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Comment by sago | Hacker News Reader

It is very tempting to be drawn into these kind of articles. But they are always worth a little caution. Counting successful predictions post hoc is dangerous.

If there had been no pandemic this year, but California had suffered from an overwhelming earthquake, this article would read "A Wo/Man Who Saw the Earthquake Coming." If a catastrophic series of diplomatic failures had led to a nuclear strike: "A Wo/Man Who Saw the Nuclear War Coming." 20 years ago there were plenty of "A Wo/Man Who Saw the Terror Attacks Coming."

And I'm not suggesting these people are crazy or out there on the fringe. Experts working in an area might agree what a worst case situation is, but disagree whether it is likely. If we took every worst case scenario entirely seriously, we would do very little else.

Learning from the past is important. But estimating the probability of things that have occurred is really difficult and counterintuitive.

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If someone saw it coming, and acted early, there would be no pandemic and the action would have been seen as an overreaction. There were at least two cases during the Cold War which could have caused nuclear war, but some people made the right call.

The article is focused more on future viruses. A bad thing happened now which was preventable.

We've got no nuclear plant meltdowns and no nuclear wars, because we applied security procedures learned from the past to the present. We have less killer quakes because buildings are built to withstand earthquakes now.

Most of these things aren't totally expensive to fix. They're a chain of bad events and all you have to do is break the chain at the weakest point. The Spanish flu was so deadly because people tried to bury it with propaganda and no quarantine measures were in place. At least today, we've panicked and taken action early.

> If someone saw it coming, and acted early, there would be no pandemic and the action would have been seen as an overreaction

Preparing for every crisis that could potentially eventuate would come at the opportunity cost of doing anything else at all.

We don't have to focus on every crisis. The context here is zoonotic spillover, which has killed millions of people historically, and it keeps happening again and again.

It's still okay that we didn't listen to experts like this last time. But this serves as a good wake up call. Avian flu didn't wake us. Swine flu didn't wake us. We were distracted when Spanish Flu came around. But let's not have this repeat too many times.

This line of reasoning is really just silly for a number of reasons.

For starters, preparing for every crisis that could potentially eventuate, even for just a single category of crisis, would still come at the opportunity cost of doing anything else at all.

Also, what’s so special about spillovers? People suffer and die from all sorts of things every day.

Finally, what lessons do you expect people to learn from past spillover events? To not have contact with any non-human organisms? Spillovers happen all the time. Most human viruses come from other animals. Is it reasonable to expect we can predict which infections, out of the millions of spillover infections that occur ever year, are going to cause a crisis? Or predict when a typically self-limiting spillover infection is going to unexpectedly pick up a new transmission route? Or should all sickness be treated as if it were ground zero for the next pandemic until proven otherwise?

> If someone saw it coming, and acted early, there would be no pandemic and the action would have been seen as an overreaction.

I admire your optimism, but I don't share it. Many are right now (and have been for decennia) foreseeing catastrophic effects of climate change (floodings, mass migration, disruption of ecosystems) and yet we fail to act. Health experts have apparently warned for years that we're not prepared for a pandemic (I believe they recently discussed this in NYT Daily https://www.nytimes.com/2020/03/11/podcasts/the-daily/corona...). An additional problem is, like the other commenter points out, that many people see many crises coming all the time and there's no objective way to tell who's right and who isn't.

You get these with everything. The "man who predicted the stock market crash", "the man who predicted the world series winner", etc.

If person A predicts a stock market crash each year, person B predicts stock market boom each year, person C predicts stock market would remain level each year, then someone is always bound to be right.

Those who predicted peak oil was "right" when oil spiked in the late 00s, but then fracking happened and now we laugh at the peak oil crowd.

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