Data Scientist Rebekah Jones, Facing Arrest, Turns Herself in to Authorities
npr.org
npr.org
Now a private citizen, Jones continues to take issue with the way the state is calculating its coronavirus positivity rate. The official Florida site says there are more than 1.3 million "total people tested" in Florida, of which about 73,500 were positive, resulting in an "overall percent positive" rate of 5.4%.
But Jones says that figure is misleading.
"I actually wrote the script to create that data, so I know exactly what it looks like," she says, adding that she's audited it and checked it with several other statisticians to make sure it's correct.
She says that on the state's dashboard, any person who tests positive will be counted as a positive test only once, no matter how many times they test positive. But a person who tests negative will be counted over and over again each time they test negative for the coronavirus.
Jones says that because many residents, such as health care workers, require repeated testing, the state's dashboard is artificially deflating the true positivity rate.
Which is a reasonable assertion about "the data".
This is where the point about her not being a data scientist comes into play, and needs to be cleared before going into anything else, such as her personal life/drama. She, like many others, including those in this comments section, are running afoul when it comes to familiarity with the subject matter of the data.
You get counted as a positive case "only once", because (early on in theory) you only get the disease once. Whether that's true or not is beyond her paygrade, to say the least.
The point I was making is that whether this is a problem or not is not a resolved scientific issue, which presupposes the data and presentation.
Furthermore 'this' is a 2 fold issue: do you count negatives more than once; and, do you count positives more than once? These are 2 separate matters; however, I would say counting negatives more than once is the least controversial part.
Either after creating her own dashboard or just before, she took resources from work and published a message on the work network which is why she's now being brought in for questioning and charged.
With that in mind, wtf are all the other comments in this thread talking about? Its like they're talking about a completely different article or smth.
Also I don't think looking down your nose at the quality of her degrees in doing yourself any favours. This article claims she wrote the code that pulled the stats together so at the very least there was some familiarity with the problem set. You'd figure implementation issues are just the matter of a Github review or smth, so how did it get to her being fired and all this crap happening?
A little more of her background is here. https://heavy.com/news/2020/05/rebekah-jones/
I am not inherently suspect or not suspect of the article. We discuss it and then if other data turns up we discuss that. If you have a former colleague of hers being on the record or her previous employer is going to make a statement then sure but if you're just gonna speculate then I'm kinda "nah".
> She was defying the team of epidemiologists in publishing bad data
Whereas your take is:
> they pressured her to make the numbers look better
And I'm sitting here thinking, between potentially corrupt state government officials, and a potentially dishonest individual making claims against said state government, are we going to get down to facts and evidence instead of debating our feelings? I'm not believing either party based solely on he said / she said arguments.
> Jones has said she lost her job after refusing requests to manipulate data
I'd appreciate it people cited what they were referencing because it appears some posters are just saying stuff without tying it back to a source making it hard to trace all the "he said, she said" and various sources.
I'm surprised more people don't know how common this is in other states. I have a bunch of anecdotal evidence and articles on both sides of the aisle contending either the numbers are too high or too low - depending on your political affiliation.
This whole COVID affair has been politicized from the outset, which is sad. It feels like the scientific data is being manipulated on both sides to create a political narrative in order to benefit one party or the other.
It looks like politics has overrun the scientific community.
But yes, that's my take on the case.
Prior to this, the press downplayed that she allegedly used shared credentials to the department messaging system, and she made a name for herself before the raid by being very public about concerns with the data on the dashboard, so the "story" was that the raid was retaliation.
This could be someone trying to silence her, but the court seems to be shutting that down very well with reasonable bail. She's also very passionate and convinced she did the right thing, so using the messaging system (despite sloppy credential management, this would be illegal) is in character for her.
I don't think the state found any evidence, after seizing her equipment, that this was her. Exfiltrating data is the sole charge sustained.
1) The judge in this video is not the county judge who is the source of the warrant against her. (The county judge, I believe, is the one who was appointed by DeSantis and immediately (suspiciously) approved the warrant against Jones that resulted in police guns being pointed at her and her children.)
2) The State prosecutor tried to levy all sorts of crap like no internet. That's probably typical. Note that this person had amazingly stable video / audio somehow.
3) Jones lawyer made some mild arguments about needing to get a job and use a phone etc. Said nothing about the DeSantis judge. The judge in this video immediately disregarded a lot of the prosecutor's asks and deflected a ton to the DeSantis judge.
4) The audio is extremely extremely bad, especially for one of Jones lawyers. The audio just goes garbled half way through his argument. Whoever this is (Zoom? MS? Cisco?) is really liable for screwing up tons of court cases.
In all, this video shows exactly how political the justice system is. This judge and the DeSantis judge are pretty night-and-day in their actions against Jones.
I saw a terrifying series about people confessing to crimes they did not commit, and the struggle to reverse their sentences. One person, proven by DNA to be innocent, would still not have their charges dropped. The prosecutor said his community believed the accused guilty so he cannot go against them.
The issues of extorted confessions and forced pleas happen with both elected and unelected DAs.
I've spent the past 2 months arguing against people claiming election fraud, and part of my argument has been that our judicial system is mostly fair and apolitical.
If what you're saying is true (and I maintain that it's not), then what happens to our claims of judicial impartiality in evaluating election fraud claims?
Does this rise to the level of judges squashing election fraud claims? I have no idea and I’m not sure how to even begin to figure it out.
> ~ Y is not likely because of X
You're saying you were basing your argument on the fact that X ("judicial system is mostly fair and apolitical") and now that you're learning that X may not have been true you're wondering what that means about Y.
I think it's appropriate to question Y now that you're questioning X but I hope that Y has nothing to do with the decision to question X. It would be an ugly truth that you might have to live with but I hope you don't close your eyes to the reality of X because of what that could mean.
Sorry for the overuse of X/Y abstractions but unfortunately I think if we replaced the specifics in this case it would deter from the point I'm trying to point out which is if we think about the what outcomes follow a truth and we disagree with the outcomes (personally invested in arguing against that) then we might choose not to look at the truth.
That being said, idk if it's accurate to say the judicial system is not fair and very political
With Team Red, it's our election system is corrupt, and our judicial system is corrupt because it ruled the election system wasn't corrupt. Oh, and Congress is corrupt because it's dominated by Team Blue and Team Red traitors.
With Team Blue, it's our judicial system is corrupt, for reasons X, Y, and Z. In fact, all our insitutions are corrupt because of systemic Foo or Bar. Oh, and by the way, we're more or less the same as China.
With these kinds of attitudes, how can we expect to come out of this with our country intact? Because let me assure you, there are plenty of groups itching for a conflict to break out so that they can rebuild society in their image from the rubble.
Many of you have no conception of what it's like to live in a conflict or post-conflict zone. We're all privileged as Americans. Not because we're perfect as a country, but because we're a functioning, developed country, or at least we were before this great partisan insanity took hold:
https://www.pewresearch.org/politics/interactives/political-... (click "Animate Data")
If we want the other side to understand, we have to speak to them in a way that they’ll understand it.
When you say “with these kinds of attitudes, how can we expect to come out of this with our country intact?” I genuinely believe you are doing harm to your own cause because you have shown that you have an ulterior motive to honest seeking of the truth.
If I were to believe that parts of the country were truly and deeply corrupt, why would I want to remain intact with that? Don’t you cut tumors out.
Also if I didn’t know you personally, I’d probably conclude that you are someone in power trying to keep the status quo and maintain power. I’d be pretty unlikely to consider your arguments at that point.
"If we want the other side to understand, we have to speak to them in a way that they’ll understand it."
with
"If I were to believe that parts of the country were truly and deeply corrupt, why would I want to remain intact with that? Don’t you cut tumors out." and "I’d probably conclude that you are someone in power trying to keep the status quo and maintain power. I’d be pretty unlikely to consider your arguments at that point."
I personally don't actually believe that the country is irreparably divided and I try to bridge divides when I see it.
But I'm sure millions of americans are jaded beyond that point and take the positions I offered in my original comment.
Ha, I'm broke because of serious chronic+acute illnesses that have bankrupted me, and not currently working. So I'd love to see a better medical system. But I've also worked in a conflict/post-conflict zone (several decades ago) so I know how much worse things can get - and that's where we're heading right now unless we can turn things around.
And tons of institutions need reform. But mostly not because of corruption, but rather poor incentives and archaic and poorly-thought-out laws. Our system is far from insalvageable.
But way to ad hominem, not engaging any further with you.
Personally I suspect it is just the result of information transmitting faster, and dangerous memes can parasitically reproduce within our minds and culture (a la selfish genes).
There are other reasons it could occur, but partisanship seems more like a decoy than a reason.
Both Team Red and Team Blue have their revolutionary wings.
Election results were certified, and challenges to them rejected, not because of judge impartiality (which is a quality of the judge), but because the facts of the election are independently verifiable (which is a quality of the world).
Judges are required to identify facts and apply the law to those facts. Doing so does not require impartiality, only adherence to reality. That is the judicial basis for rejecting challenges to election results.
Adherence to reality is the better part of impartiality.
Nothing, you just have to use the right arguments.
You don't need to argue that judges are unbiased. You need to argue that judges have uniformly concluded that there is no merit to Trump's arguments, EVEN WHEN those judges should be expected to have a Republican bias.
That said, what do I believe to be true?
Judges, being human, cannot avoid having biases. But historically both parties have believed in selecting judges who do their best to be objectively neutral while having beliefs about the law that slant their decisions towards the party. The result has been fairly neutral and fair.
However our growing polarization has lead to an acceptance of picking more openly biased judges. This is leading to an increased strain on our justice system. Particularly with recent appointees in lower level courts, you cannot expect the judge to be fair. This is much less of an issue with more senior judges because they were first appointed a long time ago when norms about objectivity were stronger.
And yes, I worry about the future implied by our continuing increase in bias. Right now a significant fraction of the country believes lies about a stolen election. They will someday come back into political power. When they do, armed with the belief that elections are stolen, they will more openly try to steal them back.
Over history, a number of countries created constitutions modeled on ours. The usual end for those countries was increased polarization leading to a breakdown in government, and eventually a declaration of martial law by the President, transforming it into a dictatorship. Nothing prevents what has happened elsewhere, happening here. Our democracy held together this time, but it is eroding. We should be very concerned with the current trend.
> and I maintain that it's not
What makes you think that it is not?
In the case of the recent election, a lot of judges who likely have some degree of pro-Republican bias (such as the conservative majority of the Supreme Court) rejected Trump's claims.
The Supreme Court is not impartial in election matters, as demonstrated when they resolved Bush v. Gore on party lines back in 2000. But when the people who are partial towards you reject your case, that's a sign that your case is really bad. If they could find a believable way to let you win, they probably would, but they just can't.
So the case against Trump's election claims isn't undermined by the partiality of the judicial system, it is actually strengthened by it.
I've seen body camera footage from this search warrant raid and never saw any guns pointed at her kids. Do you have a video that shows what you claim? I think this claim is misinformation.
https://www.tallahassee.com/story/news/2020/12/07/agents-rai...
This isn't bodycam footage, that was a camera the family had facing the door.
Also, notice the lack of trigger discipline that they're using in the videos... Absolutely disgusting.
They released the body camera footage supposedly as proof that the raid was proper, but they don't even have any footage of what they're disputing. Had there been any real sense of danger or concern about officer safety why would they all just stand around out in the open for 13 minutes where anyone inside with a gun could just start taking pot shots at officers with plenty of cover for themselves but none for officers?
If she illegally accessed the network that's a crime. She shouldn't have done that.
Either way there are questions here about the heavy handed response and whether Florida fiddled their covid numbers.
Even assuming she is 110% guilty (given the nature of computer laws, everyone is guilty but that's another discussion), I'm not convinced that everyone who emails themselves some documents before they leave gets a swat team at their houses. Or if that is the case, Florida must have a lot of swat teams...
It was about the most polite you could ever ask for the police to be when refusing them entry while they are serving a warrant to collect evidence.
That the serving of the warrant could be so overblown is part of what makes me suspect that the whole ordeal is entirely overblown.
I am a limey brit. Is it normal over there for people serving a warrant for a non violent crime to draw and point their guns like that? To my foreign eyes it looks a bit nuts even if its not the full "battering ram and tear gas" I'd expected.
I guess we'll see what the court actually finds on due course.
If you refuse to come to the door for 20 minutes, yes I suspect police will draw their guns if they have to force entry into your house to get you.
So basically they come to the door and the procedure is “knock-and-announce” — they can’t just immediately come and break your door down unless a judge has signed off on that specifically.
Police are required to wait a “reasonable” amount of time. Usually that’s more than 20 seconds but not more than a couple minutes for you to open the door.
If you refuse to open the door after a reasonable amount of time, the police are allowed to make a “forced entry”.
At that point, having to force entry into a house is itself an escalation and a violent act, and they would reasonably want to be prepared for any response they might encounter since the people inside have already indicated they will not come easily. Meaning it’s more likely they will draw their guns in a forced entry situation.
That link has mugshots and parts of the court proceedings, this is not 'slander' from what I can tell.
Now, she might still have been pushed in one direction or another, but she has a documented history of being unstable to the extreme; to say that it seems she has a penchant for attracting drama is to put it mildly.
Getting fired from a university, getting called in to a psych ward to make sure she was okay, and then immediately after being let go is pretty irrelevant to the case. I'm no lawyer but I'm pretty sure this would be objected as irrelevant if anyone tried to use it in the court case. For all we know it may even be defamation.
Is all of this relevant to the whistle blower case? Well, it might not be, but this sort of backstory does call up many questions. How did a person with a history of inappropriate sexual conduct with subordinates get a management position in the first place?
If it happened it was a relationship between two consenting adults, so there is not really a reason for them to care.
>any relationship between a teacher and their student is non-consensual
That's because teachers teach students typically under the age of 18. Professors teach adults. She obviously wasn't a high school teacher. Some universities have no policy against professor student relationships, though in the last 10 years that has quickly been changing.
Just because two people are adults doesn't make a relationship between them not dodgy; think about how bad it is for a doctor to date a patient. The situation here isn't quite as bad (well, if you start stalking a former student after they break up with you, I guess one could also argue that this case is much worse than some other situations where everything unfolds amicably), but still, relationships between people in power and those over whom the power is wielded are not just socially frowned upon, they are recognized as Bad News (if not always strictly illegal) for a long time now.
I'm not sure why you're so insistent on defending if not a sexual predator then at least someone with highly questionable judgement. And again, maybe all of this has little to do with the whistleblower stuff, but there is no question about whether or not it's true that she had an inappropriate extramartial affair with a student, stalked him after he tried to end it and was fired over the whole ordeal.
>THE COURT CASE IS LINKED IN TFA
If you look at the court case the only thing in it that is not hearsay is a dented bumper. Furthermore, she was dismissed. Because of a lack of evidence it never would have held a candle in court because it was all hearsay.
This is the problem with articles like this. They defame people, and the average person who has no legal background eats it up as the wholesale truth.
>I'm not sure why you're so insistent on defending if not a sexual predator then at least someone with highly questionable judgement.
Woo.. there is nothing in there that says she is a sexual predator.
>And again, maybe all of this has little to do with the whistleblower stuff, but there is no question about whether or not it's true that she had an inappropriate extramartial affair with a student, stalked him after he tried to end it and was fired over the whole ordeal.
It has nothing to do with the whistleblower stuff. It has to do with how garbage the article is. Falling for it is embarrassing. The fact that articles like these today are legal, is a sad state of affairs. In the US up until the 80s, articles like these would be against the law for hopefully obvious reason.
The line that's crossed isn't about the title someone has but the power structure in place. Any teacher/student romantic or sexual relationship is verboten at every educational institution because of power dynamics. If what she's alleged to have done is not sexual misconduct then why the fuck was everyone so mad about Harvey Weinstein?
I'm not going to go into detail on the power relationship here. If you're going to deny that a university instructor and a student have a power disbalance between them, and that sexual relationships between them are usually illegal but certainly pretty much always inappropriate and against all policies, I'm not sure what to say anymore.
I linked AN ACTUAL POLICE AFFIDAVID that confirms that this woman not only wrote a lengthy document on their affair, but also how she posted that online, wrote the victim's job about it in an attempt to hurt him, and posted the victim's naked pictures online (among other things). I'm not sure what sort of evidence you would consider valid short of you being there watching it happen. And this is just the AFFIDAVID, there is a lot more out there, easily verifyable from various sources. But maybe someone should call the Tallahassee Police Department, ask for Kameron O'Hara, and verify that he actually wrote the affidavid, as you seem to think that someone forged this whole document including forging the name and signature of an actual office of the TPD (which he is, that's easily verified with a single Google search)?
"and the average person who has no legal background eats it up as the wholesale truth."
That's rather rich considering that between you and me, I suspect there is only one person with a law degree, and it's not you.
If all of this is 'hearsay' and 'made up', where did the mugshots in the OP come from? Let me guess, it's all deep fakes set up by the Cabal, as a pre-emptive move to discredit her in case she would go on 2 years later to become a whistle blower for a virus outbreak nobody knew would happen for at least 6 more months? Please.
> FBI agents question NSA contractor Reality Winner, who was later charged with leaking evidence of Russian interference in U.S. elections. Even the most casual small talk takes on an air of menace.
To scrutinize her, I worked for a time as a data analyst in the pandemic too. There was a lot of shoddy work in many places, but no one of the many great employees I worked with hijacked mass communication software to send an inane message. Look at her message's text, it reads like a Tweet, there's no substance to her critique of her government in the actual message in question (she offers some more detailed objections elsewhere).
For their part, Florida did a very poor job with COVID. The governor was part of the crew of the GOP who detests science and reason, it seems, or at least capitalizes on those feelings in the populace. I understand why they fired her, you can't have data analysts hijacking your software to send mass messages of protest. I'm not sure if the message really did much damage in the end, saying it distracted fellow employees...is that very damaging?
Comparing this to the case at Google, for instance, where the engineer wrote up a long essay with many data points and actual structure...I can't help feeling that both employees' messages were greatly disseminated by the hierarchy's response to them, though I believe her Tweet had much less discussion and text to generate a broader debate here on HN or elsewhere.
What she's alleged to have done is basically on par with a fired employee sending off a net send on their way out the door.
>I understand why they fired her, you can't have data analysts hijacking your software to send mass messages of protest.
She was fired before the message was sent. She publicly stated that she was pressured to modify the data provided to make it look like the state was handling the pandemic better than they were. She did draw attention to this by going to the media, this was after she had been a thorn in the side of the state for a while.
Death rate per capita:
Florida: 110 Population: 21.5 million
New York: 206 Population: 19.4 million
Also, she is reaching far beyond her grasp. And sensationalizing quite a bit. I am sure she is intelligent and competent in her role, but that role is not that of an epidemiologist, data scientist or public policy expert. Why does this matter?
Well, focusing mainly on the public policy, nothing is cut and dry. Understanding how semi-dependent systems work together is incredibly complex. She is so heavily focused on COVID that she lacks the insight into all of the competing forces that make up a society. And yes, getting those forces wrong will also cost lives.
Finally, her dramatization of the number of deaths implies (as many people imply) that any actions (that are not blatantly unconstitutional) could appreciably decrease deaths. Outside of the island nations and China, deaths have a weak correlation with public policy. More suggestive correlations exist for population density (cases) and average age (deaths). And yes, there are outliers (Japan is older, Vietnam is denser) but there are even more outliers on the shutdown argument.
The reason this is myopic focus on lockdowns is dangerous is that if undermines the effective mitigation efforts that can help without ruining society. As soon as any leader attempts to ease anything you have the pearl-clutching "give me lockdown or give grandma death" crowd sensationally crying foul. Our ability for reasoned disagreement was a dead horse years ago, but Covid continues to beat it senseless.
South Korea, Vietnam, Finland, Norway and Thailand are not island nations and yet have a rate of death an order of magnitude lower than the US.
But yeah, we need to learn what was different in Vietnam and Thailand. Vietnam is especially interesting, but it could be easily argued that one of their tools is unavailable here (forced detention at camps for the infected)
That is why I think it's dangerous to proclaim lockdowns are a panacea because with a few exceptions you end up with similar results but a fucked economy
But the real tragedy is the lack of support for third world countries due to the contraction of the global economy. Millions will die due to a reduction in vaccines and treatable illnesses in the developing world. Millions. But it seems we are okay with that as long as _we_ don't get covid
Being an island isn't required; you need effective border controls, and effective control of population behavior. It's just a lot easier to have effective border control with an island; but England certainly didn't make use of that possibility.
The most effective strategy for countries that have large numbers of cases is to go into a strict lockdown, in order to bring case numbers down as quickly as possible. Then they can reopen to a much larger extent than they would otherwise be able to. China and several other countries have successfully done this.
Edit: You're all over this comment thread, what relationship do you have to this story, if any?
I may need some help understanding how that's a "differing opinion" about how to clean up data.
Edit: Just to be explicit, yes I'm calling out the false equivalence as a logical fallacy.
I don’t know if there is a conspiracy, but your argument regarding motivation is definitely not thorough.
I didn't interpret that comment the same way at all.
I think the gist of it can be summed up by (purportedly) Winston Churchill:
"A fanatic is one who can't change his mind and won't change the subject."
If, as you suggest, you're using a semi-throwaway account specifically to discuss COVID, unless other folks know that, your posting history with this account would likely give that impression.
They only parrot what the gov tells them and investigate nothing these days.
There are countless credible scientists saying that we are getting this incredibly wrong on so many levels yet mainstream media does not mention anything other than government narrative.
When did you see any news coverage of criticism of the "vaccine"? I mean, on a scientific level, not government ineptitude at rolling it out.
Edit: I can't reply for some reason but here's a video talking about the "vaccine"[0] and here's the Great Barrington Declaration[1]. Here is criticism from the BMJ [2] stating that (according to my maths) it's only 19% effective... in addition, it's designed to TREAT the symptoms, not cure you... what kind of vaccine is that?
[0] - https://www.bitchute.com/video/edombs4NcvQ6/
[1] - https://gbdeclaration.org/
[2] - https://blogs.bmj.com/bmj/2021/01/04/peter-doshi-pfizer-and-...
There's no credible criticism of the vaccine. Can you point to any?
Are you suggesting the media knowingly discuss information they cannot find as credible?
And, to that end, whether you would agree with the criticism or not, there is none anyway. No questioning or investigation by media of any sort around COVID science. That was my point.
Even if a hillbilly right-wing conspiracy theorist came onto CNN to talk about aliens or lizard-people that would at least be something but there is nothing but acceptance that what the government says is the ONLY answer.
To be fair there is a lot of non-government and also non-media sources of information about mRNA in general and mRNA vaccines.
Understanding how things work helps me make my own decisions about the safety. This talk was one of the better ones I found. It is clearly meant for other researchers or as a university lecture[1], so if they say something you don’t know or understand do pause often (I definitely had to) and get educated about the related science.
My conclusion: Most of this stuff is relatively old science. I was even taught parts of it in high school decades ago (i.e. not politicized). The only unknowns for me are the COVID specific spike protein, and potential overproduction/overreaction by my cells. Given many people (including some friends) have now been exposed to this specific spike protein, it is clearly inert from a non-COVID perspective. And therefore overproduction/overreaction seem to be not a big deal, given the inert nature of this specific spike. And of course now we have data from many people taking the vaccine that it’s not an issue.
Anyways, I don’t distrust the media, but I subscribe to “trust and verify”. Regardless of why you want to verify, the internet allows you to become somewhat educated on most topics in about a week. And if you wanted to spend 3 months you could even become very educated[2] on that specific topic. Might as well take advantage of it for yourself.
[1] https://youtu.be/tVh1s06H_nw
[2] it’s even possible to become an expert over the internet, but would require multiple years and enough dedication that’s it’s probably simpler to just go to college for the subject. But it’s definitely possible, so leverage it as much as you can.
Overall the degree to which information is being controlled right now is pretty alarming.
My point wasn't about vaccine distrust although that's part of it. It's more about not having a competent media that will at least say "we will question everything" and investigating along those lines. COVID is the prime example in my opinion so I provided links when asked.
It's like the trope about media coverage of plane crashes except instead of being an acute incident the media can play off of our fears day after day
https://www.fda.gov/media/144245/download#page=18
This is the first point where 300 odd people were excluded from the analysis because of protocol deviations. Worryingly, this number was much higher in the treatment group. While I hope that blinding would have prevented any motivated exclusion, it's still quite concerning.
His second main point (which is actually really interesting), is that there were 3500 cases of symptoms consistent with Covid-19 that weren't revealed by a PCR test. I'm not sure what to think of this (and note that this number swamps the actual numbers of confirmed cases by about 10x), except that it matches with anecdotal evidence I've seen around negative tests in the presence of symptoms.
The details of the second point can be found here: https://www.fda.gov/media/144245/download#page=42
As a meta-point, the world would be a better place if more people clicked on linked and attempted to interrogate the soruces of things.
There is also so much sensationalism around Covid that it's impossible to actually discuss. Mask compliance for example. I've heard so many times that if only dumbfuck America would mask up we'd be sitting pretty. Except the US has some oh the highest mask compliance of western nations. People talk about anti-lockdown protests as being pawns for the far right and hating science, yet these protests are not unique to the US or the Right.
Essentially our response to a pandemic has devolved into people shouting memes at one another while 30 million unemployed are liking up at food banks. It's fucking crazy
It feels like you're in what I call a "contrarian headspace" where you believe you've discovered something that's under-reported or under-represented, and you've grabbed firmly onto that belief, riding it into every conversation you can. Here be dragons, especially on HN.
I think, to retain my own sanity, I'm going to bow out of this conversation, but I do suggest you take a good hard look at how your beliefs landed you on the same side as the system crushing Rebekah Jones. What they're doing to her is, regardless of legal technicality, problematic, and if you're not able to see that because of your feelings about COVID coverage, you're in some trouble.
Oh is that not the case? Then don't attribute some armchair psychology to my motives. I in no way think I've "discovered" something underreported. I know full well that millions of people, from credentialed scientists to dumbfuck hillbillies see the same things I rail against.
I've been accused of disregarding human life for my views on Covid response. Which is funny as Covid has touched my family in painful ways.
Humans are complex beings, more so than your coined phrase captures. But I still love you! I hope someday we all can have a calm, reasonable discussion about epidemics. Because this will happen again, so we need to study our response here as much as possible
Police are raiding her house, pointing guns at her kids, continuing to come back with technically illiterate and nonsensical reasons to arrest her, because she's said something that someone in politics did not like. Why is this discussion even about covid? This is not an epidemic discussion, this is a political liberties discussion.
This is a discussion about Covid because the accused was motivated by Covid. My argument is that the hysteria we've whipped up over this pandemic has caused people to take crazy risks to further a cause which only exists in our hysteria.
I believe Ms. Jones earnestly believes that she had to do these things to save tens of thousands of lives. If those weren't the stakes in her head, would she have downloaded PII and misused an alert system?
Essentially our rhetoric around Covid is mentally dangerous for many people and can cause them to act beyond reason due to their misinformed notion of risk
> But I still love you!
comes off as _super_ disingenuous.
That is the unfortunate state of public "debate" in the US today. Questions never get settled, and as a result, very little gets done.
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Edit:
From the down votes it appears that I've hit a nerve here.
My reference wasn't this particular article but what happened with her in December. [0]
There was an armed raid of her house where her equipment were seiezed.
I see it as intimidation for going against the state. Perhaps others don't.
0: https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2020/dec/07/florida-poli...
She isn't a scientist.
Does that bother you?
TSA scanner employees aren't officers either. They can't even arrest people, and that is why there is typically a bored cop sitting around nearby.
The Florida arrestee was a UI web developer. Scientist ha ha ha.
There is no thing in "Data Science" that is not in statistics.