Bill Gates on Covid: Most US Tests Are ‘Completely Garbage’
wired.com
wired.com
Gates is saying tests are garbage because they take too long to get results back so they aren't actionable. This has nothing to do with the scientific/diagnostic/technical capability of the tests (which is a separate issue with antibody testing but not with PCR testing, which is what Gates is discussing). I get that it gets more clicks, but the obvious interpretation for the person who looks at the title and doesn't scroll over halfway down the page is that "Gates says COVID diagnostic tests don't work, so I guess if he's right, then there's no point trying to scale up testing or anything since the tests are garbage anyway." The takeaway is the opposite - the results aren't getting back fast enough, we need better prioritization and capacity.
Especially with how much misinformation is spreading regarding this pandemic, and how many lives are on the line, Wired should reconsider its title policy and change the headline to reflect the content in their own article rather than imply dangerous misinformation to grab attention.
Edit: On the offchance that the title on HN or on Wired gets changed, the original title that I am referring to is "Bill Gates on Covid: Most US Tests Are ‘Completely Garbage’"
That title is not reflective of the content of the article or the context of Bill Gates' statement in the interview.
The more scary thing is this:
> And that makes me feel like, for the rich world, we should largely be able to end this thing by the end of 2021, and for the world at large by the end of 2022. ... Now whenever we get this done, we will have lost many years in malaria and polio and HIV and the indebtedness of countries of all sizes and instability. It’ll take you years beyond that before you’d even get back to where you were at the start of 2020. It’s not World War I or World War II, but it is in that order of magnitude as a negative shock to the system.
The long term effects of the U.S. government's handling of this is very, very scary. What's scary about all this is that everyone is assuming that if and when we get a vaccine that everything will just restart back where it left off or even ahead. This is not the case. We are doing two things: delaying nearly everything into the future and reverting progress on the other things.
Other long terms effects are happening. I have friends in China. I have Chinese friends, well educated and talented friends, moving back to China because either they want to (makes sense at this point), are being kicked out due to H1B issues or can't get back in, or can't find jobs here. China, outside of viral hotspots, is essentially back to normal. We're losing talent, people who were obviously keen on the U.S. but unlikely to be now, and diversity in the process and feeding back those people elsewhere. This is repeating across many immigrants and non-immigrant workers. The U.S. is slowed down across all vectors. Not only are millions getting the virus and hundreds of thousands dying, we have unemployment, slowed economy, slowed travel, stunted government doing literally nothing of any use on the virus or anything else, etc. It is quite scary to understand the long term effects of this and that we have a very real chance of being leapfrogged in the process, letting this thing drag on for decades in terms of the reverberations throughout society.
One of the examples of the attitude in the U.S. is that many just shrug it off with this is just another flu. Even if that was the case, which it emphatically is not, who the hell would be okay with another flu? The flu costs approximately $10.4 billion in direct costs alone every year. We're losing much, much more than that due to the effects of and the response to COVID-19.
The last thing is Gate's comments on encryption and the explosion of viral conspiracy theories and false knowledge on social media. We are in real trouble in the U.S. with social media running rampant. I think this ideal of sticking to the guns of no censorship and supposed safety of data is naïve in this age. I think we are in real trouble if we allow YouTube, Facebook, Twitter, etc. continue to allow users to run rampant on their platforms. What is extra scary is that it's not like our government and leadership is immune to these conspiracy theories and false knowledge. In fact, our government leaders are sources and amplifiers of these things! This is very concerning and dangerous. Adam Curtis' documentary All Watched Over by Machines of Ever Loving Grace covers the Silicon valley dream of the Internet and technology liberating us, when it is in fact caging us with chaotic misinformation and control.
I think the world will find that we do need a model that's a cross between the U.S. and Chinese model of Internet censorship or other innovation to control the spread of viral false knowledge. I am personally perfectly willing to give up so-called privacy (which I honestly don't think even exists anymore anyway) in exchange for these conspiracy theories and viral false knowledge being suppressed, as these later things are far more detrimental to my life and all of our lives. These technology companies have got to check the systems they've built. Twitter should have banned Trump long ago for spreading misinformation and blatantly false information just as they should for others doing the same. That's why this GPT-3 is not exciting but scary. It's dumb but people think it's smart, and it and other tools will allow the deep viral spread of dangerous ideologies and misinformation.
In 100 years, without more control, we're going to be swimming in a pool of not knowing anything and fighting about what's true or not while not addressing any actual problems, which is already happening in the U.S. Without addressing these issues, we are very quickly heading for a long-term downturn and a cesspool of misinformation in which nothing gets done because we're all just trying to survive the turbulence.
The disinformation campaigns run by both politicians and companies is covered by Adam Curtis in his documentaries. I might as well mention his other works such as The Power of Nightmares, Bitter Lake, and HyperNormalization in addition to All Watched Over by Machines of Ever Loving Grace. The theme of control via intentional disinformation is a major one in his works.
Did you just make an attack on free speech? Who will decide whether my tweet is "false knowledge" or an inconvenient truth? No way in hell.
I am not saying these problems are easy. But should you really be allowed to both intentionally and unintentionally spread blatant misinformation, potentially causing both direct and indirect harm to many hundreds, thousands, if not millions of people all under the guise of free speech? I am not sure that trade off is a good one or even one protected by free speech.
Maybe platforms introduce spread control, greatly reducing the viral effect. Such a feature, by itself, would not be limiting any speech, but it is a form of modern censorship in a way by preventing its spread across the platform or network. Our rights say nothing about guaranteeing that everything you say is required to propagate unchecked throughout networks and platforms. Furthermore, these companies are not government entities.
It is a fact that the 2016 election was manipulated via social media propaganda through the direct and indirect influence of the wealthy and various companies (Robert Mercer, Cambridge Analytica, Facebook, etc.). It is a suspicion that foreign actors also played a part in this. Are you suggesting we just throw up our hands and allow these things to take place? These are explicitly attacks on the very system that you say I am supposedly attacking. We need to address these things as we are clearly vulnerable to them.
No. Spreading lies is very different from censoring lies. I should be allowed to say that Earth is flat, or our president is an idiot. You or the president should not be allowed to prohibit me from saying those things.
Freedom of speech does not guarantee that you can say whatever you want without repercussions and it does not grant or guarantee you unrestricted propagation of what you write or say or record through non-governmental networks and platforms.
We simply need to understand that the Internet, social media, networks, data, etc. have changed things and will continue to do so. We need to understand them and adapt our society to be able to face the new threats they provide and enable. And we need to stop having knee jerk reactions to everything.
But then, what's the danger in their way of thinking? Surely you don't believe that a particular idea or form of speech can be inherently harmful? You would be running up against the paradox of tolerance then, which seems to be sympathetic to bmitc's argument.
What you and nearly everyone who argues from your point of view fails to concede is that that these are not mutually opposed strategies. It is possible to censor dangerous information without falling down a slippery slope towards arbitrary thought-policing and Orwellian dystopia, or to at least attempt to slow the spread of dangerous misinformation by not allowing it to be normalized or given equal weight to truth, and it is possible to do so while attempting to engage the open-minded few.
In a world where the only thing one could do about the next Hitler is politely and civilly ask him and his neo-Nazi cohort for a vigorous series of Lincoln-Douglas style debates, one will be told to get lost while they go on about their business of saturating every platform they can with their propaganda and poisoning the well of public discourse.
And then what? Their strategy is more effective than yours. What can you do when your only option can be rendered ineffective simply by ignoring it and mocking it with Facebook memes? You've already lost the battle.
You made an extraordinary claim without providing any evidence or explanation. It's like saying "faster than light travel is possible". How is it possible? Has anyone done that successfully?
More specifically, who's going to be the censor? Who will decide whether what I write is a dangerous misinformation or not? How will they decide that? How are they going to censor it (removing my comments on HN, cutting off my internet, fining me, arresting me, sending a predator drone after me)? This is really scary. This is exactly how the next Hitler can emerge.
These can't be cleanly separated or considered in isolation. Believing that there are potential dangers to enacting certain ideas is not fundamentally different than considering the ideas themselves to be dangerous. After all, that is exactly what people who want racists, anti-vaxxers, conspiracy theorists, etc. are worried about - those ideas gaining acceptance and being put into action.
This is exactly why the U.S. is headed where it's headed. The U.S. is full of people that blindly think that a group of guys 200-300 years ago somehow landed upon a perfect system that somehow fixes all issues of human emotion and behavior and protects against technological developments like the Internet which they couldn't even fathom at the time, while at the same time not caring that even the system they laid out has been eroded in the interest of consolidating power and corporations.
Case in point: this headline. Pointed out in the top voted comment as being misleading. I read the article before looking at the comments and it left me with a good impression of Bill Gates, but if I had just skipped straight to the comments I'd have immediately learned the headline was misleading.
The real problems are the huge volume of people who don't engage with "misinformation" as they see it, because they prefer authoritarian control. They think it's easier and more efficient, and don't really consider the possibility of the authorities making mistakes. It's sad to see that Gates is one of these.
Take this exchange:
The irony is that it’s digital social media that allows this kind of titillating, oversimplistic explanation of, “OK, there’s just an evil person, and that explains all of this.”
That is indeed deeply ironic, because "there's just an evil person and that explains all of this" pretty sums up everyone who complains about misinformation on the internet. There's just, for inexplicable reasons, people who spread lies and misinformation claiming scientists and authorities aren't trustworthy, and they just need to be banned from everything to fix it. No deeper analysis of what they're saying is needed. They're just opaquely evil. The lack of understanding is identical on both sides.
There are plenty of more credible explanations available, one of the most obvious being that messages get corrupted in transit. People hear things third or fourth hand and the message got garbled along the way. Then instead of targets of these theories standing up and saying, no, these claims are wrong, let's go through them, they just dismiss it all with an eyeroll and demand for surveillance and speech control. In other cases, sometimes those people spreading "misinformation" may actually be straw men, and the real people expressing concern have rather more nuanced views, but it's easier to pick one crazy person and pretend everyone is like that than engage with the actual underlying concerns the larger population has.
Interviews like this actually make the problem worse, because a large component of these 'conspiracy theories' is that people like Gates really really like tracking and control. Tech=tracking is after all, a meme pushed very heavily by journalists. So when he rails against encrypted messengers because he believes tech firms should track and control people's speech, he's throwing fuel on the fire by supporting their point, apparently without realising it.
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> Then instead of targets of these theories standing up and saying, no, these claims are wrong, let's go through them
Making a convincing lie is orders of magnitude less work than making a convincing refutation of a convincing lie. That dooms approaches such as the ones you are suggesting.
Those approaches used to work, when it was expensive to widely and quickly disseminate information so most people only had a few non-local sources. Now, it is close to free and people have dozens or even hundreds of sources and there is a good chance most of the people who saw the lie won't even see the refutation. And by the time the refutation reaches those who will eventually see it, whoever made the lie has had plenty of time to make several more that work around the refutation of the first lie.
I believe the fact that people think this is because they've never gone and looked at what these groups are saying. I have. You won't get far by just blowing it all off as lies, because usually it's not lies. Rather, important information isn't highlighted, or interpretations of motivations are different, or some detail has been lost or interpolated (e.g. will Bill Gates himself be managing a quantum dot immunity certificate programme, or would that be local governments). And frankly sometimes they're pointing out mistakes that people in power would rather just ignore.
You're arguing, again, for authoritarianism. It doesn't work. The people who practice it end up believing lots of lies themselves, because anyone who could tell them otherwise is gone or silenced. Like the leaders in China who have no idea what's really going on in their country because the local officials all feed them garbage statistics, authoritarianism is ultimately the enemy of truth.