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Comment by hatenberg | Hacker News Reader

There is really no excuse for this happening in Europe. There was ample warning and no, not just from China. The math was very clear by early/mid February.

We have to face the truth that the quality of people we vote for government is not where it needs to be and that science has too long been discredited and ignored.

Some of asia learned from SARS but that's it.

Madrid was hosting marches, political rallies and soccer games with 10.000-100.000 people a week ago because people did not want to make the hard choices needed even as Korea was burning and Italy started to.

Excuses that China is authoritarian do not cut it - this was a huge fail of governance and doing what people are elected to do

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Human beings do not intuitively understand exponential growth. It's just too fast for our primitive brains. In some sense, we are standing in the middle of the road, frozen like deer in the headlights.

Science is supposed to mitigate the shortcomings of our natural intuitions and cognitive biases. The problem is that most people are not scientists. When a non-scientist is asked to trust a scientist, he or she is subject to all of the usual suspects: arguments from authority, confirmation bias, Bulverism, appeal to emotion, etc. What this means in practice is that scientists are generally not trusted over the word of one's friends and family.

by intuitively I suppose you mean feel it, which I guess is true, but it does not take a genius to actually understand the concept, especially if it is explained as right now you will get this many people per day, in a week you will get this many, in a month this many. That is pretty easy, a politician should be able to follow it.

But as has been pointed out before most people think if you do something big and dramatic to fix an oncoming problem, and it does fix it, lots of people will stupidly assume that you did not need to do the big, dramatic thing because it wasn't really a problem. So any politician who reacted appropriately would run the risk of fixing the problem and losing power in doing so, I would prefer to fix a problem like this even if it meant I would not have the power to fix later problems as my calculation would be if I do not fix this problem now I probably won't have the power to fix later problems anyway.

One way to test this is to ask random people the question:

"The number of lily pads on a pond double every day. If it takes 20 days for the lily pads to completely cover the pond, how long does it take to cover half the pond?"

I think you will be surprised by how many people say "10 days."

This is because most people are unable to suppress their reflexive response to being asked what's half of 20, not because people don't understand exponentiation.

Yes, the point being that linear halving is much more intuitive for most people than exponential halving. Even when you're told the doubling rate, your brain reaches for the wrong answer every time.

My point was not about whether people are incapable of understanding exponentials, it was about whether they understand them intuitively. You used the term “reflexive response” but what we’re both describing is intuitive or automatic thinking.

Why is it relevant that people don’t correctly apply exponential reasoning automatically? Because when people encounter information in everyday life (outside of the specific job they’ve been trained to do) they tend to use intuitive thinking predominantly. This matters a hell of a lot when it comes to making political decisions of a technical nature, such as infectious disease planning and response. Lo and behold, this is the exact problem the Italians are trying to warn everyone about!

Show someone an animation of the lily pads doubling every day and ask the same question and you’ll realise that they understand exponential growth intuitively, they’re just not good at word problems.

Show someone an animation of the lily pads doubling every day and ask them when the pond is half-covered? You're not even asking them to solve a problem at that point, only to point at the animation when it looks half-covered.

Relating this to the spread of the virus, people aren't carrying around an animation of this in their minds. Perhaps science communicators should do a better job of communication and produce such an animation? But then you're still not getting people to understand the concept. You're telling them "this is what it looks like, sort of, now just trust us." The problem is that people don't trust scientists (and mathematicians) as it is.

I agreed that people did not understand exponential growth, but I pointed out that "but it does not take a genius to actually understand the concept, especially if it is explained as right now you will get this many people per day, in a week you will get this many, in a month this many."

So if you explain to the politician, once you start getting cases in your country and give them the actual growth rates, and what slowing down the growth rates will mean, with nifty charts and so forth.

Like maybe they should do in the movie Outbreak where they have display of the red spreading across the country on its way to the White House, with a timeline animated below it, then the politician will understand the situation without intuitively understanding exponential growth.

I suppose reasonably competent data visualizers who have ever had to explain complicated things to non-technical people in an important meeting would know how to represent the concept in their particular domain without much problems.

on edit: changed our to your

> Human beings do not intuitively understand exponential growth.

This layman has read that we intuitively think of numbers logarithmically, which makes him wonder if we human beings do, in fact, intuitively understand exponential growth.

https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/a-natural-log/

...and see it as merely linear. That's the problem.

Exponential growth is like dynamite. It's absurdly fast, compared to anything people see in daily lives.

Dropping stuff and falling are good examples. If you're paying attention, anyway. I can still grab stuff that's fallen maybe 10-20 cm, but by 50-100 cm it's moving way too fast.

And that's only quadratic growth, not exponential.

That's a terrible example, why would pick an explicitly sub-exponential relationship?

Because exponential is even worse.

Right. Because it's not linear.

The only truly exponential example that comes to mind is milk souring. But that's too slow, unless you keep notes.

Population and GDP also grow exponentially, but we’ve been watching those numbers go up for decades. Most things that grow do so exponentially. Growth always comes to an end, but that often happens well before the rate of change becomes “absurdly fast.“

Interesting. I do think that few people understand what a billionaire actually is, i.e. what force you can mobilize if you are one.

Humans don’t understand exponential growth. But they could look at China and Italy and think - those guys are the same as us. We are not special. The same thing that is happening to them is going to happen unless we act now.

The real sad part of all this is that this is simply human nature. And we are next gonna go down the same path with climate change. And then not even lock downs will help.

Unfortunately, seeing oneselves as special is one of the most widely spread cognitive biases :(

The German press was explaining Italy all week... mostly trying to explain how it's all different.

Having seen the cutting of rural hospitals over the last two decades it will be a shitshow

That may explain but certainly not excuse. We submit our individual freedoms to governments we vote for to be able to act better than our ingrained short term reflexes. Best and brightest and all.

It's also not necessarily an indictment of democracy- Taiwan clearly has been on the ball here. But it is absolutely an indictment of our current state of affairs in many western countries.

Spanish lead epidemiologist was telling us a few weeks ago that nothing was going to happen here.

I did my numbers back in December. In January was already pretty worried, but I'm not an expert I thought. Maybe there's something I'm not taking in account.

So I kept reading about models and stats. Not that difficult. Ran my numbers again and again, yep it seemed pretty bad no matter what I cheated myself with parameters etc.

Then it came to Spain. I was pretty nervous by that time, kept it cool, tried to warn to people that this was no joke, everyone thought that I was a bit crazy and alarmist. Days passed, government went absolutely erratic and irreposible, lost all my trust in the lead epidemiologist and the ministry of Healthcare, not to mention the HUGE amount of healthcare workers that were insisting that it was just a flu and some of us were alarmists for two month and turned 360 in a few days.

Too late. Now I'm in it.

What “numbers” were you doing back in December? The virus had not spread outside of Wuhan, or been named or sequenced, by that point.

Maybe my memory is fuzzy, but the moment I've got the first reports about R0 incubation period etc.

I have to say that some time ago I had a course of applied statistics with epidemiology exercises so I was not really an alien to it, but not an expert either.

It's so unfortunate that Western society also seems to be losing trust in experts. As the world gets more complicated one would expect that trust in experts would be more important.

Policy makers are often incorrectly or selectively writing experts to push their agenda. Confidence intervals become averages. Multi variate predictions become univariate. 30 year models become absolute truth. No wonder people lose trust.

You don't have to understand exponential growth to look at how seriously other nations have treated the issue. Many large respectable nations have entered some kind of lockdown mode.

And I don't believe you should have to understand exponential growth to listen to clear government messaging about the severity of a problem. This is a failure of messaging by the relevant authorities.

Allow me to suggest we wait to blame until after things are on the upswing. I completely understand the impulse -- hell, I'm doing it myself -- but for most of the folks reading, the worst of this is ahead. I'm trying to focus on a bit of prep I haven't done, trying to anticipate for different scenarios and being kind to those around me.

And my snarky side says there will be plenty more targets to blame in the coming weeks - think of it as an investment.

This is classic normalcy bias: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Normalcy_bias

People will grasp at any excuse to convince themselves "it'll be fine, it won't happen to me". The fact it started in China made it easy - the Chinese government must be overreacting because it's authoritarian, it's halfway across the world, my government must have gotten this figured out, my health care system must be better than China's, etc etc. And of course the classic "it's just a flu".

It's sad that so many will suffer and die because of this.

No leader wants to take drastic action for their nation when the number of deaths they can point to for justification is smaller than the number of deaths for the seasonal flu. If they save lives and prevent the disease from spreading, it looks like they over-reacted and unnecessarily tanked the economy.

The USA is going to be in terrible shape very soon, just look at this as of tonight: https://twitter.com/davidenrich/status/1239004689338970113

wow

I cannot understand why unnecessary flying was not shut down weeks or months ago.

Go read HN comments from weeks and months ago, and see the posters encouraging prompt measures getting called paranoids. :) Now scale this up to the whole country and account for the fact that HN is probably a little better on average about reasoning about these things.

But now, on HN now we're mostly preaching to the choir...

I've been contacting the officials of my state and surrounding communities since February 28th urging action. If your community isn't taking action you should join in. Even if your politicians don't respond to math, they'll still respond to public outcry.

The best time to respond was a while ago, but today is still vastly better than tomorrow.

> Go read HN comments from weeks and months ago, and see the posters encouraging prompt measures getting called paranoids.

Exactly. Two weeks ago every coronavirus thread on Hacker News was full of deniers claiming this was no worse than the flu and this was all just media hysteria. Some probably still hold that opinion. I don't think they will be convinced until the hospitals start overflowing.

Elon Musk was one of the deniers. You would think someone who "always starts with physics" would know better.

Wealthy people have a habit of doing this. Being good at something doesn't necessarily make you good at something else, and the hero-worship the wealthy get in the US (not to mention his fan club) can't help but go to one's head.

(Engineers to, too. I try hard to watch it and I still arrogantly show my ignorance sometimes.)

He has a responsibility to not feed panic.

Yeah,

When Coronavirus appeared in Wuhan, I tended to the opinion that it would self-limiting in one fashion or another or that is would not be worse than the flu. Only people arguing with me and me investigating the facts changed that. And, yeah, changing your opinion is hard and imagining a force that will upend the world is hard so it's easy to imagine how people stay in their positions.

That said, we have a representative government with the aim of electing people who will think ahead and protect from purely reflex based views. And clearly that control has failed.

As disappointed as I am with much of the response in the US, it could still be a lot worse.

The potential for this kind of pandemic is something that the government was aware of and at least somewhat prepared for. It can be hard to imagine, but if all we had were the concerns of joe-everyman this would have caught us significantly more off-guard than it has.

Where I think we've faltered is in rapidly the hard decisions to trade-off short term economic impact vs long term health and economic impact. But there is still time to do a lot of good, and the level of our response seems to now-- finally-- be increasing exponentially along with the infection.

Yes, I've had some neighbors ask me why I didn't tell them that we had been preparing for this to potentially happen when we started about 3 weeks. I told them "because you would have thought we were crazy if I told you to do it 3 weeks ago".

And you thought I was crazy when I started 30 years ago.

That apparently makes very little difference. I listened to an interview with a Yale professor who cited stories that showed minimal impact. The supposed reason is that by the time you know a country has an outbreak, it's already to late and people from there will have travelled to your country. What apparently had been shown to be very effective is preemptive school closures. Unfortunately that's a tough call because we can't have a well functioning social system liked other developed countries.

Interview: https://samharris.org/podcasts/190-respond-coronavirus

Why are people still flying now? Most public transportation is rated as dangerous for several weeks already.

Why do people ever fly? Something like a quarter of people who travel by air contract a respiratory infection from doing so. It's an extremely effective way to spread disease.

I'm in the US, no one cared about this until a few days ago. Now, some stores are getting low on food supplies, and people are posting about it. But, I was at a store today where they were completely stocked, and the only empty shelf was the toilet paper supply! It's insane.

Surely the hand sanitizer shelf was empty too?

Tofu was surprisingly empty here.

Not empty at all, maybe a shipment came in, though.

What? I’m in New England tri state and started preparing 28 days ago. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22339369

That's cause you're smart, and read hN!

I’d argue the smart part :) Well read is a better scarlet letter. Fairfield county, CT

Parent presumably means no regular people. I had a similar experience: a month ago I suddenly realized we may need to be isolated at home for up to 2 months. I live in a place where that's actually fairly practical. Except our generator was broken. So I left work, drove to town immediately with the idea that I might be able to get the last generator as they sold out given that everyone else surely would be also buying a generator. Then over the next month I watched as Costco stacked a huge pile of generators near the entrance, eventually hand sanitizer sold out, flu medication, Isopropyl alcohol, and finally TP. I think you can still get a generator though.

What city, if I may ask?

I've commented elsewhere on this, but in the Bay Area I saw evidence of people panic buying as far back as March 2nd.

Well, all these people consciously have chosen to fly at the time like this. It was clear that drastic travel disruption is imminent and chance of exposure is high on the plane, and yet they took the risk.

Wow, you're not even considering that each infection in that airport will come back and infect a bunch of people who didn't make the choice to fly?

IE we should not allow people to take risks that are going impact all of society.

The virus has exploded the American myth that we can isolate individual behavior to individual rewards but also this myth means the country is going to seriously suffer.

This. No self-preserving politician wold have reacted early to this. And you don't get to that level without being self-preserving.

Clearly self preservation stops at simple math.

We need to confront the fact that democracy in the West by now elects people who sell the most comfortable lies instead of people who help adaptation to reality.

Political leadership being self serving while convincing people that they are not has been true throughout history, and will continue to do so in the future. There is no way to stop this without modifying human nature itself. I cannot blame the voting populace, yet at the same time, I cannot blame the politicians either. They are part of a larger system of incentives.

Then perhaps we need a better version of democracy. Or a better system of government altogether.

I am hopeful that human civilization and ingenuity can invent or discover that. I am just not confident that it would be anytime soon.

The solution I think would be to somehow get people to lead who have no desire to do so. Politics attracts sociopaths and psychopaths due to the power involved. Competent and compassionate people have no time and patience for the power jockeying while sociopaths live for it. Thus you end up with a government by sociopaths for themselves. But how to make politics unappealing to sociopaths? Beats me.

There are enough honest, intelligent scientifically-minded people who want to be government leaders. They don't get elected. Current political system favors demagogues.

The trouble is that these people need to compete against a subset of people who want power more than anything else. These honest people decide it's not worth it, and get selected against and never make it to a position where they can affect change.

Alternatively, they do, and the process of getting there makes them less likely to do the things they wanted to do.

Bring back sortition!

It's not just democracy, it includes all forms of human organization, whether it be democratic or dictatorial. I believe it will only change once we genetically engineer people to be less self serving. Barring that, I don't see how one can solve this problem.

Taiwan's leadership, ahem. Only 50 or so cases and their approval rating has soared.

Same in Singapore. Helps having well paid experts run your government and a PM who definitely understands Math (Cambridge Senior Wrangler)

Does help when an effective leader is filling an otherwise poorly-occupied leadership position.

I guess anything less would be a dummy.

You don't have to be a mainstream follower to appreciate a high-performance leader

>who definitely understands Math

In future centuries we will look back and recognize this leadership characteristic is what has always been most advanced compared to all other outstanding choices.

Especially at times when the stakes get unusually high.

Organizations, communities, citizens, civilizations, and populations have always gone by the numbers.

And there's always a mainstream of some kind, with attitude being a thing among the moving weighted moving averages.

Seems like those furthest from the mainstream can also be most sensitive by nature to an _idiot-in-charge_ across various types of idiocy, and multiple levels of government, corporations, and other organizations.

Strongarm conformance and/or manipulated populism are some things that can give rise to a mainstream with ineffective recognition & response to dummy leaders and their destructive outcomes.

Since even a slightly above average problem-solving ability can make relatively genius moves compared to a slightly below average performer, it's tragic when there's not enough mainstream force to elevate the most mathematically competent leaders to handle high-stakes responsibilities.

Even more tragic when the mainstream is less-aware, and settles on preference for the dummy ones.

The science that this was not the flu was clear 6-8 weeks ago. Even if you thought china was under-reporting, it was clear what would happen. Then korea happened.

There was no excuse because there was never a chance for another outcome. The WHO was screaming into the void.

That argument might work at a national level. It works less well at a community level, and I think stops working for any community once there is observed community spread there.

After that point it is mathematically clear that you're going to have deaths, and that similarly situated communities who react days later will have a lot more deaths. At that point the political calculus you're arguing for flips the other way around and encourages an over-reaction. ... except innumeracy is so common, we're not seeing too much evidence of that happening.

The post-mortem (for want of a better term) on this will be pretty bad for some people in leadership positions. Assuming they survive. Very precious time was squandered with half-assed measures and uninformed decisions.

I don't share your optimism. We already seeing not acting recast as strategy.

At least German politicians had the sense to step aside and hand the mess they made to the scientific experts to clean up.

The UK's moronic lack of response?

I am not holding out much hope for the people responsible for this to face consequences for their mismanagement. Here in China Xi Jinping has already been recast as the man who led the country to victory in the "people's war", mere weeks after widespread condemnation of his administration's disastrous failure to respond. Once the media switches their focus from outrage at the politicians to feel-good stories of community solidarity, people will forget how angry they were. The political elite will weather the storm, even as thousands die on their watch.

Have you not been reading the news in the US and Europe the last few years? This is exactly what was to be expected from the current set of government leaders. Respect for expertise and rationality are considered disqualifying qualities in a politician nowadays.

I would think it's the current eco system that makes those who respect for expertise and rationailty happened to have some compettive advantages during the prodedure. They have better odds to be elected over their opponents. There are some observation supporting the hypothesis but too long to discuss here.

>science discredited and ignored

There is a large faction of people in the USA who believe this a politically motivated hoax. This is the world we are living in. How can we vote in competent leaders when a large faction holds such strong influence?

https://www.livescience.com/46123-many-americans-creationist...

This has nothing to do with the politicians.

This post is exactly the essence of why I don't like politics.

It's super easy to retrospectively say "they should've done something else". You might think that even you would do the right choice, but you are wrong.

Such decision is hard for any authority. You may vote for any person in the whole world and the result would probably be similar. Lockdown delivered too early could send whole country into chaos.

Also China managed this so well that it actually could work counterproductive for other countries.

What I'm trying to say is: Don't judge others. You have little idea of the situation they are in, and saying retrospectively "you should've known better" is just childish. Just learn from their mistakes.

With your attitude, you can choose any party and will always be unhappy about the choice.

Accountability is important.

Also - doing nothing until it is too late - not even educating - is not even a choice. It's not a strategy. Its dereliction of duty.

So if the govt waited until there were 30 million cases in the country in a four month period, that would be irresponsible? If it put 300k people in the hospital, that would be an unthinkable national disaster? What if it killed 20k people in just four months in just one country?

Those are the conservative figures for influenza in the USA since 2019 November.

Where was your outrage last year and the year before. Couldn't we have prevented this influenza tragedy from happening all over again. Is this also dereliction of duty?

> Don't judge others.

It is by observing others and judging their decisions and actions that we can learn and avoid other people's mistakes.

Is it not?

Judgement is pointing fingers.

What you are asking about is just drawing conclusions. I wouldn't mix those up.

> saying retrospectively "you should've known better" is just childish

European governments were not the first to have to deal with the epidemic (China), nor among the first few (Taiwan, Hong Kong, South Korea, Singapore etc.). They were fully aware of what happened in Wuhan without early action. They literally just had to follow what Taiwan, Singapore, South Korea etc were all doing. Those countries had less information and less time to act, and yet they're riding this much better than much of Europe.

So why _shouldn't_ European governments have known better?

As I said in my original post: China managed this so well that it could make others think that it was not that big of a deal.

Wasn't until it got Italy hard that most people opened their eyes.

But the point I was trying to make was that saying that somebody should've done something differently is not helping anybody. That's just complaining and nobody needs that.

> There is really no excuse for this happening in Europe. There was ample warning and no, not just from China. The math was very clear by early/mid February.

It might be worth revisiting top comments on HN threads relating to Covid19 in the past few weeks. Quite telling how much the 'know-it-all' folks actually know about the real world - makes you even more afraid that these are the same people who run countries and have an outsized influence in the public sphere.

> and that science has too long been discredited and ignored.

There are scandals in the sciences too. Peer review rings, studies that tend toward positive bias due to the pressure to publish, some studies being paid by big companies that favors their vested interests, etc.

Science is a product of human beings and not saints, so of course there are scandals. There always were. What's changed is that now that meme-ing is replacing thought, science is easier to attack, particularly by people with an agenda.

> The math was very clear by early/mid February

The leaders of the country, the people in power, and the populace are not math literate.

The leaders all have math literate advisors. They ignore them for a variety of reasons.

Politicians only listen to experts when it is politically convenient.

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