ryankemper

> "I don't want to go to the ER, because I might catch COVID from another patient, or doctor" is a very justifiable fear.

The mortality risk of undetected/unaddressed heart problems, etc, far supercedes the risk from COVID-19. You could find some limited examples where that's not true but it is overwhelmingly the case.

It is becoming increasingly clear that the level of panic associated with COVID-19 is absolutely divorced from the ground truths.

But it doesn't just affect non-COVID-19 mortality. It may be that our response is even making COVID-19 mortality worse in some cases:

From https://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMc2009787?query=rec...):

"Social distancing, isolation, and reluctance to present to the hospital may contribute to poor outcomes. Two patients in our series delayed calling an ambulance because they were concerned about going to a hospital during the pandemic." (My note: So the irony here is incredible, these weren't just non-COVID-19 patients afraid to come in but _people who actually had life-threatening COVID-19_.)

And from https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lanpsy/article/PIIS2215-0...:

"Third, the COVID-19 epidemic has caused a parallel epidemic of fear, anxiety, and depression. People with mental health conditions could be more substantially influenced by the emotional responses brought on by the COVID-19 epidemic, resulting in relapses or worsening of an already existing mental health condition because of high susceptibility to stress compared with the general population."

and

"Finally, many people with mental health disorders attend regular outpatient visits for evaluations and prescriptions. However, nationwide regulations on travel and quarantine have resulted in these regular visits becoming more difficult and impractical to attend."

Just saw this comment. Saying "don't censor expression of opinions on online platforms" is not saying "teach creationism" in schools, nor "teach that the earth is flat".

In other words I think that's very much a red herring.

Sorry, can you clarify? Are you saying removing speech causes genocides, or not removing speech at all?

Yes, but I think trying to map out indirect violence gets into very dangerous territory. So, that's why I draw the line at "directly" advocating violence.

Of course, the lines as always get blurry. To use a random example that comes to mind, when Kathy Griffin posted the severed head of Trump - was that a direct call to violence? That's a tough one to answer. My first intuition is that it does cross the line, but I could very easily see an argument that it's not.

So unfortunately there will always be that difficulty, unless we committed to an absolutist position of not removing ANY speech. I drink a lot of the kool-aid, and even I don't go that far.

I must admit I find your reply a bit frustrating, because I literally began my comment by addressing what I feel is exactly your argument:

> I very strongly feel that we should be very careful to avoid adopting a legalistic attitude towards freedom of speech. That is, I am opposed to the argument that private corporations are not bound by the first amendment, and therefore it's okay for them to suppress content. I agree that they're not bound by the first amendment (I don't claim to understand the nuances of the "platform" laws so I won't address that), but that's different from saying that we as a society should want our private platforms to engage in such censorship and suppression.

In other words, do you see how your response is taking exactly the "well, technically it's legal" attitude that I was talking about, and how my point was about that there is a difference between what is legal and what we actually want in a society?

I personally agree that what David Icke is spreading is a bunch of nonsense. But I'm against suppressing him because otherwise I can't maintain a logically consistent belief system. That is to say, as soon as we can ban the lizard guy, we can also ban a lot more viewpoints that are not quite as controversial / outright crazy but straddle the line.

And just to head this off, the dimension of palatability to advertisers is separate, and if a site chooses to quarantine or whatever, so be it. I'm speaking merely from a framework of, "is this the kind of society we want?", as opposed to, "is it feasible for a profit-seeking corporation to adopt such an open policy"?

Right. In general contradiction arises when we try to prevent people from doing stupid things. It becomes very difficult to maintain a logically consistent view on what's okay to censor and what's not.

Most of us agree anti-vaxxers are ill-informed and that adopting their beliefs causes people to engage in patterns of behavior (avoiding vaccines) that are not in what we think is their best interest.

What about other beliefs? If someone posts a video saying that they don't think seatbelts are effective in preventing injuries during car crashes, should they be suppressed?

What about someone who claims that vaping is safe and popularizes the practice? Do we ban that?

It's easy to pick a few almost-universally hated groups and rally against them: racists, anti-vaxxers, flat earthers. Few things are that cut-and-dry. And watching the widespread rise of "benevolent censorship" wrt COVID-19 has really shown me how far we can take the idea of "protect people from information that could harm them".

For example, I recently submitted a highly controversial 7500+ word blog post that advocated for ending lockdown in the US. I got some matters of scientific fact wrong (and have since addressed or am currently working on addressing those), i.e. things like accounting for the phenomenom of "overshoot". Some sections probably did not give a perfectly fair view of "each side" and could be/were criticized as being cherry-picked. And I think I got a lot of things very right. I've now had 9 people e-mail me in the last 24 hours saying that they tried to share my post on Facebook/Messenger and that the entire domain is now blocked for violating the community guidelines. Is that something worth banning? It advocates for a position that could easily be argued will lead to death, and therefore reading it could kill people. So it's a very easy argument to make, if you take the position that we should suppress "harmful" information.

As I said at the start of this thread, I basically reject the entire concept of "disinformation" for that reason; it inevitably gets used to suppress even the most good-faith and well-researched (or in my case, somewhat-well-researched :P) arguments. Therefore I think the entire concept is inherently dangerous to a free society.

Okay, that's enough rambling for one night. I'll let everyone else duke it out :)

Are you saying that I am entering propaganda territory, or instead that David Icke is/was? The meaning is not clear to me, although I assume you are referring to myself.

Again, the distinction here is that I don't think being wrong (even if you think it's intentional) is something we should try to suppress. And the reason I think that is because right/wrong is ultimately a value judgement, and thus opens the door for equally flawed individuals to castigate a viewpoint as false while conversely spreading their own falsehoods (which they themselves view as truth).

As far as advertising revenue is concerned, I understand that business incentive. So, if they want to use Reddit's quarantine concept - or even boot them off their platform as they are doing now - they're free to do so, but I don't think that it's the _right_ thing to do.

In other words, we can agree that a business is acting in its own self-interest and thus would want to get rid of these types of people. I believe that they have the legal authority to do so, as well as all the incentives. But where I don't agree is that I don't cheer them on when they do it. Rather I think it's very dangerous.

So in other words, I suspect the difference between our beliefs here is that you are cheering on YouTube for doing this. You're (correctly) seeing that David Icke is a total fucking wacko and saying to yourself "good riddance". I certainly understand that inclination. I just don't believe in it myself, for the reasons that I've outlined. (I hope I haven't mischaracterized you there - sorry if I did)

Couldn't YouTube have adopted Reddit's quarantine concept? (Ignoring for the time-being the inherent tendency of such a concept being used to drive out dissent as happened with Reddit with respect to fringe conservative voices)

I consider your statement to really be saying the following:

"According to myself, YouTube is perfectly capable of objectively and correctly deciding that David Icke is full of shit."

Yes, by not addressing that I put myself in the trap where I was forced to respond to it anyway in a later comment.

So, in order to avoid repeating myself, I believe I addressed that notion here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23063309

In short, I am not saying that the truth will necessarily "win out" over the false. Rather I am saying - and this was my fault for not being clear enough - that I reject the notion that we should try to pick a side to suppress. Because the same part of human nature that leads to rampant spread of disinformation is the part of human nature that tries to decide what the capital-T Truth is.

So, my personal belief system - and I know how unpopular this viewpoint is, especially in current times - is just let them have at it. Remove blatant calls for violence, and nothing more. ("nothing more" should include racism and other unpopular beliefs, by the way, in case my viewpoint isn't controversial enough thus far).

So, saying "We should go out and attack $GROUP" should be removed. But saying "I think $GROUP is inferior due to highly discredited scientific-seeming reasons" should not be removed, because however wrong or distasteful it is, it's not directly advocating for violence. Similarly, something like holocaust denial or anti-vax beliefs, etc should similarly not be suppressed.

Again, I know I'm probably in the minority here, but I hope that helps you understand my thoughts on these issues.

> Some people, after being exposed to misinformation, chose to believe them.

You missed my point :) Humans, being inherently limited, are always at risk of being wrong. Being wrong about things is the default state. I simply don't think that we should strive to expunge all forms of "misinformation". That is to say, of course people believe misinformation.

> Do you have evidence that the truth more often than not win over lies?

Ah, I see my point is easily misinterpreted. I find it very plausible (in fact, I outright believe) that "a lie can travel halfway around the world while the truth is still putting on its shoes". Rather, I think the implications of using that fact to justify suppression is inherently dangerous.

Furthermore I think truth, just like the concepts of agency and free will, are useful abstractions for us to operate under. But when examined in their totality, the concepts unravel. Thus I feel that truth is local, not global, and by acting like there is a global form of truth we are only forcing our local-truth onto others in the misguided belief that we can separate truth from our individualized local contexts.

Coming back down to earth for a second, the problem always remains: "who decides what truth is"?

The classic problem - who decides what behavior is benevolent?

"$INSERT_POSITIVE_ADJECTIVE despotism" is still despotism.

So it comes down to each person's belief set - do they believe that despotism is unfortunate when misapplied but is a force for good in the right hands? Or do they instead believe that all forms of control inevitably will get seized by corrupt forces? Or more radically, that the entire concept of control is inherently contradictory when seen in the broader context of us having brains with limited computational power, limited knowledge, forever bounded by time in a locally deterministic universe, and thus any attempt to seize control just furthers the propagation of ignorance that the "benevolent despotists" are ironically trying to eradicate?

The answer is left as an exercise to the reader.

I very strongly feel that we should be very careful to avoid adopting a legalistic attitude towards freedom of speech. That is, I am opposed to the argument that private corporations are not bound by the first amendment, and therefore it's okay for them to suppress content. I agree that they're not bound by the first amendment (I don't claim to understand the nuances of the "platform" laws so I won't address that), but that's different from saying that we as a society should want our private platforms to engage in such censorship and suppression.

Booting people off of platforms merely reinforces their pre-existing beliefs, and further radicalizes them.

COVID-19 has added the additional element of this new concept of "disinformation". The argument is seductively simple: "being exposed to this information could lead you to engage in patterns of behavior that harm society. Therefore we can conceptualize this speech as being an indirect form of violence/negligence and therefore we have a moral obligation to remove such content".

Many may disagree, but I think we need to throw out this concept of "disinformation" entirely. I don't believe in fighting "bad ideas" by suppressing them, I believe in shining a light on them. Let the truth fight for itself. (And of course now comes the classic counter-argument: that the evils of disinformation possess a virality that makes them spread far more easily than the truth, being that truth is nuanced and difficult to acquire whereas bad information is seductively simple. I won't address that argument here but personally I think it's a very dangerous way of thinking)

What role do you feel private citizens should take in discussing public policy?

I agree that my projections won't be as accurate as, say, the top modellers'. (BTW, I'm working on the next iteration of this article that will tie in Ferguson's model which is IMO very high-quality and what I will use to better characterize the containment case, since I agree with the criticism that I need to do a better job characterizing the "other side" so to speak)

Where I disagree is the incredible notion that only "scientists" or epidemiologists are equipped to propose/discuss policy. That seems very backwards to me. We need experts, scientific, economic, etc, in order to help us make predictions about the ramifications of various public health interventions. But when it comes to an ultimate decision on policy, that requires knowing what our _values_ are (i.e. what we're optimizing for).

I don't see many epidemiologists trying to forecast the economic cost of lockdown, or trying to debate the ethical merits of these extreme measures, nor the constitutionality therein. They're not fully equipped to do so. Neither am I, as we've already said. But each of us as private citizens needs to look at the data and the projections, and then look at our personal values, in order to determine what we feel is best.

Or to put another way, what I would call "the cult of expertise" has a bootstrapping problem. Let's say I accept that I should follow whatever the experts say without question. The hard problem of expertise is, how am I, a non-expert, supposed to evaluate who is an expert? Or which of the experts specifically I should trust?

When we decide someone is an expert we are making a value judgement based off of our own heuristics, biases, preconceptions, etc. There's no getting around that.

To be clear, I am not "arguing against" the concept of experts. Or claiming that I know more than them, etc. All I'm saying is, it's not enough to just say "let the experts handle it", because the problem of "who is the expert?" is intractible. So instead, we make the best effort that we can.

--

Finally, I want to say that, as I've said elsewhere, if my argument is truly so riddled with flaws and holes - and this thread has pointed out a _lot_ of flaws, which I am currently trying to address - then it should not be very hard to show why my conclusions are incorrect. It really shouldn't require having to resort to credential-waving, etc.

Thanks for engaging. I truly appreciate it.

I'll terminate this by being so pedantic that we cross over into non-pedanticism.

Per descriptive linguistics (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linguistic_description), the assertion that it's wrong to start a sentence with a conjunction is incorrect. Ditto for splitting infinitives, ending a sentence with a preposition, etc.

(Descriptive linguists basically define the rules of language to be how humans actually use the damn language. It turns out such a philosophy saves you from falling into a lot of traps)

I don't have anything substantive for right now, but just wanted to say that I've gotten a lot of value out of your responses in this thread and really appreciate you taking the time to do so.

Circling back:

https://gitlab.com/ryankemper/writings/-/commit/6daa56a4a05f...

Ah, I see. You are completely right. Thanks for pointing that out.

Okay, I half concede your point. I expressed the desire to have holes poked in my top-level comment contextualizing HN submission / thread comments itself, but did not make clear reference to it in the document itself. So the external dependency means that you are by-and-large correct.

The part I don't concede is this notion:

> Instead you decided to broadcast your ignorance with confidence about an area already ripe with misinformation that is costing people their lives.

In that, it strays far too close to the dangerous notion of "advocating for ending the lockdown, however flawed, is killing people". Which is a notion I cannot and probably never will be able to get behind.

By massive excess I was referring to vents/tents. Estimates of vents needed were far too high due to the models being relied upon (i.e. not because we surprised ourselves with how flat the curve got given the seroprevalence was not expected from policymakers as far as I can tell).

Still, I _don't_ know about how we are doing in terms of healthcare workers. That's almost certainly the bottleneck and it may be that it's still a bottleneck. I'd have to do some research to say for sure. It's very possible my statement was not correct in that light.

Meta: I'm currently constrained to using one arm since I had a not-so-fun ER visit today, so I'm not really firing on all cylinders right now. So, if you happen to look into the NY capacity matter on your end, I would love to hear your findings.

Thus why I don't engage in gatekeeping. I'm just pointing out the obvious hole in your view.

There's no hole in my view because I believe that experts are right more often than not, but I also believe that they can get things wrong, or fail to see the ramifications of certain policies.

Thus why so much of the discussion seems to be optimizing for a single variable - COVID-19 deaths - while ignoring plenty of other dimensions that we care about (deaths from all causes in the long run, quality of life, etc).

In particular quality of life is absolutely missing from the analysis in many who claim that the lockdown is justified.

> This is what a large number of domain experts (including data scientists with domain knowledge) have been doing, and they believe the lockdown has been necessary (and will continue to be, at least in part).

I believe you, but can you cite some domain experts so that we have something to work off of?

I see, I think my point of contention was that it's not accurate to say that these are necessarily undercounted covid deaths. That hasn't been proven.

I do agree however that it is very likely that the majority are.

> Also, though not directly due to the virus itself, the 'avoidable' deaths are kinda due to the pandemic and an over-response-ish factor.

Right, the distinction is if they would have occurred in an environment where we weren't locking down and suspending elective surgeries in places that weren't hard-hit. In a place like New York we should definitely assume that the capacity wasn't there until we have evidence otherwise though, so that would be a region where we certainly could not blame overreaction.

Thanks, I'll try to think about this more later on.

I'm going to hold up on responding to the points about unfalsifiability for now and focus on addressing this part:

> Obviously, we can't lock the entire civilization down forever, and nobody has made such an argument - there will be a gradual easing of restrictions over the coming months, but there's an expectation that we might see another wave of virus transmission in the fall.

So, the fear of the "second wave", in my opinion, is precisely because of practicing Containment as opposed to practicing pareto mitigation and letting the virus run its course in non-at-risk individuals. Or more accurately, since we're talking about still quaranting ~40% of the US, we would still see a small wave but it would not be nearly as significant.

In other words, the potential for the wave exists because having "protected" everybody from infection, there is now a huge differential pressure for SARS-CoV-2 to exploit. i.e. there are still plenty of vectors and thus the second wave is absolutely a concern.

Given how low prevalence in places like California is, I absolutely think we will see that wave. But again I essentially view it as a sign that we handled the situation wrong.

Given our current Containment policies, the resurgence of the wave might be met by a new wave of lockdowns. I certainly hope not, but that seems very likely. Hopefully by that point though people have mostly went back to work and thus it _might_ be politically untenable.

--

I guess I'll address the unfalsifiable point really briefly (I won't do it justice) - I think the claim that social distancing did/does more than lockdown is definitely falsifiable. Maybe not perfectly so, but we can see movement data and try to correlate that with waves of infection via projecting deaths backwards in time. It's certainly fuzzy given we'd be using average time until death as a proxy, but the claim is much _more_ investigable than the infamous "lockdown worked, end of story" line.

As you can tell, I read everyone's feedback.

I don't share your views on this matter. I think, particularly given that public policy is relevant to all of us, that it does make sense for even a layperson to engage in the conversation. This is not merely a scientific issue. Rather, we need to don our scientist caps to try to figure out what is likely to happen under different scenarios from an epidemiological standpoint, and then we need to think like economists when analyzing the economic impacts of proposed policies, etc. It's very much an intersectional discipline.

While I am very transparently trying to shift peoples' opinions, I am also inviting them to try to shift my opinion.

Rather than sink 200 hours into this in order to make it picture-perfect, I wrote a first draft that I feel covers some important points, and shared it to get feedback. As you have seen, some parts were completely wrong, some parts were completely right, and a lot of parts were/are in between.

By doing so, I've exposed myself to viewpoints that I would not have otherwise heard, and vice versa.

We all get frustrated when people make statements that expose an ignorance on a subject that we are well versed in. But how we choose to respond to it is very telling. So personally, if someone makes a ridiculous statement about my field, but their statement was made in good faith and they are seeking feedback, I will absolutely take the time to try to tell them where I think they got it wrong. Even if I think they got, well, everything wrong.

Precisely this, I define lockdown as the forced closure of businesses, public parks, beaches, etc.

Telling people "we recommend physically distancing and wearing masks" does not qualify as lockdown. I hope that I made that clear in my writeup.

Thanks for jumping in here, I think you made the point far better than I could have.

> without making an effort to get their ideas validated by people

Me posting this is literally me doing that, so your visible irritation is very oddly placed.

> Credentials are not the only way to acquire or demonstrate expertise. You say you are a "dude that likes to read research papers", how many epidemiological research papers have you read? How much time have you spent discussing those papers with epidemiological experts? Did you reach out to any of those experts to have them take a first pass as fixing any mistakes you made before you decided to post it publicly

> Instead you decided to broadcast your ignorance with confidence about an area already ripe with misinformation that is costing people their lives.

This is not a fair characterization; I was very clear that this represented my "first draft" and that I was looking for feedback specifically to have people poke holes in it.

Fortunately, a lot of people did have substantive contributions that pointed out errors or places where the arguments were weak, as opposed to merely engaging in sanctimonious gatekeeping as you are doing.

> This doesn't really pass the sniff test. You wrote 7500 words on this topic, but felt that including "I have zero experience in any relevant fields" would be overly verbose? Are you sure there wasn't another reason?

https://gitlab.com/ryankemper/writings/-/commit /05b4b616c5e0017b0f80682533399c8696d897b5