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Comment by johnwheeler | Hacker News Reader

Before you propagate this information and take action, read this post about the psychology of fear mongering, and ask yourself if you identify with it.

1. Do you tend to mistrust authority?

2. Do you feel powerless to control the course of your life?

3. Do you feel like you have special information and insight the rest of us do not?

4. Do you feel comfort when thinking about the end of the world because once it happens, you will be prepared and validated?

https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/observations/psychology...

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This seems to just be a set of general steps for the dominant culture to downplay dissenters or individuals for whom the system isn't working. It doesn't tell you anything about if the system is actually working or not, or if those individuals are right or wrong. Anyone who disagrees with the system will probably go through similar feelings (maybe not point 4).

You could put yourself in the position of someone who grew up poor and disillusioned as part of a visible minority in a US city, or a Hong Kong protestor, or almost any other anti-hedgemony protestor and they'd check the first three boxes. Are they wrong or is the system wrong? Nothing in this list helps determine that.

Astute observation. 1 and 2 apply to marginalized communities but 3 and 4 do not.

I think you see point 3 come through in the discussions talking about privilege and lived experience.

It's a natural step after point 1 or 2 where the dominant group rebuts with "well it works for me, so it should work for you", and the minority group provides their theories as to what results in them having a different outcome.

>I think you see point 3 come through in the discussions talking about privilege and lived experience.

That's not the kind secret information preppers and conspiracy theorists lay claim to

I think you misascribe the intent here; in medicine, symptoms and circumstances are correlative (and must be interpreted in a manner consistent with that). For example, chest pain correlates with heart attacks but many other causes exist as well and not everyone will display the same symptoms.

The list above is merely a set of correlations. It may be useful to consider, but must be interpreted appropriately in a given context.

It would allow a count to ten style consideration of personal bias to better frame the news. Down side is if you check #4 it's unlikely you can be reasoned back to reality.

This is hilarious. Isn't 2012 the underlying model they use for everything today?

Fearmongering is the go-to default for absolutely every issue the media covers. Then during an actual literal pandemic they take a short break from every other the-world-is-ending story to give us the "don't fearmonger" lecture.

If you ever find yourself split in doubt between your own sanity and that of the media's, please for the love of God assume they're insane first.

Two observations:

1. There isn't a single media (often, when your tribe is against another, you view the opposition as monolithic rather than a spectrum composed of different viewpoints)

2. And they're not insane, editors and social media algorithms are rational and reacting to reader incentives (but it is "insane" to mistake media sources for a rational human, because most media is about covering extreme events[1])

More in my media literacy guide:

https://github.com/nemild/hack-the-media/blob/master/README....

[1] The deaths that are most covered are a tiny fraction (<1%) of the way we die https://www.nemil.com/s/part3-horror-films.html

Would you argue the US has a diverse media? Today, the concept seems laughable.

It depends on what "diverse" means to you. I would say that Scientific American isn't the same as a partisan news channel.

But to the degree that an ad driven model and social media is the primary way news distribution happens, media incentives are monolithic for media organizations.

On a discursive note, if you are interested in media incentives, "All the News That's Fit to Sell" is a great book that goes into media incentives in previous eras. When the economies of scale for printing presses went up, media naturally became more centrist and less alarmist because a single paper had to appeal to a larger audience. It gives you a sense for the power of incentives in dictating what media is created/distributed.

You must be living in an alternate dystopic 2020 media landscape where the problem is something else besides radical fragmentation of markets, instantaneous elevation of social media anecdotes to national coverage, and widespread agreement to disagree about matters of fact.

The one thing we can’t criticize our media for is a lack of diversity.

> There isn't a single media (often, when your tribe is against another, you view the opposition as monolithic rather than a spectrum composed of different viewpoints)

The overwhelming majority of the media that people consume in the U.S. is created by the same handful of companies, which each have roughly the same rules about what kinds of stories you're allowed or not allowed to publish. Having worked at one, I can assure you that you're not just allowed to publish whatever you want as long as it conforms to basic journalistic standards or whatever.

Great point. Would you argue the media landscape is the way it is due to incentives these select organizations face or the monopolistic nature of these companies?

Separately, you note the high concentration of media creation, but don't speak to the even higher concentration of media distribution (e.g., social media), which likely has its own influence on what is created.

> Would you argue the media landscape is the way it is due to incentives these select organizations face or the monopolistic nature of these companies?

It's been 10+ years since I've read chapter 1 of Manufacturing Consent, but IIRC the basic argument is that:

- Media companies are the way they are because they're funded by advertising.

- Media companies have an oligopoly because they are allowed to fund themselves via advertising, and advertising has monopolies of scale.

> you note the high concentration of media creation, but don't speak to the even higher concentration of media distribution, which likely has its own influence on what is created.

That's a good point. The fact that media companies own less of their own distribution is probably the biggest thing that's changed since Manufacturing Consent was originally published, so now institutional incentives need to be considered across two different dimensions.

> Having worked at one, I can assure you that you're not just allowed to publish whatever you want as long as it conforms to basic journalistic standards or whatever.

Should this be surprising? A newspaper isn’t a blog for a bunch of journalists, it’s an organization that makes a collective effort to speak with a single authoritative voice.

That’s a far cry from all newspapers sharing an institutional perspective, though.

Heh... maybe we should be very afraid when a media known for fearmongering tells us to remain calm.

Regardless of the other three points, it is generally rational to mistrust authority because many authorities have repeatedly failed in the past to protect lives during emergency scenarios.

And yet 99% of the time, the authorities do a great job of running everything here in the west. The 1% of the time they fail, it proves the conspiracy theorists and fear mongers’ point.

In 2020 it's more like 90% of the time, but the point still stands

Of all the national emergencies in the US since 2000, Katrina, Sandy, Puerto Rico, etc., does anyone know offhand how many were handled properly?

Seems like ~20-40% are handled improperly if not more.

The ones that were properly handled aren't news.

You never heard about the lead poisoning that didn't happen.. but you'll hear about Flint Michigan.

Try counting all the dams that didn't break and, thus, averted catastrophic floods.

Also count the forest fires that didn't happen because of regulation.

When something is declared a national emergency it's typically because society have failed to prepare.

> You never heard about the lead poisoning that didn't happen.. but you'll hear about Flint Michigan.

Not a great example for this point. Cynically, you heard about Flint because journalists rode the hype train for views and clicks, either failing to do research on other communities or failing to promote those stories to the level of hype required to break into the mainstream. They were close to notifying the public of a widespread public infrastructure and health issue, but for whatever reason fell short and became fodder for anti-"fear-mongering" attitudes.

> . . . The Michigan city doesn't even rank among the most dangerous lead hotspots in America . . .

> In all, Reuters found nearly 3,000 areas with recently recorded lead poisoning rates at least double those in Flint during the peak of that city's contamination crisis. And more than 1,100 of these communities had a rate of elevated blood tests at least four times higher.

> . . .

> Like Flint, many of these localities are plagued by legacy lead: crumbling paint, plumbing, or industrial waste left behind. Unlike Flint, many have received little attention or funding to combat poisoning.

[1] https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/thousands-of-u-s-...

How many situations don’t become national emergencies because of good management?

Since you're mostly counting hurricanes, here's a list of all category 4+ hurricanes that hit the US, although most were not that strength when they actually made landfall:

* Hurricane Isabel (5, 2003)

* Hurricane Charley (4, 2004)

* Hurricane Ivan (5, 2004)

* Hurricane Dennis (4, 2005)

* Hurricane Katrina (5, 2005)

* Hurricane Rita (5, 2005)

* Hurricane Wilma (5, 2005)

* Hurricane Ike (4, 2008)

* Hurricane Matthew (5, 2014)

* Hurricane Harvey (4, 2017)

* Hurricane Irma (5, 2017)

* Hurricane Maria (5, 2017)

* Hurricane Florence (4, 2018)

* Hurricane Michael (5, 2018)

* Hurricane Dorian (5, 2019)

That's 15 hurricanes. Of these, Katrina and Maria were the only ones where the response was considered botched. That's only 13%.

And how many of them required anything but the standard response from authorities? I can't think of any aside from Katrina and Maria. But it's when an atypical response is warranted that authorities ability to respond is tested. Based on that metric, the track record is poor.

There's also the concern of incentives. The authorities are incentivized to treat every emergency as requiring nothing over and above the standard response, because statistically this is correct. And so you would not expect the authorities to be able to recognize, or be honest about when an unfolding emergency requires an atypical response.

> And how many of them required anything but the standard response from authorities?

What do you mean by "standard response"? It seems to me that you have a working definition that is less an objective standard and more a subjective, circular definition of "anything that didn't fail."

Take Hurricane Harvey for example. The rain Houston received was record-breaking: ~30" in the course of a day or so, when the previous monthly record was 19". Does that require merely the "standard response"?

What I mean by the "standard response" are actions that are just some variation of: mobilize national guard, provide emergency shelter, distribute emergency rations of food, provide mobile health care, etc, and usually to some reasonably localized geographic location. Basically the sort of responses where simply modeling your response after the previous similar disaster is sufficient. The problem with Katrina and Maria was precisely that the playbook from prior disasters was inadequate either due to the type or scale of problems faced.

> Basically the sort of responses where simply modeling your response after the previous similar disaster is sufficient. The problem with Katrina and Maria was precisely that the playbook from prior disasters was inadequate either due to the type or scale of problems faced.

The Gulf of Mexico is no stranger to hurricanes, and Katrina and Maria don't even top out the strongest hurricanes on the list (that honor goes to Wilma). Hell, Katrina is only the third strongest hurricane of 2005. That's why the response was so heavily criticized: Katrina was essentially the hurricane that New Orleans' levees were designed for, a repeat of Hurricane Betsy a few days shy of 40 years earlier. Even the levee failures should have been scenarios that had been planned for in terms of disaster response.

How much response a hurricane requires depends a lot on building codes and other local regulation.

If it requires a lot of response it's often because of failure to plan/build accordingly.

Conspiracy theorists tend to mistake incompetence for malice; or partial incompetence for total incompetence. Hurricane Katrina doesn’t invalidate health and building codes; education; law enforcement and EPA, FAA, and SEC regulations. Decisions made are both bad and good, but it’s irrational to think the decision makers are generally untrustworthy.

Didn’t all of these agencies come about after some incident happened that was disastrous?

The SEC came about after/during the Great Depression. Building codes stiffened after terrible hurricanes.

Sure, but what’s your point? Decisions _should_ be based on past information. You don’t expect politicians to be clairvoyant do you?

There’s no doubt that politics, especially US politics and government, are pretty screwed up, but it doesn’t automatically follow that anarchy is better.

Some of it works and some of it doesn’t. That’s the point I’m trying to make.

I think you have a point because this fear also creates incentives for scammers to profit from it.

There is a difference in how people "act" on the collective level (administrative bodies and bureaucracies, even companies) and how we respond on the individual level (employees, bread-winners, family members).

There is no serious / open conversation about this inside companies right now - some places I know even discourage you and slap you with the fear-monger label, while hoping it will just blow over. Especially in Tech where we could just send people home right away and work remotely hardly anyone does this (if it hasn't already been policy).

> Decisions _should_ be based on past information.

Making decisions only on past information is what makes Black Swans a scary reality. Maybe good time for us all to re-read Taleb https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Black_Swan:_The_Impact_of_...

I feel like there must be some sort of internet law that says, “gross incompetence is indistinguishable from malice.”

Pretty sure you are kidding, but for the benefit of future readers:

> Never attribute to malice that which can be adequately explained by stupidity.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hanlon%27s_razor

There’s an obvious corollary:

> If you want to get away with it, make it indistinguishable from incompetence.

Here’s a WWII field manual from “them” on the subject. It actually helped me unlearn some bad behaviors instilled by previous bad management. :-)

http://www.simplesabotage.com/

But would you say, in a general sense, that it is better to assume malice rather than mistakes/incompetence/stupidity?

If one is responsible for ensuring security, they won't be very effective unless they realize malicious actors masquerading as the incompetent exist and are active.

If I am working on security critical software I don't try to determine the intent of anyone at all, everyone is assumed malicious and their code/actions reviewed as such.

My question was in a more general sense, do you assume that all mistakes are done on purpose to conceal some sort of plot?

> everyone is assumed malicious and their code/actions reviewed as such.

Yes we are in agreement.

> in a more general sense, do you assume that all mistakes are done on purpose to conceal some sort of plot?

Obviously not and no one is claiming that. The extremes of never assuming malice and never assuming incompetence are ... extremes.

Always starting with a presumption of innocence is said to be a useful premise for a criminal justice system. And always starting with a presumption of malice is a useful premise for security oversight. Not just code but other things like Secret Service details and plane boarding. It's assumed that boxcutter is for hijacking, so you have to give it up. It's presumed that bottle of water is some sort of chemical to be used in making a bomb, so you have to give it up. It's presumed that baby is a secret bomb, so the baby is going to be scanned and inspected. An unrecognized wellwisher rapidly approaching the President on stage at an event is presumed to be an assassin and will be tackled. A car of lost people looking for a wedding location which is approaching a US security checkpoint in Iraq or Afghanistan without slowing down will be machine gunned. A suspicious man, under the influence, who is staggering along down the center of the road in Baltimore who does not follow orders to stop and get on the ground and who instead reaches into his pocket for his id, cell phone, or breath mints, will be shot dead. Malice is the default assumption in a wide variety of security contexts.

Related term of art for programmers is underhanded code. Always make your undermining of security and insertion of backdoors to appear to be a simple coding error: http://underhanded-c.org/

It really needs an "... or corruption" appended to the end. ;)

"Never attribute to malice that which can be adequately explained by a coordination problem"

I find it hard to think of cases of corruption that are not rooted in malice.

Was not kidding and thank you :)

I just assumed because what you wrote fit so well with Hanlon's razor :)

One of the most glaring flaws of the conspiracy theorists is that they assume authority are bad for bad sake, like they're some mindless evil that does bad thing for .. no apparent reason. Even though the priorities of authority might not be aligned with that of the people, it is still a set of rational priorities, for personal gain etc. Too many conspiracy theorist make no sense because the act they suspect authority do does not make any sense for anybody.

This is why you see so many satanic cult/ritual references I. Conspiracy theories. It helps explain evil for the sake of evil.

It is perfectly rational to distrust decision makers, it makes no difference whether the intent is malicious or it is just incompetence. The end result is the same.

I trust them to be malicious enough to hide their incompetence.

I am working with some, not in a high risk domain at all and I worry the same kind of people work in high risk domains (sometimes they work in both, next election they might move to another minister).

This could easily be an issue of colloquial interpretation barriers, but there is a significant difference between healthy skepticism and a mistrust driven by assuming the other party is always acting in bad faith.

Like I said, this could be a simple misunderstanding of concepts, but there is a percentage of the population who have drifted from a healthy skepticism into paranoidTown where they assume good faith people/humanity are out to get them. This mistrust is causing many of them to fail to apply basic logic in their decision making.

Hopefully your post was advocating for what I would call a healthy skepticism.

> always acting in bad faith.

Not just that, they're always acting in bad faith and most of time even against their own interest! To cause harm to _$you_ specifically because $you're so important.

> there is a percentage of the population who have drifted from a healthy skepticism into paranoidTown where they assume good faith people/humanity are out to get them

And how big is that percentage? I’m starting to believe, sincerely, that views like the one you expressed are more paranoid and driven by fear-mongering than the views described in your comment. I call these people flat eartherers, e.g. those who believe there are many flat earthers all over the place who are a problem.

CDC says:

> The potential public health threat posed by COVID-19 is high, both globally and to the United States. The fact that this disease has caused illness, including illness resulting in death, and sustained person-to-person spread is concerning. These factors meet two of the criteria of a pandemic. It’s unclear how the situation will unfold, but risk is dependent on exposure. At this time, some people will have an increased risk of infection, for example healthcare workers caring for patients with COVID-19 and other close contacts of persons with COVID-19. For the general American public, who are unlikely to be exposed to this virus, the immediate health risk from COVID-19 is considered low at this time.

From "Coronavirus Disease 2019 (COVID-19) Situation Summary"

> This is an emerging, rapidly evolving situation and CDC will provide updated information as it becomes available, in addition to updated guidance.

> Updated February 22, 2020

https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/summary.html

I wonder how those questions would be answered by that doctor that tried to ring the alarm but was silenced.

Have you ever heard The expression "the exception that proves the rule"? Do you understand the meaning of the expression? It means that the rule is so good that exceptions to it are so rare that they seem significant. The prototypical examples are plane crashes.

What do you think the chances are that I haven't heard about that? What do you think makes this an exception?

There is a lot of politics happening around this theme. Can you trust the numbers put out by the authorities? Yes, within a margin of error due to unreported cases.

The article is not at all in the fearmongering category. It appears to me quite level headed and simply acknowledges that we are past the point of containment, something that seems born out by the facts.

To continue to deny that there is a pandemic will do a lot more harm than to accept that as a fact and act accordingly.

>What do you think makes this an exception?

Do you realize it's completely irrational to debate unknown unknowns? Any certainty comes from bias. So you think the doctor is the tip of the iceberg but you absolutely can't know how big the iceberg is. I think the doctor isn't and honestly I can't know that either. What I do have going for me is the biased perspective that on balance the world is being run adequately and if all of these subversive things were true that couldn't be the case. But I readily admit that that's circular and to the extent that it's not it's completely apriori.

My point is, in case that isn't clear: the people on the front lines of this outbreak are telling a different story than the one that you seem to favor and that up to some point (right up until it became untenable) was still held by the Chinese authorities. So I'm a little skeptical about numbers and stories coming in from Chinese official channels taking them as a baseline with the mental note that things might be much worse.

The data points that we have from outside of China: Iran, the cruise ships, South Korea and several other regions where the virus has established a relatively strong foothold should give anybody pause at this point, any comparisons with the flu are pointless and noise.

Whether or not we are calling a pandemic is semantics, in all but name it is here today.

The doctor was the tip of the iceberg, he is no longer. But there are other people in charge of the messaging for other countries and it seems as though the dreaded pandemic word is now also used by the CDC and similar organizations, internally and with qualifiers ('preparing for a pandemic') it is more a matter of time when they will feel comfortable in using it publicly.

My two cents in this great discussion. The climate change emergency and the biodiversity collapse with no corrective measure taken whilee the stakes are so high for our survival seem to be proof that the world is NOT run adequately.

I don't see how that relates at all. The parent is talking about how we perceive information and especially information that comes from authoritative sources.

That doctor had first-hand experience of what was happening and the authorities getting in his way when he tried to get the word out. He was never in a position where he had to decide between going with the consensus or follow a fringe theory, but rather whether to follow the obviously incorrect official version instead of what he could see with his own two eyes.

> 1. Do you tend to mistrust authority?

If you think the entire government has your specific best interests at heart, isn't that a sign of schizophrenia? That sounds not much different than people who think that songs on the radio or TV shows were created for them specifically.

> 3. Do you feel like you have special information and insight the rest of us do not?

Most people are following this story very little or not at all, so if you're even remotely paying attention then you have special information and insight that the vast majority of people do not.

This particular article and advice seems quite proportionate and level-headed. (In contrast to about 80% of Covid-19 articles posted on HN, TBQH)

InfoWars types. Arrogant paranoia often manifested in tribal communities that reinforce similar delusions.

Recent example: the mom who killed her husband, brother and kids because she and her new lover believe in an "apocalypse" summer 2020.

I Brainwashed Myself With the Internet is another good example from a couple days ago

https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/she-wanted-freebirth-no...

Or late stage capitalism types who have talked themselves into an imagined economic doomsday.

Do you mean “HN types”? Almost everyone in this HN thread seems to agree that we should worry about the virus.

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

Have you seen the spread in Italy?

Or Iran, for that matter.

https://time.com/5789360/iran-coronavirus-death-toll/

8 dead on 43 cases suggests severe under-reporting of the number of people infected. That in turn suggests that testing is inadequate which may cause the disease to spread further than necessary. The fact that infected Iranians have turned up in Lebanon and Canada is further proof that the number of infections is likely higher than reported.

If we take the 2-3% mortality reported elsewhere as the base than the 8 people confirmed dead would suggest at least 300-400 infections, or about 8 times higher than officially reported by the Iranian authorities.

What interests me is the low or zero figures elsewhere.

Especially Indonesia; surely they have significant numbers of Chinese travellers?

Latin America and Africa have the temperature going for them but especially Africa has a ton of back-and-forth with China so you can expect there are or will be cases there.

Indonesia is an interesting case especially geographically. Maybe there is some data on how well they did during previous pandemics?

There's a lot of randomness in life

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