Comment by ohlookabird | Hacker News Reader

Comment by ohlookabird | Hacker News Reader

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Thanks, will definitely read it, but on a first glance I couldn't see any information on your background or experience in the field of epidemiology or a related science. It would definitely help to put your thoughts into context and if you have a background in this field it would give your collection of thoughts more weight.

With all the misinformation going around I resorted to mainly listen to scientists in the relevant fields directly (if you speak German, the NDR podcast with Prof. Drosten is really nice in my opinion). Therefore I think it really helpful if research institutions and researchers themselves who are in that field (!) are vocal (but reserved and competent) about studies and thoughts. For instance, today the four big research institutions in Germany (Max Planck, Helmholtz, Leibnitz, Frauenhofer) published a joint message in favor of social distancing and contact restrictions: https://www.nytimes.com/reuters/2020/04/29/world/europe/29re...

Edit: I only found the German press release so far: https://www.mpg.de/14759871/corona-stellungnahme

I have no directly relevant credentials whatsoever and don't claim to. (I actually considered saying as such in the writeup but it's already so verbose that I felt it wasn't worth it).

I'm just a dude that likes to read research papers. As an aside, there is totally an archetype of the software engineer that thinks they're equipped to dive into unrelated fields, and I definitely match that trope. I will say in my defense though, that I try to build simple mental models and take them to their logical conclusion, which is a quality that I see in people I admire, and conversely a quality that I find lacking in people that I feel don't have a lot of insight.

Many might disagree but I am a very strong believer that arguments should be evaluated on their merits, rather than credentials. Indeed having credentials makes it that much easier to fall prey to cognitive distortions.

When have some expertise, you should absolutely evaluate ideas on their merits.

When you lack the expertise to do that effectively, you should listen to the experts (ideally those that demonstrate that they are evaluating ideas based on their merits).

The trick is determine which questions you have the expertise to evaluate for yourself and which you are better of relying on experts to evaluate.

Unfortunately, this is an area where a large number of non-experts vastly overestimate the difficulty of the material vs their own level of knowledge. This leads to the increasing proliferation of misinformation and misleading analysis like yours.

Credentials are not the only way to acquire or demonstrate expertise. You say you are a "dude that likes to read research papers", how many epidemiological research papers have you read? How much time have you spent discussing those papers with epidemiological experts? Did you reach out to any of those experts to have them take a first pass as fixing any mistakes you made before you decided to post it publicly

Instead you decided to broadcast your ignorance with confidence about an area already ripe with misinformation that is costing people their lives.

You are being irresponsible.

Absolutely wrong. Analysis done by informed laymen is essential in breaking intellectual logjams in established fields. These situations happen over and over again in history. It's increasingly looking like we have one of these logjams in public health right now.

Ideas need to be evaluated on their merits in all cases, especially in times of controversy.

> Analysis done by informed laymen is essential in breaking intellectual logjams in established fields.

Which is why it is important that people with the expertise evaluate those ideas on their merits.

What doesn't help is when less informed laymen think they can accurately judge the validity of ideas put forward by slightly more informed laymen.

What active hurts is when those less informed laymen start spreading their half-balked ideas and trying to impact policy without making an effort to get their ideas validated by people with the experience to find the simple, obvious errors they are making.

> without making an effort to get their ideas validated by people

Me posting this is literally me doing that, so your visible irritation is very oddly placed.

HN is a platform dominated by laymen in this field. Posting this article here is an attempt to publish and widen distribution. It is not an attempt to reach out to people with expertise prior to publishing.

> Credentials are not the only way to acquire or demonstrate expertise. You say you are a "dude that likes to read research papers", how many epidemiological research papers have you read? How much time have you spent discussing those papers with epidemiological experts? Did you reach out to any of those experts to have them take a first pass as fixing any mistakes you made before you decided to post it publicly

> Instead you decided to broadcast your ignorance with confidence about an area already ripe with misinformation that is costing people their lives.

This is not a fair characterization; I was very clear that this represented my "first draft" and that I was looking for feedback specifically to have people poke holes in it.

Fortunately, a lot of people did have substantive contributions that pointed out errors or places where the arguments were weak, as opposed to merely engaging in sanctimonious gatekeeping as you are doing.

> This is not a fair characterization; I was very clear that this represented my "first draft" and that I was looking for feedback specifically to have people poke holes in it.

Where was this made clear? The closest I can see is at the very end where you call it a living document and will accept pull requests that match the "style and intentions of this document" which to me sounds like you are only interested in meeting pull requests that strength your argument to further your intended narrative.

I appreciate your adding a disclaimer about your lack of relevant experience, but even it says nothing about this being a "first draft" that you expect to have holes poked in.

So I fully stand behind my characterization and I find your use of the term "sanctimonious gatekeeping" to far less of a "fair characterization".

Okay, I half concede your point. I expressed the desire to have holes poked in my top-level comment contextualizing HN submission / thread comments itself, but did not make clear reference to it in the document itself. So the external dependency means that you are by-and-large correct.

The part I don't concede is this notion:

> Instead you decided to broadcast your ignorance with confidence about an area already ripe with misinformation that is costing people their lives.

In that, it strays far too close to the dangerous notion of "advocating for ending the lockdown, however flawed, is killing people". Which is a notion I cannot and probably never will be able to get behind.

> In that, it strays far too close to the dangerous notion of "advocating for ending the lockdown, however flawed, is killing people".

I have no problem with advocating to end the lockdown. We need to do it as soon as practicable. You ar correct in supposing that a lockdown that lasts longer than necessary ends lives. I think there are some good steps we can take towards that, such as reopening underutilized hospitals in areas where that utilization has plateued.

You are doing more than that, you are trying to summarize everything we know about covid. In an environment with so much misinformation about covid floating around that is demonstrably dangerous, it behooves is to be extra care to not feed into that cycle.

> I have no directly relevant credentials whatsoever and don't claim to.

IMO this should be a disclaimer in bold right at the very top of the article.

Done.

https://gitlab.com/ryankemper/writings/-/commit/05b4b616c5e0...

Thanks, it’s a good commitment to representing your argument clearly and does you credit.

> Indeed having credentials makes it that much easier to fall prey to cognitive distortions

And having no credentials makes it even easier to make blatantly wrong assessments, to read the data incorrectly, to completely misunderstand terms of art, to accidentally believe that because you are smart, you can evaluate another field easily with some hard thinking.

Having no credentials means you are likely to not know what you don't know, and so gloss over an entire section of a field when making conclusions. It means not having worked with similar data before to help build a "sniff test" for when something in your work doesn't look right.

The difference between no credentials and credentials in assessing a complex topic and communicating that to a broad audience is as a vast as the difference between the seasonal flu and coronavirus.

I have no directly relevant credentials whatsoever and don't claim to. (I actually considered saying as such in the writeup but it's already so verbose that I felt it wasn't worth it).

This doesn't really pass the sniff test. You wrote 7500 words on this topic, but felt that including "I have zero experience in any relevant fields" would be overly verbose? Are you sure there wasn't another reason?

arguments should be evaluated on their merits, rather than credentials

It's not about credentials, it's about relevant knowledge and experience, without which it can be very difficult to actually properly evaluate the merits.

> This doesn't really pass the sniff test. You wrote 7500 words on this topic, but felt that including "I have zero experience in any relevant fields" would be overly verbose? Are you sure there wasn't another reason?

https://gitlab.com/ryankemper/writings/-/commit /05b4b616c5e0017b0f80682533399c8696d897b5

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