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Comment by sciinfo | Hacker News Reader

The vast majority of people don't have an intuitive understanding of exponential growth.

People not trained well in math and science don't even have/know the tools to help them understand it analytically.

We need (much) better math education for people studying all majors.

One of our older neighbors are inviting everyone on the nextdoor app to go to their house for movie night to prove that this is just a flu. The entire thread is people making fun of covid19 and how they are angry their retirement accounts are getting hit.

I wish I was making this up.

Geez, what part of the country if you don't mind me asking? Arrogance, ignorance, and disinformation is literally going to kill us. Thanks for sharing that.

Bay Area, CA

Thanks for the reply. I guess I'm not surprised. What movie? ;)

"there's no point for democracy when ignorance is celebrated" - NOFX

The whole song is disturbingly accurate/prophetic.

https://www.azlyrics.com/lyrics/nofx/idiotsaretakingover.htm...

I'm completely unsurprised by what you're describing. I observed similarly disturbing behavior waiting in line @ Home Depot the other day. A customer was excited to find they had hand sanitizer in stock, and another customer told him there's a whole aisle full of the stuff and that all the covid stuff is fake news which devolved into nonsensical madness between yokels I had to just walk away from. Of course our Home Depot had some in stock, we're in rural bumblefuck middle of nowhere. Our stores only run out of things when the employees forget to do their jobs.

The last sentence applies to all stores, so. Unless people freak out and stock up for the apocalypse, in which case resupply might take a couple of days.

Yeah it's crazy. I suggested in the thread that they should take this a little more seriously and was immediately attacked for being a doom mongering idiot.

Oh well, I tried.

Darwin will solve this irresponsibly stupid behavior. Causing a lot of collateral damage unfortunately.

No, old people have likely already re-produced, and will not be prevented from reproducing if they die now.

I have to concede you're partly right. Darwin will solve more than you think though:

- Some old irresponsibly stupid males are still sexually active. Darwin would stop them reproducing.

- The old irresponsibly stupid neighbour is still a magnet for younger, sexually reproductive irresponsibly stupid people, probably more so than for others.

Please live "social darwinism" to 4chan.

Ignorance is not transmitted genetically.

It might help telling him that in some regions of northern Italy, patients over 65 with arrests are not assessed any longer and are not treated in an ICU, they are left to die.

I wish I was making this up.

Edit: Source added.

https://twitter.com/jasonvanschoor/status/123714289107769753...

The whole “people don’t understand exponential growth” thing isn’t a very good explanation, considering that it applies to any contagious disease for which every person tends to infect some constant number of other people.

Which there are few in circulation, thanks to vaccines among other reasons (which lower effective transmission rate), so most people haven't really experienced it working. Somebody mentioned noroviruses the other day as probably the closest relevant thing people may have experienced - let someone with one loose on a cruise ship, and shit literally hits the fan very fast.

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