Science is supposed to mitigate the shortcomings of our natural intuitions and cognitive biases. The problem is that most people are not scientists. When a non-scientist is asked to trust a scientist, he or she is subject to all of the usual suspects: arguments from authority, confirmation bias, Bulverism, appeal to emotion, etc. What this means in practice is that scientists are generally not trusted over the word of one's friends and family.
This layman has read that we intuitively think of numbers logarithmically, which makes him wonder if we human beings do, in fact, intuitively understand exponential growth.
Exponential growth is like dynamite. It's absurdly fast, compared to anything people see in daily lives.
The only truly exponential example that comes to mind is milk souring. But that's too slow, unless you keep notes.
The real sad part of all this is that this is simply human nature. And we are next gonna go down the same path with climate change. And then not even lock downs will help.
Having seen the cutting of rural hospitals over the last two decades it will be a shitshow
It's also not necessarily an indictment of democracy- Taiwan clearly has been on the ball here. But it is absolutely an indictment of our current state of affairs in many western countries.
I did my numbers back in December. In January was already pretty worried, but I'm not an expert I thought. Maybe there's something I'm not taking in account.
So I kept reading about models and stats. Not that difficult. Ran my numbers again and again, yep it seemed pretty bad no matter what I cheated myself with parameters etc.
Then it came to Spain. I was pretty nervous by that time, kept it cool, tried to warn to people that this was no joke, everyone thought that I was a bit crazy and alarmist. Days passed, government went absolutely erratic and irreposible, lost all my trust in the lead epidemiologist and the ministry of Healthcare, not to mention the HUGE amount of healthcare workers that were insisting that it was just a flu and some of us were alarmists for two month and turned 360 in a few days.
Too late. Now I'm in it.
I have to say that some time ago I had a course of applied statistics with epidemiology exercises so I was not really an alien to it, but not an expert either.
But as has been pointed out before most people think if you do something big and dramatic to fix an oncoming problem, and it does fix it, lots of people will stupidly assume that you did not need to do the big, dramatic thing because it wasn't really a problem. So any politician who reacted appropriately would run the risk of fixing the problem and losing power in doing so, I would prefer to fix a problem like this even if it meant I would not have the power to fix later problems as my calculation would be if I do not fix this problem now I probably won't have the power to fix later problems anyway.
"The number of lily pads on a pond double every day. If it takes 20 days for the lily pads to completely cover the pond, how long does it take to cover half the pond?"
I think you will be surprised by how many people say "10 days."
So if you explain to the politician, once you start getting cases in your country and give them the actual growth rates, and what slowing down the growth rates will mean, with nifty charts and so forth.
Like maybe they should do in the movie Outbreak where they have display of the red spreading across the country on its way to the White House, with a timeline animated below it, then the politician will understand the situation without intuitively understanding exponential growth.
I suppose reasonably competent data visualizers who have ever had to explain complicated things to non-technical people in an important meeting would know how to represent the concept in their particular domain without much problems.
on edit: changed our to your
Why is it relevant that people don’t correctly apply exponential reasoning automatically? Because when people encounter information in everyday life (outside of the specific job they’ve been trained to do) they tend to use intuitive thinking predominantly. This matters a hell of a lot when it comes to making political decisions of a technical nature, such as infectious disease planning and response. Lo and behold, this is the exact problem the Italians are trying to warn everyone about!
Relating this to the spread of the virus, people aren't carrying around an animation of this in their minds. Perhaps science communicators should do a better job of communication and produce such an animation? But then you're still not getting people to understand the concept. You're telling them "this is what it looks like, sort of, now just trust us." The problem is that people don't trust scientists (and mathematicians) as it is.
And I don't believe you should have to understand exponential growth to listen to clear government messaging about the severity of a problem. This is a failure of messaging by the relevant authorities.
And my snarky side says there will be plenty more targets to blame in the coming weeks - think of it as an investment.
People will grasp at any excuse to convince themselves "it'll be fine, it won't happen to me". The fact it started in China made it easy - the Chinese government must be overreacting because it's authoritarian, it's halfway across the world, my government must have gotten this figured out, my health care system must be better than China's, etc etc. And of course the classic "it's just a flu".
It's sad that so many will suffer and die because of this.
But now, on HN now we're mostly preaching to the choir...
I've been contacting the officials of my state and surrounding communities since February 28th urging action. If your community isn't taking action you should join in. Even if your politicians don't respond to math, they'll still respond to public outcry.
The best time to respond was a while ago, but today is still vastly better than tomorrow.
Exactly. Two weeks ago every coronavirus thread on Hacker News was full of deniers claiming this was no worse than the flu and this was all just media hysteria. Some probably still hold that opinion. I don't think they will be convinced until the hospitals start overflowing.
(Engineers to, too. I try hard to watch it and I still arrogantly show my ignorance sometimes.)
When Coronavirus appeared in Wuhan, I tended to the opinion that it would self-limiting in one fashion or another or that is would not be worse than the flu. Only people arguing with me and me investigating the facts changed that. And, yeah, changing your opinion is hard and imagining a force that will upend the world is hard so it's easy to imagine how people stay in their positions.
That said, we have a representative government with the aim of electing people who will think ahead and protect from purely reflex based views. And clearly that control has failed.
The potential for this kind of pandemic is something that the government was aware of and at least somewhat prepared for. It can be hard to imagine, but if all we had were the concerns of joe-everyman this would have caught us significantly more off-guard than it has.
Where I think we've faltered is in rapidly the hard decisions to trade-off short term economic impact vs long term health and economic impact. But there is still time to do a lot of good, and the level of our response seems to now-- finally-- be increasing exponentially along with the infection.
Interview: https://samharris.org/podcasts/190-respond-coronavirus
IE we should not allow people to take risks that are going impact all of society.
The virus has exploded the American myth that we can isolate individual behavior to individual rewards but also this myth means the country is going to seriously suffer.
There was no excuse because there was never a chance for another outcome. The WHO was screaming into the void.
After that point it is mathematically clear that you're going to have deaths, and that similarly situated communities who react days later will have a lot more deaths. At that point the political calculus you're arguing for flips the other way around and encourages an over-reaction. ... except innumeracy is so common, we're not seeing too much evidence of that happening.
I guess anything less would be a dummy.
You don't have to be a mainstream follower to appreciate a high-performance leader
>who definitely understands Math
>who definitely understands Math
In future centuries we will look back and recognize this leadership characteristic is what has always been most advanced compared to all other outstanding choices.
Especially at times when the stakes get unusually high.
Organizations, communities, citizens, civilizations, and populations have always gone by the numbers.
And there's always a mainstream of some kind, with attitude being a thing among the moving weighted moving averages.
Seems like those furthest from the mainstream can also be most sensitive by nature to an _idiot-in-charge_ across various types of idiocy, and multiple levels of government, corporations, and other organizations.
Strongarm conformance and/or manipulated populism are some things that can give rise to a mainstream with ineffective recognition & response to dummy leaders and their destructive outcomes.
Since even a slightly above average problem-solving ability can make relatively genius moves compared to a slightly below average performer, it's tragic when there's not enough mainstream force to elevate the most mathematically competent leaders to handle high-stakes responsibilities.
Even more tragic when the mainstream is less-aware, and settles on preference for the dummy ones.
We need to confront the fact that democracy in the West by now elects people who sell the most comfortable lies instead of people who help adaptation to reality.
I am hopeful that human civilization and ingenuity can invent or discover that. I am just not confident that it would be anytime soon.
Alternatively, they do, and the process of getting there makes them less likely to do the things they wanted to do.
Bring back sortition!
At least German politicians had the sense to step aside and hand the mess they made to the scientific experts to clean up.
There is a large faction of people in the USA who believe this a politically motivated hoax. This is the world we are living in. How can we vote in competent leaders when a large faction holds such strong influence?
This has nothing to do with the politicians.
It's super easy to retrospectively say "they should've done something else". You might think that even you would do the right choice, but you are wrong.
Such decision is hard for any authority. You may vote for any person in the whole world and the result would probably be similar. Lockdown delivered too early could send whole country into chaos.
Also China managed this so well that it actually could work counterproductive for other countries.
What I'm trying to say is: Don't judge others. You have little idea of the situation they are in, and saying retrospectively "you should've known better" is just childish. Just learn from their mistakes.
With your attitude, you can choose any party and will always be unhappy about the choice.
European governments were not the first to have to deal with the epidemic (China), nor among the first few (Taiwan, Hong Kong, South Korea, Singapore etc.). They were fully aware of what happened in Wuhan without early action. They literally just had to follow what Taiwan, Singapore, South Korea etc were all doing. Those countries had less information and less time to act, and yet they're riding this much better than much of Europe.
So why _shouldn't_ European governments have known better?
Wasn't until it got Italy hard that most people opened their eyes.
But the point I was trying to make was that saying that somebody should've done something differently is not helping anybody. That's just complaining and nobody needs that.
Also - doing nothing until it is too late - not even educating - is not even a choice. It's not a strategy. Its dereliction of duty.
Those are the conservative figures for influenza in the USA since 2019 November.
Where was your outrage last year and the year before. Couldn't we have prevented this influenza tragedy from happening all over again. Is this also dereliction of duty?
It is by observing others and judging their decisions and actions that we can learn and avoid other people's mistakes.
Is it not?
What you are asking about is just drawing conclusions. I wouldn't mix those up.
It might be worth revisiting top comments on HN threads relating to Covid19 in the past few weeks. Quite telling how much the 'know-it-all' folks actually know about the real world - makes you even more afraid that these are the same people who run countries and have an outsized influence in the public sphere.
There are scandals in the sciences too. Peer review rings, studies that tend toward positive bias due to the pressure to publish, some studies being paid by big companies that favors their vested interests, etc.
The leaders of the country, the people in power, and the populace are not math literate.
We have to face the truth that the quality of people we vote for government is not where it needs to be and that science has too long been discredited and ignored.
Some of asia learned from SARS but that's it.
Madrid was hosting marches, political rallies and soccer games with 10.000-100.000 people a week ago because people did not want to make the hard choices needed even as Korea was burning and Italy started to.
Excuses that China is authoritarian do not cut it - this was a huge fail of governance and doing what people are elected to do