I mean that >100 media articles I’ve read in the last couple of months, from various mainstream UK sources, I’ve never seen anyone seriously entertain the hypothesis that the Delta variant is less deadly than previous variants.
That’s journalistic consensus and calling it scientific consensus is an insult to the scientific project. For society it’s very costly to confuse academic discourse with journalistic discourse. There’s a huge cost for the public trust in science from confusing the two. Making the public case that while there are a bunch of media articles suggesting that climate change doesn’t exist there’s a scientific consensus that it clearly exists wasn’t an easy sell. There’s huge collateral damage from equating the two for propaganda purposes.
The decision of what mainstream journalistic sources print depends on editorial policy and is not based on asking a representative sample of scientists in a field.
Chris Martenson was telling people to get masks in January 2020. That might make him 4-5 months ahead of the journalistic consensus on getting the mask question right. In general the journalistic discourse on COVID-19 is so bad that people who open windows in public transportation get angry looks for it because the journalist failed to tell people that opening windows and getting airflow is very useful for reducing COVID-19 risk.
You’re right, I think I phrased my point poorly. What I should have said is “If there’s no reputable or intelligent-seeming person making some claim for a long time, and then comes along some lone contrarian, that contrarian better make a good impression – otherwise it probably doesn’t make sense to invest a lot of time steelmanning their claims and digging into a hypothesis that wouldn’t even have occured to us without this person.”
Maybe you’ve seen more people talk about Delta deadliness concerns being overblown. But based on my media diet as well as based on all the conversations I’ve had with EAs and rationalists about this, the view that Delta might be a less infectious (but more contagious) variant has never come up.
It’s true that media consensus isn’t great to go by, as we’ve seen with all the instances Zvi documents in his post (mask wearing, possibility of lab escape, etc.).
The UK had a political fight about whether or not to end lockdown and what you read in UK mainstream sources likely reflects how the outlets editorial position stands in the fight.
I do think that having a good track record is what makes people credible and rather listen to people who got COVID-19 right at the start then people who don’t and who published crap about masks don’t working because they were to lazy to do real journalism and critically report.
If we take the Guardian as an example, what possible reason can there be to not publish a single article about patient zero despite Huang Yanling being recognized as important in the NIH letter to the EcoHealth Alliance? Outlets that act that strange should not be trusted.
I do think that having a good track record is what makes people credible and rather listen to people who got COVID-19 right at the start
I got Covid right at the start (among others) and I posted above that my track record is winning the largest prediction tournament at the time.
So let me repeat what I cared about conveying in this discussion, one last time:
The person in the youtube video you linked to may have gotten Covid right in early 2020, but so did hundreds of people (but maybe not thousands). Out of the set of people with a good track record on Covid, this guy is now pushing an extreme minority position. In theory, he could have been right with that. But he’s wrong because his arguments are bad in an easily verifiable way. Once someone’s core arguments for a fringe position (fringe in reference to the best sources we’d want to listen to here, not fringe with respect to the media) get discredited, there’s no reason to continue treating the fringe position as though it still has a high chance of being right. By that point, we must be prepared to say “This guy went off the rails.”
All I wanted to convey is that it makes no sense to continue holding a person’s specific opinion in high regards (good track record or not) when the opinion is highly contrarian* and just had its core arguments refuted. By continuing to argue as though the guy might still be right, you were employing a type of epistemology which, to me, seems doomed. I get the impression that you not only distrust the media consensus, but any consensus seems worthless to you when you see a single confident-sounding expert who stands out as having gotten something right when others had gotten it wrong. I think that’s too strong of an update, because lots of people got things right, and some of them may still be completely nuts and bad at reasoning, and we can spot that by checking things against a mental reference class of “consensus among the people we hold in high esteem.”
*Again, I’m talking about contrarian with respect to the sources we’d want to listen to. That’s a subjective reference class, but since we’re both on this site and value track records, our takes on this may not be crazily different. It is my highly confident impression that <3% of Lesswrongers with high karma, and <3% of people who got Covid right in the early days, think that the Delta variant is less deadly in unvaccinated population than the original variant.
BTW, it’s am minor point, but I feel like the media is biased to fail to identify new variants as more deadly, because of racism concerns. Every single media article about the South Africa variant said “there’s no evidence it’s more deadly.” They were saying this before there was enough time to know with confidence (and “no evidence” was technically false because there were anecdotal reports of children being more affected).
That’s journalistic consensus and calling it scientific consensus is an insult to the scientific project. For society it’s very costly to confuse academic discourse with journalistic discourse. There’s a huge cost for the public trust in science from confusing the two. Making the public case that while there are a bunch of media articles suggesting that climate change doesn’t exist there’s a scientific consensus that it clearly exists wasn’t an easy sell. There’s huge collateral damage from equating the two for propaganda purposes.
The decision of what mainstream journalistic sources print depends on editorial policy and is not based on asking a representative sample of scientists in a field.
Chris Martenson was telling people to get masks in January 2020. That might make him 4-5 months ahead of the journalistic consensus on getting the mask question right. In general the journalistic discourse on COVID-19 is so bad that people who open windows in public transportation get angry looks for it because the journalist failed to tell people that opening windows and getting airflow is very useful for reducing COVID-19 risk.
You’re right, I think I phrased my point poorly. What I should have said is “If there’s no reputable or intelligent-seeming person making some claim for a long time, and then comes along some lone contrarian, that contrarian better make a good impression – otherwise it probably doesn’t make sense to invest a lot of time steelmanning their claims and digging into a hypothesis that wouldn’t even have occured to us without this person.”
Maybe you’ve seen more people talk about Delta deadliness concerns being overblown. But based on my media diet as well as based on all the conversations I’ve had with EAs and rationalists about this, the view that Delta might be a less infectious (but more contagious) variant has never come up.
It’s true that media consensus isn’t great to go by, as we’ve seen with all the instances Zvi documents in his post (mask wearing, possibility of lab escape, etc.).
The UK had a political fight about whether or not to end lockdown and what you read in UK mainstream sources likely reflects how the outlets editorial position stands in the fight.
I do think that having a good track record is what makes people credible and rather listen to people who got COVID-19 right at the start then people who don’t and who published crap about masks don’t working because they were to lazy to do real journalism and critically report.
If we take the Guardian as an example, what possible reason can there be to not publish a single article about patient zero despite Huang Yanling being recognized as important in the NIH letter to the EcoHealth Alliance? Outlets that act that strange should not be trusted.
I feel like we got sidetracked.
I got Covid right at the start (among others) and I posted above that my track record is winning the largest prediction tournament at the time.
So let me repeat what I cared about conveying in this discussion, one last time:
The person in the youtube video you linked to may have gotten Covid right in early 2020, but so did hundreds of people (but maybe not thousands). Out of the set of people with a good track record on Covid, this guy is now pushing an extreme minority position. In theory, he could have been right with that. But he’s wrong because his arguments are bad in an easily verifiable way. Once someone’s core arguments for a fringe position (fringe in reference to the best sources we’d want to listen to here, not fringe with respect to the media) get discredited, there’s no reason to continue treating the fringe position as though it still has a high chance of being right. By that point, we must be prepared to say “This guy went off the rails.”
All I wanted to convey is that it makes no sense to continue holding a person’s specific opinion in high regards (good track record or not) when the opinion is highly contrarian* and just had its core arguments refuted. By continuing to argue as though the guy might still be right, you were employing a type of epistemology which, to me, seems doomed. I get the impression that you not only distrust the media consensus, but any consensus seems worthless to you when you see a single confident-sounding expert who stands out as having gotten something right when others had gotten it wrong. I think that’s too strong of an update, because lots of people got things right, and some of them may still be completely nuts and bad at reasoning, and we can spot that by checking things against a mental reference class of “consensus among the people we hold in high esteem.”
*Again, I’m talking about contrarian with respect to the sources we’d want to listen to. That’s a subjective reference class, but since we’re both on this site and value track records, our takes on this may not be crazily different. It is my highly confident impression that <3% of Lesswrongers with high karma, and <3% of people who got Covid right in the early days, think that the Delta variant is less deadly in unvaccinated population than the original variant.
BTW, it’s am minor point, but I feel like the media is biased to fail to identify new variants as more deadly, because of racism concerns. Every single media article about the South Africa variant said “there’s no evidence it’s more deadly.” They were saying this before there was enough time to know with confidence (and “no evidence” was technically false because there were anecdotal reports of children being more affected).