Title quote is from a controversial article being passed around by the techbro/”hysteria” crowd. Don’t read it; its errors have been explained elsewhere. I just wanted to draw your attention to the paragraph meant to convince you to trust the author’s analysis:
The following article is a systematic overview of COVID-19 driven by data from medical professionals and academic articles that will help you understand what is going on (sources include CDC, WHO, NIH, NHS, University of Oxford, John Hopkins, Stanford, Harvard, NEJM, JAMA, and several others). I’m quite experienced at understanding virality, how things grow, and data. In my vocation, I’m most known for popularizing the “growth hacking movement” in Silicon Valley that specializes in driving rapid and viral adoption of technology products. Data is data. Our focus here isn’t treatments but numbers. You don’t need a special degree to understand what the data says and doesn’t say. Numbers are universal.
Also, once Medium took it down, the author responded with: > I guess citations from CDC, John Hopkins, WHO, is too much for the thought police.
They targeted numbers. Numbers.
LinkedIn’s Top Things Not to Say in a Job Interview.
Let’s see those optimistic concluding remarks!
:D
tfw when you write an article against hysteria but conclude with it, huh?
I went into data science in the tech world and, honestly, most data scientists here aren’t. The culture around it is totally indifferent to subject matter expertise or theoretical validity. Its just correlation = causation fallacies across the board.
I came from a social science background and spent a lot of time considering the validity and generalizability of my data and constraints around what is and isn’t a valid conclusion to draw. They don’t. They’re like kids with matches. It’s all the worst elements of p-hacking and complete tunnel vision around consequences.
Even if this were true, I’m guessing it relies on the assumption that we actually know how many people are infected. New York cases have spiked in the last few days but the state is also testing people at a rate of 2-3x the rest of the US and has had drive-through testing centers opened since last week.
If you take statistics the first thing the professor will say is, “It’s impossible to make a dataset say different things based on how you choose to analyze it. The numbers are just the numbers. Why the fuck does anyone bother to take this class again?”
these guys.. they’re smart enough to read things (just, they’re like a kid with a new toy with a succession of new ideas
Dominic Cummings is another of this particular type of social-sciencey techbro-fanboys who have read Freakonomics etc. They use data but mainly seem to be motivated by thanatos
Are ye, aye?
” its errors have been explained elsewhere”. Where is that now? I was feeling good when I read this…