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Comment by zaroth | Hacker News Reader

This is No true Scotsman applied to “lockdowns”. Semantics aside, there is no question that certain personality types might even favor such an environment, while it’s also inarguably true that other personality types find it highly detrimental.

I doubt the answer can be found in anecdotes, nor will the true impact be fully felt or known for some time.

However claiming that wellbeing levels improved seems to me to be extremely misleading. The unemployment levels alone are overwhelming evidence that isn’t true. The secondary (non-COVID) public health impacts will ultimately be measured in millions of lives lost, due to mis-prioritizing COVID above all else.

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> The unemployment levels alone are overwhelming evidence that isn’t true

However, a lot of those unemployed service workers were making more money on unemployment than they did in their previous jobs. Add in the $1200 check and that certainly helped in that April-July period.

> there is no question that certain personality types might even favor such an environment

Yes, for sure. Introvert here. Loved it. I guess that means I could have had a successful career in lighthouse keeping in a former age.

The unemployment benefits go away faster than the jobs come back. And in the meantime the States go bankrupt and Federal debt balloons on the order of $10 trillion.

A wonder if a lot of people argue for lockdowns not just because they think it might be a worthy socioeconomic trade-off, but because they actually enjoy life better that way and aren’t personally being devastated by it. Similarly, people against lockdown could have just not been personally effected by COVID, or know anyone who has been.

Humans are particularly bad at balancing very large impact events (we tend to underestimate the big stuff and overestimate the small). I think it still very much remains to be seen which was the lesser evil — COVID or the response thereto.

> The unemployment benefits go away faster than the jobs come back

Sure, but it looks like the Democratic House and even the President want them to continue at least till year end.

> I think it still very much remains to be seen which was the lesser evil — COVID or the response thereto.

As an epidemiologist said months back (paraphrasing): "success in dealing with a pandemic will always be seen as having been an over-reaction after the fact."

The problem with counterfactuals is, it very well may have been an overreaction. The truth is often not knowable.

If the above is the logic someone is using to sell me on an idea, my suspicion level increases.

I don't believe this is a 'no true Scotsman' fallacy: the person was replying to someone claiming lockdowns were equivalent to incarceration, but the US-style "lockdown" was much, much less severe than that.

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