[yomly]

To be honest I don't find "verifiable fact" to be worth much these days. If coronavirus has done anything it has highlighted how easy it is to do wrong.

Journalists and politicians alike getting drawing incorrect insights from data.

Meanwhile so little of the data surrounding coronavirus is comparable. You have countries only recording cases if the patient was hospitalised (not if they tested positive) and cause of death reporting is a minefield.

So "verifiable fact" is just as easily weaponised / politicised as bullshit. At least bullshit is easier to debunk...

We had this almighty Imperial Model projecting 500k dead meanwhile Sweden just did their own thing.

I don't really have a leaning to the policy setting but it feels that once you wrap some information up with numbers, maths and scientific authority you can parade subjectivity as fact anyway too.

I guess I'm a little jaded after seeing politics and business use spurious pedestalise data which really amounts to numerology when you start peeling back the layers and thinking critically.

[ineedasername]

> meanwhile Sweden just did their own thing

I'm not sure if you are just throwing this out there or if your intent is to hold up Sweden as an example that contradicted expected results with respect to models/social distancing requirements/etc.

If the later, then think Sweden is not a good example of such a contradiction: With the comparably minor-to-moderate social distancing, they have roughly about 2.5x the cases per capita as their two neighbors Finland and Norway, and roughly 6x to 7x the deaths per capita.

As you said, the data from country to country is hard to compare, but at the very least Sweden should not be the poster-child for low social-distancing mandates.

[wpietri]

The point of the early models, which were predicated on no behavior change, was to change behavior. And they certainly did. Well before the official stay-at-home orders, people here in SF were starting to act differently. And when those orders came, people took them seriously. So I don't think we can blame early models for doing exactly what they were supposed to do, which was telling us what could happen if we didn't take the disease seriously.

[hunters_tryst]

Antibody studies from Spain and elsewhere show only ~5% of population of these 'hard-hit' nations has had the virus. This confirms a mortality rate of about 1% when the national epidemic has a bad first wave but limited medical system overwhelm, followed by a severe lockdown.

Best guess given herd immunity kicks in at about 85% of pop infected is about 260,000 deaths with a 1% mortality rate. With these figures 500,000 deaths is a 1.9% mortality rate - high but still possible.

contextualise everything with this 5% figure - the US, and everywhere else, is much closer to the beginning of this than to the end.

[doublesCs]

You say that verifiable facts don't count for much and then as an example point to a model? A model isn't a fact.

That someone made assumptions and drew conclusions might be a fact. But the assumptions might or might not be facts, and the conclusions certainly aren't facts. As a general rule, if it's in the future, it's not a fact.

[yomly]

You're completely right - but I guess my point is that anything that has a number attached to it is often treated as fact in the media.

In the very strictest sense of verifiable fact - boolean true/false statements with irrefutable proof, then yes I think fact trumps all.

Unfortunately I think that in reality, very little of what we think of as fact falls under that very narrow definition. And my example was merely trying to illustrate that the entire field of medical statistics and epidemiology is filled with pitfalls, given that many of the numbers that are reported themselves have a tonne of nuance and context baked into them.

And I suppose any discussion which focuses solely on the numbers associated with the current pandemic are going to be extremely lossy as the numbers are a very low fidelity expression of the "truth" (in the idealistic sense).

What does this have to do with facts? I guess I feel that culturally we attribute the trust to things we consider "facts" at quite a superficial level without digging deeper.

[eloisius]

Just like bias by choosing which stories to cover, you can choose which facts to confirm and debunk. Snopes used to be where I went to debunk urban legends. It seems they’ve taken a more political bent now. Their fact verification is still true, but it does seem like they fact check with an agenda now.