On Propaganda Part 3

hey everybody I made a video recently on propaganda and unfortunately I forgot to set things up properly and so as a result I lost my entire screencast so nobody was able to see anything I was drawing on the screen but some people did reply already to the the video I posted it's right now sitting on YouTube and it has about a thousand views and it's already elicited this this great response on reddit why is Charles voicing his twisted opinion on Kovach 19 and apparently this doctor I'm citing is a pseudo scientist and he has no idea what he's doing so I figured I'd reshoot the video but with the screencast and going to perhaps some more focused detail about a few things and maybe get a more concise output but in particular I before I began I did want to point out some articles so let me turn on the screencast real quick and then I'll show you a few things ok and you are presenting your screen huzzah so here's this nice little post on reddit from somebody says prided himself on building a blockchain based on scientific research I find it very suspicious that Charles is choosing an entirely different path when it comes to public health even worth that he chooses to share this badly research video with the community the global scientific community is highly skeptical towards the Facebook sourcing of research data in the paper and he concluded a fatality rate of point 12 percent combined with the the 15,000 404 confirmed deceased New York City would mean 12.5 million people live in New York City well I'm wondering that first things first when we're actually talking about this topic of antibody testing every single place that people are testing people for antibodies for example the Netherlands they are finding meaningful amounts of people in New York City finding meaningful amounts of people and of course doctor you and Edith was finding meaningful amounts of people that have gotten antibiotics and if you continue doing study after study after study it doesn't matter the population group it doesn't matter how you do it if it's five hundred people three thousand people and you're finding a consistently high penetration rate only a few months after its spread then it's definitely the case that more people have had this than we thought it's only a question of how many and that's a big scientific debate and the whole point about signing John in this this debate isn't that he's not a pseudo scientist he's actually one of the most prominent doctors in the world and it doesn't matter if conservative media or some other sources citing him or not at the end of the day this guy is an academic beast in fact he published the paper attacking scientists and it's one of the most cited papers of all time in medicine it's cited over eight thousand three hundred forty-one times published in 2005 and it says why most published research findings are false you see his speciality above and beyond actually being extremely strong in mathematics in fact he he won awards when he was in a Greece for this but a speciality is is actually dealing with meta research so basically it's his job to look at the entire body of science for something and get an assessment of what's the overall opinion of the global scientific community and he's really an expert at constructing experiments and he's at Stanford just one of the best medical schools in the entire world so yeah strong mathematical background he's the meta theory guy the meta research guy his papers are cited thousands and thousands of times and so any experiment he constructs and statements he makes III feel they have a great degree of credibility behind them especially given that he made almost no statements in January and February and March and waited until he actually had some research to have a discussion about things so the point of the video that I shot earlier was basically the the concept of propaganda and basically propaganda the way I think about it going to read because people like Sydney orange people who have a little easier time with that color but basically it is this idea that you have this strong reaction to something that you're not a domain expert in a little about it or none and yet that reaction is so strong that you've developed a opinion you're willing to fight over so you have an opinion you're going to share and you're going to fight so there's all kinds of things in life that you probably don't know too much about I'm willing to wait you the vast majority of people probably don't know how to repair a septic tank or build an engine there's certainly a lot of people that do know how to do that but fortunately if you were to get a hundred people in the population together especially in maybe a big city the vast majority of them would not have those skill sets so if you ask them the difference between a one septic system or engine most people probably would not have an opinion about it certainly not a strong emotional visceral reaction even though they don't know a lot about it and they certainly wouldn't go and fight you and say oh well Hemi is so much better than this engine or that engine or something like that the black-winged is crap and GM has lost their ability to make inches but that every now and then you run into opinions actually we see a lot in politics where people really legitimately don't know a lot about it for example health care it is a very complicated topic and an incredibly complicated topic we're talking about trillions of dollars we're talking about 1/6 of the entire US economy we're talking about millions of people employed in an and we're projecting about tons of issues from legal liability issues to fragmentation of data to miss incentives where there's perverse financial incentives there's issues where people aren't willing to admit mistakes because of liability there are probably if you wanted to list them all out a good 20 to 30 books you have to read worth the content to get a real good grapple and understanding of the totality of the American healthcare system and we can all agree it's not working so well it's very expensive and we're not having good outcomes but it's pretty difficult to decide where to go and what to do yet people despite the fact that the vast majority actually don't have strong domain expertise in it they only know a little bit about it they have very strong reactions in fact so much so that when they fight people who oppose their opinions however shallow they might be they basically say things you want other people to die person X to die so the point of this series of videos is really an analysis of why do people do that in general why why do people when there's some topic it could be health care it could be philosophical issues at the end of life issues it could be covin and the kovat is a phenomenal example because it's impacting all of us why do people have such strong opinions such that they're willing to write things like this why is Charles voicing his twisted opinion apparently I'm here to reject the entire scientific community by the way there is no consensus on the scientific community right now about kovat fact the only consensus is that we need more data nobody knows the w-h-o is not even sure if you have an immunity if you catch it who knows we don't even know if a vaccine is going to work at this point there are no vaccines on market for coronavirus that have shown safety and efficacy yet there's some promising trials but we won't know for a while we have no current therapeutics that work we have some ideas like ring des Vere could potentially have some upside and there's a few other things that are currently in random controlled clinical trials but we actually don't know we don't know actually what the case Calla tier 8 is every single intellectually honest doctor and scientists will tell you the CFR is unknown another thing is there's a great degree of corruption in the data that we have been collecting for example in Italy this particular poster said there's big morgues churches have been converted to morgues well if Vito goes into the ICU and Vito is a 70 year old man and he has lots of comorbidities tons of comorbidities and this he also is currently having congestive heart failure and his overall health is really terrible and he contracted and dies when he dies from kovat will say that was a kovat death check and that goes into the statistics pool we're seeing a lot of this in fact this is the dominant group people over the age of 60 people who are obese people with lots of comorbidities people who smoked for a long period of time that's here demographic now is it really fair to say that coronavirus was the definite agent there because what if they got regular everyday influenza every year over 500,000 people globally die from influenza and if Vito here had caught influenza there would be a very high chance that he'd have a poor outcome especially if he was in the ICU it need to be ventilated so yeah okay chrono did that but there's more to the story here it's a very complicated issue it's a multi variant issues lots of confounding factors and this is not something that laypeople understand really the experts they'll be the first to tell you there is no consensus we're not really sure about any of these things I and we're just trying to work our way through it and the point of the last video that I made was I listed the knowns and then I listed the unknowns so currently a lot of coronavirus talk lives in the unknown category things the case fatality rate we don't know they are not we don't know about immunity we don't know about therapeutics okay there's a lot of stuff that's sitting in we don't have good treatment etc etc and there's a lot of people trying to work on that great group of people who are well more qualified and they're figuring it out but on the notes knowns we do know that there is severe economic damage that is undebatable you don't need a PhD in epidemiology you don't need to sit down and spend your life as it's a physician to understand the economic damage of basically saying the entire economy global economy is shut down you don't need a PhD to understand that when people are forced to stay at home they've lost their jobs and they're under enormous stress and uncertainty that these things cause social damage marriages collapse people feel useless people run out of money they could no longer pay their bills I just read an article the other day that we've seen a huge spike of reports of landlords asking for sexual favors from female tenants in exchange for keeping them in their apartments just imagine that being basically molested and raped by your landlord because you can't pay rent this is a reality it's happening today right here right now to millions of people in the United States and globally millions more and in the developed world these nation-states can mostly rebound so we're looking for that kind of v-shaped curve we hope we'll have it in the developing world it looks more like that and it's unknown if they can even ever recover without substantial amounts of direct foreign investment so these are certainties of a lockdown we know these things so why do you do a lockdown well in my original video that I said it was more a tactical retreat tactical retreat and basically the idea is that you've been surprised by something and we've all been surprised on a global basis we walked into a room and then somebody just started shooting at us so what's the first instinct find cover and get your bearings and then figure out what the hell is going on and then make a plan and that's what this knee-jerk quarantine basically was something hit us and we had models the Imperial model for example and the Imperial model basically said millions and millions of people if not tens of millions will die fast it was resurrecting the specter of Spanish flu and this was mentioned many many many times and it was very scary and so we did a tactical retreat as a collective society we pulled back we said boy let's just lock up for a little bit and understanding that when we do that we are walking into a world that we fully fully appreciate if we stay too long in it will have catastrophic social consequences but we say what it's worth it because millions of people are going to die otherwise so we absolutely need to do this now 184 countries have this not every single one of them embrace this idea for example Sweden did not and what's truly amazing to me is that apparently everybody over the Internet with a keyboard on Twitter reddit they're just armchair experts in epidemiology now and they they mentioned sweetness ten times as much the rate as Norway or these other countries they Nearpod because apparently they all understand the dynamics of Sweden versus Norway versus Denmark and these are apples apples comparisons in their mind it is an interesting thought experiment take the total amount of people who have died in Sweden in the population of Sweden and extrapolate that to the population of Italy and you'll find that Italy has actually had more death when you extrapolate it than Sweden and you'll say well that's not fair sweetens a different country than Italy that's certainly true so then why are we comparing Norway to Sweden these are different countries as well it'd be much more fair to compare Norway to Wyoming in terms of density they're about the same in that respect there's more population in Norway but the density is about the same in that respect if you pick an average person outside of a few epicenters like Oslo okay well but everybody apparently knows better because it's convenient to their agenda and what is that agenda it's not their own agenda the whole point of the series of videos is it's a prop the series of videos on propaganda this concept that you're having a strong reaction so strong you're willing to go to Reddit and immediately say that I have a twisted opinion a twisted opinion I just don't care about people dying I want blood in the streets for unknown reasons it doesn't financially benefit me one way or the other in fact frankly it probably would make me more money in the long run if this quarantine ran a longer time because it helps crypto currencies and I'm heavily invested there and I'm not going to lose my job over this we have a strong economic moat but I guess I have a twisted opinion for unknown reasons so they have very strong reaction and I'm willing to wager because of the appeal the authority and no director actual rebuttal of any of the data presented that the particular poster probably is not a domain expert and I am willing to wager that the fact that he's willing to fight shame me and share that publicly and attack us what does that mean means that he's been propagandized and that's the meta point about this entire series of videos it's actually not about covet it's not about coronavirus it's nice to talk about it because it's a great example and it does elicit very strong reactions from people and what I'm trying to say is those reactions aren't your okay those reactions aren't your own that's what I've been trying to say over and over and over and over and over again that these reactions that these posters are experiencing are a direct result of consuming information and consuming thoughts in a way that have basically replaced whatever personal opinion they have with someone else's opinion and this is pervasive in modern society it's why politics don't work right now it's why everybody's fighting right now it's why everybody so angry right now because at the end of the day if we're having an academic discussion the very first thing we would do with an academic discussion as we look at models we would date debate things like inputs we would try to ask design of experiments we would be looking at data sets and been asking ourselves which ones are reasonable ones be asking about what type of tests we need to run these types of things either the list goes on and on and on these are the things that we'd actually be discussing and the point is truth we actually don't know I don't know when this whole crisis started I consumed the Imperial model and I said well these are domain experts they should know and I got very worried because they were telling me millions of people were going to die I looked the models I looked at the inputs and I said well I'm not a domain expert here but this does look like decent math and the inputs aren't necessarily unreasonable and then what happened is the clock ran and when that clock started running what did we learn that the model was wrong and they didn't account for dynamic behavior for example people change their decision-making processes based upon available information they start automatically social distancing they start automatically isolating sick people they start automatically following better hide they start wearing masks these types of things and that has a profound impact on things like how many people end up spreading it to other people and that dynamicism always makes whatever model you've constructed inaccurate you have to Foote tune and adjust your model so based on this new information I started saying well let's take a step back and let's try to at least establish the case fatality rate because if we can do that then we can start making proper policy decisions about what are we going to do because the cost here is so enormous and this is being minimized and minimized and minimized it's it's almost axiomatic people are saying if we don't do total all-out absolute quarantine you have blood on your hands every single person who died is basically would never have died if we had a total quarantine first that's not true and second they're escaping another fact of life and I mentioned it in the prior video your existence is risky people don't tend to think in these terms but insurance people do epidemiologists do anybody who looks at a population realizes that the minute that you let people start interacting with each other in a social setting these interactions have a probability of harm now that can be very small that can be very high it depends on the particular circumstances but there is no exception to this universal truth you can contract a disease and it doesn't have to be coronavirus and spread that disease to others you can engage in risky behavior with people drinking drugs you can you driving a car kills 50,000 people per year the minute that you launch quarantine just by that very act you will be responsible for hundreds of thousands of deaths and we as a society are okay with that why because we know those things they're they're quantified we accept that every year half a million or more people will die from influenza every single year we've accepted this it's one of the most lethal diseases in human history it's killed more people probably than anything else with perhaps the exception of malaria but we accept that and we say okay we got to live our life so we're willing to take this and people who say well this is not the flu they say this is so much worse than the flu and they cite the case fatality rate and what I've been trying to tell everybody is that as we evolved through this crisis we're starting to learn that the case fatality rate is probably much lower and then there's this question of what is an acceptable CFR it is not good enough to say zero it's going to be there if we're willing to leave society open with influenza and let's say that's somewhere here depending upon the population give or take if we're willing to leave society open with a CFR at that level would you be okay with the CFR at 0.1% would you be okay with the CFR 0.2 would you be okay with a CFR 0.