This is pretty much a problem in public communication in Italy. There are some notable figures that (even if they are right) act in total disregard of deontological ethics, and make disparaging comments on other colleagues.
As the article notes, it is not a matter of agreeing but of treating other people in the scientific field with respect.
Also, some of those opinions may be wrong or just partially wrong, but we don't see that many mea culpa, if any.
I agree (though I am not aware of the Italian controversies), but it’s worth acknowledging that in the case of a pandemic, scientific opinions drive policy, and policy may have dramatic consequences, including the loss of lives. So it is understandable that conversations get heated, vs disagreeing about a pure academic topic. I am less worried about the heat than about deplatforming, ie suppressing the dissenting opinion.
I don't mind heated discussions, I mean, I had some on lab meetings over what people could consider obscure details. I find however not professionally appropriate to shame what are essentially your colleagues on social media.
These controversies are pretty local: they tend to flare up every now and then because most of these people are regularly invited (in presence or via video call) to TV shows.
The public response to COVID-19 made the transition from a scientific topic to a subject of politics/religion about a month ago. While I appreciate the author's sentiment I can't help but feel the authors' are pissing into a hurricane. At this point the course this thing is gonna run seems to be out of the control of scientists, academics and honest debate.
Yeah you can pretty much transplant this sentence to any public forum:
At the same time, we are concerned by a chilling attitude among some [people], who are wrongly ascribing legitimate disagreements about [issues] to ignorance or to questionable political or other motivations.
It is a plausible explanation for his recent actions. And, in fact, his recent actions require us to re-visit his past investigations and expose with the assumption of good faith suspended.
All this does is help expose the theory of "paradox of intolerance" for what it truly is. A hammer with which to bludgeon people whom you don't agree with.
Imagine being forced to remove this article, the server provider cuts off service, and your domain banned because these kind of articles have violated terms of services.
I usually find that if you have to make an analogy for any reason other than explaining something technically complex, your position is probably faulty. E.g. in this case, I'd call this a false equivalence. Rather than making an analogy, you should explain directly why YouTube's policy is immoral or dangerous, rather than indirectly pointing at some other scenario, which will always differ in many relevant and irrelevant ways by the simple nature of it being a different scenario. It needlessly complicates the conversation.
Your video gets deleted, your channel gets a warning or a ban. Seems equivalent to what YouTube is doing to youtubers that posts information inconsistent with WHO.
"Now any content that disputes the existence or transmission of Covid-19, as described by the WHO [World Health Organization] and local health authorities is in violation of YouTube policies.
The firm may also prevent repeat offenders from earning money, and said it would terminate channels as a last resort.
> Anything that would go against World Health Organization recommendations would be a violation of our policy
This looks like the CEO misquoting the policy. I linked to the actual policy. Where does it say what you claim?
> "Now any content that disputes the existence or transmission of Covid-19, as described by the WHO [World Health Organization] and local health authorities is in violation of YouTube policies."
This is in violation for spreading harmful medical misinformation, not for contradicting the WHO, which (once again) is not prohibited by YouTube policy.
> There's a convenient feature called search on HN or any other websites. I think you might want to use it.
Oh yeah, believe some outdated policy than the CEO's recent interview. That's some quality fact checking right there! Congrets on your bleeding edge method of fact checking.
> believe some outdated policy than the CEO's recent interview
One is an actual policy that the employees follow. The other is just a quote taken out of context. The interview wasn't about launching a new policy. Instead, the CEO mentioned what YouTube was already doing in passing in a broad-ranging interview and did so loosely.
It's really not that hard to understand. You're acting like the Black Knight in Monty Python and the Holy Grail.
That process of finding the relevant and irrelevant differences is how some people think. I can go farther astray by saying "This copy and paste is immoral and dangerous because DRY" than "This copy and paste seems lazy, but would I object to it if it were generated code?" The analogy gets me abstracting features of the original problem and helps me see what parts of my reaction were attached to my framing of the original scenario.
What doesn't work so well is analogizing to things that are more emotionally intense. It comes from wanting your words to match the intensity of your emotions when the real thing is really not that bad.
It's not an analogy. There's a very serious risk that Youtube's policy will be used to prohibit honest, good faith disagreement of the kind discussed in the original article. (Medium's similar policy already has been!)
It seems like interpretations (views) of data from seasoned professionals who are much more familiar with the context than the general public are also valuable
My guess is that views here translates to hypothesis.
Sometimes Scientists could have a gut feeling, and this may not have data to back it up. I think its still important to talk about it, while acknowledging that we're discussing a hypothesis, and not a proven fact.
You're out of luck, the data are still relatively sparse, (understandably) collected under duress, and (understandably) without controls. Just about anything predictive (and many descriptive things too) any reputable scientist says will be slightly better than informed speculation. The ethically sound scientists will disclose the level of caution their suggestions for policy entail, and there will be plenty of very talented scientists who will raise a furor on the grounds that the layperson cannot be trusted to take socially responsible action without an exaggerated threat over their heads.
Should we had taken more seriously the Stanford University Faculty when they were suggesting back in March in WSJ [1] 0.01% mortality rates while the ERs were full and we could not source masks and ventilators?
The mortality rate in NY has been found by random testing more than 0.5%, or more than 50 times higher from what the Stanford Snake Oil Salesmen were predicting by looking at NBA (yes really) mortality rates.
If you possess the truth, it's even more important not to use it as a weapon, because doing so will only alienate the readers who possess less truth than you do. No one is convinced by name-calling or other outright attack, and truth is too precious to be burned this way.
I've certainly been convinced on various topics by people who were correct and also rude about it.
Do you think laywers and police are always nice when trying to get to the truth? Have you ever seen the movie Erin Brockovich, or read about the events that inspired it? Would she have had the same results while being polite the entire time?
Rude comments may break forum rules, sure. But I'm not sure sweeping generalizations about efficacy, such as the above, are needed.
Everything I say here is scoped to the relatively trivial context of an internet forum. You're talking about someone taking a principled stand at personal peril. Those are not comparable situations.
I don't think what I said is so controversial. Cheap name-calling doesn't have good effects on discussion here, and HN readers whose minds might be open to a thoughtful argument are turned off by it.
I must agree that I insulted the class of Snake Oil Salesmen by comparing them to university professors that went against their Hippocratic Oath and any kind of academic ethic to promote their agenda by making unsupported statements to general population media. They have blood on their hands and they should be held accountable once we finish mourning our dead people.
<rant> Is anyone really surprised? Current culture world-wide is built on 15 second attention span idiocy and social media bs.
Want to see this go away? Remove FB/Insta/Twitter from the planet, along with the entire mainstream media, all of which have business models based on the aforementioned idiocy as well as non-stop conflict generation.
When you are done with that task go purge every sitting legislative body on the planet which in general are bought and paid for by those same special interests.
Then you'd have a clean slate to build on for intelligent dialog and meaningful efforts related to not just Covid 19, but many other pressing global concerns...</rant>
The problem is that the word science has been robbed of its meaning. Or the meaning didn't scale well.
Every side of the so-called debate throws it left and right, now which science do you believe in? As if belief is part of the equations.
And the other issue is that there are no debates. You send a tweet, and tag WHO or some authoritative figure and then we have to believe it. Those who don't believe it are not following the science.
Edit: Science is supposed to evolve as new data comes in. Today, we stop at the first sensational news. When a fact is updated or retracted, it doesn't make the news.
You can't rob a word of its meaning. If it encompass to much, you can create a new one or be more precise.
Anyway, i think the point of this article is that people that are not scientists themselves can debate with each other, but should avoid perturbing (i'd say polluting even) the scientific debate, whether its by disparaging an adversarial opinion or but elevating a scientits too high (see what has happened with the pr Raoult cult in France). This is too much noise and scientist are people too.
Part of the problem with the reporting on death rates and, to a lesser extent, many of the tests and treatments of COVID-19, is the almost nonexistent emphasis on uncertainty quantification. A view might only be ‘different’ in the sense that the mode of the belief is shifted significantly, which is to be expected if existing beliefs are quite diffuse (i.e., uncertain).
If I could teach people one scientific concept to help us get through this, it wouldn't be immunology or epidemiology. It would be an understanding of uncertainty, where it comes from, what it means, and how to handle it.
I've, uh, spent significant portions of my life trying to understand just how well we know some particular measured values. And that's not counting the coursework.
So, yeah, I'm going to set myself up for a fall here by saying I've got a pretty decent professional understanding of the topic.
The funny thing is that they actually do this -- they show that based on their measurements of the assay's specificity, the confidence interval for the number of true positives includes zero. That means, even discounting all of the other biases, their study cannot provide a lower bound for the number of infections, which was the whole point of the study.
They then proceed to ignore this and use a point estimate for their further calculations.
The right thing to have done would have been to test the assay further, or move the study to an area where there was higher positivity and they could get a more reliable signal.
What I actually had in mind with my comment was the hydroxychloroquine trials. The interpretation of those results has been just saddening to the scientist in me. They've all been weak studies, for various reasons (many of them quite valid!), and so the results just don't have much power. And yet, the partisans jump on everything they like to push their agenda: Miracle cure! Worse than drinking bleach! Et cetera.
My reading of the data to date (note: not including anything that might have shown up in the last few days) is more nuanced. Hydroxychloroquine most likely has a small positive effect, but the data are consistent with anything from a modest negative effect to a modest positive effect to absolutely nothing at all. From its long history of previous use, the drug has known negative effects, but these are unimportant or manageable for most COVID-19 patients. However, any positive effect it may have is limited; the studies to date, albeit limited, have been powerful enough to detect a "miracle cure".
None of this says a word about mechanism of action. Someone is bound to say, "But what about zinc? You need to consider zinc!" The thing is, we did. These analyses are independent of mechanism of action. It's entirely possible that hydroxychloroquine's small positive effect is mostly or entirely caused by zinc interactions. Or not. We don't know! We'd have to do a study designed around zinc to test that theory out.
In my opinion, again as a science-y but not doctor-y person, is that giving hydroxychloroquine to COVID-19 patients in most cases will not hurt them, and might help a little bit. The biggest danger, I believe, is that people think it's more powerful than it is. We should not stop and think that hydroxychloroquine is good enough or a "cure". Because it isn't. And if a patient receives hydroxychloroquine instead of better care because people misunderstand science, that is a failing.
(The above is definitely a tangent. But getting it off my chest somewhere was good for my mental health!)
This point from the article is really important IMO
'Scientific consensus is important, but it isn’t uncommon when some of the most important voices turn out to be those of independent thinkers, like John Ioannidis, whose views were initially doubted. That’s not an argument for prematurely accepting his contestable views, but it is a sound argument for keeping him, and others like him, at the table'
In a free society information and ideas should flow freely, not be banned and originators punished as happens in closed societies. It is alarming the level of vitriol and blind adherence to 'the scientific method' aka accepted establishment viewpoint in some cases, particularly online.
For all the endless proselytizing about 'innovation' there are some remarkably closed minded people around, enabled and amplified by social networks
I'm not in the academic sciences but when my uncle published his thesis in a journal for his physics PhD, he got literal hate mail in his mailbox for going against the old-guard with his conclusions. It completely blew my mind that his peers who worked in the sciences got so wound that they sent hate mail to him. I think he still has the letters all these decades later.
I learned second hand that apparently a lot of scientific acedemia is like that. Crazy.
Thanks for sharing this. I've heard many stories like that of your uncle from professional researchers in science, economics, and other fields. This is something that people who have no experience in professional academia and science often do not understand.
In my experience a lot of people assume that because science and related disciplines are rational endeavors that the institutions and culture compassing them must also be rational, empirical, purely evidence-based, etc. Reality can be almost comically, and sometimes tragically, the opposite.
It's like finance or law or any other field with some hothead cutthroat personalities in powerful positions. Where there is perceived power there is an attraction to people who feed off of power alone. Egos are a plenty and often cruel to others trying for the same goals. Lots of people are hypercompetitive rather than collaborative, and see any peer as an adversary or challenger rather than leaning into synergy.
This kind of stuff would happen at conferences too, a couple notable cases of screaming matches from the audience to the presenter have happened. Sometimes vindictive professors will go to a rival professors's grad student's talk and just grill the poor kid, asking them impossible questions and being hypercritical. Usually the grad student's own professor has to step in and try to deflect the assholes line of questioning. Sometimes the professors are even in the same department. It's a total cringe moment for the rest of the audience, and is definitely a phenomenon that is slowly growing out of the field as professors retire.
I'm in physics and I've never heard of anything remotely like this. Are you sure that "hate mail" wasn't just pointing out errors in his work, which is a completely legitimate and downright essential part of science?
This is the bestknown public figure in Germany who supports the Imperial College Study and the drastic lockdown measures, but his public statements are mostly political, without proper evidence. Never mentioned the IFR, the R0, the absolute numbers, the curves. Our local panic guy.
The parent article referred to the author of this. I just quoted a paragraph of the parent article to make my point, I don't have an opinion/haven't read Ioannidis piece
>It is alarming the level of vitriol and blind adherence to 'the scientific method'
My experience has been that these faults are expressed in irrational opposition to "the scientific method", and just as dramatically as you've described - and that irrational support of it is much less dramatic.
> independent thinkers, like John Ioannidis, whose views were initially doubted.
The phrasing of this makes it sound as though his views have become accepted.
They have not, in fact the absolute shambles of a "study" he did to support his conclusions (that COVID-19 is weaker than flu, and that almost everyone has had it already) are a huge embarrassment, or ought to be, except that he works for the Hoover Institute, which is explicitly ideologically opposed to things like Public Health efforts.
There is no reason to for such "science" to be anything but excoriated.
Views still need to be backed by solid data and in this case, the Stanford study the article is highlight has a number of issues with its data:
"I think the authors of the above-linked paper owe us all an apology. We wasted time and effort discussing this paper whose main selling point was some numbers that were essentially the product of a statistical error."
"I’m serious about the apology. Everyone makes mistakes. I don’t think they authors need to apologize just because they screwed up. I think they need to apologize because these were avoidable screw-ups. They’re the kind of screw-ups that happen if you want to leap out with an exciting finding and you don’t look too carefully at what you might have done wrong."
Think about where you fall on that graph and then realize how many people are dumber and a lot dumber than you. But it doesn't end there. Some people are sheltered their entire lives so there is a lot they don't understand. Some people are mostly one dimensional so they don understand a lot. Some people have huge egos so they don't understand a lot. Some people have unreasonable biases and agendas that warp their otherwise rational mind into being ridiculous. Some people are so overburdened they can't do anything but work and never have a second to think for themselves. The powers that be PUMP shit into our heads all day long. lol, how many people even passed Calculus let alone could do anything with it now. And you're asking these people to look at the data? Get real. Get real! These people are not influenced by data.
Plus people value different things. Do you realize how much this quarantine is costing us? It's more selfish boomer behavior. I'm sorry but it's not worth the cost of another one or two Iraq wars to save the few people it does infect. It kills less than a percent of the people it infects. It's not like this thing kills 1/3 or even a 1/10th of the population. We are just pissing away money to protect a few boomers. They are pile driving our generation into poverty. End the quarantine.
Very few people understand anything at all about statistics other than what can be gleaned from basic arithmetic. You're asking too much of people. You don't influence people with facts.
Also, the fatality rate will rise if the virus gets out of control, which it very well could if people decide to forgo social distancing and self-isolating when possible.
Grandparent post has been voted into oblivion, so commenting here:
> Do you realize how much this quarantine is costing us?
Actually, I don't. I've seen a lot of people make the argument that lockdowns and other restrictions are "too expensive", but:
* I have not seen a single serious attempt to model quite how expensive they will be.
* Nor have I seen any attempts to model how expensive alternate approaches would be, e.g. the Swedish model. Quite a few people who propagate it seem to be under the impression that this is implemented with zero economic disruption, but that's definitely not the case.
* And to be truly realistic, the models should consider the capabilities of countries to mitigate economic consequences through fiscal or monetary means. Many countries can currently borrow at very low or even negative interest rates, so they may have considerable leverage there.
You cannot mitigate economic damage with fiscal or monetary means in any serious way. That statement of yours indicates that you do not understand the difference between money and wealth.
Money is an abstraction we use to measure (relative) value. Wealth is the sum total of physical goods/services/resources that we rely on.
When you neuter an economy, as we have done in the US, you destroy real wealth. There is no way to counteract that by injecting money. It’s like trying to claim your company is growing because share buybacks made your per-share price go up, yet your market cap in an efficient market has been unchanged.
It is no surprise then that someone who holds that view would have trouble seeing the real damage that a shutdown like ours does. We have postponed elective surgeries, leading to furloughing tens of thousands of medical workers across the country because in many areas hospitals are practically empty. We’re halting meat packing plants because some portion of employees have tested positive. We’ve stopped educating our children in person despite covid-19 being less deadly than Influenza in children (this is a fact at this point).
We treated a really bad but manageable papercut by chopping off our hand, and in doing so we have widened inequality in _every dimension_. What does a poor school-aged child who does not own a laptop do with remote schooling? What do millions of Americans who live paycheck to paycheck and are now unemployed do? What about those postponing important preventative care that will prevent future deaths from cancer, heart disease, and diabetes?
How large of a spike in suicides, opioid overdoses, and psychosis are we going to see?
We took a bunch of otherwise healthy people, instilled them with disproportionate, all-consuming fear, and have had people in social isolation, which not only produces its own mortality but will also retard the natural exchange of micro-organisms that our health relies upon.
And the biggest joke of all is that eradication is impossible and therefore we didn’t prevent any mortality, we just postponed it, while destroying the quality of life of the 99.4% of the population who never would have died from this thing anyway (there’s debate as to whether the IFR is .3% or 1% but I think .6% is a very conservative number)
—
In answer to your question about models, you are right that we need more of them, and in rereading your comment I see you were more raising questions than advocating a pro-lockdown stance. In any case I encourage you to check out http://cep.lse.ac.uk/_new/publications/abstract.asp?index=69.... I’m on mobile right now otherwise I’d quote from it but they look at it in terms of wellbeing-years
> You cannot mitigate economic damage with fiscal or monetary means in any serious way.
You kind of can. In a situation like this, you have a lot of people who can't work because they're at home (or have no customers because their customers are at home), which causes two types of economic damage. One, the thing they were making is not being made. Two, they're not getting paid, so they're not buying what they would have bought with the money, and then that isn't getting made and so on down the line.
The second problem is actually bigger (because of "and so on down the line") but can be addressed entirely via fiscal means. Give people money to replace what they're not making.
And it even helps some with the first by increasing general demand. The things that are still open (e.g. because they're work from home) will then see increased business, have to hire more people to fill the demand and provide jobs for the people who can't do their normal jobs so they're still being productive.
Doing that is not going to eliminate the entire cost, but it is going to make it a lot smaller.
> It’s like trying to claim your company is growing because share buybacks made your per-share price go up, yet your market cap in an efficient market has been unchanged.
Buybacks actually reduce the market cap because there are fewer outstanding shares and the company has fewer total assets (in the amount of the cash used for the buyback which the company no longer has because it is now in the hands of the shareholders who sold their shares).
And doing that does tend to cause the overall economy to grow because it moves cash from a company that apparently had no need for it to investors who are incentivized to find somewhere else to put it to productive use.
This isn't to say that your overall conclusion is necessarily wrong. Even 10% of the cost of shutting down the whole world is large. But if you want to compare the numbers they should be the right numbers.
> Give people money to replace what they're not making.
Count yourself among those who do not understand the difference between money and wealth. What they're "not making" isn't money; what they're not making are goods or services. That's the point you're attempting to respond to, and you've missed the point.
They are making stuff and making money. The money is often just as or more important because it is necessary to buy other stuff, particularly when "essential" things are still operating and "non-essential" things are shut down, because the people doing "non-essential" things still need money in order to buy "essential" things.
When you talk of real wealth being lost, I'm curious how exactly you see that happening. I do agree with your points about exacerbating inequality, but that's as a consequence of the status quo structure of our economy, and going back to work won't fix that. Meanwhile, our factories and equipment aren't going to fall apart in a year, people by and large won't forget how to do their jobs, we were already tossing out 40% of our food, so that's no big change, and the education system, at least in the US, is little more than free lunch and day care for many poor children anyway. It sucks for people entering the job market, but that was the case ten years ago too. I get that the government response is once again failing people (mostly in the US) but do we really want to rush back down the old path when we have a rare opportunity to talk about taking different ones?
The real wealth lost is all the production we would have had had we not shut down that is now lost forever.
Yes, without shutdown some people would have taken sick days, etc, but the effect would be extremely manageable. We would not have people dropping like flies the way the flawed IMHE model implies.
As to your question about rushing down the old path, it is very inappropriate for the government to destroy peoples’ livelihoods (and make no mistake, it was the government’s / our doing, _not_ covid), and then to turn around and say “you’re only screwed because government isn’t in your life _enough_!”. As your point revealed, this is actually IMO what democrats are very blatantly trying to do (I am calling out a specific party because it really is them who are still pushing for these lockdowns).
It’s not relevant, but know that I support UBI (iff it replaces welfare rather than being in addition to it), but not like this. This would be such an evil way to introduce UBI: manufacturing a problem and then “fixing” it.
—
The inequality exacerbation is not a consequence of our economy. The government created it by creating the concept of “essential workers”. All workers are exactly as essential as the economy (we) decide(s) they are.
But we didn’t just prevent wealth from being created, the media combined with our incompetent public health officials created an unprecedented level of panic and fearmongering that most of us have never seen in our lives. The result? Case studies like this one: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S016517812... (and no, this was not caused by covid, it was causes by the aforementioned fearmongering)
If you truly believe that productivity would not have taken a massive hit by letting the pandemic burn through the entire population then I don’t really know what to say. You’ve got some very skewed beliefs.
What makes you so sure of that? The hospitalization rates per https://old.reddit.com/r/COVID19/comments/g4tqvk/dutch_antib... (this is extrapolated from serological data but is in the right ballpark) suggest that not as many would have been taken out of the workforce as you think.
Now, the number of sick days will be far higher than the number of hospitalization-days. But if we're comparing losing, say, 25% of our efficiency, to losing 100% of it...yeah, it actually wouldn't be as massive as most people think.
Anyway, a better characterization of my view is that I view containment as an unworkable strategy (and everything we're seeing in the US further proves that, IMO), therefore we didn't actually avoid any true mortality by locking down. Rather we just postponed it.
We never overwhelmed our healthcare system, and due to cancelling elective surgeries and other important preventative care, we have actually scaled _down_ our healthcare capacity by a massive amount across the country. Tens of thousands of healthcare workers furloughed. How is that sane policy?
> When you neuter an economy, as we have done in the US, you destroy real wealth. There is no way to counteract that by injecting money.
Yes, part of the economic damage caused by a lockdown is production lost in businesses that cannot be operated safely at the time. That production cannot be restored with money.
But a big part of the damage is caused by knock-on effects of businesses and individuals reducing consumption as a result of the primary economic shock, and that part absolutely can be mitigated.
> How large of a spike in suicides, opioid overdoses, and psychosis are we going to see?
> And the biggest joke of all is that eradication is impossible and therefore we didn’t prevent any mortality, we just postponed it
That very much remains to be seen. I see it as a virtual certainty that in a year, we'll have a much better understanding of the efficacy of various currently existing treatment options. I see it as quite likely that we'll have additional treatment options. And I see it as entirely possible that we'll have a vaccine within the next few years.
And even if not a single death from covid-19 itself in the primary at-risk group is preventable, overwhelming the health care system causes preventable deaths from other causes, as well as preventable deaths and burnouts among exhausted health care professionals.
> In any case I encourage you to check out [See URL above]
You will note that your own source estimates a large benefit of maintaining a lockdown until June 1, and considers maintaining the lockdown until July 1 essentially a wash. That's hardly a ringing endorsement of your views.
> You will note that your own source estimates a large benefit of maintaining a lockdown until June 1, and considers maintaining the lockdown until July 1 essentially a wash. That's hardly a ringing endorsement of your views.
I provided the source to show that models are being formed. My own views materially differ from the authors', particularly on that point.
> overwhelming the health care system causes preventable deaths from other causes, as well as preventable deaths and burnouts among exhausted health care professionals.
Well, but what we've actually done is exactly that, in the opposite direction. Rather than our healthcare system being crushed by hordes of covid patients, across the US in places that aren't being ravaged (so, everywhere that isn't new york/new jersey/etc), we are dramatically scaling _down_ our healthcare capacity due to having furloughed tens of thousands of medical workers for the exact reason that people are postponing elective surgeries and other preventative measures that we know reduce mortality.
In other words, you're right about preventable deaths from other causes, but we actually are causing those right now by being locked down.
>And the biggest joke of all is that eradication is impossible and therefore we didn’t prevent any mortality, we just postponed it
Umm, no.
Do you think that hospitals are overloaded with COVID-19 patients just so that they could die comfortably there?
The point of shelter-in-place is to prevent overloading of hospitals so that both COVID-19 patients and everyone else could get care - and have their lives saved by medics (which is often possible).
The alternative is the Italy scenario, where the doctors will have plenty treatable COVID-19 cases, but no means to save the lives that can actually be saved.
>How large of a spike in suicides, opioid overdoses, and psychosis are we going to see?
> social isolation [...] produces its own mortality
This is scaremongering. If you have any estimates, go ahead, and pit them against what is now the #1 cause of death in many regions across the US.
>We treated a really bad but manageable papercut..
The number of people who died from COVID-19 is about the same as people who died in the Vietnam war at this point.
I don't know how else to convey the point that it's not quite a 'paper cut'.
>We’ve stopped educating our children in person despite covid-19 being less deadly than Influenza in children (this is a fact at this point).
Yes, because schools is how the flu spreads to parents of these children - and everyone else in that household.
> There is no way to counteract that by injecting money.
There is also no way to bring people back to life. Cry me a river about destruction of wealth.
> The point of shelter-in-place is to prevent overloading of hospitals so that both COVID-19 patients and everyone else could get care - and have their lives saved by medics (which is often possible).
We achieved that, and yet we're still locked down. Why?
The fears of hospital overruns was based on scary numbers that turned out to not reflect reality at all. The hospitalization rate is far lower than we thought. The infection fatality rate is far lower than was implied by the CFRs being thrown around.
> This is scaremongering. If you have any estimates, go ahead, and pit them against what is now the #1 cause of death in many regions across the US.
No, it's not. But anyway, I predict at least an extra 50,000 suicides (i.e. a 2x risk of suicide). Similarly, we could easily see twice as many opioid overdoses which would be another 60,000. (I feel more confident in the spike in suicide than the spike of overdoses because it may be that the fentanyl supply chain has been disrupted).
> The number of people who died from COVID-19 is about the same as people who died in the Vietnam war at this point.
And also roughly the same as the number of people who died from the Flu last year. And about 1/10 of the estimated 480,000 smoking deaths per year in the US.
But, I'm not saying that Covid is not a big deal. What I'm actually saying is that lockdowns don't reduce mortality whatsoever, rather they increase it, because containment is not a viable strategy and the lockdown harms groups who never would have been harmed by Covid.
I'm predicting well over 100,000 Covid deaths this year.
> There is also no way to bring people back to life. Cry me a river about destruction of wealth.
The lockdown is destroying life, not "just" wealth. And I don't just mean in wellbeing, which we've absolutely destroyed. We're causing actual deaths by foregoing preventative care, furloughing tens of thousands of healthcare workers across the country, and increasing mortality from suicide/overdose/all cause mortality in general.
You blame the shelter-in-place order which actually improves over an uncoordinated economic shutdown that the epidemic is fully capable of generating on its own.
You can't separate the effect of the shelter-in-place order from that of the viral epidemic. With a raging outbreak, even without a shelter-in-place order people will still not go to most businesses. You could have the same economic downturn without the benefit of a shelter-in-place order where people's actions are more coordinated. And this is without accounting for the cost of a possible social breakdown if enough people panic about not having fair access to healthcare when the hospitals are overwhelmed.
If we could coordinate a perfect shelter-in-place the outbreak would have been gone by now. If people don't cooperate with each other we will have a much prolonged outbreak.
hmm, I'm OP and you might have a good point there. I will think about that. I'm not saying you are right ...lol btw i dont know why literally every single fucking thing i say on the internet no matter what always gets downvoted even when im talking about a neutral subject and being positive but where was i? oh yeah, I'm not saying your right but at first thought I think you are making a good point.
regarding the downvotes I can share an opinion based on similar experiences: in my case it often was about not being thoughtful in choosing what to say.
Or in another perspective think about whether your comment is what you feel like saying or whether it is something that contributes to the discussion.
On the other hand, what are the economic ramifications of no shelter-in-place during a global pandemic? Will people still be going to restaurants, movie theaters and malls?
Only 5%? It seems like this should be much larger, especially to see the reactionary takes about opening the economy.
Put that way, it's a hell of a deal. Killing off 1% of the population, plus the economic damage of nobody wanting to go out because of fear of getting sick, and that's unimaginably worse than 5% for a quarter, economically. Of course there are are likely to be knock on effects for several quarters, but given the typical lifespan of a human, we could go several years of 5% less GDP before it would equal the economic cost of the loss of life. Not to mention the social cost, which is hard to assign a value to.
It makes me think of other comparisons. Imagine if we had terror attacks that killed 60,000 people a year if we worked to stop them, but several million people if we didn't work to stop them. How much did we decide to spend on wars in response to 9/11, and his manu soldiers of our own did we decide to kill in military actions, and how many foreign innocent civilians? It really puts 5% GDP into perspective, as almost a nothingness compared to what we willingly sacrificed in response to the last disaster, which had economic effects on top of that.
The expected lifetime value of a 60 year old is around 5 million. So one million sixty years dying is a cost to the economy is about 5 * 10^12, or five trillion dollars.
The US GDP is around 22 trillion a year.
Therefore each million >=60 year olds saved is worth completely shutting down the US economy for around three months.
2) Even the most alarmist reports barely predicted million deaths in the worst case scenario.
3) How is lifetime value of 60 year old 5 million? Based on the same SS tables, that's for 21.5 years, so ~230k per year. Where is this number coming from?
3a) Using some objective standard like annual income, it would obviously be far lower.
3b) You can even use a personal take - would you rather have $5 million (translation: very safe ~$150-200k/year for life including childhood, so you never have to work while living an upper middle class lifestyle), and have a risk of death at 60 with a COVID probability for 60-year-old (~4% CFR or so, so lower IFR and even lower combined with non-100% infection rate), or have $0, live with a median job and income, and not have that risk?
What about throwing out the "60-year-old" and taking the real average case, 72-73yo (with its increased CFR/IFR)? I'm pretty sure I'd roll that dice for as little as a $200-300k head start.
4) Moreover, disability adjusted life years and other similar metrics often (quite justifiably) weight later years of life lower than the earlier ones. Again, to make this more personal or less numeric, would you rather be paralyzed from neck down in your 30ies (and then remiss) or die at 80 instead of 85? I'd take dying earlier.
Update: I double counted the probability in 3b, it should be guaranteed death if we are talking full amount of money. I'd still definitely take dying at 73 while starting with even ~$500-700k over average-job-income-expectancy life (a free house and a college degree, basically).
Someone elsewhere on HN introduced the amount of suffering in the world to the topic, specifically people suffering to allow western quality of life. The later qualification is more interesting than it seems as to me it doesn't make it much more shameful to have needless suffering if you do or do not need people. (How badly do we need those boomers? Inappropriate question? yes?)
If 1% is 1 million then 30% is 30 million and 100% is 100 million? I thought we had more people?
But lets assume for sake of argument that we've over reacted. Its pretty fantastic the way all countries in the world [few exceptions aside] took the matter so seriously and managed to take collective action this quickly. Despite all the death and suffering we now have a legitimate reason to be hopeful and imaginative about what else we can do and what it might cost.
The situation is truly weirder than fiction: The Corona lock down might have saved [oh, say] 80 million elderly people (unscientific number). It might in 2020 also push 180 million [additional] incomes below $5.50/day, 150 m below $3.20/day, 60 m below $1.90/day. We can barely imagine the long term effects of that. Safe to say it ain't pretty.
Edit: please boomer vote me down, I got points enough!!
Spot on, I remember my grandparents, the parents generation of boomers talk about the fact their generation should give the jobs to the next.
Every boomer with a job could buy a house every where in the world. But that wasn't enough boomers dumped their parents in concrete horror houses to let them rot away and still decided to not build enough real estate for the coming generations so every boomer could run maximum profit.
We have seen what the boomers did with companies, the amount of debt, our climate, the laws & regulations they conjured. Boomers have caused an amount of damage to the future that will cripple at least the next 5 generations. Boomers have to move over.
People mention the economic rebound in 1919 after the Spanish plague but that was possible because the dead toll was as high 100 million people. That was a major release of an enormous amount of money.
All of a sudden things like natural causes of dead running at a number lower than a million is reason enough to lockdown the whole world.
I think that if society were to end restrictions, they would also need to somehow prevent anyone in covid-induced pulmonary distress from going to the hospital. A big part of the danger of covid is that it overwhelms hospitals.
I don't think that Ioannnidis needs to resign or something, but he should retract the paper and recuse himself from the ongoing debate about this issue. It was their group's decision to
a) Run op-eds in the WSJ and get on Fox News with their theories
b) Create a faulty study with biased data analysis (of all people, Ioannnidis should be very sensitive to this -- he's famous for his paper "Why Most Published Research Findings Are False."
c) Publish the flawed paper as a preprint without peer review.
d) Publish the results of the L.A. serological survey without even a preprint so that the methods could be looked over.
If you publish a study that has huge societal implications before peer review, then Twitter is going to be your peer review. Deal with it.
I don't blame them for posting a dodgy preprint (that's what preprints are for) but I do blame them for going on a press blitz for their dodgy preprint. It's not a responsible way to use their platform.
Well, some may find posting said preprint particularly questionable simply because it had Ioannidis' name on it, and he's primarily known for his emphasis on standards of evidence.
As somebody who was always annoyed by the weird amounts of odd attention that Ioannidis' "standards of evidence" papers got, I hope that this makes people reevaluate them.
The "standard" he set up was a straw man, and not how any practicing scientist I know actually looks at papers.
And when he allows his name to be used to push highly politci contrarian takes, all the weird attention his other papers received starts to make sense. It's not about the science, it's about being contrarian, at best, and at worst ways to subvert the public's view of science by deriving them on what it really means to publish a peer-reviewed paper.
And says in there that Imperial college was dangerously wrong to use a 1% IFR estimate in their modeling. I believe this interview was near or after New York City's city fatality rate was already over 0.1%, yet he was still saying Imperial's estimate was an order of magnitude off.
Throughout the whole thing he cherry picked countries with recent extreme case growth and thorough testing to take advantage of the death lag and claim they point to a tiny CFR (and IFR). In each case it steadily rose after case growth slowed and lagged deaths continued, as expected.
In the Ioannidis serology study, one of the researchers's wives recruited people who wanted a test, saying it would let them know if they could get back to work (potentially biasing things for people who suspected they had had it).
In each case it steadily rose after case growth slowed and lagged deaths continued, as expected.
Where do you see that? The data I see says the fatality rate of all forms has been dropping over time, as expected from prior epidemics where this also occurred. It's the Imperial papers that have been discredited by now, as their projections were way off in all respects - if they were right Sweden would be a bloodbath at the moment.
I agree the serology survey was not a perfect study - more for statistical/confidence interval reasons than the researcher's wife. But it may not matter. The general conclusions of the serology survey are matching many other pieces of data and evidence from around the world. For example:
"The latest figures from Italy show (pp. 12/13) that 60 of almost 17,000 doctors and nurses who tested positive died. This results in a Covid19 lethality rate of less than 0.1% for those under 50, 0.27% for those aged 50 to 60, 1.4% for those aged 60 to 70, and 12.6% for those aged 70 to 80. Even these figures are likely too high, as these are deaths with and not necessarily from corona viruses, and as up to 80% of people remain asymptomatic and some may not have been tested. Overall, however, the values are in line with those from e.g. South Korea and give a lethality rate for the general population in the range of influenza."
From https://swprs.org/a-swiss-doctor-on-covid-19/ - the source document is in Italian but the data table is quite clear even to someone who doesn't speak it. In other words for Imperial's paper to have been reasonable they'd have to assume the entire population had the mortality profile of 60+ year olds, which is just wrong.
It was a study that was about an ongoing crisis that has led to hundreds of thousands of dead people in a couple of months that had a contrarian result, had not been through peer review, had not been double or triple checked and was still promoted heavily through news media.
That it happened to also be faulty made it a tragedy. It’s farcical nature had been established earlier.
I want to add one other piece of information to this discussion, because Ioannidis is somewhat central to the point the original article is trying to make, and it is ignored by the article (because it significantly weakens some of their arguments).
Had the study simply been released and criticized, then much of this current controversy would've been avoided, but that didn't happen. Instead, Ioannidis did the rounds at several conservative news outlets in the wake of the study's release, and promoted the study's findings as the new "best evidence." This aided in pushing certain social and political agendas. Many scientists (especially on Twitter) found this specific behavior to be unacceptable, especially from a scientist that they also felt should "know better."
Will Happer should "know better" too, but as Sinclair said: "It’s difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends on his not understanding it"
Did those people criticise other epidemiologists for doing the same? Immediately holding press conferences appears to be standard behaviour during this outbreak; for example, Imperial and Oxford both did the same. In fact in the Oxford case the press published stories about the paper before it was even available anywhere, let alone in a journal.
I understand why at the moment peer review is being short circuited by everyone, regardless of political or epidemiological position. The world is hungry for news and journalists will interpret papers with or without the help of the authors. Might as well have their assistance, in these circumstances.
Your remark about "conservative news outlets" shows what's really going on here, I suspect - just another day in politically biased academia-land. If you talk to anything other than CNN then you're bad and wrong. The same has been seen with Alex Berenson, a former NYT journalist turned novelist who has never really taken part in politics nor even really discussed it much in public. Once he started tweeting skeptically about the actions of governments and academics, all based on public data, he discovered only the conservative news outlets were willing to interview him. And then that mere fact alone was used by the left to attack him, although his points were all based on actual verifiable facts and had no pre-existing political bias.
Ioannidis made a lot of enemies by kickstarting the replication crisis. Now it looks like some see a chance to get back at him.
Is there any research with "solid data" and any meaningful conclusions? From what I see most of the research is about one parameter out of the 20 or 20 parameters that could affect any practical conclusion. So while the research might be scientifically correct it is not really useful in any way. Nobody can explain why this virus spread more in one place than another, why Sweden or Japan or Germany or Italy got such various results with very different policies. There is no correlation, there is no even an agreement whether wearing a mask is good or not. His "flawed data" is as good as any other research
You've quoted the conclusions, but in the spirit of the STAT article, can you also quote the relevant scientific debate in your article, and what specifically leads to such bold conclusions (e.g. "owe an apology", "wasted time and effort", "statistical error", "screwed up", etc.)?
I skimmed through the article and, because I'm not a statistician, I could not follow what was so blatantly wrong, if we were to charitably assume that the two sets of authors may have different premises or interpretations.
> In response, on Sunday, the Stanford study’s authors said they are planning to soon release a detailed appendix that addresses many of the “constructive comments and suggestions” the team has received.
> “This is exactly the way peer-review should work in scientific work, and we are looking forward to engaging with other scholars as we proceed in this important work,” said Dr. Jayanta Bhattacharya, professor of medicine at Stanford University, who along with colleague Dr. Eran Bendavid, also assisted with the USC study.
> what specifically leads to such bold conclusions (e.g. "owe an apology", "wasted time and effort", "statistical error", "screwed up", etc.)?
They used a test with a false positive rate of about 2%, and found a positive rate of about 2%. It is impossible to use this information to establish a lower bound on the number infected. However, by screwing up the computation of the confidence interval, they claimed a huge lower bound.
> “We have been working very hard to address all the comments raised by many colleagues and I am always grateful to receive constructive criticism,” he said. “While we received thousands of congratulations for this work, I cherish far more the comments of the scientists who criticized our work and I thank them deeply for their comments.”
That's an admirable sentiment, Ionannidis must be such a wonderful guy.
However, the damage has already been done. He's already done his media blitz, so no matter what happens next, effectively zero people will hear the correction (or more likely, subsequent retraction). It'll just become yet another piece of zombie information, which will appear in dishonest talking points or gish gallops. The quality of public discourse and the reputation of science will continue its decline, and we'll be talking about the next example of this tomorrow.
If we try to be charitable, Ioannidis was too confident in his research team who made mistakes; for example:
> The authors said by email that they used a built-in Stata function and aren't sure themselves how the software used the input weights. I suspect they misapplied that function (too complicated to tweet why) but I don't know Stata well enough to be sure; it seems neither do they.
> The errors are not debatable and can be seen in these two screenshots of the supplement: 0.0034, the standard error meant to measure uncertainty about prevalence pi, is not the square root of 0.039, and the variance of a binomial estimate of proportion depends on the sample size.
My statistician friend says:
> In fact the math checks out in favor of the authors. Square root of .039, then divide by square root of 3330. .= 0034 just like reported.
> So the error is debatable.
> Now, sometimes you should be using the standard deviation, not the standard error, but that isn't his claim. The .0034 is absolutely the correct standard error, unless there is a difference in terminology for the field or something.
There was also an absurd amount of selection bias in their population. They recruited people for a COVID-19 antibody screening, and there were emails encouraging people who suspected they had recovered from the disease to get screened. If the researchers knew about the email, it's actionable research misconduct.
If they didn't know (a coauthor's wife sent the email), then it's just very very bad work.
The NYC studies actually look halfway decent. The big problem with serological tests is that even good ones may have, say, a 2% false positive rate. So if you test a population where nobody is infected, the test will say that 2% have been infected.
To get good numbers, you need a population where lots of people have been infected. That will allow true positives to swamp the false positives, which is what happened in the NYC study that claimed 21% of people had already been infected. Even if it's really only 19%, that doesn't change much.
You also need a good random sampling procedure. IIRC, the NYC study tested people shopping for essentials at mid-day. This underrepresents essential workers, people who are really good at self-isolation, and people who are currently sick. But still, it's not too bad.
The New York City numbers suggest that very roughly 1% of people infected with the virus will die, depending on how you count probable but unconfirmed COVID deaths reported by NYC. This could be off by a factor of two in either direction, depending on how good the random sampling was, and the characteristics of a given population.
Nicely put. With a case fatality of ~1%, we need orders of magnitude reduction, not factors of 2. If anyone wants to quibble over a factor of 2 you've missed the point.
Now my nightly rant: I did this kind of false positive calculation in high school statistics, and I hated it. Still do. I hate that we're dealing with this BS. I hate that stupid people put us in this position, and that smart people aren't smart enough to not be absolute knobs.
Why are you citing the NYC study as reinforcement of the other two? It is unlikely that all 3 are correct, because they imply significantly different outcomes of an infection.
> Views still need to be backed by solid data and in this case, the Stanford study the article is highlight has a number of issues with its data.
That articles backed by solid data is certainly the desired state, but it is very far from the current state of affairs on COVID. There are many articles that tout opposing views that are pretty liberal with data. Requesting an official apology (which, in science is almost unheard of) is simply an attempt at harassment. Mistakes happen, you refute errors and move on.
Scientists must be allowed to explore and advocate non-traditional views. Otherwise (and very quickly if you let hecklers in) you create static beliefs that live on for a long time, whether true or not, because the bar for challenge is very high and an error ruins a career.
My worry with pieces like this is that they're meant to encourage intellectual diversity in scientific discourse, but some people will undoubtedly try to use them as "teach the controversy!" to justify any kind of crazy non-scientific idea. How do we teach people to draw that line? Or is that a lost cause?
By teaching people to recognize where faulty data are and how they were collected. I always encourage people to look at several sources of news and figure out conclusions on their own, ignoring potential bias. [0]
It's never a lost cause to emphasize the importance of digging through an academic paper or a news article, effectively doing their own research instead of just listening to figureheads and looking through headlines.
Also worth noting that false claims need not be malicious to serve as a DOS attack. An army of untrained ‘researchers’ drawing improbable conclusions from randomly combined snippets of scientific papers can generate a huge amount of pseudoscientific ‘sourced-looking’ ideas.
Unfortunately it takes a lot more effort to actually understand a paper then to ‘just throw it out there’.
Well, one issue, is that this article (and many like it) only address controversy, and not whether a given controversy is warranted by evidence. I think it's important in discussing intellectual diversity to emphasize that going against established thought requires compelling evidence, usually rightfully so.
It also doesn't help that their only example of intellectual diversity is itself flawed, and not convincing, even to the authors.
Why are you afraid of non-scientific ideas? Science is a light to illuminate the truth. What's the point of having a light if you are hiding ideas? There is no line to draw except against this kind of censorship. We ought to teach others tools for thought, not indoctrinate based off of our own biases, lest the next generation progress no further than us.
I know you think you're being profound but this essentially just tripe.
Science is based on data and repetition. That's the pay-to-play scientific discussion requires otherwise we're not "illuminating truth" we're just regurgitating shit.
I’m not sure where you got the idea that people are afraid of non-scientific ideas–I see them discussed all over online everyday by thousands and thousands of people. No one is afraid of them, we just don’t consider them to be science. There should always remain a sharp dividing line between non-scientific/scientific and for good reason.
> There should always remain a sharp dividing line between non-scientific/scientific and for good reason.
That is a patronizing statement. If science can't defend itself then we're more screwed than we thought. Truth exists outside of Science (to state otherwise would not be a scientific statement, thus a contradiction). That leaves room for crack pot theories to potentially have truth in them. To bar them or dismiss them based off personal bias is crime against healthy intellectual discourse. Who is imposing irrational beliefs on whom? That is where the sharp dividing line should be drawn.
Well, I'm not afraid of non-scientific ideas, but I am afraid of the harms they cause. Anecdotally, I've lost a couple of family members due to secret-style law-of-attraction attempts at fixing curable (by medical science) illnesses. Kind of a bummer, but it's a free country and we can't compel people to take medical treatments when they think they can wish away the cancer.
I'm also afraid of the measurable societal harms caused by, e.g. the anti-vax movement, where preventable illnesses are making a comeback due to non-scientific belief in the hazards of vaccination.
I don't know how to get anti-vax sentiments out of the mainstream discourse, but I think the world would not be any less intellectually rich, in any meaningful sense of the concept, if no one ever thought those thoughts, and caused harmful policies to be carried out, again.
Right now, of course, I accept it as "gotta take the bad with the good" but that doesn't mean I like that things like childhood measles are on the rise in various anti-vax hotspots; especially because these aren't informed adults opting out of vaccines, but ill-informed parents making decisions for their children that do have serious impacts on childhood health and the potential for serious harms later in life.
I certainly don't see the need to defend some ideas as holding promise for progress ("we could have cured your measles as a child, but some guy made up a story out of his head and that's why you have shingles now") when they are very much regressive ideas.
Unfortunately that is not entirely accurate. Even rigorous non-controversial scientific papers have been rejected due to their contradiction of current trends, resource constraints, etc. Science has politics too. Anyone who's done research to fulfill a science directorate should be wise to that fact.
Scientific discourse is based on the assumption that all parties have the basic reading comprehension to look at the primary data.
I'm not really worried about creationism or climate stabilism competing given those conditions. And if those aren't the conditions, it's not scientific discourse.
See you are part of that group. If data was presented today that conflicted with your existing views you would try to label and disprove it.
Science must be neutral. Proof of climate stabilism through existing feedback processes may happen or not. We won't know until the data says this. If science is not neutral it becomes religion. Even gravity is just a theory.
Well said. I'm not sure the good religious folks here who are evidently big believers in the Rona calamity can fully comprehend your ideas though. For most here, i suspect it's a bridge to far.
That science should be neutral? I would hope some would be seeking that path. The idea that science is evolving with every experiment/test we attempt. To freeze on a single point of view is belief (religion) instead of fact (science).
This comment shows a shocking lack of scientific literacy.
You can't "disprove" data. Data are the root facts that science is based on, and all data from trustworthy sources is treated the same by all scientists. Nobody ever "disproves" data.
What can be proven or disproven are hypotheses, the truths about underlying mechanisms of the world that we seek to learn about through data. A hypothesis about how something behaves can be proven or disproven with data, the data itself is absolute truth. A good hypothesis explains the data that we see, a bad one will be contradicted by data collection.
There is no such thing as "just a theory". In common parlance sure, but in scientific speech "theory" is a technical term that refers to a hypothesis that has stood up to all feasible tests that could have disproven it. Gravity is a phenomenon, observed by lots of data, all of which discovered so far confirms the theory of general relativity, upgraded from hypothesis after gravitational bending of light (which the hypothesis predicted)was observed in 1919.
Data can be fake or manipulated though. And in the case of covid-19, a lot of the data is highly questionable.
"The figures are questionable
Angelo Borrelli, the head of Civil Protection, who announces the latest figures every day at 6 p.m., said Saturday night that the 793 new deaths have been caused “by and with” the coronavirus. “We count all the dead, we make no distinction between with and by the coronavirus.” However, one wonders whether these daily figures reflect the situation correctly. The dead are said to have almost all had one or more other diseases, which leaves a question mark as to exactly how deadly the coronavirus is. At the same time, it has become clear that a large number of people who die at home (which is often a retirement home) do not undergo a coronavirus test."
https://www.nrc.nl/nieuws/2020/03/22/als-italie-het-voorland...
It also questions the data, for example, the fact that even elderly dying at home without having been tested at all for COVID-19 (!!!) being counted as COVID-19 deaths. This is something I come across in more countries including the USA where various doctors have protested against policies that almost force them to include COVID-19 on death certificates. It's as if they want to artificially inflate the numbers to make COVID-19 seem a lot worse than it is. Watch this interview with Dr. Dan Erickson and Dr. Artin Massihi of Bakersfield, CA.: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cmjYRJXKixY
While it is academically interesting to try to apportion blame between COVID-19 and underlying conditions, the basic fact on the ground is an anomalous rise in illnesses requiring critical care and resulting in death.
This has been true since the first alarm bells in China, and has spread to other nations in a way that is easily observed first-hand, clearly reported by front-line medical staff, and consistent with the spread of a new disease.
That obvious data is what populations and governments are reacting to, not some calculated IFR.
Trying to label someone without engaging in critical thinking that involves understanding what you memorized is being dishonest to yourself. I will say it again. A theory is just a theory.. just the most accepted story.
Gravity is a theory (an explaination) of an observable phenonmenon. It is the accepted story until a more compelling story comes around.
Some popular theories that were disproven:
Fleischmann–Pons’s Nuclear Fusion
Phrenology
The Blank Slate
Luminiferous Aether
To your other point. Data is constantly being re-examined. How accurate is the Data is. What the data is really examining are extremely important and change.
Data is re-analyzed in the context of new data and improved hypotheses. Data is not "disproven" as you claimed. There may be several ways to explain an observation, and some of the explanations can be shown to be wrong, but the observation itself never can.
After the discovery of standard candles, when the map of the universe was completely reconceptualized, nothing ever changed about astronomical data: observations of stellar position and brightness. What had changed was the explanation for those brightnesses and the meanings attributed to them. The data stays the same, the explanation changes, and if an explanation doesn't match the data, like the milky-way-is-the-universe hypothesis, then it's a bad explanation.
Is this you admitting that you were totally wrong about how science works so now you're retreating to the conspiracy theorizing fallback position that all the universities and governments and health authorities and hospitals and nonprofits and NGOs and device manufacturers and biotech companies and nursing homes and cemeteries and obituary sections in newspapers in the entire world are all part of one big conspiracy to keep you from getting a haircut?
My 37 year old cousin who is currently in the hospital for coronavirus, you think he was actually abducted by aliens, or what? Is he a "false report" too?
What "false reporting"?
Please explain to me why we should risk tens of millions of lives worldwide over your sheepish thumb-twiddling musings about "false reporting".
To disprove means "to prove to be false or wrong"[1], and that's exactly what the OPERA collaboration did to their own data that showed super-luminal neutrinos, when they later discovered it was caused by a bad fiber connection[2].
There's also the case of BICEP2[3], where the raw data was not in dispute, but rather the inevitable post-processing required to extract the "science signal" from the raw data.
This is of course why scientists prefer to have multiple independent measurements of the same phenomena, to eliminate possible sources of error and bias. The LHC for example has two independent main detectors[4], built by different teams using different approaches, for this very reason.
That said, at least in the physical sciences (I don't follow life sciences as closely), cases like OPERA and BICEP2 are exceptions.
Do you understand the challenge you are taking upon yourself when you are trying to argue that climate change is not a severe concern? Might as well argue that the Earth is flat.
You might think that we are all just wrong. But here's the thing. The vast, vast majority of scientifically literate people in the world believe that climate change is an enormous risk to human prosperity. There might be some disagreement on exactly what the nature of the risk is. But everyone agrees it is a huge problem that must be confronted.
Because we are the overwhelming majority, you need to convince us using very articulate, compelling arguments and the highest-quality analysis. And you need to deal with the fact that most people will assume you are either ignorant or ideologically motivated to misinterpret the evidence -- because, to our eyes, that's exactly what people who compose comments like yours are (and it gets really old after a while).
By posting angsty messages that offer no value from a scientific standpoint, you are admitting defeat from the start.
If anyone who feels that way would like to suggest a neologism for the sort of discourse I describe, I'd be open to using it - I do feel the term 'scientific discourse' has been watered down a fair bit.
My point wasn't that I necessarily have a different view on what scientific discourse is; my point was that someone who is less discerning might see a discussion of one of the views you listed and see valid scientific discourse.
The issue is not that scientists, or discerning non-scientists, will take those views seriously, it's that others might (or will, or do). Hence the issue is not with defining scientific discourse, it's with educating a population to be able to apply that definition (or formulate their own functional individual ones).
Scientist should hold themselves to the highest ethical standards. The article seems to defend an article and opinion that sees economic consequences are more dangerous than human lives lost to COVID-19. In terms of scientific discourse, this sounds fishy to me. We don‘t know so much about the virus: long term effects etc.
If a scientist argues against saving human lives now, because of a man made economic systems inability to cope with the crisis might kill more people later, I say don‘t hear him, criticize him based on an ethical discourse. Save the lives now and adjust the system so people don‘t need to die.
You are assuming that a particular course of action: (1) is guaranteed to be the best way to save lives and (2) only has ramifications which we have the ability to ‘adjust’. Many scientists may disagree with you on both accounts. I don’t see why they are not holding themselves to the highest ethical standards.
In hypotheticals I would agree with you.
Yet, at the time of the writing of that article, the data from several countries regarding COVID 19 were in, and we have an indication on what metrics work to limit deaths.
We also see what we could have done to prevent and outbreak, China, South Korea, Hong Kong and Taiwan seemed to be extremely prepared.
Germany followed the virologist, epidemiologist consensus (and is going now off track to open businesses again ... a lot of scientist believe too early).
We will see in the long run which approaches worked and which didn’t. Yet, calling for an opening of businesses (because we cannot be sure about the death rate), when none of the successful countries did that, is ethically dubious to me.
HA, Good luck. I suggested that maybe we should consider ending the quarantine for the sake of the economy and my post was instantly flagged. Society gonna do what society gonna do.
That's fairly self-pitying and simple. Is it impossible that your post, intrinsically, had enough recklessness and/or low enough value that meeting the flagging threshold was within the realm of reasonableness? It can happen even when the thought in your head is more rational, since expressing subtlety in the fast-and-short forum context is difficult.
Scientists who "express different views" are listened to, when they have convincing data to support those "views."
Ioannidis is the only real example provided in the article, and his opinion piece (and the related Stanford study) was criticized, not because he's an iconoclast, but because it was bad science (and especially bad policy). Not only that, but then, instead of engaging with the scientific community, his "expertise" was co-opted by the conservative media and its agenda.
>> but because it was bad science (and especially bad policy).
is this not exactly what the original article cautions against? if it's bad science (which should be debatable) it's value as policy follows directly and doesn't need to be stated or discussed seperately.
> it's value as policy follows directly and doesn't need to be stated or discussed seperately.
The problem is that if, as a scientist, I know that people are likely to convert my findings into policy, then I have an extra duty to be especially diligent and extra thorough so that my findings are valid.
Ioannidis knew exactly what he was doing when he put this pile of garbage out there. The fact that it was shoddy methodology means that he should get ESPECIALLY torched for it as an object lesson to other "scientists".
First, the original article is actually about the exact opposite. It says nothing about attacking an opinion based on its merit, it talks about attacking an opinion based on dogma. When I say it's bad science, I'm saying it's bad science because of glaring problems with its methodology; I thought that was obvious (the term "bad science" being fairly common).
Second, I'm talking about the social policy argued for in Ioannidis' opinion piece. Social policy absolutely does not just directly follow the science; they are very different things and absolutely should be discussed separately. I find it a bit absurd to think that science inherently dictates a certain social policy.
There's a very strong aversion towards anyone with different views on this subject. I'm not convinced its solely due to a lack of data. Low sample size studies have been around for a while, but the aversion on this is so much stronger, and has an effect. In China, it's explicit. If you say there's human-to-human transmission, the police will arrest you. If you research the origins of the virus, it's illegal to publish that. In the rest of the world you're allowed to express such views, but there's a very strong chilling effect (and on social media its banned if it contradicts the W.H.O.). An example of the chilling effect would be when scientists arguing for masks had to do their work in secret: https://twitter.com/jeremyphoward/status/1244038605078757376
That’s why we believe that the bar to stifling or ignoring academics who are willing to debate their alternative positions in public and in good faith must be very high.
But the "good faith" part is precisely the problem. Though it is difficult to discern good faith from bad, those who argue in bad faith destroy the system entirely, and we need some kind of defense against them.
Reading the tweet thread linked under "personal attacks and general disparaging comments" (https://twitter.com/CT_Bergstrom/status/1253822258692284416), I see much more a criticism of poor science journalism in the WSJ than the poor science in the article itself (aside from one swipe as a "methodological piece of shit"). I'm all for rigorous debate of different scientific ideas, but the WSJ Opinion page is not where people should be marshaling allies to their scientific ideas that are regarded as tenuous by the majority of the community.
Part of the problem is that there are some Doctors and Scientists participating with agendas.
Take cloth masks, there are doctors who say it helps and doctors who say it doesn't help much. Some the doctors who said it doesn't help were genuine.
But some of the doctors were saying it doesn't help were lying because they assumed people wouldn't social distance if they wore a mask, believing the increased risk due to not wearing masks was not worth what they believed would be a big decrease in social distancing. Some of the doctors were are saying they didn't help, were lying to preserve masks for health care professionals (including lying about n95 masks).
It's hard not to feel like attacking some one you believe is deliberately putting many lives at risk to forward a political or personal agenda.
I've also heard it claimed that masks not helping was pushed because there was no peer reviewed randomized trials that showed that masks helped therefore the official advice was there is no evidence that masks helped. Of course there is no randomized trial evidence on the effectiveness of social distancing on long term reduction in mortality due to corona virus but different ideas have to hurdle different levels of evidence. This idea of different levels of evidence actually makes sense because some things have potentially high payoffs and very likely low costs. For example wearing masks would appear to fall into this bucket.
This comes back into reasoning under uncertainty that someone else brought up in the thread. The medical community has had problems in the past because bad medical interventions typically impose high costs on patients so if they have little positive benefit then it can easily become a net-negative situation. So then you have a culture where anything that hasn't gone through an RCT with multiple confirming studies doesn't exist as an intervention.
Or it just spread on the West Coast much earlier... which is why Gavin Newsom is autopsying bodies of people who died in Dec and Jan, after it turned out there was confirmed community spread in the Bay Area in late January resulting in a Santa Clara county death in Early Feb..
In what ways did Austin not listen to their own scientists? I was there during part of this and they had a fairly early response, I believe SXSW was one of the first major events to be cancelled in the US. They were also pretty quick about limiting the size of gatherings.
Right now we are being propagandized with an intensity never seen before.
I have yet to see a single person in my neighborhood suffer from this virus in any noticeable way.
What I do see is propaganda, marketing and social engineering. A massive campaign.
On Reddit I see a Coronavirus subreddit that has become an almost supernaturally airtight echo-chamber.
I see the moderator of that reddit. Some anonymous fellow who was handed control over the subreddit for no apparent reason. Who is using an account he obviously bought 3 months ago. Shutting down any discussion that begins to stray from the official narrative.
I see the usual propaganda buttons being pushed. Tribalism and fear.
Economies are wrecked worldwide. Trump shouldn't be elected because he thinks injecting disinfectant into your lungs to do a cleasing 'should be looked into' while maintaining that 'I am a person with a good you know what'.
Would you say they are wrecked because of the virus, or because of government shutdowns that were based on a fatality rate that may turn out to be wildly incorrect?
How many fatalities do you think will occur due to the wrecked economy in the next few years?
I don't think your neighborhood and a couple random people on reddit of all places offer a full glimpse of the world at large, especially considering the disease has hotspots with high infection rates while other people are mostly avoiding those places.
Conversely, I've never had influenza in my life, and I don't recall seeing anyone close to me ever actively suffering from a bad case influenza. I still believe it exists and people who got hit hard by it are probably at home.
The example this article uses doesn't help drive the point. Ioannidis was heard, and the majority of the attacks on him came from outside the scientific community. Within the community science played out how it's supposed to. The paper was looked at critically and flaws in it's data uncovered and thus correctly discredited.
Meanwhile, his hypothesis is still held by many prominent figures outside of the scientific community. So it's very hard to claim this is an example of valid ideas being at all squashed.
Worse, in this case we have hard evidence of some pretty catastrophic results from this virus. So trying to argue that the overall outcome isn't going to be so bad is proven false by counter example. We already have situations that are bad enough to warrant extreme counter measures.
A) This was published as a research paper but how much of a research paper was it? As mentioned, it selectively and fairly shallowly looked at some data (the Diamond Princess) while wholly ignoring other data (South Korea) without even providing a strong justification for its choices. It was more like "an essay with scholarly footnotes".
B) This article wasn't simply offered to scientific community. You can find a huge swath of mainstream media reports describing this paper and another large number of popular articles with by Ioannidis himself defending the positions he staked out in his article. This was essentially a media campaign.
C). The particular position Ioannidis staked out was just one of a series of positions one can find staked by a variety of figures, some real scientists, some right wing ideologues, some somewhat in between. Again, if you look, a well financed media campaign. Below is a series of link I've cobbled together I've cobbled together as documentation of this:
The American Institute for Economic Research (libertarian/right wing think tank) give it's of "significant" article: https://www.aier.org/article/vital-information-that-is-falli... Essentially a web of articles united by the need to avoid undue action on the virus (IE, not cost money).
That isn't a scientific paper but rather an opinion piece. You're talking about the more recent paper he was involved with regarding immunity in a region of California.
trying to argue that the overall outcome isn't going to be so bad is proven false by counter example.
This might have made sense to say three weeks ago. The vast majority of places have now peaked already and have seen nothing worse than the flu. The strength of lockdown has made no difference whatsoever and there are good reasons to believe even having one at all may have no impact - bizarre but that's what some of the data is saying.
In other words if you're going to engage in argument by counter-example that Ioannidis was wrong in his essay, you're going to lose. If we judge what happened purely by counting examples and counter-examples, lockdowns would appear totally insane.
The SAGE committee in Whitehall is permitting Dominic Cumming not only to listen in to the scientists and demographers and economists: he is joining in. Thus, the mis-apprehension of science leaks out, into official acts.
It will be interesting to see what policy influence Cummings has had. A media outlet earlier had claimed Cummings pushed for no lockdown. So seeing we had a lockdown that would appear to show that he doesn't have much influence. Though, it might be that Cummings opinion on what to do changed as he received more information and he ended up supporting the lockdown. Or it could be that the media misreported the situation.
Is there a resource for up-to-date reviewed papers on COVID? Like a Reddit group with community members from relevant backgrounds or something? Because it gets hard for me to keep up on what’s bs or factual, and many people pushing articles usually have political motivations.
244 comments
[ 2.9 ms ] story [ 272 ms ] threadAs the article notes, it is not a matter of agreeing but of treating other people in the scientific field with respect.
Also, some of those opinions may be wrong or just partially wrong, but we don't see that many mea culpa, if any.
These controversies are pretty local: they tend to flare up every now and then because most of these people are regularly invited (in presence or via video call) to TV shows.
https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2016/10/seven-year-legal-sag...
What, if anything, is more necessary to a free society than the free expression and debate of ideas?
This of course requires a literate and critical interpretation of the facts and data by all, but I digress. This is science.
At the same time, we are concerned by a chilling attitude among some [people], who are wrongly ascribing legitimate disagreements about [issues] to ignorance or to questionable political or other motivations.
The commons must be protected from bad actors, and bad faith whose purpose is to use the openness of society against itself. [1]
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paradox_of_tolerance
That's happening on YouTube now.
Absolutely nothing? Unless you post misinformation, in which case, it will be left up but demonetized. https://support.google.com/youtube/answer/9803260?hl=en
Where did you get the deletion and ban nonsense from?
The Google-owned service says it will remove anything it deems "medically unsubstantiated".
“Anything that would go against World Health Organization recommendations would be a violation of our policy.”
https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-52388586
"Now any content that disputes the existence or transmission of Covid-19, as described by the WHO [World Health Organization] and local health authorities is in violation of YouTube policies.
The firm may also prevent repeat offenders from earning money, and said it would terminate channels as a last resort.
https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-52198946
There's a convenient feature called search on HN or any other websites. I think you might want to use it.
This looks like the CEO misquoting the policy. I linked to the actual policy. Where does it say what you claim?
> "Now any content that disputes the existence or transmission of Covid-19, as described by the WHO [World Health Organization] and local health authorities is in violation of YouTube policies."
This is in violation for spreading harmful medical misinformation, not for contradicting the WHO, which (once again) is not prohibited by YouTube policy.
> There's a convenient feature called search on HN or any other websites. I think you might want to use it.
If you had used that feature, you might have come across https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22963070
I suggest you learn how to read critically instead of blindly believing anything you read on the Internet.
One is an actual policy that the employees follow. The other is just a quote taken out of context. The interview wasn't about launching a new policy. Instead, the CEO mentioned what YouTube was already doing in passing in a broad-ranging interview and did so loosely.
It's really not that hard to understand. You're acting like the Black Knight in Monty Python and the Holy Grail.
What doesn't work so well is analogizing to things that are more emotionally intense. It comes from wanting your words to match the intensity of your emotions when the real thing is really not that bad.
Good. They should continue.
It's interesting to phrase this as "views." I'd prefer to see all relevant data.
Sometimes Scientists could have a gut feeling, and this may not have data to back it up. I think its still important to talk about it, while acknowledging that we're discussing a hypothesis, and not a proven fact.
The mortality rate in NY has been found by random testing more than 0.5%, or more than 50 times higher from what the Stanford Snake Oil Salesmen were predicting by looking at NBA (yes really) mortality rates.
[1] https://www.wsj.com/articles/is-the-coronavirus-as-deadly-as...
If you wouldn't mind reviewing https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and sticking to the rules when posting here, we'd be grateful.
https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...
>No one is convinced
Those are some pretty broad generalizations!
I've certainly been convinced on various topics by people who were correct and also rude about it.
Do you think laywers and police are always nice when trying to get to the truth? Have you ever seen the movie Erin Brockovich, or read about the events that inspired it? Would she have had the same results while being polite the entire time?
Rude comments may break forum rules, sure. But I'm not sure sweeping generalizations about efficacy, such as the above, are needed.
I don't think what I said is so controversial. Cheap name-calling doesn't have good effects on discussion here, and HN readers whose minds might be open to a thoughtful argument are turned off by it.
Are you?
But I'll assume the answer to my question is yes.
Want to see this go away? Remove FB/Insta/Twitter from the planet, along with the entire mainstream media, all of which have business models based on the aforementioned idiocy as well as non-stop conflict generation.
When you are done with that task go purge every sitting legislative body on the planet which in general are bought and paid for by those same special interests.
Then you'd have a clean slate to build on for intelligent dialog and meaningful efforts related to not just Covid 19, but many other pressing global concerns...</rant>
Every side of the so-called debate throws it left and right, now which science do you believe in? As if belief is part of the equations.
And the other issue is that there are no debates. You send a tweet, and tag WHO or some authoritative figure and then we have to believe it. Those who don't believe it are not following the science.
Edit: Science is supposed to evolve as new data comes in. Today, we stop at the first sensational news. When a fact is updated or retracted, it doesn't make the news.
In the data starved regime, belief indeed does enter the equations in the form of a Bayesian prior.
Agreed that new data should update the results.
Anyway, i think the point of this article is that people that are not scientists themselves can debate with each other, but should avoid perturbing (i'd say polluting even) the scientific debate, whether its by disparaging an adversarial opinion or but elevating a scientits too high (see what has happened with the pr Raoult cult in France). This is too much noise and scientist are people too.
This! This, exactly! This, a million times over!
If I could teach people one scientific concept to help us get through this, it wouldn't be immunology or epidemiology. It would be an understanding of uncertainty, where it comes from, what it means, and how to handle it.
So, yeah, I'm going to set myself up for a fall here by saying I've got a pretty decent professional understanding of the topic.
They then proceed to ignore this and use a point estimate for their further calculations.
The right thing to have done would have been to test the assay further, or move the study to an area where there was higher positivity and they could get a more reliable signal.
My reading of the data to date (note: not including anything that might have shown up in the last few days) is more nuanced. Hydroxychloroquine most likely has a small positive effect, but the data are consistent with anything from a modest negative effect to a modest positive effect to absolutely nothing at all. From its long history of previous use, the drug has known negative effects, but these are unimportant or manageable for most COVID-19 patients. However, any positive effect it may have is limited; the studies to date, albeit limited, have been powerful enough to detect a "miracle cure".
None of this says a word about mechanism of action. Someone is bound to say, "But what about zinc? You need to consider zinc!" The thing is, we did. These analyses are independent of mechanism of action. It's entirely possible that hydroxychloroquine's small positive effect is mostly or entirely caused by zinc interactions. Or not. We don't know! We'd have to do a study designed around zinc to test that theory out.
In my opinion, again as a science-y but not doctor-y person, is that giving hydroxychloroquine to COVID-19 patients in most cases will not hurt them, and might help a little bit. The biggest danger, I believe, is that people think it's more powerful than it is. We should not stop and think that hydroxychloroquine is good enough or a "cure". Because it isn't. And if a patient receives hydroxychloroquine instead of better care because people misunderstand science, that is a failing.
(The above is definitely a tangent. But getting it off my chest somewhere was good for my mental health!)
'Scientific consensus is important, but it isn’t uncommon when some of the most important voices turn out to be those of independent thinkers, like John Ioannidis, whose views were initially doubted. That’s not an argument for prematurely accepting his contestable views, but it is a sound argument for keeping him, and others like him, at the table'
In a free society information and ideas should flow freely, not be banned and originators punished as happens in closed societies. It is alarming the level of vitriol and blind adherence to 'the scientific method' aka accepted establishment viewpoint in some cases, particularly online.
For all the endless proselytizing about 'innovation' there are some remarkably closed minded people around, enabled and amplified by social networks
I learned second hand that apparently a lot of scientific acedemia is like that. Crazy.
In my experience a lot of people assume that because science and related disciplines are rational endeavors that the institutions and culture compassing them must also be rational, empirical, purely evidence-based, etc. Reality can be almost comically, and sometimes tragically, the opposite.
This kind of stuff would happen at conferences too, a couple notable cases of screaming matches from the audience to the presenter have happened. Sometimes vindictive professors will go to a rival professors's grad student's talk and just grill the poor kid, asking them impossible questions and being hypercritical. Usually the grad student's own professor has to step in and try to deflect the assholes line of questioning. Sometimes the professors are even in the same department. It's a total cringe moment for the rest of the audience, and is definitely a phenomenon that is slowly growing out of the field as professors retire.
Take a look at the comment section of this blog to see it first hand: https://liorpachter.wordpress.com/2017/08/02/how-not-to-perf...
This is the bestknown public figure in Germany who supports the Imperial College Study and the drastic lockdown measures, but his public statements are mostly political, without proper evidence. Never mentioned the IFR, the R0, the absolute numbers, the curves. Our local panic guy.
My experience has been that these faults are expressed in irrational opposition to "the scientific method", and just as dramatically as you've described - and that irrational support of it is much less dramatic.
The phrasing of this makes it sound as though his views have become accepted.
They have not, in fact the absolute shambles of a "study" he did to support his conclusions (that COVID-19 is weaker than flu, and that almost everyone has had it already) are a huge embarrassment, or ought to be, except that he works for the Hoover Institute, which is explicitly ideologically opposed to things like Public Health efforts.
There is no reason to for such "science" to be anything but excoriated.
As someone said last week, maybe he just likes being a contrarian too much, and cannot look past the urge to contradict just to gain more notoriety.
"I think the authors of the above-linked paper owe us all an apology. We wasted time and effort discussing this paper whose main selling point was some numbers that were essentially the product of a statistical error."
"I’m serious about the apology. Everyone makes mistakes. I don’t think they authors need to apologize just because they screwed up. I think they need to apologize because these were avoidable screw-ups. They’re the kind of screw-ups that happen if you want to leap out with an exciting finding and you don’t look too carefully at what you might have done wrong."
source: https://statmodeling.stat.columbia.edu/2020/04/19/fatal-flaw...
Think about where you fall on that graph and then realize how many people are dumber and a lot dumber than you. But it doesn't end there. Some people are sheltered their entire lives so there is a lot they don't understand. Some people are mostly one dimensional so they don understand a lot. Some people have huge egos so they don't understand a lot. Some people have unreasonable biases and agendas that warp their otherwise rational mind into being ridiculous. Some people are so overburdened they can't do anything but work and never have a second to think for themselves. The powers that be PUMP shit into our heads all day long. lol, how many people even passed Calculus let alone could do anything with it now. And you're asking these people to look at the data? Get real. Get real! These people are not influenced by data.
Plus people value different things. Do you realize how much this quarantine is costing us? It's more selfish boomer behavior. I'm sorry but it's not worth the cost of another one or two Iraq wars to save the few people it does infect. It kills less than a percent of the people it infects. It's not like this thing kills 1/3 or even a 1/10th of the population. We are just pissing away money to protect a few boomers. They are pile driving our generation into poverty. End the quarantine.
Very few people understand anything at all about statistics other than what can be gleaned from basic arithmetic. You're asking too much of people. You don't influence people with facts.
Sorry this reply is all over the place.
>It kills less than a percent of the people it infects.
At 30% population infected, 1% is more than a million people.
I'm sorry, our values seems radically different.
>Do you have any idea how stupid most people are?
I thought I did, but reading your comment did bring an enhanced understanding.
I suspect it goes to non-lethal costs more, and then its the usual problem of milli-morts against economic cost/benefit.
> Do you realize how much this quarantine is costing us?
Actually, I don't. I've seen a lot of people make the argument that lockdowns and other restrictions are "too expensive", but:
* I have not seen a single serious attempt to model quite how expensive they will be.
* Nor have I seen any attempts to model how expensive alternate approaches would be, e.g. the Swedish model. Quite a few people who propagate it seem to be under the impression that this is implemented with zero economic disruption, but that's definitely not the case.
* And to be truly realistic, the models should consider the capabilities of countries to mitigate economic consequences through fiscal or monetary means. Many countries can currently borrow at very low or even negative interest rates, so they may have considerable leverage there.
Money is an abstraction we use to measure (relative) value. Wealth is the sum total of physical goods/services/resources that we rely on.
When you neuter an economy, as we have done in the US, you destroy real wealth. There is no way to counteract that by injecting money. It’s like trying to claim your company is growing because share buybacks made your per-share price go up, yet your market cap in an efficient market has been unchanged.
It is no surprise then that someone who holds that view would have trouble seeing the real damage that a shutdown like ours does. We have postponed elective surgeries, leading to furloughing tens of thousands of medical workers across the country because in many areas hospitals are practically empty. We’re halting meat packing plants because some portion of employees have tested positive. We’ve stopped educating our children in person despite covid-19 being less deadly than Influenza in children (this is a fact at this point).
We treated a really bad but manageable papercut by chopping off our hand, and in doing so we have widened inequality in _every dimension_. What does a poor school-aged child who does not own a laptop do with remote schooling? What do millions of Americans who live paycheck to paycheck and are now unemployed do? What about those postponing important preventative care that will prevent future deaths from cancer, heart disease, and diabetes?
How large of a spike in suicides, opioid overdoses, and psychosis are we going to see?
We took a bunch of otherwise healthy people, instilled them with disproportionate, all-consuming fear, and have had people in social isolation, which not only produces its own mortality but will also retard the natural exchange of micro-organisms that our health relies upon.
And the biggest joke of all is that eradication is impossible and therefore we didn’t prevent any mortality, we just postponed it, while destroying the quality of life of the 99.4% of the population who never would have died from this thing anyway (there’s debate as to whether the IFR is .3% or 1% but I think .6% is a very conservative number)
—
In answer to your question about models, you are right that we need more of them, and in rereading your comment I see you were more raising questions than advocating a pro-lockdown stance. In any case I encourage you to check out http://cep.lse.ac.uk/_new/publications/abstract.asp?index=69.... I’m on mobile right now otherwise I’d quote from it but they look at it in terms of wellbeing-years
You kind of can. In a situation like this, you have a lot of people who can't work because they're at home (or have no customers because their customers are at home), which causes two types of economic damage. One, the thing they were making is not being made. Two, they're not getting paid, so they're not buying what they would have bought with the money, and then that isn't getting made and so on down the line.
The second problem is actually bigger (because of "and so on down the line") but can be addressed entirely via fiscal means. Give people money to replace what they're not making.
And it even helps some with the first by increasing general demand. The things that are still open (e.g. because they're work from home) will then see increased business, have to hire more people to fill the demand and provide jobs for the people who can't do their normal jobs so they're still being productive.
Doing that is not going to eliminate the entire cost, but it is going to make it a lot smaller.
> It’s like trying to claim your company is growing because share buybacks made your per-share price go up, yet your market cap in an efficient market has been unchanged.
Buybacks actually reduce the market cap because there are fewer outstanding shares and the company has fewer total assets (in the amount of the cash used for the buyback which the company no longer has because it is now in the hands of the shareholders who sold their shares).
And doing that does tend to cause the overall economy to grow because it moves cash from a company that apparently had no need for it to investors who are incentivized to find somewhere else to put it to productive use.
This isn't to say that your overall conclusion is necessarily wrong. Even 10% of the cost of shutting down the whole world is large. But if you want to compare the numbers they should be the right numbers.
Count yourself among those who do not understand the difference between money and wealth. What they're "not making" isn't money; what they're not making are goods or services. That's the point you're attempting to respond to, and you've missed the point.
> What leads people astray here is the abstraction of money. Money is not wealth. It's just something we use to move wealth around.
Money is not wealth. You can play whatever games you want with redistributing the money, but without the wealth you have nothing to eat.
Yes, without shutdown some people would have taken sick days, etc, but the effect would be extremely manageable. We would not have people dropping like flies the way the flawed IMHE model implies.
As to your question about rushing down the old path, it is very inappropriate for the government to destroy peoples’ livelihoods (and make no mistake, it was the government’s / our doing, _not_ covid), and then to turn around and say “you’re only screwed because government isn’t in your life _enough_!”. As your point revealed, this is actually IMO what democrats are very blatantly trying to do (I am calling out a specific party because it really is them who are still pushing for these lockdowns).
It’s not relevant, but know that I support UBI (iff it replaces welfare rather than being in addition to it), but not like this. This would be such an evil way to introduce UBI: manufacturing a problem and then “fixing” it.
—
The inequality exacerbation is not a consequence of our economy. The government created it by creating the concept of “essential workers”. All workers are exactly as essential as the economy (we) decide(s) they are.
But we didn’t just prevent wealth from being created, the media combined with our incompetent public health officials created an unprecedented level of panic and fearmongering that most of us have never seen in our lives. The result? Case studies like this one: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S016517812... (and no, this was not caused by covid, it was causes by the aforementioned fearmongering)
Now, the number of sick days will be far higher than the number of hospitalization-days. But if we're comparing losing, say, 25% of our efficiency, to losing 100% of it...yeah, it actually wouldn't be as massive as most people think.
Anyway, a better characterization of my view is that I view containment as an unworkable strategy (and everything we're seeing in the US further proves that, IMO), therefore we didn't actually avoid any true mortality by locking down. Rather we just postponed it.
We never overwhelmed our healthcare system, and due to cancelling elective surgeries and other important preventative care, we have actually scaled _down_ our healthcare capacity by a massive amount across the country. Tens of thousands of healthcare workers furloughed. How is that sane policy?
Yes, but it was only manageable for so long. We have unfortunately passed that point...
Hopefully we will know more about what this massive mortality spike[1] is about, but I doubt it is from collateral damage rather than covid-19 itself
[1] https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2020/04/27/upshot/corona...
Yes, part of the economic damage caused by a lockdown is production lost in businesses that cannot be operated safely at the time. That production cannot be restored with money.
But a big part of the damage is caused by knock-on effects of businesses and individuals reducing consumption as a result of the primary economic shock, and that part absolutely can be mitigated.
> How large of a spike in suicides, opioid overdoses, and psychosis are we going to see?
Maybe less of one than one would intuitively think. Ultimately, mortality went down during the great depression: https://jech.bmj.com/content/66/5/410.abstract?sid=5c77edc9-...
> And the biggest joke of all is that eradication is impossible and therefore we didn’t prevent any mortality, we just postponed it
That very much remains to be seen. I see it as a virtual certainty that in a year, we'll have a much better understanding of the efficacy of various currently existing treatment options. I see it as quite likely that we'll have additional treatment options. And I see it as entirely possible that we'll have a vaccine within the next few years.
And even if not a single death from covid-19 itself in the primary at-risk group is preventable, overwhelming the health care system causes preventable deaths from other causes, as well as preventable deaths and burnouts among exhausted health care professionals.
> In any case I encourage you to check out [See URL above]
You will note that your own source estimates a large benefit of maintaining a lockdown until June 1, and considers maintaining the lockdown until July 1 essentially a wash. That's hardly a ringing endorsement of your views.
I provided the source to show that models are being formed. My own views materially differ from the authors', particularly on that point.
> overwhelming the health care system causes preventable deaths from other causes, as well as preventable deaths and burnouts among exhausted health care professionals.
Well, but what we've actually done is exactly that, in the opposite direction. Rather than our healthcare system being crushed by hordes of covid patients, across the US in places that aren't being ravaged (so, everywhere that isn't new york/new jersey/etc), we are dramatically scaling _down_ our healthcare capacity due to having furloughed tens of thousands of medical workers for the exact reason that people are postponing elective surgeries and other preventative measures that we know reduce mortality.
In other words, you're right about preventable deaths from other causes, but we actually are causing those right now by being locked down.
Umm, no.
Do you think that hospitals are overloaded with COVID-19 patients just so that they could die comfortably there?
The point of shelter-in-place is to prevent overloading of hospitals so that both COVID-19 patients and everyone else could get care - and have their lives saved by medics (which is often possible).
The alternative is the Italy scenario, where the doctors will have plenty treatable COVID-19 cases, but no means to save the lives that can actually be saved.
>How large of a spike in suicides, opioid overdoses, and psychosis are we going to see?
> social isolation [...] produces its own mortality
This is scaremongering. If you have any estimates, go ahead, and pit them against what is now the #1 cause of death in many regions across the US.
>We treated a really bad but manageable papercut..
The number of people who died from COVID-19 is about the same as people who died in the Vietnam war at this point.
I don't know how else to convey the point that it's not quite a 'paper cut'.
>We’ve stopped educating our children in person despite covid-19 being less deadly than Influenza in children (this is a fact at this point).
Yes, because schools is how the flu spreads to parents of these children - and everyone else in that household.
> There is no way to counteract that by injecting money.
There is also no way to bring people back to life. Cry me a river about destruction of wealth.
We achieved that, and yet we're still locked down. Why?
The fears of hospital overruns was based on scary numbers that turned out to not reflect reality at all. The hospitalization rate is far lower than we thought. The infection fatality rate is far lower than was implied by the CFRs being thrown around.
> This is scaremongering. If you have any estimates, go ahead, and pit them against what is now the #1 cause of death in many regions across the US.
No, it's not. But anyway, I predict at least an extra 50,000 suicides (i.e. a 2x risk of suicide). Similarly, we could easily see twice as many opioid overdoses which would be another 60,000. (I feel more confident in the spike in suicide than the spike of overdoses because it may be that the fentanyl supply chain has been disrupted).
> The number of people who died from COVID-19 is about the same as people who died in the Vietnam war at this point.
And also roughly the same as the number of people who died from the Flu last year. And about 1/10 of the estimated 480,000 smoking deaths per year in the US.
But, I'm not saying that Covid is not a big deal. What I'm actually saying is that lockdowns don't reduce mortality whatsoever, rather they increase it, because containment is not a viable strategy and the lockdown harms groups who never would have been harmed by Covid.
I'm predicting well over 100,000 Covid deaths this year.
> There is also no way to bring people back to life. Cry me a river about destruction of wealth.
The lockdown is destroying life, not "just" wealth. And I don't just mean in wellbeing, which we've absolutely destroyed. We're causing actual deaths by foregoing preventative care, furloughing tens of thousands of healthcare workers across the country, and increasing mortality from suicide/overdose/all cause mortality in general.
--
Here, go ahead and read https://news.ycombinator.com/reply?id=22961835&goto=threads%...
How about the fed's estimate of a ~5% hit to GDP in Q2.
The economic ramifications of the shelter-in-place are going to be massive.
If it were even spread out through the year (it is not), a 5% hit in Q2 would be $250 billion in that quarter.
If we could coordinate a perfect shelter-in-place the outbreak would have been gone by now. If people don't cooperate with each other we will have a much prolonged outbreak.
Or in another perspective think about whether your comment is what you feel like saying or whether it is something that contributes to the discussion.
Put that way, it's a hell of a deal. Killing off 1% of the population, plus the economic damage of nobody wanting to go out because of fear of getting sick, and that's unimaginably worse than 5% for a quarter, economically. Of course there are are likely to be knock on effects for several quarters, but given the typical lifespan of a human, we could go several years of 5% less GDP before it would equal the economic cost of the loss of life. Not to mention the social cost, which is hard to assign a value to.
It makes me think of other comparisons. Imagine if we had terror attacks that killed 60,000 people a year if we worked to stop them, but several million people if we didn't work to stop them. How much did we decide to spend on wars in response to 9/11, and his manu soldiers of our own did we decide to kill in military actions, and how many foreign innocent civilians? It really puts 5% GDP into perspective, as almost a nothingness compared to what we willingly sacrificed in response to the last disaster, which had economic effects on top of that.
The US GDP is around 22 trillion a year.
Therefore each million >=60 year olds saved is worth completely shutting down the US economy for around three months.
1) Taking this https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/nvss/vsrr/covid19/index.htm and combining with SS Life Expectancy tables, the average years lost per death is ~12; that corresponds to the age of 72-73, not 60.
2) Even the most alarmist reports barely predicted million deaths in the worst case scenario.
3) How is lifetime value of 60 year old 5 million? Based on the same SS tables, that's for 21.5 years, so ~230k per year. Where is this number coming from?
3a) Using some objective standard like annual income, it would obviously be far lower.
3b) You can even use a personal take - would you rather have $5 million (translation: very safe ~$150-200k/year for life including childhood, so you never have to work while living an upper middle class lifestyle), and have a risk of death at 60 with a COVID probability for 60-year-old (~4% CFR or so, so lower IFR and even lower combined with non-100% infection rate), or have $0, live with a median job and income, and not have that risk? What about throwing out the "60-year-old" and taking the real average case, 72-73yo (with its increased CFR/IFR)? I'm pretty sure I'd roll that dice for as little as a $200-300k head start.
4) Moreover, disability adjusted life years and other similar metrics often (quite justifiably) weight later years of life lower than the earlier ones. Again, to make this more personal or less numeric, would you rather be paralyzed from neck down in your 30ies (and then remiss) or die at 80 instead of 85? I'd take dying earlier.
That's true. This is a serious attempt to model, and I did in fact hear about it, now that you remind me.
If 1% is 1 million then 30% is 30 million and 100% is 100 million? I thought we had more people?
But lets assume for sake of argument that we've over reacted. Its pretty fantastic the way all countries in the world [few exceptions aside] took the matter so seriously and managed to take collective action this quickly. Despite all the death and suffering we now have a legitimate reason to be hopeful and imaginative about what else we can do and what it might cost.
The situation is truly weirder than fiction: The Corona lock down might have saved [oh, say] 80 million elderly people (unscientific number). It might in 2020 also push 180 million [additional] incomes below $5.50/day, 150 m below $3.20/day, 60 m below $1.90/day. We can barely imagine the long term effects of that. Safe to say it ain't pretty.
https://www.worldbank.org/en/topic/poverty/overview
Spot on, I remember my grandparents, the parents generation of boomers talk about the fact their generation should give the jobs to the next.
Every boomer with a job could buy a house every where in the world. But that wasn't enough boomers dumped their parents in concrete horror houses to let them rot away and still decided to not build enough real estate for the coming generations so every boomer could run maximum profit.
We have seen what the boomers did with companies, the amount of debt, our climate, the laws & regulations they conjured. Boomers have caused an amount of damage to the future that will cripple at least the next 5 generations. Boomers have to move over.
People mention the economic rebound in 1919 after the Spanish plague but that was possible because the dead toll was as high 100 million people. That was a major release of an enormous amount of money.
All of a sudden things like natural causes of dead running at a number lower than a million is reason enough to lockdown the whole world.
a) Run op-eds in the WSJ and get on Fox News with their theories
b) Create a faulty study with biased data analysis (of all people, Ioannnidis should be very sensitive to this -- he's famous for his paper "Why Most Published Research Findings Are False."
c) Publish the flawed paper as a preprint without peer review.
d) Publish the results of the L.A. serological survey without even a preprint so that the methods could be looked over.
If you publish a study that has huge societal implications before peer review, then Twitter is going to be your peer review. Deal with it.
The "standard" he set up was a straw man, and not how any practicing scientist I know actually looks at papers.
And when he allows his name to be used to push highly politci contrarian takes, all the weird attention his other papers received starts to make sense. It's not about the science, it's about being contrarian, at best, and at worst ways to subvert the public's view of science by deriving them on what it really means to publish a peer-reviewed paper.
What they actually said was:
> Globally, about 3.4% of reported COVID-19 cases have died
He also says it doesn't seem to have a higher chance of killing you than seasonal flu for each person infected:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cwPqmLoZA4s&t=1h9m50s
And says in there that Imperial college was dangerously wrong to use a 1% IFR estimate in their modeling. I believe this interview was near or after New York City's city fatality rate was already over 0.1%, yet he was still saying Imperial's estimate was an order of magnitude off.
Throughout the whole thing he cherry picked countries with recent extreme case growth and thorough testing to take advantage of the death lag and claim they point to a tiny CFR (and IFR). In each case it steadily rose after case growth slowed and lagged deaths continued, as expected.
In the Ioannidis serology study, one of the researchers's wives recruited people who wanted a test, saying it would let them know if they could get back to work (potentially biasing things for people who suspected they had had it).
Where do you see that? The data I see says the fatality rate of all forms has been dropping over time, as expected from prior epidemics where this also occurred. It's the Imperial papers that have been discredited by now, as their projections were way off in all respects - if they were right Sweden would be a bloodbath at the moment.
I agree the serology survey was not a perfect study - more for statistical/confidence interval reasons than the researcher's wife. But it may not matter. The general conclusions of the serology survey are matching many other pieces of data and evidence from around the world. For example:
"The latest figures from Italy show (pp. 12/13) that 60 of almost 17,000 doctors and nurses who tested positive died. This results in a Covid19 lethality rate of less than 0.1% for those under 50, 0.27% for those aged 50 to 60, 1.4% for those aged 60 to 70, and 12.6% for those aged 70 to 80. Even these figures are likely too high, as these are deaths with and not necessarily from corona viruses, and as up to 80% of people remain asymptomatic and some may not have been tested. Overall, however, the values are in line with those from e.g. South Korea and give a lethality rate for the general population in the range of influenza."
From https://swprs.org/a-swiss-doctor-on-covid-19/ - the source document is in Italian but the data table is quite clear even to someone who doesn't speak it. In other words for Imperial's paper to have been reasonable they'd have to assume the entire population had the mortality profile of 60+ year olds, which is just wrong.
It was a study that was about an ongoing crisis that has led to hundreds of thousands of dead people in a couple of months that had a contrarian result, had not been through peer review, had not been double or triple checked and was still promoted heavily through news media.
That it happened to also be faulty made it a tragedy. It’s farcical nature had been established earlier.
https://www.statnews.com/2020/03/17/a-fiasco-in-the-making-a...
Opinions don't need checking, peer review or double-blind controlled studies to be heard. That's why they're called "opinions".
"Opinions are like assholes: everybody's got one and they all stink!" - Unknown (NOT DeadPool; much older than that!)
Had the study simply been released and criticized, then much of this current controversy would've been avoided, but that didn't happen. Instead, Ioannidis did the rounds at several conservative news outlets in the wake of the study's release, and promoted the study's findings as the new "best evidence." This aided in pushing certain social and political agendas. Many scientists (especially on Twitter) found this specific behavior to be unacceptable, especially from a scientist that they also felt should "know better."
I understand why at the moment peer review is being short circuited by everyone, regardless of political or epidemiological position. The world is hungry for news and journalists will interpret papers with or without the help of the authors. Might as well have their assistance, in these circumstances.
Your remark about "conservative news outlets" shows what's really going on here, I suspect - just another day in politically biased academia-land. If you talk to anything other than CNN then you're bad and wrong. The same has been seen with Alex Berenson, a former NYT journalist turned novelist who has never really taken part in politics nor even really discussed it much in public. Once he started tweeting skeptically about the actions of governments and academics, all based on public data, he discovered only the conservative news outlets were willing to interview him. And then that mere fact alone was used by the left to attack him, although his points were all based on actual verifiable facts and had no pre-existing political bias.
Ioannidis made a lot of enemies by kickstarting the replication crisis. Now it looks like some see a chance to get back at him.
I skimmed through the article and, because I'm not a statistician, I could not follow what was so blatantly wrong, if we were to charitably assume that the two sets of authors may have different premises or interpretations.
Edit: In the spirit of the STAT article (edit: removed extraneous text), I searched for "Ioannidis Gelman" (the latter being the author of your piece) and found: https://www.mercurynews.com/2020/04/20/feud-over-stanford-co...
> In response, on Sunday, the Stanford study’s authors said they are planning to soon release a detailed appendix that addresses many of the “constructive comments and suggestions” the team has received.
> “This is exactly the way peer-review should work in scientific work, and we are looking forward to engaging with other scholars as we proceed in this important work,” said Dr. Jayanta Bhattacharya, professor of medicine at Stanford University, who along with colleague Dr. Eran Bendavid, also assisted with the USC study.
Edit2: I'm not sure if this is the appendix referred to (probably not because the file has an older date in it), but there is a statistical appendix in the cited article: https://www.medrxiv.org/content/medrxiv/suppl/2020/04/17/202...
They used a test with a false positive rate of about 2%, and found a positive rate of about 2%. It is impossible to use this information to establish a lower bound on the number infected. However, by screwing up the computation of the confidence interval, they claimed a huge lower bound.
> “We have been working very hard to address all the comments raised by many colleagues and I am always grateful to receive constructive criticism,” he said. “While we received thousands of congratulations for this work, I cherish far more the comments of the scientists who criticized our work and I thank them deeply for their comments.”
However, the damage has already been done. He's already done his media blitz, so no matter what happens next, effectively zero people will hear the correction (or more likely, subsequent retraction). It'll just become yet another piece of zombie information, which will appear in dishonest talking points or gish gallops. The quality of public discourse and the reputation of science will continue its decline, and we'll be talking about the next example of this tomorrow.
> The authors said by email that they used a built-in Stata function and aren't sure themselves how the software used the input weights. I suspect they misapplied that function (too complicated to tweet why) but I don't know Stata well enough to be sure; it seems neither do they.
https://twitter.com/wfithian/status/1252692357788479488
Then, Ioannidis probably didn't double check the work in depth because of confirmation bias and over-confidence in his protégés.
One claim Will Fithian makes is:
> The errors are not debatable and can be seen in these two screenshots of the supplement: 0.0034, the standard error meant to measure uncertainty about prevalence pi, is not the square root of 0.039, and the variance of a binomial estimate of proportion depends on the sample size.
My statistician friend says:
> In fact the math checks out in favor of the authors. Square root of .039, then divide by square root of 3330. .= 0034 just like reported.
> So the error is debatable.
> Now, sometimes you should be using the standard deviation, not the standard error, but that isn't his claim. The .0034 is absolutely the correct standard error, unless there is a difference in terminology for the field or something.
If they didn't know (a coauthor's wife sent the email), then it's just very very bad work.
To get good numbers, you need a population where lots of people have been infected. That will allow true positives to swamp the false positives, which is what happened in the NYC study that claimed 21% of people had already been infected. Even if it's really only 19%, that doesn't change much.
You also need a good random sampling procedure. IIRC, the NYC study tested people shopping for essentials at mid-day. This underrepresents essential workers, people who are really good at self-isolation, and people who are currently sick. But still, it's not too bad.
The New York City numbers suggest that very roughly 1% of people infected with the virus will die, depending on how you count probable but unconfirmed COVID deaths reported by NYC. This could be off by a factor of two in either direction, depending on how good the random sampling was, and the characteristics of a given population.
Now my nightly rant: I did this kind of false positive calculation in high school statistics, and I hated it. Still do. I hate that we're dealing with this BS. I hate that stupid people put us in this position, and that smart people aren't smart enough to not be absolute knobs.
That articles backed by solid data is certainly the desired state, but it is very far from the current state of affairs on COVID. There are many articles that tout opposing views that are pretty liberal with data. Requesting an official apology (which, in science is almost unheard of) is simply an attempt at harassment. Mistakes happen, you refute errors and move on.
Scientists must be allowed to explore and advocate non-traditional views. Otherwise (and very quickly if you let hecklers in) you create static beliefs that live on for a long time, whether true or not, because the bar for challenge is very high and an error ruins a career.
By teaching people to recognize where faulty data are and how they were collected. I always encourage people to look at several sources of news and figure out conclusions on their own, ignoring potential bias. [0]
It's never a lost cause to emphasize the importance of digging through an academic paper or a news article, effectively doing their own research instead of just listening to figureheads and looking through headlines.
[0]: https://www.allsides.com/media-bias/how-to-spot-types-of-med...
It takes inordinately more time and knowledge to debunk a false claim than it does to make it.
Unfortunately it takes a lot more effort to actually understand a paper then to ‘just throw it out there’.
It also doesn't help that their only example of intellectual diversity is itself flawed, and not convincing, even to the authors.
Science is based on data and repetition. That's the pay-to-play scientific discussion requires otherwise we're not "illuminating truth" we're just regurgitating shit.
I’m not sure where you got the idea that people are afraid of non-scientific ideas–I see them discussed all over online everyday by thousands and thousands of people. No one is afraid of them, we just don’t consider them to be science. There should always remain a sharp dividing line between non-scientific/scientific and for good reason.
That is a patronizing statement. If science can't defend itself then we're more screwed than we thought. Truth exists outside of Science (to state otherwise would not be a scientific statement, thus a contradiction). That leaves room for crack pot theories to potentially have truth in them. To bar them or dismiss them based off personal bias is crime against healthy intellectual discourse. Who is imposing irrational beliefs on whom? That is where the sharp dividing line should be drawn.
I'm also afraid of the measurable societal harms caused by, e.g. the anti-vax movement, where preventable illnesses are making a comeback due to non-scientific belief in the hazards of vaccination.
I don't know how to get anti-vax sentiments out of the mainstream discourse, but I think the world would not be any less intellectually rich, in any meaningful sense of the concept, if no one ever thought those thoughts, and caused harmful policies to be carried out, again.
Right now, of course, I accept it as "gotta take the bad with the good" but that doesn't mean I like that things like childhood measles are on the rise in various anti-vax hotspots; especially because these aren't informed adults opting out of vaccines, but ill-informed parents making decisions for their children that do have serious impacts on childhood health and the potential for serious harms later in life.
I certainly don't see the need to defend some ideas as holding promise for progress ("we could have cured your measles as a child, but some guy made up a story out of his head and that's why you have shingles now") when they are very much regressive ideas.
I'm not really worried about creationism or climate stabilism competing given those conditions. And if those aren't the conditions, it's not scientific discourse.
Science must be neutral. Proof of climate stabilism through existing feedback processes may happen or not. We won't know until the data says this. If science is not neutral it becomes religion. Even gravity is just a theory.
Hopefully that bridge isn't too far for most.
You can't "disprove" data. Data are the root facts that science is based on, and all data from trustworthy sources is treated the same by all scientists. Nobody ever "disproves" data.
What can be proven or disproven are hypotheses, the truths about underlying mechanisms of the world that we seek to learn about through data. A hypothesis about how something behaves can be proven or disproven with data, the data itself is absolute truth. A good hypothesis explains the data that we see, a bad one will be contradicted by data collection.
There is no such thing as "just a theory". In common parlance sure, but in scientific speech "theory" is a technical term that refers to a hypothesis that has stood up to all feasible tests that could have disproven it. Gravity is a phenomenon, observed by lots of data, all of which discovered so far confirms the theory of general relativity, upgraded from hypothesis after gravitational bending of light (which the hypothesis predicted)was observed in 1919.
"The figures are questionable Angelo Borrelli, the head of Civil Protection, who announces the latest figures every day at 6 p.m., said Saturday night that the 793 new deaths have been caused “by and with” the coronavirus. “We count all the dead, we make no distinction between with and by the coronavirus.” However, one wonders whether these daily figures reflect the situation correctly. The dead are said to have almost all had one or more other diseases, which leaves a question mark as to exactly how deadly the coronavirus is. At the same time, it has become clear that a large number of people who die at home (which is often a retirement home) do not undergo a coronavirus test." https://www.nrc.nl/nieuws/2020/03/22/als-italie-het-voorland...
Seeking an alternate explanation for the data, which is what scientists do, is not the same as denying the data, which is what zealots do.
This has been true since the first alarm bells in China, and has spread to other nations in a way that is easily observed first-hand, clearly reported by front-line medical staff, and consistent with the spread of a new disease.
That obvious data is what populations and governments are reacting to, not some calculated IFR.
Gravity is a theory (an explaination) of an observable phenonmenon. It is the accepted story until a more compelling story comes around.
Some popular theories that were disproven:
Fleischmann–Pons’s Nuclear Fusion
Phrenology
The Blank Slate
Luminiferous Aether
To your other point. Data is constantly being re-examined. How accurate is the Data is. What the data is really examining are extremely important and change.
After the discovery of standard candles, when the map of the universe was completely reconceptualized, nothing ever changed about astronomical data: observations of stellar position and brightness. What had changed was the explanation for those brightnesses and the meanings attributed to them. The data stays the same, the explanation changes, and if an explanation doesn't match the data, like the milky-way-is-the-universe hypothesis, then it's a bad explanation.
Is this you admitting that you were totally wrong about how science works so now you're retreating to the conspiracy theorizing fallback position that all the universities and governments and health authorities and hospitals and nonprofits and NGOs and device manufacturers and biotech companies and nursing homes and cemeteries and obituary sections in newspapers in the entire world are all part of one big conspiracy to keep you from getting a haircut?
My 37 year old cousin who is currently in the hospital for coronavirus, you think he was actually abducted by aliens, or what? Is he a "false report" too?
What "false reporting"?
Please explain to me why we should risk tens of millions of lives worldwide over your sheepish thumb-twiddling musings about "false reporting".
In the interest of correctness, yes you can.
To disprove means "to prove to be false or wrong"[1], and that's exactly what the OPERA collaboration did to their own data that showed super-luminal neutrinos, when they later discovered it was caused by a bad fiber connection[2].
There's also the case of BICEP2[3], where the raw data was not in dispute, but rather the inevitable post-processing required to extract the "science signal" from the raw data.
This is of course why scientists prefer to have multiple independent measurements of the same phenomena, to eliminate possible sources of error and bias. The LHC for example has two independent main detectors[4], built by different teams using different approaches, for this very reason.
That said, at least in the physical sciences (I don't follow life sciences as closely), cases like OPERA and BICEP2 are exceptions.
[1]: https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/disprove
[2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Faster-than-light_neutrino_ano...
[3]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BICEP_and_Keck_Array#BICEP2
[4]: https://home.cern/science/experiments
You might think that we are all just wrong. But here's the thing. The vast, vast majority of scientifically literate people in the world believe that climate change is an enormous risk to human prosperity. There might be some disagreement on exactly what the nature of the risk is. But everyone agrees it is a huge problem that must be confronted.
Because we are the overwhelming majority, you need to convince us using very articulate, compelling arguments and the highest-quality analysis. And you need to deal with the fact that most people will assume you are either ignorant or ideologically motivated to misinterpret the evidence -- because, to our eyes, that's exactly what people who compose comments like yours are (and it gets really old after a while).
By posting angsty messages that offer no value from a scientific standpoint, you are admitting defeat from the start.
Just that we need to be open enough to accept a new conflicting theory and not fight against it.
Trying to disprove new data that conflicts with your existing views is fine, as long as you can accept the new data if it holds up to scrutiny.
It isn't about being right, it's about accepting to be wrong.
The issue is not that scientists, or discerning non-scientists, will take those views seriously, it's that others might (or will, or do). Hence the issue is not with defining scientific discourse, it's with educating a population to be able to apply that definition (or formulate their own functional individual ones).
If a scientist argues against saving human lives now, because of a man made economic systems inability to cope with the crisis might kill more people later, I say don‘t hear him, criticize him based on an ethical discourse. Save the lives now and adjust the system so people don‘t need to die.
We also see what we could have done to prevent and outbreak, China, South Korea, Hong Kong and Taiwan seemed to be extremely prepared.
Germany followed the virologist, epidemiologist consensus (and is going now off track to open businesses again ... a lot of scientist believe too early).
We will see in the long run which approaches worked and which didn’t. Yet, calling for an opening of businesses (because we cannot be sure about the death rate), when none of the successful countries did that, is ethically dubious to me.
Ioannidis is the only real example provided in the article, and his opinion piece (and the related Stanford study) was criticized, not because he's an iconoclast, but because it was bad science (and especially bad policy). Not only that, but then, instead of engaging with the scientific community, his "expertise" was co-opted by the conservative media and its agenda.
is this not exactly what the original article cautions against? if it's bad science (which should be debatable) it's value as policy follows directly and doesn't need to be stated or discussed seperately.
The problem is that if, as a scientist, I know that people are likely to convert my findings into policy, then I have an extra duty to be especially diligent and extra thorough so that my findings are valid.
Ioannidis knew exactly what he was doing when he put this pile of garbage out there. The fact that it was shoddy methodology means that he should get ESPECIALLY torched for it as an object lesson to other "scientists".
First, the original article is actually about the exact opposite. It says nothing about attacking an opinion based on its merit, it talks about attacking an opinion based on dogma. When I say it's bad science, I'm saying it's bad science because of glaring problems with its methodology; I thought that was obvious (the term "bad science" being fairly common).
Second, I'm talking about the social policy argued for in Ioannidis' opinion piece. Social policy absolutely does not just directly follow the science; they are very different things and absolutely should be discussed separately. I find it a bit absurd to think that science inherently dictates a certain social policy.
But the "good faith" part is precisely the problem. Though it is difficult to discern good faith from bad, those who argue in bad faith destroy the system entirely, and we need some kind of defense against them.
Take cloth masks, there are doctors who say it helps and doctors who say it doesn't help much. Some the doctors who said it doesn't help were genuine.
But some of the doctors were saying it doesn't help were lying because they assumed people wouldn't social distance if they wore a mask, believing the increased risk due to not wearing masks was not worth what they believed would be a big decrease in social distancing. Some of the doctors were are saying they didn't help, were lying to preserve masks for health care professionals (including lying about n95 masks).
It's hard not to feel like attacking some one you believe is deliberately putting many lives at risk to forward a political or personal agenda.
This comes back into reasoning under uncertainty that someone else brought up in the thread. The medical community has had problems in the past because bad medical interventions typically impose high costs on patients so if they have little positive benefit then it can easily become a net-negative situation. So then you have a culture where anything that hasn't gone through an RCT with multiple confirming studies doesn't exist as an intervention.
I have yet to see a single person in my neighborhood suffer from this virus in any noticeable way.
What I do see is propaganda, marketing and social engineering. A massive campaign.
On Reddit I see a Coronavirus subreddit that has become an almost supernaturally airtight echo-chamber.
I see the moderator of that reddit. Some anonymous fellow who was handed control over the subreddit for no apparent reason. Who is using an account he obviously bought 3 months ago. Shutting down any discussion that begins to stray from the official narrative.
I see the usual propaganda buttons being pushed. Tribalism and fear.
This smells like a dang fish factory.
How many fatalities do you think will occur due to the wrecked economy in the next few years?
Conversely, I've never had influenza in my life, and I don't recall seeing anyone close to me ever actively suffering from a bad case influenza. I still believe it exists and people who got hit hard by it are probably at home.
I have never seen a murderer therefore they don't exist.
Meanwhile, his hypothesis is still held by many prominent figures outside of the scientific community. So it's very hard to claim this is an example of valid ideas being at all squashed.
Worse, in this case we have hard evidence of some pretty catastrophic results from this virus. So trying to argue that the overall outcome isn't going to be so bad is proven false by counter example. We already have situations that are bad enough to warrant extreme counter measures.
A) This was published as a research paper but how much of a research paper was it? As mentioned, it selectively and fairly shallowly looked at some data (the Diamond Princess) while wholly ignoring other data (South Korea) without even providing a strong justification for its choices. It was more like "an essay with scholarly footnotes".
B) This article wasn't simply offered to scientific community. You can find a huge swath of mainstream media reports describing this paper and another large number of popular articles with by Ioannidis himself defending the positions he staked out in his article. This was essentially a media campaign.
C). The particular position Ioannidis staked out was just one of a series of positions one can find staked by a variety of figures, some real scientists, some right wing ideologues, some somewhat in between. Again, if you look, a well financed media campaign. Below is a series of link I've cobbled together I've cobbled together as documentation of this:
The American Institute for Economic Research (libertarian/right wing think tank) give it's of "significant" article: https://www.aier.org/article/vital-information-that-is-falli... Essentially a web of articles united by the need to avoid undue action on the virus (IE, not cost money).
A nice article describing the similarity of Covid-denial and Climate-change-denial: https://www.yaleclimateconnections.org/2020/04/coronavirus-d...
An article on the effort to spin the Santa Clara tests befor e they were even release: https://slate.com/technology/2020/04/coronavirus-circulating...
What's on with Ioannidis: https://undark.org/2020/04/24/john-ioannidis-covid-19-death-...
Richard A. Epstein of the Hoover Institution, another Stanford Connected "minimizer" https://www.newyorker.com/news/q-and-a/the-contrarian-corona...
A summary of several related minimizers, with a similar program: https://arcdigital.media/what-the-federalist-doesnt-get-abou...
Aljazeera gives a broader discussion, why real scientist would do this: https://www.aljazeera.com/indepth/opinion/coronavirus-herd-i...
https://www.statnews.com/2020/03/17/a-fiasco-in-the-making-a...
That isn't a scientific paper but rather an opinion piece. You're talking about the more recent paper he was involved with regarding immunity in a region of California.
trying to argue that the overall outcome isn't going to be so bad is proven false by counter example.
This might have made sense to say three weeks ago. The vast majority of places have now peaked already and have seen nothing worse than the flu. The strength of lockdown has made no difference whatsoever and there are good reasons to believe even having one at all may have no impact - bizarre but that's what some of the data is saying.
In other words if you're going to engage in argument by counter-example that Ioannidis was wrong in his essay, you're going to lose. If we judge what happened purely by counting examples and counter-examples, lockdowns would appear totally insane.