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Comment by ryankemper | Hacker News Reader

> 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.

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> 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.

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