Cont: 2019-nCoV / Corona virus Pt 3

[Doghouse Reilly]

So, this is IMO a critically important skill for skeptics that we have neglected organizationally for various reasons. To the point where I walked away from organized skepticism, as I am convinced that until we get closer consensus on how to evaluate expert claims, we have nothing to offer the public. I wrote about it for years, posted on this forum and its JREF predecessor, but it's never achieved much. I sort of moved on.

Specifically, the evaluation of expert claims is usually evaluating a scientific claim (although of course there are other domains of expertise that come up). This is sadly exactly where skeptics fall down the hardest. We're ****** at it.

When an argument with a fallacy backs up our opponent, we mock them. When an argument with a fallacy backs us up, we pretend we didn't notice the philosophical problem. It's bad critical thinking, bad practice, internally inconsistent, muddled thinking, and disastrous when exercised in an attempt at public education.

The core problem is confusion about whether Argument from Authority is such a knock down fallacy that it has to be dismissed a priori, or is the argument still somehow salvageable under certain circumstances?


:: analogy ::
Just as a comparison... we have a fallacy that describes observing something in a small group and just jumping ahead and saying it will apply to everybody: Fallacy of Composition^WP.

Can we always dismiss these claims outright? Well, no, there are circumstances where it's actually a good argument. Some of them are called 'clinical trials'.

Some fallacies are not *terrible* arguments, if specific circumstances are met, such as in this example, controlled randomization and representative sampling.




:: back to claims on expert topics ::

Officially, if you take more advanced courses in critical thinking beyond the 101 level... the 101 is a good start and fallacies are a core topic in the syllabus, so I'm not knocking it. But it's sort of like when we get that guy here who took grade 10 physics and is arguing with a PhD about the speed of light. The fallacy people are sort of the new guy and ideally appreciate there's more to learn, but not all do, and it's a problem I don't know how to address.

Evaluating expertise has some criteria that soften the blow of Argument from Authority. To the point where there's a push to rename the fallacy "Argument from Questionable Authority".

Among other criteria, critical analysts are asked to consider:
* is the claimant an expert in the field in question
* is the claimant regarded as a current expert by his peers
* is there any sort of consensus on this topic within the field yet
* is the claimant aligned with this consensus
* does the claimant have a strong conflict of interest


The critical analyst would have to weigh and compare the mixed results in order to assign a degree of confidence toward the claim being true.

This is not a complete list, but it hits what I've seen in most critical thinking / logic textbooks that deal with medical ethics, expert decisionmaking, and laypersons' strategies for making sense of claims that are out of our scope of expertise.



:: internal consistency ::

Here's where the internal consistency breaks down... there's skeptics who say, nah, we need to do our own research, ignore the white tower eggheads, just bone up on the subject ourselves, no authority involved.

So that's quite the project if we can't discriminate among claimants. We need to treat Jim Carrey and Jenny McCarthy, or Dr. Wakefield, Aunt Mildred, and four hundred thousand Google hits the same as a peer reviewed study in the NEJM. That's a lot of reading. It's also going to be a lot of misinformation.

My opinion is that it just shoves the Authority around.
* Anybody citing a paper from, say, JAMA or NEJM or Lancet is assigning that journal as an authority.
* Anybody digging deeper and doing their own study in their own lab is assigning previous researchers whose (untested by themselves) assumptions they treat as baseline as an authority
* And the manufacturers of the equipment
* And the people who calibrate and maintain the equipment
* And their elementary, highschool, and university instructors who taught them the background assumptions they've never independently validated, oh, and the authors of all those textbooks with formulas and values for constants and so on.

My proposal is that shifting to thinking in terms of Argument from Questionable Authority as being the fallacy restores internal consistency about how we are assigning truth value to all the pieces we bring to the table when evaluating a claim. Textbooks have been wrong, but they're probably not. NEJM has been wrong, but it's probably not. Dr. X could be wrong, but based on the criteria, he's probably not.

Thanks, this is really interesting and a lot to consider. I appreciate you posting it.

 

[Skeptical Greg]

I really appreciate you posting it a second time..

 

[a_unique_person]

How long had passengers been infected before they knew it was a problem?

The infected people, asymptomatic and otherwise, were spreading there stuff all over the ship for some time period before they were confined.

They were having meals delivered to their cabins. Plenty of opportunity for contamination.

I could be wrong. I don't know the details of how the disease spread on the ship.

Have you tried Google?

 

[novaphile]

Perhaps where you are.
But this is not an universal condition for testing, e.g., in Australia only people showing symptoms are tested.

So you and I are not talking about the same oranges.

As to your “only 5% infected” - I don’t think there is a credible medical expert or modeller out there that thinks any country has Less than 5% infections. It much more likely that over 50% of any Western countries population is, or will be infected.

5% seems to be a massive underestimation of COCID-19 infections anywhere.

AND people who have had contact with people who have tested positive.

It's an important distinction which you seem to have missed.

 

[pipelineaudio]

Well, it's already in mass media, so I see no reason not to post it here - it's not like people are going to rush out and buy it because it gets mentioned at ISF.

I'm guessing you mean Invermectin: https://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2020-04/mu-pcd040320.php

Holy crap! This is what they give to us herpers due to our propesnsity to drink out of questionable water sources in the middle of the desert...My doctor said it was made for little old ladies' fru fru dogs that have heartworms

 

[Myriad]

COVID-19 is the disease and it is a new disease. Before the virus was given the name SARS-CoV-2, it was provisionally called 2019-nCov, meaning "2019 novel Coronavirus". The word novel meaning new. It's new to humans and the disease it causes is new to humans also.

Well, that's what you claim "2019 novel Coronavirus" means. Let's just say, I'm not going to be reading any 2019 novels that were typed on Coronas anytime soon.

 

[xjx388]

Such as where? It's not summer anywhere in the world.

Well, it may be technically Spring here, but the temps have been exceeding 90F (today was a brief reprieve, only in the mid 70’s after a cool front) since late February. Hasn’t seemed to stop anything; our case counts continue to grow.

 

[pipelineaudio]

Well, it may be technically Spring here, but the temps have been exceeding 90F (today was a brief reprieve, only in the mid 70’s after a cool front) since late February. Hasn’t seemed to stop anything; our case counts continue to grow.

Its always spring here and ours has been slow....still so perplexed, though its tripled since march 26th now to 350-ish

Watch it turns out to be that eating Spam slows the transmission. I was trying to think of a New Zealand/Hawaii/Japan connection and we definitely love our Spam musubis, whatever they call them in each area

 

[Skeptical Greg]

Have you tried Google?

Thanks..

Of all the hundreds of pages of statistics, scenarios and wild ass guesses, this is the most informative response I have seen in this thread.

It's going to be hard to reciprocate..

 

[Delphic Oracle]

India may have lucked out by catching a few early cases that popped up in remote areas. A plethora of religious sites and festivals for multiple faiths are slowly accelerating the cases (leading to condemnations of those followers in every direction).

It will be interesting (yes, also tragic) to see the spread play out in a country already under lock down before reaching a frightening pace.

Granting that 8,000 other variables weigh in, if a poor country with good discipline flattens their curve while a modern but obstinate country breaks its health care system, that would be quite a statement.

 

[Mader Levap]

the whole thing screeches to a halt as summer arrives, the way flu tends to?

You are grasping at straws. Your tribe screwed up and deserve losing, get over it.

Actual answer: no one will assume such optimistic thing for unknown novel virus. Especially considering there was already summer in some parts of world and COVID-19 didn't care.

 

[lionking]

AND people who have had contact with people who have tested positive.

It's an important distinction which you seem to have missed.

Can you prove this? My wife and I, and others in our family, had contact with people who had the virus. The government knew this and asked us to self-isolate, which we did. None were tested.

 

[EHocking]

AND people who have had contact with people who have tested positive.

It's an important distinction which you seem to have missed.

”generally” you will be tested and only by direction of a GP.
So not automatically AND at all.

Again, just basing assumptions on the number of tests conducted is fraught with problems.

 

[EHocking]

In this paper they have used a model to assess number of infected based on number of current deaths. They themselves point out that the infected to death ratio is unknown. Please read the comments various experts make towards the end of the article. I cherry-picked one: “This is interesting work, but is hampered by the same issues that impacts on all epidemiological models – they rely on assumptions that at the moment are based on only a paucity of scientific fact about how thus virus transmits."

The numbers used and assumed are nowhere near the 5% infection of a population you are proposing.
What do you base that number on?
None of the stats or global health dept figures support your 5% figure, was the point of my post.

 

[DevilsAdvocate]

I find it more interesting that almost 80% were not infected.

It would be nice to know what is going on there.

There was passenger isolation when it was discovered covid was on the ship. It is an isolated community, so it only spreads from a single source and doesn't keep having new infections introduced that create multiple blooms.

A similar thing happened in Vo, Italy.

My point was that using the Princess data isn't terribly useful. And also that even though the small percent of cases seems to look good, if we extrapolate those figures to the population of the U.S., it turns out it is really, really bad.

 

[DevilsAdvocate]

I mentioned earlier that the first confirmed case in my county was an employee’s sister. They had gone to Vegas in the first week of March. The employee later tested positive as well. I would wager Vegas was a huge vector, that is pretty unrecognized.

For age adjusted rates, flu hits hard in Mississippi, Alabama, Tennessee, and West Virginia. To a lesser degree in New York and Nevada, which I suspect is due to being high travel destinations.

 

[DevilsAdvocate]

So what is the takeaway from the new CDC "you can get it from talking" stuff? is it stuff we knew all along?

Sort of. We know influenza virus is expelled when people talk and breathe. But I don't think that route of transmission has been proven. It is a route that is possibly in theory, but we don't know if it happens in practices. And if it does, we don;t know the rate. It is probably small.

Transmission routes for SARS-CoV-2 are probably the same or similar to influenza. Maybe.

We don't know that breathing and talking can transmit the virus, but it is certainly possibly.

 

[DevilsAdvocate]

Are any countries actually over the hump? Do we actually know there is a 'other side' of this thing? Looks like Korea sort of is, but things still don't look good.

South Korea certainly looks like they have put it down. Probably China as well. Unless they get another breakout started.

It is looking like Italy, Spain, and Australia (maybe) have moved past peak. France and Iran (and maybe UK) look like they might be at peak.

U.S. probably still has 2-3 weeks to go. It's a big country, so it will have a longer "peak" as the peaks hit different parts of the country. I hope California can continue to keep their numbers down.

 

[Ulf Nereng]

It is quite simple: about 100k tested, about 5k found. Those are the numbers in my country. If that had been completely random testing it would have been good reason to hold that it represents well the overall percentage right now. Don't you agree? Note that I'm not saying that this will be the final percentage after the epidemic has run it's course. That could well get to where "herd immunity" kicks in at 60-70%.

(The percentage of positives was higher during the spike we had a week or so back. The last few days it has been pretty consistent. 3000-4000 people are tested on average every day. The 5%-rate has been pretty steady.)

ETA: I get the numbers and statistics for my country from this site: https://www.fhi.no/sv/smittsomme-sykdommer/corona/

 

[Doghouse Reilly]

You are grasping at straws. Your tribe screwed up and deserve losing, get over it.

Actual answer: no one will assume such optimistic thing for unknown novel virus. Especially considering there was already summer in some parts of world and COVID-19 didn't care.

My tribe? What does that mean? I don't have a tribe. How did my tribe screw up if I don't even have a tribe? Are you one of those simple-minded types who assumes some kind of political affiliation of people who share a different viewpoint than you regarding this issue?