[HN Gopher] The experts can stay wrong longer than you can stay ...
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The experts can stay wrong longer than you can stay alive
Author : joshuakelly
Score : 43 points
Date : 2021-05-05 15:13 UTC (7 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (lessonsfromthecrisis.substack.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (lessonsfromthecrisis.substack.com)
| thrower123 wrote:
| Right-wing bodybuilders on Twitter are still the best predictive
| tool since augery and haruspicy went out of style.
| mssundaram wrote:
| This article restricts its focus to borders, but I wonder if the
| author is also extending that to include internal lockdowns, for
| which there is a great amount of evidence that they're
| unproductive and destructive - see r/LockdownSkepticism for
| further reading.
| Gravyness wrote:
| Fascinating. To me this just speaks about how humans did not
| evolve to create large, complex societies of the current scale we
| have in the world. Its like electing a group of 5 people to
| represent and speak for the entire world in case an alien
| civilization comes forth.
| jordan_curve wrote:
| This is a horrible argument. The article itself went through the
| reasons that the previous common belief was not applicable to
| this unprecedented pandemic. Yet it concludes, without any
| evidence, this must have been caused by public health experts
| being so biased by their personal political convictions that they
| cannot interpret their scientific findings objectively.
| wahern wrote:
| When I was explaining to a Trump supporter, circa late January
| to early February 2020, why the China travel ban was political
| theater, I said it was because without banning travel from
| other countries it would be entirely ineffective. I also said
| that, IMO, COVID-19 was almost certainly already circulating
| widely, anyhow.
|
| That was _my_ opinion. The predominate liberal opinion was that
| it was political theater because travel bans were categorically
| _ineffective_. I was trying to help that Trump supporter
| understand that regardless of whether their intuition was
| correct (i.e. that travel bans work), the actual policy was
| bunk.
|
| Conservative factions have been egregiously, tragically wrong
| about everything. But the left and center have also been fairly
| stupid. Remember how they all claimed masks were ineffective
| and useless, often as justification for restrictive movement?
| Or how they repeated the antiquated consensus view of the
| epidemiological community that viral infections like SARS
| couldn't be spread through aerosols, but only through droplets
| and fomites?
|
| Relying on consensus views in justifiable _until_ there 's
| _substantial_ _conflicting_ evidence. I know it can be
| difficult to determine what substantial is; there 's no
| shortage of "alternative" evidence that conservatives love to
| repeat. But as things unfolded in China and elsewhere it wasn't
| difficult to see that many consensus opinions couldn't have
| possibly been correct as a simple revealed factual matter.
| msandford wrote:
| There's an appeal to basic logic that goes "if the disease
| spreads from person to person and persons don't cross borders
| then the disease can't either." That might be a simplistic
| model but it's obviously correct upon inspection unless the
| disease spreads from distant persons which in this case it does
| not.
|
| The reason you might reject the policy implications of said
| model is that the assumption going in (we can sufficiently
| restrict border movement) are in your mind impractical or
| impossible.
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(page generated 2021-05-05 23:01 UTC)