Hacker News Reader

> It'd be nice to have a centralised, low bandwidth well moderated information source for the smartest 5-10% of people to get good information in response to their questions and uncertainties.

Any such channel which is truly open to questions immediately gets swamped by political attacks, along with an endless horde who think they're in the smartest 5% yet accuse the scientists of being in the pocket of the lizard people. Malicious agents will be able to mine even slightly nuanced explanations for out of context quotes to show that their political opponents are stupid or evil. If the channel is to be useful at all, it must make statements under uncertainty, but that gives it the chance of being occasionally wrong -- and anything it ever gets wrong will be repeated ad nauseum as an argument to defund it. If the channel is visible and trusted, it also becomes a prime target for politicians looking to shift blame away from themselves.

The reason I'm completely sure this will happen is that the information channel you're asking for already exists. It's called the World Health Organization, and they've been doing informative press conferences this whole time. However, everybody on this site has decided that they're useless because of a single, incorrectly read, out-of-context tweet from 4 months ago.

> It's called the World Health Organization

That's a political organization, not what is being proposed here.

You’re perfectly illustrating what I talked about.

But the objection is perfectly valid. They are a political organization that sometimes places politics over reality (for example, refusing to recognize Taiwan, repeating Chinese reports unchallenged and praising China's transparency, or as another comment pointed out, appointing Robert Mugabe as goodwill ambassador).

That internal challenge should be added to your excellent list of external challenges the proposed organization would face, and the WHO does face: politically motivated people and powerful nations will capture the organization from the inside and abuse any trust it has built up to serve their own ends.

> refusing to recognize Taiwan

So it wouldn't be political if they did recognise Taiwan? No one on Earth besides a few Caribbean islands recognises the ROC and yet somehow the WHO has no credibility for doing the same.

Very much making the GP's point for them without even realising here.

Mugagbe is a perfect illustration of that. They were trying to tackle non-communicable diseases in Zimbabwe, getting him on board and giving him a meaningless title was their plan. Instead of seeing it as a boon for the poor in the country, people decided to make it political and demanded he not get the worthless honor. Either outcome had absolutely zero effect on the people screaming the loudest about it.

Put the politics aside for a moment and ask yourself the question: Would health outcomes for the poorest Zimbabweans be better or worse if Mugabe had kept the title?

The fact is, the Republic of China exists and is independent of the People's Republic of China. They have a military and a government that doesn't answer to Beijing, and have maintained that government in Taipei for 70 years.

That's reality.

Recognizing reality need not be political, but refusing to recognize reality for political reasons definitely is.

But the main point is that politics, not medicine or science, is dictating the WHO's decision here. Would health outcomes for the Taiwanese be better if the WHO included Taiwan?

As for Mugabe, you're arguing that it was good politics by some measure, and it may very well have been, but it also erodes faith in the organization from people who don't think it was good politics.

> Would health outcomes for the poorest Zimbabweans be better or worse if Mugabe had kept the title?

If we assume that outcomes would have been better, that implies that listening to the WHO does improve health, and therefore we should also assume that other people who would have lost faith in the organization would have had worse health outcomes as a result. I don't know how it would all balance out, but again, the point is merely that it's a political decision, not a scientific one.

> Recognizing reality need not be political, but refusing to recognize reality for political reasons definitely is.

Getting China offside means 1 in 5 people on Earth would no longer get WHO advice and state media would undermine them at every turn.

Getting Taiwan on side means appeasing political activists in the West and having little if any measurable positive health outcomes, the Taiwanese are used to this state of affairs and have more than competent doctors and lawmakers, they are one of the smartest countries on Earth.

Despite the closeness and affection between my own country and them, when their foreign minister visits they don't go near parliament or meet elected officials in public, they go to trade shows and meet with industry.

As much as it might pain some to accept, compromises are the best outcome for all here, the WHO is being realistic about the position they are in. Hopefully more sideline commentators can be too.

>Getting China offside means 1 in 5 people on Earth would no longer get WHO advice and state media would undermine them at every turn.

Doesn't sound like a bad thing if you like Chinese people. WHO has been consistently wrong about everything and is pretty much useless.

> Getting China offside means 1 in 5 people on Earth would no longer get WHO advice and state media would undermine them at every turn.

Basically you're saying the same thing I'm saying. Authoritarian nations are allowed to dictate WHO policy in order to keep them "onside".

You're just arguing that it's necessary, and I'm inclined to agree, but it's also the reason the WHO is not an impartial or trustworthy source of information. And it's probably impossible for any such organization to be so at this time.

> However, everybody on this site has decided that they're useless because of a single, incorrectly read, out-of-context tweet from 4 months ago.

Actually, they lost any credibility to me when they wanted to appoint Robert Mugabe as an ambassador years ago.

In more recent times, their position on the use of masks was criticized as confusing[1].

And let's not forget their equally confusing tweet on immunity to SARS-CoV-2 from a week ago or so (which was ultimately retracted). So not just one from 4 months ago.

Of course it's a big organization, so caveats apply. Nevertheless, they didn't do the best job at communication.

[1] https://blogs.bmj.com/bmj/2020/03/11/whos-confusing-guidance...

I agree in principle with your wish for some neutral <unquote>, informed, apolitical, insightful, measured, and cautious commentary that distils the current consensus.

But it sounds like a lot of the concerns you express are specifically around the problems that are currently being experienced by one poorly administered country.

I think elsewhere in the world, a lot of people feel they're already getting this level of information, without the political overload & misdirection.

I reject the notion that Australia is poorly administered. Our COVID-19 cases are extremely low [0] and the government has been doing a fine job compared to most others.

:)

[0] https://www.health.nsw.gov.au/news/Pages/20200503_00.aspx

Aren't the cases low because the temperatures were high when the virus first hit (and are still comparatively high)?

I'm sure Italy would have done better in the summer with 30 degrees Celsius.

Do you have any data to support the assertion that higher temperatures help calm Covid rates? Seeing as Singapore is having an extremely tough time right now, I don’t think you do. This is pure supposition.

It's a well-known correlation with influenza. Yes it may be untrue with Corona Virus, but that remains to be seen. It would be unusual if the correlation didn't hold.

Please stop insisting we have evidence when none exists.

My question was: do we have evidence that warm weather slows Covid outbreaks?

So far, the answer is “no”, and asserting anything else is not an argument, it’s a made up story.

Asserting that there is absolutely no temperature dependence without evidence is pretty much the same thing as asserting there absolutely is without evidence. If there is no data, the best choice is to say that you don't know while coming up with plausible hypotheses. That a virus might share some traits with other closely related viruses is not so uncommon. Extrapolation from prior evidence when no direct evidence is available is one of the main capabilities of the scientific method. This is pretty far from a 'made up story.'

It's a bit of moot point though. Because of the extremely plausible nature of the idea that covid might have some temperature dependence, there are many people investigating this specific claim. With a cursory web search, you can find several papers and pre-prints on the subject, a small majority of which find evidence to support that trend.

Saying that temperature can't affect covid transmission because Singapore is having a tough time is akin to suggesting climate change isn't real because it snowed in April. It is just one data point.

There was a nice article about similar coronavirus. No virus is exactly equal to the other virus, but the comparison can be helpful. https://www.quantamagazine.org/what-can-other-coronaviruses-... (HN discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23019199 | 204 points | days ago | 189 comments)

Singapore is doing fine and has one the lowest death rates in the world.

Nearly 100x less than the global average for case fatalities. For all these people testing positive no one is actually dying, most don't even have symptoms.

hasn't it been shown that vitamin-D deficiency has been shown as an aggravating factor in case mortality with covid? It's not a big extrapolation then to suggest places with warm sunshine would tend to have better outcomes.

What make you sure?

There's no evidence that higher temperatures have an effect on disease transmission.

https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/Papers.cfm?abstract_id=3551767

> "My normal position is fairly anti-government, but.... Targeted at people who are really quite clever.... It'd be nice to have a centralised, low bandwidth well moderated information source for the smartest 5-10% of people"

that only reveals ego and information blindness. it's hard to triangulate toward the truth, much less a plan, with that kind of blindness, no matter the composition of expertise. smart people may know more of their little patch of elephant, but make no mistake, they know nothing of the whole elephant. it's so easy to miss massive swaths of the elephant because you're too smart to ask the simplest questions first.

luckily, an easy first-order fix is to not dictate the composition of the audience asking questions. pick at random. then you'll get a truer picture of the bewildering complexity of the elephant and a better sense of where to take that (and a truer picture of the information holes between the panelists to fill for next time).

besides, what you ask for is simply the standard academic seminar at any major research university.

This doesn't address the problem, it only moves it. These kinds of panels already exist in many countries on many topics -- I've worked with several. In all cases, the selection of the panel and the positions they take have political motivations. They are never constructed as a random sample of domain experts. Even when trying to achieve that appearance, "domain expert" is defined so as to justify the exclusion of many inconvenient domain experts from consideration. None of which should be surprising, since this is basic human nature.

Indeed, the functional purpose of these kinds of panels, based on what they actually do, is to lend an air of authority to decisions that were made politically. For the participants, they are paid in prestige, which is a valuable currency.

A friend of mine runs a relatively popular blog on climate change. In this blog he discusses current research (including his own) in a manner targeted at relatively educated people. Its exactly the sort of thing you want.

He receives hate mail constantly. Major players in political administrations troll his comment section and evade bannings. Its a mess.

I don't know if what you describe is feasible.

This would be the CDC. They stopped doing those briefings at the, uh, request of the President.

https://thehill.com/homenews/administration/494187-trump-thr...

Normally, this is the role of peer review and top publishing venues. Those places should be putting a big push to rigorously review as many articles as and as fast as possible now.

Try r/covid19