9 ms·

Some of the most scientifically illiterate people I've encountered are the people who say things like, "We listen to the science when it comes to COVID-19". Let

Some of the most scientifically illiterate people I've encountered are the people who say things like, "We listen to the science when it comes to COVID-19". Let us be perfectly real. When it comes to political decisions based on forecasts, you are not "listening to science". Science can answer many questions. I can ask it, "How long do I need to fire the engines to achieve this particular orbit", or perhaps "How much material do I need in this region of the bridge to sustain the load of traffic going across it?" But science is not the computer from Star Trek. I can't come to science and ask it, "How long should we quarantine to minimize health impact, and maximize economic recovery?" Ultimately, that question does not have a scientific answer. It can be informed by statistics -- to the best that we understand the numbers, and scientists can present models of what they think the future will look like... but results not guaranteed. Some problems have clear cut answers, that science can contribute concrete solutions to. Other problems do not have clear cut answers -- but have a large population of supporters claiming that all "the science" agrees with them, and to disagree with them is to shun reason. This is also scientific illiteracy.

deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
throwaway_pdp09 6y ago
Edit: see replies below this post which clarify what was intended. My response was based on a misunderstanding; that cleared up, I now agree with the poster. --- > When it comes to political decisions based on forecasts, you are not "listening to science". if those forecasts are based on science/maths, yes you are listening to science. > Ultimately, that question does not have a scientific answer yes it does, just the best science can do (as in, estimate) based on limited data. If you want better than that, drop to your knees and ask god because that's all that's left. Your post badly misunderstands what science is.
- ghaff 6y ago
  I think you are misrepresenting the parent which explicitly mentions tradeoffs. Science can help inform those tradeoffs but cannot make them for you. At the risk of reopening a rather heated discussion from yesterday, "science" cannot answer the question of whether it is reasonable to have a policy allowing outdoor dining in, say, NYC. ADDED: Science can (probably and imperfectly) help you estimate how risky a given behavior is likely to be. However, it cannot tell you whether, say, a presumably low risk activity (both personally and in terms of disease spread) should be allowed given economic impact, people's social needs/wants, etc.
  - bjt2n3904 6y ago
    This is perfectly what I wanted to say, but was incapable of saying. Thank you.
  - matthewdgreen 6y ago
    What science can do is provide estimates with error bounds. Sometimes the error bounds are extremely large during a developing situation, and people should absolutely be aware of that. There's a major discussion to be had about risk/reward tradeoffs in the face of high uncertainty. (E.g., the relative cost of mandating face coverings is pretty low, even if the science is temporarily uncertain.) However it becomes impossible to have such discussions when a large contingent of the population are ignoring all of the scientific data, and instead basing their opinions on motivated reasoning, faith, or political preferences.
    - ghaff 6y ago
      I don't disagree with any of that. Indeed, there are many policies and behaviors that probably fall into the "better safe than sorry" category--given how much noise and uncertainty there is in the data--although even possibly reasonable people will vehemently disagree about what precise policies/behaviors that applies to. (As you see from voting patterns and discussions here.) And, yes, I also agree that face coverings under at least many circumstances fall into that category. At the same time, there are different tradeoffs because different people (and governments) are approaching risks and rewards differently even if the facts were known with high certainty.
nerdponx 6y ago
For what it's worth, "science" in many fields is inherently statistical. Statistical illiteracy is arguably more pervasive and insidious than "scientific" illiteracy.
ChefboyOG 6y ago
I understand what you're saying, but I think there's some "both sides"-ism at play here. Yes, there is a level of scientific ignorance displayed when people hand wave and claim "the science" is on their side without actually understanding the science. However, there is a huge qualitative difference here, illustrated even by your example of quarantine recommendations. If we approximate an answer to "What is the optimal quarantine strategy?" through the combined efforts of various sciences--statistics, biology, etc--then while the results are not guaranteed, the recommendation is certainly not unfounded. It may be incomplete, but it is built off of decades of empirical evidence. Conversely, outright ignoring recommendations about COVID or climate or something similar, simply because "science isn't always right" or because you "aren't a scientist" is a different thing altogether.
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
- bjt2n3904 6y ago
  > outright ignoring recommendations Have you ever wondered why it's not terribly controversial to "recommend" seat belts and airbags? But when your "recommendation" is to join a large organization and funnel millions of dollars into it, or to levy massive taxes to prevent "the end of the world as we know it"? Pardon me, but I'm deeply skeptical. Do you remember Solyndra? $500 million loan from the government. Went bankrupt. I will not accept this straw man re-framing of the issue. Yes, "some people" say "but science isn't always right", and that is a poor argument indeed. But I am not.
  - ghaff 6y ago
    >why it's not terribly controversial to "recommend" seat belts Yet this was not always the case. Growing up wearing seatbelts was the exception, not the norm. Much less the law in some places.
    - bjt2n3904 6y ago
      Yes, and I remember having discussions on whether airbags caused more injuries than they prevented! But the fact of the matter is the issue is largely settled in the public eye. How did we get here? The answer is simple. The approach was a dispassionate search for the best solution. There were no "scientists" claiming hyperbolic doomsday scenarios if we didn't pass specific legislation by a certain date. The collapse of our transportation infrastructure due to Kessler Syndrome -- but for highways. This should cause any rational person to be skeptical. There were no fund raising rallies held by highly influential "scientists" who refused to wear seat belts themselves. This too, should cause any rational person to be skeptical. People did not start with a chosen solution, and selected evidence to back it. They started with evidence, and searched for the best solution. In effect? Seatbelts and airbags weren't a cargo cult driven by celebrity "scientists" that relied on emotional appeal. If you want your politicians to "listen" to "science", then you must divest the emotions, the desire for power, and the appeal to authority from it.
EForEndeavour 6y ago
> "How much material do I need in this region of the bridge to sustain the load of traffic going across it?" To nitpick a bit: anyone who answers that question for a living will be practicing engineering, not science. Just as an excellent physician can espouse wildly unscientific beliefs, so too can someone become quite good at the craft of engineering without actually doing much science at all. > I can't come to science and ask it, "How long should we quarantine to minimize health impact, and maximize economic recovery?" Ultimately, that question does not have a scientific answer. It can be informed by statistics -- to the best that we understand the numbers, and scientists can present models of what they think the future will look like... but results not guaranteed. Correct me if I'm wrong, but you consider "hard" disciplines like orbital mechanics and structural engineering to be science, and anything with less certainty in it to be not science, but statistics. This is inaccurate. Find me a scientific field that doesn't involve uncertainty and statistical analysis. Your examples of orbital mechanics and structural engineering certainly do. Conclusions made in both of these disciplines will always need to account for various sources of irreducible error (e.g., uncertainty in mass, temperature, altitude, fuel load; simplifying assumptions about atmosphere structure, gravity anomaly, solar wind, etc.). The importance of safety factors is the ultimate proof that uncertainty is core to engineering: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Factor_of_safety https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Factor_of_safety Science is the modeling of reality by formulating and testing hypotheses through observation and/or experiment. Does epidemiology not fall squarely within this definition? What do you propose as an alternative approach to inform governments and individuals what to do in the face of a natural phenomenon (a pandemic) which, although inherently uncertain, exhibits behaviors that are decidedly not random and inherently unpredictable?
- ampdepolymerase 6y ago
  Statistics by definition is not science. The vernacular usage of science refers to the empirical sciences; physics, chemistry, geography, biology. Mathematics, statistics, and computer science are all formal sciences, sometimes simply referred to as math. See the application section of https://www.cdc.gov/csels/dsepd/ss1978/lesson1/section1.html https://www.cdc.gov/csels/dsepd/ss1978/lesson1/section1.html. And for when the two fields clash: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-018-04243-3 https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-018-04243-3
matthewdgreen 6y ago
As Asimov once said: "It is not so much that I have confidence in scientists being right, but that I have so much in nonscientists being wrong." Right now there are people running around saying that COVID is as deadly as the flu, that the pandemic was faked, that masks are a conspiracy. You don't have to believe that epidemiologists are 100% correct about every recommendation during a fast-developing emergency in order to see how the rejection of evidence and conspiracy-theorizing are harmful.
- gus_massa 6y ago
  > Right now there are people running around saying that COVID is as deadly as the flu, ... Which is the current best estimation of the risk of getting covid-19 and dying? Which is the current best estimation of the risk of getting flu and dying?
  - gibspaulding 6y ago
    I actually would have guessed they were pretty close. Apparently I was wrong: The following claims 5% vs .2% https://www.businessinsider.com/coronavirus-death-rate-us-compared-to-flu-by-age-2020-6?op=1 https://www.businessinsider.com/coronavirus-death-rate-us-co... Then again this chart seems to indicate something closer to 2% of confirmed cases are fatal for Covid: https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/total-deaths-and-cases-covid-19?time=2020-01-22..latest https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/total-deaths-and-cases-co... I imagine more non-fatal Covid cases go unreported than fatal ones so perhaps even that's high, but it's still close to an order of magnitude worse than the flu. Edit: That first source isn't great, and is outdated anyways. This one seems to verify the ~2% for Covid in the US. https://coronavirus.jhu.edu/data/mortality https://coronavirus.jhu.edu/data/mortality
    - thu2111 6y ago
      I think you're mixing up IFR with CFR. Current best estimate of COVID IFR is 0.27%, which is basically the same as flu. https://www.who.int/bulletin/online_first/BLT.20.265892.pdf https://www.who.int/bulletin/online_first/BLT.20.265892.pdf However the CI is extremely wide.
watwut 6y ago
I think that you are building strawman of what "listening to scientists" in the context of covid is like and then kill that strawman, basically. Listening to scientists in the context covid will not tell you exactly how long quarantine should be. But it gives you multiple predictions you can start with and then over time see which are more correct and which are less correct. It does also answer some of quite sure responses to questions that actually ended up disputed. Like: does the Covid have ability to overrun healthcare system? Do asymptomatic spread exists? Is the Covid just a little flu?
zaarn 6y ago
>"How long should we quarantine to minimize health impact, and maximize economic recovery?" You're not asking a scientific question, you're asking a political one, because you also want the economy to do well, which is political. There are two conflicting questions there, in reality; "How long can we quarantine without affecting the economy?" (Answer is like 0 days) And "How long must we quarantine to eradicate the virus?" (Answer is around 140 days if a single quarantine unit contains up to 10 people and they infect eachother on the last day of symptom-freeness). Because the question is not only political but considers two conflicting requirements, you can either satisfy both in a bad way or satisfy one well and abandon the other. A similar situation occurs when you are tasked with optimizing the material usage for a product. Science can tell you how little product material you need so that it performs to spec and it can tell you how much you need so that it'll perform it's function as long as possible. The balance informs the price of the product but politically capitalism wants you to prefer a low price, similar to how capitalism will prefer no quarantine and lockdown.
- ghaff 6y ago
  Apparently on HN, you're not allowed to admit there are tradeoffs in the current situation especially to do things that some consider to be unnecessary.
  - zaarn 6y ago
    You can have tradeoffs but then you're no longer answering scientific questions but either a political question or a question of personal belief (ie, "which you think is better").
    - ghaff 6y ago
      Of course. Science can help you e.g. estimate risk. But balancing that risk against other factors has to be a political and/or personal tradeoff. There's no way it could be otherwise. Science, even if it could provide perfect information, doesn't have the tools to make policy decisions. Whether schools should be wide-open, hybrid, or remote only is not a scientific decision although, of course, whatever scientific data is known or thought to be known should of course factor into any decision.
CarelessExpert 6y ago
> Some of the most scientifically illiterate people I've encountered are the people who say things like, "We listen to the science when it comes to COVID-19". Let us be perfectly real. When it comes to political decisions based on forecasts, you are not "listening to science". This feels like a straw man to me. First, let's be very clear: There is absolutely a cohort of people out there who are objectively denying the scientific reality of covid. Those denials ranges from the absurd (e.g. covid doesn't exist, it's a conspiracy, it's going away), to the distorted (e.g. covid is no worse than the flu), to the simply wrong (e.g. masks don't protect you, they actually make you sick). I think the refrain "we listen to the science when it comes to COVID-19" is short hand for distinguishing oneself from folks in the groups above. Let's also be clear that statistics and modelling are scientific methods. I'm frankly a little baffled that you've attempted to draw a line between these two things. Science can absolutely help you assess questions like "How long should we quarantine to minimize health impact, and maximize economic recovery?" Will the answers be probabilistic? Yes, absolutely. That doesn't make them any less scientific, and to suggest they are suggests its own form of "scientific illiteracy". Further, "the science" is very clear: lockdowns are effective, masks help, social distancing helps, contact tracing helps, and so on. "The science" is also clear that none of these are quick fixes or panaceas. They're all part of a web of interventions that each provide some small measure of protection that, taken together, can help keep the pandemic under control. This is the "Swiss cheese" metaphor in action. Science can also be used to assess the effectiveness of these methods versus their tradeoffs by, again, employing statistical approaches. Are those methods foolproof? No. But they're far from guesswork. I'd argue it's this basic misunderstanding that leads people to, for example, dismiss climate modelling... Now, ultimately, the decision as to what to do is a political one, not because statistical models and methods are flawed or inaccurate, but rather because there's always going to be a range of trade-offs, and the trade-offs we make are ultimately a political decision. But the least we can do is expect our politicians--not to mention the people around us--to assess those trade-offs based on rigorous facts and statistical methods. That's what "listening to science" means.
- Izkata 6y ago
  > Further, "the science" is very clear: lockdowns are effective, masks help, social distancing helps, contact tracing helps, and so on. Of your list of things, masks and lockdowns aren't very clear - they don't seem to be helping given the resurgence this fall. Lockdowns might even have made it worse, pushing people indoors where it spreads easier and there's less sunlight, instead of encouraging social distancing in wide-open outdoor areas. If anything, it seems COVID-19 is seasonal, and introduction of lockdowns and masks in the spring just coincided with when it was waning anyway.
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]

deleted 6y ago

[deleted]

throwaway_pdp09 6y ago

Edit: see replies below this post which clarify what was intended. My response was based on a misunderstanding; that cleared up, I now agree with the poster. --- > When it comes to political decisions based on forecasts, you are not "listening to science". if those forecasts are based on science/maths, yes you are listening to science. > Ultimately, that question does not have a scientific answer yes it does, just the best science can do (as in, estimate) based on limited data. If you want better than that, drop to your knees and ask god because that's all that's left. Your post badly misunderstands what science is.

ghaff 6y ago
I think you are misrepresenting the parent which explicitly mentions tradeoffs. Science can help inform those tradeoffs but cannot make them for you. At the risk of reopening a rather heated discussion from yesterday, "science" cannot answer the question of whether it is reasonable to have a policy allowing outdoor dining in, say, NYC. ADDED: Science can (probably and imperfectly) help you estimate how risky a given behavior is likely to be. However, it cannot tell you whether, say, a presumably low risk activity (both personally and in terms of disease spread) should be allowed given economic impact, people's social needs/wants, etc.
- bjt2n3904 6y ago
  This is perfectly what I wanted to say, but was incapable of saying. Thank you.
- matthewdgreen 6y ago
  What science can do is provide estimates with error bounds. Sometimes the error bounds are extremely large during a developing situation, and people should absolutely be aware of that. There's a major discussion to be had about risk/reward tradeoffs in the face of high uncertainty. (E.g., the relative cost of mandating face coverings is pretty low, even if the science is temporarily uncertain.) However it becomes impossible to have such discussions when a large contingent of the population are ignoring all of the scientific data, and instead basing their opinions on motivated reasoning, faith, or political preferences.
  - ghaff 6y ago
    I don't disagree with any of that. Indeed, there are many policies and behaviors that probably fall into the "better safe than sorry" category--given how much noise and uncertainty there is in the data--although even possibly reasonable people will vehemently disagree about what precise policies/behaviors that applies to. (As you see from voting patterns and discussions here.) And, yes, I also agree that face coverings under at least many circumstances fall into that category. At the same time, there are different tradeoffs because different people (and governments) are approaching risks and rewards differently even if the facts were known with high certainty.

nerdponx 6y ago

For what it's worth, "science" in many fields is inherently statistical. Statistical illiteracy is arguably more pervasive and insidious than "scientific" illiteracy.

ChefboyOG 6y ago

I understand what you're saying, but I think there's some "both sides"-ism at play here. Yes, there is a level of scientific ignorance displayed when people hand wave and claim "the science" is on their side without actually understanding the science. However, there is a huge qualitative difference here, illustrated even by your example of quarantine recommendations. If we approximate an answer to "What is the optimal quarantine strategy?" through the combined efforts of various sciences--statistics, biology, etc--then while the results are not guaranteed, the recommendation is certainly not unfounded. It may be incomplete, but it is built off of decades of empirical evidence. Conversely, outright ignoring recommendations about COVID or climate or something similar, simply because "science isn't always right" or because you "aren't a scientist" is a different thing altogether.

deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
bjt2n3904 6y ago
> outright ignoring recommendations Have you ever wondered why it's not terribly controversial to "recommend" seat belts and airbags? But when your "recommendation" is to join a large organization and funnel millions of dollars into it, or to levy massive taxes to prevent "the end of the world as we know it"? Pardon me, but I'm deeply skeptical. Do you remember Solyndra? $500 million loan from the government. Went bankrupt. I will not accept this straw man re-framing of the issue. Yes, "some people" say "but science isn't always right", and that is a poor argument indeed. But I am not.
- ghaff 6y ago
  >why it's not terribly controversial to "recommend" seat belts Yet this was not always the case. Growing up wearing seatbelts was the exception, not the norm. Much less the law in some places.
  - bjt2n3904 6y ago
    Yes, and I remember having discussions on whether airbags caused more injuries than they prevented! But the fact of the matter is the issue is largely settled in the public eye. How did we get here? The answer is simple. The approach was a dispassionate search for the best solution. There were no "scientists" claiming hyperbolic doomsday scenarios if we didn't pass specific legislation by a certain date. The collapse of our transportation infrastructure due to Kessler Syndrome -- but for highways. This should cause any rational person to be skeptical. There were no fund raising rallies held by highly influential "scientists" who refused to wear seat belts themselves. This too, should cause any rational person to be skeptical. People did not start with a chosen solution, and selected evidence to back it. They started with evidence, and searched for the best solution. In effect? Seatbelts and airbags weren't a cargo cult driven by celebrity "scientists" that relied on emotional appeal. If you want your politicians to "listen" to "science", then you must divest the emotions, the desire for power, and the appeal to authority from it.

EForEndeavour 6y ago

> "How much material do I need in this region of the bridge to sustain the load of traffic going across it?" To nitpick a bit: anyone who answers that question for a living will be practicing engineering, not science. Just as an excellent physician can espouse wildly unscientific beliefs, so too can someone become quite good at the craft of engineering without actually doing much science at all. > I can't come to science and ask it, "How long should we quarantine to minimize health impact, and maximize economic recovery?" Ultimately, that question does not have a scientific answer. It can be informed by statistics -- to the best that we understand the numbers, and scientists can present models of what they think the future will look like... but results not guaranteed. Correct me if I'm wrong, but you consider "hard" disciplines like orbital mechanics and structural engineering to be science, and anything with less certainty in it to be not science, but statistics. This is inaccurate. Find me a scientific field that doesn't involve uncertainty and statistical analysis. Your examples of orbital mechanics and structural engineering certainly do. Conclusions made in both of these disciplines will always need to account for various sources of irreducible error (e.g., uncertainty in mass, temperature, altitude, fuel load; simplifying assumptions about atmosphere structure, gravity anomaly, solar wind, etc.). The importance of safety factors is the ultimate proof that uncertainty is core to engineering: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Factor_of_safety https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Factor_of_safety Science is the modeling of reality by formulating and testing hypotheses through observation and/or experiment. Does epidemiology not fall squarely within this definition? What do you propose as an alternative approach to inform governments and individuals what to do in the face of a natural phenomenon (a pandemic) which, although inherently uncertain, exhibits behaviors that are decidedly not random and inherently unpredictable?

ampdepolymerase 6y ago
Statistics by definition is not science. The vernacular usage of science refers to the empirical sciences; physics, chemistry, geography, biology. Mathematics, statistics, and computer science are all formal sciences, sometimes simply referred to as math. See the application section of https://www.cdc.gov/csels/dsepd/ss1978/lesson1/section1.html https://www.cdc.gov/csels/dsepd/ss1978/lesson1/section1.html. And for when the two fields clash: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-018-04243-3 https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-018-04243-3

matthewdgreen 6y ago

As Asimov once said: "It is not so much that I have confidence in scientists being right, but that I have so much in nonscientists being wrong." Right now there are people running around saying that COVID is as deadly as the flu, that the pandemic was faked, that masks are a conspiracy. You don't have to believe that epidemiologists are 100% correct about every recommendation during a fast-developing emergency in order to see how the rejection of evidence and conspiracy-theorizing are harmful.

gus_massa 6y ago
> Right now there are people running around saying that COVID is as deadly as the flu, ... Which is the current best estimation of the risk of getting covid-19 and dying? Which is the current best estimation of the risk of getting flu and dying?
- gibspaulding 6y ago
  I actually would have guessed they were pretty close. Apparently I was wrong: The following claims 5% vs .2% https://www.businessinsider.com/coronavirus-death-rate-us-compared-to-flu-by-age-2020-6?op=1 https://www.businessinsider.com/coronavirus-death-rate-us-co... Then again this chart seems to indicate something closer to 2% of confirmed cases are fatal for Covid: https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/total-deaths-and-cases-covid-19?time=2020-01-22..latest https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/total-deaths-and-cases-co... I imagine more non-fatal Covid cases go unreported than fatal ones so perhaps even that's high, but it's still close to an order of magnitude worse than the flu. Edit: That first source isn't great, and is outdated anyways. This one seems to verify the ~2% for Covid in the US. https://coronavirus.jhu.edu/data/mortality https://coronavirus.jhu.edu/data/mortality
  - thu2111 6y ago
    I think you're mixing up IFR with CFR. Current best estimate of COVID IFR is 0.27%, which is basically the same as flu. https://www.who.int/bulletin/online_first/BLT.20.265892.pdf https://www.who.int/bulletin/online_first/BLT.20.265892.pdf However the CI is extremely wide.

watwut 6y ago

I think that you are building strawman of what "listening to scientists" in the context of covid is like and then kill that strawman, basically. Listening to scientists in the context covid will not tell you exactly how long quarantine should be. But it gives you multiple predictions you can start with and then over time see which are more correct and which are less correct. It does also answer some of quite sure responses to questions that actually ended up disputed. Like: does the Covid have ability to overrun healthcare system? Do asymptomatic spread exists? Is the Covid just a little flu?

zaarn 6y ago

>"How long should we quarantine to minimize health impact, and maximize economic recovery?" You're not asking a scientific question, you're asking a political one, because you also want the economy to do well, which is political. There are two conflicting questions there, in reality; "How long can we quarantine without affecting the economy?" (Answer is like 0 days) And "How long must we quarantine to eradicate the virus?" (Answer is around 140 days if a single quarantine unit contains up to 10 people and they infect eachother on the last day of symptom-freeness). Because the question is not only political but considers two conflicting requirements, you can either satisfy both in a bad way or satisfy one well and abandon the other. A similar situation occurs when you are tasked with optimizing the material usage for a product. Science can tell you how little product material you need so that it performs to spec and it can tell you how much you need so that it'll perform it's function as long as possible. The balance informs the price of the product but politically capitalism wants you to prefer a low price, similar to how capitalism will prefer no quarantine and lockdown.

ghaff 6y ago
Apparently on HN, you're not allowed to admit there are tradeoffs in the current situation especially to do things that some consider to be unnecessary.
- zaarn 6y ago
  You can have tradeoffs but then you're no longer answering scientific questions but either a political question or a question of personal belief (ie, "which you think is better").
  - ghaff 6y ago
    Of course. Science can help you e.g. estimate risk. But balancing that risk against other factors has to be a political and/or personal tradeoff. There's no way it could be otherwise. Science, even if it could provide perfect information, doesn't have the tools to make policy decisions. Whether schools should be wide-open, hybrid, or remote only is not a scientific decision although, of course, whatever scientific data is known or thought to be known should of course factor into any decision.

CarelessExpert 6y ago

> Some of the most scientifically illiterate people I've encountered are the people who say things like, "We listen to the science when it comes to COVID-19". Let us be perfectly real. When it comes to political decisions based on forecasts, you are not "listening to science". This feels like a straw man to me. First, let's be very clear: There is absolutely a cohort of people out there who are objectively denying the scientific reality of covid. Those denials ranges from the absurd (e.g. covid doesn't exist, it's a conspiracy, it's going away), to the distorted (e.g. covid is no worse than the flu), to the simply wrong (e.g. masks don't protect you, they actually make you sick). I think the refrain "we listen to the science when it comes to COVID-19" is short hand for distinguishing oneself from folks in the groups above. Let's also be clear that statistics and modelling are scientific methods. I'm frankly a little baffled that you've attempted to draw a line between these two things. Science can absolutely help you assess questions like "How long should we quarantine to minimize health impact, and maximize economic recovery?" Will the answers be probabilistic? Yes, absolutely. That doesn't make them any less scientific, and to suggest they are suggests its own form of "scientific illiteracy". Further, "the science" is very clear: lockdowns are effective, masks help, social distancing helps, contact tracing helps, and so on. "The science" is also clear that none of these are quick fixes or panaceas. They're all part of a web of interventions that each provide some small measure of protection that, taken together, can help keep the pandemic under control. This is the "Swiss cheese" metaphor in action. Science can also be used to assess the effectiveness of these methods versus their tradeoffs by, again, employing statistical approaches. Are those methods foolproof? No. But they're far from guesswork. I'd argue it's this basic misunderstanding that leads people to, for example, dismiss climate modelling... Now, ultimately, the decision as to what to do is a political one, not because statistical models and methods are flawed or inaccurate, but rather because there's always going to be a range of trade-offs, and the trade-offs we make are ultimately a political decision. But the least we can do is expect our politicians--not to mention the people around us--to assess those trade-offs based on rigorous facts and statistical methods. That's what "listening to science" means.

Izkata 6y ago
> Further, "the science" is very clear: lockdowns are effective, masks help, social distancing helps, contact tracing helps, and so on. Of your list of things, masks and lockdowns aren't very clear - they don't seem to be helping given the resurgence this fall. Lockdowns might even have made it worse, pushing people indoors where it spreads easier and there's less sunlight, instead of encouraging social distancing in wide-open outdoor areas. If anything, it seems COVID-19 is seasonal, and introduction of lockdowns and masks in the spring just coincided with when it was waning anyway.

deleted 6y ago

[deleted]