Hacker News Reader

Comment by davidw | Hacker News Reader

This is what happens when there's a leadership vacuum at the top. People start trying to figure it out for themselves.

I've been loudly talking about what's happening in Italy, because we had time to get ready in the US if we took it seriously.

View on HN

Ehh I attribute it to the rise of wannabe data scientists who want to fit a sigmoid to everything, as well as influencer culture. People would be trying to get their LinkedIn likes no matter what leadership came out with.

Well, if the government was matching a curve to it, on a public website that had updates daily, supported by professionals, then I think there would be less demand for random people to do it.

The problem is that the curves anyone today draws are guaranteed to be wrong. We have almost no idea about how transmissible the virus is, how many people have it, how many people die from it. Even worse, we have a lot of pieces of data that look like information but aren't. For the most obvious example, a lot of people are tempted to divide the count of known deaths by the count of known cases, and they calculate a number which looks like a mortality rate but is multiple times higher than any actual estimate of the mortality rate.

Any curve you see today which claims to outline the progress of COVID-19 (rather than the progress of COVID-19 testing and response) is extremely misleading.

Then have a rolling history of curve predictions, day-over-day, maybe with some commentary about what seems to be driving changes in the curve (increased tests, changes in transmissibility estimates, a sudden outbreak, etc)

Part of the problem is people who think mortality rate is the same as case fatality risk (CFR). You are one of them too, so look it up.

Every article I've read reported the WHO's statement using the words "death rate" or "mortality rate". I understand that in the technical sense, the mortality rate is always relative to the total population whether or not they're infected, but I don't think anyone is getting confused by this, and since I'm not myself an expert I'm going to use colloquial terminology over epidemological jargon. Nobody thought the WHO's 3.4% number was saying that 3.4% of the world population is dead.

Can't fit a sigmoid if you haven't found the inflection point yet.

Yes and I've heard the sigmoid described as "the first half being exponential, the second half being logorithmic" all over the place and it bothers me to no end. The natural log of x goes to infinity... I sure hope that doesn't describe infection rates.

Arguably there has been a leadership vacuum for decades, where expert bureaucrats are lecturing and patronizing the population, while themselves are being proven wrong and clueless more often than not, with no negative consequences, see the 2008 crisis, etc.

So to be clear about your argument, we don't trust epidemiologists becasue they crashed the economy in 2008?

Well, you have to say which statements from epidemiologists we should trust, because in my country a month ago they said "nothing to see, carry on", and now they say "the end of the world is near, start digging".

Do you have more than a single instance to point to in which expert bureaucrats are lecturing and patronizing while being wrong?

From my perspective it seems clear that the American public has been in the grips of anti-intellectualism for quite a long time. In 1980 Asimov made the following famous statement:

There is a cult of ignorance in the United States, and there always has been. The strain of anti-intellectualism has been a constant thread winding its way through our political and cultural life, nurtured by the false notion that democracy means that “my ignorance is just as good as your knowledge."

Here are some examples of dubious advice from experts: the Iraq war, regime changes throughout the middle east, interventionism in general, margarine instead of butter, fat is bad/sugar is good, antidepressants are harmless, medical doctors don't understand Bayes' rule, etc. etc. etc.

For the record, I'm not American, and not anti-intellectual.

Here's a better example of patronizing by experts from the current crisis: "The average person should not wear a mask. Not only it doesn't protect against the virus, but it actually may harm."

What they mean is: it may harm by giving a false sense of certainty. Clearly the average person is too stupid to understand the difference between perfect protection and "not quite perfect, but better than nothing" protection.

I don’t see the lecturing and patronization that you referenced in your original comment with some of the examples you provided. That’s the part of your post that I disagree with.

In your Iraq war example I don’t recall bureaucratic experts being involved in support of it. General Shinseki famously thought Rumsfeld’s predictions were wrong and Hans Blicks (spelling?) was famously skeptical of Bush administration claims.

I’ll certainly agree that we’ve had crappy political leadership in the U.S. but I won’t agree that bureaucrats have let the nation down in matters of science. Experts get it wrong and consensus expert opinion is sometimes wrong. There will continue to be examples of where consensus expert opinion is wrong.

You can find individual experts who are patronizing and lecturing as you put it. It’s been rare in my experience that consensus expert opinions that aren’t motivated by money, greed, power, or fame are condescending or lecturing.

Interesting! You just described my local weatherman.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com