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Comment by designium | Hacker News Reader

I don’t understand how HN has become this cesspool of nonsense. It is a news. The virus is spreading. What this has to do with US or China? WTF with you guys.

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HN became just another community where it's trendy to talk in a smug way about everything, like it's this elite community of smarter people and everyone acts like one. The only problem is that people know nothing and still act this way, like they are major experts in the field spreading the truth.

It's easier to notice when they talk about non-tech related things, because with tech you are prone to give the benefit of the doubt that they might now what they are talking about, since if it's not your field of expertise it's harder to doublecheck the claims. With news instead everything is crystal clear. Just the usual average internet user that believes he understood everything and acts as a major expert when in reality it completely misses the complexity of the issues he's talking about.

I find this to be true of smart people in general. They have strong opinions about things they know little about, maybe because they're used to being right more often than not.

This comment of yours is an amazingly good example, even an exemplar, of itself!

Well done! (I mean that. It probably sounds snarky but I swear I'm just impressed with how well the self-referentiality held up over most of the whole thing.)

Anyhow, I once got to talk to Alan Kay on here. There's a lot of noise, sure, but the signal here, when you get it, is outstanding.

It's actually not a good example of the described behavior at all. The commenter was clearly opining about how some people act on HN, not feigning expertise in some field.

I want to ask about - sometimes people presume a statement on a forum like this is an authoritative statement, when it's just an opinion.

Why don't we always just consider posts on forums to be just some opinion, from the poster's point of view, isn't that how a conversation works? Though I know expectations differ, I'm not sure why.

Let me own up to it: to some extent I was just teasing the OP.

aw, I want to discuss the question in general, not specifically. Another time.

There's so little content to the references to WHO's COVID handling that I can't tell whether they mean WHO over-reacted or under-reacted to COVID.

Agreed. I don't quite understand the focus on the WHO. They don't really control much in a practical sense. In terms of global response to the pandemic, I think we both under-reacted (at the start) and over-reacted (towards the "end"). China could have stopped the virus if they had locked down back in November/December of 2019, instead of updating their WeChat filters. Whereas by mid-2021, we were past the point of controlling the virus, but NPIs continued in force for a while longer before people realized they were mostly pointless.

China didn't know they had a virus at all in November 2019. The 16th of December is the first documented hospitalization in Wuhan. A wastewater sample in Italy collected on 18th of December was later found to be positive. 23rd/24th of Dec was the first sample collection in Wuhan which was sent to be analyzed for a novel pathogen. 27th-30th of December is when the alarm bells started really going off in China. The first official messages and international alerts went out on Dec 30th and on Dec 31st Reuters published it's first report.

So the virus had been in Italy at least 2 days after the first hospitalization in Wuhan, and around 5 days before doctors collected the first samples which were sent off to labs which later determined it was a novel virus.

You actually can't blame China for not acting before they really had any patients or knew anything was going on.

Chinese government records put the first case as Nov 17, with a daily trickle of cases after that:

https://www.scmp.com/news/china/society/article/3074991/coro...

That's useless since he didn't cause any suspicion in medical authorities, he was just a 55 year old patient, presumably with pneumonia. He was of no public health significance until the retrospective analysis was done in January.

> Agreed. I don't quite understand the focus on the WHO.

Some conspiracy folks consider the WHO, just like the UN, the manifestation of the NWO global government that secretly controls everything.

Didn't help that Trump had some weird hate boner for the WHO to such a degree that the US left it, plus a lot of "WHO is in the pocket of China to suppress the truth!" hysteria around t he same time.

Then there was this whole episode of, mostly US conservative media, creating a shit-storm over this WHO tweet [0] by interpreting that tweet as "WHO said it doesn't transmit between humans, WHO has been wrong and shouldn't be trusted!"

[0] https://twitter.com/WHO/status/1217043229427761152

I think you’re muddying the waters. Outside of US partisan stuff, corruption at the WHO is _legendary_ and has been for decades.

Those positions are surprising to me, for two reasons:

① Finger-pointing an institution that has very limited funding, and very limited power, for corruption, is like blaming the river for sea level rise. Sure, if you dig into the numbers, it contributes to the result; but fundamentally it is not the cause of the problem, and there are much bigger fishes that deserve much more scrutiny.

② Blaming WHO for a tweet where they simply report the words of the Chinese investigation with attribution, at a time where many countries with actual power pretended there was no risk, feels disingenuous.

Forget about conspiracy though, the WHO should have a relatively clear and narrow mandate, while the UN is known to be a toothless assortment of petty bureaucrats involved in everything with no clear consensus. The only thing they share is the goal of their members to grow their personal fiefdoms.

Hum... Looks like it was already a worldwide pandemic at December 2019, and in several countries already by November. So no, China trying that wouldn't have much of an impact.

I don't know if it would be possible to detect the virus earlier if it happened on some place that wasn't trying to cover it up, but when we got to know about it, it was already too late to contain.

People talking about COVID, vaccines, China and Bill Gates in one paragraph make me lose faith in humanity.

People dismissing valid criticism, are just as bad as people making up conspiracy theories that are being criticized in the above comment.

There is no way you cannot talk about the Gates foundation when talking about the AZ covid vaccine[1]. It was supposed to be open access and the Gates foundation lobbied to sell it to AZ which has a horrible track record[2].

I personally think that had they not lobbied that hard to privatize the Oxford vaccine, the problems with the AZ vaccine, would probably have been fixed with further iterations by third parties and the discussion would have looked a bit differently. But we will never know. It's worth noting that the medical branch of the Gates foundation is run by ex pharma bros.

At end of the day Gates is just another greedy grifter, hiding his greed behind altruism. That puts him squarely in line with most Billionaires that have their own little foundations that help them steer and lobby shit instead of paying tax.

[1] https://khn.org/news/rather-than-give-away-its-covid-vaccine...

[2] https://www.science.org/content/blog-post/astrazeneca-looks-...

Bit tangential and perhaps meta but, did you lose faith in humanity reading your own comment? You did mention all those things in single paragraph. Just kidding.

I agree that that's going way too far. But I also sympathize with people and see the side of people who feel like they've lost some trust in all this after the last few years. There's a spectrum of reactions.

Why would talking about corruption cause you to lose faith in humanity rather than the corruption itself?

I think it's a hacker tradition to distrust authority and question everything.

And now this attitude of mistrusting anything and everything coming from an "official" source has gone mainstream.

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