Comment by tathougies | Hacker News Reader

Comment by tathougies | Hacker News Reader

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Actually you're peddling bad logic, comparing apples and oranges.

Road deaths involve humans undertaking an action (driving) for a particular benefit (transport) that involves risk (accidents).

You cannot compare driving to the 'covid-19 epidemic', because driving is an action, and the covid 19 epidemic is not. You can't compare the epidemic to driving. You must compare action to action.

A more apt comparison is that humans go out of their home (the action) to work and be productive (the benefit) while understanding they may catch disease when with other humans (the risk).

You are not forced to leave your house against your will -- that is slavery, and is illegal. Anyone can stay home. Leaving your home has the benefit of both enriching you and your neighbor, and collectively, the country. Thus it is a very apt comparison.

The fact of the matter is we don't close roads because we judge them too important to merit doing so, and we decide to accept the risk (deaths). We have decided now against leaving homes because some states judge it too dangerous to do so and is unwilling to accept the risk (deaths), but that is not constant, and will likely change quite fast. I would not be surprised if many of those who called for a lockdown, start calling for it to end quite soon. Most people are only principled up until it starts actually affecting them.

contrary to what thatcher says, there is such a thing as a society. if you catch the disease, you risk not only your death or permanent disability, but also that of your family and neighbors, and in case of asymptomatic transmission, you have no idea you are a risk.

roads are a bad analogy because you don't spread crashes if you crash yourself or get crashed into. car crashes do not follow an exponential curve and aren't contagious. you always know you've been in a crash (except if you die). somebody's always at fault if there's a crash. pretty much none of these are true in case of a plague. we close roads and quarantine people because diseases are contagious and kill people or leave them disabled more or less randomly.

You are giving an argument as to why coronavirus is more threatening to society at large than crashes. That is not relevant to the discussion at hand, which is about whether or not allowing road travel means being complicit in deaths.

Your argument is that, yes, road travel means we choose more deaths (thus implicitly validating the argument you're trying to critique), but that because the deaths don't spread exponentially, this is okay. That is a fine viewpoint, but it relies on the premise you're trying to disprove (that we are in fact okay choosing more death in order to facilitate unnecessary human interaction).

And frankly, Thatcher has nothing to do with this, so you should probably stop bringing her up.

I would understand if you were trying to do a cost benefit analysis between saving lives versus saving the economy but it sounds like you're trying to frame this to focus on semantic differences between closing roads vs closing the economy temporarily. Baq's point is that mortality rates from the covid 19 grow at exponential rate compared to car fatalities which are flat YOY. If you let covid 19 continue to spread, about everyone will be infected, of which 1% will die - young and old - because we will have overwhelmed our healthcare system. This is why the road analogy is flawed.

I was with you on comparing action to action even though I could quibble with your trifurcation of action/benefit/risk because all frameworks are instantly valid and fictitious ;)

Lets go with it. Now is going out of your home and being productive the only way to catch Covid-19? What about going for a walk, a meal, shopping, hanging out in the park, a theater, concert......I think you are setting up a strawman here.

> What about going for a walk, a meal, shopping, hanging out in the park, a theater, concert

All these things have been deemed non-essentials in large parts of the world, and the government is enforcing it. Clearly if preservation of life is goal #1, the government can certainly shut down most life to pursue that goal. In reality, the government -- and by extension the people -- make the decision to value life in quality of life terms -- in other words, money. Thus, while I don't think people who say we should open the economy up right now are correct, I don't fundamentally disagree with their premise that human life is valued monetarily by governments all the time when deciding what policies to enact. And that is okay.

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