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Politics : Formerly About Advanced Micro Devices -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Winfastorlose who wrote (1230524)	5/17/2020 9:00:06 AM
From: Wharf Rat	Respond to of 1576711

"There was saying 'there are lies, damn lies and then there are statistics'" Trump is stuck in phase 2. Speaking of statistics, Doc Snow \| May 16, 2020 at 3:55 pm \| Reply You’re right, Mike. All along the way there have been surprises: just this morning, I was surprised to see that Brazil had posted over 15k new cases and (with a caseload already over 200k) a 7.5% daily increase. Not good! They are clearly destined for a top 3 place on the global leaderboard–and, given that their population is over 100 million greater than Russia’s and that their current increases are considerably greater as well, probably #2 spot behind the US within two weeks (ish). That wouldn’t necessarily have been predicted even a couple of weeks ago; while they were clearly on the rise, I did not expect, and probably few others did either, that from that point their growth would be near-exponential. (It’s been more often the case that the curve continues to flatten with growing cumulative cases.) But that’s just one currently notable example. Covid ‘denialati’ that I’ve seen are concerned to minimize the significance of the virus, presumably because it is economically and politically unpalatable for them. And there are two strategies that are being tried out: the first is to argue that the damage is only ‘measly,’ to use willie’s word. One instantiation of that actually misuses the concept of “mortality rate” to do so, by redefining it as the proportion of deaths to overall population rather than to infected persons. So, for example, they take the 268 deaths per million the US has experienced so far, and restate that in percentage terms: .0268% They then call that “mortality rate” (a step apparently too egregious even for willie.) “But wait! There’s more!” They then invert that to arrive at the very reassuring overall population survival rate: 99.9732%! See ma, nothing to worry about! One important tacit dimension of that is also the second strategy I mentioned, namely, that of assuming that the present moment ‘is all there is.’ Trump has done this consistently–“It’s only 5 cases! It’s only 15 cases!” The examples above commit the same sin. And again, it’s familiar from climate denial: “CO2 is only 0.04%! Sea level rise is only 3 millimeters a year!” Flies in amber, bereft of past or, especially, future. But the risk is that failing to consider the future may deprive one of actually having a future at all. tamino.wordpress.com