Comment by CamperBob2 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by CamperBob2 | Hacker News Reader

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You're not an idiot for believing the professor, but you could stand to apply more critical thought to the question, and look for additional sources before thoughtlessly propagating what you heard on a podcast. Just because "a professor" says something doesn't mean you should reflexively believe it.

As an example, a Stanford professor by the name of Dr. Scott Atlas was a prominent voice within the Trump administration who actively advocated disobedience of public-health orders at the state level. When the professor posted this (since-deleted) tweet:

https://i.imgur.com/z0OsMcg.png

.... I wrote his department head. "I thought you should know that some idiot is out there claiming to be associated with your university." They replied, "Agreed, this is irresponsible at best."

Funny thing, though. Dr. Atlas is still a Stanford-affiliated professor, more than a year later: https://profiles.stanford.edu/scott-atlas Tenure is a powerful thing, I guess. Stanford apparently can't distance themselves from this clown, but you and I can and should. That's not who you listened to, by any chance, is it?

Just out of curiosity, was the phrasing of your letter (or email or whatever) to Stanford a deliberate echo of https://lettersofnote.com/2011/02/14/regarding-your-stupid-c... ?

Yes.

Kudos. More people should do this. Too many articulate, credentialed idiots out there sucking people into their little evil fantasies.

I’ve told you who he is. What do you think?

I think you could probably choose worse sources, as many people have. I also suspect you could choose better ones, but what you really need is more sources. (It's also possible that you misunderstood him, or that he didn't do a good job expressing the point.)

What's not debatable is that the fatality rate is not 0.02%, or anything close to it. The numbers don't work. If that's what he's saying, then he's telling you that your state and local health authorities have been lying to you all along... and while not an unprecedented thing (unfortunately), that's still a deadly serious accusation. You should demand that he back it up with solid citations. He won't, so you'll need to look at other sources of data and evaluate them to the best of your ability if you want to get a more accurate picture.

In the meantime, it's important not to spread false info during a pandemic, as I'm sure you'd agree.

He seemed to have plenty of hard science to cite in his hours long conversation with lex fridman, MIT alum and lecturer. It’s available for anyone to watch. If later on it becomes clear I was spreading wrong information then I’ll own up to it.

So at the end of the day we're both just referencing different authorities here.

Why do you trust this guy's assertion on how many excess deaths there have been over the last two years, and their cause, more than the CDC's numbers?

Excess deaths != Covid deaths.

I listened to the podcast again and he said he conducted serology studies pre-vaccine that indicate an overall lethality of 0.2% but 0.05% for everyone who isn’t 70 years old or whatever. That’s detection of antibodies with 0.05% false positive rate and then a follow up on death early on in the pandemic.

So one might point out that I changed my number from 0.02 to 0.2 and this is true. But what’s also true is that there’s a huge difference between 4% and 0.2%. And I was right to point out that 1-4% is bullshit. I feel mad because I remember hearing the 0.2% number all the way back at the start of the pandemic but everyone shouted it down. And here we are and it was right after all…

>So one might point out that I changed my number from 0.02 to 0.2 and this is true. But what’s also true is that there’s a huge difference between 4% and 0.2%. And I was right to point out that 1-4% is bullshit.

Let's for a moment assume your source is correct. If you were "right" to call out someone's "bullshit" because they were an order of magnitude high in their numbers, do you recognize that we were right to call out your bullshit for being an order of magnitude low with your number?

Yes absolutely. But do you admit that when the other guy is more than an order of magnitude wrong (4%), that’s he is spreading bullshit even more than I was? And do you admit that nobody seems to call him out like they ought to? Maybe he would offer a swift correction like me and restore his honor and the whole situation could be better that way.

You keep on using the top of the estimate as if it was the only estimate. They said 1%-4%. I agree that is high, but I also don't think the real rate is 0.2% either as that requires the total COVID death number to be inflated. I don't think there is evidence for that. I think the real rate is probably somewhere in the in the 0.4%-0.8% range. That means the 1%-4% estimate is pretty close at the low end. And if we are going to err on one side or the other, the side that makes people more cautious during a global pandemic rather than less cautious is probably the way to go.

You could also read what Stross wrote slightly differently:

> SARS1 has 20% mortality among patients, MERS (aka SARS2) is up around 35-40% fatal, SARS-NCoV19, aka SARS3, is down around the 1-4% fatality level.

"Among patients" would make me assume that Stross is talking about case fatality rates, not infection fatality rates.

1-4% is a reasonable range for CFR, even if it's too high for IFR.

(Some quick Googling after the fact also shows that while MERS had a CFR in the 30-40% range, its IFR was estimated at more like 0.3-0.7% -- roughly the same range as COVID. Large numbers of undetected mild cases were cited as the reason for the large difference.)

"Jay Bhattacharya is a professor of medicine at Stanford University

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