knzhou · HackerTrans

6 лет назадdiscuss

I went to a school with similar dynamics, and if it's any comfort, I can assure you that the bullshit doesn't pay off. Those of us that pursued our interests deeply had our pick of college, those obsessed with simple metrics like AP count and SAT score got to what you call second-tiers if they were lucky, and those chasing leadership positions in do-nothing clubs got sweeping rejections. The system is not fair by any means, but it's not stupid, it can recognize people trying to game it.

knzhou

6 лет назадdiscuss

Sigh. Alright, understood, thanks for modding.

knzhou

6 лет назадdiscuss

Are you agreeing with me that people shouldn't do that? Or are you saying that calling out people that do that is the real problem?

I'm outnumbered 100:1 here by users that flood almost all of these threads and never say anything actually correct, following blind nationalistic instinct.

knzhou

6 лет назадdiscuss

It's amusing because when Trump instituted the travel ban early, it was Fox which was playing up the threat and all other news channels which were playing it down. Then a month later, they switched positions. This nonsense is why we have international organizations like the WHO, which are made of actual experts rather than pundits.

knzhou

6 лет назадdiscuss

As this and all other reports indicate, it can become aerosolized in certain invasive hospital procedures, which involve sticking stuff into people's lungs. This holds for a lot of diseases, we've known that for decades, and it doesn't have anything to do with how spread occurs in public.

knzhou

6 лет назадdiscuss

A month ago I took a lot of flak for saying that China's numbers were probably faithfully reported, as accurately as their logistics permitted. This was a claim that literally nobody could make anywhere on the Western internet without being downvoted to hell and called a shill. Everybody agreed that all numbers were completely made up, because somebody was able to fit a quadratic curve through 3 of their data points.

I still can't say China's data was real without being called a shill, but it's getting increasingly obvious that this was the case. China's numbers line up perfectly with what visiting WHO observers saw (as stated in their latest report), their hospital occupancy, their rate of exported cases, economic activity in the country, and the day to day experience of hundreds of millions of actual human beings. Anybody who still says it's all fake is just jacking off on nationalism.

knzhou

6 лет назадdiscuss

Unfortunately R0 is a bit of a vague thing.

For seasonal flu, you could think of it as being very low, because most people already have immunity. It's already endemic, so there isn't room for exponential growth.

For a new flu (like the 2008 swine flu) it is extremely high, which is why people barely did anything to contain it back then -- it was just impossible.

What we have right now is in between.

knzhou

6 лет назадdiscuss

There are a lot of things that make calculating a straightforward percentage hard:

- not all cases detected

- deaths are a laggy indicator

- recoveries are an extremely laggy indicator

- impact of demographics, healthcare quality

- sizes of effects of all 4 previous things depends on the country and the time

This has led to internet commentators coming up with wild numbers, ranging from 0.1% to 20%. At the risk of sounding like a spoilsport, I suggest we all defer to the expert numbers (2-3%), because the experts are perfectly aware of all 5 effects I mentioned, and more, and have already tried their best to correct for them, using better data than we have.

knzhou

6 лет назадdiscuss

> i wonder what the data is to back up that assertion?

The data is the tens of thousands of cases the WHO has stats on. You can read any of their reports, they've been saying the same thing for months. The main sources contradicting them are random internet commentators.

knzhou

6 лет назадdiscuss

This is important, because lots of internet commentators are just going with the most alarming possible statements: 28 day incubation periods, people can get infected twice, airborne transmission, asymptomatic transmission. These assertions are all based on outlier cases, sometimes even single cases, observed during the fog of war. Even if these accounts are correct, they aren't the typical case, which is what actually matters for policy and prevention.

The typical case has been well-known for months: most people get fevers, the incubation period is usually a few days, and most transmission is from symptomatic cases and via droplets. The WHO has collected stats from tens of thousands of cases and they've been straightforwardly pointing in this direction the entire time.

There definitely is a serious problem, but misinformation helps nobody, even if its spreaders are well-meaning. For example, I've seen a lot of people take the inflated statements ("28 day incubation period!!") to mean that stopping the spread is completely impossible, while we have seen by example that it isn't.

knzhou

7 лет назадdiscuss

I don't know if we're in the minority, but I'm completely with you. I use social media for about 15 minutes a day and it only improves my life. I'm happy when I see my friends being happy.

I think people who blame their life problems on social media have deeper underlying issues. Mark Zuckerberg didn't invent envy in 2004.

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