In this story there have been 34 deaths due to the microbe in the last 10 years. The affected area is a town of 26,000.
Yet somehow this story make it to the front page of an international computer news web site.
Examine what you read.
Usually, in my favourite threads, someone posts a problem (be it a deadly amoeba in the water supply, be it an unsolved math theorem) and in the comments solutions are discussed (often involving technology, sometimes not).
If a discussion starts here about tech advancements to water supply planning, that would be interesting to me.
Can I ask why a kid dying from a deadly amoeba in the water is political and a man dying after eating a bag of liquorice isn't?
Admittedly, there is a case to be made the licorice does have a political component in that we know it can be deadly, but do not mark it on the package. In my calculus though, water safety and fitness for use of municipal water output scores a lot higher on the public concern/public health meter than labelling one particular confectionary treat.
Both can reasonably be accommodated mind, but I'd be far more open to putting force of public mandate behind the one rather than the other.
what's news-worthy isn't the same as what's high impact.
Car crashes kill so many people every day, yet you barely hear about it. The most you'd hear about is a high speed chase or a high way pile up. Because it's rare and interesting.
So definitely examine what you read, but also learn about recency bias and such to prevent being "tricked" into thinking the wrong thing about the true state of the world.
The danger is that if we only consume newsworthy events, we lose sense of the baseline and start only predicting outliers everywhere. We need to consume statistics or everyday stories from a diverse group of people in addition to news.
Examine what you read.
(And yes, I'm aware this fails Kant's categorical imperative.)
My reply is something a bit different: I believe news in general is junk food for your brain. The incentives involved in news publishing today tend to go against accuracy and truthfulness, and the things most described are usually the things that matter least - so news ultimately yields a negative value in terms of understanding the world around you. Better to pick a book instead.
There's a tendency, on the internet, to write off establishment people and groups completely, based on their all-time most egregious mistake (eg: The NYT is reduced to their toadying to Bush over WMD, election polling is meaningless because it failed to predict 2016, etc).
Most of these organizations aren't stellar, but, at this point, the public perception is so paranoid it makes Noam Chomsky sound as credulous as a boy scout.
Wat?
By definition, nobody yet has long term consequences from a virus that is less than a year old. Some people might have medium term consequences, but nobody has lived with it for decades yet.
Last, I'd like to point out that while I agree this type of virus is relatively new to humans, and the -2 virus is very new, we do have a wealth of longitudinal knowledge from SARS and MERS cases to work with in conjunction with what we are discovering about SARS-CoV-2. So far, it is not the patients with respiratory illness that we need to be concerned about. It is the patients with zero respiratory symptoms, but high risk of other cardiovascular and autoimmune symptoms. I think we're more baffled by how this one virus can go from putting someone on a ventilator to putting someone at a significant risk of stroke in such a short period of time.
That said, I agree with you that these are apples and oranges. The brain-eating amoebas are a panic thing. COVID-19 is not something to shake a fist at. COVID-19 has been found in spinal fluid. Given SARS and MERS do not share this trait, we have a lot more reason to take -2 as a serious threat, regardless of its extremely high short-term survival rate.
The interest in this story is obviously not because anyone thinks there is an actual world wide risk of a massive outbreak of brain eating amoebas. Things can be both interesting and not the start of a zombie apocolypse at the same time.
But then you shouldn’t sell it as one. The headline is pretty clickbaity given the reality of things, and sadly this is a common trend. I think that’s OPs point.
The water really was contaminated. The residents really were warned not to use the water supply. The contaminate really does kill people by eating their brains.
The headline did not say to go full panic mode for people not in the affected area. The headline did not say the situation was out of control. Which part of the headline was misleading or panic mongering?
> Which part of the headline was misleading or panic mongering?
They don’t state which city it’s about (so it could be any major one), and mention the water supply which implies everyone is affected. They want you to go “oh shit, this could be my town”. They do tell you that it’s only in a small dump somewhere in Texas, and that it’s only killed 34 people in 10 years, but only after you clicked. The headline is definitely alarmist given the benign contents of the article.
Is this in the US as a whole or only in the local area in question?
- Downside: though the chances of being affected by brain-eating bacteria are small, the consequences are large, so it makes sense to worry about it not just in proportion to its frequency
- Novelty/newsworthiness: we're pretty aware of the risks of, say, driving or smoking, and we mentally take those into account; we're not as aware of the risks of brain-eating bacteria or a novel coronavirus
- Imperfect measurement: Because being affected by brain-eating bacteria is so rare, the number of cases is almost certainly undercounted; similarly, because the novel coronavirus is novel, people are unlikely to be good at recognizing it 100% of the time
- Non-death negative outcomes: I imagine having a small part of your brain eaten by bacteria is pretty bad even if you don't die
We regularly see outage postmortems make it to the top of this same website, despite those outages only affecting one company and their specific choice of software, and only happening once.
Brain-eating amobeas is definitely interesting.
Maybe you know what you mean but I took these sentences together as there having been 34 cases in the town. Actually there have been only 34 reported cases in the whole US between 2009 and 2018.
One case in point, the Corona situation in New York for the past 4 months. Around July the indoor dining was restricted in New York as mentioned in https://www.nytimes.com/2020/07/01/nyregion/indoor-dining-co....
Another passage from the article states: "...could trickle back to New York, which has managed to rein in the outbreak.". At that point New York had around 800-1000 infections daily, a similar number is making other countries increase Corona restrictions even more, e.g. Denmark.
But if you examine the deaths to Corona in New York since June 1st it is a very small number compared to the deaths back in April. So on that fact it seems that lifting indoor restrictions in September 2020 is not very rational, but rather an over-reaction in dealing with the after-effects of the Corona virus.
I hope that data-based decisions will return at some point.