He made a giant ruckus complete with mysterious tweets with hashes of secret documents to claim that Japan was going to have mass casualties from their ostensibly botched covid response.

It's okay to make a giant ruckus about something important that you believe nobody is paying attention to.

And it's okay to be wrong about that.

But it would be nice to see him publicly reckon with how he got it so wrong, and how he's altered how he reasons about the world to avoid getting it that wrong again.

I was thinking about the exact same thing. I lost most respect for him in that fiasco. He even said he'd stake his reputation on it, so I guess it's appropriate.

We should take the man at his word: https://twitter.com/patio11/status/1241553311024603140

> I am materially wrong about the most consequential thing I've had to have a view on in 15 years. You should probably degrade your estimate of my ability to think through complex problems.

Yes, that was the wording! I couldn’t find the Tweet so I forgot exactly how he phrased it.

And yes, that’s exactly what I did.

Until he publicly reckons with how he got it so wrong, and what he's changed about his reasoning process as a result, we should degrade our estimate of his ability to think through complex problems.

Why does he owe you something? Should he similarly find every other topic he's been wrong about and make sure to offer apologies and postmortems on his failures?

The dude works at Stripe, not someplace influencing government or health policies.

He doesn't owe me anything.

I'm just following his advice and reducing my confidence in his ability to reason about how the world works.

He didn't punch a toddler in the face. He was wrong about something in some tweets that probably reached an audience smaller than a mediocre college football game, I don't see how that obligates him to apologize or otherwise prostrate himself.

> He didn't punch a toddler in the face.

If your defense of someone has to start with such a hilarious strawman, it might be an indicator you're defending something not worth your time.

Says the group arguing about someone being wrong on the internet about nothing of importance.

https://xkcd.com/386/

This discussion itself is of nothing important. However, that doesn't preclude it from being a place where moral relativity exists and can be debated. I am not sure I understand your assumption that the importance of a claim or discussion is related to whether it can be morally judged.

Doesn't mean there's value to it. This is a perfect example of manufactured moral outrage, justified post-hoc.

The onus is on the outrage to justify it, not on the accused to defend against it.

In this context, someone was expecting another person to exhibit a particular response to earn redemption based on an absolutely benign incident. At a certain point, the yelling just becomes tedious and unproductive regardless of the philosophical value of debate and discussion.

"I'm outraged because someone was wrong and no one was hurt and no harm was done" is just hubris.

> Doesn't mean there's value to it.

Well, to bring the concept of "value" into it only drives this further philosophical; I personally consider all debates of moral relativity to hold some inherent value, due to the topic, but I admit some are vacuous nonetheless.

> This is a perfect example of manufactured moral outrage, justified post-hoc.

I don't really understand what is "manufactured" about this. The individual went and published a hefty claim, in the form of a white paper no less, that Japan was about to see a massive outbreak of COVID[0]; they believed so intently in themselves that they were willing to put this content out there and stake some lofty claims on the "work" of the white paper.

Of course those who find the work sloppy and indeed find the conclusions outlined in the paper to have not occurred at all are going to decry the author. It is their inherent right. I will leave it to you to slog through the details of the thing, I personally only joined to wax philosophical about the nature of debate on the internet.

> The onus is on the outrage to justify it, not on the accused to defend against it.

This language is so silly. The numbers forecasted in the paper didn't occur, seems pretty well justified.

> "I'm outraged because someone was wrong and no one was hurt and no harm was done" is just hubris.

Again, your language is very telling of the media you consume, but "no harm was done" is both difficult to quantify and hard to imagine as true if you consider actions of negative moral relativity to be harmful, which is not an unreasonable stance to take against breathlessly whispered, widely published failed psuedoscience.

[0]: https://www.kalzumeus.com/2020/04/21/japan-coronavirus/

> what is "manufactured" about this

There is no moral position of substance that you can argue from, where Patrick owes anyone an apology. Dead stop. He's been more than humble enough to publish an admission of error, one for which the original OP was too lazy to look for prior to impugning Patrick for it.

He's not Fauci. He created a bingo card creator and shared the experience and his personal perspective with this community. This does not oblige him to meet everyone's unrealistic expectations of how he should conduct himself.

It says far more about the people caught up in the orbit of his mistake, than he does about him.

> Again, your language is very telling of the media you consume

How do you imagine throwing an ad-hominem was going to help make for a more productive debate?

Patio11 on this: https://www.kalzumeus.com/2020/04/21/japan-coronavirus/

Almost 11,000 words later and his assessment is:

"The core result was correct."

"This prediction was correct."

"I doubt every claim is exactly correct."

He refused to even acknowledge how wrong he was, much less grapple with how his methods of research and reasoning got it so wrong.

I’ve scanned that 5 mile long article and can’t find any description of what their predictions where other than “it’s going to be worse than what people are saying in March 2020.” What am I missing?

From the article linked below, he seems to think that he was largely correct. Is that not the case?

I am willing to bet Patrick sleeps while wearing a Covid mask.

I kind of doubt it. His entire family got covid already.

His family got Omicron at the same time that ~everyone with kids in Japan got Omicron. This is consistent with a hefty level of caution.

It's wording that I use on Twitter and similar to convey a sort of nuanced problem: I do a bunch of things professionally. Some subset of those things are work that is traditionally done in industry, and which industry has very simple scripts for, and which would be adequately explained by "$TITLE at Stripe" if I had anything like a legible title.

But I'm also in that vague sphere that is often called "public intellectuals" despite not being in a line of work that traditionally contributes public intellectuals. I don't work for a newspaper, though my writing has run in newspapers. I am not a tenured professor, but some tenured professors seem to think I occasionally understand and explain things worth understanding and explaining.

This is further complicated by "That public intellectual thing is something that is expected of me but in the way that a university expects a professor to conduct scholarship without endorsing all conclusions of it, not like a company expects publicly visible employees to stay relentlessly on-message." And by the fact that everyone expects me to, at some point in the future, continue doing much the same thing while not sitting in the same seat I'm currently sitting in.

That is what I mean by "works for the Internet." Which feels sort of self indulgent, and a bit long, to need to shove into every time I stamp out my disclaimer, so it is here rather than every time I need to stamp out my disclaimer.

I too reread this sentence a few time to try and understand the message. I think that the author is trying to convey that he believes his work has a positive impact to the "global health" of the internet. Although this may come across of "full of himself" I think that it may be more of a positive mindset view of his work. If we can't convince ourselves of the value of our work then how we will ever convince the world?

I think the world would be a better place if you could all truly be this proud of our work. Is there anything we can do to make a material difference here?

It sounds like it's just Silicon Valley's "making the world a better place through scalable fault-tolerant payment APIs", except unironically.

I think it's specifically a play on Stripe's mission statement to "increase the GDP of the internet" so in that light he "works for the internet".

I like his writing, but his miss on that Japan covid thing (linked in threads elsewhere) and his knee-jerk (imo, at least overly general) anti-crypto hostility has caused me to down-rank my prior for him a bit.

That said, if you write a lot publicly you're going to be wrong sometimes. I don't expect people to be perfectly consistent or perfectly correct (I'm certainly not).

I also don't care that brilliant people sometimes come off a little abrasively, it's better imo than pseudo-humble crap. I don't even think it really applies to patio11 who comes across earnest and helpful in his writing and goes out of his way to do good (salary negotiation article is still best source on the net, the vaccine availability thing).

> becoming more and more full of himself?

No, you've just upped your expectations. Public figures are still humans, with all the flaws and mistakes that come with the experience.

> Unless "Internet at Stripe" is some internal Stripe group

Maybe the generous interpretation is that patio11 knows his audience reaches beyond individuals employed at digital companies, maybe folks in finance or government or education. Stripe isn't a well-known provider in brick-and-mortar, or used by fintech, so on a topic on something like SWIFT it makes sense.

The audience he is aiming at is less judgmental people. If you believe that what you do is consequential you can say that. Obviously if you think your work is basically meaningless you won't talk like you care about it and think that it's important. Adding caveats and explanations that show you're not actually attempting to usurp social status some people may think you're not entitled to can be instrumentally useful but you can also just not engage with these people if you don't need to or you don't find it worth the cost. You don't always need to genuflect to your betters. Sometimes you can just baldly state who you are and what you believe in.

I wouldn’t say that. I think the level of rigor is lower than earlier writing, but the voice is the same. Then again more recent topics are more complex.

Well, if it seems that more and more people are becoming full of themselves and it affects your mental state, I'd recommend changing your own attitude towards it. You can only change yourself, not other people.

I don't even understand what this criticism means. Does joking about his job title somehow mean he's full of himself? Would it be better if he said "Individual Contributor, Content & Communications at Stripe"? Some people think its arrogant to state your full job title too, like "what gives them the right to presume I care about their job so much?" or something?

IDK, i genuinely don't understand but would like to..

EDIT: or just downvote and move on that's cool too i guess. i have learned my lesson. he is disliked based on instinct and the reasoning is just post-hoc rationalization i guess. maybe asking for a justification in this regime is considered an attack.

The impression is of self importance. The way it is stated it gives the impression he works at a company that allows the internet to exist.

It reminds me of a time when stripe was the underdog against paypal and everyone championed them. Fast forward we have thought leaders from stripe thinking they work at the internet. Even paypal never pretended that. By replacing paypal with stripe did we end up with a worse paypal?

ohhh ok i see. thanks for replying, i really appreciate it. im going to think about that.