wnoise comments on Vote Qualifications, Not Issues - Less Wrong

10 Post author: jimrandomh 26 September 2010 08:26PM

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Comment author: mattnewport 27 September 2010 05:50:50PM 4 points [-]

Now, having been embarrassed by falling for too many cries of wolf (or at least, for worrying prematurely), they are wary of being burned again.

This doesn't appear to be the case at all. There are a variety of claimed existential risks which the intellectual elite are in general quite worried about. They just don't overlap much with the kind of risks people here talk about. Global warming is an obvious example (and some people here probably think they're right on that one) but the overhyped fears of SARS and H1N1 killing millions of people look like recent examples of lessons about crying wolf not being learned.

Comment author: wnoise 27 September 2010 09:00:41PM 1 point [-]

SARS and H1N1 both looked like media-manufactured scares, rather than actual concern from the intellectual elite.

Comment author: mattnewport 27 September 2010 09:08:45PM *  2 points [-]

It wasn't just the media:

Take the response to the avian flu outbreak in 2005. Dr David Nabarro, the UN systems coordinator for human and avian influenza, declared: ‘I’m not, at the moment, at liberty to give you a prediction on [potential mortality] numbers.’ He then gave a prediction on potential mortality numbers: ‘Let’s say, the range of deaths could be anything from five million to 150million.’ Nabarro should have kept his estimating prowess enslaved: the number of cases of avian flu stands at a mere 498, of which just 294 have proved fatal.

...

On 11 June 2009, just over a month after the initial outbreak in Mexico, the World Health Organisation finally announced that swine flu was now worthy of its highest alert status of level six, a global pandemic. Despite claims that there was no need to panic, that’s exactly what national health authorities did. In the UK, while the Department of Health was closing schools, politicians were falling over themselves to imagine the worst possible outcomes: second more deadly waves of flu, virus mutation – nothing was too far-fetched for it not to become a public announcement. This was going to be like the great Spanish Flu pandemic of 1918-20. But worse.

However, just as day follows nightmares, the dawning reality proved to be rather more mundane. By March 2010, nearly a full year after the H1N1 virus first began frightening the British government, the death toll stood not in the hundreds of thousands, but at 457. To put that into perspective, the average mortality rate for your common-or-garden flu is 600 deaths per year in a non-epidemic year and between 12,000 and 13,800 deaths per year in an epidemic year. In other words, far from heralding the imagined super virus, swine flu was more mild than the strains of flu we’ve lived with, and survived, for centuries. Reflecting on the hysteria which characterised the WHO’s response to Mexico, German politician Dr Wolfgang Wodarg told the WHO last week: ‘What we experienced in Mexico City was very mild flu which did not kill more than usual – which killed even less than usual.’

Comment author: MatthewW 27 September 2010 10:12:55PM *  2 points [-]

So Nabarro explicitly says that he's talking about a possibility and not making a prediction, and ABC News reports it as a prediction. This seems consistent with the media-manufactured scare model.

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