Hacker News Reader

Comment by bmarquez | Hacker News Reader

> with respect to contrarian coverage of the pandemic

How is contrarian coverage "pseudoscience"?

An example of contrarian coverage is the suicide rate rising due to the Bay Area stay-at-home order: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23269396

View on HN

How is a report from medical professionals on an abc affiliate contrarian?

Because by far the dominant narrative among urban, educated people is that continuing lockdowns are worth it because they prevent death from COVID-19. Arguments that the lockdowns are doing more harm than good are (wrongly, IMHO) associated with political conservatism, rejection of science, and so on.

Thus, evidence of the harm of lockdowns can be considered contrarian, regardless of whether it comes from medical professionals.

I have never been in an accident where I was helped by wearing a seatbelt, and preparations for Y2K cost many times more than any of the harm that was caused by Y2K bugs. Considering that I've never experienced malnutrition, I seem to waste a lot of time money and effort on nutrition, too.

Ignoring mental health consequences of difficult times is foolish, but this sounds much more like it was a "well, actually" sort of conversation meant to stroke people's egos.

The argument isn't that that point of view is correct. The argument is that it should be allowed to be presented.

Do they want to present it or to misrepresent it?

The problem is that Google is exposed to political, financial, and legislative risks from all sides -- or else Google would host all content, including pirated movies, and they'd pass off all liability to the primary offender.

Then they'd collect advertising revenue based on all the eyeballs they can get.

To be honest this is a novel disease that is affecting the world a lot right now and we simply don't know the best way forward.

This is not the flu, it is much worse, but we are generally not enforcing "seat belts" to protect the vulnerable even close to as much.

It's contrarian if it cuts against the majority opinion, not if it comes from some obscure source from a lunatic. There are many legitimate contrarian opinions, many of which later become the mainstream opinion.

That is a perfect example of pseudoscience, the article linked is anecdotal interview with two people working in one hospital. It never mentions anything about the rate.

From the article: "We've never seen numbers like this, in such a short period of time," he said. "I mean we've seen a year's worth of suicide attempts in the last four weeks."

In one hospital. That alone makes it pseudoscience. A years worth of suicides is likely between 10-40 suicides, which is tragi but doesn't show that the quarentine is causing the problems it says. For example, the rise could be due to medical workers being overtaxed due to the pandemic, or some change in which hospital is receiving patients like this.

That's not how science works. Please stop calling it pseudoscience just because you don't agree with the findings.

What two people say they experienced is not science. Even calling is pseudoscience is generous, it's an anecdote.

Science is based on observations. And I hope you realize the pseudoscience is far worse than anecdote (which is a personal observation).

Furthermore, economic depressions lead to suffering and death. This is a fact that's widely known and studied. Ignoring all the coming secondary effects to focus on only acute deaths from a single cause is clearly not scientific either.

Science is based on observations, an observation isn't science. That article was taking one data point, assuming the same thing was happening everywhere, and decided there was only one possible cause.

Then it's not pseudoscience either. Why so much resistance to an observation if you accept it is as such?

Taking one observation and assuming it applies everywhere with one possible cause is pseudoscience. If the article just said "we've seen a lot of suicides, here's how to get help" I would have no problems with it.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com