[ExI] Probability, covid, online education

[Stathis Papaioannou]

On Tue, 21 Dec 2021 at 03:47, Dave S via extropy-chat <
extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org> wrote:

> I just ran across this blog post that touches on a few things we've talked
> about recently:
>
> https://www.jwz.org/blog/2021/12/base-rate-fallacy/
>
> [image: covid-prob.jpg]
>
>
>
>
>
>
> *When a headline says "half of hospitalizations are vaccinated" it is
> innumerate fearmongering that will make people who are bad at math
> misinterpret that as "vaccines are only 50% effective", or worse lies.An
> increasing ratio of hospitalized vaccinated is an inevitable result of
> increasing vaccination rates. It is a marker of success, not failure.E.g.:
> "About two-thirds of people who die on UK roads are wearing a seatbelt, but
> this is a consequence of usage rates of nearly 99%."Explaining probability,
> statistics and combinatorics to the public is really, really hard. This
> stuff is extremely nonintuitive even without dealing with the grifters.
> Here's a really good, easy to understand video
> <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HZGCoVF3YvM> on Bayes theorem.*
>

The figures are even more skewed in favour of the vaccinated when you
consider the vaccination rate of the sun population that mostly ends up in
hospital, older people and people with chronic illnesses, and when you
consider those in ICU or intubated. With the vaccine, you are less likely
to get COVID, if you get COVID you are less likely to become very unwell
and end up in hospital, if you end up in hospital you are less likely to go
to ICU, if you go to ICU you are less likely to die.

> --
Stathis Papaioannou
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://lists.extropy.org/pipermail/extropy-chat/attachments/20211221/4d4da410/attachment-0001.htm>
-------------- next part --------------
A non-text attachment was scrubbed...
Name: covid-prob.jpg
Type: image/jpeg
Size: 95327 bytes
Desc: not available
URL: <http://lists.extropy.org/pipermail/extropy-chat/attachments/20211221/4d4da410/attachment-0001.jpg>