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Comment by olalonde | Hacker News Reader

The problem is when we fully defer to scientists on things that are beyond their area of expertise. For instance, while an epidemiologist can provide valuable guidance on measures that could reduce the spread of a virus, they might not be equipped to assess the broader implications of these measures on aspects like the economy, child development, or mental health. Similarly, a climate scientist can project temperature changes for the coming century, but determining the comprehensive impact of these changes on human societies or conducting a cost-benefit analysis of various measures to mitigate it might be outside their domain.

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No one is looking to people who do weather modeling for policy advice. They do occasionally ask economists, but then generally ignore their advice due to being politically unpopular.

I suspect you greatly over-estimate how much politicians listened to epidemiologists during covid as well. A lot of decisions were more out of desire to be seen to be doing something, because the voters went to them and essentially demanded they do something.

"Policy makers", aka the government, should be weighing actions depending on their outcomes as projected by expert consensus. That weighing should be to optimize according to a pre-defined value system, which of course is a matter of political deliberation.

To prefer personal interests (like not to have to wear a mask) over common interests (to protect against pandemic effects) incurs the negative consequences irrespective of whether one pretends to know better than the experts.

To let others play dumb and act against society is to be dumb yourself.

what about deaf people who need to see faces? Or do we not care about those people. What about small children who need to see faces to properly develop? Or does that not matter. What about people who just think they are uncomfortable for whatever reason? Who are you to force others to wear a mask?

Whataboutism very much, but to entertain you:

Yes, what about them?

You conflate individual discomforts with numerous people actually dying or suffering lasting physical damages. Who are you to pretend your personal idiosyncrasies and weird preferences were more important than society as a whole?

Despite the phrase used, this is not whataboutism. They are direct negative results of a practice with benefits in another domain. Weighing then against one another is a real and important thing to do

Whataboutism is more like a redirection / distraction. "X is bad". "Yeah but what about Y that's even worse!" when they aren't even related

Some things are simply not a matter of expertise.

One could theoretically show comprehensively that individual freedoms reduce economic output and decrease average life span, and that would still not be an argument to restrict them.

Why not?

"We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.--That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed."

Maximum economic output isn't the ultimate "good" most people are aiming for.

True, but output is highly correlated with prosperity in most places and through most of history for which we have data. Increased lifespan is also generally understood to be positive.

I would rather not have the government tell me how to live my life even if it means I die young.

At best such things are decided through majority vote, at worst through some series of opaque bureaucratic bargaining.

And the proportion of mostly self-interested folks is quite high in both cases, or at least that's what many HN commentators allege to be the case.

You've answered your own question by posting that response.

You mean like drug abuse?

There are all sorts of things that I personally disagree with that I'll fight for your right to do.

If you want to have ten sexual partners at once, do a ton of drugs, generally live a hedonistic lifestyle, you do you. I'll judge you and won't associate with you, but I'm not going to stand in your way.

The hard cases are when one person’s freedom conflicts with another’s. Like my right to own firearms vs your right to be safe, or my freedom to run my polluting business vs your freedom to have a clean environment, or my freedom to ignore lockdowns in early 2020 vs your freedom to get care at a hospital with capacity.

Sure.

The ability I have to leave my house and walk around is of a different quality to the ability I have to go to the supermarket and buy some food. Positive vs negative rights, something like that. I'm feeling lazy in my explanation but probably you know it already. :)

With drug abuse I feel it's quite simple. If you want to do meth in your home, I think you're a bit daft but I'm mostly happy for you.

If you end up in a tent city under a bridge abusing passers by and committing crimes to get your next hit, well, we should punish that hard.

Yes, this is true, but then who actually takes the decisions? Someone who isn't an expert on anything at all.

I don’t think we need experts, we need polymaths, people who are sufficiently good enough not in one thing, but in multiple things and work at the intersection of the information needed to make proper decisions.

Society is meant to overcome individual shortcomings via constructive collaboration.

Adding individual strengths, not weaknesses, necessitates adherence to some rules in open communication. Science should know explicitly how to do that.

Perhaps I was misunderstood; the idea is that this polymath would collaborate with the experts and act as a bridge between fields.

They ain't the ones in charge either, though I think I agree with the need for such people.

We basically have PR people deciding what's going to look best for them.

Yes, but those polymaths are rare obviously.

Wherefore I mentioned how the same might be accomplished without them, simply by listenening and explaining to each other.

Of course, if you assume individual experts to be really entrenched in their particular fields and entirely unable to bridge the gaps between them, you might be dependent on such talent.

I have never seen a job offering to that effect though?

Fortunately, expertise is not limited to a single concrete topic. There are experts in climate change from a socio-economic perspective, which are able to do science in such complex environments :)

If such experts existed, centrally planned economies would work wonderfully. Unfortunately, they don't. For sufficiently complex problems, the knowledge is diffuse across a wide range of individuals and there is no one expert we can turn to. That's why debate, and tolerating dissent, is important.

Huh? These experts absolutely exist - look e.g. at iSAGE during the pandemic in the UK. They combined epidemiology with sociology to provide a more comprehensive view of the situation. It's just that you ultimately have to listen to people saying "do X, which is expensive". Governments don't on the whole tend to love that.

Dissent is important, within reason. Things like claiming a medication we know is ineffective can cure Covid in the face of 99% of the medical establishment telling you you're a moron is not within reason, for example.

Luckily, scientists don't make these decisions - policymakers do.

This is a non issue.

Rather than do their job of balancing competing priorities, many of the elected policy makers handed the keys over to a bunch of insane public health officials. In many places said unelected, unaccountable public health officials had the authority to enact all kinds of crazy crap. That’s why many blue state cities continued to have mask mandates, vaccine mandates and more well into the three year mark.

If 2020 taught me anything, it’s that technocracy is a horrible form of government. If “heath-care experts” were given the chance, I fully imagine us still playing covid theater to this day.

Again, health officials don't make these decisions. They don't have the power.

> If 2020 taught me anything, it’s that technocracy is a horrible form of government. If “heath-care experts” were given the chance, I fully imagine us still playing covid theater to this day.

You may want to take a look at the mortality rates of the US vs those of other developed nations where the "technocrats", as you call them, were listened to closely. What I see in there is a complete failure of the US as a society, an example of people throwing the most vulnerable under the bus to avoid slight inconveniences like wearing a mask.

Regardless, the opposite of this "technocracy" is leaving specialized agencies in the hands of utterly unprepared people, career politicians, businesspeople and lawyers, instead of scientists and engineers. That is just madness.

> people throwing the most vulnerable under the bus to avoid slight inconveniences like wearing a mask.

That's one variable. I suspect another is ~revenge, for past transgressions, real or imagined.

As the saying goes: "As ye sow, so shall ye reap", and while sayings like this (there are many) is obviously speculative, I suspect there's a lot of truth to it.

> Regardless, the opposite of this "technocracy" is leaving specialized agencies in the hands of utterly unprepared people, career politicians, businesspeople and lawyers, instead of scientists and engineers. That is just madness.

An alternate approach is that we could collectively pursue optimality, regardless of whether that is outside the current Overton Window of behavior. No obligation, but it is an option if things ever get really bad.

This is what so called democracy is advertised as doing, but I suspect that advertising is rather false.

Except if you look at COVID mortality by state, there's only partial correlation between the zealousness of mandates and death rates [link below] Also, easing up on measures that never fully clarified their cost-benefit analysis and caused all kinds of real harm while also often descending into the ideologically and theatrically absurd wasn't just about "avoiding slight inconveniences".

https://www.statista.com/statistics/1109011/coronavirus-covi...

Cannot comment on these numbers, other than the fact that they are incomplete. Again, compared to other developed countries, the US had one of the worst outcomes.

> Also, easing up on measures that never fully clarified their cost-benefit analysis and caused all kinds of real harm while also often descending into the ideologically and theatrically absurd wasn't just about "avoiding slight inconveniences".

I'm waiting for anyone to prove that having to put on a mask was much more disruptive than COVID-19 or death. In HN, "social issues" come up a lot, like kids having to use masks and somehow suffering from "delays" in social learning, which doesn't seem to apply to me, as I have two young kids and they and their friends turned out to be just fine.

Funny though, kids seem to bitch less about masks and vaccines than adults.

> Funny though, kids seem to bitch less about masks and vaccines than adults.

That is only because they are too young to have the life experience required to call bullshit. And even if they could they have zero political power because they are kids.

And keep dreaming about how it caused no damage. We fucked over an entire generation of kids. It’s absolutely shameful what we did to kids. Adults sacrifice for their young. Not the other way around.

> Adults sacrifice for their young. Not the other way around.

Kill them grandpas, I want to go to the bar. Am I right?

A rational response would be to isolate and protect those most vulnerable (65+) and not treat everyone as a homogenous-risk group. The risk to those under 30 was miniscule, despite the news attempting to focus on the few outlier children that unfortunately were on the wrong side of the statistic.

Honest question, how do you isolate their caretakers? And their families? And their neighbors? Also, this would apply to those with comorbidities.

Maybe you start from the premise that you cannot control or contain a highly infectious respiratory virus? Maybe you do a cost-benefit analysis?

Too bad doing cost/benefit was impossible because lockdowns were never tested or proven before being used to the scale we used them. Yet we still did them despite oodles of sound, solid logic suggesting the costs would be astronomical.

That alone should have been a clue that we never should have done what we did. Especially given we already had pandemic plans… even ones created by “experts!!!” Funny they explicitly said to not do literally every single thing we did. But oh well… only covid mattered. Screw everything else.

If you think me going to a bar killed grandmas you are badly, badly misinformed.

In Finland, they started demanding COVID passports for staying at the bar in the evening. Also, if the establishment didn't sell alcohol, you didn't need the passport. The coronavirus is an amazingly smart pathogen, it can tell what you drink. Or the purpose of an outdoor gathering so it will definitely kill churchgoers but spare the BLM protesters.

> In Finland, they started demanding COVID passports for staying at the bar in the evening. Also, if the establishment didn't sell alcohol, you didn't need the passport.

Not true [0]

> Or the purpose of an outdoor gathering so it will definitely kill churchgoers but spare the BLM protesters.

Also, not true. But even if it was, given your apparent position about COVID, you must admit that outdoor gatherings are less risky than indoors.

[0] https://valtioneuvosto.fi/en/-//1271139/restrictions-on-open....

Even if it was “risky” indoors it didn’t matter. State the risks and let people decide what to do. Don’t force a barbaric, draconian, unproven, unscientific set of multi-year mandates on people.

Better to force illness and death, of course!

You sound a lot like the “I want to socialize, fuck them grandpas” kind of crowd. Bet you were devastated when you couldn’t go to the office and had to hang out with the family (ugh) all day long.

What a privileged myopic view you have. I’m glad your experience of the lockdowns worked in your favor. You are incredibly privileged and lucky. Good for you. Many people were not so fortunate.

There is more to life than the myopic focus on covid. Sorry you think otherwise. And shame on you for forcing me into your uncontrolled experiment I never consented to. Morals and ethics apparently don’t apply to covid. Neither does common sense.

Shame on you for not understanding that you are part of the same society you need to make certain sacrifices for, even at the high cost of, oh no, your convenience.

That you also have the audacity of mentioning “morals and ethics”, when you said that “adults should sacrifice themselves”, is further proof of such a hypocritical stance.

I find running uncontrolled experiments on a population without their consent highly unethical and immoral. The whole thing was unethical and immoral. And I have just as much of a right to that opinion as you on yours. Unfortunately society decided to force your opinion, despite being unproven, immoral, and unethical. It is the closest my country ever came to straight up facism. It was scary as fuck how people cheered it all on too.

We never should have mandated a single thing. It was perhaps the most evil thing humans have done. Especially what society did to children. What we did to children is absolutely shameful.

They absolutely did have rules like that - a bar I went to had to adopt those strange measures to stay open. They got amended later when people complained that the measures were completely silly.

Oh please, the contortions done by many clinical experts, media reporters, politicians and so forth to justify the mass gatherings of BLM protests while explicitly condemning other types of large gatherings and protests that weren't given a social seal of politically correct protection were blatant, common and obvious.

As for what you say about outdoor gatherings vs indoor gatherings, you're doing the same. Many of those BLM protests were not well-spaced light outdoor meetups, they involved thousands of people jam packed together in the streets. Aside from political affinity towards them or not, if you're criticizing large gatherings based on COVID fears as many of a certain political persuasion did, the BLM groupings had absolutely no reason to get a free pass.

Health officials literally made extremely poor, technocratic decisions all throughout the pandemic, I don’t know how you can claim otherwise. Quite literally, signs were posted in places like parks, beaches, and outdoor spaces that you could not go there “per order of the health department”.

The idea that you can’t go to the park to get fresh air when there’s an airborne virus floating around in closed spaces is literally the perfect example of a technocracy going completely off the rails.

You may want to read those signs a bit more closely, because the CDC did not close schools, parks, beaches, or restaurants.

> Police enforced the orders in a lot of cases, astonishingly even when there was no law in place delegating that authority to them, or when it was blatantly illegal and contradicted the US Constitution (i.e Religious assembly).

That's one of the things why the US was a laughing stock worldwide: prioritizing going to mass to a pandemic.

But it is worth noting that these orders came from state governor offices, not the CDC. Again, the CDC does not have that kind of power.

My friend, it isn’t 2020 anymore. It’s okay to admit you got fooled. Everybody will eventually convert to my side. Because those of us who see the lockdowns as a colossal mistake will be (sadly) proven right. What we did in response to covid was perhaps the biggest fuckup in human history.

The story of covid is 10% disease mitigation, 20% intellectual error, 30% media fearmongering and 40% politics.

Fooled. Tell that to the million plus people dead.

Like, WTF dude, come back down to earth, there was a pandemic and millions died.

Those people were still gonna die no matter how much yoh shamed people for the audacity of going fishing or going on a hike or using a playground. You can’t control covid. Sorry.

And speaking of… how do yo explain Japan’s huge surges of covid despite being the most mask heavy country in the world? Did the Japanese not take covid seriously?

Anyway I’m bored of this. You will wake up someday and realize how badly you got duped. There are billions of other problems in the world besides covid. The myopic fixation on covid-only was a disaster. History will prove it.

The ratio of infections and deaths in Japan is a small fraction of those in the US, with more population density and an average age 10 years older of that in the US. This is all publicly available data.

Yeah, they did way better with worse odds.

What a egotistic fool you are.

Thanks for the name calling. But don’t worry I’m used to it by now. Your responses do a great job highlighting how naked fear coupled with intense propaganda can turn people into monsters.

I truly believe if one of “the experts” gave permission to physically harm dissenters like myself, my entire family would be dead. And the dudes who snitched me out (which includes you by the way) and executed me and my daughter would go to sleep with a smile on their face. And that is not hyperbole at all.

The fact so many otherwise smart people don’t see that is scary as fuck. Fear, tribalism and propaganda is a hell of a drug.

Next up, “why being stuck at home is literally like nazi Germany”.

Grow up.

You were “stuck at home”. Your expendable delivery boy wasn’t. Neither were the people who made your food, packaged your Amazon shipments, kept your lights on, kept your favorite TV show running. But they are all expendable, right? As long as you are “safe” being “stuck at home” role playing pandemic, all the service workers can all just fuck off die. And shame on them for not “staying the fuck home”, right? And if they got laid off or lost the business they built who gives a shit about that either, right?

Again you have an incredibly privilege take. It’s so easy to cheer for lockdowns and shame those who object when you weren’t personally affected.

Why don’t you grow up? You flushed several years of your very short life down the toilet for absolutely nothing. You got played. Sorry.

You apparently lived through an experience where both the policies proscribed by the government and the organic behavior of the people on the ground constantly changed as an environment of uncertainty slowly turned into one of more certainty, and a lack of medical tools turned into one with multiple tools available... and didn't see ANY of that but just think everything was fearmongering and propaganda.

People and governments behaved differently in March 2020 than they did in September 2020 than they did in January 2021 than they did in July 2021, etc, etc, in extremely reasonable ways.

And you're trying to score political points off the fact that in hindsight you would've done some of those things differently. Well you don't fucking get to have hindsight in advance. Give up your crusade. "What we did in response to covid was perhaps the biggest fuckup in human history" - read more history.

The technocrats themselves didn't believe in their own measures, as seen by press briefings where people took off the masks the moment the briefing was over, or decisionmakers flouting their own rules to go dining out in an indoor location while the plebs were in lockdown.

Anecdotal.

It takes an incredible amount of sheltered privilege to write of what I wrote as anecdotal.

But anything that doesn’t support the politically driven covid narrative is misinformation. I’m used to it by now.

Somebody I once asked me if I’ve been living under a rock when I raised similar concerns early on. Which makes me laugh… the people living under rocks are all the people who cannot see the damage their myopic fixation caused. Writing my concerns off as “anecdotal” just demonstrates my point.

Anecdotal.

> an example of people throwing the most vulnerable under the bus to avoid slight inconveniences like wearing a mask

Which is cool unless you are deaf and need to see faces to understand what people are saying. But who gives a shit about those people… as long as it isn’t covid it doesn’t matter.

Speaking of vulnerable people… how about victims of domestic of violence forced to live with their abuser because of lockdown orders? Doesn’t matter… not covid.

How about the elderly in assisted living facilities who were isolated from their friends and family thanks to lockdowns? Loneliness is an actual killer you know. But since they aren’t dying of covid who cares if they die completely alone. They don’t even get a proper funeral… unless they are George Floyd, then you get multiple huge public funerals. Speaking of funerals none of those “millions” of dead covid people didn’t get funerals either. Only celebrities get funerals in covid land—everything else is a “superspreader” event killing hundreds of grandmas.

Speaking of vulnerable, how about kids whose only safe haven is school? What about special needs kids whose classes and therapies were canceled? What about them? Since it’s not covid, who gives a shit.

Nope. In the myopic world of covidianism, the only thing that matters is covid. Anything else doesn’t matter at all. Covidians can wave the “I’m saving grandma” flag all they want and call everybody else selfish assholes who don’t care about “vulnerable people” but those same people don’t give a flying fuck about vulnerabilities populations at all.

/s ?

Ackshually, plenty of policymakers have no clue about the topics they decide on, and that's a big issue.

> Ackshually, plenty of policymakers have no clue about the topics they decide on, and that's a big issue.

Yes, sarcasm.

When I see someone complaining about technocrats, my eyes roll so hard it hurts.

These people would be happy with a TV host as head of NASA, and see no issues with it.

Who are these “policy makers” and how did they come to power? I believe the leadership in the major blocs(the U.S.A, EU, China) are not doing a great job running the planet.

In most of the western (so called) democracies, the “policy makers” primary skill is being put on a ballot for a political party, by the party leadership, frequently not the most qualified people to rule a country.

Crucially, popular referendums should be held, often and the more radical proposals the more important it is to have the popular support.

> For instance, while an epidemiologist can provide valuable guidance on measures that could reduce the spread of a virus, they might not be equipped to assess the broader implications of these measures on aspects like the economy, child development, or mental health

Amen to that. Some / most of them seemingly had little grasp of the the concept of cost / benefit analysis. And we let these jackasses (some, not all of them) drive the bus!

I don't agree anyone let scientists drive the bus. Scientists advised and the responsibility of balancing that advise against factors such as the economy was entirely the responsibility politicians and leaders.

de facto vs de jure

> Some / most of them seemingly had little grasp of the the concept of cost / benefit analysis

Massive economic impact from social distancing vs massive economic impact from mass casualties and complete collapse of the healthcare system. Those are your choices lol.

Except there were no mass casualties and no first world healthcare system collapsed. Covid was not space aids. We knew this within weeks of “two weeks to flatten the curve” and rather than celebrate the models got it wrong, society decided to double down on the insanity.

At least a million people died in the United States of Covid, and that's probably an underestimate. Imagine if we had done nothing. The healthcare system remained intact because we took public health measures to slow down the spread of the disease.

protecting the young and physicall healthy had zero impact on that number. For the counter argument, you can look at excess deaths in Sweden and some red states (who probably made the right decision for the wrong reason--just do the opposite of what the progressives want).

This is not the problem. The problem is that thinking in terms of these distinct subject matter is at the very heart of the problem. Reality doesn't have a clear divide between different subjects.

You can start from anywhere and build knowledge from there, there is no faculty that gaurantees some knowledge being objective. There is only conjecture and criticism.

i can't think of a better mechanism of dissent than to be more accepting of people outside of their domain trying to make claims on something they're not an expert on. even if its wrong, it can still get people thinking from a different perspective.

If we had made significant investments in CO2 reduction a decade or two earlier when scientists told us the full range of future effects, we would be in a much better position than we are today. Whoever is selling you this “comprehensive impact” nonsense lied to you so they could continue using the atmosphere as a dumping ground.

The GP comment is objectively true. Most climatologists study the climate, rather than the economics of climate intervention. “Climatologists agree that global warming is real” is them speaking within their area of expertise, “Climatologists agree that an investment in solar panels is worth the cost” is laundering their authority from one area into a superficially similar one. The fact that solar panels are worth the cost doesn’t impact this argument

However, since climatologists are much smarter than the average person, I would still rather that the average person defer to climatologists on almost any issue (regardless of what it has to do with the climate)

>since climatologists are much smarter than the average person

What's the logic behind that? Intelligence doesn't conjure up knowledge out of thin air, doesn't make someone any more knowledgeable about something outside their specialisation than anyone else.

It’s an especially weird field to make that claim about, given every major prediction to ever come out of it has been wrong.

Got any data to back up that claim? Because all the data available to me disagrees with you. Here’s an easy to digest presentation of said data: https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/observations/scientists...

Apart from the fact that Scientific American has taken an unfortunate ideological bent the last years and as such is no longer the "unbiased scientific source" it once was reputed to be I don't think the claim of 'every major prediction to ever come out of it has been wrong' can be refuted by an article which claims that 'things are even worse than currently predicted'. It could be refuted by showing earlier predictions from climate science which did come true. This is probably what transcriptase was referring to when he made that claim as it is indeed hard to find historical climate predictions - made before the subject was politicised - which turned out to be true while the field is littered with predictions which turned out to be wrong. From Ehrlich's famine forecasts through the new ice scare of the 70's to acid rain there are plenty of examples where things did not turn out as predicted.

Maybe you have some examples where the predictions actually came true? If so, please share them. It is much harder to find out when things went as predicted than the opposite since the former does not nearly get as much attention as the latter.

A downvote is not a vote of confidence in climate science but more of the opposite. I can only assume that there is no proof to be had of earlier predictive successes and with that the original statement made by transcriptase is strengthened rather than weakened. Assuming that this is not the intended result it would be good to get an actual answer to the request - give some examples of predictions close enough to the mark to matter.

You may think this is just a word game but there is more at play. Blind belief in the outcome of flawed models is a bad foundation for good science. Climate models are notorious for their dependency on 'fudge factors', magical constants which need to be introduced to make their outcome match the expected one. It is not clear what those fudge factors actually represent, it can be anything from a simple miscalculation of a given effect of one of the inputs - i.e. something which does not change the predictive power of the model once the factor has been dialled in correctly - to an unknown variable input which has substantial effect on the output. The latter can seriously affect the predictive power of model output since it is by definition unknown whether the fudge factor is related to the output in some way, e.g. cloud cover affecting temperature sensitivity which in turn affects cloud cover leading to uncertainty in the climate sensitivity of simulated inputs. Cloud cover is just an example, there are many other similar factors which can wreak havoc with the predictive capacity of complex and sometimes - often - poorly understood models.

Scientific American is becoming borderline misinformation machine. You're spot on, don't mind the downvotes and flagging on HN. It's a badge of honor at this point.

> However, since climatologists are much smarter than the average person, I would still rather that the average person defer to climatologists on almost any issue

Half of everyone is 'smarter' than the other half.

There are climatologists that are not 'smarter' than me. Should they defer?

> However, since climatologists are much smarter than the average person, I would still rather that the average person defer to climatologists on almost any issue (regardless of what it has to do with the climate)

Its not always a mater of smarts - you also have to look at the incentives. A scientist that tells you everything is fine gets a lot less attention than one telling you to panic.

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