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Comment by Taek | Hacker News Reader

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.

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

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

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.

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

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?

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

Surely the hand sanitizer shelf was empty too?

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

Tofu was surprisingly empty here.

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

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.

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.

wow

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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!

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