[JustAnotherFan]

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/04/03/opini...e=Homepage

She is quoted well into the article, helping to explain how misleading stories on Covid spread--with a particular look at a blog by Aaron Ginn, who offered seemingly plausible skepticism about the severity of the epidemic.  Ginn, a product manager, said “You don’t need a special degree to understand what the data says and doesn’t say.”  The post gained millions of views as it was increasingly featured on Fox--which Starbird charts-- until it was debunked by epidemiologists as “unsubstantiated” and ignorant of “first-chapter-of-the-epidemiology-textbook stuff.”  The blog has since been taken down--prompting anger from the right. 

Starbird says:

“In a crisis event, one thing people do is engage in sense-making — seeking out facts and coming up with explanations,” Kate Starbird, an associate professor at the University of Washington, told me this week. “It’s a way of psychologically coping with the uncertainty and anxiety of the event, and of having agency in the response.”

Mr. Ginn’s post, which seems informed by his reflexive skepticism of the mainstream media, filled two needs for readers: It offered a scientific-seeming explanation that real scientists would not provide. And it provided a political foil, the media.

“The online dynamics allow others to seize upon that sense-making process and to use it to further their own political objectives,” Dr. Starbird said. In this case, it drew political lines around a public health issue.

An epidemiologist commenting on the Ginn post went further:

Without a deeper knowledge of epidemiology or evolutionary biology, it would have been easy to be seduced by Mr. Ginn’s piece. This, according to Dr. Bergstrom, is what makes armchair epidemiology so harmful. Posts like Mr. Ginn’s “deplete the critical resource you need to manage the pandemic, which is trust,” he told me. “When people are getting conflicting messages, it makes it very hard for state and local authorities to generate the political will to take strong actions downstream.”

Now, this board has some professional physicians and some people well trained in statistics.  But the rest of us are indeed "arm chair epidemiologists."  Something to ponder.

Excellent share, 81alum. I think it is fabulous how society has largely democratized the ability to put our ideas out there for the world, so that we are not overly reliant on sources of information that can easily be controlled by people with power and money (e.g., government, mainstream media, churches). Unfortunately that rise in the ability to easily share ideas with the world has not come with a rise in critical consciousness. I can't help but put much blame on the schooling system (that so many of us navigated so well) that but for a very few demands shallow understanding, discourages deep inquiry, and promotes performative displays in lieu of meaningful learning. This is why I believe it is so easy for people to latch onto whatever challenges their image of self the least, whether that be political, religious, or just a need to be a contrarian.

[JustAnotherFan]

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/04/03/opini...e=Homepage

She is quoted well into the article, helping to explain how misleading stories on Covid spread--with a particular look at a blog by Aaron Ginn, who offered seemingly plausible skepticism about the severity of the epidemic.  Ginn, a product manager, said “You don’t need a special degree to understand what the data says and doesn’t say.”  The post gained millions of views as it was increasingly featured on Fox--which Starbird charts-- until it was debunked by epidemiologists as “unsubstantiated” and ignorant of “first-chapter-of-the-epidemiology-textbook stuff.”  The blog has since been taken down--prompting anger from the right. 

Starbird says:

“In a crisis event, one thing people do is engage in sense-making — seeking out facts and coming up with explanations,” Kate Starbird, an associate professor at the University of Washington, told me this week. “It’s a way of psychologically coping with the uncertainty and anxiety of the event, and of having agency in the response.”

Mr. Ginn’s post, which seems informed by his reflexive skepticism of the mainstream media, filled two needs for readers: It offered a scientific-seeming explanation that real scientists would not provide. And it provided a political foil, the media.

“The online dynamics allow others to seize upon that sense-making process and to use it to further their own political objectives,” Dr. Starbird said. In this case, it drew political lines around a public health issue.

An epidemiologist commenting on the Ginn post went further:

Without a deeper knowledge of epidemiology or evolutionary biology, it would have been easy to be seduced by Mr. Ginn’s piece. This, according to Dr. Bergstrom, is what makes armchair epidemiology so harmful. Posts like Mr. Ginn’s “deplete the critical resource you need to manage the pandemic, which is trust,” he told me. “When people are getting conflicting messages, it makes it very hard for state and local authorities to generate the political will to take strong actions downstream.”

Now, this board has some professional physicians and some people well trained in statistics.  But the rest of us are indeed "arm chair epidemiologists."  Something to ponder.

Excellent share, 81alum. I think it is fabulous how society has largely democratized the ability to put our ideas out there for the world, so that we are not overly reliant on sources of information that can easily be controlled by people with power and money (e.g., government, mainstream media, churches). Unfortunately that rise in the ability to easily share ideas with the world has not come with a rise in critical consciousness. I can't help but put much blame on the schooling system (that so many of us navigated so well) that but for a very few demands shallow understanding, discourages deep inquiry, and promotes performative displays in lieu of meaningful learning. This is why I believe it is so easy for people to latch onto whatever challenges their image of self the least, whether that be political, religious, or just a need to be a contrarian.