Epidemiologists and the medical field have made it clear we are _under_ reacting. But apparently some politicians want to down play the problem and their obfuscation is echoed in every corner of the web with great zeal and again drowning out reality.
It's like the climate change denial phenomenon but at high speed.
We need to figure out a way to get through the tribal mentality. Right now, a significant plurality (if not an actual majority) of people are more concerned about their side winning points than about effectively dealing with a crisis.
This is driven, as far as I understand it, by evolutionary psychology. It was an advantage to be "right enough, and unified" as opposed to "completely right, but divided", and an advantage to take care of "us" before taking care of "them." As a result, we are hard-wired toward tribalism.
Smart people are able to set this aside and deal with the facts as they are, but we still have to overcome the initial, emotional surge that takes offense whenever something we hold true is challenged.
One of the big issues is that people don't see immediate fallout from this sort of behavior on the national level. They vote for people who cut taxes for the rich and gut worker protections, but never connect that to their own financial ruin. The effect follows too far after, and too far from, the cause.
Politics, as a result, is treated like football: root for your team, because the other team sucks.
We might see some of that change as the bodies start piling up from COVID-19, but I doubt that there will be a larger societal change.
We'll quickly adopt patterns and opinions given by well known individuals without judging the output on its own merit. We'll follow tools, frameworks and trends that emerge from organizations without assessing its suitability for ourselves. In fact we will even twist our world view in order to accommodate someone else's reality, at detriment to ourselves. I specifically don't want to give examples, but you can come up with a few of you think about it.
It's a matter of course in our industry however so we don't really consider it to be analogous to the above problem, simply because we are inside the system. We see nothing wrong with what we're doing and are quick to judge outside groups on the same behaviours... Which makes it even more analogous!
But with today's amazing communication technology this means that strong opinions without evidence in support of ideological action for causes and reasons not grounded in reality gets broadcasted; low-quality opinion masquerading as facts.
But I think it may be possible to "hack" this lack of repercussion by a platform/institution where reporters/publishers can artificially promise repercussions for themselves that so-and-so statement is true. e.g. betting that a claim is true, and allowing anyone to challenge your claim with contrary evidence by posting a higher stake, that if the challenge meets some platform/institution-wide threshold for rules of evidence, allows the challenger to pocket up to half of the prior claim's stake (the remaining becomes the stake for the new claim), else the challenger loses their stake and the prior claim stands. Of course, the evidence needs to meet a certain standard.
The hope is that non-bogus rules of evidence end up supporting only a theory of very sane and reasonable facts, whereas bogus rules of evidence end up allowing a lot of bogus claims to stand unchallenged that are not falsifiable, or that claims are too easily contradicted, so that it becomes easy for people to tell real information from ideological polemic, and also invites challenge from fact-checkers and competing interests.
If the collective "we" (if there is such a coherent thing) were to listen primarily to experts, we would need to constantly shift which expert to which we are listening, depending on the problem of the day. Additionally, each of those experts would have to take time out of their expert practice area to become a highly skilled communicator.
Is the Surgeon General an expert or politician/media figure? Is the WHO reflective of experts all the time or is it an institution with political and media concerns?
Beyond that, even the politics is not falling in predictable lines. There was a report this morning that the mayor of New York wants to reopen the schools in a few weeks.
It is great that attention is now being paid to this subject. Although the overall suicide rate has continued to _rise_ in spite of 11 years of a rising DOW, the suicide rate among those approaching retirement has risen significantly in the last decades. From past trends we know this is directly related to social security[2]. I sincerely hope the attention continues and solutions are pursued and deeply hope that, as some think, it is not a cynical ploy.
Likewise, I hope the sudden concern for food security among the vulnerable poor continues.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Epidemiology_of_suicide
[2] https://books.google.com/books?id=ESSEHA5TyoIC&pg=PA360&lpg=...
No doubt social security (Social Security?) does affect those of us who are older. I can personally attest, though, that there are a lot of other factors that also come into play (and in my opinion may be more important).
If for political reasons we refuse the European approach then the concern is not that fatality counts and epidemiologist will be balanced by economist but that epidemiologist and economists will be balanced by lobbyists.
As if to underscore this point, the order for 80,000 ventilators[1] was stopped yesterday on grounds that it was too expensive[2]. The cost at 1 billion is equivalent to 1/4 to 1/12 of 1% of the total F-35 order at 428 to 1196 billion [3] And the f-35 order is already controversial to begin with.
[1] https://twitter.com/realdonaldtrump/status/12417326813664829...
[2] https://www.nytimes.com/2020/03/26/us/politics/coronavirus-v...
[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lockheed_Martin_F-35_Lightning...
Re the ventilators, the most obvious standard would be not the F-35 cost, but rather what we pay to support a statistical life under other circumstances (e.g., medicaid, EMS services, etc.) No idea what the right balance is, but we don't want people to needlessly die because we overshot on the ventilators.
Yes obviously they take the main blame.
but also others.
From Jan,
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/01/29/opinion/coronavirus-panic...
> China’s response appears to be driven by political considerations more than epidemiological ones. The government has imposed a travel lockdown on more than 35 million people, which experts say is a quarantine of unprecedented size and scale, yet it may not even turn out to be very effective.
what about the nameless experts media has been quoting to float their conspiracy theories. Will these ppl take some of the blame for eroding people's trust in experts?
I was referring to this.
Author isn't interpreting it as "we don't know".