General > General Technical Chat
Covid 19 virus
Siwastaja:
--- Quote from: Cerebus on March 22, 2020, 04:12:59 pm ---As "happiness" is entirely subjective, how can there be an "actual reality"? You mean, "I am miserable, therefore it (and everybody else) is wrong".
--- End quote ---
That's a good question, indeed; the wording "actual reality" was stupidly simplified. Of course, you could kind-of objectively measure it using suicide statistics (or problems caused by severe alcoholism) for example - we do worse than average European society, but are not among the absolute worst -, but it won't be exact, because that reflects one extreme form of unhappiness, and only shows the shape of the distribution, but you can't accurately derive the mean value of "happiness" by assuming a perfect gaussian distribution, because it won't distribute that way.
On the other hand, let me ask you this: if you asked North Korean citizens to participate in such a study, you would most likely get the result that they are the happiest country in the world (I think it's obvious why they are not part of the study.) If I then play devil's advocate and say they are not "really" happy, would you agree with me? You might, I guess; for example, starving to death due to lack of food doesn't sound like a happy life; although indeed, happiness is subjective and we can't just say "you are not really happy" to someone.
It's quite interesting, btw, how you changed my literal description "quite average" to "miserable" in your grumpy old men analogy.
No need to reply to these philosophical remarks, it doesn't matter much here, let's get back to the corona.
engrguy42:
Years ago I had a buddy who was a PSYCH professor at a university. And he'd always tell me his little "gems of truth" about human behavior that were very well known in the world of psychology, but nobody really talked about because people might get offended.
But the one that he'd often repeat whenever we discussed big issues like this is this:
"People believe what they want to believe. Facts are totally irrelevant".
And I kept pressing him with "yeah, but what about engineers and scientists and stuff??"
His response "Read my lips: People believe what they want to believe. Facts are totally irrelevant".
And after doing a tad of research I learned there's an absolute ton of studies with the same conclusion. And after following internet and media discussions for many years I've learned he was 100% right.
It's a fascinating subject, and I encourage folks to do some investigation. Really interesting phenomenon.
Stray Electron:
--- Quote from: not1xor1 on March 22, 2020, 07:12:33 am ---it is hard to realize how quickly this gets out of control
in 3-4 days US is likely to become the first country in the world for no. of cases
I think on next Sunday it will get 200-300 thousands cases and around 3-4 thousands deaths
in 2 weeks deaths might probably exceed 10'000 and might even get close to 20'000
--- End quote ---
I wish that I could say that you're wrong. I thought that the large number of new cases being reported might be due to previously untested individuals that they were just getting around to testing but even after more than a week of large scale testing, the new case number is staying high so most of them probably really are newly infected individuals. Thanks to the irresponsible students and others that continue to party like it's 1999 this is is going to sweep through the US like a wildfire.
Nominal Animal:
Note that a majority of the cases, 378 as of Sunday, 22 March are in Helsinki-Uusimaa region, with just 1.2 M people.
I'd like to emphasize that the difference between mzzj and Siwastaja or myself is not political, but something different, more like temperament or attitude. I hope this will come out as neutral, and illustrates the difficulty in managing the situation; I have no intention of claiming one is better than the other, only that one might be more appropriate for this particular situation, and much less so for some other situations. I've also seen people I know well shifting from one to the other (both ways!) as their own situation has changed. Keep this in mind, okay?
In this axis, there are two basic groups of Finns. One group believes that we can do whatever we want, including rejecting old agreements (breaking them, essentially), set whatever new laws the country wants, and that it is a matter of will. The other group believes that their choices are based on existing law (and international agreements), and that there is really only one sane course, the one they propose.
Funny side note: Remember the movie Iron Sky? Which country didn't arm their spaceship? It is extremely funny to Finns, because it is true!
There is almost zero discussion between the two. It is made even harder, as the second group misunderstands the first group, because they observe the suggestions from the point of what they believe current law and international agreements allow.
(In 2015, when there was a flood of asylum seekers from Sweden to Finland, one side wanted to "close the borders", i.e. re-enact border checks, and reject those who came from another safe EU country to Finland seeking asylum. A lot of people objected, because they sincirely believed that doing that would necessarily also close the border for all other traffic as well. Correct or not, that illustrates the difficulty in the two sides' attitudes, and the difficulty in getting the true ideas across.)
Because of this divide/difference, there is actually very little discussion between the two groups on how things could be done. Internally, there is usually a lively discussion (on one side, about what kind of changes would be needed; on the other, the leeway given by existing law and agreements, and how other countries have applied or misapplied those), but it is not reflected by the media. Indeed, the mainstream media only reflects the latter, for whatever reason. (That does not mean that group is happy about the media, though.)
The annoying part, the one that really bothers and angers me, is that because of that lack of honest discussion, the latter group will invariably resort to "nobody could foresee this" and "hindsight is 20/20" type arguments afterwards. Obviously, neither group is willing to actually take responsibility, because we are all humans, but rejecting direct, honest discussion of the practically available approaches and possible solutions, does not mean that you can label the other suggestions as "hindsight" afterwards.
I first observed this as a child, when the Finnish officials delayed revealing the Chernobyl disaster. Like now, they sincirely believed that people would be better off not knowing. (This is prevalent in Finnish media, who are much more concerned about what Finns should not hear about, than they are about what they should hear.) As an adult, I was among the ones who were called "Linux zealots" and "conspiracy theorist" when we correctly predicted the downfall of Nokia into Microsoft ownership when Stephen Elop became Nokia's CEO. (I should point out that a lot of people still consider me a conspiracy theorist for Nokia, even though I said even then that I don't think there is any conspiracy, that the end result would simply be a logical result of the business strategy, and nothing sinister. :-//)
The reason I don't think this is political (in the commonly used sense), is that this grouping is independent of political views. There is not much correlation with this way of grouping to Left-Right or Socialist-Capitalist axes; you find members of both groups in all political parties here. As long as no action is taken, or major changes made, this major difference does not cause deep rifts within the political parties. (In a very real sense, you could say that the split in the True Finns party a few years ago was exactly due to this rift, though -- so perhaps there is one party that does include mostly the first group and very few of the second group, because they already split along these lines.)
I fear that this rift between the two groups is what is driving the no-action/minimal-action policy; that action is avoided because it would lead to internal political problems, and not because the political groups are internally in agreement as to what course of action is best for the whole country.
iMo:
--- Quote from: engrguy42 on March 22, 2020, 04:30:51 pm ---Years ago I had a buddy who was a PSYCH professor at a university. And he'd always tell me his little "gems of truth" about human behavior that were very well known in the world of psychology, but nobody really talked about because people might get offended.
But the one that he'd often repeat whenever we discussed big issues like this is this:
"People believe what they want to believe. Facts are totally irrelevant". ..
--- End quote ---
That translated into the Politics means - today's success in Politics is hugely based on Populistic Marketing.
None Politician wants to be the "bearer of bad news" ("Facts are totally irrelevant").
"Shooting the Messenger" is an everyday reality in Politics and it works perfectly everywhere ("People believe what they want to believe").
--- Quote from: Siwastaja on March 22, 2020, 03:50:50 pm ---For the Finnish people, it has already become a tradition to be on the top of the World Happiness Record, it's considered important as a part of our public image. This is part of the "what does the elephant think of me?" mindset. Of course, such studies measure more the mindset of the people answerring to the questions, than actual reality, which is quite average. For some reason, North Korea is missing from the study; I'm sure they would get even better score out of it..
--- End quote ---
I doubt it works such an easy way - ie. they ask a Government how the happiness is like in their country, or, they ask a few people assigned by the leading Party - that would mean no second place would ever exist.. :)
Look at the actual Report - a pretty sophisticated stuff..
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