The first and most important is "who is the expert". Out of all epidemiologists and government bodies saying different things, who should we listen to?

Secondly, people have other expertises that may be relevant. Experiments have demonstrated that getting people with a lot of different perspectives together can produce better decisions. I recognize that I'm not an expert in respiratory diseases. But I'm pretty good with mathematics, including graph theory and statistics and differential equations. Someone else may know a lot about how supply chains or small businesses are affected by various policies. Or they may be experts in the psychological effects of various levels of isolation.

I also want to mention shouldn't necessarily underestimate the armchair analyst. It's possible to learn a lot on your own. This ties in with the first point I made above, about who is the expert. Evaluating people based on credentials is one way. It's easy and low effort. Taking into account conflicts of interests and track records will improve your evaluation quality a lot. And for most people it's probably not worth their time to evaluate how credible an armchair analyst is.

Many of us activist bloggers got our start by asking "stupid questions" and then digging deeper when the answers didn't make sense.

Some times we just need motivated laypersons to explain what the experts are trying to say.

Other times we need to point out the emperor is naked.

And so forth.

Scientists and organizations are made up of people, and thus they can make errors like everyone else. Our expert panel yesterday in Italy pulled out catastrophic scenarios (150K people requiring ICU) that were heavily criticized, not only by "regular" commentators but also scientists.

I don't mean that experts can't be trusted. quite the opposite. They play an important role in advising for a proper public policy to manage the current epidemic, but with such a large number of unknowns, mistakes can and will happen. And when they occur, they must be pointed out regardless of where they come from.

The average scientist or medical organisation has no more economic knowledge than a layman. The costs of the lockdown are primarily economic. We couldn't possibly make the best decisions by listening to people who are only in a position to identify the benefits of the lockdown (medical) and not the costs (economic). In that regard, some random blogger is just as qualified to assess the economic costs as some random doctor or epidemiologist.

After all, you were able to recognise both parameters?

Not to mention the fact the core competency of an epidemiologist is statistical analysis and predicting human behaviour with mathematical models at a high level of abstraction, so it's not like the interdisciplinary understanding is a stretch for them

Public policy wrt Covid basically occurs at the intersection of epidemiology and economics. The epidemiologists can help tell you what will happen under different scenarios, and the economists can tell you what will happen economically speaking in those same scenarios.

We're basically balancing the economic impact directly attributable to sick days and to COVID-19 deaths, with the impact of the shutdown itself.

As you already know, my conclusion is that the latter is far more severe. But that balancing act is of course precisely what all the debate is about.

OTOH, someone well versed in economy but not in epidemiology or medicine would fail to understand some of the health implications of the current epidemic.

It's not a problem per se, but that's where the discussion on public policy comes in, weighing all the opinions from the stakeholders, then making a decision (right or wrong, but taking responsiblity for it).

That's why I'm wary of statements like "we will reopen when the scientists say so": it's a deflection of responsibility (they don't carry the burden, rightly so, for their decision, but politics does), and for the politics, a serious step back from its duties.

There's no hole in my view because I believe that experts are right more often than not, but I also believe that they can get things wrong, or fail to see the ramifications of certain policies.

Thus why so much of the discussion seems to be optimizing for a single variable - COVID-19 deaths - while ignoring plenty of other dimensions that we care about (deaths from all causes in the long run, quality of life, etc).

In particular quality of life is absolutely missing from the analysis in many who claim that the lockdown is justified.

Appeals to authority are never good to do blindly. If different conclusions are reached from two parties, then the conversations must continue if they are legitimately grounded.

He was sued for using the title "engineer" while not being registered as a professional engineer in the state. He still had an engineering degree and the education that came with it. He was only written of since traffic light cameras were a money maker and the times were intentionally short to keep the money flowing. Basically he could have been Einstein himself and would have faced the same road blocks, because the people responsible did not want to hear the truth, their money depended on not hearing the truth.

A better comparison for this case would be the story of amateur mathematician Goodwin in Indiana. Whose attempts to revolutionize math were ultimately blocked by a university professor abusing his position as authority figure to coach legislators against redefining PI. Actually it is a nice reversal: Goodwin was a doctor first and self taught mathematician second, and he was in direct opposition to the educated authority on math of his time. Meanwhile now we have a computer scientist and self educated expert on virology contradicting almost every practicing medical professional alive.

It would be interesting on HN if we developed a habit of interrogating everyone for their credentials and shouting them down immediately if they're just another software engineer.

That would be horrible but anyone who is a specialist in a field knows how consistently wrong the HN hivemind is on any subject outside the realm of software. This place is perhaps the biggest community of people who overestimate their knowledge on any subject when in reality they have little knowledge/expertise in said subject.

Ironic, because many people here seem to believe not taking ourselves too seriously will lead to this forum degenerating into another Reddit.

It didn’t sound like an interrogation, it sounded more like a brick wall of “this conversation is over.”

There are definitely diplomatic ways to say this to people or change the subject.

When people ask me, I usually say “I have no idea, we’re all stuck on this ride until the end”.

HN is a rich source of ironic behavior indeed.

Nobody suggested that experts are infallible or should be followed blindly, that’s just an obvious straw man. Experts disagree and make mistakes, and other experts regularly help point that out and make corrections.

What does not follow is the idea that expertise doesn’t matter, and that I have to listen to everyone single person’s hot take on a subject that they just started studying last month.

I'm also very frustrated about people sharing horrible lies and fakes from blogs or Facebook posts.

But I think we should judge the article by its content rather than by whether it's by a programmer or a doctor.

This is why I like anonymous or nearly-anonymous forums like this one: it forces you to think about the content without being influenced by the author's attractive photo, their fame or credentials, or the letters "MD" next to their name.

It doesn’t follow that I have to give every speaker equal weight; this would result in me having to listen to millions of amateurs before hearing an actual expert. The simple reality is that due to the limitations of time and preferential attention given to those with experience and expertise, it’s perfectly reasonable to ignore random blogs.

> horrible lies and fakes from blogs or Facebook posts.

You can’t take the ultra-rational “listen to everyone on the merits” approach and dismiss things as “lies” without a shred of specificity or evidence in the same breath.

It now occurs to me that the experts (epidemiologists?) have already done this, which would be a pretty good starting point. If so, why aren't we now debating their plans?

I want someone, anyone to state thresholds and benchmarks. Tell us the parameters and values. Then we can have a constructive debate.

Declining infection and death rate for X days.

Permissible level of activities to keep R < 1.

Supply chain activity levels to keep people fed, production of essential goods.

Given the complete lack of a plan at the federal level, we can forgive the Ryan Kempers of the world for trying to make some sense of this craziness.

Also, it just now occurs to me the newly formed regional compacts most certainly are doing the same. I'll look to see my jurisdiction is publishing.

1. Examples: https://www.vox.com/2020/4/10/21215494/coronavirus-plans-soc...

Very quick response, because I will go back and read all the linked plans more thoroughly.

I want more of Center for American Progress's "Step #6: Targeted, gradual lifting of restrictions", done more concretely.

https://www.americanprogress.org/issues/healthcare/news/2020...

Apologies, because I'm way more arm wavy than pedantic, so always struggle to explain myself:

I expect:

Concrete targets with concrete numbers, to be revised as necessary. Repeating from above "Downward trend for X days."

Explicit preconditions and assumptions. Like "3 day supply surplus of PPE, with excess mfg capacity to allow ramp up." and "Sufficient testing (per capita) with X hours turnaround with < X false negatives."

Automatic actions, consequences when targets & thresholds are reached. Like "Restore social isolation if trends are flat or increasing for X days."

Initially, best guess for targets and thresholds are just fine, then iterate as we mature.

PS- CAP omitted temperature screenings, which I currently think must be part of the overall strategy.

And scroll down to the section on hero worship to see where the author anticipated and addressed your objection.

For example, I also don't have medical education, yet I am entitled to analyze information and insist that homeopathy, Chinese medicine and chlorine necklaces absolutely do not help against the virus, unlike the educated medical professionals who disagree with me.

Whether the author is a health official who has authority to do something is irrelevant to the substance of their opinion.

Discussing the experience and expertise that someone has in a subject when they’re making policy prescriptions is absolutely in bounds. While it sounds high minded to say that we should argue everything on the merits alone, the brutal reality is that this results in the experts (who are few) being shouted out by the amateurs (who are many).

Expertise matters; this isn’t debate club. If you’re going to start making extraordinary claims in a field you just started studying last month, you must provide extraordinary proof. Not having expertise in an area doesn’t make you a bad person, it just means that maybe we don’t have to listen to your take.

Perhaps by gaining a degree and employment in the area of health and medicine?

A software reliability engineer citing LessWrong and reddit to argue epidemiologists fundamentally misunderstand how to do epidemiology is much closer to the instinctive contrarianism of the average defender of homeopathy....