1000) is double that of Germany (3 per 1000).
- werbel 6y ago
  Your comment sounds like it's an exceptional achievement that in Germany the value is half of the USA. When in fact it's the US that's embarrassingly low on the list: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_infant_and_under-five_mortality_rates https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_infant_an... Let's skip the top countries like those in Scandinavia, Japan, Singapore, Germany and Switzerland. Belarus, Latvia, Lithuania, Poland, Serbia, Bosnia and Herzegovina are all above USA.
rmbyrro 6y ago
As a famous economist has said, Brazil is like "Belindia": Belgium and India in the same country. Deeply heterogeneous society, unfortunately. If you don't take this into consideration, you risk saying something really apart from reality when it comes to Brazil...

xoa 6y ago

>I'm sometimes confused how far apart the general opinion on platforms such as hn is compared to people you encounter in real life. Really? If anything I'd think HN of all places should be used to this class of problem, because it's endemic in much of tech particularly IT/devops, and we have arguably one of the more recent biggest and most well known cases of it ever: the Y2K effort. That was a massive industry wide problem that, in a rare case, also got significant media attention. And it was solved thanks to an utterly enormous level of effort. Hundreds of thousands if not millions or more of man years were put into going through decades of by definition crufty-as-hell code that maybe nobody had looked at in ages or had any recent mental model of and hunting for and fixing date issues. Sometimes permanently, sometimes through delay hacks ("let's consider 00-20 to be the 2000s, 30-99 to be the 90s" for example). Then there had to be lots of testing and dry runs leading up to the switch. And it mostly worked! There really were major problems, but they mostly came up in testing. The deadline was hit, it was a huge success. And the public result? It became the butt of jokes and a "cautionary story in overhyping a nothing burger" etc for the next decade at least. The general takeaway for the public seemed to be not "we solved this potential catastrophe thanks for a huge effort" but "we spent a ton of money and time and worry over something that didn't do anything!" The basic issue of problems where the success scenario is essentially "nothing happens" but the failure scenario is huge costs is definitely hard to square with human psychology. Prediction vs reaction requires expertise in the subject that of course not everyone can possibly have, which in turn means non-experts must be able to identify and trust actual experts and institutions, with all the fuzziness and further issues that can bring. Arguably the ideal for Security, IT, ops, health, and many other areas is that they're mostly like air: noticeable primarily in their absence or degradation. If it's a particularly nice day and environment and the air is extra fresh we might take note of that as we first encounter it, and perhaps reflect at times how we feel more energized and clear headed then normal, but it's human nature to quickly let that fade into the background, and a significant amount of pollution or quality degradation is also something that can become omnipresent and looked over if it's not to the level of actual pain/breathing issues. I don't know if there is any real formula for that beyond the hard work of institution building, with trust hard to gain and taking long time periods but fairly easily squandered. Even that may not be enough in the face of short term expediency and profit. Experiences like being treated as a cost-center and screaming into the void about security threats that we can see coming down the track from ages away and know have the risk of major costs are probably all too common here :(.

squarefoot 6y ago

> I'm sometimes confused how far apart the general opinion on platforms such as hn is compared to people you encounter in real life. This is normal; HN is a technical oriented community of people who know how and where to look for information, then able to dismiss the usual bullshit. It's very unlikely we'll find a Covid-19 negationist or a flat earther over here, for example. Just nitpicking, I got your point and agree with it.

rmbyrro 6y ago
The vast majority of people out there are not flat earthers. I wouldn't consider this as evidence that people in HN are better than others. Getting information is not thinking freely. I can get the best information possible, but if I don't know how to think for myself without subconscious external influences, I'm not a free thinker. In my opinion, only someone thinking freely could consider in better shape. Seeing how many biased and wrong statements are being made only on this thread tells me HN is not a golden pot of free thinkers...