I’ve spent a lot of time on social media trying to get people to tone down their more extreme statements re: nCOV.
I would be interested to learn more about your views on the current outbreak. Can you link to the statements you made on social media, or present your perspective here (or as a top-level comment or post)?
(shared in one xrisk group, for example, as “X-riskers, it would appear your time is now: “With increasing transportation we are close to a transition to conditions in which extinction becomes certain both because of rapid spread and because of the selective dominance of increasingly worse pathogens.”. My response: “We are **not** “close to a transition to conditions in which extinction becomes certain both because of rapid spread and because of the selective dominance of increasingly worse pathogens”.)
Or, responding to speculation that nCov is a deliberately developed bioweapon, or was accidentally released from a BSL4 lab in Wuhan. There isn’t evidence for either of these and I think they are unhelpful types of speculation to be made without evidence, and such speculations can spread widely. Further, some people making the latter speculation didn’t seem to be aware what a common class of virus coronaviruses are (ranging from common cold thru to SARS). Whether or not a coronavirus was being studied at the Wuhan lab, I think it would not be a major coincidence to find a lab studying a coronavirus in a major city.
A third example was clarifying that the event 201 exercise Johns Hopkins did (which involved 65 million hypothetical deaths) was a tabletop simulation , not a prediction, and therefore could not be used to extrapolate an expectation of 65 million deaths from the current outbreak.
I made various other comments as part of discussions, but more providing context or points for discussion etc as I recall as opposed to disagreeing per se, and don’t have time to dig them up.
The latter examples don’t relate to predictions of the severity of the outbreak, more so to what I perceived at the time to be misunderstandings, misinformation, and unhelpful/ungrounded speculations.
I would be interested to learn more about your views on the current outbreak. Can you link to the statements you made on social media, or present your perspective here (or as a top-level comment or post)?
Hi Wei,
Sorry I missed this. My strongest responses over the last while have fallen into the categories of: (1) responding to people claiming existential risk-or-approaching potential (or sharing papers by people like Taleb stating we are entering a phase where this is near-certain; e.g. https://static1.squarespace.com/static/5b68a4e4a2772c2a206180a1/t/5e2efaa2ff2cf27efbe8fc91/1580137123173/Systemic_Risk_of_Pandemic_via_Novel_Path.pdf
(shared in one xrisk group, for example, as “X-riskers, it would appear your time is now: “With increasing transportation we are close to a transition to conditions in which extinction becomes certain both because of rapid spread and because of the selective dominance of increasingly worse pathogens.”. My response: “We are **not** “close to a transition to conditions in which extinction becomes certain both because of rapid spread and because of the selective dominance of increasingly worse pathogens”.)
Or, responding to speculation that nCov is a deliberately developed bioweapon, or was accidentally released from a BSL4 lab in Wuhan. There isn’t evidence for either of these and I think they are unhelpful types of speculation to be made without evidence, and such speculations can spread widely. Further, some people making the latter speculation didn’t seem to be aware what a common class of virus coronaviruses are (ranging from common cold thru to SARS). Whether or not a coronavirus was being studied at the Wuhan lab, I think it would not be a major coincidence to find a lab studying a coronavirus in a major city.
A third example was clarifying that the event 201 exercise Johns Hopkins did (which involved 65 million hypothetical deaths) was a tabletop simulation , not a prediction, and therefore could not be used to extrapolate an expectation of 65 million deaths from the current outbreak.
I made various other comments as part of discussions, but more providing context or points for discussion etc as I recall as opposed to disagreeing per se, and don’t have time to dig them up.
The latter examples don’t relate to predictions of the severity of the outbreak, more so to what I perceived at the time to be misunderstandings, misinformation, and unhelpful/ungrounded speculations.