Comment by lbrito | Hacker News Reader

Comment by lbrito | Hacker News Reader

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Brazilian living in Brazil here.

This news is not surprising at all.

I'm going to avoid adjectives so that my comment doesn't get downvoted into oblivion by government fanboys, but let's just say that it is safe to assume that the Brazilian federal government does not believe science should be the main weapon in the fight against Covid.

Brazil is one of the few countries that denies the pandemic[1]. The others are Turkmenistan, Belarus and Nicaragua. Fun fact: neither of those are really democracies (whether Brazil still is a democracy, it is increasingly debatable).

The Brazilian president has scoffed covid as "a little flu"[2].

He is also against social distancing/lockdown measures, claiming they don't work[3]. Needless to say, he doesn't provide any scientific evidence of that -- he knows full well his supporters need nothing more than his word to believe in anything.

State governors are basically on their own since the beginning of the pandemic -- a lot of states implemented lockdowns/social distancing, but with limited effect since Bolsonaro routinely goes on national TV to downplay those measures and basically call them a hoax.

The situation now is that people are fed up with the long, ineffective (because they were always superficial, half-baked) social distancing and lockdowns, and the state governments are beginning to reopen right when the death toll is accelerating.

So basically we're screwed. Deaths will accelerate like crazy now that a lot of places are reopening and the federal government will do anything it can to hold onto its alternate reality where everything is fine.

[1] https://www.ft.com/content/974dc9d2-77c1-4381-adcd-2f755333a...

[2] https://www.euronews.com/2020/04/06/a-little-flu-brazil-s-bo...

[3] https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2020/05/04/while-bra...

I couldn't have said it better myself.

We're also severely under-tested. Given our fickle social distancing and isolation, I highly doubt we "only" have 600K infected people. Our flagship universities (USP, UERJ) have already estimated that the real number can be up to 16 times higher.

The population is encouraged to reach out to the health service only when they have the most severe symptoms, since the public health service is at the edge of collapse in many states. The number of people dying at home, and dying from severe respiratory syndrome is abnormally high. It all adds up to an even grimier picture.

About our governors and mayors, I personally think most of them are doing what they possibly can do. They're facing an immense pressure to roll back lock-down measures in order to "save the economy" partly because of the finance minister's catastrophic failure. Businesses had a hard time getting credit, and the people in need were left scrambling for that ridiculous $120/month benefit.

We're living in a failed state.

> Needless to say, he doesn't provide any scientific evidence of that -- he knows full well his supporters need nothing more than his word to believe in anything.

I want to live in a world where this is actually viable everywhere, where we can trust our leaders to confer with experts and change their opinion if the situation changes. (Living in Germany, I do trust Angela Merkel that much, for example. I want that for everyone.)

I take your point, but Angela Merkel is a very special case. Angela Merkel is a quantum chemist. I wish every world leader was an actual scientist too, but there aren't many who can wear two hats the way Merkel does.

Many in Chinese leadership have technical degrees in science. While science appears to be the enemy of some authoritarian governments, others see it as their national edge.

> I want to live in a world where this is actually viable everywhere, where we can trust our leaders to confer with experts and change their opinion if the situation changes.

I want to live in a world where everyone knows to verify things for themselves. Yes, I'd like leaders we can trust, but trust should never mean "don't check". (At the very least, have multiple other sources you trust to cross-check your sources of authority.)

Trust is an essential element of society. Constant individual validation simply doesn't scale, trust is enormously efficient, and low-trust societies are poor and dysfunctional societies.

That's not to say you can simply declare trust (though TOFU / TOFI tit-for-tat is remarkaby reliable), and the question of how to bootstrap trust is a difficult one. Ironically, many nationalist/populist behavioral patterns substitute a sense of tribal trust patterns for epistemic ones.

Ideally, a set of values and institutions which provide robust cross-checking and validation, distributing the trust verification burden, emerge. Any systemic doctrine of power concentration, whether authoritarian government, monopolistic economies, exclusive religions, educational uniformatism, etc., tends to undermine this.

An ensemble model of trust is entirely reasonable: for things that don't require a mountain of evidence, you can mostly trust that the collection of sources you depend on will not all simultaneously gaslight you in a consistent way. But the comment I was replying to suggested that in an ideal world you could trust one source (political leaders). I'm suggesting I'd like a world where everyone consistently applies critical thinking to all sources of information.

I'd like a world where everyone consistently applies critical thinking to all sources of information.

And that specifically Does. Not Scale.[1]

It fails two ways:

1. Individuals suffer information overload, trust breakdown, and validation fatigue.

2. Society finds itself with no common foundation of common shared facts and mechanisms. All points of view are asserted to be equally valid, expertise is entirely dismissed. Tribal beliefs are asserted as true (for Us) and invalid (if Them).

There is, I'll posit, a broad gulf between "verify everything" and "be prepared to question any belief". One varient of the latter is "strong opinions, weakly held" (https://medium.com/@ameet/strong-opinions-weakly-held-a-fram...) I'm not fully convinced this is a valid model, but it seems a good initial approach. It addresses both the need. to act in the moment, based on. partial information, and the realisation that this information and conclusions based on it may be faulty. The problem occurs when making decisions with no recourse --- betting the farm, burning the boats.

Otherwise, I lean strongly on Baconian, Pragmatic principles: our brains, both individually and socially, are sense-making organs, optimising for practical benefit. A challenge is that subject to perception, processing, and model-generation costs, complexity and rigour, though affording greater accuracy and precision, have enormous costs.

A manifestly false assumption of rational markets (and behaviour) theory is that information is free. It's not --- it has extraordinary costs, and model formation and coordination --- getting everyone on the same page --- are among the highest. We're constantly facing a complexity cost constraint (this is the essence of Gresham's law), in which a much simpler model is, under relaxed environmental selection, often more useful, as it permits discarding expensive perception, processing, and model transmission (education of the population). Which works fine until environmental selection mechanisms are increased.

What a trust, not in authority but in expertise, has to offer, suject to sufficient checks, is an efficient distribution of information, processing, and model formation. This is the ultimate aim of Baconian Science, expressed in the motto of the Royal Society: In nullis verba --- on the word of no person. Rather, it is justified trust in experiment, experience, integrity, and institutions, that gets you this.

Mind, the usual problem is that power-serving institutions have a staggering tendency to become self-serving and select not based on truth but on self-interest. Correcting for this tendency is the great problem of polity, commercial, social, justice, and moral systems.

________________________________

Notes:

1. As I was composing this reply, another HNer in a different thread makes similar remarks: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23450409

I was aware, when posting my reply, that I was positing a fantasy world. So was the comment I was replying to. But you seem to have imputed a very specific (incorrect) assumed meaning to "apply critical thinking" and then carefully dissected the result.

When I said "apply critical thinking to all sources", that doesn't mean "re-derive everything from scratch and give zero weight to information obtained from others". "be prepared to question any belief" is closer to what I had in mind. Beyond that, there's little harm in trusting a single source for information you are not actually heavily relying on yourself, but that wasn't really the point of this thread. Are you really trying to argue that the world would fall apart if people generally speaking put a little more critical thought into verifying information they're exposed to from a single source before giving it undue weight?

I may have misread you. In which case, consider my response to a not-infrequent assertion that individual responsibility and media literacy alone, absent some general social value of individual and institutional epistemic integrity is sufficient. That really does not seem to work.

And rereading this thread, particularly your response here (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23447763), that seems to me close to your argument. If not from scratch and first principles, in large part.

If not, care to restate?

It's less the obligation to validate, and more the licence to bullshit, that concerns me. Brandolini's asymmetry is steep. I've spent more time than I'd have liked around intentionally devceptive persons, and institutions (and machines). The experience is virtually always tremendously umsettling, at best.

There are reasons why social, moral, and legal strictures against deception, fraud, and betrayal of trusts run so deep, with frictions against values of free expression. Dante put bearers of false witness in the penultimate circle of his Hell.

I'm certainly not advocating in favor of continued BSing or deception (from leaders or otherwise); I'm solely advocating that people apply more critical thought so that people don't get away with it as often.

The other day I read an article (sorry, I lost the link to it) comparing the response to the coronavirus between nations led by men and women and it was not very surprising to me that countries whose president or prime minister was a woman had a better first response and fewer deaths compared to neighbour states. I would love to read a "postmortem" about that when this is all over.

It’s pretty amazing how short the list of countries like that actually is.

You more or less described the United States. I'm not sure if that should be comforting to you or disturbing to me.

I don’t understand. How can the same people hurt by this virus go around claiming it’s a hoax?

There is people that claim that the earth is flat while driving with their GPS. I guess that it doesn’t give too much hope about common sense.

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