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Has the Corona virus affected any cons yet?
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434 posts in this topic

1 hour ago, gcstomp said:

 

We are leaving it up for anyone who wants to read, while also including a thread from a biologist who debunked it.

Could you please provide the link?

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26 minutes ago, tabcom said:

What do you object to specifically with?

after starting with the lack of professional credentials to understand data, fact, deductions and conclusions? a lot. people will believe it and assume it is a totally credible source. it is not. it is sky is falling we are all going to die sensationalism.

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Anime Central in IL which was scheduled for mid May has been cancelled for this year.

I suspect Heroes Con will also get postponed or cancelled but I have not been able to find any news on that.

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5 minutes ago, wilbil said:

after starting with the lack of professional credentials to understand data, fact, deductions and conclusions? a lot. people will believe it and assume it is a totally credible source. it is not. it is sky is falling we are all going to die sensationalism.

Did you even read it? It was the opposite of "we are all going to die sensationalism." The article that was pulled is entitled "Evidence over hysteria"

It was pulled because a blue check biologist disagreed with a number of the points and argued the original poster didn't have the "proper credentials" to interpret the data. 

For those who wish to read it: https://www.zerohedge.com/health/covid-19-evidence-over-hysteria

 

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2 minutes ago, Mr. Zipper said:

Did you even read it? It was the opposite of "we are all going to die sensationalism." The article that was pulled is entitled "Evidence over hysteria"

It was pulled because a blue check biologist disagreed with a number of the points and argued the original poster didn't have the "proper credentials" to interpret the data. 

For those who wish to read it: https://www.zerohedge.com/health/covid-19-evidence-over-hysteria

 

yes i read it. you win. i am a pacifist.

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tab, you want me to provide a link to what?  it is your original link https://www.zerohedge.com/health/covid-19-evidence-over-hysteria  with 1st lines right at that link :

Update (3/22/2020): After falling under much scrutiny, Medium has deleted Ginn's post. Of note, Ginn is a former 2012 Romney digital campaign staffer with no background in medicine or infectious disease.

We are leaving it up for anyone who wants to read, while also including a thread from a biologist who has refuted it. Click on the tweet below to read.

and you can point by point follow as Carl Bergstrom, someone with actual credentials, dismantles every bit of the Ginn material with which you started your thread, and made 15 bullet points over.

You would open up the Bergstrom twitter thread, the guy who knows his from his elbow, to follow along, but the numbered Bergstrom tweets from YOUR OWN original post and counter point each of the numbered Ginn points: 

1. I hate to invest precious time on taking apart the atrocious @aginnt

article pictured below, but it is getting too much traction here and even in traditional media. This thread could be far longer than it is, but I'm doing my best to only discuss the most glaring flaws.

2. The introduction should be blaring red warning to any thinking person. The author begins by disputing that *context matters*. Without the background to put information in context, all the data in the world are not defense against misinterpretation.

3. You can give me all the stock market data in the world; I don't have the background to make the best use of it because I fundamentally do not understand how the market works or how to take advantage of that understanding. Infectious disease epidemiology is no different.
4. *Information gets lost in translation.* The author claims to be an expert in making products go viral. I suppose that field has borrowed some ideas from epidemiology. Now he's trying to back-infer how epi works from what he knows about that area. It doesn't work that way.
5. Imagine Shakespeare run through google translate into Japanese, then translated back to English by someone who'd never heard of Shakespeare. So much depth would be missing. Same here. We end up with loose neologisms like "virality" instead of a solid theoretical framework.
6. The author discusses the apparent decline in daily growth rate irrespective of control measures. He begins with some truism about small numbers being easy to move; this is irrelevant in the face of the exponential growth that he stresses in literally the previous sentence.
7. He fails to see that this drop in apparent growth rates is heavily driven by left censoring and shifts in testing strategy. Testing started at different times in different countries, was influenced by case density, and early-on, tests individuals in all stages of disease.
8. Next, inferences about "virality" and "viral capacity". I suppose he means "transmissibility". If so, we've spent 20 years developing sophisticated statistical methods to detect changes in transmissibility. With noisy, aggregate data this back-of-envelope stuff doesn't cut it.
9. Disaggregating data is essential to provide context, especially for transmission processes. That the virus can cross national boundaries does nothing to negate the importance of spatial structure and within-country analysis. Aggregating data obscures critical patterns.
10. I hate to ascribe to malice what can be adequately explained by incompetence, but using this lie to sweep away the disaggregated data is such utter nonsense that I wonder how a silicon valley guy could make this claim by mistake.
11. Then there's the bell curve business. If Hernstein and Murray gave the term a bad name, Ginn says "hold my beer". Most things in nature follow a bell curve, so viruses do too? Not science exactly. And do most things? What about log-normals? Exponentials? Etc etc etc.
12. But that's not the worst part. We have literally over a century's history of mathematical modeling epidemic progression. Some look somewhat bell-like. Others don't. It depends on the circumstances, details of the virus, behavior of the population, interventions, etc.
 
I mean I am just copy/pasting from your own link, demonstrating why your read thru isnt what you understood it to be.
 
 
 
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Anyway, link for latest statistics, updates every few hours as countries submit their updates: https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/

337,881 worldwide cases, but for the 111,402 closed cases, 87% recovered/discharged, with 13% death rate.

In U.S., drop down to open link, again it is updated every few hours so these numbers will be vastly outdated by morning https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/country/us/

and this is not speculation, conjecture, projection, just data as provided by participating counties.

38,164 cases. This is just the start in the U.S. so there are a mere 574 closed cases, 31% recovered, 69% death, but again this is a virtually meaningless number as we are just at the start of the data collection. I pointed out 3 days ago, when U.S. had 11,000 cases, numbers would be outdated by morning. With U.S. cases doubling every 2 to 3 days, and some CDC models showing 160 mill to 214 mill could be infected in country throughout epidemic https://www.nytimes.com/2020/03/13/us/coronavirus-deaths-estimate.html

Edited by gcstomp
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50 minutes ago, wilbil said:

after starting with the lack of professional credentials to understand data, fact, deductions and conclusions? a lot. people will believe it and assume it is a totally credible source. it is not. it is sky is falling we are all going to die sensationalism.

Grammar sonny :preach:

 

Your reply to my request leaves me with the impression you haven't even clicked the link, let alone read even a snippet.

I'm sorry if my post doesn't support your confirmation bias.

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1 hour ago, gcstomp said:

tab, you want me to provide a link to what?  it is your original link https://www.zerohedge.com/health/covid-19-evidence-over-hysteria  with 1st lines right at that link :

Update (3/22/2020): . . .

 
 
 

OK, THANKS

I read the article BEFORE that update was posted. I'll check out the rebuttal.

 

MY OWN UPDATE

" . . dismantles every bit of the Ginn material with which you started your thread,"

Carl Bergstrom doesn't really offer a rebuttal. It is more a stream of consciousness outline of undeveloped thoughts. 

Edited by tabcom
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