My favorite story when I hear someone dismiss an argument saying 'that is obvious':
Lazarsfeld was writing about “The American Soldier”, a recently published study of over 600,000 servicemen, conducted by the research branch of the war department during and immediately after the second world war. To make his point, Lazarsfeld listed six findings that he claimed were representative of the report. Take number two: '“Men from rural backgrounds were usually in better spirits during their Army life than soldiers from city backgrounds.”
“Aha,” says Lazarsfeld’s imagined reader, “that makes perfect sense. Rural men in the 1940s were accustomed to harsher living standards and more physical labour than city men, so naturally they had an easier time adjusting. Why did we need such a vast and expensive study to tell me what I already knew?” Why indeed.
But Lazarsfeld then reveals the truth: all six of the “findings” were in fact the exact opposite of what the study found. It was city men, not rural men, who were happier during their army life. Of course, had the reader been told the real answers in the first place, they could just as easily have reconciled them with other things they already thought they knew: “City men are more used to working in crowded conditions and in corporations, with chains of command, strict standards of clothing, etiquette, and so on. That’s obvious!” But this is exactly the point Lazarsfeld was making. When every answer and its opposite appears equally obvious then, as he put it, “something is wrong with the entire argument of ‘obviousness'”
Oh yes, I hate this kind of thing so much. People have so many pseudoscientific explanations and theories to support whatever random products and practices they like.
I call these “huh, that makes sense” explanations, since that’s often what people say after hearing them. You even used the magic three words above.
The related phenomenon in biology is called the “just so” fallacy; e.g. “X species evolved Y just so that they could do Z”. It’s a comforting story, but it will often lead you astray.
Edward says that Nate's prediction should be interpreted as:
“If nothing else changes between now and the election, Joe Biden has a 85% chance of winning.” (Silver’s argument)
But the problem is this prediction is not testable as election only occurs once at the end. Thus, one should use Nate's early predictions as pure entertainment.
Nate's final predictions show that they are well-calibrated across all of his political predictions but it is hard to estimate how accurate his model predictions are just for presidential elections given he has predicted only a few so far (unless one assumes all elections have similar uncertainty, which is clearly not true).
Greenwald was not claiming he is breaking the story. He was trying to shed light into the media blacklisting of the story. It is indeed Ironic that his story got blacklisted as well!
I think some editors are perhaps trying to avoid a repeat of the 'Hillary email/Comey announcement of 2016' scenario but didn't anticipate the Streisand effect.
In hindsight, best approach may have been to cover the story, get a sound bite from Biden denying that he benefitted, say there is no evidence he benefitted and leave it at that.
I don't get this obsession with comparing Sweden, a remote, sparsely-populated country, to more dense, well-connected, large population centers. If you really want to compare Sweden, please restrict your comparisons to its closely similar, equally remote and sparsely populated neighbors, namely, Norway and Finland. The 10X difference between them will be immediately obvious.
Finland and Norway have half the population of Sweden.
Sweden has about the same population as Belgium, Portugal and Greece...or Georgia (and Ohio, and Michigan, and...) in the US, none of which are places that people are shy about extrapolating from, when it suits their narrative.
You may not like the conclusions that can be drawn from Sweden, but you can't dismiss it based on population. Try again.
Yes, I agree. This issue is super-nuanced and I believe Mark has spent years (since the 2016 election fiasco) looking into this as well as being advised by top minds to arrive at his current position. These employees are acting emotionally now but will realize the value of Mark's position over time (in my opinion).
> These employees are acting emotionally now but will realize the value of Mark's position over time
Classical liberalism has never been a majority position. The reason it exists is due to smart people thinking hard about the problem of governance, and imposing its rules top-down. But maybe thats just me being european.
> I'll go out on a limb, and say that the existence of police unions is not the most important factor behind police brutality, and the killing of people of colour by police, in the US.
Hard to say if it is the most important but it is a pretty important factor. See https://www.joincampaignzero.org/ for all research that indicates the unions are a key stumbling block.
That is true. On a meta level, that is kind of what a police union should protect interests of the police force. Shows how this, be it unions or any other association, can backfire.
John's analysis is cherry picking in many ways. Death rate in Diamond Princess is 1.1% today and 2% is listed as severe. Assuming 50% of severe make it, final fatality rate for the ship may end up closer to 2%. John then adds a 50% discount factor but it is not clear how he picked that number. Also, the 1% of population infected seems to be another number pulled out of a hat. If we are basing our figures based only on the ship with no other assumptions, we have to go with 20% infection rate. Thus, one reasonable estimate of risk from the ship data is 20%x2%x330M = 1.3M deaths if we wait for "evidence" and did nothing. Clearly, this argues for doing something!
Edit: Also, Germany does not test dead folks for coronavirus while Italy does. Further, SK death rate has gone up to 1.3% (0.9% is an old number) and many more are in severe category. Thus, the sub 1% numbers seem more like the outliers than the above 1% numbers.
The Dimond Princess was evacuated. It’s passengers where unusually healthy for their age range, and while older than the general population had few people over 85 which is the most at risk population. Further, these people got world class care from experts and whatever minimal care an overworked heath system could provide.
Given all that they still had 9 deaths out of 712 infected with many still in critical condition.
You don't have to be bedridden to have lungs that are one cold away from death.
People with advanced COPD etc are everywhere but can walk short distances etc and prefer cruises to schlepping through airports and whatnot.
Knowing people who go on large long cruises they tell me they've never been on one where they didn't have at least one death. Indeed I know people with serious health issues who go on these knowing there is good on site medical care at hand.
Large ships have a lot of passengers. In the US Men hit a 2% chance of death at 68, which jumps to 3.6% at 75. At 85 that jumps to 9.6%, and by 95 your at 26% and the numbers keep increasing.
This means you can’t simply look at the average age to estimate risk factors. Still a 2% risk of death per year x 3000 people = 1.15 deaths per week ignoring crew. In other words what you’re describing is still a fairly heathy population.
I am pointing out curse ship populations are actually at lower risk than society for this specific disease. The crew is all young and it’s mostly irrelevant if someone is 4 or 40 relative to people being a heathy 80 or sick 90.
That's just not true. It's pretty much impossible to be 80 years old and not be more susceptible to infection generally. Statistically the people dying have an average of 2.7 comorbiditities.
Average is meaningless in this context. US Men hit a 2% chance of death at 68, which jumps to 3.6% at 75. At 85 that jumps to 9.6%, and by 95 your at 26% and the numbers keep increasing. A 50:50 mix of 85 year old men and 38 year old men have vastly higher risk of death than a group of just 62 year olds.
Except those higher odds of death are strongly associated with major heath issues. So, simply excluding the sickest 5% of the population makes a huge difference in survival rates.
That also seems wildly optimistic. 80% seems like a more reasonable assumption than 20%.
Also - 99.9% of those patients (pulled out of a hat) wouldn't have access to health care because the capacity was already overwhelmed, so the death rate will jump markedly.
Because 712 out of the 3711 passengers and crew were infected, and 713÷3713 ≈ 19.2%. So that gives us some sort of vague idea how much of the population from which the ship was drawn will become infected if exposed.
You don't need to be particularly fit or healthy to go on a cruise. Yes, sure, you can't be on life support, but generally 'healthy enough' to travel on a cruise is exactly what I'd expect from any random sample of the overall population.
The problem is the disease is mostly killing off the least heathy. Exclude only 5% of the population and deaths might easily drop by 1+%. Further the Dimond Princess was evacuated specifically because they could not contain the spread. Suggesting their rate of infection is indicative of anything would mean we had somewhere to be evacuated to.
You may not understand what "random sample of the overall population" means if you would expect every single person in the sample to be healthy enough to travel on a cruise. Almost 1% of the population in the US has Alzheimer disease or other dementias, for example.
I noted exactly that in my comment. Yes, not all the population can go on a cruise. No, it's not like it's only the healthiest 20% of the population that can. If I randomly sampled the population I'd expect the majority to be capable of a cruise. What do you think cruises are like?
If you agree that they are not a random sample of the population - they are healthy enough to be fit for travel (like the majority of the population) you are not trying to contradict ant6n's comment as I thought. I misunderstood, my apologies.
and it's not a small travel (e.g. the British tourists that went on board the Diamond Princess).
If you are not in good health at the beginning, you don't adventure yourself 10 hours+ from your home.
So this group is likely in better shape than average population.
Isn't the average age on a cruise ship far older than in the general population? I would've thought the people on board would on average be far more vulnerable.
It’s a narrow band excluding the young and oldest so, the average is older but the maximum is younger. With a very sharp decline in their 80’s, which is when things really get bad.
Considering how quickly the numbers get worse with age and ill heath many countries are at higher risk.
Classics have a way to taking things to extreme to illustrate various points. The Gulag example highlights that when a person had a choice to take the road to the left (selfish) or the right (selfless), they took the right road and gave up their self/happiness but ended up achieving meaning. Frankl's book on search for meaning also talks about meaning being more desirable than happiness.
The point is not that suffering makes ones life meaningful but the struggle or striving or the road seems to be preferred by the wise than an end state like happiness.
