But what we are seeing here is deplatforming of organizations and people that represent the leadership of a much more mainstream movement that includes a huge fraction of the U.S. - half the country voted for trump! So this is one of those things where a difference of degree becomes a difference of kind. I don't think this is going to end well.
[edit] - as an nuclear engineer - that study you cited reminds me of perturbation theory. You make a small tweak to the system and develop a model to fit how such small changes affect the larger system. But perturbation theory conclusions don't scale accurately up to "large" perturbations. If you pull the control rods a tiny bit in a subcritical reactor - you get higher neutron-multiplication factor for your existing/present neutron sources. So you might think that if you pull the rods 10 times as far, you get 10 times the multiplication - but you'd be wrong. If you pull them 10 times as far you go super critical and then you get like 1,000,000,000 times as much multiplication.
There is clearly a large disenfranchised segment of the population. They have all kinds of reasons with varying degrees of veracity. Lots of people are trying to ignore it, sweep it under the rug, etc. But the real problem here is that a lot of corps+people are trying to "fix" it by stamping it out. Nearly half of the U.S. voted for trump - so I don't think stamping it out is going to work - but it might lead to worse things.
I agree authoritarianism is dangerous. I also agree that authoritarian dystopias can be driven not just by governments, but also by powerful corporations. I don't really see too much of an important distinction between either. This banning is effectively authoritarianism - just not perpetrated by a government (directly - but possibly indirectly to appease the new administration/govt by a large corp). I think we should be just as concerned about this as if it were perpetrated by a govt.
I don't understand how the same people who said we should defund the police are forcefully suggesting that we need a strong police response here? I'm not going to take any sides. All sides are so rife with hypocrisy that I just don't know what to say.
In the absence of evidence either way, I think it's a pretty reasonable assumption. Without some level of assumptions, we would be paralyzed and useless - never able to make decisions. Use the data we have - make reasonable assumptions, revise assumptions as new information is available. I can speak from the experience of myself and those I know - which is that death hurts - period. It's also inevitable. Make your peace with it. Don't let your fear of death ruin your life (and the lives of others). Who are you to assume that these mitigations are less bad for society than the alternative? Because you also make assumptions. I'm just saying some people feel and assume differently than you. Just because they disagree with you doesn't mean that they aren't reasonable, well-read, thoughtful, people that have good reason to feel/think differently than you.
My entire take was explicitly _not_ based on discounting the value of older people's years. Also, the loss from death is felt by loved ones regardless and is approximately the same whether someone dies this month, next month or next year. Generally, w.r.t. the pandemic we are very rarely talking about someone that is losing more than a couple years. I explicitly said I was not discounting the value of older people's years - for the sake of conservative argument. You aren't arguing against my point. You just found a way to turn it into an emotional issue. I care about old people. I have 3 grandparents in their mid 80s who I love very much. Although it might be easy to allow yourself to dismiss my argument because you can convince yourself that I just don't care about my fellow man and the aging population - that is simply not the case. I was saying that a reasonable argument could be made for discounting those years, but I didn't for my numbers arg. My point still stands.
I've done plenty of reading on keynesian economics. I understand that it's not always a zero-sum game, etc. etc. Also, I never advocated for ignoring the plight of humans. We should always strive to help and lift each other. But there are always costs. We can all agree that I, for example, probably shouldn't give away my resources to the point that my children go hungry. But I certainly can make sacrifices to help others. I was never arguing that. Just saying that we can't evaluate the benefits we get without taking into account the costs. And just because the costs might be difficult to measure and don't feel as immediately sharp doesn't mean it is wise to be dismissive about them.
What makes you think I'm refusing to take precautions? I take precautions consistent with how I perceive the risk to myself and others - just like I always have my entire life. Just like you have your entire life. Ebola is a completely different risk/tradeoff profile than covid. Consider how many quality of life years have been lost due to things "saving" us from the pandemic. I'd wager we've had at least a ~10% reduction in quality of life for everyone in the U.S. (that's where I live so I'll use the example). That's 300+ million people for about a year. That's 30 million quality of life years lost. How many people will we have saved? Maybe 500,000? On average they had maybe 3 years left to live each. Also, people dying tended to not have a great quality of life (i.e. they were near the end of their life anyway) - but just to keep the estimate conservative we won't discount/reduce the worth of their final years. So we saved 1.5 million quality of life years. What kind of moronic tradeoff is that?
The pandemic doesn't exist in a vacuum. It's not as if we can ignore everything else and just mitigate for the pandemic at all costs. The economy and social infrastructure/interaction is extremely important to the physical and mental health of everyone on the planet.
There are all kinds of rights that have nothing to do with what people can do on their own property. Read almost every amendment - many have to do with rights we have places outside our own personal property. The entire point of this discussion is about what we are allowed to do in places nobody "owns" - i.e. places the govt owns - because the govt's purpose is to serve the people after all. Your argument is hopelessly broken here. What if the government told you you didn't have the right to leave your property - even to get food for yourself. Too bad for you - you are only free to get food on your own property. You probably wouldn't like that I suspect.
These specific changes won't be permanent - I agree. But the precedent they set for the future will be. And, in the mean time - these mitigations have and are having a huge personal impact on me, my wife, and my children - among others. Just because a lot of these things might not be a big deal to you, doesn't mean they're not a big deal to others. And I'm tired of people telling me that these things aren't a "big deal" to me. How the hell can they know how big of a deal they are to me? That's up to me to decide.
Yeah - And I should invest specifically in Mexico because my grandma happened to be born there. African Americans - are Americans. They often have their own American subcultures, but the U.S.A is their home. Sure they have history connecting them to somewhere. But they can invest wherever the heck they want. No need to limit our generosity to our many generations removed ancestral roots.
But don't you realize it's completely circular? You have the right to have me not have the right to infect you. But don't I also have the right to have you not have the right to have me not have the right to infect you? The point is. How much do we want to limit _individual_ freedom in order to achieve community/global safety. This is not a black/white question with a right/wrong answer. As much as you want it to be a cut-and-dried issue - "you're rights end where mine begin", etc. - it is not. It is trivial to disassemble any argument along those lines. At the end of the day - it's all about freedom vs safety. It's fine if you don't draw your line in the same place. But trying to imply/suggest that your position is somehow objectively more right/true is ridiculous.
I'll try hard to keep the discussion nuanced. Governments are basically institutions that we allow to restrict our freedoms for some benefits - safety, various common-good things, etc. We all have our preference for where we draw this line personally on the liberty/convenience <--> safety spectrum. A lot of people (including myself) feel like these lockdowns, pandemic mitigations, etc. have far crossed the acceptable line in this spectrum. In my opinion, I'm not fighting a virus any more. I'm fighting people trying to steamroll my rights and lifestyle. Others may feel differently - they may feel like for the sake of global/community safety, I should have fewer rights. I don't feel that way. This isn't binary. Nobody is right or wrong - we are all fighting for our line on the spectrum.
Well - The hacker news community is not even remotely representative of the U.S. population (nor typical pops in other countries I suspect). If you thought it was, then you'd think 90% of everyone in America voted for Biden. But it was much closer to 50-50. So these forums are only useful for understanding the positions of people on these sorts of forums.
So he draws his line in a different place. Perhaps he didn't do his full position justice. Maybe he feels like the lost human connection, dress code for your face, forced shutdown of certain businesses, school closures (and online learning) are costs that are not worth the benefit we get. I could hardly blame him. The online communities I follow often seem to be overwhelmingly in support of stricter mitigations, etc. Maybe he feels like he's been yelling into the wind for too long to keep up the nuanced discussions.
For me personally, I likely feel similar to him. From all the data I've seen - the vast majority of people - especially the workforce - have very little to worry about personally. The small (but not negligible) fraction of people that have increased risk can often reasonable take their own appropriate extra precautions. Then there is the even smaller fraction that can't reasonable take the precautions that they feel they need - those are the people we should work to support directly. We should be able to do this without broad, sweeping measures that are just completely not necessary for the direct benefit of most people.
Let's not create an either-or strawman for either side on this issue. The fact of the matter is - there has always been and always will be a convenience/liberty <---> safety tradeoff. This is a spectrum. We can all disagree with each other on where the right place is to draw the line on the spectrum - but it is ridiculous to imply that reasonable people can't have drawn their line (for good reasons) in a different place than you.
That was a good rebuttal. My point, which apparently I didn't make very well, was that we accept some danger in order to avoid some limitations on liberty. It is not a binary tradeoff. We could choose to enforce those rules or make them more strict and save even more lives potentially, but we don't. Because society has decided to draw our line in a certain place on the liberty/safety spectrum. You and I and many others draw our lines in different places on this spectrum. That's fine. I don't dismiss other arguments against my position as being made by dumb, uninformed people. We need to be careful to avoid judging all the sides by their "worst" proponents.
It's a matter of extrapolating the fatality/damage rates out to everyone on the globe. We take that hit plus a bit of fallout - or we can try to continue dealing with things in the big, long, drawn-out, messy way much of the world has been doing. Sucks both ways. Some people prefer one suck - and others prefer a different suck.
I live in one of those "shitshow" states. And the vast majority of the population here is completely fine with how things are panning out - except maybe the reduced restaurant capacity and part-time schooling - those are pretty annoying. You can't force people to care about things they just do not care about. I acknowledge that some people (legitimately) have different values w.r.t. tradeoffs of dealing with covid. They don't have to be stupid or uniformed or brainwashed to think differently than me. And neither do I or many of those shitshow makers have to be brainwashed or uniformed to think/feel differently than you.
Just because people drive like A-holes around me when I'm riding my bicycle on the road doesn't mean that I should try to get the government to take away their cars by force. Or to force them to never go over the speed limit. Or to force them to only drive smaller cars with better visibility out the windows. Sure it would be nice if people did all these things. But I don't think it's right to force any of it. I'm sorry about your wife - that would be really scary and suck. I hope that both of you are able to stay safe and healthy.
You tell them that it's in the noise w.r.t. the danger of being alive - because it is. But instead we have news and social media shouting from the rooftops that everyone is going to die or have some nightmarish long-term effects. All of which are no more significant than the risks people take every day on _purpose_. Driving, hiking, swimming, socializing, getting drunk, etc. Sure it's communicable - we've been happily spreading communicable diseases for millennia that kill people. Nature is cruel. But don't expect society to stop "living" to avoid dying.
Nobody is invulnerable to anything. But we should never make generalized/universal policies to the detriment of the masses motivated by long-tail extremes. Just because we don't know how to reliably measure the (real and large) impact of mitigations, doesn't mean we can/should pretent that impact doesn't exist. It's all about tradeoffs. And I'm tired of emotional heart-strings cases that are "easy" to measure stamping out all the real effects of mitigations that are "hard" to measure. And I've also heard way too much about, "but if we could have responded effectively/quickly like China/Vietnam/New Zealand then we wouldn't have been _forced_ to do these other damaging mitigations" - that is a theoretical idea/world that we don't live in. Given the actual situation - that we live in a country with free-spirited/selfish people with pretty significant individual liberties, how should we address the virus? That is the real question.
Why isn't it valid to acknowledge all the data/risks, and still feel like we should just let the virus run its course? I know of tons of people who feel this way. You are arguing against a straw-man. Yes, there are many conspiracy theory nutcases out there. But people who believe all the numbers and still think we are overreacting are still being censored/ignored to oblivion. Not only that, but my (highly reliable ;-) anecdata tells me that most of these people are busy raising kids and growing the food you eat. Just because they don't have the time to spray their opinions all over the internet and petition their govt officials to freak out doesn't mean that their viewpoints are less valid.
Not having vulnerable people close to you is not the only way you can hold my position/view. I have three grandparents who I love dearly in their 80s - one with diabetes, one with rheumatoid arthritis, and the other with lung scarring from tuberculosis. My parents are approaching 60. My wife's parents are in their 70s (both have had covid already). And I have several of my own children. My position is that, yes covid sucks. In my personal view/opinion, the danger/risk levels of covid don't warrant anything nearly so severe as what has been going on all over the world. Let people live. Don't treat them like babies that need to forced to take their medicine. We've long since crossed the liberty/safety threshold I'm comfortable with.