The first is hierarchy - most people get their idea of true/false right/wrong through the social structure they're embedded in, and from who they consider senior and look up to. This is pretty fixed even if the senior figure gets something conspicuously wrong.
The second is consistency; beliefs usually come in sets, and they're often tied together by being supported by the same sources (see above). And it's especially tempting to have a consistent set of beliefs that happen to be wrong, rather than deal with the messy inconsistency and uncertainty of the real world. This is why people don't get partially deprogrammed from cults.
The third is loyalty and identity group membership; this is the peer-to-peer version of "hierarchy" above. Disagreement is an attack on the peer group. The extreme version of this is seen in religions who will ostracise unbelievers. If you want to stop being a Mormon or a JW you may have to walk away from everyone you've ever known.
"Sources" are fairly useless in this situation unless you can find one that's already inside the target's perception of loyalty and hierarchy. Anything from outside can be easily dismissed.
Fixed your last sentence.
I was stressing too much over it and it drives me insane people are so stubborn without any data to back their claims. If provided data they just wave it aside with a random argument and move immediately on to another topic within the subject criticizing something else, so you have to keep extremely sharp in all topics or they just swing from side to side until they find a topic you have no information about and start making shit up, since you don't want to reach conclusions without data they win there as they just create stuff out of thin air.
It's crazy, looks like debate club where the other party never gives up or surrender no matter what happens.
They won, I just do my best to educate the my small ones into critical thinking, save as much money as I can to have some fat for the next shit that comes up and hope for the best. Basically If people are so stupid to behave like that, it's not my problem anymore, my plan is to have enough to take care of my family.
> Arguing with stupid is like wrestling with pig in mud. After some time you see that pig seems to like it.
> Arguing with stupid is like playing chess with a pigeon. It will topple figures, shit in board and be proud of winning.
The problem is when their stupidity affects your life.
“Never argue with stupid people, they will drag you down to their level and then beat you with experience.”
Attributed to Mark Twain
And today you learned something. You're welcome. Hopefully that was a good momentary distraction and you didn't have to thing about all the idiots who think covid isn't really all that bad for a couple seconds. :)
> “Someone who’s dying from a bad pneumonia will ultimately die because the heart stops,” said Dr. Robert Bonow, a professor of cardiology at the Northwestern University Feinberg School of Medicine and editor of the medical journal JAMA Cardiology. “You can’t get enough oxygen into your system and things go haywire.”
> But Bonow and many other cardiac specialists believe a COVID-19 infection could lead to damage to the heart in four or five ways. Some patients, they say, might be affected by more than one of those pathways at once.
> ...But Bonow said the damage observed in COVID-19 patients could be from the virus directly infecting the heart muscle. Initial research suggests the coronavirus attaches to certain receptors in the lungs, and those same receptors are found in heart muscle as well.
> In March, doctors from China published two studies that gave the first glimpse at how prevalent cardiac problems were among patients with COVID-19 illness. The larger of the two studies looked at 416 hospitalized patients. The researchers found that 19% showed signs of heart damage. And those who did were significantly more likely to die: 51% of those with heart damage died versus 4.5% who did not have it.
> ...That work has already resulted in changes in the way hospitals deal with the cardiac implications of COVID-19. Doctors have found that the infection can mimic a heart attack. They have taken patients to the cardiac catheterization lab to clear a suspected blockage, only to find the patient wasn’t really experiencing a heart attack but had COVID-19.
I think it's impossible (with the current state of technology) to determine the actual cause in patients with comorbidities. The patients died _with_ coronavirus in these statistics rather than _from_ coronavirus.
Anyway, it's hard to argue with those people. But if you look at the average deaths a country has per month, and see the increase because of Covid, you should be able to infer something is wrong with just a bit of common sense.
Heart failure causes a drop of oxygen in the blood, which leads to multiple organ failure. Direct cause of death is often kidney shutdown.
People have a tendency to look for 'one' cause for an outcome. Sometimes there's just multiple causes I think.
You have read incorrect information. Only deaths "where the disease caused or is assumed to have caused or contributed to death" [1].
Of course, there will be errors. As with any number, especially one reported daily.
BTW: there are also reasons for COVID deaths being underreported, so the bias in the number isn't really one way.
[1] https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/data/nvss/coronavirus/Alert-2-New-I...
This is the difference between proximate and ultimate causes.
However there is also a good chance that even if covid-19 isn't the only contributor to a person's death. For example a person with heart disease can extract enough O2 from the air to live but because of there disease they are below the normal human amount. Then comes along covid-19 with futher reduces their body's effectiveness and the person doesn't have enought air to live.
Nothing you can do can convince them that the coronavirus is real. They fundamentally deny that it exists even as it knocks on their door.
https://theweek.com/speedreads/907411/youtube-bans-coronavir...
When someone has a heart attack and dies how do we know they had covid-19? We're mostly not testing people. We don't test the dead people. So we know or suspect they have covid-19 before they die. This is not a bunch of asymptomatic people dropping dead from expected causes then being labelled as covid-19 deaths, it's a bunch of people with severe symptoms who are dying and having multiple causes listed on the certificate, one of which will be covid-19.
Here's a useful thread that looks at the "they would have died anyway" comments: https://twitter.com/ActuaryByDay/status/1246866119597621248
> now that currently if someone dies, say on Heart Disease, and has positively tested on Covid-19, that the death cause is counted as Covid-19.
We know that covid-19 causes myocarditis, and that this is a significant cause of death for lots of covid-19 patients.
Covid deaths in healthy people and
Covid-related with comorbidity deaths.
When you're lying on your deathbed drowning in the effluvia of necrotic lung tissue at least you can rest easy in the knowledge that your humanity didn't count and you're just a statistic, but at least you helped a wealthy person avoid not making as much money as he could have.
If we know that one part of the population can withstand the disease well and another is susceptible to it we can develop ways to navigate that.
Those baseless beliefs, conspiracy theories, denials and other seemingly pointless normalcy biases seems to occur when the reality is somewhat “substantial”, even if it might not be for you/me right now.
I can’t say which of those people are ill, those who have , or those who don’t have that kind of “plain wrong internet opinions”, because the former could be a more environment resilient form of thinking. Those people are functional IRL, so there must be more than just being idiots.
I mean, it certainly allows a lot of logical simplification... what if that was one requirement for self sustaining sentience...to be able to be casually schizophrenic? That would be too much of reality for me...
"Bowling Alone" is a good book that tries to explore the underlying reasons for this development, that started some time in the 1960s.
The current "war" in cyberspace probably contributes to it as well. Here is an interesting interview with a US four star general about that new area of conflict: https://youtu.be/qOTYgcdNrXE
I mean if you see the situation in Italy and Spain and you still say "it is just flu, nothing different then usual" then there is no reality that can save you, maybe if you get sick and end in one of those hospitals...
I think hospitals should maintain enough capacity to handle influx. I think that people should wear masks and wash their hands. But none of that changes what I wrote above. And it doesn’t change the fact that many, many people have a fetish for doom. It’s the same with global warming or the second coming of Christ — a kernel of truth or good intention becomes a mass fetish for doom and no reasonable discourse can survive.
Herd immunity would still mean millions of dead people you'd have to step over.
The countries that thought they could go this route did a hard reverse once reality hit them.
This disease is now the #1 cause of death in America. Nothing like a trifling total; nothing like a drop; nothing like an ignorable fraction. Very, very significant.
Are you going to atoms in the universe next?
So following this logic lets shut down all hospitals and stop treating all illnesses?
There's also some paranoia because this is new, and because of the fear of asymptomatic carriers. That makes people think they're helpless and have no way of protecting themselves. A loss of control is an important factor in creating terror.
That being said, this virus does truly appear worse. Wherever that fear threshold is for people, this virus has crossed it.
What negates this thinking is hard mathematics ie that all the other things don't kill at a _geometric_ rate. If left unchecked millions of people will die in a short amount of time.
Yes flu also progress similarly but we have vaccines for the flu and we manage it seasonally. Even considering the CFR for covid-19 will drop substantially it is still killing by OOM more people across all age brackets without co-morbidities (not to mention medics) which the flu doesn't do.
Should we be lucky enough for Covid-19 to have the same disease burden as the worst flu season as of late, and not the disease burden it's actually projected to have, several orders of magnitude more people will die than they would from the flu. So no, compared to 7 billion, they are not basically the same.
Your "really good points" hinge on a shaky understanding of statistics at best, or just outright ignoring the available data at worst.
The majority of people weren't in WTC either...
Those people are neither "deniers" nor "callous".
It's not really the peoples fault, it's all the disinformation, bad reporting and incompetent governments. I work at a critical facility on a skeleton crew. I hide in my office, wear gloves out in the shop, and wash wash wash wash my hands. Though, at work most people have these impressions, all parroted from bad press and advice:
"you only need face masks if you are sick to prevent the spread."
"It's the flu, you can't avoid it."
"everyone is going to catch it eventually"
"you only need to worry if you're really old or have an underlying condition"
- The true number of people who are infected.
- The death rate, which would require that we know how many people are or have been infected.
- The number of people who have tested positive and then died of COVID-19, rather than a pre-existing condition.
- The number of people who have already had COVID-19. Data from various sources show that up to 75 percent of people may be asymptomatic.
Some people--not all--look at the degree of uncertainty in the data and conclude that "experts" can't possibly know what they claim to know. It just isn't possible.
The "cure" for such people will be widespread testing or at least randomized testing.
But here is the biggest one: at pandemic level, it's much more productive and safer for everyone to assume that they are potentially infected, and wear mask to prevent spreading it elsewhere. In my country, when facing guidelines of social distancing, a lot of people are responding with "I am healthy, and I don't really care if I got infected so I should be able to go outside and do everything I want". And if you follow it up with "You might not care about your health, but you might spread it to other people, so you should still stay home", their answer is "Are you saying I am infected? I am not". Your argument is suspiciously similar to that line of reasoning.
Yes, non-medical mask might not block things coming into your body, but everyone is a potential carrier, and if everyone wears a mask, society gets safer, quicker.
That's not creepy at all! /s
> I don't really agree with any of your reasoning
And that's okay! It's good to apply a healthy dose of skepticism, especially when neither of us have all the facts. We can agree to disagree for now, and I may even change my mind as I get more verifiable info.
Thank you for sharing your opinion.
With these people stories and narratives work better than facts and figures. Try sharing articles of people suffering and/or losing their loved ones.
HN types use numbers to assess impact, these folks judge impact by how much emotion they've been lead to feel.
Maybe a reminder of that would help. "It doesn't actually make it better, to just ignore it. It isn't going to go away if you pretend?"
Consider smoking kills 1,300 per day (480,000 per year) in the US. That isn’t a contagious virus it’s a product you literally have to purchase and use for decades and people still do it. Think about before it was common knowledge that smoking killed and how it was ingrained in culture and how it took decades to remove smoking from air planes, school, restaurants, even hospitals. Even now with knowledge of the risk/dangers and social changes 1,300 die everyday.
I’m not trying to make it a whataboutism, but to highlight the difficulty in getting people to change their behavior even if it means death. For example, this virus seems to kill mostly people with chronic diseases (hypertension, diabetes, heart disease, obesity) which are all dietary diseases and responsible for about 1M deaths per year in the US, this is common knowledge and the fact this virus is most deadly to that group...yet how many people will actually take steps to change and improve their diet and lifestyle?
To your point/question I’m not sure how you change people’s behavior...I mean we could right now eradicate all new cases of type 2 diabetes moving forward by getting people to eat a certain way, but people would rather argue about that than actually curb their behavior
Please read the newspaper article about the crona-denying pastor who went to Florida, got infected and died. According to his son he very well knew the virus was not a hoax and his stand came from "being frustrated with the media pushing Corona with a political agenda" (not a verbatim quote but it's in the ballpark).
There are fairly influential figures out there pushing far more dangerous stories. The virus was manufactured by Bill Gates in order to push a vaccine that contains a tracking microchip. The virus being caused by 5g is another one.
For those, I just don't have a clue how to deal with.
If you throw a rock on a dude he will deny the existance of the rock until right after the broken nose stage.
First, it just does not matter at all what most people think. The scientific way would be to develop a good model to see whose opinions actually matter, directly or indirectly (network effects).
Second, there is an endless stream of deaths and births. If you look at the rate that you can possibly achieve to educate people and - far more important - to develop trust, you have to set this "rate of education and trust development" vs. the "rate of exchange in the population". Then it's easy to see that it's an unsustainable idea to try to educate everyone.
Third, what really matters is trust, education about a particular subject comes in with significant distance. The vast majority of people who "believe in [evolution, corona, 'science'" are actually just as clueless as those who don't. That's not criticism, that's just human brain capacity. Ask any real science questions, e.g. from freshman tests in college, and see how many of the "believers" are able to answer.
So I think a better approach is to not dwell on the problem that "x amount of people don't believe in...". It's the wrong problem. It is not possible to solve, unless you have a static extremely long-lived society. Instead, create a system that acknowledges the problem and finds solutions. Like, don't try to convince each and every person of the dangers of a pandemic. Just create rules and enforce them, period. Of course, this works best when people trust the "system", government etc. But solving that trust issue is the far better solution instead of hand-wringing about people's "stupidity", which I think is missing the point completely. There is no way around this so-called "stupidity", and IMO the far bigger issue is a lack of trust.
I'm with Sherlock Holmes and his famous statement about (sort of, don't remember exact words) "what do I care about the solar system and if the earth revolves around the sun?". If somebody works as a butcher, for example, their views of the solar system and of corona should not matter one bit. (Yes they elect politicians - but what does that have to do with anything?)
Yes of course it would be nice with more people knowing more stuff. I myself took lots and lots of (uni) courses way outside my own field just for fun. However, I think looking at that as a solution is looking at a non-solution and a distraction. That would be a bonus to make things better, not what makes it all work at all.
I'm shocked.
(Meanwhile, half the COVID-19 threads are people pissed off because the US did take a technocratic approach to mask recommendations and they hate it because programmers don't get to be part of the inner circle of public health decision makers.)
Literally the point of the site, mang. Like, you're not wrong, but that's the default response to everything posted on HN -- shouldn't be a surprise.
One of the major issues is the Boomers are hitting that delicate age where things start to kill them instead of being shrugged off. Trying to protect the 50-70 cohort is the real dance here.
Now consider a home with four people under 50. The chance of someone in that home getting unlucky is then around 1 in 5. There is only a 81% chance of all four "being out of action for a week or two then getting back up unaided".
I'm cautious and I'm not about to venture out of my apartment until we all know what is going on, but the data we have so far isn't a compelling story that would convince everyone.
Let them learn from their own experience or let them see it with their own eyes. There is a theory that anti-vacc is on the rise, because people does not know anybody who suffered from the grave consequences of the diseases which we have vaccines to prevent.
The same probably applies to the COVID-19. That's why I'm wondering, why the news are not full of videos about what is happing in the hospitals and why they are not trying to show what it is really like to have serious symptomps because of the infection.
Funny you mentioned that. The reason most EU citizens are okay with the lockdown is a video from Lombardi showing doctors removing an old man from a respirator (basically killing him) to save a younger man.
> bro crowd ...
> dense crowd ...
> bashing their heads ...
Maybe it's your tone?
Political discussion isn't so much about the exchange of views anymore, but about "winning" and "destroying" the other side.
And there is a reason for that. There is an interesting interview with a US 4-Star General about the topic of "controlling the public" in cyberspace: https://youtu.be/qOTYgcdNrXE
Here's a nice talking point:
https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/daily-deaths-covid-19?cou...
In the US, the number of deaths has doubled since last week. That site has many other interesting charts.