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Erik Angner Profile picture
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18 Feb, 7 tweets, 4 min read
Periodic reminder that in terms of outcomes, Swedish corona policy is thoroughly average in EU comparison – not exactly a model to be emulated by the rest of the world, nor a crime against humanity that should be prosecuted in the Hague. Cumulative COVID-19 deaths in Sweden and the EU
Only about two weeks separate Sweden and the EU in this graph, which shows cumulative confirmed COVID-19 deaths per 1M people. Source: ourworldindata.org/coronavirus-da…
There's a lot of disinformation. Here's @ForeignPolicy, which I've always considered a reputable publication, writing that Sweden's death rates are among the highest in Europe: foreignpolicy.com/2020/12/22/swe…
But that's not true now, and it wasn't true when the article was published. The author's own source says Sweden is #19, much closer to the median (#24 Romania) than to the extremes: worldometers.info/coronavirus/#c… Death rates across European countries
By this logic, I'm one of the tallest men in Sweden! Anyway, I suspect we would all benefit if the most agitated commentators could just pipe down.
New numbers today! In terms of excess mortality for 2020, Sweden is again in the middle of the pack – though slightly better than the median. Figures from @SvD and @AgrarSvennis
Sources: svd.se/svenska-dodsta… and

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More from @ErikAngner

Erik Angner Profile picture
17 Feb
One point that the pandemic has brought home to me is just how narrow people's expertise is. I'm regularly surprised by how a celebrated professor of X can exhibit a sub-college-level understanding of Y, even when X and Y are related. /1
Ask a professor of (say) virology about the properties of viruses and I assume you'll get a dependable answer; but ask about human behavior, public policy, causal inference, the law – or God forbid, ethics – the answer can go whichever which way. /2
Call me naive, but in the microenvironment where I work – in the intersection of science and the humanities – people take a certain amount of pride in being well read, even outside of their official domain of expertise. /3
Read 8 tweets
Erik Angner Profile picture
11 Sep 20
In re Hanno Sauer's declaration of victory in the "reason wars": A thread. /1
Let me preface this by saying I think "war" is a terrible analogy for scholarly discourse: (a) it trivializes the real thing, (b) it suggests science is a zero-sum game, (c) it triggers norms suggesting that "all is fair," and (d) it encourages people to choose teams. /2
Anyway, let's ignore the clickbaity headline and the hard-charging introduction and go straight to the conclusion. Here's what Sauer thinks the evidence shows. /3 Image
Read 15 tweets
Erik Angner Profile picture
16 Jun 20
The FT and @gideonrachman go down a well-worn path when criticizing the Swedish corona strategy – and end up with a predictably misguided conclusion. /1 ft.com/content/4f6ad3…
In Rachman's narrative, "Sweden's failure" can be traced back to a single "decision" – viz., the "refusal to go for a hard lockdown" – which was "a policy error" driven by "self-confidence … shaded into arrogance about the country's supposedly superior rationality." /2
As is well-known by now, the Swedish constitution does not permit a hard lockdown. There were things on the margin that the government could have done differently, but home confinement, travel bans, etc., were simply not in the cards. /3 bppblog.com/2020/04/23/the…
Read 7 tweets
Erik Angner Profile picture
11 May 20
Terrific assessment of projections of demand for Swedish ICU beds. The first two panels are model-based projections by academics; the third is a simple extrapolation by the public-health authority; the fourth is the actual outcome /1 dn.se/nyheter/vetens…
tl;dr Model-based projections drastically exaggerated the actual demand – sometimes by more than an order of magnitude. Today the number of patients in intensive care is about 450; it never exceeded 600 /2 icuregswe.org/data--resultat…
Around the same time, if I read their data file correctly, the IHME projected a demand of 4400, with a 95% uncertainty interval of 1400–11000. The real number is therefore way outside the interval /3 healthdata.org/covid/data-dow…
Read 13 tweets
Erik Angner Profile picture
1 Apr 20
Dear colleagues, fellow academics, and experts of all kinds: Now would be a good time to practice the intellectual virtue of epistemic humility. /1
plato.stanford.edu/entries/modest…
Being an expert involves not only knowing stuff about the world, but also knowing the limits of your knowledge and expertise. It requires both cognitive and meta-cognitive skills. /2
It is, of course, fine and good to have opinions and to express them in public. The point is that true experts express themselves in a way that reflects the degree of confidence they are justified in having in their beliefs. /3
Read 8 tweets
Erik Angner Profile picture
18 Feb 19
Beware of people claiming to be really good at logic and rationality <A THREAD> /1
One thing we learned from Kruger and Dunning’s pioneering work is that people who are in fact very good at logic tend to *underestimate* their ability doi.org/10.1037/0022-3… /2
People to the right in this graph did very well on K&D’s logic test, and on the mean they underestimated both their ability and their performance on the test /3
Read 20 tweets

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