Covid-19 (Coronavirus) - Please stay safe, y'all


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You're probably missing a lot of information if your source is just the MSM and you do not apply critical thinking, for example (from the NYTimes article):

Yep, you got it precisely right. Data has a spectrum: Highly Inaccurate --> Highly Accurate.

You can actually measure the quality of data if you have enough controls. In fact, one of the key insights into this was provided by Charles Deming after WW2 (a worthy research topic for those that want to increase their reasoning skillsets) . He had the insight that in order to control the quality of auto part production on an assembly line, you DON'T measure every part for quality control. Instead, you apply statistical analysis and only test statistically relavent number of parts on the line and adjust production based on that.

He is one of the key people that helped Japan rebuilt after WW2. He single handedly showed the Japanese how to go from a country producing low quality trinkets to high quality high technology products.

The data that we are being fed is only only highly inaccurate (at minimum by virtue of omission), but it is highly politicised.

Excellent post.
 
If more critical/analytical thinking like this was applied - but universally - then we probably wouldn’t be in such a situation in the first place... And please, let’s not stoop to Trump’s tactic that “there are some very fine people on both sides” (when one of those sides is white nationalist - essentially the KKK etc.) whilst he now says anti-fa and BLM are simply “terrorists”, and deliberately obstructs and covers up scientific approaches to dealing with Covid-19. Such an approach is aped by his and Bannon’s mutual chumps across the Atlantic Bridge in London, where what was until 10 years ago a leading, pandemic-prepared system has been systematically defunded and dismantled, where resources were also deliberately and explicitly diverted for Brexshit, primarily in the interests of Atlantic Bridge and CFoR.
When in the midst of a pandemic an independent, transparent scientific advisory group for emergencies has to be formed for the benefit of the public because the one the dictatorship is “following” is so opaque, you realise just how necessary critical/analytical thinking and transparency are.
The transparency thing is particularly relevant to such projects as Pyra when many of us are (at least in part) here for a more open, community-based technological platform in our society. Hardware isn’t selected purely on hearsay without any critical/analytical thinking; members with actually relevant qualifications and knowledge look up components, their specifications and needs/interactions with other components, weigh up their pros and cons and decide on what’s most appropriate for the project.

Well, once again, a few questions:

1) The fine people thing is a hoax: https://www.scottadamssays.com/2019/04/30/the-fine-people-hoax-funnel/

Basically, you have been DELIBERATELY lied to and you believe those lies.

So ...

2) If the fine people hoax is a lie, how many of the other claims you make in the rest of your post could be totally wrong? How many of those claims can be examined from on additional perspective? How many can be examined from two or more additional perspectives?

Just a thought.
 
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@TeDaDeS They know nothing, that you don't. They're trained in jumping gaps in causality chains - also called religious conviction/being faithful/being a cancer to society.

Hmmm ... interesting. Are you saying that you DON'T do that at all? Are you saying that you are better than "them"?

How have you come to the conclusion that the other side is wrong?

Might it be possible that, this isn't only a question of right / wrong, good / bad data, but this is a general concern of the human brain performing pattern recognition and heuristics on potential danger? I mean, you and I evolved in small tribes over the last 2.5 million years, our brains are literally designed to be danger heuristics machines.

Is it also possible that the people worried about 5g might be also talking about a whole set of related issues that may have nothing to do with technology but might lie in the general area of one group of people FORCING change on another instead of slowing things down a bit and giving everyone time to learn?

Might this also be a bandwidth issue? Human individuals have a maximum amount of bandwidth available to allocation for the incorporation and integration of new information, GROUPS of humans have far far less bandwidth available for the same task if you look at it from an agregate perspective.

Are you sure you are in a position to actually talk down to other fellow human beings like this?
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No need to worry, I'm just resorting to my own tactic of telling it how it is. (And just to be clear, I'm not a Trump supporter and I'm not right-wing.)


How do you know? Have you spoken with people who are against the COVID-19 measures?

There are valid objections against the COVID-19 measures. COVID-19 can kill people, but COVID-19 measures kill people as well. The damage of destroying economies worldwide is huge. People are committing suicide and starving because of measures. And many old sick people are dependent on help from friends and family and their lives are made miserable by COVID-19 measures.

Both sides have valid concerns. It's too bad the situation is not really as easy as the MSM makes it look. One side wanting people to survive and having all the reliable scientists and the other side just being villains who want to spread selfishness and hate for no reason would make it easy to choose a side. But the real issue is much more complicated and much less clearcut than that. The whole COVID-19 issue is very complicated and it's hidden in a thick fog.

Once again, most excellent post. A well rounded, skeptical perspective.
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Unfortunately, it takes a few years to be able to see the bigger picture and, just like chess, to see moves and counter moves. And then, it takes seas of time to keep up.
While you investigate, there is so much misinformation, that, even if you have the video of an interview, it could only present part of the data, and steer you into a wrong conclusion (see picture).
So how to learn that skill?

....

Absolutely wonderful post. Thanks.
 
tldr. (at least not all of it.) have we realized that forums aren't the best spot to debate all the particulars here?

if you think there's a better way to do things, get into public health and get some learning on. be influential after doing your own studies and writing real papers.

otherwise, loose lips sink ships. people are dying because of stupid choices that themselves and others make, in the name of freedom...
 
It's a right wing belief that the value in people is expressed only in the work that they do, and the value of that work is only measured in dollars. It may be a bit extreme to describe them as being analagous to the KKK, but this is Germany, so who really knows?

To be clear, most Germans are lovely people, and in the past few decades have seems to have been mainly left leaning social democrats, at least it seems from the outside. But more recently that does seem to have resulted in the growth of rejection by young people becoming more right wing.

Can you expand on what you mean by "It's a right wing belief that the value in people is expressed only in the work that they do, and the value of that work is only measured in dollars.".

Money is an arbitrary unit of exchange. It solve the problem of coincidence of wants (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coincidence_of_wants). It allows humans to do ARBITRARY amount of labour, STORE that labour in little green rectangles and then RELEASE the labour back out as energy via trade.

People say money is the root of all evil. It is a cute saying, but money is one of the most AMAZING inventions by our species that I can imagine. Money allows us to not just provide an arbitrary measurement between completely unequal things (we can use money to compare cars, brain surgeons and potatoes all in one spreadsheet), it allows us to FLOAT the comparative value through inflation.

Money is a stupendously useful tool and civilizations have re-invented it many times over. On the west coast of Canada they used deep water sea shells that could be mined like gold (meaning they were difficult to mine and therefore inflate out of value) as a currency.

So, when you say "right wing values", what does that mean? How would a left winger value humanity?
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tldr. (at least not all of it.) have we realized that forums aren't the best spot to debate all the particulars here?

if you think there's a better way to do things, get into public health and get some learning on. be influential after doing your own studies and writing real papers.

otherwise, loose lips sink ships. people are dying because of stupid choices that themselves and others make, in the name of freedom...

Well, this is demonstrably wrong inn all sorts of dimensions. To start with, you can easily argue that human conversation is inefficient because it is a single dimensional array of serialized data. Ever notice how most conversations are an error correction heuristic (comparing details and agreeing on which ones are correct, kind of like a shitty human versions of the tcp/ip protocol?) filled will infinite loops like goto statements in old basic programs? That's why. You could also argue that the human brain is inefficient because it doesn't have the ability to fully visualize and hold multivariant / multidimensional arrays and communicate the co-relations between datasets to other humans.

I think it's fun to have a conversation, it's always inefficient.
 
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It's a right wing belief that the value in people is expressed only in the work that they do, and the value of that work is only measured in dollars.
You should step away from the left-right view. You are describing a capitalist value, be it right or left.
So if the grandparents take care of the kids, this replaces the daycare center or au-pair, and thus, can be measured in dollars. Knowing that the values your grandparents instill in your child are yours (most families think alike).
As a society that has enough production for "non-essential" people to be sustained, we can have arts like poets, philosophers and symphonic orchestra's, and free public libraries with librarians that know where every book is because they have to put them back each time.
 
Far Right Watch has done a pretty good job ...

Just so it is said, I love this thread. You guys are really throwing out a statistical point cloud that nicely arches over 99% of everyone perspectives. Very fun.

I have a few questions for you Phlyra.

1) How much do you actually know about Right Wing watch? Do you know which individuals make up the organization? Do you know the ideological directionality of their members? Do you know the political aliegence of each member? Do you know the RACIAL aliegence of each member?

Are you REALLY REALLY REALLY sure you know anything about this organization, on any level?

2) Do you know who funds this organization?

3) Have you looked into what information they leave out of their reports?

I am kind of getting at something here in an indirect way. I don't have a great analogy here, so let me try something like this. You know how dogs are trained to behave one way by their trainers? And one trainer can train the dog to be aggressive while another trainer can train the dog to be the most submissive creature you can imagine?

This is how it works with humans.

My self included.
 
It's that mix of pushing a political agenda instead of reporting news.
If you report other things then the expected view of your target audience you might lose viewership, that directly affects your the companies income.
Indeed, follow the political line of your investors. And keep the ratings high. It's a constant struggle for any tv channel or radio station (even state owned).
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2) How many other ways is it possible to classify political views other than right wing and left wing?


ps: In the Netherlands politics is so weird that many groups have a mixed bag of political views. We have a website in NL to test for your best match (https://stemwijzer.nl/) and last time I punched in my numbers, weird recommendations came out of it.
But it was on difficult things, for example:
Cramped cities, or change farmland into new cities.
More outer dikes (higher dikes=more protection; pumps to get the water out) or more inner dikes (more water buffers to keep fluvial waters, but less dry space) to keep water out.

Here is one example: https://eu.stemwijzer.nl/#statements:wintertijd:12544:opinions
Should EU not use the summer/wintertime anymore (permanent wintertime). If you agree, some leftists, like the green party, but also rightist, like FvD say yes. Other leftist, like GroenLinks and right PVV say no... right....
 
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ps: In the Netherlands politics is so weird that many groups have a mixed bag of political views.

Great posts by the way. Before 2016 I had a simple left right view of the world. After 2016 I had trouble understanding why everyone that was on my side (the left) all of a sudden turned nutty.

I have been forced integrate the far left + middle + far right into a single world view.

Political labels are useful in the same way that flags are useful - they help you see who your enemy is on the battlefield.

I will leave the rest of my comment for elsewhere, I have totally bombed out this thread!

Ha!

Sorry everyone. You guys are too much fun.
 
Here is one example: https://eu.stemwijzer.nl/#statements:wintertijd:12544:opinions
Should EU not use the summer/wintertime anymore (permanent wintertime). If you agree, some leftists, like the green party, but also rightist, like FvD say yes. Other leftist, like GroenLinks and right PVV say no... right....

That is, roughly speaking, my current perspective. People will adopt whatever political flag is convenient to get what they think they want.

There are layers below and around that which control what a person wants. Watching everything since 2016, it turns out it is stupendously easy to control what people want, it just takes an enormous amount of wealth and resources. If you can SURROUND a group of people with a unified narrative (there are some limits to this of course), over a long enough period of time people will start to mirror the narrative. Here is how this works:

* A part of our brain is DESIGNED to mirror the behaviour and emotions of members of our tribe. This is the mechanism that allows us to feel kinship, share sorrow, feel empathy. This is the mechanism that allows us to build tight tribe bonds which in turn allows us to survive.

* Statistically, all tribes have variability that can be described in defferent ways. Individuals have variability amongst each other. Groups like men and women share variability at the group level. What this means is that if you can flood enough of the environment with a unified narrative, all you need is 100 monkeys (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hundredth_monkey_effect) to spread the narrative. You just need enough trusted members of a group to mirror the narrative and it will spread to the rest of us through our brain mirroring mechanism automatically.

The reason that the value systems of the different dutch parties differ in ways that don't follow into simple political categorizations is because the people controlling the resources / narrative environment have arbitrary desires and goals. Or to say it another way, those countries where political parties do fall into simplified political labels have a narrative that only curently falls into those labels. The political groups simply mirror these values, the labels and values are entirely arbitrary.

Please note that, although the cooks and cranks are turning out to be right, narratives in our species have a self organizing spontanety. We have all been members of a group of people where one nutter starts a rumour and before you know it everyone actually beleives this bullshit and you are left scratching our head as to how that happened. Our mirroring mechanism allows for this spontaneous self organization of narrative and eventually beleif.

I now label peoples political flags based on, roughly speaking, the aliegences they make in order to get what they want, and then subgroupings of things that they want.

So far it has provided a tremendous amount of clarity.
 
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Are you saying that you DON'T do that at all?
Nope
Are you saying that you are better than "them"?
I'm saying most aren't aware of it. I'm trying to be and not jump to conclusions.
How have you come to the conclusion that the other side is wrong?
What side? I was referring to the observation, that there are improbable statements made without solid reasoning.
you and I evolved
Individuals don't do such a thing. ;p
 
and we're the best at number of infections now, too! freedom (liberty) comes after life in the declaration of independence. your right to swing your fist ends at my nose; so too it should be with germs and breathing.
What about the flu? We've been spreading those germs for years. The flu can kill thousands of people during a season. Does your right to breath the flu stop with my nose?

just wear a d@*# mask... liberty won't mean anything if our economy goes into free fall.
It's actually the COVID-19 measures that are taking down the economy, not COVID-19 itself. Is your point that if we follow the measures, they will sooner be unnecessary? Otherwise I fail to see your point.
 
You should step away from the left-right view. You are describing a capitalist value, be it right or left.
You're correct in that the right side of my sentence described capitalism in more words. But preceding that was the important word, namely 'only'.
So if the grandparents take care of the kids, this replaces the daycare center or au-pair, and thus, can be measured in dollars. Knowing that the values your grandparents instill in your child are yours (most families think alike).
But how many families pay their grandparents that same amount for this work? That's okay, grandparents have emotional investment in the little people they're looking after, so in many cases they're happy to do this. But we also don't fund elderly care properly, and it's even worse when you look at things like care for adults with learning difficulties. Yet that's capitalist too, because you can only charge what the people are willing to pay. This is where I find right-wing/convervative/republican/call-it-what-you-like thinking falls down for me, because for them the capitalist position rules over almost all else.
 
What about the flu? We've been spreading those germs for years. The flu can kill thousands of people during a season. Does your right to breath the flu stop with my nose?
There are vaccines.
It's actually the COVID-19 measures that are taking down the economy, not COVID-19 itself. Is your point that if we follow the measures, they will sooner be unnecessary? Otherwise I fail to see your point.
Assume the measures are effective, then yes, without them COVID-19 would bring down the economy.
 
You're correct in that the right side of my sentence described capitalism in more words. But preceding that was the important word, namely 'only'.

But how many families pay their grandparents that same amount for this work? That's okay, grandparents have emotional investment in the little people they're looking after, so in many cases they're happy to do this. But we also don't fund elderly care properly, and it's even worse when you look at things like care for adults with learning difficulties. Yet that's capitalist too, because you can only charge what the people are willing to pay. This is where I find right-wing/convervative/republican/call-it-what-you-like thinking falls down for me, because for them the capitalist position rules over almost all else.

I like the gist of this post. I have stopped using terms like capitalism, communism, etc. I can no longer see any of those labels as useful.

There is only one thing: trade.

You have stuff I want, I have stuff you want. We trade. That is it. Capitalism allows individuals to negotiate terms of trade. Everything else up through communism allows other arbitrary groups of humans to tell you how to negotiate terms of trade.

Did you know monkeys understand value, trade and exchange: See here:
There is ONLY TRADE and NOTHING BUT trade. Communists did not eliminate trade in any way. They simply changed the rules of trade to enrich them selves. We are all always fighting about who control the rules of trade and how to put english on the cue ball to help your friends and family.

This shit never changes, it's been like that for ever.
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Assume the measures are effective, then yes, without them COVID-19 would bring down the economy.

There is no proof of either claim in this statement.
 
if you think there's a better way to do things, get into public health and get some learning on. be influential after doing your own studies and writing real papers.

I want to address this post once again. On second reading your core message here is absolutely great. You are right. If I think I have anything worth while to say, why not do real work with it.

You could not be more correct.

There are already plans under way. Currently, in the west, we have negotiated away all control over the key instituations and control points in our society. Many have already paved the way, many have gone into politics, I am focusing on getting control over our cultural institutions, starting with getting control over our mythology. You would not believe how important mythology truly is.

The conversations here and elsewhere are mostly pointless, I agree with you. But, once in a while, testing the water and seeing what bites or what body checks you helps.

The other way to look at conversations like this is, if we can get past the problem of a serialized communication medium, we are all a / b testing our ideas and positions. Hopefully new skills are gained out of such a thing.

I appreciate the critique though. Excellent post.
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You're right, the conditional should read "Assume that the measures are effective and covid is as bad as they say it is,". I'm not aware of a second claim. ?

Oh I see. You are correct.
 
Yes, I agree with this to a degree. At the local level, if you have something to sell and someone wants to buy it, then negoitate a price and get it done. But there are situations where that breaks down, the original one being monopolies.

I swear I am not monitoring this thread! I just had lunch and the window is open.

Levi, I have to admit that flaw that you point out in my post. If we did not have laws about theft, monopolies, false advertising, even environment, my ability to trade is impacted in the negative meaning that I would always be afraid of theft and would have to cary a gun around. Somalia has no laws, its not a nice place to do business.

I will probably have to somehow update my perspective to accommodate the oversimplification. On the surface of it this sounds like a complex systems problem. My statement sounds true when only two people trade. When you have a large scale society, a new set of rules seem to emerge.

Hmmmm ... good point.
 
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