Comment by Jonnax | Hacker News Reader

Comment by Jonnax | Hacker News Reader

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Why is it clickbait?

This article has quotes form doctors saying that the symptoms of COVID have been unexpected.

""We still don't really know why some patients feel OK to begin with, even though they have incredibly low levels of oxygen in their blood," says Prof Hugh Montgomery, a consultant in critical care at the Whittington Hospital in north London." "

""The volume of this is, of course, unprecedented in the era of modern medicine," says Ron Daniels, an intensive care consultant at hospitals in Birmingham.

"But it's also the type of illness which is so distinct, and the way it's really different from almost every other patient that we've ever seen before.""

"The main protein in the blood which forms blood clots is called fibrinogen.

"Normally," says Beverley Hunt, "it's somewhere between two and four grams per litre in your blood. It goes up a bit in pregnancy, but what we're getting with Covid is as high as 10 to 14 grams per litre. I've never seen that in all my years as a doctor.""

Honestly with this kind of detail and information, why is this clickbait?

The key element of most clickbait headlines is that it teases some interesting information, often making it look more interesting than it actually is, while at the same time omitting the key fact from the headline itself.

Just enough to make you curious, but force you to click if you actually want to get any information, and leave you with a nagging unpleasant feeling if you _don't_ click.

Typically, this will be a fact that would easily fit in the headline, and would make the headline a sufficient summary for a large number of readers to no longer feel the need to click through to get that one word out of the article.

For example (real HN post): "Bitcoin stealer infected 700 libraries of major programming language" -- if you don't click, you risk missing a critical security issue that affects you. If the authors put "Ruby" in the headline, 90% would know a) all they want to know about the incident b) that they're not affected.

A positive example: "CDC’s New ‘Best Estimate’ Implies a Covid-19 Infection Fatality Rate Below 0.3%" -- a clickbait version of this would be "CDC’s New ‘Best Estimate’ Implies surprisingly low Covid-19 Infection Fatality Rate"

For the link posted here, the content of the article can't be easily summarized in one word, so I wouldn't call it clickbait, but the headline still matches the same structure clickbait headlines use, which makes people assume the worst. In particular, claiming that some finding is "surprising" seems to be a very common theme in clickbait: "YOU WON'T BELIEVE WHAT..." or "Ten facts about ... #3 will SHOCK you!" is the stereotypical clickbait headline.

It's considered clickbait for the "it's just the flu" / "it's no big deal" crowd.

Continuing on this tangent, I don't really understand these conspiracy theories. From what I see the people currently in power around the world have very little to gain from this pandemic: it wrecks their economies, increases unemployment and social unrest.

If I wanted to create panic in order to enact surveillance laws and I was willing to use extremely shady means to do so it seems like it would be massively easier and more efficient to just have a good old terrorist attack. At least I wouldn't have to deal with a major economic crisis. Also I wouldn't have to convince the vast majority of the world to play along.

I'm very skeptical of conspiracy theories in general but the ones surrounding COVID-19 make even less sense than the usual ones IMO.

You are trying to apply logic to a conspiracy theory and that is doomed to fail.

These conspiracy theories seem to have one thing in common and that is they are never backed up with by a logical or scientific based argument.

The best bet for autocrats is to minimize the public perception of what the pandemic is doing, because indeed they have very little to gain from it. The Dictator's Handbook explains the mechanisms of this very well.

Is it possible it’s just another manifestation of tribalism rather than an actual belief in the proposed conspiracies?

I’ve just finished Timothy Snyder’s road to unfreedom. I can see myself that i’m suffering a bit of a bias in my answer that i attribute to that book.

If it’s true what he suggests in the book, then disarray and chaos would be the goal here rather than the tribe having a coherent view of the risks and a measured response.

Conspiracy theories are often more about the believer than the belief.

That's not to say that some tiny fraction of conspiracy theories aren't true, and some other small percentage aren't partially true. Skepticism is a good thing. Like everything else, when it's balanced and under control.

But a sustained passion for serial conspiracy belief can become something more than just about the topics of the beliefs.

Of which conspiracy theories?

People saying "it's like the flu / it's no big deal" are talking about death rates and severity, not that they think it's literally the same as a flu virus. And that belief is not a conspiracy theory: for one, it alleges no conspiracy. It's actually the obvious conclusion to draw from public data which shows flu-season like excess death rates.

[retracted]

"Baffling" does not mean "surprising". Baffling means "impossible to understand", "perplexing", "puzzling".

I'll refer to another comment of mine in an unrelated thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23282625

https://thespacewriter.com/wp/2019/11/16/scientists-are-not-....

Start: "Every week, I see headlines in the mainstream media (as well as the “social” and online media outlets) that say something like “NASA Scientists Baffled at….” or “Scientists Bewildered by…”. It’s annoying and tells me that the writer and/or the headline writer is a) lazy and b) doesn’t have a clue about science or scientists. "

Can you recommend any non-mainstream media that are also no "social" and online media outlets? Books would come to my mind, but these do not provide any recent news, so I'm always baffled when someone criticizes "mainstream" media as if they had some kind of premium access to better, but semi-secret news sources. LexisNexis?

Or is it just a way of talking and you don't want imply that there are non-mainstream media worth reading?

I would think it was obvious that I was quoting something from the link I posted, but I guess it's not, somehow.

As far as what mainstream media is - I would think that is also obvious. Mainstream media tends to have a broad focus, and not to have analysis suited to experts in the field they report on.

So if one is discussing science reporting and says Mainstream Media it means publications that do not limit themselves to publishing on matters of science, probably don't publish on science very often, and probably don't have staff that know much about science.

Just as when you talk about programming and say mainstream media you are not talking about Dr. Dobbs or some ACM Journal.

As a matter of fact ACM Journals, being focused on relatively narrow subject matters, are not mainstream media.

There is of course mainstream media used as a general pejorative where it is assumed that it exists to disseminate some form of official propaganda that people knowledgeable about some conspiracy can see through.

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