New Defaults
stratechery.com
stratechery.com
> Third, it should be the default to move fast, and value experimentation over perfection.
These points are making me twitch: We have seen so many examples (even in the software world) of companies trying to move fast and eventually figure it is far better to be thoughtful about changes both major and minor.
Imagine tossing a coin that has a 0.001:99.999 probability split. Just 0.001% chance that you will be killed vs 99+% chance that you won't. Believe me, you don't want to be tossing this coin in a macro scale OR way too many times. Individually we make these choices every day and get out scratch free, BUT once you bring in enough coin tosses, there is an irrefutable point that one of it is going to end up killing you. Individually the hope is that you won't take enough chances like that before you naturally die off.
As conservative as it sounds, keeping status quo is the safer option for a society. There is a reason we see folks turning conservative once they have generated enough wealth - the need to never be poor again far outweighs the need to be wealthy.
We shouldn't thoughtlessly discard proven ways of doing things, but we may need to update the weight that we give them. What worked well in 1990 isn't as likely to work today as 1960's practices were in 1990.
I suppose the point could be interpreted to mean "investigate the assumptions of the status quo and find out which ones are no longer valid" - but then, that's not what Thompson wrote.
As to points one and three - I don't buy that "free speech is good" is no longer the default and I don't see much in this essay that shows otherwise. The example given (Youtube censoring perspectives that contradict the WHO, despite the WHO itself having disseminated falsehoods) leads directly to the questions: should Youtube not have been allowed to make that decision? And if not, how should they have been prevented?
As to the third point - revisiting the example just discussed, surely the WHO's communications (of which Thompson seems critical) could be seen as an example of an organization hewing to the very default he asserts as valuable? Move fast with your communications, value early release over perfect certainty, etc.
This is the opposite of Chesterton's Fence, the idea that knowledge is often encoded in the current state of things, and you should seek to understand what that is before changing it.
That's how I feel when people throw stats at random. Especially airplane vs car safety.
That has to be some kind of named law: As the volume of a system increases, tolerance for failure decreases. Used in cases of: 1% failure of a hundred might be acceptable, but 1% failure of a million isn't.
The higher your scale, the faster it will fail.
Maybe its not a law of large numbers, but one of medium numbers (in the sense of Dawkin’s Middle World is human scale or Ron Graham speculating that maybe all the most interesting math is in the very large numbers we can’t work with)
I feel like Technology Connections did a better approach to the same topic of innovation:
https://youtu.be/GiYO1TObNz8?t=335
The idea is "But Sometimes". That is, this new innovation is great in all these areas, but sometimes it's worse. That then becomes a locus for the FUD campaigns -- justified or not. It's also the same kind of thing heard in "no one was ever fired for picking IBM". Fear of an unknown potentially bad outcome outweighs all the known bad outcomes which are improved by the innovation.
I was just remarking on the outright pointers in those two points that status quo is bad / speed of change is god etc. - There is a difference between being against change and being resistant to change.
I am all for incremental changes because I strongly believe existing tested and hairy systems got there by handling a million corner cases that the new one is probably going to solve all over again.
Replacement systems become warranted only in those cases where earlier systems have lost any form of iterability and are stuck per-say and have been obsoleted in some ways. Most of the other scenarios are just developer job-security :)
Again all the above apply only for reasonably complicated systems. I am all for hello world's getting rewritten every day.
An observation I have happened upon recently: The more time you spend away from the computer thinking about the problem you want to solve with the computer, the better the outcome will be. Spending a few days to consider the pros/cons of various business entity identity schemes is probably worthwhile when weighing the long term consequences.
Also Ben is based in Taiwan, he should know better. The current Tsai Ing-wen's regime actually oppressed free press and freedom of speech by terminating CTi News TV broasting license due to political reasons (since CTi New airs opposing views to her government and is generally seen as close to the mainland China).[1]
I don't agree with Ben's first rule of new default either:
First, it should be the default that free speech is a good thing, that more
information is better than less information, and that the solution to
misinformation is improving our ability to tell the difference, not futilely
trying to be China-lite without any of the upside.
[1]: https://www.bbc.com/zhongwen/simp/chinese-news-55000536
Now that we understand this piece of information, is the best way to solve the problem more information, or to forget that we ever learned it?
No, a large portion 72 million Americans don't. They still believe fringe theories and conspiracies like 5G signal caused COVID-19 or election was stolen.
> The more information is NOT better at all. Information overload will cause great harm and push people to the extreme ideology
I sense that you believe in two conflicting views. You want less information, but are critical of silencing a pro-China TV license in Taiwan? How do you rectify this yourself? I'm trying to understand.
Do I take it that this information you are providing me is an exception?
Although I appreciate your desire to decide what information I’m allowed to access I’m going to politely decline. Thanks for the offer.
Even prior to official orders coming through, people were acting on information they were receiving from news reports on the virus.
Kids were pulled out of school, the restaurant industry was seeing less traffic, fewer people were in bars and people that could find a way to work from home and minimize going into the office were already doing so. Some larger firms were proactive on this.
Not everyone will act perfectly with more information, but more information allows more people to make better choices for themselves and make their own risk/reward tradeoffs ahead of the curve. I think it was February that N95 masks started selling out in the shops around here, maybe sooner, and it was at least a week prior to the lockdowns that supermarkets started selling out of staples and had long lines leading into their parking lots.
Sure, maybe the population size requires different ways of governing, but let’s not make the mistake of looking towards such a horrible government for source of inspiration.
As you said, a startup has to operate differently from a large corporation, but let’s pick a “successful” corporation.
Nevertheless I think you're making a solid point: information overload can be pretty harmful. I think that's what Thompson is getting at with his comment "the solution to misinformation is improving our ability to tell the difference" but honestly that's not a solution so much as it is a goal - granting that it's desirable for people to have this filtering capacity, how can it be learned?
> Second, it should be the default that the status quo is a bad thing.
The author wants this default changed because he doesn't like the status-quo. Look, I don't like it either but assuming that people don't like the current state of things in literally every single aspect of life unless stated otherwise compared to "I want to change X,Y,Z." is way off base.
There’s no one extreme that is perfect but I personally would prefer rapid progress with some mistakes as opposed to what we seem to be experiencing now.
If someone like this author was actually interested in working to fix the problem they would start by trying to provide regulators with the resources they need to actually keep up with a fast changing world filled with tech-bros out to 'disrupt' any industry where they think they can make themselves a middle-man in a transaction. Make it interesting and worthwhile for smart people to work on improving the regulatory process and adapting it to current realities and maybe we can start to make progress that is both rapid and safe.
I work in the very conservative world of engineering, where there are standards and regulations up the wazoo. Welding standards, CE markings, standards for how high on the car your headlamps have to be, pressure ratings, instrumentation accuracy classifications. My colleagues in civil and nuclear engineering have even more stringent regulations to contend with. Compliance with those standards costs labour and money. It's tedious, painstaking, careful work. These regulations have been hard fought, and have taken millions of man-hours to perfect. But this is why we are able to have the degree of safety that we enjoy in this world.
This zeitgeist on HN that goes against regulation, fueled perhaps by SV culture, is a recipe for disaster. Self regulation is NOT a thing. I can write this down for you and promise ALL of my potential life savings. This is NOT a great article. It's a rambling overreach of a disaster that starts out fairly nice, but descends through seven circles of Paul-Graham-Know-It-All-ness.
It's a way better choice to be in a future where we are arguing about the extent and content of the regulation rather than the presence of it in the first place. A deregulated world is scary to me.
In the meantime, how many deaths would you allow due to cars not being able to drive at night?
There is no scenario in which nobody dies. Doing something, even if it's not perfect, is often better than doing nothing.
Oops.
But then again, doing something is often better than nothing. Even if it’s not perfect.
You do eventually have to ship something, no test is ever going to uncover 100% of all possible problems. I guess you'd prefer to just never release anything? Then, certainly humans will live forever.
If you believe a deregulated world is better then you should be pleased with the progress made by engineers and managers like those at Boeing involved with the 737 who disrupted and circumvented the regulatory state for airplanes.
Progress involves risk. Cowering and doing nothing because someone, somewhere might possibly be harmed is as bad as having no regulation, if not worse. We wouldn't have airplanes at all if someone were running after the Wright brothers telling them it's not safe.
How does "Maybe we don't need 800 bazillion regulations that make it impossible to do anything" get translated to "Oh, so you want a wild west cowboy world where everyone does whatever they want and there are no regulations at all?" Try and have at least a little bit of nuance.
Neither I nor TFA are arguing to abolish all regulations. Just recognize that regulation has a cost. It's not an unalloyed good. When speed matters, like getting a vaccine to end a global pandemic, that cost is measured in lives just as surely as the cost of a lack of regulation is.
If you're building a bridge for millions of cars to drive on, that's something we've done many times and which needs to be done correctly and carefully, so you should definitely pay attention to all the carefully collected wisdom embodied in standards.
If you're inventing clever new algorithms, then you should experiment as efficiently as possible, because 99% of what you try will be thrown away. Carefully planned waterfall style development will actively hurt you at this stage, because you have no idea where you're going yet. If you find something promising and want to scale it, then you slow down a little and check your work. This continues as you scale, and by the time your billion dollar business depends on your clever algorithm, the update process for your production version should look a lot more like the bridge building process.
In theory people will argue that it's just a way to make things more 'visual' and 'approachable' to the lay public, but 9/10 times it comes across to me as just a dishonest way to make your audience 'think past the sale'.
Here's an example:
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If we had widespread ebola or if coronavirus was as deadly as smallpox I don't think many people would be making this argument, and we already have plenty of case law.
Sadly, I'm not so sure of this, anymore. 350K+ deaths in the USA alone has called into question the public's ability to assess risk and do the right thing. I don't see why it would be any different for something like Ebola. You'd still have the same viral Facebook videos calling it a hoax and a conspiracy. You'd have the same toothless, unenforced "orders" from the government to quarantine. You'd have the same people refusing to cooperate Because Freedom. I don't see why anything would be different except for the number of deaths.
The number of deaths would make it much clearer that the risk is real. Again, if driving killed 10% of people every year, people saying it is a hoax would not be very convincing, when most of people you know who tried driving for a few years are dead.
FDA approval processes (and many of the other governmental processes in liberal democracies) are built around peacetime opportunity costs. They prioritize safety over rushing to get a vaccine out the door. When the opportunity cost changes (i.e., there is a new global pandemic and lives are on the line) those institutions have trouble updating their behavior accordingly.
Conversely, authoritarian regimes are much more militant. You see this in China's approach not only to the virus, but in audacious economic initiatives (e.g. Belt & Road) and the defense of its political ideology on the world stage.
That mindset is actually similar to the democracies that have responded best to COVID. Israel (very much a "wartime" country - mandatory military service, surrounded by its enemies, etc.) is blowing the rest of the world out of the water in its vaccination implementation. In normal times, it is a powerhouse of innovation, largely due to elite technological groups in the military. South Korea (another country with mandatory military service, enemy with nukes to the north) had a great COVID response. And Taiwan, a country that faces constant existential threat from China,
> [E]xhibited the exact same sort can-do attitude alongside a free press, elections, and pig intestines in the legislature.
The US last had a "wartime" mindset during WW2. Many of the innovations in the following period (nuclear physics, space race, computers, etc.) can be directly attributed to the massive mobilization effort and public-private partnerships of the time.
So the question to ask is: How do we cultivate the wartime mindset that leads to innovation? And if COVID can't catalyze this, what can?
Nothing along these lines even remotely happened. The boogey man of 'forcing people to quarantine' can be avoided while still creating incentives and expectations that individuals should opt-into a plan that concentrates risk and concentrates isolation requirements around known risks.
A positive test in the West comes with vague advice to quarantine at home. It should've instead come with a pre-paid package providing hotel+food+income-supplement that continued for the quarantine period so long as you don't violate the isolation expectations ... Incentives, not punitive measures, would've sufficed to make it possible, easy, and expected for people to _avoid_ spreading to their co-dwellers/neighbors or anyone they come into contact with by necessity for basic survival needs.
>Second, it should be the default that the status quo is a bad thing; instead of justifying why something should be done, the burden of proof should rest on those who believe things should remain the same.
This is ignorant of the cost of change. That cost is the main reason why society collectively assumes that "the system works". Arguments for change have to first attack that notion - as communists, fascists, and all other kinds of anti-conservatives do. None of them believe that change, in and of itself, is valuable.
Likewise, the author's talk of opportunity cost neglects the price of failure - in doing a retrospective analysis (like the one of vaccine development), it's easy to ignore the counterfactuals that never actually happened. But leaving them out means that your analysis is meaningless. Would the author be convinced to write the same article if the vaccine had been rolled out in January, and as a result the world suffered a second thalidomide scandal?
A better comparison would be the swine flu vaccine in 1976. According to Wikipedia [1], about 45 million people were vaccinated and 362 of them suffered Guillan-Barre syndrome. Only 1 person died of the actual swine flu.
But that comparison actually makes Ben's case stronger. What if all 330 million people in the US had been vaccinated against COVID, and 1 in 100,000 of them (about the same proportion as for the 1976 vaccine) had serious side effects? Even if all of those side effects were fatal (and they wouldn't be), that would still be only 3,300 deaths--less than 1 percent of the US COVID death count currently reported. And even leaving aside that not all side effects would be fatal, that death count is clearly an overestimate, since in the US people would be given the choice whether to be vaccinated, and not all Americans would take it.
From that perspective, your argument falls in the same hole as Ben's: based on a retrospective view of bounded outcomes, you are trying to argue about unbounded future events. The real risk of a rushed vaccine rollout is not a repeat of the 1976 incident, but a medical disaster which is unpredictably and massively worse. Modern medical red tape exists precisely because of the risk of such disasters.
Why don't you think the swine flu vaccine, which was much more rushed than the current COVID vaccine, was reasonably close to a worst case outcome? Or at least close enough to serve as an upper bound estimate for side effects from the COVID vaccine?
> based on a retrospective view of bounded outcomes, you are trying to argue about unbounded future events
That's just as true of our actual response to COVID--none of the so-called "experts" ever really considered where we are now as a possibility back when doing so would have mattered.
> a medical disaster which is unpredictably and massively worse
You mean like what actually happened with COVID?
> Modern medical red tape exists precisely because of the risk of such disasters.
No, it doesn't. Modern medical red tape exists because our approach to risk is extremely one-sided; we punish regulators only when something bad happens that we think they could have prevented, not when something good fails to happen that they could have enabled. For example, the FDA took ten years longer than European regulators to approve beta blockers for people at risk for heart attacks. A rough estimate is that 100,000 heart attacks were suffered by Americans during those ten years that could have been prevented. But no regulator got punished for allowing those 100,000 deaths to happen.
Because
1. the negative side-effects of a vaccine are not a function of its rushed-ness - just like the injuries you get when a car runs you over are not proportional to how quickly you ran into the road without looking both ways.
2. I don't believe there is a sensible "upper bound" for medical side-effects, apart from the obvious one (everyone dies). Even if there was, you could not think to have safely established it through a single example.
This is also a very retrospective view. How would you establish when a regulator "failed to enable" new medicine? How could you decide that an entity had enough information in advance to make a decision that is obvious in retrospect? How would that entity then prove its historical ignorance in its own defense? Moreover, in the case of a disaster, how would it argue that its predictions were justified and the opportunity cost was too great to institute rigorous checks?
These questions don't exist for the current system. A regulator that fails to catch some medical issue is not questioned on its intentions, but instead punished for simply not being rigorous enough. That cures are slow to roll out is just the price of safe medicine.
I don't see how we can know that this is representative of the worst possible outcomes.
Also note that the swine flu vaccine was not an RNA vaccine, it was an ordinary flu vaccine using, as far as I know, deactivated virus. RNA vaccines are inherently safer.
No, because even if you assume no black swan (ex: zombie outbreak due to bad QC control of a new and untested mRNA technology) you are trading less old people death for more young people death.
Why should I increase my low risk of death even by 5% to save an old person that has maybe 1 year left to live anyway?
I believe it will be as "optional" as not having a SSN or a bank account: in theory possible, in practice with so many hurdles that people will relent.
(ex: ban unvaccinated people from plane, train and bus interstate travel using the TSA for controls)
I assumed that they would in my hypothetical, yes. That's in a USA that was even capable of considering that option a year ago, the concept of a "free country" would be understood.
In the actual USA of now, that concept is not understood; just as the article under discussion says, our current society combines the worst features of freedom with the worst features of authoritarianism, and gets the benefits of neither. Your hypothetical about how vaccination will be handled is an example of that. In other words, you are giving further evidence that the status quo in the USA is not working and needs to change.
What your comment and the article both miss are the second order costs to safety failures: it's not only the immediate side effects that are a problem, but rather the change in behavior coming from the rest of the population.
If you think that 330 million people would have gotten a vaccine that had not gone through any safety trial, even though a large portion of the population is still unsure after the phase 3 trials, I think you're deluding yourself. If, on top of that, you had widely reported and exaggerated ("free speech" at work) reports of side effects, the percentage of willing volunteers falls dramatically. Vaccinating 5% of the population in January doesn't really help.
That's just as true of our actual responses to COVID.
> If you think that 330 million people would have gotten a vaccine
I explicitly said in my post that not all Americans would choose to take the vaccine. You are attacking a straw man. I was simply giving the highest possible upper bound to the expected number of deaths from vaccination.
> a large portion of the population is still unsure after the phase 3 trials
Yes, and why is that? Because despite all of our "respected" institutions saying that the vaccine is safe, many people don't believe them. Why not? Because they know that those same institutions lied to them, repeatedly--and not just in general, specifically during the whole COVID crisis. So why should people believe those institutions now?
In other words, we have a problem with the status quo.
> If, on top of that, you had widely reported and exaggerated ("free speech" at work) reports of side effects, the percentage of willing volunteers falls dramatically.
Who would be reporting and exaggerating the side effects in a way that everyone would hear about? The mainstream media. In other words, the problem you describe is the status quo right now. So the status quo in this respect obviously needs to change since it makes us as a society stupid, unable to even consider courses of action that, in hindsight, would have been obvious and dramatic improvements over what actually happened.
Please expand on that point to clarify. The second order negative outcomes of a botched vaccine rollout would be enormous, both for this particular pandemic and longer term.
> I explicitly said in my post that not all Americans would choose to take the vaccine. You are attacking a straw man. I was simply giving the highest possible upper bound to the expected number of deaths from vaccination.
This is a key point that you cannot elide though. If 30% of the population takes the rushed vaccine but 70% takes the tested slowly rolled out vaccine, the difference in the herd immunity outcome is large.
> Yes, and why is that? Because despite all of our "respected" institutions saying that the vaccine is safe, many people don't believe them. Why not? Because they know that those same institutions lied to them, repeatedly--and not just in general, specifically during the whole COVID crisis. So why should people believe those institutions now? > In other words, we have a problem with the status quo.
The FDA never lied during the pandemic, that I know of. Broadly speaking people do trust them, and the tests and approval has a positive effect on vaccine acceptance. Also note that this isn't a binary choice "status quo"/"not status quo", you have to offer a realistic alternative to the status quo that we can measure the status quo against. Rushing the vaccine has more negatives than positives, in my opinion (both in hindsight and even more so with the information we had at the time).
> Who would be reporting and exaggerating the side effects in a way that everyone would hear about? The mainstream media.
No, mostly social media. But even if the mainstream media is responsible (whatever that term means, it encompasses local stations, cable news, NPR and newspapers like the NYT/WaPo, each of which have different propensities to exaggerate), you're not offering a solid alternative.
Our actual response to COVID has had huge second order negative effects, like killing the economy, for no real benefit. You need to include that in your analysis.
> The FDA never lied during the pandemic
I didn't say "the FDA", I said "institutions" in general. That includes both government organizations like the CDC and the WHO and the mainstream media. The FDA isn't the government organization that generally does direct public communication in a pandemic, so they didn't lie because they didn't really say anything at all. They did, however, botch development of tests and kept state and local health authorities from developing their own tests.
> mostly social media
You obviously have been living on a different planet from me for the past year.
> you're not offering a solid alternative
Oh, you want me to reinvent society from scratch?
You're right that I don't have a working alternative society in my back pocket, but our current society is clearly not working. The first thing to do if you're in a hole is to stop digging.
There's strong evidence that the economy suffers whether or not governments institute lockdowns, mostly because people choose not to go out on their own. For example, take a look at the Swedish unemployment rate over the past year: https://www.statista.com/statistics/527418/sweden-monthly-un...
> I didn't say "the FDA", I said "institutions" in general. That includes both government organizations like the CDC and the WHO and the mainstream media.
The CDC didn't lie either, AFAIK. The WHO is irrelevant in this case because they're not in charge of approving vaccines in the US.
> Oh, you want me to reinvent society from scratch? > You're right that I don't have a working alternative society in my back pocket, but our current society is clearly not working. The first thing to do if you're in a hole is to stop digging.
There's no need to reinvent society from scratch, but if you criticize a situation harshly it's best to have your desired alternative in mind: what, exactly, do you want people to start or stop doing?
Yes, in a free country many people will choose to curtail activities. But that's still a lot better than governments shutting down businesses without any real data or science to back up their decisions, including many businesses that (a) aren't linked by any real data to COVID transmission, (b) are taking precautions to protect their customers, and (c) still have plenty of customers who would like to go there. Not to mention (d) allowing "essential" businesses to stay open, but "essential" often means "has political connections" rather than really being essential, and (e) politicians notoriously violating the very lockdown rules they impose on everyone else. Which causes further secondary damage by further eroding people's trust in institutions.
> The CDC didn't lie either, AFAIK.
To be fair, the CDC hasn't done a lot of public communication either--most of that has been Fauci, who works for NIH, not CDC. But the NIH is a government institution too. And the things he said were trumpeted by the media, who I also included in "institutions":
Masks are bad--no wait, masks are good!
Lockdowns are bad--no wait, lockdowns are essential!
The herd immunity threshold is 60%--no wait, 65% to 70%--no wait, 70% to 80%, or is it 70% to 80% to 85%? Fauci admitted to the New York Times that he was just making up those numbers based on no actual science, just on what he thought would manipulate people into doing what he thought was a good idea.
> The WHO is irrelevant in this case because they're not in charge of approving vaccines in the US.
We're talking about second order effects. The WHO refused to even admit there was a pandemic until March 11, by which time Europe was already weeks into exponential growth and the US was not far behind. No wonder people in January and February 2020 weren't thinking in terms of a vaccine (or, for that matter, of shutting down international travel to stop the spread, which the WHO advised against).
There's strong evidence hard lockdowns lower the spread of the virus. See, for example, the correlation of lockdowns and cases in France. Allowing people to make their own choices doesn't work to deal with a pandemic because a very small subset of the population can cause the vast majority of cases, negating any personal effort made by the rest.
The argument isn't that institutions are perfect and never make mistakes (or politicians), but rather that overall they've taken reasonable measures to deal with the current situation.
> To be fair, the CDC hasn't done a lot of public communication either
The CDC (and the FDA) have published tons of documents about recommendations, vaccine efficacy, etc.
> Masks are bad--no wait, masks are good! Lockdowns are bad--no wait, lockdowns are essential!
As the pandemic progresses, we learn new things about it and adjust. This is exactly what you should expect from your institutions: give you the best info available at the time. This is the full quote:
“There’s no reason to be walking around with a mask. When you’re in the middle of an outbreak, wearing a mask might make people feel a little bit better and it might even block a droplet, but it’s not providing the perfect protection that people think that it is. And, often, there are unintended consequences — people keep fiddling with the mask and they keep touching their face.”
In April, the CDC (which, as I said, _does_ do public communication) changed this recommendation to instead push wearing masks https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/prevent-getting-si...
Remember that initially it was not clear that Covid was highly airborne. At the time, folks were recommending disinfecting groceries. This doesn't mean the advice at the time was bad, that's hindsight bias.
Once more, evidently you and I have been living on different planets for the past year.
> As the pandemic progresses, we learn new things about it and adjust.
That would be fine if that's what happened. But it isn't. The guidance had nothing to do with getting more information, and everything to do with trying to manipulate people into doing what the "experts" wanted them to do by misinforming them. The mask quote you give is a perfect example: there was good reason to be walking around with a mask (my wife and I started doing that around the end of February--and social distancing and all the other common sense precautions that any responsible adult should be taking when there's a pandemic, no matter what any so-called "experts" say). No protection is perfect (even an N95 is not perfect), but a mask is a lot better than nothing (even if not all virus particles are kept out, drastically reducing how many get into your upper respiratory tract makes a huge difference). But no, our nanny state "experts" were afraid we might touch our face so they lied to us. (They were also afraid health care providers would run short of PPE. But if governments are going to be authoritarian, they can just put themselves at the front of the line for however much PPE the health care providers need, without having to lie or manipulate anybody.)
I wish you would detail what exactly you disagree with instead of replying with quips like these.
> my wife and I started doing that around the end of February--and social distancing and all the other common sense precautions that any responsible adult should be taking when there's a pandemic, no matter what any so-called "experts" say
Did you also stop touching all surfaces/disinfecting your phone, groceries, etc.? If so, then that decision turned out to be pointless. If not, you had no reason not to at the time since we didn't know if surfaces, air, or other vectors were most responsible for infection. Social distancing was highlighted very early on. I think you're judging decisions made then with hindsight bias.
If I tried to detail everything, it would be pages and pages. I'm simply drawing attention to the fact that things which you take to be obvious facts, aren't. If you ask "which things", my short answer is, as far as I can tell, pretty much anything you believe that isn't based on something you saw with your own eyes or checked in detail yourself is questionable, because there are no reliable sources of information in our society. (That means none--on any side of any debate. That's what makes the current situation so difficult.)
> Did you also stop touching all surfaces/disinfecting your phone, groceries, etc.?
No. We did wear gloves (medical grade vinyl or nitrile) when doing things like grocery shopping, and washed our hands after handling those items.
> If not, you had no reason not to at the time
What drove our general actions was our own common sense and background knowledge about how viruses generally propagate. We were looking at whatever data was available, but we didn't give it a lot of weight because we knew the virus was new and anything said about it was tentative, and also because of the general unreliability of information sources that I mentioned above.
> Social distancing was highlighted very early on.
Not as early as we started doing it. It wasn't until we had been doing it for several weeks that we saw it being emphasized in the media, and it wasn't until a week or two after that that we saw it actually becoming common in our area. We also watched spring break happening in various places with no signs of precautions or social distancing, several weeks after we had started doing those things.
There would have been many people who would not want to take an unproven vaccine, but there might have been others that found the risk reasonable, assuming production could have been made available earlier.
Yeah, it'd be a damn shame if a big chunk of the country had lunatic ideas about vaccinations.
If a nation X and Y and Z can work together to cook more virus and more misinformation and intentionally release it in Western countries, that would spell doom. This is the Prisoner's Dilemma for Western countries.
> Third, it should be the default to move fast, and value experimentation over perfection.
These two bullets are the same. Rather, the latter is both necessary and sufficient for the former. Without experimentation (implying the evaluation of success and the intent to abandon unsuccessful methods), defaulting to status quo is preferable.
The incentives for Moderna/Pfizer/AZ are a bit complex here. If they did a challenge study and discovered that 25% of vaccinated individuals were infected but had lower viral loads, that might have made it more difficult to get approved. Instead, doing what they are doing - rolling out vaccination with zero public health monitoring of folks after the fact allows them to avoid having to deal with that. Moreover, for the anti-vaxxers, who currently seem to have focused in on the fact that a tiny fraction of folks appear to have an anaphylactic response to the lipid nanoshell on the mRNA, it would have been easy to say "Oh, the vaccine doesn't actually work at all."
It's unfortunate, but certainly not the first time where incentives are aligned to favor ignorance rather than maximum knowledge. I think the really interesting question I have is whether Moderna will continue to follow their Phase 3 participants after they are all unblinded and vaccinated. If they do, and do a good job of assessing changes in antibodies, then I'll be really impressed with their ethics.
It's one thing to know it's a tiny fraction, another to have a friend in the hospital overnight. I'll take my vaccine anyway, but ... yikes.
Additionally, AFAIK we don't actually know if the vaccines prevent COVID infections at all, we just know they prevent severe illness. If a challenge trial provided enough evidence of that, why wouldn't that be sufficient?
Does the data actually back this up? It seems to me like the cited data could also support that everyone who would have otherwise opted in still went and selected stocks.
I can't see the full paper cited, but the abstract says:
> Second, a substantial fraction of 401(k) participants hired under automatic enrollment retain both the default contribution rate and fund allocation even though few employees hired before automatic enrollment picked this particular outcome.
This seems to be specifically not stating the conclusion that the article did.
So the increased participation may have caused a shift to some degree. (Maybe those less likely to participate normally often choose a more conservative investment?) But not entirely.
https://www.nber.org/system/files/working_papers/w7682/w7682...
This is a downright dangerous view. My job as an engineer is managing complex systems, quite often in maintenance mode. I have fielded my ideas that come from people that do not understand the full complexity of the system, and thus, cannot understand why their idea is bad. It's not just that I (as a maintainer) have to explain why their idea will not work: I first have to teach them enough about the system for them to actually understand the system, and then explain how their idea would interact with the system, and the consequence of that; that's often closer to "here's how you can mentally simulate the system" and perhaps a little of "and a naïve simulation would think this, but remember parts A, B, and C have properties a, b, and c, and those interact to do X, which is slightly surprising (albeit straightforward once you think about it)"
There's often precious little time for that, and it can often suck the limited oxygen out of the debate and thus, out of other ideas that might be better. It is much more useful, in almost every situation I've ever been in, for ideas that are being suggested to be well-researched in the status quo.
"The system should be documented!" you might cry: it is. For example, we maintain a system that uses a load balancer. It's documented (as part of the system) that the load balancer is part of the system. It's documented (as part of the load balancer) how the LB works. And then we hit issues such as "SNAT port exhaustion" that requires you to have read enough of the documentation that you have a mental model of "load balancer" that is more detailed than "it balances the load" and realizes that an SNAT LB would have operating limits and that the symptoms we were seeing could be the result of all this coming to a confluence. It's not trivial.
(And, there is a difference between this point and the later "value experimentation over perfection", which I do agree with. Experimentation, to collect data to aid good arguments to changing the status quo is of course a good idea. But the second point strikes me as "the status is inherently bad" and one should not even seek to understand it, as implied by the author's suggestion about where the burden of proof should be. And I don't even like Chesterton's Fence, and here I'm having to basically argue for it!)
But the data isn't so clear. Countries in South America locked down hard and early but it had no effect on the pandemic spread. And all Asian countries, without a single exception, have outperformed Europe, US, and SA by more than an order of magnitude, despite countries having responded to the crisis in different ways. How can this be?
I think it's much more honest to say that we don't have the answers. We have questions. It's been a year, and the questions keep mounting. We don't know why Belgium got hit hard but Germany did not. Why Slovenia didn't have a first wave, but did get a second wave. Why did every African country do well despite limited ability to lock down or distance? Why did all of Asia do well? Why is the correlation between NPI and future infections/hospitalizations so weak?
And frankly I find the combination of a mounting pile of unanswered questions one the one hand and a call for censorship of dissenting voices on the other very disturbing.
This is virtually impossible given how much government, politicians, and even individuals have staked their identity and reputation on being correct and knowledgeable.
That's the most evil aspect of authoritarianism and despotism. The inability to admit failure, limitation and falibility. This is why Fauci and friends always couch their responses to criticism with dismissive explanations.
I'm constantly frustrated with the unimpeachable self-confidence that's so pervasive now. It's only worse when their failures are so apparent.
In the short term, absolutely. One hopes 5-10 years down the road, a disinterested analysis can get a comprehensive if not conclusive picture.
> I'm constantly frustrated with the unimpeachable self-confidence that's so pervasive now.
I couldn't a agree more. I have no doubts about the absolute best intentions of those making public policy, but their arrogance and utter lack of circumspection with such obvious failures does nothing but further undermine their long-term credibility.
The "health reasons" part goes like this: If I say "From what we know now, we think the best plan is for people to do X", how many people actually do X? Fewer than if I project more certainty. So even if I know that X is just our current best understanding (say, 60% probability of being right), we still have a better expectation value of the outcome if more people follow the plan that has 60% chance of being right. So I oversell the certainty to up the compliance, in the hope that it's actually helpful.
The problem is that, while this may help in the short term, in the medium term I'm setting my credibility on fire, and if we need compliance in the future on a plan that we're 80% sure is right, we may not get it, because nobody believes me by then.
Maybe our strategies were wrong. Maybe they were right but the virus was stronger than our strategies. Maybe all the feasible strategies wouldn't have made much of a difference.
We won't ever know. There are many things we can never know. We've become addicted to knowing, with the Internet and all, and similarly we've forgotten that some things (yes, still some few things) are not in our hands.
I sure hope we will understand these things better, in the fullness of time. Even if the answer turns out to be some boring mix of cultural practices, genetics, and luck, it's still worthwhile having that understanding for the next time.
I do hope and expect that we'll eventually come away with at least a partial explanatory model that doesn't lean too heavily on being an isolatable island. But an awful lot of what we've heard so far seems to be case-by-case after the fact rationalizations leavened by how the country's politicians are viewed.
I feel like there's a kind of built in bias against fully appreciating the effects of the unknowns given the nature of the crisis -- because being the guy who says 'well actually we might not _know_ that' in every policy discussion about the pandemic doesn't actually contribute much benefit ...
At first in the US, the recommendation was to not wear a mask. The reasoning was that we weren't sure about whether airborne or surface-borne spread was more of a factor (remember the huge shortages of hand sanitizer), and we wanted to prevent a run on masks, so that we would have enough masks for health care workers.
This then gets into the reasons why we didn't have enough PPE on hand in our strategic reserve which is more of a political question.
So in the case of the US at least, I think we are aware of the proper strategies, but many people, from the top down, refuse to adopt and/or promote those strategies.
With regards to SE Asia I imagine the fact that they’ve been through this two or three times before is a big factor.
Why we did soooo poorly in western countries across all the different strategies is something I’m looking forward to dissecting ...
We may be playing out a new chapter of Guns, Germs, and Steel, where the germs source from East Asia instead of eastern Europe and the Middle East. The death toll may be a pale comparison to the % of lives lost among First Nations people during the colonial era, but we aren't fighting many territory wars these days. It's more proxy wars now, and economic wars.
Over the course of say 3 epidemics in as many decades, the differentials in economic harm could compound substantially.
But even if you're right, social darwinism can do measurable amounts of damage. Added to the levels of stupid we already exhibit, this certainly is not helping things.
I also didn't take the comment as implying any deliberate ill intent on China's part. European germs decimated indigenous populations whether or not they were spread intentionally.
It is an interesting point, although I think if pandemics become more common the West will adapt. As TFA mentioned, a promising vaccine was created in Boston within two days of receiving the digital sequence of the virus DNA (not even a live sample!). As the risks of pandemics become more widely understood, there will be increasing pressure to accelerate vaccine rollout for future events.
It's not necessarily causation of course, and likely not this simple, but it's fascinating and maybe not all that surprising that the regional impact of covid correlates quiet well with regional obesity:
https://ourworldindata.org/uploads/2019/11/share-of-adults-d...
This study found that a total of 73% of ICU Covid patients were overweight (34.5%), obese (31.5%), or morbidly obese (7%).
The median age in the U.S. is 38. The median age in Africa as a whole is 19.
Africa also has very few cases, but this is simply because mass testing is not available.
This is false. The hard lockdown period in most SA countries lasted 3-6 weeks at most; after that there was almost no enforcement by the police, no fines handed out, no public shaming. It was essentially left up to individuals with ample latitude in how they chose to exercise self-imposed freedom.
Poor people in SA did not generally have the option to stay at home with a robust safety net such as in Europe. Wealthier business owners have to deal with an inefficient legal system that burdens anyone who does things by the book.
The first few weeks with a real lockdown were remarkably effective, as shown by the mobility and disease transmission stats. As soon as the countries stopped using their monopoly of force to limit mobility, the disease shot up, in an entirely predictable manner.
It's truly unfortunate that this misinformation keeps cropping up.
In the US, people are still out and about horsing around despite Stay At Home orders, and there are just no consequences. They just busted an illegal gathering in NYC [1] with over 300 people, yet only the organizer got a slap-on-the-wrist $15K fine. Where are the $15K fines for each of the party-goers?
1: https://www.cnn.com/2021/01/02/us/sheriff-nye-raids/index.ht...
From the article, > more aggressive and systematic quarantine regime whereby suspected or mild cases — and even healthy close contacts of confirmed cases — were sent to makeshift hospitals and temporary quarantine centers.
The thing that really worked was not centralized quarantine. It's how to identify people for centralized quarantine. My family has gone back to normal life (like pre-covid normal) since March. Since then every new coronavirus case will be on the headline, and deep contact tracing (not only close contacts, but close contacts of close contacts of close contacts of ...) will be performed to ensure suspected infections are quarantined.
People coming from another country are required to provide extensive documentation of negative test results in the past three weeks. The tests need to be conducted in very specific time frames and even locations, and often between two flight connections. The rules are deliberately designed to make people stop thinking about coming to China. Sadly I'm in the US and I don't expect to reunite with my family until mid 2022.
No they didn't
While I am not going to answer your questions, I am very careful when it comes to comparing data across countries.
There are enough open questions when it comes to interpreting the data from a single country (a very common being selection bias, as it is unclear what the preconditions are for conducting a test and I am still missing the numbers of how many tests have been conducted).
However, when I look across countries, there are some very odd curves, which I have a hard time to explain. I find it much more likely that in some countries someone manipulated the data (by whatever means). I still think the data is valuable, but when interpreting it, it should be considered, that not all data is 100% valid.
I enjoyed reading this, but it did seem a bit disjointed.
Modern healthcare may be expensive and advances may be slow, but it generally works and people trust their doctor.
No kidding! Just look at where we are with personal data. The default is opt-out - it should be opt-in. And for consent, the default is 'assumed' consent - it should be 'informed' consent.
However switching that little switch would mean killing businesses worth tens of billions of dollars. We're talking about millions of people losing their jobs and their privileged positions.
I'm not saying this because I agree with them, I'm just pointing out that threatening their livelihood will cause a vicious reaction. People have been killed for less. Wars have been started for less.
We're talking about millions of people losing their jobs and their privileged positions.
My point is that there are many of those people I mention, they're rich, smart and quite powerful. Many of them are on this exact site, by the way.
They're not going to give up what they got without a fight.
You are implying surveillance capitalism is necessary because "certain people" can threaten, harass, maybe kill citizens into participating because it makes "certain people" rich.
My sarcasm implies it's unnecessary. Further it is a net-negative to society and everyone knows it. Look at tobacco, oil, or coal.. eventually they lose their grip. Get real.
Another example you might be familiar with if you're American, the US healthcare system, especially the private insurance system.
How is getting rid of it going? :-)
A huge part of the functioning of the Internet is enabled by practices you need to explicitly opt out of--if you can opt out at all.
For reference, $14 billion is the total amount spent campaigning for both the congressional and presidential campaigns in the US 2020 election.
Uber was able to buy their California ballot proposition for a mere $300 million in marketing costs.
It seems as though we need more people with really solid problem solving skills. Because I have found that people who do not know how to solve problems tend to root strongly for the status quo. I think it's because they know if they admit that there is a problem, they will not be able to address it. So they would rather rationalize the way things are.
Also this is the first major use of mRNA vaccine, scientists and experts were not sure how well it would work. Administering it without trials could have led to a nightmare scenario for a few individuals and anti-vaccine stance for a larger chunk of population.
Ben is probably right, the status quo should change, but I am not sure if the 'opportunity cost' calculus he makes is accurate in this case.
I'm not so sure. See my response to ivanbakel upthread.
Ultimately, any optimization strategy that depends on using just the worst case without the probability of the worst case to optimize on is going to rapidly find itself unable to optimize because the worst case has cost infinity with every path.
FDA has just paid for this risk of losing credibility with hundreds of thousands of lives. Was it a good price?
> The worst case scenario of a hastily approved vaccine is so high that it probably makes sense to bear the cost and take the health/economic hit.
Really? You ran the numbers? Show your work.
It's not like the FDA doesn't understand that people suffer every day a new medication isn't approved. In fact they've been experimenting, -- yes slowly -- with adaptive trial designs that are more flexible than the stereotype of rigid Phase I/II/III
Yes, manufacturing needed to be improved, so Moderna couldn't have shipped 100M doses in Q2 2020, but we probably could have had everyone over 75 vaccinated before the second wave with moderna alone. Doing the same for J&J, Astrazeneca, Pfizer, and Novavax means in hindsight we would not have any serious COVID issues right now.
>the default is to push for censorship, if not by the government — thanks to that pesky First Amendment — then instead by private corporations.
It's the goddam internet. You don't have to write on FB. You don't have to write on Twitter (and please don't try to actually write on Twitter). Dozens of companies will offer you essentially one-click wordpress installations for you, with 10 more clicks to customize it to match your aesthetic inclinations. Write your stuff there .... oh wait, just like Stratechery does.
Nobody is coming for your blog. And, in the foreseeable future, nobody will come for your blog. You can write whatever you want. Getting people to read it might be slightly harder than if you use some corporatist social media platform, but arguing along those lines merely cements those platforms in their pseudo-monopolist places, which is hardly desirable for all manner of reasons.
Is it a good thing that FB/Twitter et al. can make wrong-headed decisions about the content they allow on their platforms? It's not great. But compared to the information overload issues mentioned here by other commenters, it's not obviously bad either. And it does nothing to reduce your freedom of speech.
Ben Thompson could post articles on Stratechery that make non-libellous false claims about anything he wants, and nobody will stop him. He could this every day for the rest of his life and nobody will stop him. He doesn't like the monopolistic aspects of current social media giants, but continues to insist that they are so important that any "censorship" on these platforms is a significant social issue. I find this contradictory, and naive, and in almost every sense, simply wrong.
But this is the result of a complex intersection of factors, particularly contemporary journalistic practice. It doesn't just come down to their existence or size. The fact that journalists in the media that still gets the most "views" consider these platforms to be a way of "taking the temperature" of the country has at least as much to do with the way they "drive the national conversation" as anything else.
Look, I'm 100% fine with actually taking over these platforms, making them public spaces, removing all "censorship" of any kind (it would be actual censorship now, since it would done by the government), and watching them all deteriorate into an even greater stinking mess than they are already.
But I'm not fine with telling privately owned platforms what they can and cannot do, or with conflating their attempts to regulate what happens on their platforms with censorship (even in double quotes), or pretending that it matters all that much.
Meanwhile, I can still read Stratechery.
>drive the national conversation and consciousness
I honestly don't see that.
Would you still believe "you don't have to interact with Supercorp?" If so, the same is true trivially with a government as well. It's very easy to leave the United States if you want. Even if you couldn't leave, you don't have to speak. After all, you have the right to remain silent.
That aside, you would think a sensible government would prevent a private entity from reaching the heights of its abilities in any area.
When I hear friends and families share conspiracy theories with me and I read that many people are deeply hesitant to become vaccinated, they cite these instances of YT or FB squashing posts as further proof of the legitimacy. All this is to say that these tech companies simply should not get themselves involved with answering the question of "what is true?".
I suspect that disinformation spreads faster on FB/YT/Twitter than information because it is sensational. Humans love to hear stories and are compelled by them more than facts. I second Ben Thompson here that we should focus on learning how to learn and how to parse information. We should learn how to tell when an argument is bifurcated or someone is appealing to ad populum and learn to accept nuance and disagree respectfully.
Yes, absolutely.
But from my perspective this has nothing to do with the idea of whether Twitter telling you that you cannot post, or flagging your post, is a socially-significant issue that should be considered as some kind of censorship.
This is an idea I continually see presented as a solution. What I have not seen is an executable solution or a provable hypothesis that it is feasible.
By no means do I think it's a bad idea. But how do you execute on such an idea?
It is in those fertile grounds that intentional education, mentorship and friendship can help cure the ills. When I hear that we are year-over-year distrusting our neighbors and citizens in deep-red or deep-blue states to do the right thing, we have to learn how to trust again and see each other.
It is going to be local. And it is going to be constructive, not destructive.
In a world where, say, 3 large companies can decide to change the dominant narrative that 70% of the country reads, what those three companies decide is in fact a significant social issue. It may not be "censorship", exactly, but it's still a relevant issue.
One can argue that this is a bad situation without simultaneously arguing that the platforms' limits on speech is socially important. One can argue for expanding the platform choices and reducing the manipulation->addiction games, and still be working towards a more expansive context for free speech.
So, yeah, I could go for that. More choices, less addictive, each platform carries whatever they want.
Sure, if free speech is only about speaking, then someone can speak just as well on a mountaintop as they can in downtown Boston. But speech also has an element of being heard.
When the First Amendment was ratified, speech in a public square was the commonplace way of getting a message out to the world. Now, that commonplace medium is controlled by private corporations that don't fall under the jurisdiction of the First Amendment. If "free speech" continues to be important, then we need to create additional protections for speech in these virtual public squares where people can be heard, not just for speech in Internet wastelands that are the digital equivalent of an ice floe in Antarctica.
First of all, there's no geography on the internet. Being able to only speak from the top of a mountain in Colorado in 1789 would have severely limited the potential of the population to hear you (essentially, to zero). Being able to speak "only" from one's own blog only makes discovery difficult, it does not limit people's access post-discovery.
Secondly: you appear to consider FB/Twitter etc. to be "virtual public squares". They demonstrably are not this. At the very least, it would require legislation to make them so.
Thirdly: even given the 1st amendment, even physical public squares have distinct limitations in how they can be used. For one thing, they do have geography. Any given public square is a long way from most of the population in a country of any size (even more so in countries like the USA that span thousands of miles), meaning that a particular public square is not effectively accessible to most people. As a corollary, most of the public will never be present in any actual public square.
They also have geometry: there are limits to how many people can speak in them at once.
Finally, in a public square you still cannot do the equivalent of yelling "fire" in a crowded theater, along with presence of simple noise limits for many possible public square locations. These things work very differently, or are non-existent, for written communications.
Exactly. And furthermore, while the big social media platforms help discovery and amplification, they're not that powerful (fortunately). They're not the difference between Faneuil Hall and a remote mountaintop. Posting on Facebook and Twitter is no guarantee of being heard. You can ignore all the major social media platforms and your ability to reach a wide audience is still incredibly democratized.
Yes, that is what I am saying. I am advocating for legislation to protect free speech on platforms like FB and Twitter in a similar (but not identical) way that the First Amendment protects free speech on a public street.
No it wasn't. If you wanted wide distribution of getting a message out to the world (or even wider than your literal public square), you needed it to be published & distributed. That means you had convince a publisher (i.e. a private corporation) to print your pamphlet or have the means to buy your own press. You also had to physically get it into people's hands. The Internet reduces these costs so that making your thoughts available to anyone is easier today than it ever was.
Even if it was, that still doesn't show any implied intention (it certainly is not explicit) of some right for one's speech to be heard. Enforcing such a right would be impossible and probably contradictory to some other freedoms granted in the bill of rights.
Facebook is a roped-off section at the edge of the public square. Most people who visit the public square spend most of their time in this roped-off Facebook section.
In the Facebook section, Facebook concierges monitor each person carefully. The concierge will occasionally bring various third-parties up to each person while constantly gauging engagement as a proxy for how likely a person is to return to Facebook section.
Facebook uses their engagement metric (plus all of the observations taken to derive the engagement) to value and sell access to (through the concierge) their patrons.
You are equating some specific consequences of this concierge service to censorship as if that is the only problem. This censorship is not the only problem it is also not even a relevant problem.
This is the important catch that the article seems to miss completely.
More specifically, it ignores the way engagement-driven distribution affects communication in the FB/Twitter mega-silos.
Good luck building an audience from scratch without having a strong social media presence.
Additionally, your blog can absolutely be "taken down" or canceled, even if through self preservation. Just look at SSC.
Most hosting services have very permissive policies (they have to, they could not possibly preemptively police stuff running in VMs). If you need something more permissive, find an even more permissive hosting service (probably outside the US). I'm not saying that you do anything with a blog and be guaranteed that it stayed available, but you'd have to do way, way, way more than anything a platform like FB/Twitter would take action on.
It seems to me that suggesting that this "takedown" has anything remotely to do with what is being discussed here is disingenous.
What "seems to you" is entirely wrong, but I'm curious as to how you would rationalize dismissing that as "disingenuous"[1] without even attempting to explain how. It seems like you couldn't find a way to actually reject its obvious relevancy, so you chose just not to do it by using a word that seemed like it should be enough to shut down discussion, and leave it at that.
[1]: I'm not entirely sure how the other person was "pretending to know less" by bringing up how SSC had to be taken down because in today's climate, what what was almost done to the author would have threatened his livelihood. It's a quite apt counterpoint to your notion that owning your own domain is some sort of magical protection against censorship.
That’s not the same as saying they should censor, at least not censor in such a way as to effect the public discourse. They have the choice, that does not mean we can only uncritically observe their choices. If they don’t want porn, fine, which is probably a good call because it makes moderating porn a lot easier if you just ban it all, and some forms are illegal and immoral. If they want to ban pictures with the color purple or somebody holding up their hands making an “OK” gesture? That’s a bit more controversial, they can, their servers, their property, that doesn’t make it less stupid were they to do so.
There’s a million alternatives to Facebook and Twitter, tons of social media companies, the goddamned phone system, FaceTime, most chat apps, the bloody pub when the pubs are open again. This does not mean Facebook, Twitter et al. are beyond reproach in their policies, and this is why they walk such a fine line: they’re taking it from both ends.
Customers and users have a right to ask for what they want, more censorship, less, none at all or an extreme moral panic amount, maybe every post should be pre-approved by the Facebook Thought Security & Public Morals Maintenance Bureau before it goes live? I wouldn’t advocate for it, but there’s probably someone that would prefer it and deserves a slap in the head for it.
Ordinary people (i.e. non-tech-nerds) are not going to abandon the large platforms for smaller ones, or federated ones. The huge amount of easily discoverable content large platforms are the reason the audience remains.
So yes, what the large information outlets does matter more than what the small ones do.
Yes, there's a network effect. No, it's not everlasting, or all-encompassing.
Basing current policy on claims about how people will behave in the future seems like a bad idea to me.
But where is the new Usenet for example? Where do you announce new software without using GitHub or Reddit or conferences for marketing?
Search engines don't find it. Torvalds had it easy with announcing Linux.
With limited exceptions, I'm against removal of speech as the verb "censor" is defined here: https://dictionary.cambridge.org/us/dictionary/english/censo...
On FB I've seen warnings added to the bottom of posts, and on Twitter I've seen clickthrough warnings. I think they have every right to do so. What type of content do they go all the way and remove?
This, I think, is the flaw in this argument. People do not always have good intentions, and they are polluting the informational landscape to the point where it's dramatically impacting society.
The principles he's asking for are indeed happening right now, but in a nefarious way:
"Free speech is a good thing" - Sure, but that means 4chan, QAnon, anti-vaxxers, and the like also get loud, free speech now.
"Status quo is bad" - The previous status quo of large, centralized media groups is gone, and with it basic levels of journalistic ethics and transparency.
"Move fast, value experimentation" - Changes are happening to the way information is produced disseminated much faster than societal constructs can keep up. I didn't have to worry 20 years ago about my relatives treating "Hillary Clinton runs a sex dungeon in a pizza shop" FB memes with the same weight as NBC Nightly News.
Fixing these issues, whether by government, tech industry, or otherwise, will involve some level of "authoritarianism".
John Stuart Mill
Just think of all the assumptions that you need to make when you figure out "should I take a COVID-19 vaccine":
* Is this vaccine safe? What do I know about the companies that are making it?
* What even is a vaccine? Are they all the same? How do the different ones work?
* Is COVID-19 even real? Have I personally witnessed people getting sick? Is there statistical evidence that large amounts of people are getting sick? Is the death rate worse than the average flu?
* How do we even know this is transmitted between people? Do masks work? What even is a virus? How do they grow and replicate?
* Are doctors lying to me? Do they have an incentive to? How do I fact-check these claims when I can't travel around the country and see with my own eyes?
* et cetera
You have to rely on some assumptions to be able to answer these questions, which is the whole point of having an educational system at all, and necessarily prioritizes ones that we have deemed "correct". Is this authoritarian? Should we just let children loose on Twitter after they're born and have them re-derive all information for first principles again?
-- Ronald Reagan
By whom, that is the question? By the listener? Probably no.
But once you get committees and probably bots (b/c there is not enough people to judge the entire information flow of today) that decide the weight of X using some flexible criteria for others out there, the bad actors will do their utmost to influence them and get them under control.
And, ten years from now, hey presto! Whatever the Prime Minister does not like, will be classified as misinformation.
This system is accountable to Darwin, not Newton. It evolves.
The authoritarians are as nefarious.
You may not believe it, but when you give a human the power to censor what would make them lose power ("fixing the issue" is how they describe it), it has been historically hard to make them stop using that power.
But that's not the worst. The worst is the other, powerless humans, who nonetheless cheer for the powerful humans to be able to censor them! What do they have to gain? Fleeting feelings of superiority over a different set of powerless humans, at best. And a one-way trip to the Gulag at worst.
So you see, in your planet things may work out fine, but here it's all a bit messier than that. Take my advice, go back to your planet where you know what are the "issues", and how to "fix" them.
Echo chambers are very powerful tools. People don't like to find out they are wrong and modern media platforms make it very easy to surround yourself with content which re-affirms your existing beliefs. It's also extremely easy to unintentionally trap yourself in an echo chamber. The content feed algorithms on most popular social media platforms are basically designed to trap people in echo chambers in order to maximize engagement.
All of the groups you mentioned maintain their limited popularity by capturing their members in information echo chambers. The thing is, people can only be released from echo chambers by exposing them to alternative sources of information. Giving any organization the power to restrict free speech is dangerous because you essentially give that organization power to legally enforce echo chambers.
Personally, I feel safer having fringe groups like QAnon and anti-vaxxers running around than relinquishing that sort of power to any organization.
The mediums are different now but the problems are still the same. Give it time and we will figure it out.
The statement about valuing intentions over outcomes applies just as much to bad intentions as to good ones. People with bad intentions don't always do harm, any more than people with good intentions always do good.
As for actual outcomes, I don't think the case is anywhere near as one-sided as you appear to believe. See below.
> Fixing these issues, whether by government, tech industry, or otherwise, will involve some level of "authoritarianism".
No, "authoritarianism" is what caused problems like your relatives' beliefs. That "previous status quo of large centralized media groups" did not just evaporate; it killed itself by throwing away whatever "journalistic ethics and transparency" it once had (and one can argue that it never had very much; it was just that before the Internet there were no alternate sources of information available so people could see how much politicians and the mainstream media were lying to them). Your relatives believe random Internet sources as much as NBC Nightly News because they know NBC Nightly News will lie to them--because NBC Nightly News, and all the other mainstream media outlets, killed their own credibility.
Why did they do that? Because they thought they were authorities and that the public would regard them as such--since before the Internet the public had done that, because the public had no choice. In other words, the mainstream media thought they had the authoritarian power to declare what is true, even if it's actually a lie. They still think that; it's just that the number of people who don't treat them that way any more is much larger now, and will only continue to grow.
This seems to be what most people expect, that someone else will solve the problem, that someone else will have to step in & take responsibility for all the irresponsible people.
I disagree with this. I think it's up to us. Right now we rely on platforms to communicate & respond, to marshal direct responses. Which is unfortunate. These groups all have their own safe-spaces, have their own moderated environments. They have coordination & dissemination & protected spaces, as they exploit the Bullshit Asymmetry Principle/Brandolini's Law, as they poison & make other spaces unsafe.
What's missing, to me, is some good cross-platform ways to register dissent & disagreement. The aegis, to me, is not other people. It is us. A -1 vote, that we can deploy easily, that we can reinforce each other on, anywhere. Let disagreement be known. Those who want to go further ought bring Issue Based Information Systems (IBIS)[1][2] up & online to talk about the things they have seen online, to link the world of mis-information into their own structured, defined refutations, and let others amplify & support those refutations. Link more, structure more. Do it on our own turf, consolidate our responses, and most of all, support each other, follow each other's feeds, plus one the links, plus one the arguments.
More sunlight, use this great internet, use speech, to cleans away so many of the darker shadier rots. Society, building some aegis, some protection, to shield itself, to let good voices amplify & support each other.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Issue-based_information_system
Proposal: Articles that are hard to read for non-US citizens should be marked [US&A]
-- Borat