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Comment by jsnell | Hacker News Reader

But Vince from YouTube was of course completely wrong there. At the time they recorded that video, there was overwhelming evidence that the Alpha variant was more transmissive. It was astronomically unlikely that it could have been explained by a founder effect or individual super-spreader events. Unsurprisingly, the evidence was correct while the uninformed pattern-matching from a non-epidemiologist was wrong.

For this new variant it could still plausibly be a founder effect. But that's because the circumstances are different this time (the variant became dominant while cases were surging from almost nothing, not when the cases were already at a high level). Not because that checklist is actually correct.

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> But Vince from YouTube was of course completely wrong there.

Claiming Vince was wrong in the video also means the researchers that discovered the variant were wrong. After all he was just parroting their findings in the video.

This article was on the same day as your YouTube video and paints a very different picture. So what's your source that the YouTuber has accurately parroted scientific findings?

https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2020/dec/21/calls-for-n...

Vincent Racaniello is a professor of virology.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vincent_Racaniello

17 minutes in, dismissing the R value that the UK scientific advisors calculated based on unpublished data, that we now know was correct: "you can't use epidemiological data to prove a biological effect of an amino acid..."

Yeah, that's a virology point of view all right. That something has to have a proven biological mechanism before it can be taken as fact, or even considered as a risk. That's bad public policy though. With his reasoning there would have been no reason to increase restrictions in the UK in Dec/Jan, but in fact the restrictions were extremely necessary and the variant caused tens of thousands of extra deaths.

The R numbers coming out of UK epidemiology are garbage, Racaniello is right about that. They aren't physically grounded in any way, they're just arbitrary fudge factors brute forced to make their equations plot graphs that look like reported government stats so far. The same model will routinely calculate totally different values of R for different areas of the same country at the same time, without variants or anything like that.

Also the claims about variants being "more infectious" are - when you dig in - hopelessly confounded by seasonal effects that many epidemiological papers were at that time still ignoring.

The seasonal effects are trivially controlled for by comparing the growth rate of the variant to the growth rate of the wildtype at the same time. And that's exactly how the original analysis was done, because the people doing it were not incompetent.

For your seasonal effect explanation to make any sense, the effect would have to have only applied to Alpha but not to baseline Covid at the same time. And then it's not a seasonal effect, is it? It's an actual difference in the behavior of the two variants. The same goes for any other similar confounder that you try to manufacture.

Not the analysis I saw, where Delta's growth rate was compared to Alpha in the same time window, not the start of alpha's own growth period. Because yes, they are totally incompetent. You can look at graphs of the changing proportions to see visually that that's not much difference in how fast they took over.

Professors can be wrong or misunderstand things. They are human too.

Is there any evidence besides an appeal to authority?

An expert in the field is more likely to be right compared to someone who isn't an expert. Their opinion should carry greater weight

The modern issue is that most of experts are with very narrow expertise, which is not carrying that great weight as you might think and such expertise also doesn't mean that much in responsibilities.

My mother at 14 after a car accident was considered as lost cause and by opinion of expert she should be dead, but survived only because her relative with much less medical expertise believed in second opinion and got her in different hospital. Sometimes, these stupid parroted ideas about expert opinions can only be proven wrong by personal experience only. But quite many people do not learn from their own mistakes, so, meh - there is no cure for stupid people, who can't think by themselves.

PS Every covid mutation so far has put scientists on alert...

If a thousand people point to expert A, and a single person points to expert B, does that tell us anything useful about expert A or B?

expert A has thousands of twitter followers, while expert B does not use social media.

Only if they have a good record of predictive accuracy.

Is that the case here?

Are you claiming a professor of virology shouldn't be classed as an expert in viruses?

They are only allowed to be an an expert in 2021 if a majority of anonymous Twitter followers agree with their assessment, and if their stated political opinions for their entire lives lean in the correct direction. Please note those two conditions correlate.

Not saying this is you. Normally your comment is a trope by the right to paradoxically imply how they are such victims in 2021, but the other side are snowflakes and want to cancel every one.

There’s an overlap with hard left and a few other niche political views as well. Though with less victimhood and more consistency at times.

Personally, I care very little for appeal to authority myself. The bias among experts based on their political views is generally going to be very high.

Vince kind of lost his credibility when he allowed David Tuller to post on his blog.

So Vincent wasn't wrong, because he was just parroting the experts.. but Vincent is the expert? Am I understanding the logic correctly?

No you're not understanding the logic correctly. The GP was wondering why he has to trust a YouTuber to accurately parrot a research article and I point out that he's not a random YouTuber. Of course he can still be wrong?

Appeal to authority is a logical fallacy, no? Because that's exactly what the claim is. I understand that it makes him less likely to misunderstand the research (probably) but its not a guarantee and is naive to depend on that fact.

Appeal to authority is not a logical fallacy, although some people argue that it is. Put more correctly: experts know better, but aren't perfect. For example, were I to cite Peter Duesberg, a well known virologist, about HIV transmission, I'd be wrong, even though he's an expert virologist.

I assign higher priors to subject matter experts until I have reason to believe otherwise.

> Appeal to authority is not a logical fallacy, although some people argue that it is.

I mean, it is a logical fallacy. An expert isn't right only because he's an expert, he's right only when the evidence supports his position. Do all experts only make conclusions based on evidence, or do other beliefs factor in? I think the answer is clear, hence the fallacy.

No, it's not a logical fallacy. Nor would the fact that experts don't make conclusions purely on evidence mean their citing their statements fallacious.

For any given scientific question, select two populations. One populaton is enriched in subject matter experts, while the other is selected at random. Have them make blind predictions about scientific facts. It is not fallacious to sdtate that the first group's predictions will have a higher posterior probability.

I've actually studied a lot about logical fallacies, and so I can tell you with certainty that appeal to authority is, indeed, a logical fallacy.

Source: Myself, an authority

Joking aside, you are just misrepresenting what the "appeal to authority" logical fallacy is. An "appeal to authority" is when one argues that "X is correct because <insert some expert> said it was". In really, X is either correct or incorrect, regardless of what any authority has said about it.

So yes, appeal to authority is absolutely a logical fallacy. Changing the definition of those words and then arguing that your definition isn't a fallacy is called a fallacy of equivocation. And yes, a fallacy of equivocation is also a logical fallacy.

What's really going on here is two different meanings of the word "argument". Appeal to authority is indeed a fallacy if you're dealing with a logical argument meant to prove something absolutely and undeniably true.

That's not the only kind of argument that exists though, and we're pretty unlikely to be in that kind of argument on the internet talking about current events. When trying to tell from incomplete facts what's more likely to be true, listening to what an expert says is a pretty good start.

I agree with everything you said. But I still say that “appeal to authority is not a logical fallacy” is a false statement, regardless of whatever shinanigans is going on in this discussion.

Agreed. It's always a true statement, though sometimes irrelevant.

you can't provide anything absolutely and undeniably true, except maybe in math. I mean, I used to do debate and after some time I noticed that none of it was based on truly logical arguments; everything was about persuasive seduction and coming up with the minimum to cast doubt on your opponent's position.

But yeah, I like the way you put this; we're just arguing on the internet about things which are too messy to have a true false dichotomy.

> you can't provide anything absolutely and undeniably true, except maybe in math

Logic is part of math, and logic is where logical fallacies come from.

You really need to look up what "logic fallacy" means. Any invalid logical inference is a fallacy. An appeal to authority is not a valid logical inference because an authority's claim is not necessarily true; the definition of a valid inference rule is if it's result is necessarily true if it's antecedents are true. Therefore an appeal to authority is a logical fallacy, by definition.

Appeal to probability is also another kind of logical fallacy. Don't get me wrong, there's value on knowledge and judgement that resides outside of the logic domain but you don't know what's a logical fallacy.

What does the logic domain have to contribute to human arguments? There is nothing, other than pure math, which follows logic. Nothing in our society is logical in a way that people arguing objective facts could resolve a problem.

A lot. It's the language of pure reason and a tool for abstract thought. It's a pillar of any STEM field like math, computers, physics, engineering, etc. Our society was built on top of it. I think you're misjudging it's value because you're mistaking it for a way to achieve non-falsifiable claims, which it's not as any logical claim only hold as much as it's premises, while ignoring it's value as a framework for though.

Where is the appeal to authority? I made no such claim and have explained what I meant in considerable detail? I have explicitly mentioned several times that he can be wrong. Appeal to authority means authority isn't wrong because authority.

lozenge stated: "So what's your source that the YouTuber has accurately parroted scientific findings?"

To which you replied: "Vincent Racaniello is a professor of virology.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vincent_Racaniello"

This is an appeal to the authority of Vincent's position as a professor

On its own you can interpret it like that, but this is a bit unfair. I have already explained what I meant with my comment, I even have a comment that predates the one you cite where I explicitly claim that he can be wrong... My point was not to say that he's right because he's a professor. It was to clarify that he's not a random YouTuber.

It seems silly, to me at least, to take external statements to this given thread and apply them as if they were said here. I took your comment at face value, all seven words and the URL. That was the entire statement, there was no mention of "he's an expert but he could be wrong"

When asked for evidence, the ONLY evidence that you provided, was that he IS an expert. Full stop.

At the time the message tree was vastly different. The messages were next to each other. It looked like this:

             GP
             /\
      Comment.  My 2nd reply with link.
        /

My first reply where I said he could be wrong.

> So what's your source that the YouTuber has accurately parroted scientific findings?

The parts of the video where he literally quotes the original findings.

And then dismisses their findings as "that's a flawed argument and not how we do science" (17 minutes in).

Why does it matter? Researchers are wrong all the time, improving upon that is kind of the point of science.

It's a bit unfair that the GP calls him Vince from Youtube. He's a professor of virology so not just some nobody giving his opinion on Youtube. This doesn't mean he can't be wrong of course.

I did feel a bit bad writing it, but it was for the purpose of countering the appeal to authority. This is a epidemiological question, and being a professor of virology doesn't make you an expert at that. So the outcome was that Racaniello ended up recommending inaction, since he'd only accept evidence from his own field (i.e. lab work).

Thanks dude, now I have to deal with lots of replies that misunderstand what I wrote in response to you. While you knew who he was! :P

But all good. I used to listen to his podcast at the beginning of the crisis but after a while I stopped because I felt they were ignoring reality while waiting for science. Which felt like a strange way of working when reality was what we had to base decisions off of.

I think it matters that he’s wrong because you’ve already given him such a high stature. Him being wrong means a policy that depends on him being right should also be reinspected. But policies aren’t that flexible.

> Why does it matter?

because the science matters. This new SA variant could be more transmissible or it could not be. Lets stick to the actual data and go from there.

The question is: what do you do in the absence of data, or with only very preliminary data? By the time the scientists have had chance to fully investigate the moment for action has often passed.

'... what do you do in the absence of data, or with only very preliminary data?'

Stop shoveling carbs at every meal. Lose 30 pounds. Start to exercise and increase cardio-pulmonary performance. It appears most people in developed countries became couch potatoes and gained fat. To each his own. My body, my choice. Your body, your choice.

One day this totally common sense comment will be the norm.

Probably the same thing as if a new variant didn't exist. Get vaccinated, wear mask, etc.

I think we are misunderstanding each other. I asked why it matters if Vincent being wrong means that the scientists that wrote the article would be wrong. To me it is a natural thing that happens in science. Of course the scientists can be wrong?

because I was getting the impression the person I replied to was trying to frame the situation as a YouTuber vs Scientist argument. That of course wasn't the reality.

But the actual commonsense evidence is that Alpha isn't more transmissive, which makes Vincent right. Alpha, Delta, and every other variant has turned out to be the same when practically speaking as experienced in our actual cities and populations across the world. So Vincent is ultimately correct: the "evidence" based on modeling was lacking, and his second point was that politicians and the media should not be rhetorically distorting the scientific positions that can be taken. There's a difference between taking reasonable precautions and oversimplifying scientific positions in order to "motivate" the public or to make media hype (both of which are TWiV's pet peeve, as anyone who has been watching their videos can see).

Absolutely False.

https://www.yalemedicine.org/news/5-things-to-know-delta-var...

Delta’s quick growth rate has been especially dramatic, says F. Perry Wilson, MD, a Yale Medicine epidemiologist. Delta was spreading 50% faster than Alpha, which was 50% more contagious than the original strain of SARS-CoV-2, he says. “In a completely unmitigated environment—where no one is vaccinated or wearing masks—it’s estimated that the average person infected with the original coronavirus strain will infect 2.5 other people,” Dr. Wilson says. “In the same environment, Delta would spread from one person to maybe 3.5 or 4 other people.”

https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/34369565/

“ We found a mean R0 of 5.08, which is much higher than the R0 of the ancestral strain of 2.79.”

Please stop spreading misinformation.

> Alpha, Delta, and every other variant has turned out to be the same when practically speaking as experienced in our actual cities and populations across the world.

This claim is wildly false, and you've already been refuted by someone else.

Remove your false post.

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