We took videos of comatose pedestrians at face value, forgetting to adjust for base rates
We obsessed over the Diamond Princess instead of the many lightly infected ships
3\ We panicked over ground glass opacities and myocarditis, forgetting to ask how common those are after flu
We proclaimed no evidence for seasonality despite a 99% prior being appropriate
4\ We believed hospitals were full despite partisan hacks like the NYT being almost entirely unable to report evidence of fullness
5\ In testing, we ignored that false positives will swamp real positives when prevalence is low
We refused to imagine that off-season transmission crashes could indicate herd immunity of T cell cross immunity
6\ To justify masks and lockdowns, we looked at places that had them and succeeded, or placed that didn't and failed, forgetting to notice the places that didn't have them and succeeded, or had them and failed
7\ We assumed that the virus arose in Dec 2019 because that's when we noticed it, ignoring that it would take cosmic luck for that coincidence, and that COVID almost certainly was all over the globe by then
8\ It is darkly funny that the canonical example used to teach Bayes Theorem is an oncologist misdiagnosing a rare cancer
It's how I learned Bayes
And masks and lockdowns show us the medical community is still broadly innumerate
9\ Time and again, we scared ourselves back into lockdown because cases were "surging", neglecting to notice that testing had surged more
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Every time POTUS wants to start a war, he should have to get all the governors together in a drafty castle and grovel until one of them steps forward and starts a slow clap
1\ BofA was started by Italian immigrants, who figured out that by *discriminating* between Northern and Southern Italians (whom US lenders couldn't tell apart), they could lend to the good Northern credits
2\ Thus, the one-time biggest bank in the world succeeded because they figured out how to make finer and finer distinctions between individuals, which had a "disparate impact" on Southern Italians
But the alternative was no loans for any Italian immigrants. It was a win!
3\ Thanks to the Civil Rights Acts, "disparate impacts" are now illegal. E.g. a company asking about criminal history will incur the ire of the EEOC, because of the disparate impact on blacks
So a rational company just pulls out of black areas, leaving deserving blacks worse off
Government is always happy to take up the banner of a new religion. It has been on every single side of the Gender & Sports issue, except the principled side of "not our business":
1\ It's odd: the collective kabuki dance in which we all pretend to be fragile and afraid of giving or taking offense
Meanwhile, we thrill to the Hollywood trope of "comfortable American place": the black barbershop, the construction site, the police precinct locker room