Translated material
Swan is white. 10 cynical, optimistic April theses
The world sits home and is watching a real man -made crisis. It was created by governments that are guided by political rather than economic considerations. The media and scientists sow panic, but the markets behave as if they know something. Here are 10 theses that will help add a spoonful of rational optimism to the diet.
1. People (both inhabitants and the media) do not understand statistical data well. The situation around the Covid-19 is not as bad as it seems .
Alas, people do not know how to count too well. It becomes especially difficult for them when it comes to very small or very large values. The population of the Earth somehow copes with arithmetic , but statistics and probability theory are difficult-they are not always intuitive. Nobel laureate Daniel Kaneman found out that people overestimate small probabilities and underestimate large ones. What can we say about the situation when fear has great eyes, that is, there are great values to any small probabilities. This is exactly what happens when an undesirable outcome is drawn in extremely gloomy tones: for example, in the interior that includes a hospital corridor with a lung fan (this is lucky).
Let's admit: with the perception of pandemia and its illumination in the media, things are traditionally bad. The media, as expected, scare, the population is scared, the voice of sober experts in such cacophony is not easy to distinguish. And experts say : the real mortality from the Covid-19 is much lower than it is reported, because you need to take into account the eccla perishable or in extremely mild form. If you use the correct estimates, the percentage of deaths falls significantly. In the reports of the victims of the virus, storytellers make a mistake of the basic percentage over and over again, for example, ignore the age structure or do not take into account that at least 2/3 of the victims would have died without any virus.
2. Stopping the economy is a politically motivated choice of governments of different countries, and not inevitability.
The risk of COVID-19 is not in the disease itself, but in the fact that the necessary treatment methods for certain categories of patients require a high load on the healthcare system. If the load is peak, the system does not cope, as it is arranged "for normal time." Models that allow you to calculate the need for medical care and mortality are unstable and unreliable . But politicians cannot wait until scientists agree on the right methodology. Hence the calls “make a curve [of the numbers] more flat ” and the used methods of social distance. In fact, they are saved with this approach, first of all, not people from illness, but a healthcare system from overload.
The audience, frightened by high amounts of mortality and terrible personnel from Italy, demanded that politicians take measures. And the politicians accepted them-announcing the Locdowns-penis and other restrictions. 56% of the British believes that it was done too late. Now the same audience sitting home begins to ask the authorities (for example, in the same UK): and, in fact, why such dragon measures, on the basis of what data decisions have been made? Politicians will have to answer, and since the answers are unlikely to arrange the population, the economy will have to “turn on” back.
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