Along with a slight appreciation of Laura Ingraham.
Consistent with the spirit of my most recent post, “Socratic Grilling as a Way to Learn,” I watch the Fox News Channel a few times a week and often flip to CNN to see what they’re saying. On both networks, people spin like crazy. Which does not mean that you can’t learn from each.
I’ll give an example from last night, where I learned something important from one of Tucker Carlson’s interviews and also noticed how severely his nationalism and hostility to China can get in the way of clear thinking.
First, the good. Tucker interviewed Alex Berenson, a former reporter for the New York Times. Of course the subject was COVID-19. Berenson led with the caveat that he’s not an epidemiologist but that his expertise is another area: comparing predictions with what actually happened.
Berenson stated that a model used by the government in, I think, Washington state predicted about a week ago that the number of hospitalizations of COVID-19 patients in New York by yesterday would be about 50,000 whereas the actual number was 13,000. That’s incredibly valuable information, if true. It should cause people who follow that model to take a careful look at their model. Are they doing so? I have no idea.
Second, the bad. Later in the show, Tucker showed a segment in which an English-speaking doctor, an American, I believe, talked about how well the Chinese government had handled the crisis in Wuhan, where it originated. The doctor then went to suggest that we in American should bring over a few thousand of those Chinese doctors to help us here. Then Tucker did his signature laugh and stated that the doctor had said we should have doctors from China run our hospitals. My wife and I looked at each other like “What?” The doctor hadn’t even suggested that Chinese doctors run our hospitals. What he seemed to be saying is that we should hire them as inputs because they know a lot.
What I’ve noticed that is characteristic of Tucker: when the issue involves China or immigration, he loses his critical faculties. When it involves both, as this did to some extent, it’s almost a guarantee that he will lose his critical faculties.
I’ve not generally been a fan of Laura Ingraham but we watched her for more than a few minutes because lately she has been quite good at reminding her audience of the catastrophic costs of shutting down a huge percent of the economy. She was quite good on that yesterday. She also had on Alan Dershowitz, an emeritus professor of law at Harvard. Dershowitz made some good points about loss of liberty. As per usual, though, when he started to say things she didn’t like, Ingraham cut off the conversation pretty quickly. The particular thing here was his statement that it was not justified for some state governments to close down abortion clinics.
Note: Here’s a piece I wrote back in 2005, when I was more of a fan of Fox News Channel. I gave them 2 cheers. I think it’s now about 1.5 or maybe less.
READER COMMENTS
Gordon
Apr 3 2020 at 5:35pm
If the model did predict 50,000 hospitalizations and there were only 15,000, one possibility is the model didn’t take into account the percentage of people who may not be covered by any sort of health insurance. In social media, I see people commenting on how they never want an ambulance to be called for them because the ambulance ride and a potential hospitalization would cause them financial ruin from which they’d never recover. And these kinds of posts have vast numbers of people concurring with the sentiment.
David Henderson
Apr 3 2020 at 6:02pm
You wrote:
I doubt that that’s it. The data I’ve seen say that fewer than 10% of Americans no longer have health insurance.
Chris
Apr 3 2020 at 9:18pm
For what it’s worth, having insurance, even a good plan, does not mean you won’t be stuck with the cost of that ambulance if someone deems your trip non-emergency. I have insurance and I would have to be incapacitated to have an ambulance called for me.
Matthias Goergens
Apr 4 2020 at 7:23am
We’d also need to look at the error bars of the model.
If the model prediction came with really big error bars, that included the actual observed number, then we don’t need to revisit the model. It would just be a very loose model with big error bars.
If the model doesn’t come with error bars, it’s not worth thinking about on a scientific level.
Jon Murphy
Apr 4 2020 at 9:52am
You make a valid point, but in this case if the error bars included 13,oo0 with a middle of 50,000, then those are insanely large error bars and the model would be tactically useless for making predictions.
Josh
Apr 3 2020 at 7:48pm
https://covid19.healthdata.org/projections
This is from the U if Washington and might be what they were talking about. It does predict 50,000 hospitalizations for this week in NY.
But they also say that NY state only has 13,000 hospital beds. So they’re projecting that at this point NY has 60,000 people who are so sick that they need hospitalization but most can’t get it because there are literally no beds available.
I have no idea if that’s accurate. But if indeed NY only has 13,000 beds, that gives the 13,000 number a very different context from what Berenson gave it.
marc savard
Apr 4 2020 at 12:25pm
Yes context is everything, one of the biggest casualties in this whole sorry episode. Example: when a NYC ER doc was being interviewed complaining about all of the virus patients she was having to treat, she exclaimed ” we’ve treated 900 Covid cases so far!” That sounds enormous to many, but then she went on to add that they treat 75,000 people every year. Well, now maybe not so much of an overwhelmed facility if they’re used to treating 200 per day and she had treated 900 over about a months time of Covid, an extra 30 per day, some of which could have come in anyway for flu.
Thomas Sewell
Apr 4 2020 at 8:18pm
From what I could find, after cutting the numbers for a few years, NY State had 53,000 hospital beds at the start of the year. Was that 13K number for NYC alone, or something?
An indicator is that the hospital ship in the NYC harbor apparently only has 20 patients, so they don’t seem super-desperate for space at this point, just focused on expanding capacity.
Jon Murphy
Apr 5 2020 at 8:45am
My understanding is the low figures on the hospital ships are due to bureaucratic squabbling and inflexible rules rather than lack of demand
TMC
Apr 6 2020 at 3:29pm
It’s lack of demand. From covidtracking . com NY has 16,479 current hospitalizations from coronavirus. 28,092 cumulative.
TMC
Apr 6 2020 at 3:50pm
I was curious about total beds, but found “Cuomo said the state is trying to increase its hospital beds by 50,000 to 75,000 by ending elective surgeries, reconfiguring space and adding medical staff.” So they should have plenty of beds available.
Mark Bahner
Apr 3 2020 at 9:18pm
Is it “critical faculties” or “respect for the truth”?
I can see the possibility of misunderstanding the suggestion to bring over doctors into “running our hospitals”. But it seems more likely to me that Tucker Carlson simply didn’t care about accurately characterizing his guest’s statement.
TMC
Apr 6 2020 at 3:34pm
He likely didn’t take the claim “how well the Chinese government had handled the crisis in Wuhan” very seriously. There’s a lot of evidence it has not handled it well at all. On the group reports from Wuhan citizens have been saying it is much worse than being reported.
Tom Means
Apr 4 2020 at 5:34pm
I’m getting tired of hearing the phrase, “listen to the experts” from people who are medical doctors and not experts in other fields. They may understand a virus better than me but they are not trained to understand how to decide what is an acceptable level of risk. Like politicians they prefer to choose the option that poses a minimal amount of risk. While somewhat exaggerated, they would prefer everyone lock themselves in a bathroom to avoid the virus. If the disease spreads like wildfire, they will take credit. If they are wrong , they will say better safe than sorry. The same goes for forecasts. Safer to over predict the number of infections and deaths and if you are correct, you will take credit. If you are wrong, again it’s better safe than sorry excuse. Unfortunately, the approach of over predicting bad outcomes fails to deal with the reality of weighing the benefits and costs of risk exposure. Individuals have better information in terms of understanding the exposure to risk. If there are any professional experts trained on risk exposure, it’s in the area of economics and management science , though I am “slightly” (LOL) biased. And there are no experts, in any field I am aware of, when it comes to the area of forecasting the future.
Dave Robinson
Apr 5 2020 at 4:36pm
Tom — Great point about “listening to the experts”. They KNOW for a fact that they are undercounting cases and overestimating mortality rates. Yet because of the lack of antibody tests (enabling sampling of the population for a true “infection rate”), they won’t emphasize this, because they can’t say by how much they are off.
If interested, send me your email and I’ll send you the (hopefully) scientific articles I’ve seen on this.
Michael Sandifer
Apr 5 2020 at 8:17am
While none of the networks offer good news coverage, how does Fox earn any credit at all, unless you’re talking about Chris Wallace. It’s literally a propaganda network.
David Henderson
Apr 5 2020 at 9:51am
You write:
I answered your question in short form in my post and in long form in the article I linked to.
You write:
I think that’s too strong, especially with the word “literally.” But there is a huge amount of propaganda. I laid out some of it in my post that you’re commenting on and more of it in the long article that I linked to.
I do think, though, that CNN and MSNBC are just as propagandistic.
I agree with you that Chris Wallace is about the best on Fox, but even he has times when he slips and pushes the popular party line, as he did in the 2007 Republican debate in going after Ron Paul on foreign policy.
I’m wondering something, though. To make your statement, you must have some basis. How many hours of Fox News Channel, other than Chris Wallace, do you watch in an average week?
John m moore
Apr 5 2020 at 9:06am
That only 10% are without health insurance may be true, but in real life, Obamacare does not provide affordable health care because of its huge deductible. The normal Silver plan has a $14,000 per year per family, cash deductible, about $6,000 a year in premiums and co-pays. Here in Oregon, the state has modified Medicade to provide healthcare for all. Any worker earning less than $2400 a month pays nothing. From that level, those earning more pay reasonable premiums. The plan includes dental.
J Mann
Apr 6 2020 at 12:06pm
If we’re listing the good and bad of Tucker Carlson, let’s give him credit for being an early journalist to hype the Covid risk, including both warning his viewers and he actually crashing a Mar-A-Largo party to try to convince the President to take things more seriously:
https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2020/03/tucker-carlson-on-how-he-brought-coronavirus-message-to-mar-a-lago
David Henderson
Apr 7 2020 at 12:06pm
Good point.
Comments are closed.