Strict logic of the delirium: why the entire Network is filled with fakes about the pandemic

The famous Russian analyst Andrei Movchan could not stand the pressure of various kinds of delusional interpretations of the causes and consequences of the coronavirus pandemic and decided to answer immediately everything:

“Maybe this quarantine bothers me, or maybe I’m getting old, but Facebook tape began to annoy me wildly. It was as if I had failed in the intellectual Middle Ages with its aggressive-mythological consciousness, bulging psychological aberrations and the absence of many authors in the arsenal of basic techniques of critical thinking.

I don’t even speak about the ideas of chipping through a vaccine (and thoughtful comments like “smoke without fire”). But the discussion of the topic “The Ministry of Health invited people to test and revealed the presence of antibodies in 12% of those who arrived means 12% was ill in Moscow” makes me want to cry. Don’t you understand that basically those who think they have been ill have gone to test? And what kind of accuracy do the tests have - you know? So what is this all about?

The endless debate about “treatment methods” is no less fun on the principle that there was a person, he was ill, I gave him a pie, he recovered, probably the virus infects pie receptors, give an urgent pie to everyone. Of course the next day in the city’s shops there are no pies left ...

And how wonderful are the dialogues about the statistics of the number of cases on the basis of testing with Novosibirsk tests, which, unlike Pavel Globa, are mistaken in more than 50% of cases, and even not everyone is done! And how good are economic forecasts by the end of the year, for 21 years, for 22 years - to the nearest tenth of a percent of GDP, with complete misunderstanding of the length of quarantines, their contents, schedules for restoring industries, etc.! Let me remind you that the month of quarantine carries away 2.5% of annual GDP in Russia.

Of course, I understand that now the main issue of hygiene is how to wash hands and whether it is necessary to sterilize the ordered products and the courier who brings them. But brain hygiene seems no less important to me, especially since the virus will pass away, and many will have the brain until death. Therefore, I decided to state several rules of brain hygiene. Suddenly someone will come in handy.

So.

Most facts mean nothing. Nothing at all. You have to put up with it.

If you have a strong opinion, you can take any fact and with some effort to interpret it in full accordance with your opinion. You can practice at your leisure.

On the Internet there are always enough interpretations of any fact that coincide with your opinion, as well as enough who support your opinion, whatever it may be.

It is a natural human condition to think that he knows everything about what seems familiar to him. But a person does not know everything, in 90% of cases he heard a ringing, but does not know where he is. Therefore, you need to check yourself and others. If people checked themselves and others, no one would write about the “Swedish way without quarantine” (in Sweden, quarantine measures differ little from German, they are only recommended) or that there are fewer deaths in Sweden than in the rest of Europe; her comments would be “Hertz Vse” (in fact, filing for bankruptcy protects against creditors and allows the company to continue working), there would be no reports of record unemployment in the United States (in fact, in the United States unemployment benefits are paid on unpaid leave, and there are now about 80% of those who have applied for unemployment, as soon as quarantines are lifted, they will immediately go to work). "Is it so?", - the main hygiene issue when faced with applications on the network.

Public statistics are almost always severely distorted by methodological errors and the vagueness of the quantification mechanism. A great example is the mortality from the virus, which every country, every city and every hospital thinks differently. Using statistics productively can only be very limited and in rare cases. The main thing you can do with public statistics is to predict how politicians use it: they do not understand statistics and therefore their interpretation of data is fairly easy to predict.

In complex bureaucratic systems, where the optimization of the state of each element is through the optimization of the flow of information, rather than changing the real world, data never reflects reality - but always reflects the needs of the top of the hierarchy. The data on morbidity and mortality from the virus in Russia are obviously neither related to morbidity nor mortality. They are not underestimated or overstated - they simply reflect the expectations of the highest bureaucracy. If you are interested in what the highest bureaucracy is waiting for, look at this data. If the incidence has gone down, then they want to remove quarantines at the top. If you are interested in the incidence rate - sorry, you will not recognize it.

In science, a theory is considered proven if at that moment (a) there are no contradictory facts, and (b) it predicts facts not known at the time of the prediction (not only new discoveries, of course, but simply the results of experiments not yet done). As you can see, nowhere in this definition is there evidence of a theory through the selection of facts that do not contradict it. Nevertheless, 99.9% of theories in the media are proved in exactly this way - through “evidence”, that is, the reduction of several facts that fit into the theory. For any delusional theory itself, one can find enough corroborating facts for one good article. In particular, for the theory of a flat Earth - (1) we see that the Earth is flat; (2) nothing falls off the Earth; (3) railways consist of straight rails, and if the Earth were not round, then the rails would have to have curvature, etc.

The logic of the presentation does not indicate either the veracity or the correctness of the conclusions. The ideas of the flagiston, the ether, the geocentric hypothesis, the works of Lysenko, the protocols of the Sions of Zion, and the version about chipping were described logically. One of the signs of schizophrenia is the strict consistency of delirium. By the way, in the previous paragraph the arguments in favor of the Earth plane are logical, but absolutely wrong.

A prediction of the future in history is possible only if you know the nature of the process and it is ergodic. If you do not know the nature of the process, no data set can be extrapolated to the future. If you do not believe me, build a trend of temperature change from January to July and continue it for another 6 months. If you still don’t believe it, look at the articles a month ago with forecasts of the development of the epidemic. Spoiler: if you need extrapolation, then most likely you do not know the nature of the process.

To estimate the population from the sample, the sample must be truly random, and the determination of the implementation of the parameter in the sample accurate. According to visitors to the women's toilet, you can not determine the sex ratio in the city. A test with 80% accuracy cannot determine the number of patients (provided that this number is relatively small). Everyone needs to know by heart the literary version of Bayes' theorem: “if the falsity of the test is comparable to the share of positively tested sample elements, you can forget about the accuracy of determining this share once and for all”.

In general, today I play the role of Churchill. I do not offer you anything but tears about the complexity of the world and the sweat of mental effort - because without these tears and this sweat everything very quickly ends in great blood...”