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Manfred comments on [Link] The Coming Plague - Less Wrong
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Comments (46)
One might wonder it indeed. It would be nice if one had actually devoted research to the question rather than guessing poorly.
Honestly, without any attempt to understand the other side at all, this seems irrelevant to LW.
I don't agree. If Cochran is right than either the CDC is lying because it feels we can't handle the true (i.e. it's better to let <10 Americans die of Ebola than to inflict lots of economic harm on West Africa), or fuzzy refuse-to-accept-tradeoffs-thinking infects CDC analysis. (I'm not competent to judge if Cochran is right.)
Barring the omission of the CDC being wrong for mundane reasons, the possibilities you listed (CDC right, CDC wrong and lying, CDC wrong and biased) are in fact all the possibilities. Reading this article does not appear to have actually restricted what you think could be true about the world, at least not enough to be worth mentioning!
I mean, yes, the possibilities you mention are interesting and LW-relevant. But this article actively avoids any actual information about why the CDC is against travel restrictions - possibly a consequence of the author's extreme confidence that they're right.
The five paragraphs up to that point are engaging with the explicit reasons that Laurie Garrett gave in the linked article. It's almost as if you made no attempt to understand the article and just mined for quotes.
I think the analysis that an r<1 disease is more stoppable by quarantine than an r>1 disease is correct, and that Cochran is right and Garrett is wrong when it comes to comparing ebola to the flu. As a factoid about someone being wrong in the media, it is of tepid interest to LW. If it were only this, I would simply say that this probably belongs in the open thread.
My desire to see it on this site becomes negative only because of the author's habit of insulting all people and major organizations that disagree with him rather than expressing even one google-search's worth of curiosity in what the CDC's argument is.