Hacker News Reader

Comment by rhema | Hacker News Reader

Spreading misinformation is bad. However, maybe casting media into the memory hole risks creating glorified digital martyrs.

I wish the WHO made more transparent arguments about the utility of masks. Their failure and apparent flip-flop gives the crazies low-hanging fruit and ethos.

View on HN

I believe they (and the CDC) are switching their stance on masks because they didn't want people wearing masks to have a false sense of security. Now, it's getting bad enough that the benefits of people wearing masks and not infecting others are starting to outweigh the downsides.

That was only like #3 in bad/dumb things the WHO has done lately.

I struggle to figure why anyone trusts an organization that is so in China’s pocket they’re happy to report it’s not human to human spreadable then fake a disconnect on a video interview just to try and avoid answering a question about Taiwan and then to double down by answering the question pretending Taiwan doesn’t exist and just substitute China in place (no, Taiwan is not an “area of China”).

I don’t care about the opinion here. The WHO has lost almost all credibility to me.

[Taiwan isn’t a country] https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=HjpOqVgP36o

[No human to human transmission, China says so] https://mobile.twitter.com/WHO/status/1217043229427761152?re...

Anyone that ever had close contact to what the UN does, knows that it is a corrupt, inefficient and grossly incompetent organisation, filled with cousins of African strongmen and other connected people. Same goes for people working in NGOs cooperating with the UN, a common arrangement for example in Geneva is that while the partner works as an oil broker, the other writes position papers on women's rights and observes meetings that has half of the members of the subcommittee asleep.

We have a major "boy who cried wolf" problem with the media, and many of our truth-finding institutions. There've been enough instances in recent decades of arrogant incompetence and self-serving deception, that the public grows to distrust experts disproportionately in domains where it really matters: vaccines, epidemics, climate change.

Do you hold lunatics and quacks to the same standards, or are they not considered part of the media... Despite having what are, essentially, television channels?

"Quack" is in the eye of the beholder: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Half-life_of_knowledge

I don't mean to paint a false equivalence between the likes of Icke, and the first person to say "maybe bloodletting isn't helpful". But what does one do about collective/consensus quackery? Even if the consensus of experts is the more solid bet on average, the outliers are consequential, whether it's telling citizens not to wear masks, or invading Iraq for no good reason.

> Despite having what are, essentially, television channels?

Mu. The new media landscape doesn't map cleanly to the old. For better and for worse, cheap and asynchronous publishing puts us in uncharted territory relative to the "Blue Church" of 20th-century broadcast media: https://medium.com/deep-code/understanding-the-blue-church-e...

(I do find it interesting that InfoWars is now incorporating their pariah status into their branding: they brag that they are the "Most Banned Network in the World". For those on the other side, a banning by the Social Media Giants can serve as an erroneous counter-signal that the bannee should be trusted. Cross-reference with the Streisand Effect, and Orwell's admonition that "journalism is printing what someone else does not want printed".)

A healthy dose of distrust towards experts is necessary, because they're wrong all the time.

What about the experts - including those at the CDC - that said COVID-19 was no worse than a flu? Are they no real experts, or are they just the wrong kind of expert?

https://www.businessinsider.com/wuhan-coronavirus-lesser-thr...

"Trust the experts" is nothing but an argument from authority. You're likely going to trust whatever expert confirms what you already believe.

It’s important to separate individual experts from the general belief of experts as a group on some topic. However, this is a different problem where understanding context of experts is the issue.

Back when 5 known cases of COVID-19 where in the US, the risk on that specific day was lower from the virus than the flu for the average American. “immediate health risk” However, understanding that risks change over time is critical to understanding what was being poorly communicated by that piece.

This covid-19 debacle illustrated a big conflation with experts and authoritative bureaucracies.

Researchers, scientists, and people on the ground in China, Taiwan, and South Korea issued early warnings well ahead of the WHO, CDC, and FDA flip flopping on transmit-ability, masks, and testing.

Unfortunately the average person can’t tell the difference between a researched investigative journalism piece in the New York Times and an opinion column in the New York Times. Most people can’t tell the difference between the Washington Post and the Washington Times. Many people can’t tell the difference between the Chicago Tribune and a random website that stole the Chicago Tribune’s layout.

All these differences matter an enormous amount. They don’t matter subtlety like missing the freeway exit and taking the next one. They matter like chopping your hand off instead of keeping it.

>Researchers, scientists, and people on the ground in China, Taiwan, and South Korea issued early warnings well ahead of the WHO, CDC, and FDA flip flopping on transmit-ability, masks, and testing.

Do you have a rough timeline for 'well ahead'? From what I've read it was classified as zoonotic, because the staff in China who handled the initial cases weren't presenting, and the wet-market was the only causal link. That's when the WHO reported (mid/late Jan) that human-human transmission wasn't possible.

>Unfortunately the average person can’t tell the difference between a researched investigative journalism piece in the New York Times and an opinion column in the New York Times. Most people can’t tell the difference between the Washington Post and the Washington Times. Many people can’t tell the difference between the Chicago Tribune and a random website that stole the Chicago Tribune’s layout.

But its not just "average people", its most people, including HN folks. On any expert topic, when you have no hands-on expertise, you apply "common sense", or read some articles, and then you're back to square one. Most scientific fields are advanced to the point where common sense doesn't get you very far. Not only that, there are a lot of professional explainers who muddy the waters by repeating things without understanding the nuances. I think its fine to say whatever, as long as its fine for me to ask "OK, but what makes your opinion worth something".

Here is what the CDC said in your reference:

> Although the CDC considers this coronavirus (whose scientific name is 2019-nCoV) to be a serious public-health concern, the agency said in a statement Friday that "the immediate health risk from 2019-nCoV to the general American public is considered low at this time."

Your paraphrasing of them is dramatically misrepresenting what they said, which I think is the real problem. "Experts" tend to hedge and use inconclusive language, because that is correct. Then journalists come along and confuse/misinterpret things a bit, but the real damage comes from people like you come on social media. The vast majority of people seem to only ever read these misunderstandings and misrepresentations from other social media users.

Here is what an expert in the field said, in my reference:

„When we think about the relative danger of this new coronavirus and influenza, there’s just no comparison,“ William Schaffner, a vaccine expert at Vanderbilt University Medical Center, told Kaiser Health News (KHN). „Coronavirus will be a blip on the horizon in comparison. The risk is trivial.“

I guess we can both agree it turned out not to be that small of a blip.

> "Experts" tend to hedge and use inconclusive language, because that is correct.

Well, clearly not all of them used inconclusive language. Furthermore, if your "expert opinion" is inconclusive and hedged against all possibilities, it may be honest, it may be correct, but it is also useless.

Anybody with literally zero expertise on the topic could've told you that "Coronavirus is bad, but at this point in time we don't have a clue what is going on, nor do we know what is going to happen, so let's do nothing for now". That is, of course, paraphrasing the CDC and its experts.

Again you’re misinterpreting what was said, an incoming ICBM is a blip on the horizon. At the time it was a potential threat, which could become very real very quickly. Part of that was splitting up the actual quote into multiple pieces without the correct context, but that’s on the reporter not the expert.

> Coronavirus is bad, but at this point in time we don't have a clue what is going on, nor do we know what is going to happen

Yes, that was probably the only objectively correct thing to say at the time. At the time, this seemed like it could have still ended up like SARS v1. If they advised drastic measures at the time, people similar to you would have crucified them as alarmist and disregarded any advice they may have had.

I think that we actually took the maximum response possible politically regardless of what experts may have said. Even now, there are large contingents of people, including political leaders who think we are overreacting, and the US response wasn't that different from most of the world in timing or severity.

> so let's do nothing for now

They didn't say that. I doubt they would call something a "serious public health concern" and recommend doing nothing.

> Yes, that was probably the only objectively correct thing to say at the time.

Maybe, but had they been less objectively correct and worked based on unproven assumptions, harm could've been prevented.

> If they advised drastic measures at the time, people similar to you would have crucified them as alarmist and disregarded any advice they may have had.

Agreed, but that doesn't change the fact that it would've still been the right call. They would've been vindicated very soon after.

As it stands, the experts made the wrong call. I don't fault them for it at all. I'm just pointing it out as an example that sometimes even the experts get it wrong and therefore being suspicious of expert opinion is always warranted.

> I doubt they would call something a "serious public health concern" and recommend doing nothing.

Well yes, that's me being sarcastic. They didn't explicitly recommend to do nothing, but they didn't recommend to do anything either. So that's what was done. Nothing. Same difference, perhaps?

> We have a major "boy who cried wolf" problem with the media, and many of our truth-finding institutions.

Media isn't a "truth-finding institution". Neither are global political organizations. What we have a problem with is people being brainwashed into believe that media/political organizations are "truth-finding institutions".

> There've been enough instances in recent decades of arrogant incompetence and self-serving deception

Because they are in the business of deception. And it's not decades. It's centuries.

"Nothing can now be believed which is seen in a newspaper. Truth itself becomes suspicious by being put into that polluted vehicle."

"I will add, that the man who never looks into a newspaper is better informed than he who reads them; inasmuch as he who knows nothing is nearer to truth than he whose mind is filled with falsehoods and errors." -- Thomas Jefferson

Reply on news.ycombinator.com