"Be kind. Don't be snarky."
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
If you know more than others, that's wonderful. Please share some of what you know so the rest of us can learn. None of what you wrote here helps anyone learn—it just puts others down, makes you sound supercilious, and makes the community worse. A comment like this stuck at the top of a thread, letting off fumes and polluting the environment with meta nastiness, is one of the worst things that can happen on HN. No one intends it to happen—I'm sure you had no such intention, nor did the upvoters, but it's the default that we co-create on the internet unless we consciously do otherwise.
https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sor...
If you just pour acid on stuff that you scorn, it may get heavily upvoted because everyone is feeling anger and scorning others is a way to relieve that feeling—but you can't pour acid without pouring it on the commons, which is extremely fragile. By getting upvoted, the damage you cause is amplified 1000x. People posting here need to take care of the commons, the same way none of us would pour toxins into a mountain lake, leave campfires burning in a dry forest, or litter in a city park.
I totally get how frustrating, nay maddening it is when others are wrong and ignorant on the internet and self-satisfied about it. But being a good citizen on HN means learning to tolerate the pressure and metabolize the irritation this activates in you. Then you can come back to the commons with a response that builds it up—for example with interesting, relevant information—rather than tearing it further apart.
Our brains are hard-wired to weight painful impressions—like internet comments that seem dumb or wrong—much more heavily than pleasurable ones, like comments we agree with. This makes it feel like HN is dominated by wrongness and dumbness and meanness to a greater extent than it actually is. We all need to become more aware of this mechanism (especially by observing our own reactions more closely) so we don't destroy this place by making the mistake of feeling like it's already been destroyed. The truth is that it's hovering precariously in between.
https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sor...
https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&so...
Generic warnings about "bias and groupthink" have no helpful effect anyway, let alone snarky putdowns of others. Apart from adding off-topic noise, they polarize the audience into a "like and agree" tribe and a "dislike and disagree" tribe. Then the two go after each other in increasingly nasty and unthoughtful ways.
If you actually want to reach people you have to do it differently. If you (I don't mean you personally, but all of us) don't actually want to reach people, but just to vent bile, that's not what this site is for, and there are other places to do it.
and as the population grows am hugely thankful for the moderation too
I’m not sure why you would question the intentions of the upvoters - do you believe they don’t understand how the upvote system works? It seems clear they had every intention of promoting OP’s message and forcefulness with which it was delivered.
I don't believe that either the commenter or the upvoters wanted an off-topic flamewar to be pinned at the top of the most popular thread on HN's front page. That would be malice! Outcomes like this happen on the internet, not by deliberate malice, but because a large number of small contributions—usually made without much attention, and without thinking of the overall health of the community—compound into a damaging outcome.
Perhaps take some of your own advice; one comment in this thread has not damaged HN.
Consider; for me OP did not leave as painful an impression as the helicopter parenting and scolding that followed. Trigger the Streisand Effect at your own risk.
Moderation comments are an unfortunate evil. To some extent they do the very things we're scolding others for. I don't feel very good about that and I'd love to find a better way—especially because they're even more tedious to write than they are to read. https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&so... Unfortunately, the system doesn't regulate itself with community and software mechanisms alone. There needs to be a moderation mechanism as well, i.e. humans who are giving the system their primary attention and giving feedback to it. I'd never claim that the way we do it is the only way or the best way, just that it's better than nothing.
While I have you: could you please stop creating accounts for every few comments you post? We ban accounts that do that. This is in the site guidelines: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html.
You needn't use your real name, of course, but for HN to be a community, users need some identity for other users to relate to. Otherwise we may as well have no usernames and no community, and that would be a different kind of forum. https://hn.algolia.com/?sort=byDate&dateRange=all&type=comme...
Honestly though, Reddit/HN without a comment section would be great. Let messenger systems handle propagation.
irc.ycombinator.com would probably be much easier to moderate and be a lot healthier for everyone too.
All of these people thought they were smarter than the instruction I received from a real doctor, nurse practitioner, and the CDC. These were smart people, though, and mostly (but not limited to) highly educated engineers.
The easy to point to example is how a lot of doctors viewed masks at the beginning of the pandemic. Or how trickle down economics is also endorsed by experts. Or experts opinions on mental health drugs. And so many other subjects where it won’t be hard to find an expert on the dumb side of the argument.
I think we should rely on experts, but we can’t dismiss people’s doubts or research just with a “I’ve seen a real doctor” slight of hand.
Ok, so I've looked into the history of this a little, and most of the mask mythology seems misunderstood.
Prior to 2020, most medical professionals believed most viruses, and corona viruses particularly, could not be transported as aerosols. This was a subject of research where the data had not come in.
About late March, it began to appear that the virus could be an aerosol. Hard results did not come in until April and May, and many in the field discovered they had egg on their faces.
Conflicting advice is to be expected with new information.
Example, a local wine shop in my small town where you are not allowed to touch the bottles, but I see the staff inside with their masks off when there's no customers in the store.
Frankly, I think people really just don't _want_ to believe it's aerosol transmitted. Because the consequences for public policy would be so drastic; no malls, no factories, no schools, etc. should really be open if you admit it.
But it’s also possible they’d have to admit grandma-type adages about opening the windows actually work and office buildings don’t let you do this anymore.
But no, keep applying youre second grade logic: spreads through air-> indoor places unsafe-> CLOSE EVERYTHING.
That's not to say some of it isn't security theater (ie my parents were washing cookie boxes with soap some a couple of months ago), but those measures aren't being driven by the public health, but rather the unrelenting fear mongering of the media.
I've also looked into it a little and come to the opposite conclusion. Here is one study from Singapore in 2014 that showed surgical and n95 have about a 68% and 95% efficacy respectively at preventing SARS transmission https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4293989/ Masks have also been shown to provide protection against the common cold (many strains of which are also coronaviruses) and seasonal flus https://www.livescience.com/7661-masks-protect-colds-flu.htm...
In the absence of more specific information about SARS-COV-2 early in the pandemic, surely it would have made sense to default to using the preventative measures that were known to be effective at controlling SARS and other known respiratory diseases? Especially when these measures come with no real risks.
It's true that they didn't know with 100% certainty, and China's misinformation about human to human spread in the beginning and not allowing the CDC team in early to investigate certainly didn't help either. Maybe these experts, including Dr Fauci, the CDC, and WHO, just made what turned out to be very bad judgement calls and they honestly thought that masks wouldn't prevent the spread of the disease. But by far the likeliest explanation in my mind is that these institutions knowingly lied to the public in an attempt to manipulate people into not buying masks, and I still find that to be absolutely unconscionable.
https://bmcinfectdis.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/s128... [2019]
"In summary, despite the various mechanistic arguments about which organisms can be potentially airborne and therefore aerosol-transmissible, ultimately, the main deciding factor appears to be how many studies using various differing approaches: empirical (clinical, epidemiological), and/or experimental (e.g. using animal models), and/or mechanistic (using airflow tracers and air-sampling) methods, reach the same consensus opinion. Over time, the scientific community will eventually form an impression of the predominant transmission route for that specific agent, even if the conclusion is one of mixed transmission routes, with different routes predominating depending on the specific situations. This is the case for influenza viruses, and is likely the most realistic."
The link I posted is to a 2019 paper discussing how and why some viruses are considered airborne transmissible such that masks would help. (Single papers don't usually settle complex questions, right?)
cactus2093's links are to a paper discussing the difficulty of getting people to use masks correctly and a science popularization article describing an unnamed study from the University of New South Wales and an unidentified CDC study. The first link does include references about the utility of masks, to articles titled "Risk of transmission of airborne infection during train commute based on mathematical model", "Knowledge about pandemic influenza and compliance with containment measures among Australians", "Physical interventions to interrupt or reduce the spread of respiratory viruses: systematic review", "Professional and home-made face masks reduce exposure to respiratory infections among the general population", and "A schlieren optical study of the human cough with and without wearing masks for aerosol infection control", but those don't seem to imply the issue is settled. The second link does go on to say, "While some governments are already stockpiling masks for use in emergencies, MacIntyre said these guidelines had been implemented without evidence to support them. "We now have provided that evidence," she said," but it's difficult to evaluate the last sentence.
> Prior to 2020, most medical professionals believed most viruses, and corona viruses particularly, could not be transported as aerosols. This was a subject of research where the data had not come in.
cactus2093 replied
> I've also looked into it a little and come to the opposite conclusion. Here is one study from Singapore in 2014 that showed surgical and n95 have about a 68% and 95% efficacy respectively at preventing SARS transmission https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4293989/ Masks have also been shown to provide protection against the common cold (many strains of which are also coronaviruses) and seasonal flus https://www.livescience.com/7661-masks-protect-colds-flu.htm...
There's two ways I can see you interpreting this.
1) You are being extremely narrow in your focus and saying that you are talking specifically about viruses being transmitted as aerosols (although the overarching topic here is about whether or not masks are effective). And thus, since there was no research specifically about this, then there's no reason to recommend masks. This doesn't address the point that there's research that shows masks are effective against similar kinds of viruses.
2) You actually are talking about effectiveness of masks and saying that viruses could not be transmitted via aerosol was to say that because they are not shown to be transmitted via aerosol, then there's no evidence that masks would work, in which case, again, we're back to the issue that there was research prior to 2020 that showed masks are effective against similar kinds of viruses.
So the question remains, are you wrong about your assertion that
> Prior to 2020, most medical professionals believed most viruses, and corona viruses particularly, could not be transported as aerosols. This was a subject of research where the data had not come in.
and if not, what are we missing about what you're trying to say?
> Some kind of admission that the US health field ignored research because "eww, icky Asians?"
There was certainly the perception that Asians wearing masks was ridiculous. Whether or not this perception extended to American experts and influenced their conclusions is unknown to me.
"1) You are being extremely narrow in your focus and saying that you are talking specifically about viruses being transmitted as aerosols (although the overarching topic here is about whether or not masks are effective). And thus, since there was no research specifically about this, then there's no reason to recommend masks. This doesn't address the point that there's research that shows masks are effective against similar kinds of viruses.
"2) You actually are talking about effectiveness of masks and saying that viruses could not be transmitted via aerosol was to say that because they are not shown to be transmitted via aerosol, then there's no evidence that masks would work, in which case, again, we're back to the issue that there was research prior to 2020 that showed masks are effective against similar kinds of viruses."
Backing up a bit...
As far as I've seen, there are three primary routes for infection for respiratory diseases: 1) contaminated surfaces, 2) (large) droplets produced mostly by coughing or sneezing, and 3) (small) aerosol particles produced by normal activities like breathing and speaking.
The normal measures against 1) are avoiding touching possibly contaminated surfaces, washing your hands, and not touching your eyes, mouth, etc. And roughly speaking, that's about all you can do.
The normal measures against 2) are staying distant (i.e. 6ft) and keeping interactions short because the droplets do not remain airborne long, and covering your face when you cough or sneeze. Masks would certainly be helpful in the case of 2), but not especially so because a) the normal measures work fairly well, b) most people do not want to wear a mask[1], c) many people who do wear a mask do not do so correctly, and d) the supplies of medical grade masks were (are?) sketchy. (Both of the links provided are specifically aimed at b) and c), no?)[2] A study of 1000 students at an Australian university is interesting, but the advantage of a) don't necessarily overwhelm b), c), and d).
There are no normal measures against 3). The only useful measures are to avoid all contact with potential carriers, significantly improve indoor ventilation and air filtration (aerosols remain airborne for a very long time), and properly using medically-effective masks when interactions are required. Transmission by asymptomatic carriers is primary, hard epidemiological evidence of 3).
According to (https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7322154/), asymptomatic carriers were reported at the end of January and significant confirmation appeared about March (https://wwwnc.cdc.gov/eid/article/26/7/20-1595_article). Shortly after that (April 3), the CDC recommended masks (https://www.bmj.com/content/369/bmj.m1422).
From your limited choices, my closest meaning is your 1). But,....
Now, put yourself in the place of someone making an official policy recommendation in, say, February or early March. You don't have hard evidence that masks are required, but you do understand that they will provide some marginal benefit. On the other hand, ensuring that masks are worn consistently and correctly is an uphill struggle (as we have seen over the last year). Further, the supply of medical grade masks where their use is required, hospitals for example, is not infinite. Oh, and you want to make the minimally invasive recommendation you can, because you actually aren't out to cause as much damage as possible by, say, killing the economy. Beyond that, you know that at some point you are going to be facing pandemic fatigue, where people stop taking the situation seriously and then things get very bad (as in last summer, last fall, and earlier this winter). What do you do?
As it turns out, they were wrong about some of their assumptions. Being wrong happens. It is not proof of an evil conspiracy or even of a conspiracy of stupidity. It's people who are pretty good at what they do, making what they think are the best choices, and being wrong.
Suggested Reading
https://www.bmj.com/content/369/bmj.m1422
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25616014 (No, really, "The Plague Year" in the New Yorker is probably the best history of the pandemic so far, and explicitly touches on a lot of these issues---including medical professionals saying, "yeah, we were wrong.")
[1] I am talking about the US specifically, not Taiwan, Japan, or anywhere where mask wearing is more common socially.
[2] Everyone wearing pressurized, highly filtered contamination suits at all times would prevent essentially all cases of respiratory disease transmission. But no one is going to push that idea without a really, really good reason.
PS: While writing this, I ran across https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S019665532..., which is the first solid, halfway data-backed estimate of the prevalence of asymptomatic carriers: 1.82%
As I remember it, the advice wasn't "don't wear masks," the advice was "stay home." If they said "go buy masks," that would mean leaving your house to get a mask, which would directly contradict the more important advice of staying home. Also if they said wear a mask when you leave the house it would have been interpreted as "it's ok to go on with normal events as long as we have masks" which wasn't the message they were trying to send, either. The message was stay home, and at the time it was probably the right message, and not a lie.
There was “stay home” but also “stop buying masks because you are stopping medical, first responder, etc. personnel from getting them and they aren't useful for the general public” during the initial PPE supply shortage and hoarding.
This wasn't a lie, AFAICT, but Aa statement that was completely correct public health statement in the context it was given that was widely interpreted as an individual health statement.
There was no misunderstanding, the message was "don't wear a mask unless you're sick, masks don't help the wearer they only help keep a sick person from spreading it to others around them". That was just a lie at the time, we didn't know that for sure and we had every reason to suspect the opposite.
I've heard lots of people say that was the message, but it wasn't the one I heard and it's not the one I find in any of the documented statements from public health officials.
That’s most American medical professionals. And they mostly seemed to believe you would get yourself sick faster by touching your eyes after taking the mask off wrong, or that masks provided 0% protection unless you wore an N95 with a fit test, or that if they didn’t lie about them being useless people would steal them from hospitals. They certainly didn’t believe they were truly useless, since they were all wearing them for procedures.
Actually, wasn’t the excuse for suddenly being like “face masks are good actually” that they didn’t know COVID had asymptomatic spread before then? That’s even worse than not knowing it spread through aerosols.
> This was a subject of research where the data had not come in.
By using the technique of “not assuming all of Asia is primitive and superstitious”, it was easy to figure out what to do without an RCT. Note there isn’t evidence that surgical masks help during surgery either.
My company had a zoom conference with a very well respected British doctor, he won something more or less equivalent to a nobel prize in mediciine, and he told my company, on May 4th, that masks are not necessary. This was already a bit head scratching, but what I feel he probably meant, but certainly did not explicitly say- is that its not a priority for an individual to wear a mask when there are shortages for front line workers.
But mix a changing message with an inbred resistance to being told what to do and the inconvenience of a mask, and this comes out the end for many as "They don't know what they are talking about these "experts!", I don't need to listen to them, they can't get their story straight!" and here we are...
This comes off as blatantly lying to us for our harm, not "they don't know what they're talking about". If someone lies to you and knowingly puts your life at risk through the lie, it's very rational not to believe anything they say in the future. This is not mere mixed messages.
If government and/or experts want to have non-negative credibility, they are going to have to start consistently telling the whole truth.
Exactly. Real life example - someone I know asked her doctor about getting the Moderna covid vaccine while pregnant. The doctor not only said it was ok, but also verbally recommended it and gave her a written paper to help her get the vaccine. She was able to get it a couple days ago. Then yesterday the World Health Organization announced that pregnant women should not be getting the Moderna vaccine because they were not included in the trials.
So who’s right here? It’s hard to trust a “real doctor” when something like this happens.
It also happens that, doctors in particular, barely see you for 5-15min, that is not enough time for them to fully understand what is going on with you and your whole history. It’s only enough time for them to make a quick judgement based on their pattern matching abilities from their own experience and then give, an educated, recommendation. But they are not really vested in you in particular, you are just one more, and if their recommendations don’t work for you, they usually don’t really care and won’t go down the rabbit whole with you, at the most they’ll just refer you to someone else.
A doctor usually looks at an individual. (And we know a lot of pregnant women got infected with COVID. We know that hospitalization was higher for them, but also that mortality is the same - https://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/volumes/69/wr/mm6925a1.htm?s_cid=mm... , so the immune reaction should be the same too)
The real problem is that it's impossible for a non-expert to gauge the expertise of any of these entities (your full-sized real-life walking-talking doctor who you know for a deacade, the WHO and anyone in between). Even simply asking many questions is just the illusion of getting informed (not just because there's rarely any time for proper answers as you mentioned), but because the answers are biased, so this naturally biases the next question too. (Unless there's enough time and effort to go through years of science and try to falsify whatever theory is being communicated with very targeted questions, it's close to useless/futile effort.)
> But they are not really vested in you in particular, you are just one more,
Yep. Agreed. Also usually primary care physicians are better at "bedside manner" and pattern matching than at real medical science. (Because it's not really their job to have 20 doctorates in every subfield of biology.)
Trickle-down economics is not explicitly endorsed by anyone, because it's a pejorative. That's like saying "totalitarianism is popular in some countries"; you might think those countries are totalitarian, but they don't.
What many on the left assume it means, is a sincere description of growth "raising the tide"; and how ridiculous an idea that is.
Of course the tide has risen to an unprecedented degree in human history both since the term "trickle down" was invented; and moreso, over the last 40 years.
The term was coined by Will Rogers about 90 years ago.
This is a side effect of using the same category terms, but not talking about the underlying distributions.
Eg., in the UK, 80% of the country were industrial working class or poorer until 1980s; and middle class only started at top 5%.
Today, the "industrial working class" level of wealth, is the bottom 20% at the very most.
So if you hold the class terms fixed, "middle class" it seems the 80s top 5% has "stagnated", only to fail to mention, it now 60% of the country.
If you hold the distributions constant, the wealth level acheived in the top 5% in 1980s is now a majority of the population.
"You" in the above is a specific individual.
"They" in the above is undefined and extremely imprecise.
For various definitions of "they", your statement could be true, false or somewhere in between.
I read the same waffling about masks you did, the information I read (since it was inconsistent) led me to believe that I should wear masks more than directed. I did this out of an abundance of caution because at the time early research eerily concluded that not much is known about the longer term effects of this virus, there was stark contrast in the symptoms various people had, and that there were layers to exercising prevention. I acted in a similar manner when I limited my social circle.
The difference in the way, I think, these people used much of the same information that I did is that it became authoritative to them. After they'd read enough articles straight from the CDC it made them feel qualified to interpret them. I'm reminded of one guy who demanded I get another PCR test before he hung out with me, even after I hadn't experienced a fever for 10+ days. For some context, when I got sick I came back negative on both tests I was given. I was later told my viral load was not high enough on those days, ironically these also happened to be some of the worst days of the virus. It was only after I lost taste and smell that the doctors realized I had COVID. My friend cited all the reading he had done as evidence that I just wouldn't accept his "perspective". When I asked the doctor about getting both PCR and an antibody test she responded, "Do you have an actual reason? We already knew you were sick." In reality, the time which I would've been contagious had long passed, yet my friend couldn't get it out of his mind that transmission was a possibility.
Another example is a friend whose brother had gotten COVID a few months back. His symptoms were certainly worse than mine. Where I didn't experience much trouble breathing, he did among other things. I went on a walk one day because it was one of the days in between being sick that I had some energy and wasn't overcome with brain fog. I shared that I was exhausted after this short walk and that I'd probably stave off a walk for a few days to see where I was at. She chastised me for going on a walk, explaining that her brother had been told not to exercise for three to six months, and that it seemed as if I was taking COVID as a joke. What I realized after googling this specific treatment plan is that it's usually given to people with some form of cardiomyopathy and other conditions (none of which I have.) I am now about 3 weeks removed from having COVID and I'm back to riding my bike, which is consistent with what my doctor told me. My doctor told me recovery has a lot of variables and I'll need to go at the pace that I'm comfortable with and listen to my body. Regular checkups should help to that end as well.
The theme among these people is when I tried to explain what doctors had told me and why I was going to stick to what they were saying (more generalized as drawing boundaries) I was met with harsh rejection. The key here is that authoritative sources were no longer respected. The fact of the matter is that doctors do take a bit to arrive at consensus and that can be frustrating to a public opinion that is waiting on them for their own sanity, but just because you landed on the correct conclusion a couple times (or even a more conservative solution that kept you equally safe) does not make you an authoritative source. So, I'm not going to tell people to stay in their own lane but you can't just go lecture people based on your own understanding. That's when you forget that all of this information you gather outside of your own domain is good for exercising caution and light conversation.
Yes, in general if you don't know much on a topic you'd on average do best if you listen to the experts but you can outperform that if you can identify the right kind of smart people with a good track record.
Of course they are right sometimes but on many issues with a binary choice (should or shouldn't wear masks) that's a 50% chance.
In the long run you want to be able to discern hearsay, opinion, and rumors from facts and accountability to them.
You see it today when inquiring if a pregnant woman should get the vaccine. Doctors won't really advise you because although they maybe feel it's totally safe if you're far enough along, they would be held accountable if something happened. They can be "pretty sure" about things, but that isn't enough. Meanwhile, "very smart person" on Twitter can reference a bunch of content from unaccountable people that says it's safe and come off as an expert when they aren't. It's easy to be "right" when you don't have skin in the game and especially so when no one is going to hold you to account for all the times you were wrong or misinformed.
That doctor didn't just avoid guessing. He gave unsolicited advice, on limited information, that turned out to be exactly wrong and somewhat dangerous.
No, but one doctor might base advice on one study he saw another on a different one. Having skin in the game helps but it is also well documented that doctors might be overly cautious due to risk of litigation and thus sometimes chose suboptimal courses of action.
>Of course they are right sometimes but on many issues with a binary choice (should or shouldn't wear masks) that's a 50% chance.
No, this isn't a real coinflip. There's evidence for and against things like this, and some people have learned better than others how to evaluate such evidence and can definitely do better than 50%.
Smart people with a good track record are generally called "the experts".
* There was preliminary evidence from the experts it might work.
* At some point Trump got wind of this and mentioned it.
* The media, in an effort to portray Trump as wrong, went on a crazy cherry-picking campaign to show HCQ as completely ineffective. "HCQ does not work" was the prevailing sentiment for almost the entire past year because of this, even though evidence was still coming out it does work under certain circumstances.
* Now that Trump is out of office, our understanding of HCQ is shifting back to exactly what that preliminary evidence said that Trump repeated.
"They included 30 569 patients with systemic lupus erythematosus or rheumatoid arthritis who were already taking hydroxychloroquine in the 6 months before what was considered as the start of the pandemic in England and 164 068 patients with these rheumatic diseases who did not use hydroxychloroquine. The study found no significant difference in standardised cumulative COVID-19 mortality associated with hydroxychloroquine use (0·23% among hydroxychloroquine users and 0·22% among non-users) with an adjusted hazard ratio of 1·03 (95% CI 0·80–1·33)."
* https://www.acc.org/latest-in-cardiology/clinical-trials/202...
"Among patients exposed to patients with SARS-CoV-2, hydroxychloroquine, administered within a median duration of 2 days as post-exposure prophylaxis, did not reduce the incidence of SARS-CoV-2 or COVID-19 infection within 14 days, compared with placebo (vitamin C)."
* https://www.nih.gov/news-events/nih-research-matters/hydroxy...
"Researchers assessed each patient’s condition 14 days after being assigned to a treatment group. They used a seven-category scale ranging from one (death) to seven (discharged from the hospital and able to perform normal activities). The results showed no significant difference between the hydroxychloroquine and placebo groups. The scientists also found no differences in any of 12 additional outcomes, which included mortality 28 days after assignment to a treatment group or time to recovery. Based on the data, they concluded that hydroxychloroquine was not an effective treatment."
* https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jama/fullarticle/2772921
"Several published rigorous studies have demonstrated similar findings. In the well-conducted clinical trials published to date, hydroxychloroquine has been evaluated in a wide variety of populations, ranging from patients with severe illness2-4 to individuals at risk of severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2) infection, in whom the drug was used as primary prophylaxis5; these studies failed to show any beneficial effect of the drug. This raises the question: How did medicine get to the point where so many studies were conducted assessing the possible benefit of hydroxychloroquine, that led to nearly identical findings, and have been published in major journals?"
* https://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMoa2022926
"Among patients hospitalized with Covid-19, those who received hydroxychloroquine did not have a lower incidence of death at 28 days than those who received usual care."
* https://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/volumes/69/wr/mm6935a4.htm
"New prescriptions by specialists who did not typically prescribe these medications (defined as specialties accounting for ≤2% of new prescriptions before 2020) increased from 1,143 prescriptions in February 2020 to 75,569 in March 2020, an 80-fold increase from March 2019."
* https://www.aljazeera.com/economy/2021/1/27/oklahoma-attempt...
"Oklahoma tries to return $2m worth of hydroxychloroquine"
Under what circumstances does it work?
They primarily suffer from dogma IMHO. For example, now they know people with breathing difficulty should be kept in prone position. I dont know if that applies outside of Covid19, but I thought it was really interesting to see them learn it. Like "oh, what we'd normally do is bad but this variation is good".
Medicine also suffers from a fear (justified) of litigation. If they dont follow accepted practices they may get sued if someone dies. The funny thing with Covid was watching that fear when there was no accepted treatment. Seeing them say "The FDA hasn't approved that for covid" when they hadn't approved anything at all yet.
very US-centric. Medical litigation in many others parts of the world doesn't work in the same way, and isn't a driving force in the way medicine is practiced.
"When Knowledge Knows No Bounds: Self-Perceived Expertise Predicts Claims of Impossible Knowledge" - Stav Atir, Emily Rosenzweig, David Dunning
https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/095679761558819...
Sadly, many doctors and nurses are statistically illiterate. I know, because I (try to) teach them statistics. Remember, the Surgeon General of the CDC said that, "[masks] are NOT effective in preventing general public from catching #Coronavirus," perhaps in some misguided belief that avoiding panicked mask-buying was more important than a mask-wearing public.
[Sorry for insulting our healthcare heroes, but ... evidently y'all haven't been responsible for teaching them evidence-based medicine. It ain't easy.]
Use any definition of "mask" and "effective" you want, but preferably effective should include some concept of "prevents spread of respiratory disease".
Covid is a serious illness. Far too many people have been told, and believe, that they can continue their normal day to day life so long as they put mask on. This is untrue, and this advice has driven mass infection and death.
This spins off into a whole discussion of how evidence-based medicine can lead you off the cliff when you follow its letter, and not spirit, because despite something being bloody obvious, there is no RCT proving that.
“Parachute use to prevent death and major trauma related to gravitational challenge: systematic review of randomised controlled trials“
The argument was not "we can't do tests because this is new", the argument was "we've got dozens of studies across a range of settings and respiratory diseases (which we expect to act similarly to covid) and we struggle to see any benefit, until we drop the quality of the research down".
No, I can't. Can you link to papers that show flossing is effective? Probably not, but the mechanism is so obvious that essentially all dentists will tell you to floss. Further, mask-wearing was already a well-established practice in medical settings to prevent the spread of respiratory disease from practitioners to patients.
> believe that they can continue their normal day to day life so long as they put [a] mask on. This is untrue
Combined with some coordination on travel restrictions and quarantines, it seems Taiwan has been able to keep that normal day-to-day life for the majority of Taiwanese.
https://www.wbur.org/hereandnow/2021/01/08/taiwan-covid-19-p...
https://www.reuters.com/article/us-china-health-who/who-chie...
We don't see much benefit there, either. See the "clean surgery" papers.
That was a thing a few years back: https://www.health.harvard.edu/blog/tossing-flossing-2016081...
> We concluded that household use of face masks is associated with low adherence and is ineffective for controlling seasonal respiratory disease.
"Do masks work, if you use the right type of mask and wear it properly?" isn't particularly controversial (the answer is probably "yes") but it's a stupid question because we don't care about optimal use, we care about real world use. And in the real world people might improperly wear a mask and go outside when they're symptomatic.
We don't have much good quality evidence for that, but here's a study that showed people were prepared to do things like wear masks, but were less prepared to self-isolate or book a test if they had symptoms: https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2020.09.15.20191957v...
"However, during a severe pandemic when use of face masks might be greater, pandemic transmission in households could be reduced."
Later: "Although our study suggests that community use of face masks is unlikely to be an effective control policy for seasonal respiratory diseases, adherent mask users had a significant reduction in the risk for clinical infection. [...] Adherence with treatments and preventive measures is well known to vary depending on perception of risk and would be expected to increase during an influenza pandemic. [...] Therefore, although we found that distributing masks during seasonal winter influenza outbreaks is an ineffective control measure characterized by low adherence, results indicate the potential efficacy of masks in contexts where a larger adherence may be expected, such as during a severe influenza pandemic or other emerging infection."
It was an open question, but the general opinion before 2020 was that masks would not be particularly useful. Sketchy results started appearing in March with better days in April and May. Several experts said, "we were wrong."
Medical grade masks are very useful. Others are less so. But they primarily prevent you from giving the virus to others.
https://old.reddit.com/r/Coronavirus/comments/fdf5fq/we_are_...
Here's a paper from 2010 after the H1N1 pandemic.
Face masks to prevent transmission of influenza virus: a systematic review https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/epidemiology-and-inf...
Our review highlights the limited evidence base supporting the efficacy or effectiveness of face masks to reduce influenza virus transmission. An important concern when determining which public health interventions could be useful in mitigating local influenza virus epidemics, and which infection control procedures are necessary to prevent nosocomial transmission, is the mode of influenza virus transmission between people and in the environment.
The interesting thing is everything they recommend, we've adopted during COVID, including physical barriers and front line workers additional PPE equipment:
Physical barriers would be most effective in limiting short-distance transmission by direct or indirect contact and large droplet spread, while more comprehensive precautions would be required to prevent infection at longer distances via airborne spread of small (nuclei) droplet particles [19]. In healthcare settings, stringent precautions are recommended to protect against pathogens that are transmitted by the airborne route, including the use of N95-type respirators (which require fit testing), other personal protective equipment including gowns, gloves, head covers and face shields, and isolation of patients in negative-pressure rooms
There's five additional studies referenced in the MedPub doc: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/20092668/
A current Danish study concluded masks don't reduce the spread of the virus:
Effectiveness of Adding a Mask Recommendation to Other Public Health Measures to Prevent SARS-CoV-2 Infection in Danish Mask Wearers https://www.acpjournals.org/doi/10.7326/M20-6817
In this community-based, randomized controlled trial conducted in a setting where mask wearing was uncommon and was not among other recommended public health measures related to COVID-19, a recommendation to wear a surgical mask when outside the home among others did not reduce, at conventional levels of statistical significance, incident SARS-CoV-2 infection compared with no mask recommendation.
People are already debunking this Danish study but here's a CDC study showed even when people do wear masks, they were still getting sick:
Community and Close Contact Exposures Associated with COVID-19 Among Symptomatic Adults ≥18 Years in 11 Outpatient Health Care Facilities — United States, July 2020 https://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/volumes/69/wr/pdfs/mm6936a5-H.pdf
In the 14 days before illness onset, 71% of case-patients and 74% of control participants reported always using cloth face coverings or other mask types when in public,” the report stated.
In addition, over 14 percent of the case-patients said they “often” wore a face covering and were still infected with the virus. The study also demonstrates that under 4 percent of the case-patients became sick with the virus even though they “never” wore a mask or face covering.
Personally I feel like masks aren't stopping the spread mainly because people either use one or two masks continually without cleaning them daily, or put them on dirty surfaces thinking its ok and then putting them back on, or simply not wearing them over their nose. Masks would probably be effective if people wore them properly and only used them once. Hoping 300 million people all follow those simple rules is a bit hopeful to say the least.
There seems to be something different about the US population than, say, the Taiwanese population regarding mask usage. I don't have a good explanation for it, because I think blaming "culture" is lazy research.
And the WHO were too?
One has to balance that with awareness they’re talking out their ass.
You're welcome to your opinion but this appeal to authority is seriously wearing thin. Pretty much the only field which hasn't been embarrassed by an outsider of late is physics, and even that might not last forever (I remember the smugness with which Stephen Wolfram is routinely dismissed from having non-consensus views of physics).
Progress almost always comes from non-consensus outsiders. This whole website is supposed to be a testament to that!
I am less familiar with finance, but I see this all the time when HN discusses legal matters. The conversation is almost pure noise, because it's dominated by people who have so little knowledge of the topic in question that they don't even recognize a term of art when they're seeing one. Which, in turn, engenders fundamental misunderstandings, and so the whole conversation ends up being a sort of large-scale trainer battle at the gym that specializes in strawman-type Pokémon.
Imagine if a discussion of programming were dominated by non-programmers who are seemingly willfully ignorant that, in the context, the word "functional" does not mean "designed to be practical and useful, rather than attractive."
Yeah, he's just strawmanning and shaming a hypothetical group for the applauses of a circlejerk.
No, it's just that it's not interesting when an expert is right about their domain expertise so we don't talk about it.
The issue is people getting skewed by this and then inferring that it must mean, on average, that their outsider opinion is as valid as experts, but really, it's not.
If RobinHood tells me how clearing houses work, they have a huge reason to lie to me.
Given what we say in cases like Enron, Bear Stearns, I am shocked and dismayed at the eagerness of Hacker News contributors to so readily accept whatever Robinhood tells them as 100% gospel.
Where were all these experts on clearing houses a week ago, warning of this exact risk? Because plenty of people had opinions on Gamestop, that maybe the SEC would halt trading altogether etc, but not a single person mentioned this clearing house liquidity issues until it happened. And I still really can't get a good explanation for why if I had 10k in my non-margin account that cleared over a year ago I can't use that to buy a stock(or withdraw for that matter, though hopefully that's temporary). OR, if people were allowed to sell stock, who were they selling to?? Clearly SOMEONE was allowed to buy! A lot of misdirection around things like margin accounts.
Robinhood didn't give any real explanation until many hours later. But they're apparently just "poor communicators." Amazing how a billion dollar company filled with conflicts of interest making a totally unprecedented restriction that actively helps their hedge fund investor simply can't possibly be committing any sort of fraud.
Because nobody's ever committed fraud before, a Robinhood press release must be treated as the "facts". This is insanity . Robinhood are not the "experts" in this case, their version of truth is probably the least reliable of all parties.
Interestingly, we weren't cutoff uniformly in all markets. NY desk was trading about 75% of regular volume for 4 days into the bankruptcy before someone (SEC?) told them to knock it off.
There's a lot going on in Robinhood's back office and legal teams of which we are not aware. While I'm as pissed as anyone that they shutoff trading, I'm open to the idea that the shutoff was for far more mundane reasons than collusion with Citadel and Point 72.
Robinhood did not halt trading or shut off trading.
Robinhood prevented _buying_ Gamestop and only allowed selling.
That’s entirely different. It can only do one thing - drive the price down which is market manipulation. It’s supposed to be illegal.
Reading the SEC's letter (in the OP), you can clearly see the SEC wants everyone to sell out of their position and make this whole thing go away. RH no doubt has an army of lawyers and compliance people whose entire jobs/careers is to predict what the regulator wants and proactively be their lapdog. (The regulators meanwhile are completely free to be Monday-morning quarterbacks and retroactively assess fines to anyone, despite providing no concrete guidance of what to do in an unprecedented situation like this one.)
If they hit their collateral limits, they have two options.
1. Stop all trading for a few days, as the trades settle, the funds clear, and the collateral requirements drop. Cue millions of pissed users who want to close their positions, but can't.
2. Only stop trades that increase their collateral requirements - buys.
There's also option 3 which is 'immediately get kicked off the settlement networks and go into bankruptcy, because they are trading past their collateral requirements.'
Which of these three options would manipulate the stock price less, and screw over fewer people, in your estimate?
This was actually a very fair, by-the-books standard trading halt. It just happened to benefit the short sellers who had been squeezed because they could easily find people willing to sell.
You definitely could still buy GME if you found some extremely random call option holder who needed to sell to cover their position. This would not be changing a net new position, just like selling to someone looking to cover a previous short, and this was never blocked - it’s just there was no volume for this, nobody owned calls and needed to sell.
If there are enough mechanisms of "Crony Capitalism" at play, to cause most of the trading apps in existence to halt trading, this is definitely something that needs to be investigated.
Likewise, if there are enough of these crony mechanisms involving collusion between Facebook, Twitter, Square, Stripe, and Visa targeting people, this also warrants investigation. It seems to be part and parcel the same sort of thing.
People have been calling stuff like this out since the 80's!
This is a fine way to settle debates about the health/viability of a publicly traded company, but it doesn't help much when the point of contention is a question of law.
Someone comes in and describes from first principles what a reasonable system would look like, and then someone else haughtily chastises them because that isn't how the existing system works. But if you read it as they intended it, i.e. as a policy proposal rather than a legal opinion, then the fact that it isn't the existing system is the point. The intention is to change the system to make it that way and the desired response is either support or a criticism of the mechanics of the proposal rather than its basis in existing law.
First, they believe that their system is how the world should work, and therefore how it would work if only someone, somewhere, weren't interfering. The result is conspiracy theories.
Second, they have not fully thought out the consequences, or don't care about them, and dismiss the historical consequences of similar systems in the past. Reasoning with people who ignore evidence in favor of their theorizing is difficult.
you must be new to the internet.
My opinion (see below for how I have defined these)
Outsider expert > establishment expert for public ally challenging and overturning norms
Any expert > layperson on the basic facts (ignoring statistical aberrations, of course)
“Outsider” being unconstrained by norms, not afraid to be cast out of a long established peer group
“Expert” has deep grasp of contemporary facts, second and third order consequences, puts in controls to remove cognitive biases, deep curiosity and healthy scepticism.
“Layperson” being someone who is probably intelligent, but grasps quickly onto unfamiliar concepts and data and makes heuristic calls based on limited data.
I dare say that most people here on HN have been hit by upper management telling them to do something stupid or impossible. I'd even wager that most have had them get defensive when you try to explain why doing X isn't a good idea.
That's effectively what I see when someone criticizes "experts" broadly and generally. I've long accepted that there are many individuals that know a lot more about subjects I know little about. While I have a pretty good read on things related to computers, I'm more than willing to admit that I'm not an expert in science, medicine, climatology.
So who should I trust? Should I trust the youtuber that's "Found" the secret that the "so called experts" are trying to hide from the public? Or should I look to the actual experts actually working in the field and take their word for it? Or do I take the harder route and try and build understanding on the subject on my own?
I certainly have tried to expand my personal understanding in general. However, what I've found is that by and large the experts actually know what they are talking about. You should generally trust them. The place where I've found a LOT of misinformation is the "skeptics" that hurl doubt without evidence while denigrating "experts". That is the place where I've found outright lies.
Evidence of such BS artists include Flat earthers, Anti-vaxxers, and climate change deniers. Those are all flat out wrong positions. There's mountains of evidence and experts against each of those positions and mostly lies or misrepresentation in favor.
[1] As the saying goes.
It's from Arthur C. Clarke.
https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/155962-when-a-distinguished...
Red lines with green ink --> use a thermochromic ink, change the temperature.
7 lines all perpendicular to each other --> sure, in 7+ dimensions.
Solve the climate crisis --> geo-engineering.
(y'know, if you're faced with something which seems obvious, and the expert is struggling, why? And should you simply trust them and give up? Why is the extra "explanation" just the same thing repeated again and again? How difficult it is to say "I still don't understand" after several of these explanations. And then at the end it's less clear whether the request is reasonable, if you use spoons as a proxy for other things).
Right. It's the expert's blind spots that contain the best nuggets of value.
But financiers, bankers, and economists have a much less convincing record - and that's after you filter out the ones who have been caught breaking the law.
What the OP comment was citing wasn't that. Rather, it was people like me - reading that document, not knowing the terms but assembling some form of self reinforced "knowledge".
There's a difference between very well informed outsiders which rival experts and random people. Thinking I know more about vaccines and the dangers than researchers, doctors, etc is moronic. I have no foundation to be making that decision, and beyond the obvious "free will" arguments, i shouldn't.
In many US states, the legal definition of "assault" is much different than the battery most people picture.
Robbery is not larceny.
Burglary is not larceny.
Your peers probably don't know what robbery actually is.
Yet my next thought was in the "forest vs trees" direction which as far as I can tell as someone with homemade popcorn watching both this thread, and the "meme stock" story (saw that phrase last night),
I will suggest that as in the case of the peers' ignorance of specific legal definitions,
it's the thought or thrust that is usually being grappled with, and the dimension of argument is usually not e.g. about the specific crimes some person might be guilty of or not, but rather the fact of their wrongdoing. Where "wrong" is not a legal concept full stop.
So too in the case of the GME thing, if not this thread; I suspect that there is a lot of implicit meta-argumentation going on,
and that some of what I see in this thread appears to be missing (or more likely, dis-missing) that, to engage in "tree" level quibbling.
(All said, I do agree words and their meaning matter; and that when we want to use them informally, because specificity in some domain is not germane to our argument, we would do well to be explicit about that...)
This is effort to learn vs. making hasty judgements issue.
I have studied several subjects over 100 - 1000 hours as an outsider, but that does not mean that I can criticize experts. I can ask pointed questions maybe. Being intellectually humble is good.
In this issue outsiders should at least read everything Matt Levine writes on the subject as a starting point.
When? Who? Are you talking about, say, Dr. Burry and the mortgage bubble? Because he was definitely an 'expert' already.
Definitely not one of the anointed "experts" who followed the too-common family connections, Ivy League, and i-banking VP path.
> Progress almost always comes from non-consensus outsiders. This whole website is supposed to be a testament to that!
Even granting that these statements are accurate (which plenty of sibling comments are willing to dispute) I don't think these statements suggest that "Stay in your lane" is bad advice.
Why? It's a question of distributions. For any given task/field there are a lot more laypeople than experts. Consider the following simple model where we quantify some arbitrary ability score. If lay people's scores are normally distributed with a low mean and expert's scores are normally distributed with a high mean we can still see the best lay person beating all the experts simply because there are so many more of them.
"You don't know more than the 'experts'" is good advice for almost everyone even if there are counterexamples.
There's a separate problem I think you're trying to point at where in some fields credentials don't correlate as well with expertise as one would hope. But even if credentials are an imperfect proxy for expertise, they are probably better than just trusting your gut in the absence of any expertise of your own.
> Pretty much the only field which hasn't been embarrassed by an outsider of late is physics, [...]
This seems an idiosyncratic take on the current state of science to me. I've seen plenty of examples of a field being embarrassed by insiders (e.g. the replication crisis of psychology) or seen great results from experts who were not particularly recognized by the system as set up (see Yitang Zhang's work on the twin prime conjecture). What I don't think I've seen is a field's dogma being overthrown by a complete outsider. For the sake of my own calibration, I'd welcome any examples of this.
People with the stock industry conspiracy theories are doing the exact same thing as voter fraud people. That is, people with almost no information are forming theories about a secret cabal of the powerful keeping them down.
The reality which is becoming obvious is that trades were at several brokerages were halted because of capital requirements for brokerage firms. The capital requirements for some of these meme stocks changed, the stocks were very broadly held at these brokerages, and they simply didn't have the capital on hand where it needed to be to cover the requirements. That's (1) a lot more boring, and (2) a lot more complicated than a conspiracy about market fixing, so it doesn't get attention outside of people who actually know.
It's one thing to study this in your own time and make meaningful contributions. It's another to assume that simply because you have an opinion, it's somehow valid.
In this particular instance something seems to be fundamentally broken.
Don't confuse cause and effect. This doesn't mean all anti-consensus ideas are genius and progress. Most are still just junk. See the "all big thinks initially looked like toys" meme for another example.
But jumping to crystals? Seriously?
The broker I used to work at has a big disclaimer on all their marketing stating that 77.9% of retail clients lose money when trading with them.
Doesn't stop people signing up thinking they can beat the market...
In 1999, the rational move would be to short tech stocks as they were over valued, but those who tried it lost lots of money because they didn't factor in how crazy investors were at driving up the price.
You can technically be right but still end up losing everything.
https://money.cnn.com/quote/shareholders/shareholders.html?s...
What do the regulations and laws actually mean and how are they actually in real life enforced historically? Oh yeah appeal to authority. We're literally talking about the authorities.
Laws and regulations -- and business arrangements and customs -- aren't some kind of objective external thing to be observed scientifically from first principles. That's the whole error. Like if you can show a logical flaw you can prove they are't really so because they must be logical! They are socially constructed and the result of human action, by people with the power to do so, for particular ends. They are continually re-constructed by human action, they are constructed by the powerful.
The guy is disliked for taking too much credit for things, not for "having non-consensus views" - which is sort of the opposite problem.
See https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/physicists-critic... for scientists dismissing his theories of physics.
I respect him for his work in programming. I dislike him for assuming that success makes him correct in whatever theories he comes up with in physics. Particularly when he has failed to produce any testable predictions.
It is fairly obvious that this is not the case for most people in threads about GME.
Being cognizant of our (humans’) fantastic, ego-bolstering tendencies is a good thing.
there is some good to come of it, but i do wonder if the baby is being thrown out with the bathwater. true experts can handily defeat nonsensical arguments in their fields and unusual viewpoints can enrich their thinking.
If so...relative to today?
This is an interesting point. The statement I read from her is saying that N95s are hard to wear for long periods of time, so people will wear them improperly. So the overall adherence is higher with cloth coverings and have a net higher benefit.
She’s not saying “don’t wear n95s” she’s saying “we don’t recommend it because...”
This is an important distinction.
Also N95s have to be fit tested to be effective. So randos buying N95s and wearing them will frequently not work.
That was the excuse doctors were giving me in March that they all suddenly dropped. Are N95s without perfect fits worse than cloth masks, which don't have fit tests either? Are they better than no masks? Was Facebook wrong to stock up on N95s for employees during wildfire season?
> So the overall adherence is higher with cloth coverings and have a net higher benefit.
This is one of the worst things public health experts seemed to just be totally wrong about. They were obsessed with "risk compensation", where if you make things safer in the wrong way people will act riskier so it doesn't help. But this doesn't actually seem to happen.
This is the important question. Well are they? I’ve seen a lot of people wearing N95s and almost every one of them are wearing them incorrectly. Is this better than a cloth mask? I don’t know. But having huge gaps on the bridge of one’s nose where air flows is really bad to reduce risk. And my favorite is seeing them work with beards that prevent a seal.
I can’t find any tests of cloth mask vs bad n95. Saying “common sense” as the reason is not a compelling reason to try to get 300M people doing something.
I don't think this is true. No box of 3M N95 masks I've ever bought has said anywhere "failure to fit test this mask renders it ineffective." 3M Aura masks have an instruction video on how to maximize the fit, but thats just a bit on how best to adjust the little metal bit that clamps around the nose.
An ill-fit N95 that might not be perfectly adjusted to conform is still way better than a cloth mask which isn't intended to seal at all.
Some masks are just incompatible with some faces, it’s greaT that Aura’s have an instruction video, that doesn’t mean it will work for all people.
> An ill-fit N95 that might not be perfectly adjusted to conform is still way better than a cloth mask which isn't intended to seal at all.
I think you’re probably right. But I don’t know of a study that tests this because N95s are measured as conforming to spec, not when they are worn improperly without a seal at the nose and chin. I hope we get some info on this.
The Dirextors (and Fauci’s) comments weren’t about this though, they mentioned how N95s are uncomfortable and thus hard to wear consistently. Try wearing an N95 for 6 hours of school. Especially without training. I think the recommendation for cloth masks is because of the ability for people to wear them.
So the recommendation is not based around optimal standards of use, but around likely use.
This doesn’t mean that N95s don’t protect people. I wear them in public. I’m just trying to correct GP’s criticism that someone the CDC director’s comments are incorrect or illogical.
[0] https://www.cdc.gov/niosh/npptl/topics/respirators/disp_part...
i always find it fascinating to hear people's take on science and medicine
especially when conclusions that have weight reach politically hazardous territory
Not saying that a yearly check-up isn't beneficial (it is), just that they shouldn't be prescribing Type 2 diabetes medications on the spot (and getting kickbacks) and instead should tell the patient to stop stuffing their faces so much.
To my mind, I'm doing the equivalent of chiding front-end beginners for not spending a few minutes reading the part of the ecmascript spec that describes the language's primitive values. (Or at least a primer that covers the names of those types.) That spec is free, and I can probably find the relevant section faster than I can type this sentence.
Actually, it took me a minute and a half-- it's in section 6.1.6: "ECMAScript Language Types" of the ECMAScript 2020 spec.
It doesn't take much longer to skim that section and start a mental model with at least the name for each primitive type.
Armed even with that superficial knowledge, a beginner is less likely to make mistakes in communication with others. E.g., they are less likely to read a tutorial on symbols, confuse it with a tutorial on strings, and/or waste the author's time asking a question about strings.
Someone who hasn't read the spec (or at least a primer) might assume that those words are synonyms, or perhaps that "symbol" refers to the content, or has something to do with unicode code points, or has the same relationship and single and double quotes in ecmascript.
I have no doubt such a beginner can concoct all kinds of interesting definitions for "symbol" from first principles. Perhaps in some cases their own idiosyncratic misunderstanding describes some "alternate ecmascript" language that has superior features to the real ecmascript. That we can so easily construct these alternate realities is cool in and of itself and is an obvious part of the learning process.
What isn't cool is when a critical mass of commenters who don't know and won't learn the basic terminology pretend to have a discussion about a topic which in reality each comment is in it's on parallel universe of idiosyncratic terminology. Especially on this topic, it's extremely likely that one's idiosyncratic, uneducated take is going to be immensely more boring and fruitless when compared to accurate and well-informed takes on what played out in the stock market over the past week.
I look forward to posting something like this the next time the topics of macroeconomics or unions come up.
And I am so sick of the HN-trademark "I'm smarter than the average bear" arrogance that you display here. Pick an article about nuanced subjects like COVID vaccines, the 737 Max, the law in general. Guaranteed the comments section here has dozens of people incorrecting each other about semantics of these subjects in which they are not domain experts.
Everyone's entitled to their opinion, but your opinion is worth less than that of a domain expert.
You know he's a total crank right.
Is that you, Michael Gove.
> You're welcome to your opinion but this appeal to authority is seriously wearing thin.
It is you, Michael Gove.
> Progress almost always comes from non-consensus outsiders.
Certainly the spread of COVID19 in the UK and US is evidence that something can spread with the encouragement of "non-consensus outsiders".
I will say that I’m not too busy for this at the moment, and getting to my very basic level of understanding has required me to sort through, at the very least, a fairly decent chunk of reference material and reading interpretations and explanations online.
Like, here’s some things I’ve been grappling with understanding recently:
How do settlement risk, clearing brokers, and clearinghouses work? Why does buying an ordinary stock carry so much settlement risk?
Why do market makers buy stock for delta hedging? How do they figure out how much stock to buy?
To make an analogy, it feels like I’m some kid in chemistry class who just learned how to draw bond diagrams, and then I watch a video of someone talking about how they figured out the structure of some chemical using Raman spectroscopy.
- prior the 1980s, when you bought a stock a physical stock certificate was passed back and forth between your broker and the broker selling the stock
- as you can imagine, as trading volumes increased this became unmanageable. In fact, at one point, the exchanges would close every Wednesday just to give people time to catch up on all of the exchange of certificates
- everyone, rightly, agreed that there needed to be a better way and the idea of a clearing house emerged. In this model, all of the physical certificates lived in one place. Ownership was tracked via a central "database" (originally not electronic). This made it MUCH easier to transfer ownership aka "settle". This is very similar to how gold is traded e.g. the NY Fed holds it for other countries etc
- An added benefit of a clearing house: it's easy to see how much everyone owns of everything. e.g. if one party is over leveraged or has gone extremely short, in theory, the clearing house can choose to not deal with that party or, more flexibly, request additional capital etc.
Here is also a specific example about settlement risk:
- let's say you report all of your trades to your clearing broker (think of them as a mini-clearinghouse)
- a data file gets lost or corrupted and the clearing broker says "Wait! Something is wrong! We are not letting you trade until we get this figured out!"
- EVEN IF YOU ARE CORRECT and they are wrong, you now have market risk because you may be holding a position that is losing you money. So much money in fact that it might drive you out of business.
The above is an actual answer to a settlement expert when asked "What is your nightmare scenario?". This in turn, could have ripple effects to other clearing brokers and trading firms and is generally all part of "settlement" or "clearing' risk.
Source: have worked in fintech trading for many years.
Also, couldn't a broker eliminate this risk by just making assets "unavailable to trade" until they've been settled? Granted, I understand why brokers wouldn't want to do that under normal circumstances, but it seems like something they should be able to enable when liquidity becomes a problem.
To me, "Your cash can't be spent yet because the TSLA sale you just made hasn't settled" would seem a lot more understandable than "We're halting GME purchases".
The legacy systems reason is a big one. There are banks with mainframes built in the 80's as part of the critical infrastructure. Another reason is that everyone doesn't communicate directly with the main clearing house. e.g. brokers clear with other brokers who then clear with the clearing house etc.
> To me, "Your cash can't be spent yet because the TSLA sale you just made hasn't settled" would seem a lot more understandable than "We're halting GME purchases".
There have been interesting solutions to disputes. e.g. I think it was NYMEX that had a rule for floor traders along the lines of "If Trader A and Trader B have a clearing issue, NEITHER of them gets to trade till it is taken care of." Given that these traders traded with each other multiple times a day coupled with they were making no money during this dispute, both parties were incentivized to come to an agreement.
The clearinghouse ultimately moves the security and money to their right place, and allows brokerages to let each side move on faith that everything will be right once the dust settles. On settlement risk, a key point is that there usually isn't a huge amount of risk. This is why DTCC is nearly imperceptible for retail players. In this case, the volume and short situation is so extreme that clearinghouses are getting antsy that there may not be enough of the securities available to actually make good in the end, so they're twisting arms at brokerages and requiring they have 100% of it on-hand so that there's no surprises when they go to officially give the buyer their security and the seller their money. This is obviously very expensive, which is why brokerages started limiting buying of volatile securities, have had to take out money to get 100% hedge on these trades, and why RH is allowing trading of volatile securities but only in volumes of 5.
Market makers buy stock for delta hedging because if they don't, they could get caught out and either deliver at a loss or not be able to deliver at all. Figuring out how much you need is a trick of the trade; if you or I knew what their strategy was, their position could be in danger.
Don't the settlement worries provide evidence of naked shorts? (Naked shorts being selling a share without being sure the share would be available at settlement? And naked shorts illegal?)
Wouldn't the normal procedure be to halt all trading until the issues had cleared up? As opposed to allowing positions to be closed, but not opened?
This situation is rare. Halting all trades is very scary for all parties involved. It's way worse for just about everybody than asking brokerages to have 100% collateral is.
On one hand we have Occam's Razor: "the simplest solution is almost always the best." On the other we have "For every complex problem there is an answer that is clear, simple, and wrong." How does one know which to apply?
Just like pi means different things in different contexts. It might be a permutation, projection, a function which counts prime numbers, or it might be half the period of sin. I might write π(10) = 4, or π ≈ 3.14…, or for π in P, etc. I might say that π is the right inverse of ι, in other words π∘ι = id, and point to some digram with a bunch of arrows.
Delta is not just “a change” in this context. It is specifically the rate of change of an option’s value with respect to the value of the underlying security. Just like pi, delta and gamma mean different things in different contexts.
There seem to be a lot of moving parts, and a lot of possible outcomes.
Trading and Exchanges: Market Microstructure for Practitioners (cost of this on Amazon seems to have more than doubled since I bought it 11 years ago)
Algorithmic Trading and DMA: An introduction to direct access trading strategies
From https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2021-01-25/the-ga...:
The market maker has sold you an option that goes up in value as the stock goes up. The more the stock goes up, the more the market maker owes you. It hedges this by buying something else that goes up in value as the stock goes up—specifically, stock. Its option pricing model—the Black-Scholes formula or a related model—tellsit how much stock to buy; that output is a number called “delta” and ordinarily expressed as a percentage. Delta is the sensitivity of the option price to the stock price; the higher the delta, the more the option behaves like stock. The more in-the-money the option—for a call option, the higher the stock price is relative to the strike price—the higher the delta will be. A loose, nontechnical, incorrect but still sometimes helpful way to think about delta is as “the probability that an option will end up in the money.” A 100-delta option is so far in the money that it is sure to convert into stock, so it's just stock. A 0-delta option is so far out of the money that it can’t possibly convert into stock, so it’s just worthless. A 50-delta option is roughly at-the-money—a $50-strike call when the stock is trading at $50—and could go either way. The more stock-like an option is, the more stock the market maker will buy to hedge it. Here,Bloomberg’s OV page computes a 37.57% delta for the Jan. 29 $50 call as of last Tuesday; I rounded up for ease of use.
If you are remotely interested in these kinds of things I can heartily recommend reading Matt Levine (https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/authors/ARbTQlRLRjE/matthe...). He's at the same time educating and entertaining and what is more leaves out all the bile and negativity that is connected to these topics in other places. Gamestop is covered in recent issues.
"Don't feed egregious comments by replying; flag them instead."
That said, when I saw that top comment I thought for a second I've confused the domains, this sounded like something taken straight from there.
Source: HN expert, to my continual shame.
That is most every online discussion these days. I would only add "first principals learned at highschool and/or undergrad". The real scientists/lawyers/doctors with deep backgrounds in fields, the ones who dare to talk online, stand out like sore thumbs.
When the market wildly diverges from steady state operations, this is an entirely reasonable thing for the SEC to do. An unstable market hurts the average person far more than a stable one.
Or you could simply point out when someone is wrong, and explain why, assuming you are an expert. Then we all learn.
That’s pretty rare in online discussion, especially the kind with voting. The most popular argument wins, not the most correct one.
I could explain, as you suggest, and so could other experts. In my experience the likelihood of a response with denials, shifting goalposts or similar is much higher than an acknowledgement and gratitude for education. I’ll pass, but others might enjoy the challenge.
I've commented on some of the RH posts and got downvoted because people didn't like the facts (and I think maybe took it personally too). I've worked in Finance long enough professionally to know that I don't understand this fully and few people do. I do know enough to know when the comments are nonsense though.
I think that some of these issues comes down to respect and also arrogance. Imagine going into a new field and after 30 seconds deciding that you know everything (the Dunning–Kruger effect?)! Have a little bit of respect for those in the field and listen. Feel free to comment/ask, but don't spout 'facts' without checking and I think we'd all move forward faster.
The other reason that listening and not spouting fiction is a good idea is that it is a lot of effort correcting people d that effort could otherwise be spent elsewhere. Folk have good will, but there's a finite amount that shouldn't be wasted! Once that's run out they look to use their time effectively. Correcting you /again/ won't be up high on the list.
Stop putting STEM workers on a pedestal. We're still just people. Like everyone else.
Then I had a few people tell me, "Nope, its called a "short squeeze" and totally legal. Then I had to go back and do some research on how short squeezes work. Then I found several instances where this had happened, just not nearly as public because of social media.
The small amount of research opened my eyes to the fact even though something may seem illegal, in the finance world, there's a lot of gray areas and details most people will never know about until something like this happens.
Even during the election, the controversy following the election, and the Capitol riot, the front page didn't get taken over by a flood of articles. Something is different this time. It was not good. I hope it won't happen again.
The moderators on this site do great work, and I'm sure this caught them by surprise and they did their best. I hope a controversy like the one that happened with WSB and Robin Hood in the past few days will not be able to take over this site to such an extent again.
Or is the criteria that it's a negative and implicates mainstream institutions?
I'm asking an honest question in good faith because I'm nervous at people conflating fringe ideas and extremist ideology with merely non mainstream ideas or suggestions.
If I want to see a flood of fake news and conspiracy theories there are plenty of other places to go. HN is not supposed to be the kind of site where that happens. Somehow the norms that prevented that from happening before on this site, even during times of extreme political controversy, have been broken.
Thoughtful people who have been on this planet for decades build up a world view based on the countless examples of actors on the world stage behaving the way that they do. A single article or internet search is not how we are informed.
Haven't politicians and regulators been doing the same thing for ever?
Can't a normal person challenge that?
Why should we blindly follow the narrative of the politicians and regulators?
Or is this your own fantasy you've built up...
it's amazing how many HN physics comments start with "my theory"
Meanwhile, when you do this (I don't mean you personally), it's always to bash the other side of some $issue, which is just the sort of flamebait and provocation we're asking people to avoid here—regardless of how wrong other people are or you feel they are.
This approach is just teaching people to repeat memes after pundits and not use their brain - instead of teaching them to work on better reasoning skills, and applying these skills to the problems they face, while accounting for their lack of expertise.
Discussions should be about arguments, not people's authority. If you see someone being wrong and you know better because you've studied the field for longer, point out the flaws in their arguments, offer corrections, but embrace that they're at least trying for understanding, instead of condemning them.
Closely related XKCD: https://xkcd.com/1831/
That's how every opinion anyone's ever had works. Everyone has a mental model, which they use to understand the world. If you have a problem with the specifics, address them. Otherwise, you are simply appealing to authority.
That said, Internet discussions are run on Cunningham's Law - you say what you think you know, and others will call your errors out, or challenge your assumptions. As long as people don't read any single comment as gospel, but consider the whole discussion in context of their own knowledge, applying basic critical thinking, everyone gets to train their reasoning skills and learn something. I'd expect this to be a baseline on HN.
I'm confident being the protagonist of that XKCD is a rite of passage in this industry :).
In general, this can't be a way to move forward as a society if people just make stuff up.
>>Alice said something along the lines of “I hate people who frivolously diagnose themselves with autism without knowing anything about the disorder. They should stop thinking they’re ‘so speshul’ and go see a competent doctor.”
>>Beth answered something along the lines of “I diagnosed myself with autism, but only after a lot of careful research. I don’t have the opportunity to go see a doctor. I think what you’re saying is overly strict and hurtful to many people with autism.”
>>Alice then proceeded to tell Beth she disagreed, in that special way only Tumblr users can. I believe the word “cunt” was used.
Alexander explains what's going on as:
>>Beth chose to stand up for the people who self- diagnosed autism without careful research. This wasn’t because she considered herself a member of that category. It was because she decided that self- diagnosed autistics were going to stand or fall as a group, and if Alice succeeded in pushing her “We should dislike careless self- diagnosees” angle, then the fact that she wasn’t careless wouldn’t save her.
>>Alice, for her part, didn’t bother bringing up that she never accused Beth of being careless, or that Beth had no stake in the matter. She saw no point in pretending that boxing in Beth and the other careful self- diagnosers in with the careless ones wasn’t her strategy all along.
https://www.slatestarcodexabridged.com/Weak-Men-Are-Superwea...
(But to be serious, I think it’s easy to accidentally take forum comments personally because the physical act of reading HN comments, social media DMs, and text messages are all basically the same. So maybe it’s easy for our emotions to get mixed up.)
One really good example in that link is a user trying to claim that race & iq is the determining factor in economic outcome while dropping racial slurs as examples to justify racism against Asians and other groups that he thinks are ALL "wealthy" and "smart".
It's a great illustration of parent's comment. Taking an outdated model and then using it to justify his/her own skewed views. Sort of like how we use colour labels created by a Swedish pseudoscientist to reduce ethnicities to is being heralded as a great achievement.
1. Read Wikipedia on another field 2. Decide, based on that knowledge, that the field is “ripe for disruption” 3. Usually fail miserably if parasitic ad tech isn’t the core business model
Even politicians show more humility than these people. It’s as if typing into a computer makes them think they are omniscient high priests. Most of them even have the gall to call themselves engineers. We don’t call machinists engineers, and most programmers are digital machinists.
or what experts call "a model"
I didnt know Vincent Cerf, Tim Berners-Lee et al were HN users.
/ducks
Which is exactly the parent's point. Don't assume words mean the exact same thing from one field to another.
1. Reads a technical document outside their domain.
2. Feels dumb because they don't have a grasp on any of the concepts.
3. Too busy to use the very internet which some of them probably helped build to magically render learning materials to the screen in front of them at zero marginal cost.
4. Sees the word "manipulation"
5. Substitutes the laymen's definition of "manipulation"
6. Builds a fantasy World of Wall Street from first principles around that definition
7. Argues their fantasy first-principles Wall Street against other participants' fantasy first-principles Wall Street
8. Everyone leaves sync'd on the fantasy of feeling smarter than when they arrived.