Comment by fizzyfizz | Hacker News Reader

Comment by fizzyfizz | Hacker News Reader

I'm sure this person means well, and is very intelligent, but I stopped reading at the byline. I went and found what this person's expertise actually is.

    Zvi Mowshowitz is a former professional Magic: The Gathering 
    player who also held a developer intern position at Wizards
    of the Coast Magic R&D. He is known for having created 
    innovative and sometimes game-breaking decks TurboZvi and 
    My Fires.

Now, there is a balance between credentialism and amateurism. Amateurs can get a lot of things right. They can also get a lot of things wrong, and I at least don't have the meta-expertise to know which is which, especially when there's breaking news.

Do we need informed amateurs? Yes. But the crucial test is still whether they are accepted or promoted by the professionals. Zeynep Tufekci was vocalizing concerns that many professionals had, which is why her criticisms of health policy worked out.

In contrast, I have an extremely nerdy friend who has thinks it's her job to explain things to people, and thus writes deeply researched, well-footnoted blog posts about COVID, which are quite often wrong.

I for one can't tell what sort of person this is. But I also know that I'm not good at tagging facts with epistemic certainty. If I read a thing in a blog post it will probably stick, but I'll forget where I got that. So the simple solution it to not read it.

I think when it comes to writing explainers, it's 2021 and we have a wealth of resources and can wait for the professionals, including scientists who blog part time. I suggest that more people should be like me, and ignore the laypeople, indeed even most of the journalism, at least during the initial stages.

Especially when his conclusion gets into him predicting specific percent chances of things happening… I know he slapped a disclaimer around it, but that still feels more than a bit irresponsible. This really feels like a “wait for the experts” moment.

Edit: I don’t think the parent comment deserved to be flag killed. It’s entirely legitimate to point out that the author is not an epidemiologist or biologist or any other relevant -ist, and that early on you often need the domain experience to sift hype or panic from actual data. This is doubly true given the somewhat sensational tone here (“we’re f**ed”).

The author could be practicing a superforecasting exercise of coming up with probability estimates and grading them at the end of the year to calibrate, but this author doesn't show his work as to where these estimates come from.

For example:

> In hindsight the 70% prediction was somewhat overconfident, and a prediction of about 45% would have been better

That's a huge post-hoc adjustment, what factors were important? Just because a p70 event does not occur does not mean that it did not warrant a p70 at the time.

Zvi has been blogging approximately weekly about covid since the beginning, and has a very good track record.

Look through some of his posts and see how they've held up? https://thezvi.wordpress.com/?s=covid

(On credentials, it looks to me like you ended up with his credentials specifically in the context of game design? He's also worked as a trader, which is some practice at turning unclear information coming out in real time into good concrete predictions.)

The whole article is a ln unreasonably self confident assemblance of either obvious/common sense points or facts grabbed together by other sources (most twitter) with some witty comments.

Not worth reading, except for the tweets embedded.

> except for the tweets embedded.

but I would never have read those tweets were it not for the article. Does that make it worth reading?

I think you should continue doing what works for you, but I would ask you to consider carefully recommending your remedy to others. The explainers you're mentioning kick down a lot of doors, whether their conclusions are correct or incorrect. They collect a lot of sourced information in one place, and widen the channels between everyone and information when they do blog. You said yourself this person's blog posts were well footnoted. That is an incredibly valuable, dying practice on the internet. Consider for a moment the people that are experts. Consider the grad student working elbow to elbow next to the doctorate researcher, who are not on a corporate or government payroll and do not have the resources and trappings that come with such positions. The infohazards you rightfully avoid as being wrong and repeating misinformation comes at a high cost to you, are worthless to these people. They're researchers. Their job is being wrong, many times, as quickly as possible, until they can finally be right about something. What they want is that wealth of information. And frankly, it's dwindling. We don't have the wealth of information in 2021 that we had in 2016. The rigor you'd see on an average wikipedia page is missing. News articles, including those quoting experts, allow their authors more leeway than ever to post their own opinions and interpret news, regardless the news source. It's becoming incredibly difficult to find all the facts in one place. I am absolutely not going to downplay the harm that misinformation does and I applaud you for taking intelligent steps to avoid spreading it. As an individual your policy, not reading something you're likely to repeat, is laudable. There's just room for both you and your explainer friend on this internet of ours, isn't there? And room for a diversity of approaches toward using our time online, I say. What's important is that we all care very much about the truth, and I am optimistic where that is concerned.

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