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I see this as directly correlated with the gradual denigration of liberal arts education, a core tenet of which is critical thinking.

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Liberal arts education leaders haven't been doing themselves any favors. During the recent COVID-19 pandemic we saw many college administrations abandon all critical thinking to enforce blind obedience and mandatory compliance with pointless and counterproductive policies around lockdowns and mandates. Scientists were condemned for daring to even discuss alternative views.

I absolutely see value in classical liberal arts education. But popular denigration is inevitable when people see hypocritical academics casting aside true liberal thinking and using their platform to promote pernicious ideologies.

Million of people die in the US. In a pool of 300 million people that might be a small minority but it could be much worse.

I was diabetic and still am, and was obese. I was also young. There's no telling that a viral infection would have landed me in the hospital but I do have risk factors.

COVID is definitely a risk. It would be foolish not to practice at least some measure of risk control.

There's definitely some loss of trust in institutions, but if it weren't for RFK, I would still trust them more than some random skeptic covid. Now, I don't trust the FDA anymore, how ironic.

In Southern California, surfers were arrested for surfing on an empty beach. Parks were closed. This was hailed as a safety measure. I suspect these sorts of policies are what GP was talking about, rather than vaccines or masking.

These were completely valid short-term responses to a situation where an effectively quarantined country had a small outbreak in Venice Beach and we didn't know a lot about spread.

But we were not that country. If the front door is wide open and there's a large sign above it saying "Free stuff - take what you want" because your spouse wants to embrace minimalism and throw away all your joint belongings, then triple deadbolting the back door and installing security cameras are not effective measures to protect your belongings.

There are other policy areas where states can experiment with "Red state" vs "Blue state" policies and compare how they perform, but pandemic spread is not one of them. The most permissive line of defense is the decision that has been made for everyone, and all it takes is one person (we used to call these 'bioterrorists', now we call them 'Presidents') to decide to "get this over with before the election", and it renders any other sensible precautions moot.

Areas where very aggressive precautions were implemented to counterbalance reckless policies elsewhere... didn't do that. You can't do that, without a very strong quarantine around the different policy regions.

This does not offer any commentary on the idea of sensible precautions, in a vacuum. The politicization of COVID that happened very rapidly didn't need to occur, and it did not occur in most other pandemics in this country, or in many other countries during COVID.

You should read about the politicization of the 1918 flu: https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC7893336/

You picked two odd examples. A beach is debatable as being capable of being opened and closed, and whether or not a person is tresspassing, but parks are generally managed by the state or country. Of course they can close down. They typically close from subset to sunrise.

The idea of a beach closing at night-time was novel to me, when I first came to the US. In the UK beaches are ... just beaches, their status is that of "beach", and access is not controlled at all.

Generally there's a fine for being caught sleeping on the beach I think, but that's really to discourage people being swept away.

With a few exceptions for snooty uptight municipalities who've written rules far beyond the norm you're generally allowed on the beach 24/7 on the east cost and access is likewise uncontrolled (except New Jersey). I can't speak to the west coast.

I picked two examples of everyday activities that should have been obvious to everyone that they were safe.

Mere weeks later public health authorities encouraged this sort of behavior (going to the beach or the park with ample space between individuals). It seemed a relevant example of "pointless and counterproductive policies around lockdowns"

> There's definitely some loss of trust in institutions, but if it weren't for RFK, I would still trust them more than some random skeptic covid. Now, I don't trust the FDA anymore, how ironic.

I stopped trusting the institutions the moment that the CDC admitted that they lied to people about "masks aren't effective" in an effort to preserve supplies for hospitals. Even if their motivation was good, that doesn't matter in terms of trustworthiness. If they lie to me (as they indeed did), I'm not going to trust them any more.

I would find that a little more convincing if the people complaining about being lied to about the efficacy of masks were also the people who were afterwards arguing most strongly in favour of masks.

Strangely, it appears to be the opposite.

That doesn't seem that strange. If they can't trust an institution, people stop trusting lots of things.

No, people are supposed to then test themselves

I think it's very easy to Monday morning quarterback administrative decisions about COVID-19 mitigation now that we're past it, when, at the time, we had very little information which led to a ton of hysteria. I'm not going to relitigate the COVID-19 pandemic response, but I will say I don't think it was inconsistent or ill-advised at all to err on the side of following national health guidance in an emergent situation like that. Even from a purely legal/lawsuit-aversion standpoint, you'd ignore federal guidance/mandates at your financial peril.

> at the time, we had very little information which led to a ton of hysteria

If anything, this simply underscores GP's point. Getting hysterical when you lack information is a total failure of critical thinking, so to the extent that liberal arts educators did so, we should be skeptical of their ability to think critically.

No, that's not a correct conclusion in full generality. The first days of Covid where a case of decision-making under uncertainty: what if R had been 10 and the fatality rate had been 25%? We did not know at first, and these are not absurd numbers: they have existed in past pandemics and if they had held again, fatalities could have been in the tens of millions. Locking down until you can gather more data to rule out this possibility is a rational decision under that uncertainty, because there's asymmetric downside risk of "tens of millions die" versus "chattering internet commenters are annoyed they can't go to the beach".

There's more of an argument here regarding lockdowns going on longer than they needed to, but as much as people want to blame "the experts", most of that was bottom-up from voters. To cite one example, despite how many times I've heard to the contrary, the CDC never, at any point, recommended school closures: that was pure grassroots demand from parents.

You're really missing the point. Many liberal arts college administrations went far beyond any sort of federal government guidance, and imposed lockdown and mandate policies with zero scientific basis. Or look how the Stanford University administration and fellow academics treated Dr. Jay Bhattacharya; that story was repeated at colleges all over the country. The level of hypocrisy and inconsistency makes it clear that they don't deserve any sort of benefit of the doubt.

Classical liberal arts are wonderful, and have been a great benefit to all of humanity. But sadly many academics no longer live up to those ideals in thought, word, and deed. Instead they're more focused on indoctrination and political advocacy then a search for higher truth. If they want to restore public trust in liberal arts education then they need to start by reforming themselves. Otherwise no one will take them seriously, and many taxpayers will oppose public funding.

>imposed lockdown and mandate policies with zero scientific basis

The If Books Could Kill podcast just came out with an episode last week about how the phrase "lockdown and mandate policies [have] zero scientific basis" is almost technically true but is certainly incredibly misleading. The short version is that it would be incredibly difficult to ethically test many healthcare policies to the point that they have scientific support in the way we usually think of having evidence... but we can look at the preponderance of evidence we do have and understand that masks help block germs and viruses, staying home from work or school means I won't transmit contagious diseases to my colleagues, etc

https://www.buzzsprout.com/2040953/episodes/17348825-in-covi...

Isolation and masking have been proven again and again to minimize the transmission of infection. There are still 700-1200 excess deaths per week: https://www.pmc19.com/data/PMC_COVID_Forecast_June232025.pdf

I don't know how any of that had to do with liberal arts. To give you the benefit of the doubt and assume you're interpretation is correct: do you blame the person when they panic in a major earthquake, as they watch their peers crushed around them?

It wasn't normal times and abnormal times need preparation. It's a great thing the acting president during COVID removed the pandemic response team the previous year. It's not wonder we were chickens wandering about without our heads.

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