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A comment on Dr. Levitt: Your words have power. Use them carefully.

Re:Dr. Levitt: Your words have power. Use them carefully by troelsSteegin on Wednesday December 30, 2020 @01:01PM (#25584088)
Quoting: "I’m concerned that people interpret your conjectures as facts.". Harris the author is a Phd candidate in biology at Stanford who is calling out Levitt, a Nobel Prize winning structural biologist at Stanford, for his evidently non-scientifically based popular COVID advice "in keeping with your hostility to epidemiology". Harris maintains Levitt is doing damage, real damage to public health, to his reputation, and the reputation of Stanford. I am just some random, but I was persuaded by her reasoned and pointed argument. Her article took some guts to write. I hope it is constructively received. I would be curious to understand what is driving Levitt.

EDIT: adding a link to an interview w/ Levitt from 8/20: https://www.stanforddaily.com/2020/08/02/qa-michael-levitt-o...

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Re:Dr. Levitt: Your words have power. Use them carefully by elefanten on Wednesday December 30, 2020 @01:12PM (#25584241)
How can you be persuaded by one side of a debate, particularly when you’re someone uneducated in the field?

That’s a startling outcome to me. Is it because she claims to hold the consensus view? Because it was well written?

How do you conclude with being curious to understand “what is driving Levitt” rather than “what is Levitt’s reasoning?”

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Re:Dr. Levitt: Your words have power. Use them carefully by troelsSteegin on Wednesday December 30, 2020 @02:05PM (#25584823)
I was persuaded by the evidence cited by Harris in her editorial. I am categorically interested in Levitt's reasoning. Based on this article, his beliefs are miscallibrated, and that seems odd to me.

A broader question is what should happen when a scientist voices a non scientific opinion? A famous scientist is more likely to get my attention than some ordinary scientist or some pundit. Maybe I am a sophisticated consumer, or may be not. Should I believe this person just because he or she is a scientist? Should the scientist issue a disclaimer - "this is my non scientific opinion"? I think a point Harris is making is that if one is going to opine while wearing the mantle of scientific authority - Nobel, Stanford prof - your arguments should be robust. Harris met that standard for me.

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Re:Dr. Levitt: Your words have power. Use them carefully by kestonis on Wednesday December 30, 2020 @02:21PM (#25584993)
It is very easy - all interviews, opinions, public speeches by all scientists are under "non scientific opinion". Only scientific articles on reputable scientific journals are scientific opinion. All other media is not, because even if you link your speech to specific article and you speak with journalist you use dumbed down terminology. During process of converting scientific article into layman terms there is loss of information. Sometimes it is crucial information or it becomes source of misinterpretation.
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Re:Dr. Levitt: Your words have power. Use them carefully by MyHypatia on Wednesday December 30, 2020 @02:04PM (#25584818)
The author of this article presented documented evidence of Dr. Levitt's incorrect and speculative statements which he has not bothered to clarify. I am persuaded by the article because it presents the evidence clearly and backs it up with citations of that evidence.
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Re:Dr. Levitt: Your words have power. Use them carefully by kestonis on Wednesday December 30, 2020 @02:10PM (#25584873)
Well it is very easy to check consensus view of science - it is published scientific articles. Why it is consensus view? Because it is peer reviewed and different journals have different reputation ranks. In scientific debate you always link the source - scientific article. If he cannot link sources, means there is no need to understand either “what is driving Levitt”, either “what is Levitt’s reasoning?”
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Re:Dr. Levitt: Your words have power. Use them carefully by timr on Wednesday December 30, 2020 @02:05PM (#25584820)
She's loose with facts, herself: consider the four links provided at the end of the sentence "I was personally distressed to watch you tell the governor of Florida, where my high-risk family members live, that COVID-19 does not present a significant threat in terms of overwhelming hospitals. This is verifiably false." That's a pretty big, specific claim. What is the evidence she is providing?

Every word in "this is verifiably false" links to a different article, only one of which provides even weak evidence that one might characterize as supporting the claim:

* Link one is to an article about San Francisco from December 10, claiming that hospitals there will run out of beds in 17 days. Florida is not mentioned (incidentally, hospital capacity in SF has increased slightly since the article was written [1]).

* Link two is to a an article about Miami-Dade from December 4, where they quote CEOs from two hospital chains, who say that they have enough beds to handle the current caseload, but "may" not have enough staff.

* Link three is about cases nationwide. It does not mention Florida.

* Link four is about a White House report from November. The article explicitly says: "The November 29 document showed a minimal change in total hospitalization from the week prior". The "evidence" here is that the document predicts a "post-Thanksgiving surge".

To my knowledge, no hospital system in Florida has been "overwhelmed" by any conventional definition of the word [2]. Florida hospitals currently appear to be well below the peak seen in July [3]. The predicted "post-thanksgiving surge" does not appear to have materialized [4].

Reasonable people can certainly disagree and debate the current level of strain on hospitals in the US, and the appropriate trade-offs in our response to these strains. However, it's not fair or intellectually honest to attack another person for weaknesses in past speculation when you are yourself engaging in speculative, possibly misleading forms of arguments.

[1] https://data.sfgov.org/stories/s/Hospital-Capacity/qtdt-yqr2...

[2] https://www.cdc.gov/nhsn/covid19/report-patient-impact.html

[3] https://www.orlandosentinel.com/coronavirus/os-ne-coronaviru...

[4] https://covid-19.direct/state/FL

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Re:Dr. Levitt: Your words have power. Use them carefully by nhod on Wednesday December 30, 2020 @02:26PM (#25585028)
To be fair to her, she did not claim that hospitals in Florida specifically were at risk from being overwhelmed. Instead, she takes issue with Levitt telling the governor of Florida that COVID generally does not present a significant threat in terms of overwhelming hospitals, which is in fact verifiably false; COVID has overwhelmed hospitals all over the world multiple times. I write this from LA, where our hospitals are currently overwhelmed, and likely to get more so in the next three weeks as people return from holiday travel.
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Re:Dr. Levitt: Your words have power. Use them carefully by timr on Wednesday December 30, 2020 @02:52PM (#25585285)
Yes, I considered this. The sentence is phrased somewhat ambiguously, which is why I said she's being loose with the facts. But the links she provides neither back up the claim (all are speculative), and 3/4 are not specific to Florida, so I think it's a fair critique given the forceful nature of the statement, and the fact that she's calling out Levitt for his own past speculation.

The link to Levitt's supposed comments to the governor is broken, so we can't verify what he actually said in detail. However, if you follow the other links, you can see that she is not above taking comments out of context when it serves her purpose. In the comment about about 10 deaths in Israel, it's fairly clear that Levitt is not making a bold claim about the distant future -- he's saying that given the case counts at the time, it would be surprising to see more than ten deaths, not predicting ten deaths in Israel, ever.

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Re:Dr. Levitt: Your words have power. Use them carefully by mkolodny on Wednesday December 30, 2020 @02:18PM (#25584960)
According to the New York Times' "How Full Are I.C.U.s Near You?", AdventHealth Ocala in Florida is currently at 97% capacity with 56 Covid-19 patients, and the average I.C.U. in Florida is at 82% capacity.

https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2020/us/covid-hospitals-...

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Re:Dr. Levitt: Your words have power. Use them carefully by timr on Wednesday December 30, 2020 @02:34PM (#25585119)
It's possible to find specific hospitals that are at/near capacity at nearly any time of year. Right now, hospitals across Florida appear to be at about 80% capacity, with individual hospitals ranging from 0% to 100% available:

https://bi.ahca.myflorida.com/t/ABICC/views/Public/HospitalB...

This is consistent with the CDC link my previous post. Of course, it's not possible to tell how this compares to any normal year, because we don't have that data.

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