How Apocalyptic Is Now? | Hacker News Reader

How Apocalyptic Is Now?

unherd.com

95 pointsjajag91 comments

Interesting predictions. However, they do not fit the facts on the ground, at least here in Poland, which is some weeks ahead of the US with respect to the development of the epidemic.

(I'm relieved that) people have gotten sick and tired of the restrictions, about 50% (and growing every day) are not wearing the masks inside anymore, or bother with the distancing, despite official requirements. All restaurants and bars are opening up on Monday, my favourite one described the prior atmosphere as a "psychosis of fear".

It's interesting what happens when the second wave of infections occurs, which is becoming more and more likely. It's hard to imagine the population will be as fearful and obedient as the first time, should the government try to impose another lockdown.

If, as Nassim Taleb believes, the lockdown was bottom-up, demanded by the people rather than imposed by the government, a repeat seems unlikely. Perhaps that's why the stock market is surging?

They’ll resist the lockdown again until people start dying in large numbers and hospitals fill up and then it will be too late.

It's evident by this point that you can avoid total lockdowns and still control infections. Permanent lockdown is simply not a realistic solution, so I expect we'll all start tending towards the Swedish model, regardless of how much gnashing of teeth and fiery twitter rhetoric such decisions will generate.

As for the apocalyptic atmosphere - it doesn't seem possible to really predict how bad/good things will get. How many predicted during WW2 that upon its exit would be a period of unprecedented social progress & economic equality?

> How many predicted during WW2 that upon its exit would be a period of unprecedented social progress & economic equality?

There was some precedent there: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roaring_Twenties

How silly, of course, since WW1 hadn't ended yet!

Realistically, the end of WW2 was indeed followed by unprecedented social progress and economic equality in many parts of the world.

Sweden has by far the highest per capita death rate of its neighbors. I don’t think they’ll be emulating them.

Poland locked down hard very early on and stopped the pandemic in its tracks. If you completely stop the lock down now, it'll spread rapidly and overwhelm your hospitals. But I doubt it'll happen that way. Presumably, you'll ease up on the restrictions, restaurants will be open but with fewer tables, there will be very few if any large events. Most people will be wary. This may be enough to keep R at or below 1.

Addendum: In no meaningful way is Poland some weeks ahead of the US. Poland is on around day 45 since the first people started dying, the US are on day 55. Throughout, around 10 times as many people (per capita; ie. 883 have died in Poland overall, if the statistics can be trusted) have died in the US each day from the disease, which presumably means that around 10 times as many people were infected. Like I said above, Poland has stopped the disease in its tracks, which is good! But it doesn't confer some sort of societal immunity.

Source: https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/covid-daily-deaths-trajec...

Wearing masks in places like grocery stores is something we need to do if we want to limit the spread.

The main beneficiaries of that mask wearing are the employees, which sort of hollows out most of the reasons to refuse.

Got a link for the taleb commentary?

https://twitter.com/nntaleb/status/1258931279317405696 and there are more tweets on that if you scroll the feed.

I fund it fascinating that in "developed" or "fully western" countries it is the youth that is disregarding the lockdown measures. In Kosovo/Albania it is the precise opposite. An acquaintance of mine in China told me that it is the genX and older generation there too that seems to not understand the gravity. How come this big difference?

Maybe older generations spend less time reading internet hysteria (or news or whatever you'd like to call it)?

Any more reading on taleb’s take? Could it be bottom up but kind of ignited and fed by media coverage?

What makes you see a second wave as likely? (Not challenging you, I’m just curious)

It's just too contagious and countries are opening up that still have quite a large number of infections. Seems like a very tricky balancing act to keep R under 1.

Poland and the rest of the world is just slower to change culturally. If what he describes happens in the usa, it will happen elsewhere just takes 10 years longer, but maybe less.

I take exception to this analysis:

"The numbers killed in terrorist incidents may be small. But the threat is endemic, and the texture of everyday life has altered profoundly. Video cameras and security procedures in public places have become part of the way we live."

The author writes about this as if our response to terrorism is some sort of deterministic feature of the natural world. Instead, however, our response is series of distinct policy choices, none of which were ever inevitable and all of which are subject to change (even if that change is hard to accomplish).

The security theater in (particularly US) airports is not a deterministic consequence of terrorism - it's the result of the policies of the GW Bush administration. The widespread use of CCTV cameras in the UK is not a deterministic response to crime and/or terrorism - it's the result of several governments worth of explicit policy, as evidenced by the remarkably lower use of such cameras in other nations affected by similar phenomena.

Talking about "what has happened" as if it was inevitable, and not the result of choices made by the powerful is dangerous and dampens the possibility of a belief in other outcomes.

There is a diffeerence between modes of threat. A visible threat vs. an invisible one, an undirected threat vs. a directed one.

Some years ago I realised that there are in fact two uses of the term "invisible* in Adam Smith's Wealth of Nations. Among oths I find the significance of the more well-known one to be greatly overstated. But the other seems notable on several counts:

"Regularity, order, and prompt obedience to command are qualities which, in modern armies, are of more importance towards determining the fate of battles than the dexterity and skill of the soldiers in the use of their arms. But the noise of firearms, the smoke, and the invisible death to which every man feels himself every moment exposed as soon as he comes within cannon-shot, and frequently a long time before the battle can be well said to be engaged, must render it very difficult to maintain any considerable degree of this regularity, order, and prompt obedience, even in the beginning of a modern battle. In an ancient battle there was no noise but what arose from the human voice; there was no smoke, there was no invisible cause of wounds or death. Every man, till some mortal weapon actually did approach him, saw clearly that no such weapon was near him. In these circumstances, and among troops who had some confidence in their own skill and dexterity in the use of their arms, it must have been a good deal less difficult to preserve some degree regularity and order...

Smith, WoN, Book V, Chapter 1

https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/The_Wealth_of_Nations/Book_V/...

That is, it's the loss of certainty and security which of itself is exceptionally disruptive of order.

Terrorism is (generally) rare, but is specifically directed so as to inflict maximal disruption.

Disease, especially epidemics, are trust attacks. We cannot be know with any certainty what otherwise innocent and trivial encounters or activities might. have major consequence. Entirely unaware individuals may be exposing others to grave harm. Paranoia is prudence.

I don't disagree with any of that. But I also don't see what it has to do with my point that our response to any threat is often a matter of policy choices, rather than something predestined. (and of course, sometimes it isn't).

You can see this even with the case of sars-cov-2, where different policy decisions about the response have contributed to (or resulted in?) different impacts around the world. I imagine we will see it going forward too, just as we do with differing responses to terrorism.

Sure. As it happens, that's not the element I was reponding to.

But to address it: There's a strong argument tp be made that how soccieties choose to address their challenges has a major impact on outcomes. That's the major premise and subtitle of Jared Diamond's Collapse8. Others disagree seeing that outcome as inevitable (Tainter, on whom aDiamond draws extensively).

A more interesting approach tries to understand what the dynamics at play are. William Ophuls, though decidedly pessimistic, holds out hope and draws no final conclusions, though he explores the question(s) in detail, particularly in Plato's Revenge, though also in earlier works, notably Ecology and the politics of scarcity.

Why* certain political responses (including thatre, denial, scapegoating, and distraction) are frequently recurrent can prove illuminating.

When our immune system is over-fit to the wrong kind of thing, we call that an allergy. People who have been raised with animals or who have had to fight off parasites tend to have less allergies. I think this idea holds for our society; our societal immune system needs to be tested too, otherwise we attack ourselves (identity politics, the culture wars...) So I disagree with the author, I think we will be better off when this is done. We will go back to the bars and we will enjoy our lives more, we will think about our long term goals and make better efforts to get to them.

Herd immunity

Always amuses me how the apocalypse of Inidgenous Americans never seems to make the cut...

amuses?

I doubt the op meant in a pleasurable sense.

What's the saying? History is written by the victors? I don't think there will ever be a reconciliation in history for the elimination of native peoples across two continents.

In a thousand years it will just be described as ‘a migration’.

Obviously not in a pleasurable way.

It's disheartening / devastating / infuriating that the genocide of 120-40M people barely pierces the consciousness of the dominant culture when talking about apocalypses or genocides...

Winners don't talk about the people they murdered to win. Same thing about Australia, Canada and less so New Zealand.

It is also hilarious that the USSR is the only country apart from Japan to successfully industrialize and avoid a colonial genocide from a Western power.

If you could pick a place to live being a Russian in Moscow 1919 would give you a much better chance of surviving compared to being an Indian in Manhattan in 1624, Toronto in 1787 or Melbourne in 1835.

Russia was a Western power as far as Central Asia and the Caucasus were concerned

If having an empire is the definition of being Western than you need to include the Ottomans too. At which point the word means nothing.

Russians were genocided by their own government, not a foreign power (except for the many used as meatbags in WWII).

Please study the actual history of the USSR-- there were multiple genocides of different religions and ethnic groups. Most notable were the pogroms and the death of millions in the Ukraine:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Holodomor

https://press.princeton.edu/books/paperback/9780691152387/st...

Interesting how all the groups who had genocide perpetrated against them somehow ended up with a double population than when they were conquered with, meanwhile Ireland still has a smaller population than they had in 1800.

> the USSR is the only country apart from Japan to successfully industrialize and avoid a colonial genocide from a Western power.

Thailand was never a colony either. Besides, USSR was not a country and formed after the colonial heydays.

It's sad but true. People even deny native genocide. I had a comment yesterday saying the natives didn't experience genocide but were simply "moved off their land".

But I guess I can understand it somewhat. It took me a long time to come to terms with it as well. The genocide of the natives didn't sink in until I saw a list of the native languages that were wiped out along with the natives. It was dozens and dozens of languages. Many times more languages than exists in the whole of europe.

>"moved off their land"

"Thus husbands and wives were together only once every eight or ten months and when they met they were so exhausted and depressed on both sides ... they ceased to procreate. As for the newly born, they died early because their mothers, overworked and famished, had no milk to nurse them, and for this reason, while I was in Cuba, 7000 children died in three months. Some mothers even drowned their babies from sheer desperation.... this way, husbands died in the mines, wives died at work, and children died from lack of milk ... and in a short time this land which was so great, so powerful and fertile ... was depopulated. "

Bartolomé de las Casas - A Short Account of the Destruction of the Indies

Europe had many more dialects and languages than now... Some of extinction stories are genocidal as well. We have to assume a lot about what happened as Rome colonised southern europe, for example, but much of it probably rhymes what happened in the americas.

this is like people comparing the indigenous african slave trade to the triangle trade - completely facile.

>Rome colonised southern europe

colonization in the ancient world wasn't rapacious like it was in the new world. conquered peoples maintained much of their way of life and simply became vassal. in the roman case (towards the end) they even got roman citizenship.

Edit:I finally figured out hn downvotes - paper over a genocide nbd - use the word facile downvotes

Tell that to the Gauls!

>In the five centuries between Caesar's conquest and the collapse of the Western Roman Empire, the Gaulish language and cultural identity underwent a syncretism with the Roman culture of the new governing class, and evolved into a hybrid Gallo-Roman culture that eventually permeated all levels of society

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roman_Gaul

Can you point to symbiosis with native American culture that resembles that to any extent today in the US? All we have are racist football team mascots

I think the parent may be making a joke about the village from Asterix: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Asterix#Description

The people being conquered in Europe were also a lot less vulnerable in several key ways— my understanding is that they were largely overwhelmed by superior military tactics and infrastructure (roads and so on), but once conquered they were at a similar level in overall technology and well positioned to participate in the larger Roman economy.

North American native peoples faced new infectious diseases that they weren't at all prepared for, a huge technological disparity (guns), and a lot of predatory economics (trading away valuable furs for beads and trinkets).

> Europe had many more dialects and languages than now...

Yes I know. The difference is that with the natives, the language disappeared because the people got exterminated rather than through forced standardization/adoption of national languages.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yotvingia

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Old_Prussian_language

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sudovian_language

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vends

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wends

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sorbs

Comparing the coronavirus to the Russian Revolution is so overblown, I can't believe an academic would suggest it with a straight face. This fear-mongering really needs to stop.

Russian civil war was also the result of the 400 years of continuous tsarist expansion (among many other reasons); absorbing that much occupied land from baltics to pacific, and a lot of diverse people should be hard.

dramatically the ruling family (romanovs) among the 3 most successful expansionist dynasties next to english & spanish were totally annihilated at the end by their own people.

Should Djenghis Khan and his successors not also be on that list?

Genghis and his descendants certainly conquered a huge area, but the empire quickly broke apart after Möngke (Genghis' successor) died, into the Ilkhanate, Yuan dynasty, Chagatai Khanate, and Golden Horde. Most of these didn't last more than a century, but more relevantly, the Mongols weren't particularly interested in spreading their culture and largely kept their language a private matter. Subsequently Mongolian (the language) basically doesn't exist outside of Mongolia/Inner Mongolia (China) and culturally there is far less influence as compared to say, the Russian or Spanish empires.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Division_of_the_Mongol_Empire

Just a minor clarification/correction: Möngke wasn’t the direct successor to Genghis: there were two other leaders in between.

Really, if one is thinking about the end of the world, it is good to prepare, but we don't have to fear as we can be OK. In my belief system we have living prophets (comparable to Noah with the ark, etc etc), and they provide much good advice and support for us in these times. But yes, it is good to be humble & wise, to learn, and to prepare. I've put notes on what/why and how I reliably learned for myself, at my simple site (deals w/ climate change but applies to the rest of it...). I am just me and can be wrong, but am very confident in this case: http://lukecall.net/e-9223372036854581820.html

(ps: I realize this will seem wacko to most, but I'd appreciate it if you skim my reasoning, I worked hard to make it skimmable while saying in detail how I came to these conclusions, and add a reasoned comment, with any downvotes. Thanks.)

Unherd.com have had some of the best journalism of the crisis so far. In particular some of the interviews with epedimiologists:

https://youtu.be/bfN2JWifLCY https://youtu.be/6cYjjEB3Ev8 https://youtu.be/bl-sZdfLcEk

Indeed and they are lining up new ones next week

https://mobile.twitter.com/freddiesayers/status/126132013778...

The author is wrong. Apocalyptic in religions means revelations, not necessarily end of the world. It rather means the revelation of what is good and what is evil. It will become clear to people even if they didn’t know that good and evil existed (religious people know that without an apocalypse). Given that, the article bases on a wrong foundation so that the author naturally reaches wrong conclusions. In today’s world some people and especially people in power do lie a lot, which has severe consequences in the bad conditions we‘re living right now. The wake people know that those lies will be disclosed very soon, hence we should see an apocalyptic with Christian eyes, who see the revelation in that the poor politics concerning Covid will not last for very long and we will be shown the truth as part of the revelation (=apocalyptic).

The article seems to completely forget about climate change. The current pandemic is going to look like a tiny speed bump in a few years when we start seeing regular deadly heat waves, crop failures, and other natural disasters. Billions of people are going to be displaced, and we'll see wars for the remaining livable land. The effects of climate change are all around us already, and they're happening much faster than any of the models predicted:

* new research indicates that parts of the Amazon and other tropical forests are now emitting more CO2 than they absorb https://e360.yale.edu/features/why-carbon-cycle-feedbacks-co...

* one billion people will suffer from “unliveable” heat within 50 years, study finds https://e360.yale.edu/digest/one-billion-people-will-suffer-...

* potentially fatal bouts of heat and humidity on the rise, study finds https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2020/may/08/climate-...

* study finds ocean ecosystems likely to collapse in 2020s and land species in 2040s unless global warming stemmed https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2020/apr/08/wildlife...

* studies show drought and heat waves will cause massive die-offs, killing most trees alive today https://insideclimatenews.org/news/24042020/forest-trees-cli...

* multiple overlapping crises could trigger 'Global Systemic Collapse' https://www.sciencealert.com/hundreds-of-top-scientists-warn...

* 246 academics call on government to act now to avoid global collapse https://www.nationalobserver.com/2020/02/04/opinion/246-acad...

* Planet's largest ecosystems collapse faster than previously forecast https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-020-15029-x

World's oceans are also acidifying to a similar rate https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ocean_acidification#Rate as the Permian extinction (but again in 100 years instead of 20k-60k), with an anoxic event https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anoxic_event#Consequences locked in after 1,000ppm or 360 gigatons https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2017/09/170920182116.h..., which we will reach by 2100 at the latest. So that's whatever's left wiped out.

And here's what's currently happening with food production. Two different groups of 200+ scientists and academics, separately from each other, each warned of near-term global collapse:

* https://www.sciencealert.com/hundreds-of-top-scientists-warn...

* https://www.nationalobserver.com/2020/02/04/opinion/246-acad...

Examples of record-breaking crop failures currently happening:

* https://www.nationalgeographic.com/environment/2019/06/midwe...

* https://www.cnbc.com/2019/07/19/extreme-heat-wave-hits-us-fa...

* https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2019/may/15/austr...

* https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2018/jul/20/crop-fai...

* https://www.zerohedge.com/health/historic-midwest-blizzard-h...

* https://mobile.abc.net.au/news/2019-10-02/low-rice-crop-lead...

* https://www.telegraph.co.uk/global-health/climate-and-people...

* https://phys.org/news/2019-12-climate-whammy-corn-belt.html

* https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2019/11/12/britain-facing-p...

* https://weather.com/science/environment/news/2019-08-01-drou...

* https://phys.org/news/2020-01-atlantic-circulation-collapse-...

* https://phys.org/news/2019-12-climate-threat-global-breadbas...

* https://phys.org/news/2019-12-large-atmospheric-jet-stream-g...

Scientific studies projecting future crop failures:

* Schlenker and Roberts, 2009. Nonlinear temperature effects indicate severe damages to US crop yields under climate change. PNAS, 106(37), pp.15594-15598 https://www.pnas.org/content/106/37/15594.full

* Mora et al, 2015. Suitable days for plant growth disappear under projected climate change: Potential human and biotic vulnerability. PLoS bio, 13(6), p.e1002167 https://journals.plos.org/plosbiology/article?id=10.1371/jou...

* Schauberger et al, 2017. Consistent negative response of US crops to high temperatures in observations and crop models. Nature Comms, 8, p.13931. https://www.nature.com/articles/ncomms13931

* Sakschewski et al, 2014. Feeding 10 billion people under climate change: How large is the production gap of current agricultural systems?. Ecological modelling, 288, pp.103-111 https://booksc.xyz/book/30274837/03002c

* Liang et al, 2017. Determining climate effects on US total agricultural productivity. PNAS, 114(12), pp.E2285-E2292 https://www.pnas.org/content/114/12/E2285?collection=

News articles about projected crop failures:

* UN says passing 2C will have a 'very high projected risk' of global food supply instabilities https://www.nbcnews.com/mach/news/climate-change-could-trigg...

* UN says passing 2C would cause 'multi-breadbasket failure' https://www.nytimes.com/2019/08/08/climate/climate-change-fo...)

* UN says passing 2C would cause 60% of global wheat to be subjected to 'Severe Water Scarcity (SVS)' drought events https://www.commondreams.org/news/2019/09/26/new-research-wa...

Given that our response to the pandemic has been to largely ignore the science and try to get back to business as usual and we're still largely pretending that climate change isn't happening, I don't really have much hope for continued existence of human civilization.

How anyone can continue to place so much faith into dogmatic science, after the global and nearly universal failure of these same institutions to properly prepare for and handle covid, is beyond me.

This post is pure fear porn. Environmentalists have been making these same doomsday predictions since literally the 60s and deadlines continue to come and go without incident.

Look, the papers that predict what's more likely to happen aren't sexy, so they don't get read much if they're published at all. The truth is that based on all of our evidence regarding the speed of climate change in the past, if there's any change from human emissions it will be slow and take on the order of 100+ years, during which time the only measurable indicator will be an increased rate of turnover and spending for infrastructure projects, maybe a slight uptick in immigration, as we have a bigger storm or a bigger flood here and there.

That doesn't even mention the potential benefits to climate change - there's nothing that says that the earth won't potentially have more fertile land area if the permafrost thaws, for example. But such an attitude is clearly not popular among alarmists.

I had to post this link exactly 7 days ago. Is there some misinformation currently being pushed in the climate change denialist bubble recently that accounts for the sudden questioning of the validity of historical modelling?

https://climate.nasa.gov/news/2943/study-confirms-climate-mo...

The scientists did not fail to prepare for the pandemic, and the countries that had scientists in the driving seat handled the pandemic very well. For example, Vietnam currently has no deaths from covid-19 precisely because scientists were in charge. Meanwhile, countries like US, who dismissed the scientists have the highest death toll in the world.

Climate change denialists don't seem to grasp the concept of basic risk assessment. We don't know exactly what will happen, however we definitely know what could potentially happen. Claiming that just because the scientists might be wrong there's nothing to worry about is the height of insanity. You're essentially advocating for playing Russian roulette with our biosphere.

People who actually study the climate are the ones who have the best idea of what will happen. Period. These people are unanimously telling the rest of us that all the best available evidence suggests that horrific things will happen.

And now we're seeing these things starting to happen, and we're seeing them happen at a faster rate than was expected. Yet, idiots who have absolutely zero understanding of this domain continue to insist that there's nothing to worry about because they read something on Facebook that one time.

>Vietnam currently has no deaths from covid-19 precisely because scientists were in charge

Vietnam was prepared because they, like Taiwan, knew from the start that China was lying and took proactive steps that western countries failed to take.

>Yet, idiots who have absolutely zero understanding of this domain continue to insist that there's nothing to worry about because they read something on Facebook that one time

I'm a geoscientist. The fact that climate dogma is righteous dogma doesn't mean it isn't dogma. You claim that none of us have the qualifications to question climate change, but somehow we are equipped to call "deniers" idiots?

>People who actually study the climate are the ones who have the best idea of what will happen. Period. These people are unanimously telling the rest of us that all the best available evidence suggests that horrific things will happen.

Except if you actually read an IPCC report (not the made for headlines summaries, dig in a page or two) you'll see that in reality scientists are far less certain, and all this world ending talk is literally worst case. And historic data tells us that even the most rapid historic climate changes happened over scales comparable to human lifespans.

>You're essentially advocating for playing Russian roulette with our biosphere

There's a grand irony here - once again, like the reopen controversy, the people have chosen the side of the majority of "scientists" and hunkered down, shaming others with worst case threats while ignoring that mitigation is also enormously expensive and pretending that anyone questioning the lockdown is a denier. Your dogma leaves no room for shades of gray.

I'm out of room to explain for the billionth time so I'll keep it short - climate change is one of the softest of sciences because it is purely model and backtest driven. That leaves a massive gap in capabilities to be nicely filled with unquestionable dogma. The fact that those ignorant Republicans don't understand climate change doesn't mean that the learned and capable among us shouldn't be free to question the narrative.

Look at how poorly we understand nutrition - that's arguably at least as rigorous of a science as climate change yet the difference here is at least the conclusions are falsifiable. Meanwhile the food pyramid has been dangerously incorrect for decades.

You put too much faith in modern institutions.

>Vietnam was prepared because they, like Taiwan, knew from the start that China was lying and took proactive steps that western countries failed to take.

I keep seeing this nonsense repeated, but China reported cases very early on. https://www.who.int/news-room/detail/27-04-2020-who-timeline...

The only difference was that Vietnam and Taiwan took it seriously and prioritized people's lives over the economy. Meanwhile, Western governments largely chose to do the opposite. This is the exact same pattern we're seeing with climate change denial as well. The institutions are prioritizing short term profits while ignoring the science.

>I'm a geoscientist. The fact that climate dogma is righteous dogma doesn't mean it isn't dogma. You claim that none of us have the qualifications to question climate change, but somehow we are equipped to call "deniers" idiots?

Being a geoscintist does not make you a climatologist. It's amazing to me that people who are experts in one domain think that gives them the authority to talk about other domains.

I'm deferring to the domain experts PRECISELY because I know this knowledge is outside my area of expertise. I'm calling the deniers idiots because you seem to think that you know better than people actually studying the field. I'm sure you'd be pretty appalled if I started telling you my notions about how I think geoscience works based on my extensive computer science knowledge.

>And historic data tells us that even the most rapid historic climate changes happened over scales comparable to human lifespans.

That's because historically things like mass scale industrial production did not exist. Humans are not operating on geological time, and it's surreal that this has to be explained to somebody calling themselves a scientist.

>There's a grand irony here - once again, like the reopen controversy, the people have chosen the side of the majority of "scientists" and hunkered down, shaming others with worst case threats while ignoring that mitigation is also enormously expensive and pretending that anyone questioning the lockdown is a denier. Your dogma leaves no room for shades of gray.

All I can tel you is that US accounts for roughly a third of the deaths worldwide while the number of deaths and reported cases continues to grow exponentially. So, yeah this is a perfect analogy for climate change denial. In both cases business interests are prioritized over science with similar results.

>I'm out of room to explain for the billionth time so I'll keep it short - climate change is one of the softest of sciences because it is purely model and backtest driven.

Your capacity to deny facts is absolutely stunning. We're no longer talking about predictions here. We're talking about actual events that are happening around us. Sounds like people like you will continue denying there's a problem as you're boiled alive in your own juices.

>You put too much faith in modern institutions.

I'm doing the opposite of that. I believe scientists and experts in the domain over the idiots who think that we should risk the fate of humanity to keep the growth economy going.

>Being a geoscintist does not make you a climatologist. It's amazing to me that people who are experts in one domain think that gives them the authority to talk about other domains.

I literally consume the same data. It's a sister field. We have the same problems with the exact same uncertainty because we use the same instruments for collection. My opinion is valid but that doesn't matter because anyone who take a position remotely critical of climate science can expect an immediate, vicious, purely dogmatic response.

>I keep seeing this nonsense repeated, but China reported cases very early on. https://www.who.int/news-room/detail/27-04-2020-who-timeline....

>The only difference was that Vietnam and Taiwan took it seriously and prioritized people's lives over the economy

It's easy to dismiss other peoples' arguments as "nonsense" when you misrepresent them. The question isn't whether China reported cases or not. It's the fact that China deliberately underreported cases and contributed to an underestimation of the pandemic by laymen and professionals alike who are too naive to understand the dishonesty typical of authoritarian regimes like the CCP. The peoples who have been dealing with China for millennia hold no such delusions.

>The ability to deny facts is absolutely surreal. We're no longer talking about predictions here. We're talking about actual events that are happening around us

This is only true if you cherry pick your literature. I'll remind you our discussion is about future predictions of which only catastrophic outcomes are suitable for (one sided) discussion. The fact that some minority of models agree with current measurements does not resolve the uncertainty regarding the predictions that spawned this entire discussion.

You underestimate the complexity and chaotic nature of science. Certainty in doomsday climate predictions is hubris.

>I literally consume the same data. It's a sister field. We have the same problems with the exact same uncertainty because we use the same instruments for collection. My opinion is valid but that doesn't matter because anyone who take a position remotely critical of climate science can expect an immediate, vicious, purely dogmatic response.

Again, as somebody who works in a complex field I know perfectly well that it's rare that somebody has broad expertise outside a fairly narrow domain. People who think they do are typically suffering from Dunning-Kruger effect. You also keep using the word dogmatic in a weird way that makes question whether you even know what it means.

>It's easy to dismiss other peoples' arguments as "nonsense" when you misrepresent them. The question isn't whether China reported cases or not. It's the fact that China deliberately underreported cases and contributed to an underestimation of the pandemic by laymen and professionals alike who are too naive to understand the dishonesty typical of authoritarian regimes like the CCP.

It's easy to dismiss nonsense when it is demonstrably nonsense. China was dealing with a novel virus and had no idea what to expect from it. There was no evidence that this was some novel influenza based on a handful of cases, or that it could easily spread between humans. However, China did report it on the 2nd of January, and the world had all the same information we had now at the start of January. It's really not surprising that you're a conspiracy theorist in general though.

The fact that China had absolutely no warning and has less deaths than US now really shows the difference between countries that trust science and those that do not.

>This is only true if you cherry pick your literature.

There's a unanimous consensus in the field, but I'm sure oneiftwo knows better because he's a "geoscientist".

>The fact that some minority of models agree with current measurements does not resolve the uncertainty regarding the predictions that spawned this entire discussion.

Show me a single model that's predicting things happening faster than what's observed. If there's anything the models can be faulted on is being too conservative with their predictions.

>You underestimate the complexity and chaotic nature of science. Certainty in doomsday climate predictions is hubris.

I do no such thing. I just understand the basic concept of risk assessment. Gambling our entire civilization on "I hope all the models are wrong and everybody in the field is overreacting" is complete and utter idiocy.

Continued existence of the human race is what's at stake here, and anybody who thinks we shouldn't err on the side of caution when it comes to that is a dangerous idiot.

Do critics of government hold other prediction "markets" to the same standards?

People predict sportsball outcomes. A much smaller problem domain, with far more historical data, insane audience engagement (interest), and ample expertise.

Are sportsball predictions qualitatively better than pandemic predictions?

>Do critics of government hold other prediction "markets" to the same standards?

You realize that modern economics is basically divination for the same reason that climate science is uncertain? Structurally the two sciences are actually similar in critical points, namely that the domains are non experimental and purely model driven. Yes, you should be extremely sceptical of any economist who tells you that he's certain about anything.

>People predict sportsball outcomes. A much smaller problem domain, with far more historical data, insane audience engagement (interest), and ample expertise

You can't seriously compare the complexity of climate science with sports betting.

The big difference here is that the risk of climate scientists being right is that billions of people die. Meanwhile, all the observed evidence either fits the models or is rapidly outpacing the predictions made by the models. We're not longer talking about hypotheticals here, we're observing these events happening right now. If you look through the links in my above comment you'll see that a lot of them are talking about observed events.

>The big difference here is that the risk of climate scientists being right is that billions of people die.

That's literally an absolute worst case prediction. You cannot guide policy exclusively with worst case predictions.

>We're not longer talking about hypotheticals here, we're observing these events happening right now

No, we're seeing warming and minor sea level rise right now - and even this is less certain than people would have you believe, we only recently realized for example that the mismatch between expected and current warming could be explained by the ocean acting as a heat sink. Imagine how many other similar phenomena we have yet to discover.

Physical systems tend to be nonlinear. Even a high rate of warming now does not preclude a comfortable maximum due to nonlinear restorative forces.

That's why nothing, literally nothing that we've observed to date, can significantly reduce the uncertainty regarding doomsday predictions.

When the worst case scenario is the end of human civilization we absolutely should drive policy to avoid that. It's absolutely surreal that anybody would argue otherwise.

>No, we're seeing warming and minor sea level rise right now

Read the links I provided earlier. These are not minor events. You're just parroting dangerous nonsense here.

>That's why nothing, literally nothing that we've observed to date, can significantly reduce the uncertainty regarding doomsday predictions.

And idiots will continue parroting this exact line as billions of people are dying. Exactly the same way idiots are protesting social distancing, lockdowns, and mask wearing in US right now. It's the same pattern with the same dangerous fools putting the rest of humanity at risk.

>And idiots will continue parroting this exact line as billions of people are dying. Exactly the same way idiots are protesting social distancing, lockdowns, and mask wearing in US right now

There is no purpose to have a discussion when your thinking is so narrowly black and white. Your worldview doesn't seem to allow for the shades of grey necessitated by uncertainty.

If all skepticism was met with the same belittling as climate science, we'd still be stuck in the dark ages. Don't think it's possible for an institution of sciences to be very wrong for a very long time about a very important topic? Look at the forces that caused us to fruitlessly pursue the amyloid plaque hypothesis for decades.

Consensus has a strong normalizing effect, but that does not necessarily mean that a given consensus is correct.

Anyway I'm being rate limited by sanctimonious downvoters so this conversation is effectively over.

Edit: by the way, with respect to the lockdown controversy, did you hear about the atrocious academic modeling code that informed the lockdown policy? A single 15k line C file which, among other things, does not seed random number generation and cannot be reproduced. So bad that I just found there's an entire website dedicated to a teardown[0]! But I'm an "idiot" for showing skepticism. Do you think climate modeling code is any better? Have you worked with academic code? I have. It's universally bad. But, again, I'm an "idiot" for expressing any degree of skepticism.

0. https://lockdownsceptics.org/code-review-of-fergusons-model/

>There is no purpose to have a discussion when your thinking is so narrowly black and white. Your worldview doesn't seem to allow for the shades of grey necessitated by uncertainty.

There are no shades of gray here. We're weighing human extinction against an economic system here. These things are not comparable. The whole point of an economy is to facilitate human existence.

>If all skepticism was met with the same belittling as climate science, we'd still be stuck in the dark ages.

Your skepticism is not rooted in facts and evidence, but rather has an ideological basis. When all the experts in the field unanimously say we should be dealing with global warming, that's what we should be doing. Anybody who is not an actual climatologist needs to get the fuck out of the way.

>Don't think it's possible for an institution of sciences to be very wrong for a very long time about a very important topic?

Sure, it's possible, but only a fool would gamble the fate of humanity on that. The stakes are simply too high here. There are also no actual downsides to addressing climate change. Imagine the horror of having a cleaner environment and sustainable industry creating millions of new jobs and advancing our technology and science.

>Anyway I'm being rate limited by sanctimonious downvoters so this conversation is effectively over.

It's good to see that majority of people see the dangerous absurdity you promote for what it is.

>by the way, with respect to the lockdown controversy, did you hear about the atrocious academic modeling code that informed the lockdown policy?

And just like with climate change you ignore the actual facts all around you. 80,000 people died in US while 0 people died in Vietnam. Chew on that for a while next time you claim that following scientific consensus is the wrong thing to do.

>There are no shades of gray here. We're weighing human extinction against an economic system here. These things are not comparable. The whole point of an economy is to facilitate human existence.

Again, you don't seem to have any actual experience with risk assessment, because all risk assessment is grey. You weigh probability of outcomes and cost of outcomes and come up with a value. That's literally my point, that the you are at one end of a high dimensional extreme. That's what this entire argument boils down to.

Science is a high-d gradient descent search. You can easily get stuck chasing a local optimum, and bias and dogma like the kind that blinds your judgement can send groups of scientists in the wrong direction and, more importantly, keep them there for decades. Your exploration constant is far too low if you respond with such blind hostility to anyone with criticism. You're hindering progress and when your policy is guided by such one sidedness, that's dangerous. This doesn't just apply to climate science. We couldn't even get the nutritional pyramid right, and climate science is hard for the same reasons - non-expert mental, data and model driven and only verifiable in hindsight.

Not all scientific fields are equally rigorous. An appeal to a climatologist on the subject of climate is far weaker than an appeal to a physicist on the subject of physics because of the nature of the fields. Climate science by nature is extremely uncertain, i.e. you search the high-d space with less gradient information, and personal/institutional biases can converge to fill in those gaps nicely enough to have you trapped in a local minimum.

>again, you don't seem to have any actual experience with risk assessment, because all risk assessment is grey.

There is no meaningful comparison between the risk of human extinction with having to transition off fossil fuel economy. This is what this entire argument boils down to. On one hand, you have the end of civilization and possibly end of human existence, and on the other you have some temporary inconvenience. These are fundamentally not comparable.

>Science is a high-d gradient descent search. You can easily get stuck chasing a local optimum, and bias and dogma like the kind that blinds your judgement can send groups of scientists in the wrong direction and, more importantly, keep them there for decades.

You're creating a false equivalence between the two possibilities. All the best available science tells us this is happening. There is absolutely no scientific basis to doubt that this is happening.

So, yes there may be a chance that all our accumulated decades of observation and models are wrong, but it's far more likely that is not the case. Our observations are either matching or outpacing what the models predict. You just keep parroting the same nonsense over and over like a broken record. It's dangerous nonsense, and you don't seem to understand what's at stake here.

Apologies; I didn't cleanly separate my intended question from my own navel gazing.

"... global and nearly universal failure of these same institutions to properly prepare for and handle covid..."

What should have happened?

How do we apply those lessons learned?

Agree with the thesis. Change just accelerated. we are as likely to go back to our careless attitude about respiratory infectious disease as we are to doing surgeries without masks and gloves.

  I am the son, and the heir....
  of an apocolypse that is criminally vulgar.
  I am the son and heir....
  of nothing in particular.

It actually kind of fits.

I am sorry but this is a ridiculous thesis. This will be over eventually, either by developing a vaccine or by mutation into a more benign strain. Nobody in their right mind will practice social distancing just because they are used to it. No system that goes against basic human drives is stable. Right now there is a risk, benefit balance but once that risk is gone, what exactly will balance this? Laws? They are already in conflict with the constitution, good luck justifying any of this if there is no deadly pathogen around.

>They are already in conflict with the constitution...

PATRIOT Act would like a word.

unherd’s LockdownTV series — see “Interviews” section in main page — is balanced (in terms of view points) and highly recommended.

On YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCMxiv15iK_MFayY_3fU9loQ

IMO, trying to understand historical processes in terms of political theories is more noise than signal.

Medieval english king alfred kept a chronicle of his time. Viking invasions such. His "political theories" were religious: righteous christians, pagans, heretics, divine justice & such. That's how they understood their history.

Biblical "chronicles" like the book of kings, judges & such offer a similar take. Sin & righteousness determine wars, invasions, usurpations & coups.... apocalyptical or otherwise.

Move into the French, American & derivitive revolutions of 1700-1800s: Reason, Industrialism, Enlightenment Philosophy & such. revolutions. Political theories. Liberty. Rights. etc. Instead of righteous & piety, radical liberals would build free & just societies.

So... French liberty culminates in a pretty vicious and vindictive early republic which soon crowns an emperor. American liberty did not seem overly bothered by an institution of slavery that was vast and cruel enough to make a pharaoh uneasy. Liberty didn't apply to native americans and often "person" meant just male landowners.

Meanwhile the theoretically opposite British, with their anti-liberal constitutional monarchy... Not really less "liberal" in practice, from a historical perspective.

Liberal or conservative commentators from the period (even modern ones) seem to think everything is derivative of the political theories battling it out. It's not that different from ancient judeans or medieval saxons interpreting every event via their religious lens.

IRL, the relationship between political theories, practice, & history is chaotic & uncorrelated.

Liberalism, socialism, communism, etc.... theory does not generate into reality, hardly ever.

It's a shame that HN has become full doomer. The virus is nowhere near as bad as the clickbait factories want you to believe because fear is such a good profit generator for them.

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