I feel like your underlying assumption here is that the average human has a similar level of intelligence and critical thinking skills as the average HN community member.
At the risk of coming across as extremely snobby, that just isn't true at all.
At the risk of coming across as extremely snobby, that just isn't true at all.
If you think the people who grow our food, make our clothes, build our houses and cars, fix our plumbing and heating and air conditioning when it breaks, run our electrical wiring safely, run the utility plants that provide our power and water and sewage disposal, and do the thousands of other things that are necessary to keep our technological society working, have less intelligence and common sense than you do, you don't come across to me as snobby, just woefully uninformed.
I did not mention any of those folks. The reason you knocked that argument out of the park was because it was made of straw.
Yes, you did. You said "the average human". All of those folks are average humans.
In that case, so are all other humans too. The GP did not mention any specific occupational or educational categories; that was all your own invention.
No. My underlying assumption is that my country (the US) is supposed to be a free country, where people are expected to make their own decisions and manage their own lives. If a significant fraction of people aren't capable of doing that, then, as I said in another post downthread, that's a problem, yes, but it's not a problem that can be fixed by just telling everyone to trust the experts. That makes the problem worse, not better.
That's highly dependent on a bunch of stuff that you can not choose at birth. For some variations of those you are going to find yourself decidedly less free than others.
Agreed that blind trust in experts makes the problem worse - in principle. But with hysteria just around the corner (of which the wishful thinking that a cheap and common cure exists is one exponent) I can see why authorities chose to try to massage the message. Where they wrong? Probably, in the general case, yes. Were they wrong in this case? Possibly, but I would not be too sure of that, taking into account that even the highest levels of politics were actively spreading mis-information against informed scientific consensus. If we actually had trusted the experts things would likely look a lot better. But instead, we outsourced our trust and hence our decision making to committees, politicians and the lens of the media.
The fact that every country acted on its own was yet another confounding factor, if this had been a giant synchronized operation then it likely would have worked out differently as well. Even today we are still seeing giant differences between countries, rather than that the rich countries structurally help the poor.
Meaning, which country you are born in? Yes, of course; that's why I specified which country I was talking about.
My original comment about the poor track record humans have of actually advancing "the greater good" when they think that's what they are doing was meant to be general, however.
> If we actually had trusted the experts things would likely look a lot better.
Which experts are these? From what I can see, with the benefit of 20-20 hindsight, two actions that the world could have taken to drastically reduce the impact of COVID, much more than anything anyone actually did, are:
(1) Stop all international travel, sometime around late January or early February 2020.
(2) Make the vaccines that were discovered in January 2020 available, at least to high risk people (e.g., the elderly, health care workers) in high risk areas, sometime in February or March 2020.
I'm not aware of any "expert" that ever recommended either of those things. Indeed, experts were vociferously recommending against #1.
> Meaning, which country you are born in? Yes, of course; that's why I specified which country I was talking about.
Yeah, because there are absolutely no differences between people at birth within a country.
Unless those years of education and experience translate into actually being able to make better predictions about what to do than you can, they're useless as something to rely on.