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Comment by throwaway0a5e | Hacker News Reader

The kill rate for the disease the example animal (lobster) the article spends most of its time discussing is ~50%. It isn't surprising that avoiding it is a highly consistent and avoidable behavior since the competitive advantage is so large.

Humans kick people out far before the stakes are that high. I'm reminded of how people with Leprosy were treated before there were drugs to treat it.

Generally speaking "hanging around with the least fit members of your species" is a losing strategy if you want to not starve long enough to reproduce so it should come as no surprise that evolution selects for the trait of avoiding the least fit members of one's species to varying degrees (depending on the specifics of the species and the type of "least fitness" in question).

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Vietnam has very few cases of Covid-19, especially given its population and proximity to China.

One of the reasons why was because they had some of the strongest containment measures in the entire world. One of the strategies they did early on was to have a very strict quarantines of villages/regions known to have infections. They would quarantine second and third degree connections to people who were infected. It may seem extreme, but given the fact that the number of total infections is fewer than 500, it's hard to argue that it wasn't effective.

I'm sure strong containment would help, but that degree strikes me as an infringement upon liberties. It is extreme, and the fact that it was effective doesn't change the legality/morality of that sort of infringement on personal sovereignty.

>an infringement upon liberties

Which is more of an infringement on liberty, a temporary quarantine or permanent death?

The American philosophy on this is "temporary quarantine," in general. Feels wrong, but when you look at American behavior through that lens, a lot of things make sense (gun policy immediately comes to mind).

America has a deeply-ingrained "rugged individualism" cultural myth that includes the notion that sometimes the pioneer in the wildneress starves to death or gets set upon by wild beasts, and that's "just a thing that happens," "just God's will," "the price of freedom," etc.

It is a slippery slope. Many diseases kill. Do we start forcing people to quarantine for those? At what threshold? Do we start controlling other aspects of people’s lifes to reduce morbidity? Unhealthy behaviors? I’m reminded of the sci-fi plot of the AI tasked with not harming humanity deciding to keep each person as safe as possible by effectively putting everyone under house arrest.

This is a false dichotomy. At-risk people can stay at home as long as they need to until it's safe. Those who aren't at risk can go about their business as normal. I'd say taking away the liberties of everyone is worse than a single-digit percentage death rate.

“Give me liberty or give me death” were founding words of our country. If you don’t believe our commitment to liberty and freedom was important, then what else made America the #1 most successful country for the last century?

Slavery, abundant natural resources, a commitment to not listening to 'sound economic policy' of its times (which would have had the colonies be strictly agrarian, shipping raw cotton to the English industry - look at Egypt and India for how well that worked out), genocide of the indigenous population, many years of exerting soft and hard power to control the continent, etc.

'Liberty or death' is a nice slogan, but it is in no way a core part of what made the US the most powerful empire in history.

Where was our commitment to liberty and freedom for the Black people we made slaves? The Irish we discriminated against? The Japanese we locked up in concentration camps? The natives we killed and stole their land from?

'Liberty' has always applied to a very small culturally white subset of the population. 'Death' came to the rest.

I'm curious by what metric you perceive we've been #1. The fact that we have the largest prison population and per-capita incarceration rate comes to my mind most readily.

>If you don’t believe our commitment to liberty and freedom was important, then what else made America the #1 most successful country for the last century?

The US got through World War 2 relatively unscathed compared to the rest of the world with its manufacturing infrastructure and vast natural resources intact, profited from loans made to aid Europe's recovery, entrenched its military hegemony leveraged by being the sole nuclear power, and made the US dollar the world's reserve currency.

It is an infringement upon liberties. It's more a question of "when are such infringements, as bad as they are, warranted?" - presumably there's enough people in this case who think it's worthwhile that people cooperated.

It's this kind of thinking that has made US to be at the level they are now. The freedom of an individual has been engrained in to the heads of people so well that a huge portion does not even consider social distancing / wearing masks, because it infringes upon their liberties. Of course, it is not as extreme as locking down villages/buildings but the point stands.

Sometimes people need to understand (I know this is not a popular opinion) that for the general good they need to give up their liberties for a while.

I only wish they could see how they look from the outside. The US and the UK are laughing (crying?) stock for those of us in places where we, for the most part, take this seriously, and have it under control.

The freedom of the individual is, in most cases, more important than the greater good. If you disagree, you'll have to make a better case than just saying that it's not true. There's a very easy solution that doesn't infringe upon liberties: everyone makes his own choice according to the level of risk with which he's comfortable. A healthy twenty-something can probably go about his business and be fine; an at-risk person should stay home as long as necessary until it's safe.

Is a law against drunk driving an inappropriate restriction of my liberty?

Following your logic, we should say that people must have sufficiently armored vehicles to go out, so that it's safe in case they're hit by a drunk.

> There's a very easy solution that doesn't infringe upon liberties: everyone makes his own choice according to the level of risk with which he's comfortable.

This plainly doesn't work. Social problems can't be fixed by individualist solutions. The vast number of people who are in the huge risk class (probably a quarter of Americans) can't be forced to stay in house arrest to avoid death, when much easier solutions could prevent the disease from even existing, as seen in Vietnam.

A few weeks of highly localized, tight quanatine are nothing compared to what is going to happen and be required to prevent millions from dying in the US alone. Unfortunately that ship has long sailed away..

Liberty ends when it substantially endangers non consenting people.

Even hard core libertarians accept government force to contain epidemics.

Government force in what way? There's a big difference between telling typhoid mary that she can't work as a cook any more and telling everyone he must risk his job and livelihood for a small number of at-risk people.

The concrete policies can and will be argued forever.

I'm saying the principle is clear.

How small is the number of at-risk people?

A quick Googling suggests about 60 million people over 65 in the US. Then we should add some millions for problems like diabetes. So, 1 in 5? 1 in 4?

Further, some young people seem to have permanent lung damage from the disease.

Why do you think you can speak for “hard-core” libertarians? I am a thoroughly moderate one and don’t believe this at all

There are of course also libertarians who oppose it.

As David Friedman put it:

> "There may be two libertarians somewhere who agree with each other about everything, but I am not one of them."

AFAIK, the classic "minarchist" position is that the reason to even have a government is to provide certain important Public Goods that can't be provided otherwise.

Those are (1) National defense, (2) A legal system with courts, jail, police etc, (3) Fighting epidemics. (3) is far less discussed (until 2020), but it's agreed on when mentioned.

Though in reality many such libertarians consider #3 as a sub-element of #1. For good or for bad, this has led to the debate on why if public health is to be funded, isn't it a part of the military.

In Germany there are States that are basically virus free. Still the Federal Government after asked by the States to OK lifting of the Mask duty, insist openly that lifting the duty to wear a Mask would let people loose the fear for the virus!

Is it still OK to restrict freedom to just keep people in fear?

Stronger containment measures does not always equal better. All it does is buy time at the cost of time (and human rights). The curve gets flatter, yet the volume remains the same, unless they're biding it out for a vaccine. And who knows if/when that will come.

If the entire world had contained the disease this well, then there would be no more COVID-19.

I keep telling people that and feel like a lone voice in the wilderness.

Not realistic.

I mean, it kind of is realistic. Many places in the world have drastically reduced cases. If every place managed to accomplish this, then through contact tracing and testing, it becomes simple to stop it in its tracks.

Unfortunately some people want to ruin things for everyone.

The worst are those who prioritize politics above fighting the disease or those who consider mitigation solutions (such as masks) as a political statement.

Yes, it is very realistic to lock poor people in the slums in their metal barracks to let them be cooked to death, before they starve to death, because they lost every income being locked in and their government is not competent or rich enough, to provide with basic supply. But yes, Covid19 could be erridicated this way.

Seriously,

"More than 820 million people are hungry globally"

"https://www.who.int/news-room/detail/15-07-2019-world-hunger...

820 million people on this earth were hungry in 2019.

When you are hungry, really hungry, which is not something most people in the western world know about, and also have only limited dirty water supply, then you have other problems, than a new disease, all the rich, old people are scared about.

So no, it is not at all realistic, to have the world in its current state, in effective lock-down, without causing more harm, than good. Unless you don't care about the poor in the first place.

SARS-1 is an example.

I wonder if containment is the only solution.

The vaccines on trial and in research, may not work.

Containment does work. Isolate the sick. Lock down for 4 weeks. Face masks everywhere. Keep socially distant. Avoid indoor settings.

Get groceries delivered, or have an employee inside do the shopping and packaging, and you pick up the order outside.

These are hard choices, but it can effectively kill this virus in 4 weeks. It’s not rocket science anymore.

They also did a very strict quarantine of a city block right in the capital. My friend's business was shut down as it was located in that area. It had guards to keep the 100 residents in place and food was distributed. It was a very happy time when they went long enough with everyone testing negative enough times.

Southeast Asia, where bats/pangolins are originally from, also might have been exposed to milder coronaviruses in the past (common cold, etc).

> Southeast Asia, where bats/pangolins are originally from,

Bats been all over the world much longer than humans have [1]. Pangolins are widespread across Asia and Africa, and have been for 10s of millions of years [2]

> also might have been exposed to milder coronaviruses in the past (common cold, etc).

The whole planet has been exposed to milder coronaviruses in the past and present - that's the "common" part. They are so common that they are a confounding factor in the current COVID19 antibody tests, thus reducing the confidence of a positive test result in areas that don't have a known outbreak.

1. https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10914-005-6945-2#....

2. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pangolin

> "hanging around with the least fit members of your species" is a losing strategy

I could imagine in some circumstances it isn't. The slowest in your group will likely be first targeted / caught by a predator.

I think “hanging around” is a little too loose of a term to have a truly meaningful discussion, but I generally disagree with your assertion.

If you are in a herd and can be near another other herd member, it would not be beneficial to be near the one that predators are likely to target. If you are near that member, any mistake you make while running away might be your last. Less so the further away from that member (and the predators) you place yourself.

Predators do not always catch their prey. A fit herd can escape without any of its members being eaten. A herd benefits from having its weakest members culled, not by having weak members. No herd animal I can think of would slow down a trek for its weakest members.

Young animals are often the weakest members, and plenty of adults will stay close to protect them from predators (I am thinking of Wolves where an adult bison is too large to take on, but a child is what they target). That seems like part of a winning strategy to me. There are tons of strategies employed in nature, I don't think its correct to say one is winning and one is not.

The young generally aren’t considered unfit. In the cases where they actually unfit (say a lame leg) they certainly aren’t kept around as a sacrificial offering to predators as in your example.

That might work with bears, but hardly with viri ;-}

Would you say public shaming is en evolutionary adaption? I don't have a problem with your argument. I am curious about your thoughts though.

I'd say that the universe (and evolutionary processes) don't care much about ethics and morals and feelings.

They "care" (in as much as they care for anything) about results...

Yes. The caring bit is up to us sentients.

Being cast out from society appears with many other animal spaces according to wildlife documentaries that I have seen. Public shaming is more difficult to match to animal behaviour.

There are people with vitiligo that are stoned to death. Aside from cosmetic effects it is completely harmless. And that is even though we have a social aspect compared to lobsters.

Don’t forget about albinos. They’re hunted because some believe they’re witches. Others will dismember them because they believe their bones have magical powers.

Here’s a story about albinos in Africa but harmful superstitions and brutal people are rampant throughout the world, western or otherwise.

https://www.cnn.com/2016/06/07/africa/africa-albino-hunted-b...

> There are people with vitiligo that are stoned to death.

Citation? I can't find any sources, even non-credible ones, on Google. In fact, your comment is the top result for me when I search 'vitiligo "stoned to death"'.

No citation, doctors I worked with told me. It's symptoms can be mistaken for leprosy and there is an immense stigma attached that escalated to violence. I doubt they were exaggerating.

A https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bachelor_herd forms when young mammals start to get edgelordy, and are driven from their natal herds?

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