Alternatives to the World Health Organization

[Alex_Krycek]

15 minutes ago, Phi for All said:

!

Moderator Note

You really need to stop organizing your arguments in this conspiracy model, where you make opinionated insinuations you don't intend to support with evidence. It's virtually impossible to discuss anything meaningful, especially on a science site, when such bad faith is exhibited. That's why it's against the rules.

 

This is not an "opinionated insinuation - it's part of an ongoing debate spurred by two WHO insiders:  Jamie Metzl and Dr. Peter Dajak.  Both were recently interviewed on 60 minutes about the WHO investigation, and have differing theories about the cause of COVID.  What leads me to be highly skeptical of Dr. Dajak's claims is that he and his team of experts had limited access during their investigation, and could only rely on the sceond hand information provided by the CCP, hence my comment about them feeding the WHO information.  It's common knowledge that the CCP frame events to fit their self serving, politically expedient narrative.  Again, this is all part of a public, spirited discussion that has been broadcast on mainstream media.  

Source:  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fSaqOHypxTI

 

 

 

[ScienceNostalgia101]

4 hours ago, swansont said:

To what end? What changes if we determine an outcome like natural outbreak or accidental release from a lab studying the virus?

We will have a clearer picture of who tends to be right and who tends to be wrong.

 

This doesn't tell us whether the latter was due to incompetence or malice, of course, but putting aside what they have different, what they have in common is that we know there's more where that came from and can extrapolate it into how they'll handle other matters.

 

Also, sending in spies might buy us more time to determine where the next pandemic will come from so we'll have more time to implement our pandemic strategies next time. We did this for Iraq, least we could do is do the same for a country that has already gotten more people killed through this pandemic than Iraq did during the first Gulf War.

[swansont]

33 minutes ago, ScienceNostalgia101 said:

We will have a clearer picture of who tends to be right and who tends to be wrong.

Again, what does this change?

 

33 minutes ago, ScienceNostalgia101 said:

This doesn't tell us whether the latter was due to incompetence or malice, of course, but putting aside what they have different, what they have in common is that we know there's more where that came from and can extrapolate it into how they'll handle other matters.

 

Also, sending in spies might buy us more time to determine where the next pandemic will come from so we'll have more time to implement our pandemic strategies next time.

I fail to see how this informs a pandemic strategy. Is the strategy different in the three cases? (leak, natural, don’t know) What do you do differently?

 

33 minutes ago, ScienceNostalgia101 said:

We did this for Iraq, least we could do is do the same for a country that has already gotten more people killed through this pandemic than Iraq did during the first Gulf War.

We did what for Iraq? What does Iraq have to do with this?

4 hours ago, Alex_Krycek said:

It's common knowledge

Not really a thing in this kind of discussion.

[ScienceNostalgia101]

1 hour ago, swansont said:

I fail to see how this informs a pandemic strategy. Is the strategy different in the three cases? (leak, natural, don’t know) What do you do differently?

You listen to the people who have a pattern of being right, and dismiss out of hand the people who have a pattern of being wrong.

[swansont]

12 minutes ago, ScienceNostalgia101 said:

You listen to the people who have a pattern of being right, and dismiss out of hand the people who have a pattern of being wrong.

I’m sure that’s an answer to a question, but it’s not an answer to my question.

 

[ScienceNostalgia101]

8 minutes ago, swansont said:

I’m sure that’s an answer to a question, but it’s not an answer to my question.

Yes, it is. It really is. If the World Health Organization keeps making the same mistakes (at best) over and over again, that reflects poorly on their credibility, while reflecting relatively better on those with the more accurate predictions early on about what the World Health Organization was getting right or wrong.

[swansont]

4 minutes ago, ScienceNostalgia101 said:

Yes, it is. It really is. If the World Health Organization keeps making the same mistakes (at best) over and over again, that reflects poorly on their credibility, while reflecting relatively better on those with the more accurate predictions early on about what the World Health Organization was getting right or wrong.

I didn’t ask you anything about the WHO, so it’s ludicrous to claim that this is an answer to my question.

[CharonY]

5 minutes ago, ScienceNostalgia101 said:

Yes, it is. It really is. If the World Health Organization keeps making the same mistakes (at best) over and over again, that reflects poorly on their credibility, while reflecting relatively better on those with the more accurate predictions early on about what the World Health Organization was getting right or wrong.

 

Who got predictions right for this pandemic and then acted accordingly?

[John Cuthber]

50 minutes ago, ScienceNostalgia101 said:

You listen to the people who have a pattern of being right, and dismiss out of hand the people who have a pattern of being wrong.

So, we dismiss Trump out of hand - because he was so wrong about lots of things.
And, on that basis- we know that his views are often wrong.

So, for example, since he didn't like the WHO, we can reasonably deduce the the WHO is probably a good thing.

 

[swansont]

13 hours ago, John Cuthber said:

So, we dismiss Trump out of hand - because he was so wrong about lots of things.

Unfortunately, those of us in the US weren’t able to dismiss him out of hand. And yet his administration’s response seems to not have much to do with the information he got, since he largely ignored it and did almost nothing.

Which is one reason I want to know why it would have mattered knowing the details of how the virus originally spread. Would Trump have done a different kind of nothing? Would governors have changed their push to repeatedly reopen too soon? Would they have done something different in avoiding mask mandates? How were these decisions based on the WHO's investigation?

[John Cuthber]

18 hours ago, swansont said:

Unfortunately, those of us in the US weren’t able to dismiss him out of hand.

The good news is that we are able to dismiss his views on the WHO.

[ScienceNostalgia101]

On 4/13/2021 at 7:13 PM, John Cuthber said:

So, we dismiss Trump out of hand - because he was so wrong about lots of things.
And, on that basis- we know that his views are often wrong.

So, for example, since he didn't like the WHO, we can reasonably deduce the the WHO is probably a good thing.

A stopped clock can be right twice a day; I wouldn't expect a ball to fall upwards just because Trump said it would fall down.

 

With the World Health Organization, people seem to be expecting more than a stopped clock of it. People turn to it for international cooperation on medical issues, even though individual countries can form a variety of alliances, issue by issue, without having tor rely on an institution that made a very similar set of mistakes (at best) twice in a row for two new diseases coming out of China decades apart.

[swansont]

6 hours ago, ScienceNostalgia101 said:

A stopped clock can be right twice a day; I wouldn't expect a ball to fall upwards just because Trump said it would fall down.

 

With the World Health Organization, people seem to be expecting more than a stopped clock of it. People turn to it for international cooperation on medical issues, even though individual countries can form a variety of alliances, issue by issue, without having tor rely on an institution that made a very similar set of mistakes (at best) twice in a row for two new diseases coming out of China decades apart.

So list what, exactly, they got wrong.

And explain why knowing the specifics of how the virus got out would have made an impact on how the world responded to it; please stop dodging this question.

[Area54]

8 hours ago, ScienceNostalgia101 said:

A stopped clock can be right twice a day

Whereas a broken record can be wrong all the time.

[ScienceNostalgia101]

On 4/17/2021 at 10:45 AM, swansont said:

So list what, exactly, they got wrong.

And explain why knowing the specifics of how the virus got out would have made an impact on how the world responded to it; please stop dodging this question.

Forgot about this thread until very recently.

 

How people react isn't just based on perceived "expertise," but also on perceived intelligence and perceived honest. People consider pollsters experts on polling, but that doesn't mean they trust them, especially after multiple catastrophic failures reflected poorly on either their methodology or their sincerity in their interpretation of the results; it's unclear which.

 

A similar thing, if to a lesser extent, is now happening to the life sciences as to the social sciences. A decision not to blindly trust the "experts" but to examine which fields, and which groups of "experts" within these fields are to be trusted, with the perverse incentives taken into account, and the apparent effects thereof examined in light of the evidence by all of us, not just by other scientists who may have all sorts of untold unforeseen incentives to close ranks.

 

We see this with the World Health Organization. Instead of blindly accepting their "expertise" we see them making the same "mistakes" with this as they did with SARS and are not sure whether to question their judgment or their integrity, but know that it reflects poorly on any conclusion coming out of them in the future.

 

And in my opinion, it's about time.

 

Is this concept worth its own thread or no?

[swansont]

22 minutes ago, ScienceNostalgia101 said:

Forgot about this thread until very recently.

 

How people react isn't just based on perceived "expertise," but also on perceived intelligence and perceived honest. People consider pollsters experts on polling, but that doesn't mean they trust them, especially after multiple catastrophic failures reflected poorly on either their methodology or their sincerity in their interpretation of the results; it's unclear which.

 

A similar thing, if to a lesser extent, is now happening to the life sciences as to the social sciences. A decision not to blindly trust the "experts" but to examine which fields, and which groups of "experts" within these fields are to be trusted, with the perverse incentives taken into account, and the apparent effects thereof examined in light of the evidence by all of us, not just by other scientists who may have all sorts of untold unforeseen incentives to close ranks.

 

We see this with the World Health Organization. Instead of blindly accepting their "expertise" we see them making the same "mistakes" with this as they did with SARS and are not sure whether to question their judgment or their integrity, but know that it reflects poorly on any conclusion coming out of them in the future.

 

And in my opinion, it's about time.

 

Is this concept worth its own thread or no?

You quoted me, but I don't see how this addresses any of the points I made

[John Cuthber]

35 minutes ago, ScienceNostalgia101 said:

People consider pollsters experts on polling, but that doesn't mean they trust them, especially after multiple catastrophic failures reflected poorly on either their methodology or their sincerity

Could you expand on that- with real examples?
Please take care to distinguish what the pollsters said from what the press and TV said about the pollsters' assessments.