Patrick McKenzie – How a Discord Server Saved 1000s of Lives [video]

The subject is initially Covid 19 medical interventions but later branches out a bit. The video description has a timestampted list of segments: “Why hackers on Discord had to save thousands of lives”, “How politics crippled common sense vaccine distribution”, “Fundraising for VaccinateCA”, “Why tech needs to understand how government works”, “What is crypto good for?”, “How the US government leverages big tech to violate rights”, “Can the US have nice things like Japan?”, “Financial plumbing & money laundering: a how-not-to guide”, “Maximizing your value: why some people negotiate better”, “Are young people too busy playing Factorio to found startups?”, “Thinking well and finding true rigor”, “The need for a post-mortem”.

Transcript of the first minute or so:

> [00:00:00] California had the most desirable object in the history of the world and rather than adopting any sensible strategy for getting it into people’s arms was bickering over who should get it first.

> [00:00:11] We should be outraged about this and we’re mostly not if you Googled vacine near me before a certain day there was no answer. After that day there was an answer. That answer came from us.

> [00:00:19] The successful project plan was made by a bunch of rank amateurs at this topic on Discord in the course of a couple of hours Society should not rely on us as plan a how did this happen. It is enormously to the United States credit that we have a extremely functional extremely capable tech industry. Maybe we shouldn’t treat it like the enemy.

> [00:00:44] Today I’m chatting with Patrick McKenzie. He is known for many things on the internet, he’s known as patio11. Most recently he ran VaccinateCA which probably saved on the order of high four figure number of lives during Covid.

I did not find this interview interesting. My impression is that it’s much more efficient to read some of patio11’s writings (https://www.kalzumeus.com/greatest-hits/) and posts in HN (https://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=patio11) than watching this video.