hey timr, i really appreciate your level-headed critiques (in the positive sense) of covid research despite the continued negativity you're receiving. few folks have been able to ignore the fearmongering and dig more deeply into the turbulent and harried research to tease out where we're really at in terms of understanding and uncertainty. just wanted to go beyond the anonymous upvote to show some appreciation and support.

Thanks for the kind words. I've been trying really hard to stay balanced on this issue here.

That's crossing into personal attack and not a legit way to argue with someone on HN. Your comment would be fine without the last paragraph.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

I don't see how that's a personal attack. It might be an unsubstantiated inference at best. The substance is easy to gather using your search tool, however:

https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=7&prefix=false&qu... https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=1&prefix=true&que...

Lots of misinformation on masks, aerosol transmission, vaccine for kids, etc. The usual stuff.

If you are willing to allow this kind of content on HN, the downward spiral is unavoidable.

> will I find similar baseless dismissive content?

I don't think you'll be very surprised by what you find. There are a number of accounts on HN that have been systematically downplaying the pandemic since the beginning, ranging from wishful thinking to simply not knowing a whole lot about viruses and RNA viruses in particular. The 'usual suspects' promote their preferred solutions, ranging from untested medication to just pretending the problem doesn't exist. It's a bit frustrating that this forum, which prides itself on being so smart harbors some of the worst elements of the conspiracy fueled story lines that are being pushed for way more than they are worth.

With 830,000 Americans verified dead from this virus (and probably a lot more than that once you look at excess deaths for that same period) and on average 1250 new ones added every day, besides the long term effects for the ones that survive a heavy case you'd think that by now even the most hardy of these people would have realized that their mantras are getting a bit long in the tooth.

We have a serious problem, it could easily get much worse and we've squandered our options for cheap and fast solutions. The problem is a global one and as humanity we have a piss poor record of dealing with global problems (except for the Ozone layer issue, but I wonder if we would have been able to deal with that in the political climate that we have today). This isn't over yet and the only way we are going to solve it is by collectively admitting that yes, we do have a problem and that no amount of wishful thinking or quackery is going to get us out of it.

There has to be room for debate and that means room for people who are saying wrong things (or that you or someone else considers wrong). In any complex situation, there will inevitably be a wide spectrum of views. I don't think it's a good idea to lump that spectrum into a binary (which is what phrases like "usual suspects" seem to me to be doing).

Fair enough, but there is an asymmetric component at work here that I think bears identifying: you can have a community of tens of thousands of individuals that are moving in a mutually beneficial way and you can destroy that same community by having a few hundred dedicated people that will shout down every attempt at a reasonable discussion with misinformation and downright junk.

Destruction is simply much easier than construction. The dutch have a proverb about this (they have proverbs on just about anything, so that shouldn't come as a surprise): "Een gek kan meer vragen dan tien wijzen kunnen beantwoorden" -> "One crazy person can ask more questions than ten wise people can answer".

And that gives HN at times a weird imbalance where it might seem to a casual observer that we are on average a bunch of racists, in denial about COVID, that we aim to spread quackery and that letting this junk unanswered is tantamount to agreeing with it. I know that isn't the case, but you could not fault an outside observer for having that view because we put that on display almost every day.

This asymmetry is also present in real life, for instance in the form of vandalism, where destroying something takes a lot less effort than it does to repair it. And PG addressed some of this in his 'no broken windows' article (which I still think is one of his best pieces and exhibits a lot of deep insight).

So there is a difference between 'room for debate and the ability for people to say wrong things' and 'people saying wrong things because it either amuses them or because they aren't trying to debate anything at all, they are just trying to spread their payload to as many eyeballs as possible'.