I would like to see the evidence about lockdowns not destroying businesses as well. I was working for an economic development company in the second half of 2020, and we saw many businesses failing in the region. Not a huge percentage more than usually fail, but that was coupled with a very low rate of new business formation. Instead of the normal churn of closings and openings resulting in small net positive growth, there was significant loss of businesses.
Second half of 2020 is when lockdowns were gone though, right? Depending on what you mean by lockdown. In any case, most of the economic effects of 2020 were probably due to the reactions of the general public to the pandemic, and it's questionable to try to attribute all of that to the government policies (which is what I assume "lockdown" refers to).
Not in Pennsylvania. Lockdowns and hard limits on businesses continued till 2021.
As to whether it was just public reaction, that might be some of it, but the desired level of self quarantine varied quite a bit by region. There was a lot of... tension... between citizens and the government due to ridiculously draconian rules locking things down. The long duration was a big reason for business failures, as firms were running out of working capital, due to being closed or forced to run at severely reduced capacity.
Bit of a question for you: how do you go from "Second half of 2020 is when lockdowns were gone though, right?" to "most of the economic effects of 2020 were probably due to the reactions of the general public to the pandemic, and it's questionable to try to attribute all of that to the government policies"? The structure of those two seems to assume there cannot be any effect of lockdown policy, as by the second half they were gone and 2020 was all private reactions anyway.
I mean, I get that you're saying that the specific incident was not predictable (though animals crawling into boxes and breaking things is a recurring problem that should be predictable enough to warrant putting some mesh over every opening), but that doesn't mean you can't prepare for a general class of "something bad happens to one specific box of equipment, how does the rest of the system cope?". A plan that needs everything to go right is very fragile, good plans allow for a couple of things to go wrong, and have generalised contingencies.
My question is: Why isn't anyone else doing this specific analysis? You would think that governments, universities, etc. would be motivated to do this type of analysis. (Maybe they are, and I just don't read the right blogs to see those posts?)
My semi-flippant response is that this sort of heavy meta-analysis will get you close to the right answer. And doing something that will inevitably lead you near the right answer means that you might end up finding out you were wrong. And for many institutions, admitting you were wrong is *bad*
Is no one else doing this specific analysis? I feel like it's one I've seen a lot of examples of in my social networks.
I haven't seen anyone try to publish something this general, but the problem for publication is that if you attempt something this general, you'll really have to look at *everything*. Instead, published work has to focus on one method and/or one measure, and those published studies are the fodder for this sort of thing.
The British Government has been repeatedly requested by backbench MPs in the ruling party to provide a cost/benefit analysis of lockdowns and other restrictions. They have, in turn, repeatedly refused to do them. Perhaps this situation would be a starting point for where to look?
The govt's reasoning ended up being that a cost/benefit analysis is too hard to do. But if it's too hard to know if doing something is a good idea or not, standard practice would surely be to not do it?
"if it's too hard to know if doing something is a good idea or not, standard practice would surely be to not do it?"
If it's too hard to know if doing X is a good idea or not, then it's *also* too hard to know if doing not-X is a good idea or not. Unless you have some principled way of determining which thing is X and which thing is not-X, and always doing the not-X when you can't determine which is good, this isn't going to be a viable "standard practice".
What distinguishes this case in particular is that the downsides of the "not-X" scenario are going to be obvious, quantifiable and horrible (N deaths, with the tally updated every day) and the downsides of the X scenario are going to be diffuse, non-obvious and (as this post shows) unquantifiable.
Sure! That's probably the most common impetus for 'we need to do something, THIS is something, let's do THIS' generally and I would expect it to be an extremely constraining force on any relevant decision makers.
When in doubt, do the thing that won’t get you fired if you are wrong.
This sounds flippant but I think it’s actually a quite strong explanation of what’s going on.
Also worth noting - while I can’t praise the UK’s handling of COVID (remember they gave up on contact tracing in favor of a herd immunity strategy early on, which led to them being one of the worst countries in the world for deaths), I think they are an example of what happens when politicians simply let public sentiment (or their perception of public sentiment) steer their actions; the public wasn’t asking for a cost/benefit at the time, and wasn’t interested in choosing actions in such a framework. (See “pause AZ because it might kill 1/1000 of the people it saves”, “forbid human challenge trials”, or “delay approval for vaccines that are clearly effective in other countries”.). The public was terrified, and Something Must Be Done.
The core mechanic I’ve seen is that a rational response to changing data looks like indecisive flip-flopping to the public, and feels like such to politicians. Public health policy folks are aware of this too. And the low rationality of the public strongly constrains what paths you can take, particularly once you’ve picked an initial direction.
"while I can’t praise the UK’s handling of COVID (remember they gave up on contact tracing in favor of a herd immunity strategy early on, which led to them being one of the worst countries in the world for deaths)"
My impression is that many countries didn't successfully do contact tracing, only a few did. Am I mistaken?
I suppose it depends on what you mean by "successfully". I think the UK did
worse at it than most EU states, and better than the US, though they started off well enough. The issue is that contact tracing is harder the more cases you have, so it's a strategy where you really need to strongly commit early on. Countries like New Zealand (kind of a special case given it's a relatively low-population island country) and S Korea would be some examples where they pushed hard to do contact tracing and seem to have kept a lid on things more convincingly than other countries.
I would argue (as Scott alludes to in his post) that in hindsight, a better approach would have been to do much more intensive contact tracing from the beginning, and this should be one of the lessons we keep in mind for future outbreaks.
I wasn't claiming that the UK was uniquely bad at contact tracing though -- the "in favor of herd immunity" bit was what I think is most damning. In other words, they started off with a plausibly sound strategy in place, and then abandoned it for the worst possible strategy; the delta there is very pronounced.
I'm not sure if your examples of what the public wants are supposed to refer to the UK, but I don't think they work if they are. The UK never paused AZ use, although it did restrict its use to older people, and did allow human challenge trials (I'm not sure about the timing of vaccine approvals).
People writing about lockdowns on blogs? There are a lot of people doing this sort of analysis. I've read dozens of them, almost all of which conclude lockdowns are bad and not worth the cost, usually due to weak evidence for the counterfactual but sometimes for other reasons like the impact on education.
Here's a response to Scott posted on the Daily Sceptic, which started out as a UK blog for lockdown sceptics and thanks to the never-ending restrictions is now evolving into something more. It posts analysis of lockdowns and related topics literally every day:
The tl;dr of the article is: where's the studies showing no impact on mortality; models like CoronaGame aren't "actual evidence", claims about Sweden aren't using age-adjusted mortality and don't use all the data throughout 2020, educational/remote learning impact ignored.
Which, in fairness, is the sort of thing this new blog post is reflecting upon - the difficulty of capturing all the evidence, all the angles and arguments etc.
Here's another article providing a response to a pro-lockdown analysis:
tldr: new paper claims lockdowns don't cause worse health outcomes but ignores all non-health aspects; paper argues no excess deaths in short term which is probably true but what about the long term when you consider restricted healthcare access e.g. missed cancer screenings; the alternative scenario is presented as doing nothing vs focused protection (daily sceptic/lockdown sceptics as a site tends to be in favour of Great Barrington).
I would say that the destruction of schooling is not only an emotional impact but a much more serious pragmatic one, especially given that schools have not at any point been important to health outcomes due to COVID's overwhelming preference for the old and sick. So it seems like it should play a key role in any analysis.
At any rate, if you aren't aware of this sort of analysis it's not because it hasn't been happening but because you aren't moving in the right social circles to find it.
Re Schooling; Walking the dogs the other day, I was thinking about dog years and time sense. (Do dogs experience time ~7x faster than we do, a daily walk for me is once a week for them?) And this is certainly true of children. I'm sure we can all remember how long the years were when we were 5-10 years old. So a five year old missing a year is a way more important than a 50 year old missing a year.
I'm not sure that it's they experience time more slowly, but the time expereinced represents a greater proportion of their total memory of time so seems longer, and this sense of "more time" persists because as we get older al time experienced is less of a fraction of the total so it seems faster after the fact, and we remember it seeming faster. Plus the younger we were, the less total information we had to carry, so time seems longer. I.e. Imagine you are locked in a white room for an hour as a child versus an adult. As an adult, you could probably pass the time by thinking about things/remembering things, but as a child you are mostly focusing on your environment/current situation so it seems much longer in hindsight. But it would be hard to see how you were actually expereincing time moving slower in the present moment. I think adults spend more time thinking and perhaps for many of them more time doing tedious, non-memorable repetivie tasks, so it seems like time was longer when everything was relatively new and less internal thinking relative to external perception was done.
Universities, maybe, but why would governments be motivated to do this type of analysis? Governments are driven by the politician's syllogism, "something must be done, this is something, therefore this must be done". In March/April 2020, most Western governments were not in a position to do anything obviously and immediately useful, therefore they had to do something mostly useless(*). Performing an analysis that might reveal the thing they are doing as mostly useless, is not in their political interest.
They could and should have done research on how to selectively target the lockdowns to make them more useful and less harmful in June/July, but that's not quite the same thing as the top-level "are lockdowns net good or bad" that Scott was looking at. It's also more difficult and doing it right has a Copenhagen-ethics mad-sciency vibe.
* And maybe also some long-term useful stuff behind the scenes, but they had to to something visible and immediate.
What's the market for them? The usual answer to "Why isn't someone doing X?" is "There is nobody who is willing to pay enough to have X done that the people skilled in the art of X are willing to shift their efforts from whatever else they're doing to earn grocery money to X."
As a statistician, I'm very skeptical of people who crenulate their zeugmas. Just because you have some asymptotic zuegmoyal theory doesn't mean that it applies well to finite samples. If you're going to be a Crenulist, at least verify that Epstein's theory holds in your data set!
So what the author should do, start thinking about finite-sample umpirics? I thought the results like ET are not really relevant unless you are in a field like pulpology where you have a good idea of the underlying umpire principles (and you can draw a rephantasm on blackboard, look at the arms and see them flow). But I have understood that with this kind of moebius, we don't know the umpire, and there are so many plausible rephantasms you don't really have good reason to choose any over other?
I am more of armorical omnitronics person, so the way we were taught to think about crenulation in our armorical statistics class, the Crenulist approach can provide reasonable approximations, as long as you choose appropriate Bacon hamburger crenulates for myriads so that you don't overzeugma them, and plot the paranoids to check for any holisticity. There are tribbleworld R packages for that kind thing.
> One thing I found helpful was to ask Person A what they thought of Person B's work, relay it to Person B, Person B would say something like "he's neglecting to consider that you need to fulminate the synecdoche", then I would relay that back to Person A, and after enough of this I would get a meaningful sense of where they disagreed (or occasionally one of them would just admit they had made a mistake).
This is *EXACTLY* the model I've found myself stumbling into working on my Georgism follow-up. I've got all the Georgists on one side telling me everything checks out, and then a bunch of skeptics on the other, and all of them have impeccable credentials and PhD's in econ or tons of professional experience, and I'm just a guy who read a book and wrote about it on the internet that one time.
So far the above method seems to work. Speaking of:
@Erusian, if you're around I'd like to get in touch off-site so I can send you some of the best arguments about the practicalities of land assessment so I can start the claim->response->counter-claim->counter-response cycle, if you're up for it. Email me at lars dot doucet at gmail dot com if you're game.
Okay I think I found the article by Ricardo you're referring to, assuming the "idea" you referred to is LVT specifically.
So I am (somewhat) familiar with it, though indirectly. I knew Ricardo and Smith laid the foundation for George but I was a bit fuzzy on their exact positions on LVT. I was pretty sure Smith supported something like it but wasn't sure about Ricardo. A friend pointed out a section from "Taxation: The Lost History" by Terence Dwyer that quotes from the Ricardo piece I think you're mentioning, if you want to confirm:
-------
> The doctrine that a tax on rent cannot be shifted is given its classical formulation at the hands of Ricardo (Ch. X, Pgf1-3). The tax is on infra-marginal surplus, which does not enter into price, and hence cannot be shifted. However, Ricardo (Ch. XIV, Pgf6), unlike Smith, did not favor the special taxation of rents, in part because it seemed to him a violation of horizontal equity (treating equals equally). Ricardo (Ch. X, Pgf2-3) also objected to the practical difficulty of assessment and the consequent danger of taxing the returns to capital sunk in the soil, but he also recognized that landlords would soon separate land rent from quasi-rent on sunk capital if such a tax were put into practice. McCulloch (1863: BK 1, Ch. 1, 42-44) pressed this objection with even greater vigor against Smith's (BK V, Ch. 2, Pgf47) argument. There is, however, another objection Ricardo (Ch. XIV, Pgf6) mentioned:
> > If it be considered that land, regarded as a fit subject for exclusive taxation, would not only be reduced in price, to compensate for the risk of that taxation, but in proportion to the indefinite nature and uncertain value of the risk would become a fit subject for speculations, partaking more of the nature of gambling than of sober trade, it will appear probable that the hands into which land would ... be most apt to fall would be the hands ... of the gambler than of ... the sober-minded proprietor, who is likely to employ his land to the greatest advantage.
> Ricardo implied here that a tax on rent is *not* neutral, that it will cause land to be less efficiently used. What is startling is that this argument is the opposite of what later writers tended (correctly) to assume. Later debaters, both for and against the taxation of land values, have agreed that such a tax deters land speculation by raising the holding charges paid by the speculator or other under-user of land. It is hard to disagree with Carl Shoup's (1960: 82) conclusion that Ricardo's argument here is "forced" and that his real objection to rent taxation is based on concern for property rights.
-------
I haven't double checked that with the original source to make sure it's a fair characterization, but I'll be sure to look up the Ricardo citation now that I (presumably) know which work I should be looking for, and add it to my reading list independently.
The bit of Ricardo I was thinking of is in the _Principles_ and amounts to "land would end up being owned not by those who could use it best but by those with the most political influence." It's an early public choice argument.
Incidentally David, would you be interested in joining the ranks of Georgism-skeptics whilst I as paidhi* intermediate between the two species? You can email me at lars dot doucet at gmail dot com if you don't want to expose your own address on a public forum.
*The foreigner series is hands down my favorite sci-fi work. Glad to encounter another fan in the wild!
I think _The Paladin_ may be my favorite Cherryh book, but there is a lot more of the Foreigner series.
A while back I reread Cherryh's first book. It has an introduction by Andre Norton, saying she wished she could write like that.
I was impressed. It was true — the book felt like a Norton book only better. But Norton was a very successful author, Cherryh a nobody, and Norton had the honesty to not only realize but say in print that Cherryh was better than she was.
I'm not all that interested in an organized debate over Georgism. If I want to go into that argument, I can always correspond with my friend and ex-colleague Nick Tideman, who has to be one of the more sophisticated supporters.
Will do. I have an email I check occasionally: theerusian at gmail.com.
For what it's worth, my reaction to Georgism is basically, "This all makes sense, at least in a general way. But it doesn't appear to actually describe any empirical reality I've experienced or read about or heard of." I've come to have the opinion that the Georgists describe a real problem but their solutions don't work as advertised.
Much thanks. I think the readers will benefit from your perspective. Also, in case anyone was worried, I'm not planning on singling out Erusian as the token skeptic with the burden of speaking for the entire opposition, I just feel a particular obligation to especially hear out *this* community's specific objections.
The Georgist land value tax is equivalent to the government owning all land and auctioning off its use to the highest bidder (perhaps with a right of first refusal). This should be enough to be very suspicious of it.
But market – and auction! – design are important, and an entire branch of academic economics too. The earlier review itself mentioned one possible feature of such a possible design, i.e. only hold the 'auction' when the current owners sell or transfer 'land'.
And property taxes already act as a _partial_ land value tax, and potentially some of them could be higher than what even a 'perfect total land value tax' would be assessed at. People (or other owners) do in fact lose their 'land' too, e.g. when they fail to pay their property taxes.
Actually, I think the feature was to only demand payment of the tax when the 'land' is sold, but there's obviously a lot of ways a land value tax could be designed.
As opposed to the current system, where the government also owns the land, but gives it to people that it likes and charges them some arbitrary value to hold it?
At the end of the day, the state owns defacto owns the land. We observe that this is true, because if you don't pay your taxes it reverts.
We also observe that this is true because sovereign property supersedes real estate. You own property because your sovereign says you do. That's why Native American tribal land titles aren't enforceable and USA land titles are.
Suppose a Lenape court decided that the purchase of Manhattan Island in 1626 was invalid and therefore all land titles on that island are invalid and it reverts to the heirs of the prior owner, ie the Lenape tribe in common. I don't think their attempts to turn up with bailiffs and demand the Empire State Building would work.
And that's because Manhattan does not belong to its present landowners as a result of a succession of title; it belongs to its present landowners because the United States government says it does and the US government has the capacity to enforce that - ie it is the sovereign power over Manhattan.
This isn't a moral or an ethical position, it's a factual one. You can't restrain government with some outside force, you have to get governments to restrain themselves.
There is no Federal property tax so under this argument the individual states own the land, not the Federal government.
The issue with this and Gadsden's argument is that it immediately reverts to the most extreme interpretation. The state could take something from you, therefore you don't own it.
If you apply that consistently you get all kind of nonsense. For example, the state can execute you. Therefore, you're already dead. In a sense this is true: you live so long as the state doesn't kill you and you will always eventually die. Yet most people put a high premium on "being alive" and see it as something important and worth protecting. Likewise for owning things.
I'm only arguing against the most extreme version of libertarian proprietarianism.
Or the most extreme versions of liberal human rights rhetoric.
Governments, if good, are shaped by the people (to quote Jefferson "Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed"), and the people value being alive and owning things, which is the most secure protection for life and property.
The point here is that you can't stop the state from having power, but you can (and should) shape how it uses it.
On the wider point about real property, I think people value security in their own home, and it should in general be really hard to push people out of their home, and that this should be regardless of whether they own it or rent it.
AIUI, the main point about George and LVT is that he objects to landlords. Owner-occupiers are not landlords, and exempting them or applying LVT more loosely (eg, let an owner-occupier roll up LVT into a charge on their estate secured against the property, so if you're property rich but income poor, you can just not pay and then the house gets sold to pay off the tax arrears when you die) does not seem incompatible with the underlying principles of Georgist LVT.
Of course you can stop the state from having power. States have wide variance in how much power they have. The state in Somalia has no power. The state in the US has power but less than in Great Britain. The state in Great Britain has power but less than in North Korea. The state in North Korea does in fact own all the land.
Again, the issue is you're turning a spectrum into an absolute and then arguing from that absolute. But no one's granting you the absolute you want because it's wrong. I'm not an extreme libertarian but I think your objections to their point are pretty facile.
As for Georgism: There are some Georgists who argue that. There are also Georgists who actually do argue for the government to literally own all land. Iirc, George himself argued that the government charging rent on all land was ideal but the tax would be more practical to implement.
I think it's much more common for the government to either sell the land to the highest bidder, or leave it in the hands of the people who got there before the government showed up in force. Selling vs. leasing or quasi-leasing to the highest bidder is debatable, back-room deals where one favored buyer gets the land at a pittance are usually bad, but taking the land away from the people who already own/use it because you have a Great Theory about how to put it to better use is the thing that should set off alarms.
Yes, a strong government has the power to take land away from people. And to take everything else away from people, including life and liberty. Saying "therefore, everything and everyone is really government property and should be treated as such", also should set off alarms.
I'm not gonna try to do a fully nuanced theory of land ownership; I just want people to recognize that all land ownership is predicated on theft, somewhere up the line.
If you live in the USA, there is a 99.3% chance you are living on stolen land (Except parts of Pennsylvania, because William Penn was baller as fuck), and the people we stole it from probably stole it in turn, all the way back to the first people across the ice bridge. There are few plots of land on the planet without some skeletons down there somewhere.
Property rights in general can get kinda sticky of you try to be maximally conscientious; land rights are fucked from the get go unless you are pure realpolitik.
Adversarial-collaboration-by-proxy is a wonderful way to get more insight into where exactly the disagreements that matter are, and which disagreements are popular but not important (or of marginal impact).
I took this approach, mediating between a "AGW skeptic" and a "Climate activist" and learned a lot. It seems that one side loses patience very quickly when being called on to explain why the 1940s got colder over the last 20 years.
Yes, you read that correctly. Check historical temperatures for 100 years ago as reported in 2000 and compare with them with values now reported - they differ.
Anyway, that may not be as important as I think it is, its just an example of the kind of thing that emerges through Adversarial-collaboration-by-proxy.
If I'm recalling correctly, Stewart Brand, when moderating a discussion, does not allow debate to begin until each participant has described the other's position to that person's satisfaction. An excellent habit.
So, the discussion will be a long attempt by someone else to explain my position and my telling them that they are wrong because [X]. Which, with careful choice of X, allows me to expand on my point in response to their claims. Meanwhile, I'll just claim that their position is incomprehensible and not worth debating. I'll never admit that they truly understand my position, so the only plausible end point is their giving up.
This is in fact a "debate", but a perverse one unless neither side uses that hack. If you can find an environment where neither party will try to hack the rules, there may be some merit to it, but I don't think it is a general solution.
Brand declaring me a dummy does not necessarily mean that the audience will believe me to be a dummy, and so Brand declaring me to be a loser does not necessarily make me a loser. That requires particular skill on the moderator's part, and a more nuanced policy than originally described.
And as even generally described, the policy would seem to place Brand at a disadvantage because for that part of the (pre)debate, he has implicitly ceded to me the authority to decide whether other people are smart enough to discuss the matter with me. If I'm even approximately as smart and careful as the moderator, and ruthless enough to "cheat", it seems like I ought to be able to take control of the debate unless the moderator wants to reveal himself as a dummy who will throw a tantrum and quit if things don't go his way.
Many many years from now the verdict will be that lockdown effectiveness was not worth the negative externalities inherent to the lockdown, regardless of the marginal benefit some lockdown statistics have shown. I know that no one will, but feel free to screencap this and throw it back in my face at some long distant future date, so long as you acknowledge my ability to do the same.
That seems highly unlikely if you include the net present value of the vastly expanded ability to work from home. Almost every company I know of that has office work types jobs is saying they are going hybrid. That's a lot less time commuting and a lot more free hours over the next decades. A lot less stress, etc.
I think it's points like these that our host was getting at.
That net present value you're focusing on has significant negative externalities in commercial real estate, business, down-sizing, reduced hours and a million others that it seems like you're choosing to ignore. And they go beyond the economic externalities I just listed, and I could go on.
The pandemic was a bad thing. Period. Pardon me for being among those who still see it as being a net-loss for humanity and believing - I think correctly - that certain actions indeed made it worse. Feel free to screencap it, like I said.
Am I right that you aren't inclined to credit the pandemic for anything positive? If the rapid advance of mRNA technology is the boon that some claim it might be for cancer etc. would you change your mind?
You started the conversation with "many many years from now", right? The trouble with the future is that we have very few non-hypothetical observations of it.
I have evidence of negative externalities from the lockdowns occurring right now. So do lots of other people. Sorry, I'm not going to accept future cancer treatments from mRNA technology that apparently isn't keeping people from contracting covid now as relevant observations of positive future externalities.
It seems exceedingly unlikely that, coincidentally, mRNA would be first deployed in 2021 even if there was no coronavirus. Do you think if the virus hit us years ago, there wouldn't be mRNA vaccines for it - it hit us just in perfect time for a coincidental breakthrough?
Well, I happen to think that they designed the working vaccine in 2 days mainly thainks to the previous years of research, but that wasn't my main point. My point was that it's not easy to conclude that *with* the pandemic but without lockdowns, it wouldn't have mappened.
There is truth in both directions. People were pushing mRNA tech for a long time. However, it was plagued by problems like, er, being too dangerous relative to the phalanx of not-very-dangerous things that remain for people to be vaccinated against, which is why it suddenly emerged onto the scene during COVID when all the normal rules were thrown out of the window.
I suspect that if there had been a big pandemic any time between 2005 and 2035, it would have been the first deployment of mRNA vaccines, though it might have taken a year or two longer had the pandemic been in the early part of that period.
I think with adenovirus vectors (the technology between AstraZeneca, Johnson&Johnson, and Sputnik V) we actually did have the weird coincidental situation of the first adenovirus vector vaccine being approved in late 2019: "The rVSV-ZEBOV vaccine was approved for medical use in the European Union in November 2019, and in the United States in December 2019"
I dunno, it seems relatively straightforward. The lockdowns caused considerable pain, which resulted in enormous social pressure (and government $$) to provide a vaccine very early and the mRNA vaccines always had the inherent advantage of being very fast, since you can build one as soon as you sequence the viral RNA.
It's hard to imagine the guaranteed immediate several billion dollar market *didn't* significantly accelerate the mRNA vaccine development. After all, Moderna's revenue according t o a quick check with Google business is up 1100% year over year. Hard to imagine all those people did *not* respond to financial incentives that large. I would guess there were a lot of 100-hour workweeks.
I'm saying that - economically speaking alone - there are 'negative externalities' that came with (and are coming with) the less commuting, less use of commercial real estate utopia you're giving as an example. And that's just economically speaking...
This argument is a classic example of the Broken Window Fallacy. There is no economic value in activity (like long commutes) that can be completely avoided without any reduction in economic output.
There are likely some negative consequences to some people, but there are greater positive consequences to other people, such that it's a benefit on the net.
Also, those "other people" aren't actually other people. When there are many small efficiency improvements around that harm some people a bit, and benefit others more than they harm the former, many if not most people will end up on the losing side of some of these situations and on the winning side of others, probably benefiting on the net. Attempting to forestall these sorts of changes is a recipe for a stagnating society on the long run.
Unless buildings were torn down or something, that one sounds like a *pecuniary* externality to me -- rents going down is a negative externality for landlords but a positive one for tenants (and rents going up would be vice versa)
Sunk opportunity costs for landlords are not net positives for tenants that aren't in the market to begin with because they've realized they can work from home. A tenant doesn't benefit from rents going down unless they decide to sign a lease, which many are not doing and may never do again. Reduced rents don't benefit people who aren't renting.
" A tenant doesn't benefit from rents going down unless they decide to sign a lease, which many are not doing and may never do again. Reduced rents don't benefit people who aren't renting."
A tenant does not extract the benefit of a lower rental rate if they aren't a tenant. Tenants don't extract the benefit of lower rental rates if they aren't renting, now or in the future. I think that's pretty self-explanatory.
Investing is a risk. Most real estate investors didn't price a pandemic into the risk, but neither did Zoom investors.
I'm a multifamily investor and one of our properties in a tourist town struggled mightily. Nonetheless I'm glad fewer people died as a result of not coming here. We lost a year of cash flow, but we'll still do fine on the back end.
For example, explain how reduced rents on storefront Manhattan property with 75% vacancy rate benefits renters? I would tell you, as many in that market will tell you right now, that 75% vacancy rate DOESN'T BENEFIT anyone, that includes the people that couldn't give a damn.
If the vacancy rate is 75% the problem is the rents are too high. The reasons behind NYC high vacancy rates are very interesting. Louis Rossmann has done some very interesting work on that.
The rents are at 50% of what they were 15 months ago. Wrong again. I'm sure if they were giving it away and there were no takers your response would be the same.
I think that, most likely, the largest effects, both positive and negative, to come out of the pandemic will be things which have a small but permanent / long-lasting effect (e.g. a culture shift to more remote work, a more authoritarian culture, increased polarization and international tensions), rather than effects that were time-limited to the pandemic itself (not being able to go to the bar for a year, an 20% increase in mortality over a year or so).
Those vacancies _could_ benefit lots of people, e.g. were those units to be rezoned for other purposes (for which people are willing to pay a rent profitable to the potential new owners).
Those 75% vacant Manhattan "storefronts" aren't really storefronts - they are billboards masquerading as storefronts.
In any case, every class of good has a friction rate of "vacancy" that it needs for the market to function well. With housing, it's usually in the high single percent, and with unskilled labor it's usually in the low single percent. With street space, it's usually more like 50-75% (one of the advantages self-driving cars are claiming is that they can reduce that vacancy rate).
Storefronts functioning as billboards for global brands may well have a different sort of natural vacancy rate, but the renters of those billboards do benefit from lower rents, just like drivers on toll roads benefit from lower tolls, even when the road is 75% vacant (as needed for drivers to go fast).
> negative externalities in commercial real estate, business, down-sizing, reduced hours
How is the first a negative? It seems like broken window fallacy. Same with reduced hours -- if work isn't necessary, then trying to save it is about the same as supporting jobs where people dig holes and fill them again.
> That net present value you're focusing on has significant negative externalities in commercial real estate, business, down-sizing, reduced hours and a million others that it seems like you're choosing to ignore.
And a million going the other way that you're ignoring: less time wasted commuting, less traffic congestion, less pollution from commutes, and so on.
I highly doubt this. "x many lives were saved when society came together" is always going to be more morally satisfying than "300 million people couldn't go to the bar".
Then why has no one written a take on Prohibition that showed how many lives were saved from drunk driving/alcohol violence/alcohol poisoning/etc.? Or perhaps the point is, that take would look so convincing, and everyone who could write it is so against Prohibition, that none of them want to?
Prohibition was such a success it was never tried elsewhere outside the Middle East, was repealed in less than 15 years, and took an amendment to the constitution to undo its mind-boggling stupidity. I.E., the negative externalities of prohibition did, in fact, outweigh the 'lives saved' supposedly of the temperance movement.
"X many live were saved when society came together' was apparently not more morally satisfying than '300 million people couldn't go to the bar'.
That would explain why it's so easy to get a bottle of just about anything I want in Tamil Nadu. I like my virtue signaling like I like my prohibition, effective.
Tamil Nadu? Really? The area that according to Wikipedia no longer practices prohibition and where the government actually sells alcohol? That's your counter example?
That's a great point. Let me do a quick brain dump.
Researchers have repeatedly shown us that drinking even moderate amounts of alcohol is bad for health, and that hundreds of thousands of people die everywhere because of the wide availability of alcohol.
However, the general consensus today seems to be that prohibition is bad, and that people should be allowed to do what they want. Of course corporations minting billions of dollars selling alcohol fund all kinds of studies saying "alcohol is good for your kidneys" or whatever. Everybody knows it's bad. But they're just hoping against hope that it's not "that" bad because "everybody else is doing it".
I think people mostly tend to justify the status quo, which is precisely what the brain does to justify our instincts and our actions anyway. If the world didn't shut down at all, people would say "of course we can't shut everything down. Use your common sense and wear a mask if you want to stay safe." But because the world has largely shut down, people say "of course we had to shut down. The economy is not that important. We had to save lives."
There seems to be some kind of an invisible line that puts alcohol on the "bad but not *that* bad" side, and cigarettes and heroin on the "too bad, need to stop" side. And this line kind of makes sense. I suppose the powers to be placed no lockdown on the "too bad, can't risk it" side, especially after looking at other countries reeling from a massive number of deaths.
sJust to modify that slightly - the consensus is that drinking really quite moderate amounts (1-2 units/day, with no sudden swings) is beneficial to health, but the effect swings dramatically negative as you drink more than this.
This is the famous "J curve", which is still disputed, but is I believe generally still accepted:
The paper that I cited, which was touted as the most comprehensive study ever done and published in a top journal and all that, explicitly claims that drinking even small amounts is bad (unless you suffer from cardiac problems), and that the analysis done in papers that support moderate amounts of drinking is uniformly flawed
I'm pretty underwhelmed by that paper. I am in general by massive meta-analyses anyway, but if you look at the raw data plots from which they draw their final curves, it's a giant forest of outliers. Making any kind of firm conclusion is pretty iffy.
In addition, the conclusion that any amount of alcohol is bad is true only for the statistical average person in all the many countries and demographics they studied. But no actual person is a statistical average person, just as no actual family actually has the 1.8 children a statistical average family might have. A better conclusion would be that if your personal risk factors are higher for diabetes and heart disease, then just as other studies have shown, moderate drinking is probably good for you. But if your personal health and family history suggests your major risk factors are cancers, that would suggest abstinence is best for you.
This paper is definitely interesting, and underlines the point that there is a significant health burden globally (across the 195 countries studies) from alcohol consumption.
On the other hand, it also shows quite clear J-curves for example with consumption vs deaths from ischaemic heart disease (most common cause of death aged >65 in western countries) and diabetes (affecting 20%+ aged >65 in western countries).
That's why I looked at the studies closer to my circumstances for guidance. The increased cancer risk with alcohol consumption is the most personally concerning for me, so I'll do some more looking into that.
Well-informed people have defended Prohibition quantitatively. There were substantial health benefits from lower alcohol consumption. Other well-informed people have scoffed at these arguments.
One issue is that the costs of drinking differed by ethnicity: Italians and Jews don't feel a huge urge to binge drink once they've had one drink, while English and Irish, not to mention Swedes and American Indians, often do. Germans seem to fall in the middle, and had a beer-drinking culture that seemed to moderate the problems caused by alcohol better than the hard-liquor drinking culture of Northwestern Europeans.
So you hear a lot of different opinions about the costs and benefits of Prohibition, but it's hard to figure out the overall effect because of subtle but substantial differences in resistance to the effects of alcohol for complex reasons of nature and nurture.
This may or may not be true. But I would agree that we need a few years post covid to allow the political pressure to die down to get more trustworthy results.
Why would the future have any greater insight than the present does? The only surefire test would be to rewind history and run the past two years over again with e.g. no lockdowns at all, and see what happened. If after a year of no particular action you had 680,000 (American) deaths instead of 625,000, or even as high as 780,000 -- which is I think the instinctive assumption of most people, for the same reason that we assume the weather today will be a lot like it was yesterday, sheer inertia -- then it does seem problematic. On the other hand, if with no particular action we had 2 million deaths instead of 625,000, then it would take a pretty high valuation of freedom of movement and/or economic growth to say saving a million lives wasn't worth it at all.
Of course, we can't do this experiment. And since there were no states or countries that took no defensive measures at all, and indeed most of them took pretty similar measures (or measures equally draconian but adapted to their special political (China) or geographical (New Zealand) situation, there's no natural experiment like this. We're in the business of looking at rather small differences in measures or timing of measures and trying to extrapolate all the way out to the stark regime of doing almost nothing. As Twain observed quite some time ago, with a sufficient length of extrapolation you can prove almost any silly thing.
I think a more reasonable expectation is that it will be a subject of endless academic debate, like over whether nuking Hiroshima and Nagasaki was "worth it."
You seem like the sort of person I'd like to make some bets with if we could have a trusted third party hold the funds and adjudicate the bet.
This lockdown effectiveness question is too vague and will take too long to settle one way or the other, so I'm not interested in that. But what other things do you believe with such gusto that might be proven right or wrong in a reasonable amount of time? Let's get some bets on the record!
I think there is a substantial difference between someone who leans liberal or leans conservative and someone who is an ideologue. If someone like Tyler Cowen - who leans libertarian/conservative - comes out in favor of lockdowns that voice carries more weight with me. Alternatively Freddie DeBoer's writings on human ability, testing and education in general carry more weight with me as he is from the very far left. But in both cases they are calling them as they see them. They are not insisting on finding facts that fit their existing ideology. Or if they are, when the facts don't support their ideology they are open to saying, "My theories don't work in this instance."
I agree that when someone criticizes their own side's position then it's cause for special interest/concern. But I'm more confused about the opposite question - how do you adjust when somebody supports their own side's ideology? Like, obviously this is suspicious. But how suspicious? And if you're too quick to discount it, then don't you risk never listening to any heterodox opinions (since heterodox people register as "having ideologies", and someone who just says "normal things" doesn't seem like an ideologue, even if they are very consistently and vocally normal?)
I'll give you an example. We were worried my mother in law needed a hearing aid. We tried to get an appointment with an audiologist which proved to be an issue in her rural area. But we got an appointment at the local Miracle Ear franchise. They did a very thorough test and said her hearing was fine. Now they are in the business of selling hearing aids - if they say you don't need one you REALLY don't need one.
If they said she needed one I would have gone along with that as well. But I have less confidence. If you want to convince me of something your argument needs to be less convincing if you're advocating for something that's not in your best interest.
And look at you giving Miracle Ear free (and effective!) advertising. It can make damn good business sense not to sell your product if that in turn engenders positive associations and future business down the road. As a not small side effect you can employ honest brokers who care deeply about people getting the best possible outcome for their hearing and not just selling snake oil for a quick buck.
For some reason I'm not able to pin down, the libertarian, lockdown-bad, guns-good person seems to be more of an ideologue than the socialist, lockdown-good, guns-bad person. Although both of them seem to belong to distinct schools of thought, the lockdown-good narrative is definitely more mainstream (globally, at least) than the lockdown-bad one. I think it takes more ideologue-ness and resistance to criticism to step outside the mainstream and preach your gospel than it takes to stay within the mainstream and spew mainstream ideas.
For instance, I am a capitalist in the generic sense of the word. However, if I was a capitalist in Soviet Russia under Stalin, I would be a Real Capitalist.
The flip side of that is that there are two reasons to reject the orthodoxy. One is ideology, conforming to a different and currently out of fashion orthodoxy, and for that your point is right. But the other reason is that the evidence or arguments are not consistent with the orthodoxy and you have a strong commitment to truth, in which case your views deserve more weight than average, not less.
So I would give more weight to conservative or libertarian opinions from someone whose background was one in which they were heterodox than from someone who grew up somewhere where they were the local orthodoxy.
Yes, you should! I think the reason to mostly restore any 'weight loss' thru that mechanism would be by reading his arguments for those opinions, which allow you to rely less on a 'general ideological weighting function'.
I was told, at second hand, that someone who observed me and my father skiing when I was a teen reported that we spent all our time arguing, so the mere fact that he held an opinion isn't a strong reason to expect me to hold it.
You should give less weight to my opinions on climate change or drug legalization because they justify my opposing policies I have other reasons to oppose, just as you should give less weight to the current orthodoxy on climate change for analogous reasons.
"Spending all your time arguing" is compatible with Freud's "narcissism of small differences". Academics usually spend most of their time arguing with the people that agree with them about subject matter, methodology, question framing, and everything else except for one or two bits of disagreement, and much less arguing with the people that disagree about more.
Let me address your second point. I think it is intuitively plausible (and historically mostly accurate) that most beliefs espoused by the society you live in are largely correct. If we take an extreme example, say Nazi Germany, most of the beliefs that were espoused by society were morally fine. Be fearful of God, sacrifice for your country, we should work hard to achieve our potential, etc. There were only a handful of beliefs that were clearly wrong: Jews- bad, a racially superior race should take over the Earth, etc. Hence, even in Nazi Germany, an honest dissident would only be at loggerheads with the government and society over just a handful of points.
Hence, the more you are out of the mainstream, the larger the pool of issues that you disagree with everyone over, and hence the larger the possibility that you're not being intellectually humble (and probably just grandstanding to signal moral or intellectual superiority). Of course it is possible that you're right about one thing that everyone is wrong about. However, it is astronomically unlikely that you're right about everything that you're in disagreement with society and the government over.
Disclaimer, if it wasn't clear from my comment: I'm obviously not saying Nazis were good. It is needless to say that Nazis were horrible. I'm only given an extremal example about how society is mostly right about most things, even in the worst of times.
Related: Should we trust someone's writing less if it has obvious ideological slant?
My intuition is 'yes': If the author is clearly angry, has an axe to grind, and his writing is peppered with value judgments and with snark towards opposing views, I'm not inclined to trust it at all. If it is written in an dispassionate fashion, withholding strong judgments, I'm inclined to trust it more, *even if* I know that the author has the same political views as the previous, angry person.
But it's not obvious that I should do this. If you are an ideologue, focused on convincing people of your views rather than finding out the truth, then it makes strategic sense to write in a way that sounds objective and dispassionate, but it's actually biased.
However, I believe that intentional, calculating deception on the part of the author is less common than semi-conscious bias. Someone who writes in a dispassionate fashion will be more inclined to actually consider the evidence for his statements. Flippant dismissal of opponents often acts as a substitute for argument; an unproven statement stands out more in an analysis that attempts to sound objective.
Further related: Can we make people's writing less biased by *requiring* them to write in an unbiased-sounding fashion? I have an idea that one way to reduce political bias in social sciences would be to make it inappropriate to include normative judgments in academic papers. Would this make them closer to the truth, or just hide their biases better? I have an intuition that even if the academics involved would hold the same political views, those would influence their research somewhat less. Again, normative judgments can fill in for evidence when the latter is scarce. I also expect that it would reduce peer pressure a bit: if research and politics were clearly expected to be separated (even just in the official parts of conducting the business), it would be more obviously inappropriate to criticize a research paper on the basis that it doesn't come down in favor of the right political side.
You can also make progress when arguing with someone in good faith by asking for them to steelman the argument. The same goes for both sides of the argument obviously.
There's a certain type of person who, regardless of ideology, is just inclined to rebel against any received wisdom. I have a friend like that. It doesn't matter what the topic is - lockdowns, politics, music - he's just reflexively against whatever is popular unless it's something his young son likes.
Dismissing the science of someone when the science agrees with their politics and their politics is the opposite of yours is basically just a description of why many conservatives don't trust a single word academia says and are considered anti-science morons. I fail to see how liberals who dismiss anti-lockdown studies by a libertarian are any different and think they should all be considered equally anti-science.
The issue is more akin to bewaring the man of one study [0]. If most studies say one thing and then a scientist with political bias produces results agreeing with their bias, then you should probably discount that study.
That just means liberal academics win any "debate" by default. Having fully captured academia they are now paid by the government to churn out liberal biased studies all day every day, so anyone who tries to decide who's right by simply counting studies will always end up with concluding that the left must be correct about any imaginable issue.
For that heuristic to be useful, all papers and analysis must be of roughly equal quality. But it's not the case. Consider the paper Scott mentioned last time - the Flaxman et al paper concluding lockdowns work. This paper is one of my go-to examples for academic corruption because it's bad in just so many ways. It creates a model the authors know is a work of fiction and which bears no resemblance to reality, and we know this because they tell us so in the paper itself, yet it racked up 1300+ citations and the number is still growing fast.
In such an environment any paper written by a libertarian or conservative is going to end up looking like a lone isolated viewpoint simply because the average libertarian would much rather be founding a startup than pumping out nonsensical papers in an academic office all day.
My impression is that libertarianism is *more* common within academia than outside of it. The vast majority of non-academics line up with one of the major political parties, while academics more often adopt specific ideologies that are at best tiny niches outside, like libertarianism, socialism, etc.
I think the only thing you can do, unless you know a lot about the person — for instance that he has sometimes argued against his side's position when he thought it was wrong — is evaluate the argument itself, giving no significant weight to the fact that someone knowledgeable made it.
One thing you're forgetting is the propaganda angle. On reddit, it's pretty common to see a 'I used to believe X but now I believe Y', even though the user history shows that to be obliviously untrue. It's too the point where I've started instinctively trusting someone criticizing their own side's position _less_
Obviously this is only a problem with anonymous /pseudonymous sources.
If one side offers a thesis and the other responds with an antithesis and they are both well-thought out and well-supported by evidence ... well, then there is probably a synthesis out there somewhere that could make sense of why both the thesis and the antithesis are somewhat true.
Maybe it's just my own ideological filter at work, but to me, it seems pretty clear from what you wrote that they said, that the libertarian was the reasonable one and the liberal was not.
The most extreme statement you could find for the libertarian was one comparing lockdowns to house arrest. But I don't see how this statement is extreme. It's just a factual assertion, right? For long periods in the whole world people have been prevented either from leaving their homes entirely, by the police (if self isolating), or from leaving a small zone around their house of a few km, (if not self isolating). This is extremely similar to what house arrest means - you may not leave your house and if you do the police will force you to go back. Thus this statement doesn't seem extreme or even ideological but more like a statement of fact.
The most extreme statement you could find for the liberal called relaxing lockdowns equivalent to "human sacrifice". This is VERY extreme. Firstly human sacrifice is a deliberate murder of someone, whereas living normal life and unknowingly spreading a virus is neither murder nor a knowing act under any moral code that existed anywhere up until about April 2020. And partly because relaxing lockdowns = normal existence. So whoever said that is equating living a normal life i.e. the null state with making human sacrifices i.e. a state that is so barbaric it hasn't existed in the west for thousands of years. That actually looks like quite a good foundational definition of extreme.
I think your level of suspicion is artificially increased by your apparent belief that only one guy finds that lockdowns don't work, which is a conclusion I still find somewhat baffling. I've read dozens of papers, long blog posts, essays etc finding they don't work, especially if by "don't work" you're willing to consider the failure of the modelled counter-factuals to happen at all. I could rattle off dozens of talking points immediately, so how is it possible we ended up living in such different informational worlds?
The noncentral fallacy: "X is in a category whose archetypal member gives us a certain emotional reaction. Therefore, we should apply that emotional reaction to X, even though it is not a central category member."
The archetypical example of house arrest without due process occurs when there is no pandemic (so meeting people is not unusually dangerous), and is intended to punish the arrestee—while the arrestee's guilt is not proven, and/or the action it punishes isn't (or shouldn't be) a crime (a typical example is a dissenter in a dictatorship). Calling lockdowns house arrest is a rhetorical tactic that attempts to transfer the emotional judgment of such obviously illegitimate house arrests of innocent people to the lockdowns—even though there arguments for the coronavirus lockdowns that don't apply to the archetypical case of putting innocent people in house arrests.
There are good arguments for and against the lockdowns, but the use of such rhetorical tricks reduces someone's credibility in my mind (on either side).
All you're saying is that because you personally agree with putting people under house arrest at the moment, it's therefore not "really" house arrest, and thus blah blah some claim about fallacies.
How about this: I am under house arrest right now, because someone in my household tested positive. I have not tested positive, nor am I sick, but I am now expected to not leave the house at all for any reason for 10 days, and there is no route of appeal whatsoever, in fact it required nothing more than someone putting my name and phone number into an automated system.
I have committed no crime, the state has no evidence I am posing any harm to others, the justice system is not involved at any point, and we have zero support for even managing the basics of living, something which people under house arrest do get! In fact the display on our cooker broke a few days ago yet the cooker firm won't visit to repair it because of the scary COVID, so we can't even easily prepare food now.
What's happening to me IS in fact house arrest, I do in fact feel like it's a despotic regime, and I am deeply unimpressed by your attempt to rewrite the definition so that something is only house arrest if you personally disapprove of the motivations.
Certainly, describing it as house arrest is orders of magnitude less politically extreme and biased than calling ending lockdowns "human sacrifice".
I didn't say that I supported lockdowns; I'm ambivalent about them. I didn't say that the one who talked about "human sacrifice" language wasn't also obviously biased. I didn't even say that lockdowns weren't house arrest. What I'm saying is that calling lockdowns house arrest is loaded language, and someone who opposes lockdowns should argue why they are wrong, instead of using loaded terms.
Compare an example from the post by Scott I linked: someone who says "Nelson Mandela was a criminal" is factually correct (he committed a crime by dissenting against the apartheid system); nevertheless, someone who says that sentence is most likely trying to muddy the waters: he's trying to get the listener to apply the judgment we apply to a typical criminal to Mandela—even though the typical criminal has committed crimes that most of us disapprove of, while Mandela has committed a crime most of us don't disapprove of. Again, calling someone a criminal for committing an atypical crime that most of us don't disapprove of is truthful, but it's loaded language; it signals that the speaker has an axe to grind, and is trying to use rhetorical tricks in lieu of arguments. I'm generally inclined to consider such speakers less trustworthy.
What do *you* think is someone's motive to choose to use the term "house arrest" instead of "lockdown" or "stay-at-home order"?
For all we know he used all those terms - Scott didn't link to the articles he had in mind, so the only info we have is that some economist wrote articles critical of lockdown that did indeed argue against them but which also compared them to house arrest. This was described as extreme, seems we both agree that's not actually that extreme, and so it boils down to is it "loaded language" or not? I mean, sure, I guess? But it's mostly loaded in my view because someone who loves lockdowns wouldn't use that term, not because there's anything wrong with it or even because it's biased, but because it puts in stark terms what they really are, and they'd rather avoid thinking about what exactly they're supporting.
Or put another way, can a factually true statement become "loaded" or suspicious simply because other people get upset when it's used? Maybe that's the definition of loaded. Not very useful concept if so, though.
The way I think about it is that people who have political positions significantly far from the median position are likely to care strongly about politics, since people who don’t care much about politics tend to just take on whatever the typical view is among their peers. And people who care strongly about politics are more likely to have bias in their results that have political implications (whether intentionally or not).
That’s not to say that people who have strong political views close to the median are any less likely to produce biased results. It’s just that it’s hard to distinguish them from people who don’t have particularly strong views (which is the vast majority of people, in my experience), so a result from someone with unusual political views rightly stands out as being particularly deserving of skepticism.
"The way I think about it is that people who have political positions significantly far from the median position are likely to care strongly about politics, since people who don’t care much about politics tend to just take on whatever the typical view is among their peers."
Alternatively, they might care strongly about truth and not much about politics, hence be willing to say things they think are true even if those things are politically out of favor.
This is the feeling I get lately about expressing my opinions publicly in general. I always imagine the response “Well, of course you believe X- you’re Y.” And I am. I have pretty much the opinions a person like me, demographically speaking, is likely to have. So even if they’re honest is there even any point to expressing my thoughts?
On the other hand, it’s not total alignment with stereotypes, and I’m wary of expressing opinions that would get me lumped in with other people whose identities are on-paper similar to mine, but who are vastly different from me in important ways. Some of those people are ideologues, and some kind of scare me even if we’re living very similar lives and have a lot of similar values and beliefs.
I think this is a driver of political polarization; media (social and otherwise) flattens and reduces us to a few bullet points, which others will use to apply their own categories and assumptions, which you might then have to exert a lot of effort to correct, if that’s even possible. So what we tend to do is signal loudly which side we’d rather be associated with, even when that preference is marginal. You’re never expressing your nuanced ideas- it’s more like all you can do is choose whose extremists scare you less.
I don't find it very suspicious. When a smart person holds an heterodox opinion, one of the first questions I ask is why this particular person noticed the problem with orthodoxy but all the other people who are as smart as he is did not notice anything. A single smart person making a mistake is much more likely than a multitude of smart people all making the same mistake.
But something like "that person has a different ideology than his peers, so he doesn't have the same blindspots" is a perfectly reasonable explanation that does not require any weird coincidence.
There's an interesting question about how many sides to consider here. If you don't look too closely, libertarians can *look* like conservatives who have some unusual openness to ideas that criticize "their" side. But once you identify libertarians as a third group with their own distinctive ideology, they often don't look so open any more. Similarly, at first, Glenn Greenwald might *look* like a leftist with some unusual openness to ideas that criticize "his" side. But when you see Matt Taibbi, Tulsi Gabbard, and a group of others that have a similar constellation of views, you begin to wonder if there's another niche with a distinctive ideology.
I don't quite know how to think about whether Tyler Cowen or Freddi DeBoer might fall into these sorts of things, or whether this even really adds anything, or just takes away the original apparent insight.
Tyler Cowen and Freddie deBoer are relatively special in that you can just evaluate their arguments directly. I haven't read (or watched or listened to) Taibbi and Gabbard enough to judge, but Greenwald seems much more an intermediary for other ideas than Cowen or deBoer – IMO.
As far as whether a conservative prognostician arguing against lockdowns is more "marked" than a liberal one arguing in favor, I don't think it's necessarily determinative, but I do think it's relevant that under ordinary circumstances, nobody favors lockdowns at all. It's not that lockdowns in general are a liberal position which you'd expect liberal people to be in support of unless the evidence weighed really heavily against it, it's only due to extraordinary circumstances that anyone supports lockdowns.
This is a distinctly America-centric perspective, but I think you could tell a similar story about other countries, where conservatives are biased against taking the pandemic seriously, not because this is an inherently conservative position, but because an important figure, Trump in America's case, took a stand on downplaying the pandemic. If Bob Woodward can be taken at his word on the subject, Trump's efforts at downplaying it don't even reflect his own best understanding of the pandemic at the time, since he thought having people take it less seriously was better for the economy, and likely him by extension. If we had had a different Republican politician in office, someone like George W. Bush perhaps, then taking the pandmic seriously might never have become a tribal signifier in the first place.
This is a very good point. "I don't like the government telling me what to do" is very much the libertarian position and not the conservative position*. America is unusual in having libertarianism associated so closely with conservatism.
I partially agree with this, but I don't think it answers everything asked in the post.
There are two issues here, imo. First, instead of the pro-Xer vs anti-Xer dichotomy in the post, there is also the possibility of non-Xers. In Scott's example, the conservative academic is clearly a pro-gunner releasing a pro-gun paper, but the liberal academic could plausibly be a non-gunner, or close to it -- someone who just isn't personally interested in guns rather than an anti-gunner who invests a lot of time and energy into anti-gun causes. In theory, you should discount a pro-Xer's pro-X paper about as much as an anti-Xer's anti-X paper (i.e. somewhat but not entirely), but a non-Xer's paper, pro or anti, should carry more weight.
It sounds like your argument is that in this case, liberals are non-lockdowners releasing pro-lockdown papers, so it's natural to give them more weight. But the problem is, over the course of the pandemic, lockdowns clearly did become politicized. I know that in my peer group, support for lockdowns was the default, not based on an extensive review of the evidence. People simply listened to trusted authorities and followed their intuitions. So it probably is fair to assume that at least for papers written near the middle or end of the pandemic, liberal writers are pro-lockdown to begin with.
So in the lockdown case, not the general case, the reason Scott feels the way he does is probably just a mix of his personal priors about lockdowns and the fact that it's very natural to apply extra scrutiny to minority positions.
The upshot seems to be that human societies are complicated, social science is insanely hard, politics is even harder, and even the smartest and most honest politician has to rely on a combination of judgment, intuition, and common sense to implement their policies. That's why open debate and epistemic humility are important.
Yeah, most of the time people support their own side's ideological positions. Unless you know everything about crenulating zeugmas you're going to have to either A) if orthodox, discount because orthodox ideologues are sometimes sloppy due to most of their peers being relatively uncritical towards the work, or B) if heterodox, discount because it could be a clever arguer trying to sell you a box that you do not want.
Of course, you could be dealing with a clever arguer also in case A, so maybe you should discount orthodox arguments slightly more anyway. I have no idea, this problem stumps me. I feel you.
At least this was a good reason to post that cute bat again. More covid posts, please.
One issue I have about emotional costs is the comparison point. It's a global pandemic, an intrinsically "bad" event, and life is going to be less "good" than before. There's going to be long term trauma about how poorly it was perceived to be handled and how ill prepared we were for it. Some of the measurements of quality of life are good at showing the impact of the pandemic, but not the cost effectiveness of lockdowns.
Yeah, I agree that a lot of the time the baseline for those comparisons seems to ignore the entire global pandemic and think the choice is between lockdown and 2019. It stands out to see "missed a family member's funeral" used as an example of emotional damage from lockdown, while the benefits of "_postponed_ a family member's funeral" is pushed to the "it's complicated" section of the original post. (Granted, that's not an impact on hundreds of millions in the US, probably, but hundreds of thousands times an extra decade or so with parents and grandparents is nothing to sneeze at.)
> One thing I found helpful was to ask Person A what they thought of Person B's work, relay it to Person B, Person B would say something like "he's neglecting to consider that you need to fulminate the synecdoche", then I would relay that back to Person A, and after enough of this I would get a meaningful sense of where they disagreed (or occasionally one of them would just admit they had made a mistake).
It sounds like you kind of rediscovered the Delphi method? RAND came up with a consensus-building framework specifically for opposed experts back in the 60's and it seems to work *really* well. I wish all political and economic arguments were given that treatment. Original article here:
To be honest, I found this post much more interesting than the post it is about.
I have been trying to get this across to everyone who will listen, for over a year now, and I haven't been successful but I can't stop because it's extremely important to my continued survival:
The question "do lockdowns work?" is incoherent and unanswerable, because both "lockdown" and "work" are and will always be underspecified.
You can't aggregate over millions of people, summarize death counts or economic costs or whatever, generate an average, and use that number to judge things. As you point out above, this question is much too multifaceted to do that
But I'll make a stronger claim: you can't even do this in principle. One might be tempted to say "aha, well, maybe there's 50 dimensions but we can analyze all of them and come to conclusions" but you can't! Because people have varied lives and, no matter what conclusion you will come to, somebody somewhere will say "if we did it your way, I would not be alive right now. Eff you" and there is absolutely nothing you can say to that person to change their mind.
There is no way in principle to settle this argument. It is a bona fide conflict, and the way it gets settled is the guy who gets to decide, decides, and then says "tough if you don't like it". That is in fact what our society did last year, and I didn't like it.
All of the mainstream, public scientific discussion about the pandemic is bullshit. It just is. It is not the case that a whole bunch of honest, concerned, and curious scientists all decided to dive in and see what happens. I know we here like to think that's the case, because we here actually do do that. But the rest of the world does not. The rest of the world does the science they're paid to do. If it gives the results that the people in power want, then they get published and publicized. If it does not, they do not. As a result, you end up with a bunch of 'science' supporting what the people in power have already decided they want to do, and the people in power use that 'science' to wash their hands of any responsibility for people being mad at them.
You can see this happen in real time if you pay attention. This is a relatively trivial example, but it is very accessible: Dr Fauci's overnight 180 on masks, and everyone acting like this didn't happen (but was totally fine if it did). Prior to his flip, Fauci and the rest of the medico-political establishment told us that The Science Says Don't Use Masks, and the news dutifully reported that. Then, overnight, Fauci says that The Science Says Use Masks, and the news dutifully reported on that. When questioned on it, all they say is "we're just following the science, and the science evolved". But we know that's a lie. Why? Because Fauci said it was a lie under oath to congress.
In reality, the actual fact of the matter, which I expect most of you here either knew or just assumed, was political. They were afraid of a run on masks, which would put medical practitioners at risk, and so they told the public not to wear masks. Then, when they were satisfied that the medical practitioners were well supplied, like magic, 'the science changed'. In reality, the government gave out an arbitrary order ("do not buy masks") in order to achieve a domestic policy goal ("don't let hospitals run out of PPE"), and instead of just saying that, they lied to our faces and bastardized 'science'.
In fact (I'm not gonna go look this up, so apologies if my memory is wrong), I think that was the conclusion you came to in your original mask post. The public health advice prior to covid was "do not wear masks", and the reasons for this was a) people wear them wrong and it wastes them; and b) that takes them away from people who actually need them.
What is the point of my work-procrastinating rambling? My point is that fundamentally you cannot use 'science' to determine if 'lockdowns work'. The overwhelming majority of the 'science' on this is science in nothing but name. If you do _actual_ science to try and get an _actual_ answer, everyone will ignore that answer with some variation of "yeah but no because thing I care about". You can ask extraordinarily specific questions like "did imposing a 8pm curfew reduce the number of deaths by 500 or more". Even that isn't really a great question, because imposing a curfew doesn't mean people comply with it, and so it equivocates the question of "does adhering to a curfew work" with the question of "does imposing a curfew _policy_ work" which, despite appearances, are two very different questions.
Maybe, if we constrain ourselves the platonic world of abstract thought, that cannot interact with the outside world in any way, we could come up with The Correct Answer to the question of lockdowns. But that's not particularly useful. Implied in the question of "do lockdowns work", is the hidden question "should we implement lockdowns". But as is abundantly clear by now, the decision process we use to implement lockdowns is completely disconnected from the actual answer to the question of whether or not they work. The whole question is poorly defined, and the answer doesn't exist
I agree with this wholeheartedly, with the addition of - there are lots of OTHER questions about the pandemic that are well-defined, do have potential answers, and could very heavily improve our future responses to them, that we could all be working on instead!
I agree, although I can't think of any particularly relevant ones off hand.
But also, I am extremely pessimistic about the functionality of our institutions. We _could_ be working on them instead, but it won't happen. It would be really great if it did, but it won't.
Institutions is a perfect one: so the question would be "how to convince Americans to demand reforms to the CDC and FDA to improve our response to future pandemics?" Not to be a nagging scold, but to me, that's one example of what Scott (and everyone else here) should be working on.
See, I don't think that's possible. In fact, when I'm feeling charitable I think Scott's prior post on that subject hits the nail on the head. Those organizations are too beholden to politics to be trustworthy, responsible, and useful. It sucks. That's why I'm generally speaking against large political institutions and for small, bottom-up efforts
I am fine with that, what I am asking for is for us, commenters and Scott, to focus on answering the question "How to convince people to support a small, bottom-up effort to either create a better response to a future pandemic, or persuade enough people to reform/abolish-rebuild the institutions that are supposed to do that"
Isn't that what these posts and discussion threads are? We're all debating with each other, trying to reach some kind of meta-conclusions about the robustness of science, knowledge, institutions etc. Lockdowns happen to be the proximal topic today but the discussions aren't so different to other threads Scott has hosted.
Personally I'm in the abolition camp. All public health bodies have totally destroyed their own credibility, which it turned out wasn't that high amongst people in the know even before now. Which organization has NOT done a 180 degree turn on supposedly critical issues and then pretended it didn't happen, by now? Fauci isn't the only senior public health official who is a liar. Most countries have them, though they weren't all brazen enough to literally admit that in national newspapers.
If you want to be a group of experts advising the public on something, then it seems obvious to me that fostering trust is goal number 1. All other goals you may have depend on it unless you become totalitarian and just try to take over the world. Public health has gone all-in on totalitarianism in the past year and it just leads to malicious compliance, ignoring their suggestions and eventually more politicians will try to do what Trump did and just defund them. Because it's the right thing to do.
It strikes me that the Front Line COVID Care Alliance (https://covid19criticalcare.com/) appears to be one of the "small, bottom-up" efforts, but it seems like the larger institutions (government, media) are doing everything they can to discredit it.
The FLCCA was founded an actual ICU doctor treating actual critical COVID patients to reflect the latest information for creating COVID protocols. They don't seem to have any agenda other than providing the latest information about the best-performing treatments in as observed in the field.
The best evidence they don't have ulterior motives is that they're mostly suggesting cheap, readily available drugs that profit no one. In fact, they're actually warning patients not to get scammed into spending too much money on doctors or treatment.
Again, this is a group of doctors treating actual COVID patients trying to provide information to other doctors and patients, including collecting and interpreting as much breaking medical literature as possible.
And yet there's a weird amount of resistance to them.
Some of it is the inevitable protest that tHeyAREN'tUsiINGenoUghlarGEscaLedouBLEBlindTRIals! but the reasons for why they can't base everything on a large scale double-blind trial is patiently explained on their FAQs, which no one seems to read.
But most of the resistance seems to be a weird orthodoxy that nothing except lockdowns and masks and vaccines should even be discussed, with social media sites and search engines actively blocking many posts on the topic.
This seems like a very pessimistic viewpoint - if anything beholden to politics cannot be trustworthy, responsible, and useful, then it seems like we just have to hope for a benevolent dictator, rather than having governing institutions with any sort of social input into them.
I think the scope and scale of the institutional failure on covid has actually mentally damaged all of us, and our unwillingness to look into the Lovecraftian depths of that failure has made us also reluctant to consider reforms, because we'd have to look at the failures to do so. I still think we should.
This is likely not a very popular position, but speaking personally, I find the institutional failure of last year so egregious that I now believe I have a moral obligation to stymie their efforts, no matter what it is they're trying to do. They must be punished for their failure and this is the only tool available to me.
I actively sabotage covid efforts now. I'll stop when our politicians grovel on TV
Well sure, I can see why it's not popular, but do you think we could find a compromise position that A) you would support, B) would be effective at fixing those institutions and C) popular enough to gain support? I think finding that would be more important than determining if lockdowns work or not.
For the sake of adding a datapoint, I have done likewise. I'll also add the caveat that I don't think merely "reformed" institutions would solve the problem. Rather, no institutions having the relevant powers is preferable due to (imo) the risk of misuse being greater than the risk of no use.
Just a correction - Fauci never said "don't use masks" or "masks don't work". All he ever said was "we have no evidence that masks work and there is no reason for ordinary people to use masks", which sounds frustratingly similar, and proves that the medical establishment is bad at communication. But he, and people of similar scientific stature, never lied or even said the things we now think are false.
> But he, and people of similar scientific stature, never lied or even said the things we now think are false.
This is obviously not true; I almost feel like I'm in a "we were never at war with Eurasia" situation. I mean even if restrict to Fauci himself, do "we" now think all of this is true?
"The typical mask you buy in the drug store is not really effective in keeping out virus, which is small enough to pass through material. It might, however, provide some slight benefit in keep out gross droplets if someone coughs or sneezes on you."
I think a lot depends on what "really effective" means. I would rather say now that sanitizing your hands is basically irrelevant for this particular virus (though relevant for others). I think most people here will say that the typical modern masks (which weren't available in drug stores in March, 2020) likely have some moderate percentage reduction in probability of transmission, but it's not clear how big or small.
It really is unclear how effective masks are, and the big thing that has changed is just that conventional wisdom says "we don't know how effective they are, and it's really easy, so might as well wear them" where it used to be "we don't know how effective they are, and the medical establishment never advises doing anything that we don't know the effectiveness of".
The masks issue is extremely frustrating because if you read the pre-COVID literature or do any post-COVID analysis of the mask mandates issue, then they conclude mask mandates don't work. Pre-COVID: there are medical papers arguing this. Post-COVID: where are all the graphs showing sharp drops in incidence 3 days after mask mandates are introduced?
So when the medical world was asked about masks at the start, they appear to have been correctly summarizing the state of knowledge until that point. They said eh, masks, well, we don't have any convincing evidence they work actually. It wasn't just Fauci, they were all saying that. And it appears they were justified to do so.
But then something went wrong, and it's not entirely clear how it happened, but it seems that for political or ideological reasons the idea of universal mask wearing suddenly became very attractive. I think this is not very surprising given the prevailing ideology in public health (collectivism), because these people just love the idea of "society coming together", "solidarity" etc, and they suddenly realized that they could say anything at all and politicians and the public would do it. Hence: universal mask wearing. A WHO spokesperson actually admitted that this was the result of political lobbying to a BBC journalist at some point! The journo put it on Twitter but, what a surprise, didn't make it into a full story. So then of course they had the problem of inverting their position. That's when they came up with this idea of the "noble lie".
Beyond the inconsistency with pre-COVID medical evidence there are other problems with the official timeline:
1. There was no need to lie to ensure medical workers got masks.
Virtually all masks were being made abroad, I recall reading early on that there was only a single company making surgical/N95 masks in the USA and in the beginning they were refusing to increase production anyway because they had been burned before by "fad" demand spikes for masks. So the supplies were all coming in via ports and government could simply have nationalized any in-flight shipments using existing customs infrastructure, then signed long term contracts at above cost to monopolize the future supply. People just didn't have access to masks at scale early on in the epidemic, and if they had done, it would have been trivial to pass a law stating that governments and health care providers get first dibs.
2. It assumes that ~all health experts worldwide can say "masks are ineffective and not very important" yet ~all healthcare workers worldwide themselves will know this is a lie and ignore it, without blowing the whistle to the press, even though masks are supposedly life saving. This is a ridiculous assumption.
3. Even if we take their claims at face value, it means public health experts see lying as such a low cost strategy that they'll deploy it even for managing very short term issues like supply chain imbalances, despite the obvious long term damage it would do to their credibility. Or in other words, it says that public health feels so powerful that the normal rules of accountability and honesty just don't apply to them. This is a terrible message to send to the world!
Fully agree with this on all points but just want to add one more datapoint - in email communications in Feb 05, Fauci stated a belief that masks in the sense that mask mandates want them used don't work, which is not consistent with his alleged "conspiracy" to sequester masks for healthcare providers. https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/20793561-leopold-nih-foia-anthony-fauci-emails page 3027
> So when the medical world was asked about masks at the start, they appear to have been correctly summarizing the state of knowledge until that point. They said eh, masks, well, we don't have any convincing evidence they work actually. It wasn't just Fauci, they were all saying that. And it appears they were justified to do so.
Frankly, I can't even imagine a world in which they would be justified in saying so. We were dealing with a new virus whose transmission vectors were completely unknown. Why *wouldn't* you recommend masks *just in case* until we know more about this new pathogen? Clearly masks work to some extent or healthcare staff wouldn't wear them at all.
As of now, healthcare workers are wearing masks to accommodate the customers (patients) who want them to wear masks. It is a signal that we take covid Very Seriously here.
Source: for work I am privy to some of the conversations about this and how most of the office workers and RNs are various degrees of upset over having to wear a mask despite being vaxxed.
> As of now, healthcare workers are wearing masks to accommodate the customers (patients) who want them to wear masks.
That's not what I meant. Hospital staff were wearing masks long before COVID in certain wards or when doing certain work. Clearly masks work to stem the spread of infection. That's just a fact.
Then COVID came and it was apparently killing people at alarming rates, and we didn't really know how it was transmitted. What moderately intelligent person in their right mind when faced with these basic facts would recommend *against* masks? A health professional is very aware of the precautionary principle.
The only explanation that makes sense of Fauci's recommendations against mask use was his stated fear of shortages.
There's long-standing public health policy in the "evidence-based" world that you *shouldn't* recommend *anything* unless you have empirical studies showing it works. This has been the source of a lot of our problems, that a more Bayesian approach would do better at.
> "we have no evidence that masks work and there is no reason for ordinary people to use masks", which sounds frustratingly similar
There is no meaningful difference between a country's leading healthy authority saying "don't wear masks" and "there is no reason for ordinary people to use masks".
Furthermore, Fauci didn't just leave it at that, he also said that wearing a mask could be *worse* than not wearing one, because people fiddle with it, touch their face, and so on.
So yeah, saying that Fauci said "don't use masks" is a very fair abbreviation of his recommendations at the time.
The "people fiddle with it" is a case where the science really did change. We were genuinely worried about surface transmission at the early stages of the pandemic and then fairly quickly learned it was unlikely to be significant. Therefore people playing with their masks in public (which is absolutely something that happens a lot) is not the problem it seemed like it could be. Maybe it's still a problem for other diseases, but it doesn't seem to be a concern for COVID-19.
If only other public policies and perceptions had updated in the same way. Too much wasted effort on spraying down the streets, cleaning the subways, etc. that are irrelevant to COVID-19.
But I'll make a stronger claim: you can't even do this in principle. One might be tempted to say "aha, well, maybe there's 50 dimensions but we can analyze all of them and come to conclusions" but you can't! Because people have varied lives and, no matter what conclusion you will come to, somebody somewhere will say "if we did it your way, I would not be alive right now. Eff you" and there is absolutely nothing you can say to that person to change their mind.
You can do a writeup where you try to determine position on all of these 50 dimensions, and end up with: "Lockdowns helped with X, Y, Z; they made Q, W, E worse, and also had effects 1, 2, 3 which are hard to classify as good or bad". Let's say it is backed up by a prediction market, and population generally believes in prediction market's accuarcy, so there's no dispute over facts.
It is possible that after reading this, exactly half of the population believes "Lockdowns worked" - which means "they were net positive". But it's unlikely. It'll probably be skewed. The answer still won't be "objective" - but it can be meaningful. Are serial murderers bad? Vast majority of the population will have one answer. Technically it won't be a fact, but...
What about smaller questions: Does locking down golf courses and beaches work?
I suspect we can say now with some confidence that the lockdowns of expansive outdoor recreation in the spring of 2020 were a bad idea spread.
It's worth reviewing the almost transparent propaganda tools that were used to promote shutting beaches, such as printing pictures in newspapers of seemingly ultra-crowded beaches taken with super long telephoto lenses that compress distance unrealistically.
I don't know about that case, but Fauci admitted he was lying about herd immunity in a NYT interview. That wasn't, of course, the way he put it, but he said he was changing his estimate on the basis of poll results showing more people willing to get vaccinated. That means that either his previous estimate or his new estimate was a lie (or perhaps both), since the poll results don't change anything relevant to what is required for herd immunity, only for what he wanted people to believe was required.
"In a telephone interview the next day, Dr. Fauci acknowledged that he had slowly but deliberately been moving the goal posts. He is doing so, he said, partly based on new science, and partly on his gut feeling that the country is finally ready to hear what he really thinks.".
Partly based on new science. So he's partly lying, and you are too.
Yes, they were worried about a run on masks which would result in medical practitioners not having an adequate supply. But that wasn't the only or even the primary reason the CDC initially recommended against mask use. Simply, most epidemiologists didn't think covid was transmitted through aerosols. I remember this vividly, because I was trying to find out whether this was the case, and I though it was, and was surprised that most research claimed otherwise at that time (March 2020). In fact, I could only find one paper relating to aerosolization of the original SARS in a Toronto hospital because of the HVAC system and because of intubation. So the thinking back them was that doctors needed masks because they were intubating, but that the spread was mostly through fomites and heavy droplets that didn't travel far. I thought this was clearly mistaken, but THAT was the primary reason why masks were initially not recommended.
But even if Fauci wilfully lied, I don't see how you can go from this one data point to "you can't use science to determine if lockdowns worked." That sounds like the type of conflict theory argumentation we should strive to avoid.
TL;DR version: lockdowns: good/bad? - is a waste of time that we could be spending on a more important question: how to persuade people to demand a better overall pandemic response (and prevention) in the future. Your post about it was great and fascinating and I loved reading it, but I will straight up paypal you money today if you produce one as good about "finding the best way to demand better next time."
Long version:
I think this is the key point: "But the smartest people I talked to kept - is "derailing" the right word? - derailing onto more interesting and important pull-the-rope-sideways plans. "
And:
"none of that turned out to matter at all compared to some question about stoned driving vs. substituting-for-drunk-driving, which nobody started out caring about."
Because that's exactly the truth - lockdowns yes/no is a very interesting (and extremely difficult) question to answer. But really, for the question of "how should we fight pandemics" it doesn't matter that much - there are other interventions that will have a massively larger effect (and in fact will make doing the research to determine if lockdowns work really hard, as you discovered) that this is like trying to figure out if you should amputate the left or right leg of the guy who got run over by the wheat thresher. The real answer, for society, is taking precautions to avoid the "got run over" scenario, or "let a pandemic get so bad you are debating lockdowns" scenario. The various "Titanic deck chair rearrangement" plans don't move the needle very much.
In fact, given the pandemic's ability to inspire Americans to polarize even the most mundane things, I think that the true answer to your question: "lockdowns? yes/no?" is actually "I think you should stop asking this question." I say this is as a libertarian, first amendment maximalist who has indeed been following this issue and happily debating it with others for a year and a half: this is a rabbit hole that doesn't have... whatever rewards rabbit holes are supposed to have at the bottom of them.
I don't mean to diminish the importance or quality of your work (or anyone else your reference), but for the goal of having the public know what good pandemic response is, this just doesn't help. (I intend no moral or judgement criticism here AT ALL) It is so hard to isolate, so amenable to data cheating, mistakes and incredibly confounding errors (maybe lockdowns work in areas where people believe they work and therefore cooperate, but don't in places where they hate that kind of thing?) that time spent worrying about it just convinces the average person that the question DOES matter, and that other questions (that really do matter more) don't. That is, those people who tried to derail you are exactly right: every minute that you (and all the researchers you cited) spent trying to figure out the truth of this question was time that could have been spent mobilizing public demand for the truly effective pandemic solutions (which surprisingly seem to be far less controversial, and easier to prove they work in practice), for a net benefit.
By any objective, scientific - and indeed, conventional-wisdom-approved measure, there are lots of things (again, many uncontroversial and agreed upon) we could have done better on the pandemic. Politicians and bureaucrats from both parties (or even unaligned) flubbed it to previously unimaginable levels (I used to think the CDC was great!). So the fact that we have no mass movement to Do Better Next Time (and stunningly little promise that any changes have been made, or that anyone at all was held accountable for failures) is shocking, and trying to fix that seems like a much more fruitful use of (anyone's) time.
If someone could figure that out, I would love it. I would love it so much that I would send them money right now to work on it.
Upfront: I'm not trying to criticize you but I'm writing off the cuff and might be blunter than is optimal
> In fact, given the pandemic's ability to inspire Americans to polarize even the most mundane things
I don't think that Americans did this. I think that this was done to Americans. I have no evidence for this beyond reasoning from first principles, so feel free to discount my position as unsupported. But to me it seems abundantly clear that politicians and their catspaws on both sides of the aisle actively and intentionally polarized this issue because they perceived it to be useful to winning the election. It is a pet peeve of mine when people just blanket complain about 'Americans being polarized', as if it's just a moral failing on the American people. It isn't. It's a systemic and intentional failure
> It is so hard to isolate, so amenable to data cheating, mistakes and incredibly confounding errors (maybe lockdowns work in areas where people believe they work and therefore cooperate, but don't in places where they hate that kind of thing?)
This is an incredibly good example that highlights one of the other things I've been trying to highlight (and raised in my post): For every question "does <x policy> work?", there are two separate and independent questions lurking there. Question 1 is "Does taking X action work?" and Question 2 is "does government implementing policy X work?". A lot of people arguing for particular policy positions appear to act as if they just assume that those are the same question. The idea that, for example, they might pass a policy that sees widespread resistance, comes across to them (or at least, comes across to me that it comes across to them) as just an aberration. "Oh, well, just stop them from doing that then". That's not a good policy implementation strategy, and frequently results in literal fascism.
Which, as an aside: Even the Nazis and Commies didn't get 100% compliance with their policies, where noncompliance was punished by your family getting murdered. So I really and truly don't understand why Americans seem to take a utopian optimism towards policy implementation.
You question is great at highlighting the distinction between my questions A and B, because it highlights two different scenarios where the difference between questions A and B is itself different, which underscores the point.
> By any objective, scientific - and indeed, conventional-wisdom-approved measure, there are lots of things (again, many uncontroversial and agreed upon) we could have done better on the pandemic. Politicians and bureaucrats from both parties (or even unaligned) flubbed it to previously unimaginable levels (I used to think the CDC was great!). So the fact that we have no mass movement to Do Better Next Time (and stunningly little promise that any changes have been made, or that anyone at all was held accountable for failures) is shocking, and trying to fix that seems like a much more fruitful use of (anyone's) time.
I remain incredibly skeptical and pessimistic about our institutions, and assert that they didn't flub anything; they accomplished exactly what they wanted to, it's just that their real goals were not their publicly stated goals
(And, for the record, I am not alleging some kind of nefarious conspiracy, although I think things that would qualify as that did happen. For the most part, I am alleging that the primary motivation for the various policies passed was optics. Politicians wanted to look like they were doing something, and to cover their asses when what they did didn't work)
As for the no mass movement thing, I agree with you that it's horrendous that we don't have one. I disagree that this is surprising. I cannot think of a mass movement in my lifetime that was actually focused on something of substance, despite there being lots of substance that needs mass moving. It's always focused on bullshit trivialities.
Further: Most Americans (appear to) believe one of the following:
1) "Our response" (by which they mostly mean the local response wherever they live) was actually good, so why would we protest anything?
2) "Our response" (by which, again, they mostly mean the local response wherever they live) would have been good, except for the fact that Republicans (or Democrats, depending on the state) stopped it. We'll be totally fine next time as long as we keep those people out of power.
It is dumbfounding to me that people think this, because the data to the contrary is obvious and everywhere. I know it is a Republican talking point but, Cuomo's poor nursing home decisions caused tens of thousands of deaths, and yet most of the people I hear talking about him think he did a great job and wish other governors had done as great of a job. Because nobody is reading the dry stats, they're watching the emotionally-laden news, and the emotionally-laden news is telling them that Cuomo did well. (Perhaps because his brother is the newscaster).
But the fact that most people think this way seems pretty obvious by inspection to me
I think I have a different position than either of you. It's not weird or wrong that Americans became polarized on this. Lockdowns were really really awful and unpleasant for a lot of people and it's reasonable that it produces strong emotions, and fear of getting coronavirus (plus actually getting coronavirus) is also really really awful and unpleasant for a lot of people and it's reasonable that it produces strong emotions. There wasn't a lot of great data proving that one thing vs. the other was definitely worse for everyone. I don't think it was some kind of inexcusable failure that we ended up having strong polarized feelings about this.
I agree that it is not surprising that we became polarized about it, (though there are certainly other tiny, strange things about it that became strangely Red or Blue coded for no underlying reason), my overall complaint is that we DID become polarized about it out of proportion to the real possible cost/benefit, at the cost of demanding (polarized or not) solutions that would actually have helped. As evidenced by pols constantly fundraising on the lockdowns/masks culture-war issues, but very few fundraising on "I will ensure that half a million americans never die in a pandemic ever again by doing the following 3 effective reforms"
It really seems like there *should* have been a constituency for "open the playgrounds and close the bars". But somehow polarization ensured there wasn't.
I personally believe that shutting down gyms, parks, hiking trails, and other recreational/exercise facilities, actively increased the death count.
In fact, one mystery I currently consider to be unsolved is why my city (Austin TX) has a mortality rate (~80/100k; from memory, might be wrong) less than half of the national average (~180/100k; from memory, might be wrong). My two candidate explanations are age and fitness. People here are very outdoorsy and active and the obesity rates (at least, based on my entirely unscientific study of who I see when I go outside) are very low. Gyms and such were shut down for like 6 weeks, and outdoors locations, even when they were formally shut down, the shut downs were never enforced.
I suspect, but cannot reasonably demonstrate, that this was causal of our low mortality rates
(Terminology note: "mortality rate" as I'm using it is deaths over population, whereas "fatality rate" as I'm using it is deaths over infected)
(inb4 mortality rate is just a proxy measure for case rate. Austin's case rate is solidly average with, at the time of this writing, approximately 10% of the city confirmed recovered. Further, you're going to have to trust me on this but I've done the math on fatality rates and they show similarly low numbers; I think it was 0.9% vs 1.5% US average or something like this)
Have you done this calculation on other central cities? My guess is that central cities in general will have lower age distributions and higher fitness distributions than suburbs and rural areas, and so central cities in general will have lower mortality rates than the nation as a whole. The main exceptions would be New York (hit hard early on) and possibly Rust Belt cities (higher age distributions). Cities that have incorporated most of their suburbs (San Antonio, Nashville, Jacksonville) might also be counterexamples.
I haven't looked at the numbers to verify. But if Austin has lower mortality rate than Dallas, Seattle, Washington, Boston, Atlanta, then that would be something that needs further explanation about uniquenesses of Austin itself.
The Bay Area still hasn't been hit that hard, either. Smart, rich, skinny people have done better on average than others. For example, in Los Angeles, the places where entertainment industry people live have notably lower rates of cases and deaths than places where working class Latinos live.
But, it might also be that in the future Boyle Heights will be approaching herd immunity while Malibu finally gets slammed. The future is hard to predict with something this novel and this volatile.
This is pretty obviously true. For example, Utah had the 4th highest number of people getting COVID per capita, but the 6th lowest death rate in the country. And Utah didn't doing testing particularly well and with a conservative population (many of whom were anti-mask and anti-lockdown, and the "lockdown" in Utah was quite mild), they likely had tons of undetected cases. But despite lots of people getting COVID, they had less deaths and hospitalizations because they have the youngest median population in the country and most people are relatively fit and outdoorsy.
Being maximally charitable to the lockdown people, one olive branch I can extend is that my fear of covid went to zero as soon as I recovered from it. It is hard for me to remember the fear I had before that happened but, I felt very differently before I caught it.
Although I am proud to say, my position on lockdowns has been relatively consistent. Even when I thought 50 million Americans would die, my position was "we need these but they'll never happen and it would be really bad if they do". Then they did happen, and it was really bad, and the only thing I changed my mind on was the need
I'll go a step further than this: I think that political polarisation on important issues like this is normal and healthy. Half of our society devotes itself to finding evidence to support a policy shift in one direction, while the other half does the same in the other direction, and between the two we (hopefully) optimise our approach, at least along that axis. Same reason we have adversarial trials.
I recall a similar political polarisation arising around the proper degree of response to terrorism, another freedom-vs-security tradeoff, post-9/11.
I am 100% there with you on political diversity of opinion. I don't think anyone would have a problem with polarisation if that "[and then] we (hopefully) optimise our approach" step happened regularly and reliably. I think the issue people have is that the polarization starts to become "the" thing for most people involved, to the detriment of their ability to optimize our approach.
I agree with Scott: It's not clear to me even at this point after 18 months what policies have proved worth the cost other than hurrying-up vaccine development. And I wonder if even vaccines weren't mostly a lucky break -- we happened to have had a lot of development of a new technology in recent years that turned out to be extremely effective against this particular pandemic -- that might not work in the next pandemic.
Keep in mind that not only was this a novel pandemic, but its roller-coaster-like nature has made it hard to learn lessons. It's a lot easier to learn how to respond to something when its rate of incidence doesn't much change unless we do something. Instead, covid is almost always going either up or down, so making a policy change and carefully measuring the response is hard to do because the rollercoaster car is either going up or down, no matter what the policy. Ideally, we could figure out that policy X will make the rollercoaster go up at only 60 degrees of incline instead of the 70 degrees without policy X, but that's not easy to measure.
Also, with or without government policies, people make their own responses. For example, the Swedish state didn't shut down its movie theaters in 2020, but pretty shortly the theater owners shut down themselves because Swedes had stopped going to the movies: and that was either because of fear of Covid or because Hollywood wasn't releasing any new blockbusters or some combination or something else.
So it's reasonable for people to argue over lockdowns because it's a damn hard problem to get convincing data upon.
My approach might be to try to rank elements of lockdowns from probably good to probably bad based on what we know now: e.g.,
Shutting down ski resort apres-ski bars: probably a good idea.
Shutting down ski slopes: hard to say.
Shutting down golf courses and beaches: probably bad ideas.
W.R.T. vaccines I hate to say it but the jury is still out on those.
It's apparent that we don't really know what the safety profile of the vaccines actually is. Governments and manufacturers have been quietly updating the warning labels to discuss problems like blood clotting, which were not detected during the trials. So the question becomes one of scale and cost/benefit analysis, which is the sort of analysis that can be difficult especially when the numbers are all very small.
Consider that we have no reliable data on the prevalence of vaccine injuries. In the USA the VAERS system appears to be seriously backlogged and the CDC is (unsurprisingly) apparently not in any hurry to unbacklog it. This week it contains 12,300 reports of deaths following vaccination vs just 6,000 a week ago. In normal times VAERS reports are rare so it's not surprising there's a backlog, although their failure to clear it properly is damning because the COVID vaccination programme now has the dubious distinction of having more death reports than all other vaccination programmes combined, at least since VAERS data started being collected.
The raw numbers are hard to use because prior studies have suggested that only a tiny proportion of all side effect experiences are reported to systems like VAERs. On the other hand, maybe in COVID times people's awareness of the reporting systems is higher, who knows. I've personally had some experiences that make me think the official data is grossly under-counting, but I can't prove that, it's just anecdotal.
Also, people like to cite trials but it appears that [drug] trials in general may under-estimate side-effects for unclear reasons, by like 3x-4x:
And finally, if you look at the meltdown over the publishing of the "2 deaths caused for every 3 deaths saved" paper a few weeks ago, it's pretty clear that you simply aren't going to be allowed to publish any research in journals on the cost/benefit profile of vaccines.
So the state of knowledge on vaccines looks pretty weak to me. Clearly, these programmes were not advertised as "the most dangerous vaccines in history by miles" although that's what comparative data is now saying. It will be quite some years before our society has regained enough rationality to actually be honest about what's happening right now.
Correction: I did some more reading and it appears the CDC lowered the count to ~6,000 again after raising it to ~12,000? They appear to have inflated the death count by an extra 6,000 deaths and then decided those reports shouldn't have been there, and didn't notice until after publication?! Or at least it's not really clear what's going on there.
"It's not clear to me even at this point after 18 months what policies have proved worth the cost other than hurrying-up vaccine development. "
Not to be rude, but are you joking? Are you implying that we, as humans, are still just in the dark on what we could've done better on the pandemic?
First, to start with, for the one you at least admit exists: vaccine development, there were tons of "hurrying-up" that could've been done, not just in development, but deployment, regulatory approval, earlier/faster testing and trials, human challenge trials, bigger pre-purchase commitments, supply chain enhancement, approving lower-quality vaccines as stop-gaps, spending more on manufacturing, the list literally goes on! The death toll was thousands per day, speeding the arrival of "Everyone Gets Vaccines Day" by one day saves thousands of lives. The cost/benefit equations become not even worth calculating because they're so obviously, ludicrously slanted towards "spend a billion bucks and get vaccines out a day earlier." Are we (America) having this conversation? Are we talking about punishing/firing/executing the people who didn't make these slam dunk, life-saving decisions? No, we're fighting over long term, generalized, half-assed lockdowns that (might) move the needle a few points either way.
Second, nothing about Test/trace/isolate? The stuff that everyone who has ever heard of a pandemic thought the CDC was there to do, and in fact had all these plans and tons of docs, scientists, epidemiologist, nobel prize winners - were begging us to do, from way back in early 2020? Not even worthy of mention? It absolutely would've worked, conditional on committing to do it (and figuring out how to ensure that "commitment" happens is ANOTHER more-worthy pandemic question to consider). You approve/manufacture as many tests (rapider-the-betterer, easier to use, home use, etc...) as possible. You don't ACCIDENTALLY CONTAMINATE 180,000 TESTS AT THE CDC. You don't FORBID ANYONE, INCLUDING MASSIVE TESTING CORPORATIONS, TO PRODUCE TESTS. You test as many people as possible, symptomatic to start, then as much as possible, hiring as many tracers as you can, for double average wages. When you get a positive, you test their contacts as best you can, and isolate them for 2 weeks with full support (cover their pay, cover their doordash/grocery delivery, whatever). You start this right at the beginning - we had the info necessary to see that we'd need it, because so many people (that no one paid attention to) were screaming it. And If you aren't keeping up, (nothing works perfectly) and some place does break out, you institute a 2 week "for reals" lockdown, where everyone really does stay at home, you focus test/trace on the area and food/water/medical support/national guard and pay everyone's paychecks.... for two weeks. You start letting out people who test negative as you work through the pop and then after 2 weeks, the virus is going to be mostly cleared from that population and regular old TTI will handle it - and you go back to "no lockdown at all" - or maybe just "no obviously crazy superspreader events like competitive kissing festivals". Not what we (or anyone else) here are calling "lockdowns" - the half-assed, too-weak to work, too-strong to not cause large harms, for like a year - thing.
That might sound like a lot of money, but it's chump change compared to what we spent on "stimulus" that didn't even do anything to reduce spread. TTI with full isolation compensation is a discount pandemic response. This would work, really. Not perfectly, but it would've, for vastly less money than stimulus and the cost of unchecked spread, and the economic cost of the lockdowns. There is no debate that this would work, because obviously it would work! If you track the spread of the disease, identify where it exists, and cut it off from contacting others well.... it works, the same way to apples fall from trees. You can say "well, it was political impossible" but we it WAS politically possible to spend WAY more, lockdown WAY more, damage the economy WAY more - and retain a CDC with a budget of billions for decades that would respond to the worst threat to American civilians in the history of the country with.... nothing.
There's a bunch of other things that I think would've helped too, (people should go do some high-powered RCTs on say, ivermectin) but faster vaccines and TTI cover most of it. Terrorists killed 3k on 9/11 and we spent trillions doing things that we know almost certainly didn't help. Covid in Feb 2020 is obviously modeled by people as ignorant and unaware as Peter Navarro (!!!) to kill over 250k people (pessimistic scenario!!!) and we spent almost nothing actually fighting it (due credit for Warp Speed) and ..... no one cares, politically? Ho hum, what could we have done? Let's debate lockdowns!
Again, yes, I'm ranting on my soapbox. Yes, I'm sure I seem really annoying. But come on! We FAILED. We fucked up so bad it's damaged our brains and made us unwilling to even look at the scope of the failure, and made us want to just instead contemplate the design of the caskets we're burying the dead in. We aren't addressing the problem.
But this (a pandemic) is going to happen again, and I'm no insane doomsaying Cassandra (quite the opposite), I have good evidence - because it is literally happening RIGHT NOW. The Delta variant is, if you want to define it, a new pandemic - yes, it's relatively similar to original covid, and thankfully the vaccines give some broad response to it, but it's a mutation. It's traits are a mutation - it seems to be more communicable, mostly. But nothing at all in evolution says that variant Theta or Lambda won't have immune escape (or radically higher mortality, or something). Everyone seems to agree now that doing gain of function research (we can debate if we were at Wuhan Virology, but who cares?) on highly transmissable coronavirus is a bad idea. But we are doing GOF research on a massive scale in the millions of human laboratories who are currently infected with alpha/delta/whatever, because the virus in them is interacting and reproducing alongside their natural immunity (or from vaccines) and providing evolutionary pressure to find way around it. We literally already know this has happened, and resulted in partial reduction in the quality of immunity granted by natural/vaccine.
We still have people researching in the field to see if some pesky bat generates a new virus to infect us, but we have millions of humans cycling quintillions of viral generations that have already produced a number of variants that have .... gained... some functions. The "next" pandemic is already happening, and thank god it shares some immune profile with the previous one, and I'm confident it (delta) won't actually be *that* bad in the US. But we aren't doing anything, other than the vaccine companies preparing boosters - and good on them for doing so. Are we really cool with that being the only thing? There are so many more questions more vital than "do American-style long-term lockdowns work?" and one of them is "why is there no war to make sure this never happens again, even though it is, right now, happening again?" And even if you don't count the variants as "next pandemic", we've had sars1, mers, sars2, etc... in just a few decades. SOMETHING else will pop up in 5/10/15 years.
I am FINE with the idea that I'm crazy, and I'm seeing ghosts that aren't there. I'd be thrilled if you could convince me. But.... tell me honestly, does it look like I'm wrong? Please do, because I really, really want to be wrong.
Australia, where I live, has come close to not having the pandemic, but then because it seems like politicians don't actually understand the meaning of the word "quarantine" we kept letting people into the country after eradicating Covid temporarily, and surprise surprise we got more cases. We're now in our 5th lockdown, of which only 1 should have been necessary, and we lockdown seriously here - there's now been almost 12 months cumulatively where I've only left the house for food shopping.
The vaccine supply is far lower than it should be, because like everyone else we were too cheapskate to pay what it cost to get enough early, and now are paying in lockdowns and deaths instead.
I wish I could seriously punish the people responsible for all the fuckups, and I am sorely tempted to vote against every incumbent on principle come the next elections, but this isn't a partisan issue, it's a general incompetence issue, and the current opposition probably wouldn't have done any better than the current government so voting feels like far too weak a signal.
>Lockdowns were really really awful and unpleasant for a lot of people and it's reasonable that it produces strong emotions, and fear of getting coronavirus (plus actually getting coronavirus) is also really really awful and unpleasant for a lot of people and it's reasonable that it produces strong emotions.
That description seems calculated to appear symmetrical, but the situation was highly asymmetrical and I think it was the asymmetry that drove much of the polarization.
Lockdowns are moderately unpleasant for almost everyone, and while there is substantial individual variation, it's a distribution around a central mean. Covid is completely harmless to almost everyone, and really really really bad for a few people. And fear of Covid, is the sort of thing normal people don't deal with by complex risk-analysis math, but by a quick instinctive sorting into the categories of "completely harmless", "intolerably dangerous", or (sometimes, not everyone has the knack for this) "dangerous but worth the risk".
The infectiousness and virulence of Covid, baseline Covid in particular, is right at the fuzzy border of those three categories in the estimation of most people. And at a part of the border where the fuzziness correlates with tribal characteristics like e.g. Red Tribe mostly working blue-collar jobs and Blue Tribe mostly working desk jobs. So once people do the instinctive sort, the "completely harmless" crowd is obviously going to feel lockdowns are a grievous imposition and the "intolerably dangerous" crowd is going to feel them a trivial sacrifice for the common good, they're going to see most of their tribal mates standing with them on that, and instant polarization.
Nah, not critical or blunt at all - I think you are right on all fronts.
Regarding the "polarization" thing, I think I was just speaking sloppily. For the context of my argument, it doesn't matter if polarization is "natural" or "imposed" - I'd include the "politicians and catspaws" in "Americans" in this case.
" I am not alleging some kind of nefarious conspiracy"
Same here. I'd be less worried if it were a conspiracy. I think it's just institutional lack-of-focus, incompetence and no accountability.
"I remain incredibly skeptical and pessimistic about our institutions, and assert that they didn't flub anything; they accomplished exactly what they wanted to, it's just that their real goals were not their publicly stated goals"
Oh, I think you are right. Which is why one way you could frame my question-we-should-be-answering is "how to convince Americans to demand that they try to achieve their publicly stated goals?"
"As for the no mass movement thing, I agree with you that it's horrendous that we don't have one. I disagree that this is surprising."
You are right here too. I am just trying to move the conversation here (on Scott's blog) to that question: how to mobilize public opinion to demand fixes to matters of substance - specifically in this case, pandemic responses.
> Oh, I think you are right. Which is why one way you could frame my question-we-should-be-answering is "how to convince Americans to demand that they try to achieve their publicly stated goals?"
It is my personal belief that demands will never accomplish this, because the people in power can just say no.
I think more extreme measures are the only viable measures to changing anything. I also thing that more extreme measures would be both disastrous and, ultimately, ineffective, so I don't advocate those either.
I think you're underestimating the level of "reform" I'm willing to go with. My niceness is tactical. If peaceful happy democratic reform can give us a CDC and FDA that prevents half a million dead americans, then I'm good with that. If cranky but peaceful abolition/rebuilding does that, then great. But protecting citizens from external threats is the first and sometimes last true role of the state. Failing to do this undermines the legitimacy of the entire institution, if I were in ancient China, I'd be talking about the mandate of heaven. If not-so-peaceful means are necessary to nudge our governmental system from one that CAN'T stop half a million civilian deaths to one that CAN... then... well.... that's what I'm saying: I am trying to push you to have a discussion about making that train run on time... because there are half a million dead bodies if it's late. Just saying "oh well they're run by politics guess we can't do anything" is a cop out. I am pushing you (and everyone else) to have a discussion about how you fix that, GIVEN that constraint.
So a Chinese approach? Current regime gets and has maintained the Mandate of Heaven? Some hell at the beginning, and the rest has been relatively chill.
Mandatory lock-downs stink. Voluntary lock-down has all the right feedback. You just need to know when it's 'dangerous' for you to go out. Which is what novid tries to do.
If you're pursuing elimination, rather than a steady state of misery and moderate death, then you care a lot about the minority of arseholes who are either woefully misinformed or horrifically callous and selfish. Strict border controls + extremely tough lockdowns where being out of your house gets you arrested whenever cases appear locally, means that a locality can actually have business mostly as usual unless and until the "strict border controls" part fails.
It's interesting to see the question of "how much more do you trust someone arguing against their typical ideological bias" in a very different context than I'm used to seeing it in. I work in a corporate business environment, and the analogy my boss likes to use is "PETA vs. the butcher", in that those are two people which you would expect to have very different opinions on the sanctity of animal life.
So yeah, assigning additional credibility towards people arguing against their typical positions is meaningful - but exactly how much additional credibility to give something, and how much more seriously to take the argument, is a very interesting question. On first glance it's the sort of thing that seems unavoidably subjective; every individual arguing against their ideological bent is going to have a varying degree of attachment to their "tribe" and therefore the emotional or social costs of believing things that go against their prior attachments - and thus the amount of additional 'virtue' we would assign them for 'having done science correctly' - would similarly seem to vary on a case by case basis.
Do you award extra 'virtue points' if the head of the NRA argues for gun control in a specific scenario, vs someone who's just a member, vs someone who's just Republican?
What about the opposite scenario, where the head of the NRA argues for total lack of gun control? My statistics background says "this is the null hypothesis, there's no additional information to be gleaned here" but is there ever a point where someone is so ideologically committed to certain positions that even otherwise good-seeming arguments that they are making should be discounted or taken with a grain of salt? Maybe if they're trying to sell you something?
An interesting question that I'm going to be thinking about!
An example I've seen recently is that all the big oil/gas companies apparently came around to "carbon taxes are the way to fix climate change" view over the past few years, so they could say "see, we support ways to fix climate change!" But it turns out they did this because they figured out this was both the least popular way to fix climate change, and a totally serious policy idea among serious people, so they could be sure that they would look serious, even as no politician would ever actually try to implement it. If they had supported something less unpopular, it might actually have happened.
That's entirely possible, but in the interest of fairness there's another explanation, which is that certainty is *good* in finance. You can lend to a project that knows its risks, but it's much harder to lend to a project that doesn't (even if your base case risk for the latter is lower!) Carbon taxes provide a lot of certainty for budgeting (much more so than, say, cap and trade programs).
(Disclosure, I'm a banker who works in energy and infrastructure financing)
Also, the former approach can backfire:
"the [Canadian] federal minimum price started at $20 per tonne of CO2 equivalent in 2019. As of this April it’s $40, rising to $50 in 2022 and increasing by $15 annually until it reaches $170 in 2030"
Fully agree. Business doesn't give a damn what the rules are, whether you need to rub blue mud or green into your belly button to be considered A-OK by the current shibboleths, but what they absolutely need to function is some degree of stability and transparency in the rules. Otherwise, you can't plan, and there are such massive inefficiencies in your operations that you can't compete on the basis of competence, you have to do it on the basis of connections (to lawmakers and enforcers).
How do you know that was their motivation? I associate oil and gas people with being pretty free market capitalist, and carbon taxes seem like the most free market capitalist compatible way to do things, so I'd expect them to settle on that position by default. You're asserting they're playing 4D chess and I'd like to understand the evidence for that.
"Keith McCoy, a senior director in Exxon’s Washington government affairs team, was recorded on video in May saying that the company backs a carbon tax “as an easy talking point” and an “advocacy tool” because “there is not an appetite for a carbon tax” and that Republican legislators who oppose taxes in principle will never let it happen.
“Nobody is going to propose a tax on all Americans, and the cynical side of me says, yeah, we kind of know that – but it gives us a talking point that we can say, well, what is ExxonMobil for? Well, we’re for a carbon tax,” he said.
Later, McCoy reiterates the point: “Carbon tax is not going to happen.”"
1. What you describe doing in representing A to B and then B to A corresponds pretty closely to the job of paidhi in C.J.Cherryh's (very good) sf Foreigner series. The paidhi first acts as A's agent in representing his position to B, then switches roles and acts as B's agent in representing his position to A.
2. Your experience trying to figure out the net effect of either lockdowns or Marijuana legalization is similar to mine looking at the effect of climate change. There are a whole lot of possible effects, positive and negative, and what one mostly sees is a calculation based on a subset biased towards the result the person calculating wants or expects. Nordhaus gives a lot of weight to very speculative calculations on low probability high cost effects of climate change but, so far as I can tell, never considers low probability high cost effects of preventing climate change — even though the obvious one, the end of the current interglacial, is a climate effect that has happened multiple times over the last few million years.
There is one way of including emotional effects in the calculation — leaving individuals free to decide for themselves whether to quarantine. They have the right incentive with regard to emotional costs, since they are the ones bearing them. It's an imperfect solution because they have too weak an incentive to take precautions — if they get Covid, much of the cost goes to them but much to other people to whom they might pass it. And all of the cost if they already have it and don't take precautions goes to others.
My family in fact quarantined more tightly than the rules require until we were vaccinated.
CJ Cherryh Foreigner references = +10 internet points.
Also, I think you have it exactly right with comparison to climate change: the question is fascinating academically, and intriguing politically - because, crucially, within the extremely limited framework that almost everyone operates in, which is: "how exactly bad will climate change be, if the only solutions we have are drastic or less drastic carbon reductions?"
But in the same way as "lockdowns?", the question becomes less interesting when you take the wider look at solutions to the general problem: "well, if one of the solutions is something cheaper/easier like nuclear power, lots of solar panels, carbon capture, some mild geo-engineering, some flood walls" then the intensity of the question fades away. If I can spend (magic numbers) 1 trillion bucks on that stuff to prevent the negative effects of climate change, I don't actually care if the cost of unmitigated climate change is 10T or 20T, and fascinating academic debates about it lose their luster.
Similarly, if I can spend 1T on test/trace/isolate, radically fast vaccine deployment and better safety protocols on virology labs and reduce pandemic severity by 90%, I am suddenly not really interested in whether lockdowns cause 10% more or less harm than not-lockdowns.
On your problem with fancy statistics ... . I tried to follow the controversy over the Lott and Mustard paper on the effect of concealed carry, eventually stopped when the statistical arguments got above my level. Like you I have taught low level statistics and, while my mathematical background is much stronger than yours, my statistical background probably is not.
I think someone else has already made this point, but if the significance of an observation requires more than Scott Alexander / David Friedman / John Schilling etc level statistical technique to tease out of the data, then the significance of the observation is probably too weak to make a major policy decision around and it is probably unwise to burn your political capital on pushing that policy on the unwilling.
I loved someone made that observation with respect to the vaccines and that first, famous chart that came out showing infections just ended - became a flat line - after 14 days, something to the effect that: "That is the type of result you want - one obvious to anyone who sees your data, not requiring a lot of statistical techniques to tease out."
And sure enough, those things have been a Godsend, the Delta variant's protestations to the contrary notwithstanding.
"Apparently pro-lockdown academics who get too close to the public spotlight have been getting harassed by lockdown opponents, and this is a known problem that pro-lockdown academics are well aware of. I was depressed to hear that, though in retrospect it makes sense."
I'm very new to this blog. I love the smart writing. But man do I wonder sometimes what alternate universe the author lives in to not know this stuff has been going on for a year and a half now. Federal, state, county and city health directors have received death threats, with armed protestors sometimes showing up at their house. The health director instantly becomes the most reviled person in their region. Many have quit over it.
There's an idea many people have that the biggest harassment to get people to shut up is coming from the racial left. This idea doesn't have much basis in reality, but it is widespread.
If I understand correctly, Kenny Easwarans point wasn't that Radical Left doesn't do harassment. The point was that it's not the biggest one, while being framed like it.
Current narrative focuses on social justice inspired harassments too much because it's still somewhat new and hot phenomena. You can't get lots of clicks for news of a radical right-winger harrasing gay people and sending death threats to feminists because everyone kind of knows that it's what radical right-wingers do. It's bad, unjustified and kind of shameful, so we prefere not to talk about it too much. There is no real controversy here.
But when we see how some left-wing activist behave themselves somewhat similarly towards their political opponents - now this is interesting. In what sense such actions are justified and in what sense they are not? How it affects our society in grand scale? Intelligent people can argue different positions here, while feeling smart, talking about consequentialism, paradox of tolerance, power dynamics, and other different political and ethical theories.
As far as I can tell, harassment from the radical right usually takes the form of hate mail and threats of extralegal violence; but the violence rarely pans out, and the authorities protect you from it. Harassment from the left usually takes the form of attempts at career damage, it sometimes pans out, and you usually have no legal recourse. (This tool is largely unavailable to the right.) It's unclear which one is worse.
And *now* we're stuck in the position of small-threat-of-murder/rape vs moderate-threat-of-career-damage (or the attendant psychological ramifications of threats of both) - it's turtles all the way down...
I'm not convinced that I've seen this difference. It seems to me that both sides usually do both, and the results are pretty similar (usually the violence doesn't pan out, and career damage does or doesn't depending on the employer). I can think of several people who got their career harm from right-wing mobs (Milo Yiannopoulos and Will Wilkinson are the immediate ones that come to mind, but older cases like Steven Salaita also seem relevant).
You seem to be unaware of YouTube banning videos and whole channels based on people even talking about the science of the lockdown and pandemic handling in general. Is that the case?
To the extent that there is a left or right aspect to toeing the official COVID line, yes there is. The left wing is the "do what the government says" side, for those of you playing at home. That some on the left willing to question their own side have been banned as well does not diminish who is doing the banning.
Another note: The harassment of people with mainstream positions is generally spread out across more people, so I expect a random person who espouses a mainstream position to be less likely to be seriously harassed. There is just not enough capacity to harass everyone who expresses a mainstream view.
An exception is when a person expressing a common view is somehow special. E.g. I can easily imagine a pro-lockdown high-level health official getting harassed. I'd actually expect an anti-lockdown academic to get harassed for the same reason: while opposition to lockdowns is not rare in general, if it's rare among academics, then an opposing academic makes a prominent target.
This is a really good point. It's also a part of why something that seems unexceptionable to a member of the majority can be seen as part of a systematic annoyance by a minority - if black people are 10% of the population and white people are 90%, and a white person asks to touch the hair of the first black person they meet, then average black people will have this interaction happen 9 times while the average white person won't even realize there's a pattern.
A public official like a health director is a perfectly fair target for protestors (but not death threats). Academics are a different matter, but I've seen "called me names on twitter" referred to as harassment too often to take such claims at face value.
I'm not sure how much it tells, when it comes to complex empirical questions. Knowing how common it is that different analyses of evidence come to very different conclusions, I'd often be very reluctant to promise to admit that I'd been definitely wrong on the basis of empirical evidence alone. For all I know, the next day someone may come along and present an equally convincing analysis suggesting I'm right. If I have theoretical reasons for my beliefs, I would often only be sure to change my view if, in addition to empirical counter-evidence, someone presented a theoretical explanation of why the empirical evidence differs from my prediction, with evidence to support that theoretical explanation.
It sounds like you have articulated quite well the general burden of proof to shift you from a position you hold strongly (and I tend to agree with it) - you require *both* empirical evidence contrary to your prediction, and an alternate theory that did correctly predict the observed empirical result (while still explaining all past results)
"It sounds like you have articulated quite well the general burden of proof to shift you from a position you hold strongly" Specifically, I'd apply what I said when I hold my current position based on theoretical arguments, not just empirical evidence. Essentially what I'm saying is that, when it's so hard to make sense of the empirical observations, I prioritize theoretical arguments over empirical evidence. To make me admit that I'm wrong, you would need either unambiguous and overwhelming empirical evidence, or theoretical arguments that match empirical observations—but unambiguous, overwhelming empirical evidence is unlikely to exist against a position I hold strongly, because if it did, I would have probably already heard about it and adjusted for it.
Do you really believe that the mathematician with his zeugmas, crenelated or not, started off with a totally unbiased mind, a tabula-rasa, and let the math lead him to a conclusion? Or do you believe that he started off with some emotion, instinct-driven position and found the data and the math to justify it?
You can’t perform any meaningful post-facto analysis of the pluses and minuses of lockdowns because you can’t perform a test with one America locked down and one not locked down. Comparing states is a worthless exercise – the social, economic and cultural differences between, say, California and Alabama, are simply too great. The researchers who have tried to do that just prove my contention: they begin with a belief and try to find the data to support it, ignoring the fatal limitations of the exercise.
The same is true with data for marijuana usage: we know with some degree of confidence the typical health and behavioral impacts of marijuana usage, but we cannot possibly forecast the net benefits\harms caused to American society at large, and all those who pretend we can and that they have the right methodology, have started out intending to prove their instinctive belief (even when they’re adamant they haven’t) and produced nothing of value.
So, what do we do when decisions have to be made, like about lockdowns? Well, we start off with what we know for sure:
Covid is an infectious disease spread by contact. Covid is potentially fatal or highly debilitating. We have very limited facilities for treating patients with serious cases of Covid. People will respond to images of hospitals denying admission and people dying at home in great distress by self-locking down. Such ad-hoc quarantining will be chaotic and lack legal protections, and will cause great economic damage.
We don’t need Zeugmas to be sure of any of this. All we need to do is to confidently state the common-sense facts, draw the obvious conclusions and act accordingly. For the most part, that, thankfully, is what we did.
This is my least favorite kind of argument. "Complicated analyses can be biased, so instead we should just use my common sense intuitions, which can definitely never be biased, even though other people have the exact opposite common sense intuitions I do. And you can just dismiss them when they say what common sense tells them, because my common sense tells me it's wrong, and surely you can't dismiss my common sense."
Oddly enough, you've argued for the virtues of common sense elsewhere - prediction markets for example.
Common sense that's based on known and irrefutable facts is the soundest type of opinion. If your common sense is based on made-up facts and fake news, if it's common nonsense as so much is, of course, I can dismiss it (I'm not saying your is).
> If your common sense is based on made-up facts and fake news
But the problem is, in a dispute where multiple sides or participants are _all_ appealing to 'common sense, it's not obvious which 'facts' are made-up and which 'news' is fake.
I prefer the idea of 'reasonableness' as described by David Chapman – https://metarationality.com/reasonableness – i.e. reasoning that's not 'rational', or maybe a-rational, but _not_ 'irrational'. One problem in appealing to 'common sense' is that it often doesn't seem to be particularly common!
We let the fake news peddlers win when we doubt our ability to arrive at the facts of a situation - and that's exactly what they want: nothing is securely grounded in reality, no facts are true, every opinion is just as worthy as any other.
But I reject that. Take the two topics Scott touched on: Covid and marijuana. There are enough facts known about each to make common-sense judgments and arrive at sensible opinions, supporting lockdowns in the case of Covid and legalization in the case of marijuana.
Scott was making the argument too complex. The kind of data he's looking for can't ever be reliably found. A great deal of social science research seems to be reaching too far for data that doesn't exist and we give too much credence and respect to mathematicians and statisticians who are using decidedly shaky data sets. All the Zeugmas and equations in the world won't overturn my common-sense conclusion that a creature with a beak and wings, one that waddles and quacks, is a duck and not an elephant.
I probably believe similar things you do. But I can't "reject" the things in the first paragraph. It's not that truth exists - but it really can't be credibly determined which side has it at present. There's no argument to bridge different, eh, "sets of beliefs".
There are cynical 'peddlers', but then there are true believers too.
Prediction markets provide a solution. Theoretically, one which doesn't contradict any of the prevailing "sets of beliefs". Arguments for them are... non-ideological? Something like that. Pure deduction, math, basically.
If they work like e.g. Scott believes them to work, and current "sets of beliefs" will reach such consensus, then there's a trustless solution. The problem wasn't such a big deal in the past because we were mostly covered by authoritative sources of truth - but that wasn't really principled in the first place (kinda very wrong, really), and it's unlikely to somehow emerge again. I think "The Revolt of The Public and the Crisis of Authority in the New Millennium" gets the base problem right.
As for the lockdowns themselves, frankly, I have no idea. I like them for a heterodox reason tho; I want stuff to move forward and I believe mass lockdowns (which were kinda magic blackswan for me btw. - I'd never expect such a thing could actually happen, and certainly not be sustained for more than a week or two) help.
They should've accelerated death of retail (which is a relic of the past), they made remote work slightly less of a niche (unfortunately somehow, despite how long the situation took, it'll still massively backslide I think). They might've pushed us a little closer to the UBI. Hopefully also automation, if people believe human labor is less reliable now.
I'm sad The Conversation didn't focus on remote work, apart from acute 'lockdowns' aspect now that it was widespread for a while. Why aren't people making the connection with climate change, housing, commute(=time lost) and so on? Widespread push for remote work to become a standard for all mental work seems so obviously necessary if one believes any of these are problems.
I think your understanding, as described in this comment, is uncharitable. I don't think almost anyone is, deliberately, a "fake news peddler" – nor does anyone want it to be the case that "nothing is securely grounded in reality, no facts are true, every opinion is just as worthy as any other". In fact, AFAICT, that's exactly backwards – almost everyone believes that _something_ IS "securely grounded in reality", that there are true facts, but that THEIR own opinions are MORE worthy than those of the people with which they disagree.
I appreciate Scott looking at arguments and 'making' them complex – the most interesting arguments or subjects/topics/whatever ARE often complex. And anything with even a hint of consequentialism is necessarily going to be complex and complicated – the world is big, good data is expensive, and our own understanding is severely limited. I generally appreciate people NOT being satisfied with 'common sense' and exploring the MUCH larger space of possible hypotheses, and examining the relevant evidence in as much excruciating detail as they can manage.
Let me clarify what I said and what I mean: of course, the real world is a complex place and many events in it can be understood only as a result of detailed analysis based on extensive data. Some of what Scott does in this area is very interesting and worthwhile and I appreciate and enjoy it as much as you do.
But sometimes meaningful data just can't be obtained. For example, measuring the outcomes in those states that locked down with those that didn't and using those comparisons to decide if lockdowns were right or wrong as national policy across states and communities that widely differ. Or trying to draw up a comprehensive balance sheet that captures every bit of the good and the bad of marijuana legalization. Both of these are examples of Scott wrestling with decisions that didn’t require such complexity. I called what was needed instead “common sense” and I seemed to have touched a nerve here with that term.
But what I mean by common-sense isn’t rustics in cloth caps quoting from Old Moore’s Almanac, although it seems to have been interpreted in that way, but smart people using known and secure facts about the world to form opinions and make decisions that pass the test of being obviously true. What I’m complaining about is when people ignore such common sense and spout unreliable and often worthless data to justify opinions that are, just on the face of it, idiotic.
We were awash in such idiotic opinions about locking down, many of them from smart people who were saying things that made me cringe – and some of them still do. There are those who can prove that global heating is fake, that vaccines cause autism, that immigrants commit the majority of crime. You can prove anything and you can make any idea no matter how absurd seem reasonable – just look at what QAnon cultists think.
We have to be careful about worshiping data, about trying too hard to nail everything down. “Striving to better, we oft mar what’s well”, as King Lear said. Sometimes we just can’t interrogate the world to get every scrap of reliable data, and sometimes common sense, as defined above, is the best guide to what’s true and what’s isn’t.
I don't think prediction markets are associated with common sense - you can bet based on your common sense, I can bet based on my sophisticated model, and whichever of our strategies was better will win.
I think political science has pretty roundly disproven your second paragraph - see all those studies showing that people with better science education/knowledge are *more* likely to be polarized around scientific issues, not less.
Have you read my original lockdown post (or any of my other Much More Than You Wanted To Know posts)? I feel like that might be the quickest antidote to what you're saying.
Actually, your point about people with better science education/knowledge supports my argument: too much knowledge can be a bad thing. In the social sciences, in particular, you can rummage around published research and find results to prove almost anything.
The main point of my post was to argue for making decisions based on what is solidly known, what you might call common sense, and not go searching for what probably can never be known, or what is arrived at through decidedly shaky and often biased means.
Yes, I agree. I feel like there is a whole class of arguments like this, which boil down to "Determining the truth is hard, so I won't even try". Even if you can't fully understand an argument or formulate a counter-argument yourself, there are plenty of steps to try to partially understand it rather than just giving up -- some of which you described in this post.
I like common sense, but common sense works when it does work because it's based on familiarity with a lot of similar cases. Coronavirus was a pretty unusual case.
Common sense is just a nice way of saying "mental inertia," and the only genuine utility it has lies in reducing the chances of falling for scams that rely on strange theories that require unusual coincidences to be true, e.g. it keeps you safe(r) from tinfoil hat conspiracy beliefs.
But you will never make money using common sense, since you will always buy when everyone else is buying (prices are high) and sell when everyone else is selling (prices are low). You will never innovate or invent, because common sense will tell you that the innovation or invention is impossible or unwise, since ipso facto it defies the conventional wisdom.
I'm pretty confused here. It sounds like you said "we can't possibly figure out whether a given policy is a good idea or not", and then you said "so we'll just use common sense to figure out whether a given policy is a good idea or not", which seems like a flat contradiction to me.
I don't see how I can coherently choose which policy to support other than "try to predict which will have the best results". Even if I'm not very good at predicting that, taking my best stab at it still seems obviously better than any other strategy of choosing policies.
Was Max Davies *trying* to escape from consequentialism? I thought he said that people will self-quarantine anyway, but mandating a quarantine would cause less economic damage, and therefore we should mandate one. That sounded pretty consequentialist to me.
> It sounds like you said "we can't possibly figure out whether a given policy is a good idea or not", and then you said "so we'll just use common sense to figure out whether a given policy is a good idea or not", which seems like a flat contradiction to me.
I would steelman his argument as:
"we can't possibly figure out whether a given policy is a good idea or not given all possible variables, downstream effects and feedback loops, so we'll just figure out what policy looks good based on the well understood foundational principles at play"
In this case, the foundational principles being how viruses spread via contact, therefore we should reduce all possible points of contact and not make it a choice so people are forced to go to work by idiot bosses.
People will respond to images of hospitals denying admission and people dying at home in great distress by self-locking down. Such ad-hoc quarantining will be chaotic and lack legal protections, and will cause great economic damage.
"
That is where your common sense chain of logic breaks down completely.
People responded by staying at home long before American hospitals denied people admission and BEFORE politicians responded with mandatory lockdowns.
Politicians were actually *encouraging* people to go out to their community events because businesses were hurting because of the VOLUNTARY stay at home behavior.
One description of why the unknown unknowns can be high impact and unpredictable:
Suppose the US had absolutely no lockdowns. This would probably make the population dislike the incumbent Republican government more, which would probably lead to the Democrats win with a huge majority in the election. Whether this is good or bad is up to your interpretation, but it could plausibly have an impact much larger than the marginal impact of the lockdowns.
On the other side, suppose the US had stronger lockdowns with more bipartisan support from the federal government. This might lead to the incumbent Republican party staying in power in the election, especially if the stricter lockdowns had a large impact on keeping case counts down. Similarly, this could also plausibly have an impact much larger than the marginal impact of the lockdowns.
Of course, the assumptions behind both of those scenarios could be incorrect, but they're at least *plausible*, making the whole situation impossible to evaluate to a binary yes/no.
Whether such effects should be taken into account depends on the reason for discussing whether lockdowns were beneficial on the net. Reasons I can think of can include (1) whether we should use lockdowns in a similar situation in the future, (2) whose early predictions were right, or (3) which party we should praise (and reward with our votes) for its COVID policies.
I don't think the sort of indirect effects you discuss should be relevant to any of these, even if they trump the more direct effects. The effects on elections will be different at a different place or at a different time. Predictions probably didn't intend to cover indirect effects through the elections. And if, say, you're a Democrat, you probably don't want to reward Republicans with your vote in the next election because they benefited the world (in your opinion) by losing the election; likewise, if you're a Republican, you don't want to punish Republicans for losing the election by voting Democrat the next time.
"If a professor comes up with some study that shows guns decrease crime, and that professor is a gun owner, goes hunting every day, and donates to conservative organizations, is that suspicious? What if another professor shows that guns increase crime, and this professor has never owned a gun in her life, hates hunting, and donates to liberal organizations? It feels like "enthusiastic gun owner" is more of a "marked" group than "non-gun-owner", but that's just a coincidence - if we had been in a world where academia leaned conservative and most professors owned guns, it would be the opposite. But should we really discount the fact that the pro-gun study professor has an NRA bumper sticker on his car? I’m still not sure how to think about this."
This strikes me as the fundamental crisis both of rationality and our current moment. My sense is that most people have already surrendered to the view that political or class alignment overshadows all evidence of unbiased analysis or opinion. And its not like there aren't plenty of real examples of this! But if we can't find any way past this problem we are probably screwed.
When there is enough uncertainty, model outcomes reflect the biases of the author a surprising amount of the time. I'd do a study on this but I'm biased that this is clearly true.
Here is some advice, if you don't like questionable statistical manipulation then never look closely at some areas of climate science. This is particularly true for the ones that make it through the media's new and alarming results filter.
A lot of statistical manipulation can be a sign of a very difficult problem, it can also be a sign that the less complex models weren't giving answers the author liked. For some problems where there were literally new statistical methods invented for analysis it would be nice to see a progression of different model outcomes and how the results were affected. Sometimes raw data is just crap, and you can't polish it no matter how hard you try.
I'm very surprised and sorry that <i>"it just felt too weird and transgressive to focus on something authorities weren't even talking about."</i> That's one of the biggest reasons I started following your writing, Scott - you've been willing to focus on weird but important aspects of situations, even when authorities aren't talking about them!
The toughest thing about this topic for me is the fact that for many conservative places (like Indiana where I live), "lockdown" was largely hypothetical! Yes, stuff closed for a bit, but for most of COVID you could go most places and largely wouldn't even be asked to wear a mask.
How do you study the effects of a mask "mandate" (read: suggestion) that more than half the population simply ignored? Surveys seem like a very thin way of learning things like "a quarter of the people at the grocery store don't wear masks" and "lots of people never stopped getting together at all."
Sadly, some terms really just seem to be extremely memetically infectious, e.g. 'garner'. 'Lockdown' too is just too convenient for almost everyone. I'm not even sure that it would do any good to invent another circumlocution.
And now that we're complaining about terms – 'COVID' isn't quite right; 'SARS-CoV-2' is better!
We need a word to describe the things a whole lot of governments actually did. We don't have nearly so much need for a word to describe a thing that almost nobody actually did or is likely to do. "Lockdown" is the word that is in common use for the thing that we need a word for, and I don't think it is worth the bother of trying to force a transition to a new term just because "Lockdown" seems etymologically impure in this context.
But using "lockdown" to describe whatever is in common between the covid policies of Texas, Singapore, China, Australia, UK, and San Francisco is like using "democracy" to describe whatever is in common between the government forms of Texas, Singapore, China, Australia, UK, and San Francisco! It's not a useful category.
Possibly I'm missing something, but I think Texas, Singapore, China, Australia, the UK, and San Francisco all had at one time or another the thing where the government orders people to stay in their homes unless they had an approved reason for going out. Granted, in Texas and China that was imposed at the city or county/province level. That, plus closures of a broad range of businesses, and schools, and bans on public gatherings, seems like a useful category. The fact that specifics (and severity of enforcement) differed within members of this category, doesn't mean it isn't a useful category.
"People are allowed to leave their homes when they want to" vs "People can only leave their homes for approved purposes", is noteworthy and worth talking about in ways that "here is the list of specific approved purposes for leaving your home" isn't,
In the United States, every single place that ever had an order had "going out for a walk" as an approved purpose. And most places only had the relevant order for something like 6-10 weeks. The vast majority of the political argumentation about government-mandated pandemic response measures was after most of these stay-at-home orders were gone
It seems to me that "business closures" are one policy to discuss, "bans on public gatherings" are another, "mask mandates" are another, and "stay at home orders" (with or without the outdoor exercise exception) are another.
There's nothing gained by lumping them all together as "lockdown" any more than you gain something by lumping together Singaporean one-party elections, Chinese style one-party decision making with mass membership in the party, US style two party bicameralism (with more or less restrictions on how to register), and Australian style mandatory voting with transferable vote as a single thing called "democracy".
>In the United States, every single place that ever had an order had "going out for a walk" as an approved purpose.
Even prisoners in solitary confinement are usually allowed to walk back and forth in the exercise yard for half an hour every day. If you're allowed to "go out for a walk" but not to go anywhere or come within six feet of anyone, I'm not giving you any credit for allowing me to decide when and on which empty street to take my allotted walk.
We need a word for the situation where you are only allowed to leave your home is to take a walk on an empty street (or other short list of approved things), because that is a thing that happened and it is controversial that it needs to be talked about. We have a word, "lockdown", which is being used for that purpose and for no other purpose in any related context. I am sympathetic to your view that we could have chosen a better word, but it's too late for that and this word will do the job.
I could tell that paper was exhausting to write, and thank you for going through with it, even if the results weren't quite what you wanted in terms of clarity.
I find topics like this to be intellectual catnip personally. The fact that it really seems like no clarity is feasible, or maybe even possible, just makes the meta-investigation of investigations of such topics themselves fascinating.
Quick back of an envelope gives me that if the whole world was as prosperous as W. Europe (where I am) that would save ~3m child deaths/ annum
3m/ annum is roughly the C19 death rate over the last year. I have no idea what would have happened if we'd done nothing and carried on. If we'd doubled the death rate but the economy had carried on growing normally we'd be at break even.
The correlation between wealth (GDP/capita) and longevity, both in life expectancy and child mortality, is overwhelming. I saw some talk about this in 'phase 2' of the conversation last year but it seems to have been forgotten
The argument is actually much stronger than that - you get most of the benefit well before you get to W. European levels, so you can get most of the benefit for a small fraction of the cost! You can see that in the data on that site itself (Disclosure, I'm real big on effective altruism, it's pretty front of mind for me constantly).
Like how "emotional damage" overwhelms the calculation when it comes to lockdowns in developed countries, poverty overwhelms the calculation when it comes to lockdowns in rest of world. Well, that, and younger populations can have an order of magnitude lower IFR too.
"Other times I just went for maximally stupid models and saw what happened"
I think you're probably being too harsh on this as a good judgment method, at least in this case. Lockdowns are, in general, very 'maximal' policies; they are not "adding a penny tax to drinks at the bar" or "restrict advertisements for tourism" which are the much more typical policies you might see a government introduce. They are a great cudgel of a policy.
As you state, this is helpful in bounding things, but given the political interests, and the immense difficulty of teasing out impacts, it should bound people to a great degree. If the broad policy of preventing interactions fails to produce broad results, we should be quite suspicious of very careful, complex models. Given the replication crisis and similar scandals, I think a skeptical instinct in these cases would prove a better judge overall.
If one was studying lockdowns, why choose red vs blue states? Why not instead choose US vs China? Because that's an emotional ouchie for many.
I would argue that the targeted comparison reveals a lot about the motives of an author. Even red and blue states aren't that much different. They each have large percentages of the opposition who behave according to their tribal tendencies regardless of government edicts. I'm no fan of China but the real question to me is whether hard core China-style lockdowns are what is needed once widespread transmission is underway, not these flip a red/blue coin and micro-analyze the results.
I live in Florida and we have been bombarded by the national media with partisan accusations constantly. No state mask mandates! Curiously my county was under mandatory mask orders for over a year, as was almost every metropolitan area in Florida. Florida left the decision making to the local areas. Florida-Man-Moron. Aaaaaghh, people on beaches! It was all so tiring and wasteful to read.
Nobody won against covid. Tabulating the losses to 50.1/49.9 is not very interesting. Open a county level national map, set it to cumulative cases/deaths per population and scroll around. The timing was different, but the cumulative results were pretty uniform. There was a big dry forest and it burned down.
"One thing some people fairly called me out on was asymmetric political bias adjustment."
Yeah, I think you are correcting in the wrong direction.
Who gets better at arguing and defending their points: Someone who is surrounded by people that agree with them, or someone who is in a hostile ideological environment?
I think if you want to be an openly conservative or libertarian academic you have to be *better* than your peers within your field. Otherwise you'll get washed out. Just like anytime you see a racial minority succeeding in a field with discrimination, they are almost always above average in that field because they are operating with a handicap.
Economics is the exception, and you should go look up the actual numbers. I can't cuz I'm on mobile right now, but if I remember correctly it's still a clear liberal majority. It's just more like a 2:1 ratio of liberal:conservative. Which demonstrates how bonkers the rest of academia is when they complain about how "conservative" the economics field is.
The University of Chicago law school has the reputation of being conservative. After spending most of ten years there, my guess is that, in every presidential election of my lifetime, the Democrat would have won. Note that both Obama and Cass Sunstein were on the faculty.
Just the other day I saw the ratio 4:1 for economists at American universities in some graph on some website. No idea where I saw it, how many institutions it covered, when it was from, who made it or how reliable it was so please do add a whole wheelbarrow of salt to this claim but the number stuck out because the ratio was that much higher than I'd have imagined.
Also on the Tyler Cowen point specifically ... Cowen is a huge germaphobe. And I know a few professors in the GMU econ sphere that are pretty convinced his personal germaphobe views have been a major impact on his views of the pandemic.
It's less of a libertarian being against lockdowns then it is a germaphobe being in favor of lockdowns, and coincidentally libertarian on some other things that don't have much impact on him.
I heard Trump was also a huge germophobe, which doesn't seem to have affected his views very much.
This reminds me of the many claims that "conservatism comes from purity intutitions against disease" and such - there's sometimes okay evidence for them, but somehow the instinctive fear of disease doesn't translate into intellectual policies on disease the way you would expect.
I heard an interview with a journalist who covered Trump for New York Magazine—Olivia Nuzzi—, who claimed that Trump wasn’t a germophobe, he just thought poor people were gross.
It seems Trumps germaphobia is somewhere along the lines of finding sneezing/coughing gross, and not wanting to shake hands with people that just coughed or are sick.
After the pandemic his "germaphobic" views seem to be the default. And now that I think back on it, Trump did last all the way into October before catching Covid.
The descriptions I heard of Cowen's level of germaphobia were a bit ... more. I generally like Cowen and would feel bad describing some of his reactions publicly. It would feel even more like attacking him than what I have already said.
"the instinctive fear of disease doesn't translate into intellectual policies on disease the way you would expect."
I don't think it is instinctive fear that matters as much as the specific fear of covid-19. I'm not sure why one germaphobe got triggered by covid and another one didn't.
Cole has the right of it; even economics is very slanted left. Increasingly so as the American Economic Association has recently been jumping up and down cheerleading for social justice issues. It took a while, but econ has started down the road to sociology along with the other sciences.
And yea... Tyler Cowen has been awful on the whole pandemic thing.
I guess it depends on how strong the pressure is among academics to conform to the mainstream opinion on a particular issue.
On the one hand, there is your argument that we should correct in favor of the contrarian opinion. If most researchers are biased in favor of the mainstream, liberal-associated opinion, there are likely to be good arguments or evidence for the contrarian view that don't get publicity.
On the other hand, if there are 2 conservative academics espousing the contrarian view, and 100 liberal academics espousing the mainstream view, and the pressure to conform on the issue at hand isn't extreme, then it's more likely that the 2 conservatives are wrong because they are biased than that all the 100 liberals are wrong because they are biased. The liberals may be biased as much as the conservatives (or more, because of the peer pressure), but out of the 100 there will surely be at least a few who come to the right conclusion and are willing to say it (again, if the pressure against it isn't extreme).
Indeed, the contrarian, conservative-associated position is more persuasive if there are a few liberals who come out in its favor.
In most cases I think people would recognize that ~2,500% under representation of a group might imply at least some kind of discrimination.
So the 2 vs 100 numbers might not be representative of the true numbers on each side. If it was 100 liberal academics vs 50 conservative academics and they all held views along party lines would you be quicker to recognize that it's just a partisan topic?
Scott: Thanks for the effort you devoted to the article. I do not think we are near a final accounting on this issue. And, I doubt that we will ever achieve real clarity because some information that would be very good to have was never gathered, such as: We did not do random tests of healthy individuals to determine what the real rate of infection was; There were nowhere near enough autopsies performed to be able to get an accurate picture of dying with COVID vs dying from COVID.
Further we do not have a good grip on many collateral issues:
"Study: Hospitalizations for eating disorders spike among adolescents during COVID" by University of Michigan
"The number of adolescents admitted to the hospital for severe illness from eating disorders has increased significantly during the COVID-19 pandemic, new research suggests. At one center, the number of hospital admissions among adolescents with eating disorders more than doubled during the first 12 months of the pandemic, according to the study that appears in a pre-publication of Pediatrics. The 125 hospitalizations among patients ages 10-23 at Michigan Medicine in those 12 months reflect a significant increase over previous years, as admissions related to eating disorders during the same timeframe between 2017 and 2019 averaged 56 per year."
"Emergency Department Visits for Suspected Suicide Attempts Among Persons Aged 12–25 Years Before and During the COVID-19 Pandemic — United States, January 2019–May 2021" Weekly / June 18, 2021 / 70(24);888–894 On June 11, 2021, this report was posted online as an MMWR Early Release.
"In May 2020, during the COVID-19 pandemic, ED visits for suspected suicide attempts began to increase among adolescents aged 12–17 years, especially girls. During February 21–March 20, 2021, suspected suicide attempt ED visits were 50.6% higher among girls aged 12–17 years than during the same period in 2019; among boys aged 12–17 years, suspected suicide attempt ED visits increased 3.7%."
From that article: "The estimated 93,331 deaths from drug overdoses last year, a record high, represent the sharpest annual increase in at least three decades, and compare with an estimated toll of 72,151 deaths in 2019, "
If the extra 20,000 deaths are attributed to the lockdown. it might change the cost benefit ratio dramatically.
And the problem with *anything* like this is that it's very hard to tell how much to attribute it to government lockdown policy and how much to that fact that many members of the general public drastically changed their individual behavior.
Re. Bias adjustment: I'd say it's valid, in that anyone who breaks from the consensus needs to be more harshly evaluated, even if that consensus might be political in nature; Like how market skeptic economists get raked over the coals
> For example, one person brought up that I (as a younger person) might be underestimating the emotional distress older people feel about COVID, because they (unlike me) are at serious risk of death.
Isn't it the opposite? For me (and my young friends), and lots of people around 25 (in France), the conclusion is that we sacrificed a big chunk of our mental health and youth to protect the physical health of old people.
If you have a good memory, you can play blindfolded chess against 10 GMs and score 50%. Just pair them up and let them play each other with you as a conduit. Derren Brown does this on TV with a twist (he takes 11 and defeats 1 to end up with a winning record).
I don't think "emotional damage" is the right term. It wrongfully implies that the damage of being unable to do normal activities like going to a bar is somehow different from health damage. It's not. The reason we dislike being ill isn't because it gives us some abstract "bad health" state. We dislike it because it stops us doing normal things. That's what health actually means to most people. Ability to do normal activities is a critical component of QALY - a disability that has no harm beyond making you unable to go to work, unable to do recreation, and unable to see your extended family would be considered a devastating health impact, not just be called "emotional damage".
> a disability that has no harm beyond making you unable to go to work, unable to do recreation, and unable to see your extended family would be considered a devastating health impact, not just be called "emotional damage".
That's a really good point, thanks for bringing it up.
Wow. This seems like the start of a really relevant thought experiment. Have I not read this anywhere else? Considering both sides of it as though they were both diseases clarifies the trade-off. If I imagine that I can reduce the impact of the coronavirus by giving almost everybody this other disease, which doesn't do any harm beyond debilitating symptoms mimicking lockdown... Would I choose to counter Pandemic C by releasing Pandemic L into the population?
And the rhetorical move can be reversed: What if both were government policies? Imagine we lived in a horrifying dystopia where the police more or less randomly sprayed people with a toxic gas that harmed them the same way coronavirus does. A lot of people don't even notice the effects, but, also, a lot of people die. This is legal, and it's politically impossible to completely stop the toxic gas policy. But there's a ballot initiative to mandate lockdowns, and if it's implemented, it would decrease toxic gas incidents by exactly as much as lockdowns decrease coronavirus cases. Would I vote to counter the toxic gas policy by implementing lockdowns?
The main reason I struck this realisation is because for QALY calculations, medication side effect impacts are treated no differently than an equal impact arising from illness in the first place. From that, I realised there's no reason to consider the side effects of public health interventions as incomparable to the side effects of medication.
I figured I'd check on "[tobacco] kills way more than COVID".
The WHO claims that ~8 million die annually worldwide from tobacco. A bit over 4 million people have died of COVID to date; about half of them in the first year of the pandemic (March 2020-March 2021). (Source, some Forbes article I googled.)
Either of those stats might wildly misrepresent the numbers; c.f. the debate re: the accuracy of Indian statistics. Hard to judge.
Of tobacco mortalities, ~7/8 are of smokers, who, depending on your ontology of addiction, may have accepted the risks of tobacco use. On the other hand, COVID mortalities may cluster in those who avoid precautionary measures, etc., so that might not be that different.
It's easy to imagine that in a world without interventions many more people would have died from COVID (e.g., a world without lockdowns where Mainland China had much higher levels of death). But then, it's easy to imagine that in a world without interventions the level of smoking would also be way higher.
The big difference, IMO, is that tobacco use & concomitant death is probably pretty constant from year to year, while COVID seems unlikely to stick around in the exact same way. And tobacco is, as you note, part of ongoing society, while COVID is an unusually bad pandemic disease.
On the other hand, tobacco users do report enjoying tobacco, and basically nobody reports enjoying COVID.
My initial intuition in response to this was that I find deprivation through social rules less destructive than the same deprivation applied internally.
Suppose for example that I've been (perhaps unjustly) placed on the no-fly list. The government says to me, "would you rather that we forbid you from buying a ticket, boarding a flight, etc., or would you rather be hypnotically programmed with a debilitating fear of flying, such that you won't ever want to get in a plane again, no matter the incentive?" I think I'd choose the former—and the same in plenty of other cases I can imagine.
I'm not exactly sure why that is, but it does seem like an interesting angle for investigation.
The reason we dislike being ill is because it feels horrible. Even a simple cold is *miserable* - even though it doesn't prevent you from doing your normal stuff. Your head hurts, your nose is all sore from blowing it, you can't breathe properly, you keep sneezing, your eyes are watery, your throat hurts from post-nasal drip. People with incurable cancer can mostly do their normal stuff, but they suffer from pain and malaise and the horrible creeping knowledge of imminent doom.
Illnesses that don't physically prevent you from doing normal things are still quite unpleasant.
Not all illnesses are the same. Yes, many included pain, nausea, or general discomfort as symptoms, but there are ones that might mimic lockdowns - eg. severely immunocompromised people, who spend their whole life about as justly afraid of contagion as an old person in a Covid hotspot, but are actually perfectly healthy (assuming no other concurrent diseases) for as long as they can avoid any exposure to pathogens.
It's interesting how different the perspectives on something like the cold can be. For me, while it's unpleasant to have it, I'd be far from describing it as miserable. The main restriction is definitely having to pace myself for simple things like going on a walk or for groceries, and being exhausted afterwards. Having to forego some social events. Not being able to do anything productive. I'd gladly take more felt symptoms to avoid those, and if a cold only made me feel worse I would judge it as much less severe…
Don't agree at all. The reason we don't like being seriously ill -- and I don't mean with a cold or some other trifling inconvenience the youngest crowd may understand as "sick" but with something genuinely nasty like cancer or emphysema or malaria -- is because it physically hurts, a lot, and even if you get better you have to endure a lot of painful and humiliating medical intervention, and because people start treating you weird, as if you don't exist, or are an object instead of a human, and because it puts the serious fear of God into you that you won't get better, you'll just die in pain and anxiety, and even if you do you'll suffer permanent disability or pain.
The fact that you're not going to be able to meet up with the guys this Saturday to go to the bar and watch the game is about the least important fear that attends, say, a diagnosis of lung cancer or being bit by a rabid bat. You're grateful if you just get to the point where you can breathe without pain or talk a walk around the block.
Regardless of the weighting of emotional damage relative to sickness, we need to be able to categorize different kinds of harms in some way: one will use different studies to quantify sickness and to quantify emotional damage. If you don't like term "emotional damage", what term do you suggest for what it refers to?
Scott's point in using a 'dumb' model was precisely to avoid arguments about complex or complicated statistical methods, i.e. quickly and 'cheaply' evaluate the plausibility of some kind of causal claim in a way that others could follow and evaluate without background knowledge of esoteric statistics.
My point is that Scott's model is clearly not only "dumb" in the sense of "simple", but also "dumb" in the sense of bad. He does a "best fit" line on data where statistically there is no reason to just draw a single line.
While Scott may have eliminated some researcher bias, so does flipping a coin. I would rather he had just flipped a coin.
I am being serious. There's nothing virtuous about using a bad model in itself. Scott's model is not particularly good, I don't think it is better than "no model at all", i.e. flipping a coin.
"Not lying" (even though that's just a metaphor) doesn't imply any superior ability to get at truth. One can just say nothing. In modelling terms, 'saying nothing' would be to produce something that is uninformative or just patently silly.
So IF a simple model seems to shows something interesting and plausible you should give it some bonus points for likelihood of truthiness. Whereas a more complex model with many tunable parameters can be manipulated by the researcher (or just internally over-fit itself) to produce seemingly more interesting stuff much more of the time - even if it's nonsense ('lying').
Simple models have the advantages of being easier to interpret not being "p-hackable" (able to tweak parameters to achieve a desired result). The latter, in particular, can easily happen by accident: it's natural to continually add stuff to a model until it produces a result that matches your expectations.
Simple models work where reality is simple. There is a reason "back and white thinking" is decried, it is because "black and white thinking" is an example of a simple model failing.
Because more complex models tend to have more degrees of researcher freedom in them and be harder for other people to understand, which opens up more avenues for designing the model to get the conclusion you want whilst hiding that you're doing so.
Thanks for writing this one and the earlier one, Scott. There is a lot of clear thinking still to be done about the global Covid issue and moving it forward is important. Also nice technique for getting researchers to talk to each other.
This got too g-d-n long but I think I had a point.
Part of the challenge of analyzing lockdowns in the United States, and some commenters have mentioned it somewhat - I am not sure anywhere in the US "really" did a "real" lockdown. There were narrowings, yes, there were some stoppages - school! work! but the combination of society, government and policy delivered something other than "lockdown." Some call it closures, I'm sure there are other names. Some smaller locales (e.g. Indian reservation) had curfews and "only residents allowed in" policies but this was not widespread.
So, in the US, lockdown it was not, and so the dramatic mental references that attach to that word are not as pertinent. Economic damage, business damage, livelihood damage, educational damage, relationship damage, all to varying extents. We don't need the word "lockdown" to communicate that there were bad consequences. Some of the bad consequences derived from the partial nature of the restrictions; we didn't shut enough down for long enough to make enough difference, and it's possible that fewer shut-days would have been required to achieve the same outcome or better, if the shut-days and open-days were distributed differently.
I remember late Feb/early March 2020 because I had just left a job and moved to a different state. I had enough money to get by while finishing the move and for the first time in a long time I was not freaking out about 100 things. So when I'd get up in the morning and hear birds and there were no contrails and little traffic and then we'd go to the park and walk around trying to be socially distanced, it was like a gift. Which felt dirty in a way, because people were dying, suffering, struggling, but for my specific situation it felt like, ok, this is what it takes to lift the miserable rat race lifestyle off of us and let's make sure we never accept it back. For many people that lift did not occur at all but for some it did. Air quality improved dramatically where I was. My suspicion is that people who could work from home, had some conscience for their fellow man and were able to act on that by conducting isolation, and tended to left/center-left politics, may have felt that lift more than other groups. And so now for some people the word "lockdown" means "that lift." When the people with the means to do so undertook more of a "welfare of humanity" project than perhaps ever before, and it was one uniquely suited to the "personal is political" stance; making personal choices for the benefit of humanity, writ very large. It hit a lot of buttons.
That began to sour a few weeks in though when people were still going out in public but not as often and some of the social graces eroded; people who had gotten very good at pretending not to fear each other now showed furtive glances in stores, plus, what if someone coughed on me? And it had never been good for people without financial security, work-from-home, decent daycare. Then the "welfare of humanity" project shifted to a laser focus on the experience of these essential workers, who needed to be helped. Then the welfare of humanity project, which was already coming apart, became aligned with social justice in the United States and became even more "welfare of humanity." But by now "lockdown" meant "welfare of humanity" for enough people that discussing it was difficult. "Lockdown" did not mean "welfare of humanity" for everyone by any stretch; even with what we had in the US which was not lockdown, even that did not mean welfare of humanity project.
So we have to face that "welfare of humanity" project did cause suffering, did cause harm, and there are a few levels to that. The tradeoff level is tempting because it gets over with faster. But we skip the "what is harm" and "what is welfare of humanity" and "what was lockdown" definitions at our peril.
An element of the harm which I don't see mentioned much is an increase in paranoia in multiple quarters. Paranoia of government, of international politics, of other people. Maybe sublimated fear of Covid itself, maybe just looking at the policy challenges and disagreements and struggle. The "wow, they're incompetent" reaction hit people differently and I think depended somewhat on how much an individual was invested in "welfare of humanity," Some people already thought the government was incompetent and were maybe saddened but not surprised. Others found themselves in contexts where paranoia/criticism was embraced, for the first time they saw behind the Oz curtain. That had some low-information aspects though but I think it partly spawned the Jan 6 capitol situation, and this a-ha moment was pretty widespread. It became "a-ha" versus "welfare of humanity" and there we linger at the social level. Covid-era has caused wakeup calls in different ways for different people; some who had some trust in society prior to Covid looked at "welfare of humanity" and "shutdowns" and realized they were at the mercy of people they didn't trust, and reacted to that.
I think "welfare of humanity" jumped the shark in early summer 2020 but I have not yet mapped exactly how. The "a-ha" has not always reflected reality and has moved further away in fact, but to me it is less hollow, it still has fuel, and so the rabid mistrust will continue. But "welfare of humanity" euphoria causes hangover, but since it also coincides with a left goal, or many left goals, it cannot be put down either. In July 2021 now it is paranoia versus hangover, with some liberal policy accomplishments.
In Covid terms though, still the US is a society that had arguments about philosophy while doing not enough of the right things not enough of the time, while people died. We did not correctly name the task at hand and take effective action. And Covid went away a little bit but not forever, and now it is coming back. "Welfare of humanity" won't work anymore but "paranoia" doesn't protect from disease either.
Some of the most antisocial impulses of the "welfare of humanity" theory turn to paranoia themselves; "I am surrounded by idiots who don't understand data or science, I am smarter but alone, I could save you but you won't listen, why should I try to save you when you will not save yourselves" etc. That may or may not touch down to reality in various places, but it still operates coherently as the narrative of the hangover of "welfare of humanity."
So we have a lot of paranoia now and the disease is still spreading. Let's see, what comes next? It is important to try to figure out what reduced disease spread, because disease spread is a big negative. Looking at localities that had low transmission rates while being adjacent to localities with high transmission, those are the places I want to look at, because whatever they were doing probably umbrella-ed themselves against what would other wise have been higher numbers; that one is worth analyzing.
The answers may be different for different contexts. What to do at the level of a nursing home? What to do at the level of a town? How about metropolis? Neighborhood? Home? We have approached this looking for the one type of policy solution that everyone would agree on ("welfare of humanity!") but this a) jumped the shark and b) wasn't granular enough anyway. Some of the social enthusiasm from "WoH" went to "vaccines!" But when the authorities say very seriously that x will be enough, film buffs know, it is too early in the film, x will not be enough, they are just saying that so the populace doesn't panic. I got the vaccine but I believe the success against the variants stuff is overestimated; I thought things wouldn't be getting truly weird again until later in the fall but my timeline was wrong, I think it's happening sooner than that.
The question "should we lockdown again, and in what context" is interesting partly because we have to admit we never did that, and the various closures did hurt a lot of people, and welfare of humanity is in the hangover stage, paranoia is rampant, fires are burning, and people are still getting sick. So as for me I think, no, we should not do again what we did this last time, we need to learn what we can from the experiences that have been recorded and become equipped to craft functional solutions at state/local levels. Will that happen? Highly unlikely, partly because "paranoia" funnelled into "That is not a disease!" Yes, it is still a disease, yes, we need to deal with it, will we need some types of closures at some point in the future, maybe, but whoever does them should try to do it better this time. Policy? Voluntary action? Without "welfare of humanity" lifting people up, how many people will do voluntary restrictions this time? Are all those folks mostly vaccinated now anyway? How will the breakthrough infection rate decrease the impact of partial restrictions now?
I'm vulnerable to stories of overwhelmed hospitals. Other people have their different tipping points. There is a chance though that politicians/social leaders will be unwilling to touch restrictions even when it might help, because "welfare of humanity" is in hangover and "paranoia" is afoot. And in addition to the narrative wars there are actual germs around which still have to be dealt with.
It might be satisfying to conclude that "lockdown/welfare" didn't work. For me I think it didn't happen and again finding local communities that fared better than expected would be where the clues would live. Given it didn't happen here, indeed, it didn't work enough. That deserves noticing, that in spite of all the sacrifices people did make, mostly it wasn't a lockdown and it didn't solve everything. If we have to make sacrifices again we need to make smarter sacrifices.
This was too long but the sense of trying to see facts behind a tornado of narrative is very strong. The test-and-trace folks could do a lot of good if there were enough of them. I appreciate Scott taking a swing at it though because it helps show where to look next.
> mostly (completely false) claims that lockdowns cause more suicides, lockdowns devastate businesses, etc.
As far as I can tell the first is (probably) not true (though we don't really know, who knows if the toll takes a few years to set in, Tyler Cowen thinks emotional connections that were cut during the pandemic won't recover), whereas the second is probably not entirely false, at least as a first approximation?
>And it's so stupid - emotional damages! People being annoyed that they can't go to the bar
A few sentences later you write how weird it is that the libertarian people are writing angry op-eds, where did you think this anger came from? I mean "emotional damages" seems like such an obvious thing; this is obviously what people are also emotional about when they hate lockdowns; why else would they be emotional? No offense, but how is this in any way surprising?
>and it's good they are replaced by resilient ones.
I'm confused, why would they be replaced by better ones? As any economist will tell you, the alternative to something suboptimal is often not something perfect but nothing at all...
I strongly disagree with you here, because I think you’re missing the class of businesses that did best in the pandemic. In the US at least, after the initial shock the stock market did shockingly well. One of the explanations for this is that businesses traded on the stock market generally have the capital to weather COVID. And then all of their local competitors without the capital die out, and their market share increases making them worth more long term.
Closures seem predominantly based on capital rather than quality. While I don’t claim this is 100% of the cause, I think it’s a heavy contributor. And generally I think most mom and pop places are better than, say, McDonalds. But if you like the food most mega-chains serve, I guess we just have differing tastes.
> a restaurant that can survive a pandemic is probably better than one that can't.
I don't think that's right. A restaurant that can survive a pandemic is one that makes easily packaged food that can be easily delivered and/or served outside. Those features are sometimes good after the pandemic, but there are restaurants that *can't* survive a pandemic no matter *how* good they are, because their value depends on coziness and conviviality and social mixing.
The pandemic isn't a uniform depressant for all restaurants, but is distortionary in various ways.
You can blame the restaurants dying on the combination of pandemic and responses, but it's very far from clear that *lockdown* was the relevant cause, as opposed to just the general loss of customers you'd expect for a location undergoing a disaster even with zero government intervention.
Well, I realize that I'm atypical, but in my case I was and am furious that the government even has the right to do that. I read somewhere that the core reason Sweden never had a lockdown is that it's literally unconstitutional for their government to impose that kind of controls on the citizens. It ought to be similarly unconstitutional here.
I checked this out (cursorily) and it looks like Sweden doesn't have zoning laws, but does have extremely stringent (relative to the US, anyway) fire code regulations.
Don't "lockdowns" often *help* businesses when compared to the alternate uncertain world where a large fraction of people are avoiding public spaces *without* a lockdown? With a lockdown, it's very easy to put in place a loan program for shuttered businesses and an expansion of unemployment benefits for workers (as most developed countries did). But without a lockdown, it's much harder to target those things to the businesses that need them, since many think they are operating, even though they still have to deal with reduced customer activity.
>Don't "lockdowns" often *help* businesses when compared to the alternate uncertain world where a large fraction of people are avoiding public spaces *without* a lockdown?
Maybe, I mean nobody knows. You could still pay businesses to close though; or help companies that are not 100% closed.
Great post, well-written, fascinating, as always — but I'm sorry, I've been completely sidetracked by something you mentioned.
There's a chance cannabis decreases IQ? By how much is it posited to do this, and is it permanent? Because I smoked a lot of marijuana back in the day, and my IQ is the only good thing about me*, and I would like to know how much dumber I possibly made myself.
*Actually, I'm kind, handsome, charming, and humble, too, but I won't mention that stuff.
I think this is a great post simply for admitting the complexity of the situation. The only thing I've found odd about this whole thing is that nobody – yourself included as I recall – contrasted the response to this pandemic to the response to the Spanish flu a hundred years ago. Hundreds of thousands of people died in America alone, and in a very COVID-like way, yet as far as I know there were never any involuntary restrictions anywhere, people just went "well that sucks and is terrifying" and went about their normal day until the flu became nothing more than... the flu. (I've seen an Everett True cartoon where Everett canes the living shit out of a guy for not voluntarily wearing a mask, but that's about the peak for stringency of enforcement to my limited understanding.) However, I'm far from an expert on this, and I've been hoping in vain all this time for someone who does know to do a carfeul compare-and-contrast on this.
"it's so dumb that it couldn't lie even if it wanted to"
If I'm not mistaken, a lot of why the Spanish Flu didn't get a huge response is because a lot of countries were in the middle of a world war and didn't want to show any weakness. Not to their own populace nor to the enemy. The entire reason we know it as the Spanish Flu is because Spain was basically the only country reporting honestly on it while everyone else downplayed or denied it.
That said, I also seem to recall there being local lockdowns, but I'd have to go digging to find a source on that...
This doesn't really intuitively check out for me: my personal gestalt impression from stuff I've read in the past is that US media and society were open and concerned about the influenza, and the US also entered WWI (a pretty distant, foreign war) almost at the same time the flu became serious, so it wasn't like they had an ongoing war footing giving reason to clamp down on that stuff so the boches wouldn't think they were weak and invade.
Maybe what you say was true of the European states, it wouldn't surprise me. It doesn't seem to explain much about the American response, though.
I thought I'd heard the opposite about 1918 - that although they were pretty limited in what they could do (because there was no Zoom and most people were poor manual laborers so they could hardly close workplaces) they did a medium amount.
Thanks! I have to admit my takeaway from the Anti-Mask League article was the opposite, though: "The ordinance it protested lasted less than one month before being repealed."
The (surprisingly still quite low on detail) Wiki article about the Spanish flu itself also seems to suggest that the NYC health commissioner didn't go further than to mandate staggered business opening times and shift starts to improve crowding in the subway.
The school article does an odd thing, but I suppose reasonable from its purpose, where it provides a lot of detail on NYC and Chicago keeping schools open but just asserts without defending it that most schools were closed – I'm sure it's true, but the lack of detail or support does make it hard to evaluate. It does strike me as interesting that large population centers deviated from the norm and (apparently?) didn't generate national outrage.
In any case, I think my main takeaways from these sources and generally what information I can find is, firstly, that the *federal* response was nil or effectively nil: the whole flu response was handled not even on the state but the municipal level. This is at all events very different to the present case. Secondly, I would still like to see a real, thorough and thoughtful compare-and-contrast on the whole thing.
I really love meta posts like this. You have a really interesting way of thinking about things. I don't always agree with your specific opinions but I am always fascinated by how you think about them.
History always ends up oversimplifying stuff, because actual history is far too complex to document in detail. I expect we will eventually converge on just using total deaths per million within jurisdictions over a fixed period (not yet over) as the sole metric of success.
Thank you for both the original and meta analyses!
Re the bias question: the expert class is almost by definition devoid of poor people, young people, and uneducated people. So it doesn't seem conspiratorial to suggest that the harm done by lockdowns to those groups of people is probably underestimated in expert analysis.
Wouldn't it be strange if that were _not_ the case? This seems like a more important issue to me than specific ideological biases, like "that guy writes in Mother Jones" or "that lady owns a lot of guns."
I'm skeptical of things like this because, for example, the expert class doesn't have many black people in it but they sure do seem to think about them a lot.
Being able to "think about" something does not mean that you have an accurate analysis of that subject. Many experts think about the poor, that doesn't mean that they understand them very well.
I don't think there's been an adequate accounting of the many ways that lockdowns greatly improved a lot of people's lives, partly because it's taboo to talk about a lot of people having a nice time while others are dying, and partly because even if it was asked about, people are reluctant to admit it because of said taboo.
Yet SOOO many women I know will secretly say that 2020 was one of the best years of their life, that the lockdown was a huge relief, and that it vastly improved their physical and mental health. A lot of guys do too, but definitely way more women. Granted, I am talking about middle class people who didn't lose their jobs. They just suddenly got an extra 15 hours of their life back each week, which was previously spent in unpaid but required labor (commute, etc.). And now because of the lockdowns, they have far greater bargaining power and flexibility at work. I understand the impact was very stratified based on demographics, but I think there is a major underestimation of all the positives, because it's just not very nice to talk about how a bunch of relatively secure middle class suburban people suddenly had more enjoyable lives, while older people were scared and essential workers were having a terrible time.
I don't know if there will ever be good research on this so long as it's taboo to admit, and someone who lost a family member or job is going to scream at you and tell you what an enormous jerk you are.
The junior associates at my firm are all getting a $15k raise and the ability to work flexibility from home or reduced hours -- things that were unthinkable pre-pandemic -- just to induce them not to leave. For them, it looks to me like the whole thing net positive, and not by a small amount.
I was initially appalled by the lockdowns. I could not believe that this country is so senior-focused that we were going to sacrifice the livelihoods of young and poor people on the alter of keeping a bunch of near-death retired people safe, when they were the ones who could most easily stay home. However, I'll admit that 2020 was a fantastic year for me personally, and continues to have positive impacts on my life. Most people I know say the same.
Also, are people really as polarized on Covid as some of these comments are making it seem? Not in my experience. There is a hysterical small percent on either tail end who are get very upset, but the vast majority of people are not and have never been like that. Most people complied with the orders without much grumbling, but also didn't particularly care whether others followed them or not. Out of about 300 familial, professional, and friendship associations I have that span the entire political spectrum, I knew maybe 7 or 8 who took adamant and angry stances on one side of the other. Most everyone else was sort of mildly but not overly concerned and rather live and let live about it. Every right wing Republican I know got the vaccine, and a large portion of the left-wing people would admit privately that they thought the whole thing was overblown and they weren't particularly concerned about catching Covid (and most of them broke the lockdown rules anyway). I think the supposed polarization is a bit of a internet creation. You can ask someone a yes or no question on a survey, but are they measuring the strength of the response and how strongly one feels about their answer?
I was also surprised that the two Astral Codex surveys on Covid asked questions solely about negative impacts on the respondent's life and not a single question about positive impacts.
My observation is that women, on the whole, find the work world more stressful than men, and get a lot less out of it with respect to ego gratification or whatever you want to call it that causes (some) men to be very driven about their work. More women than men would prefer to work less. My profession is about 20/80 female/male, and while most of us women in the profession would be considered on the extreme side of high-earning and career-oriented (for women), many of them would quit their job without a second thought if they felt they had enough money -- the status and prestige and competition aspects don't seem that important to them. Whereas plenty of the men have to be basically dragged out kicking and screaming when they're getting close to 80 and still want to keep working. I just think many women would prefer a slower-paced life with more time at home and less time on the job (and spending 2 hours a day getting ready for work and commuting counts as "on the job" time even though it isn't productive or compensated for). I definitely know plenty of men that feel this way too, and have greatly enjoyed the extra time they've had for family and exercise and being in nature, but that seems almost universal among white-collar women.
My office told people to go home and stay home last spring, but allowed people to come back in if they wanted to by summer. Only about 20% of people came back and they were all men. This year, the office is strongly encouraging and needling people to come back in, but lots still haven't, and there is still a gender skew because about 60% of the men have come back in, but hardly any of the women. So I think that pretty clearly indicates their preferences. Most of them say that given the option, they would prefer to go in to the office only about once or twice a month.
Clearly though, I am not talking about essential workers here. Though even there, among the few I know, I heard a lot more resentment among the women about having to go in to work every day while white collar people got to stay home.
Also, the scant polling I've seen on the topic shows that women and young people were a lot more likely to cite positive impacts to their wellbeing from the lockdowns.
I am one of those men who consider job a necessary evil to pay the bills. My commute was already very short, but I still enjoy working from home. I can eat lunch with my family, as opposed to buying something expensive in a restaurant. I can use the breaks to exercise or do the dishes, which means more free time in the evening.
On the other hand, closed kindergartens were a source of stress. It is difficult to work from home when you also have kids at home and they use every excuse to interrupt. (My three years old daughter sees me without the headphone, she yells "you are not wearing the collar, you are not actually working" and climbs on my back, while I try to write code.)
Looking at my colleagues and their preferences, I get an impression that it is mostly *managers* who want to return to the office. I assume that one of the perks of being a manager is that you can act dominant, which is hard to do when you are alone in the room.
And the small kids aspect is definitely relevant, as the *only* people who went back into the office last summer were the men who had small kids at home.
I thought it was interesting that most of the media stories about white-collar women focused on the ones who live in high-density areas in tiny apartments, and how stressed and miserable they were stuck with their small children in small apartments. That makes sense, however, I didn't really read *anything* about the much larger quantities of women with kids who live in the suburbs or small towns, who found being home with their kids enjoyable (they could go outside and play) and who appreciated not having to spend mornings frantically getting kids dressed, packed lunches, and out the door or evenings and weekends driving them around to activities. Although I technically live in a metro area, it is suburbs, and a large majority of the women I know (and plenty of the men) found the whole thing to be a big relief and improvement to their quality of life.
And people with pets, not young kids, REALLY loved it.
One thing this person didn't mention that I've heard from some women is that wearing masks in public spaces helped ease a lot of the pressure women often face to look pretty and smile and have men comment on their appearance. (Though for some waitstaff I hear it created more pressure from men asking them to take off their mask to show their pretty smile.)
Another gendered aspect of the difference is that women very often are the ones shuttling kids around to many activities on the way to and from work. I wouldn't personally know how losing those shuttling duties compares to 24/7 childcare duties.
I heard this from lots of women as well. That it was freeing to be able to walk around in public space without being judged (in either a positive or negative or sexual or not sense) based on their appearance. Being able to not be looked at. And also just plain old extra time saved not feeling like they had to wear makeup. A lot of women expend large amounts of time and energy on a daily basis to making themselves look presentable to society, and that burden was removed when they could stay home and could still basically "hide" behind their mask.
I'm a little uncomfortable with this vein of thought because it would seem to run logically into the arena of maybe a good portion of women really would prefer wearing burqas?! Which I don't really want to contemplate. But admittedly I heard people talk about liking masking for that reason, and there were millions of memes on enjoying be able to be comfortable and not dress up/put on makeup/do hair.
It also goes against the (former? Ideologies move so quickly nowadays, I can't always keep up) feminist talking point that women dress up sexily to please themselves, not men.
I always thought that was a silly talking point and obviously false. Lesbians are not known to dress up and make themselves uncomfortable at equal or higher rates than straight women. Besides, anyone who has ever lived with women and knows how comparatively slobby yet comfy we tend to be when we're home by ourselves (or with just those we feel comfortable with) knows that's utter nonsense. I lived in an attic apartment above 15 sorority girls in college, and I assure you they were not walking around their house in heels with done up hair when they were home, just to please themselves. They were in pajama pants and slippers with their hair in a bun. But when they got done up for a night out, watch out!
>Yet SOOO many women I know will secretly say that 2020 was one of the best years of their life, that the lockdown was a huge relief, and that it vastly improved their physical and mental health.
Does that include the women who were locked in with their abusive husbands 24/7?
I think you may be typical-minding, or at least typical-lifing, here. "Work from home and socialize on Zoom" is a thing that works really well for a decent fraction of the population, maybe including everyone you know. But I think you're jumping too easily to dismissing all the rest as "a hysterical small percent" plus some trivial grumbling.
No, not at all. Of course the pandemic had profoundly negative impacts on many people. But the article Scott referenced, where there was extensive weighing of the various costs and who they fell on, didn't include, as far as I saw, any counter-balancing of *benefits*. Surveys I've seen show that about 80 something percent of Americans name some negative impacts, but 70 something percent also name some benefits. So it isn't a trivial amount. And I think the benefits are underweighed (to the extent they're taken into account at all, when tallying costs) by the taboo aspect of anyone benefiting from what was a tragedy for others.
If I had to guess, my estimate would be that the pandemic/lock-downs were severely negative for 15-20% of the population (because of job loss, serious illness or death in relatives or network, or the unpleasantness of lockdown in a big city), mostly negative but only moderately or mildly so for another 45ish percent, and net positive in anything from a mild to strong manner for the remaining 35-40ish percent. There are a LOT of suburban and small town white collar/office workers in this country, who didn't lose their jobs and who experienced an increase in quality of life after the initial toilet paper and fear period.
If we're tallying up costs of lock-downs and who they fell upon, don't we have to subtract out benefits to get a full picture?
Of course, *absolutely no one* was weighing or considering any such benefits to lock-down or remote work when making the initial policy and public health decisions. So perhaps because that wasn't a goal or aim of lock-downs, it shouldn't be taken into account when trying to retrospectively aggregate the costs and how well they "worked"? I can see that argument. Certainly it didn't cross my mind -- as I mentioned, I was initially anti-lockdown and only foresaw economic disaster. It did not cross my mind that they could be beneficial to my or anyone else's life.
But if you take unintended negative consequences into account, it seems like you should take unintended positives into account too.
I really enjoyed this meta process reflection on doing that long piece. I hope you do this kind of thing again, the process reflection, not necessarily the long piece, though that was good too.
It's an important insight that when you get closer to something, you find the naive concerns about it are irrelevant to what's actually going on. I find this is true across a wide range of topics and disciplines. Consequently I highly recommend getting close to things as soon as possible.
For example, if you think you might want to be a lawyer, go shadow three different ones for a day right away, rather than spending extra time studying for your SATs so you can get into a pre-law program, so you can get into law school, so you can get an internship, so you can get hired 20 years from now and then finally discover that you hate something about the job that nobody ever mentions. (John Taylor Gatto was big on this, and recommended "a thousand different apprenticeships" starting in elementary school as part of his education reform platform)
Or consider the debates about ethics in self driving cars; should they swerve to hit the aged nun or continue off the cliff? Great for journalist thinkpieces, but completely irrelevant to the ways that self driving cars are actually programmed.
Heinlein recommends getting close to lots of things: "A human being should be able to change a diaper, plan an invasion, butcher a hog, conn a ship, design a building, write a sonnet, balance accounts, build a wall, set a bone, comfort the dying, take orders, give orders, cooperate, act alone, solve equations, analyse a new problem, pitch manure, program a computer, cook a tasty meal, fight efficiently, die gallantly. Specialization is for insects."
But I find it's also important within narrow specialties; I've seen people argue about a flaw in a piece of hardware in endless meetings without ever having laid eyes on one. When I started carrying one around to all the meetings, the problem was understood much faster. Or when I've gone off daydreaming for days about a potentially difficult part of a problem, only later actually making an attempt at a solution and finding the hard parts are elsewhere.
I'd say the effect is roughly logarithmic; huge gains when you go from zero encounters to one, then diminishing returns as you spend more time with a thing and become an expert in it. But it's amazing how long people will go before getting those first few encounters.
While your black traffic fatality information was indeed really interesting and impressive, and while I'm glad you noticed it and sad that other people who could have gotten it taken more seriously didn't also notice it, you're doing the thing where you bring controversial statements about race into a totally unrelated thread again. Banned for one month.
Re: the CS/AI/stats thing - I've tended to notice that something similar applies in psephology (study of elections). Nate Silver was primarily a statistician, not a political scientist.
Over here in Australia, our best-known psephologist (employed by our public broadcaster, the ABC to analyse redistricting and provide election coverage) was primarily a computer scientist who went into election research on a whim:
Another well known election analyst in Aus was primarily an invertebrate ecologist (Kevin Bonham).
One who used to write a lot about psephology and polls (now moved onto COVID-19 stuff) graduated in econometrics (Bryan Palmer, pseudonym Mark Graph).
One who used to have an active pseph blog but is now mostly on Twitter (Pollytics/Possum Comitatus, aka Scott Steel) was primarily an economist.
I know at least one pseudonymous pseph who was primarily a philosopher (unable to reveal which, it's in confidence).
Of the remaining well known ones, I think three are primarily political scientists (Peter Brent, Ben Raue and Malcolm Mackerras). So that's a 4-3 in favour of non-polisci to polisci (or 5-3, if you count the pseudonymous one) amongst Australian psephologists.
I think there's probably something - maybe the uncertainty, maybe the politics, maybe the status - about fields like election analysis and live pandemic epidemiology which attracts people from other fields to come and contribute.
Dunking on my industry less- when I read the section in the original article on emotional distress, I was like “agreed, but, my personal experience of the pandemic was WAY less emotional distress than pre-pandemic, because all the weird social-and-institutional-pressure-y obligations were gone, and there are a bunch of people like me I’ve talked to, and how do we quantify that” and then I was like “ah yes we’ve gotten to the part of data science where we try to pin a number on the pain of a coercive society, sounds like an average Tuesday when KRs are due at work”
My feeling is that, if the validity of a study hinges upon the right way to "crenulate the zeugma", then it is very likely that the study is too tentative and/or the effect is too weak, and should not be used as the basis for public policy.
Since this is the second time I've seen a comment to this effect I wanted to offer a different perspective:
A lot of systems there's a ton of variables that have no effect and a few variables that have a huge effect. But because you don't know what the variables are you have to start by blindly groping towards correlations and only as you start to understand the system do you gain the ability to grasp cause and effect. But once you start tuning the variables on purpose the actual effect is huge.
This actually appears in a lot of scientific fields - someone discovers a subtle correlation between optical systems and wavelengths and even though the original correlation is incredibly weak, it enables incredible technologies like lasers.
I do agree that if the whole question is "US style lockdowns: YES/NO?" then you ought to see a large effect before selecting "YES", I also think there's room to believe that subtle statistical insights have the potential to make it possible to select the subset of policies that produce the most positive effects with the fewest negative ones.
>Whenever I talked to Aussies or New Zealanders, they just really wanted to stress that they had ascended beyond such primitive mortal concerns, defeated the virus their own way, and were somewhat annoyed that the rest of us were squabbling about the relative merits of our inferior plans rather than focusing on how great they were. Sorry, guys.
We Aussies boned up the initial phase as badly as anyone else (refusing to close all borders long after it had spread beyond the PRC), we were just lucky it came here late. An amount of the rest I am unable to quantify is downstream of that.
Re the emotional damage, I find it striking that you're overlooking the biggest source of emotional anti-utilities on the pro-lockdown side. The pain of loosing a loved one years before they would otherwise have died.
There is some weird taboo against mentioning this.
I remember some people complaining on Facebook, saying how sad their kids will be because they are not allowed to visit their grandparents during lockdown. And I was like: huh, wouldn't they be *more* sad if their grandparents *died* as a consequence of their visit? But there were like twenty people already debating in that thread, and no one mentioned anything like this.
If I try to imagine what kind of mental model could make a person think like this... I suppose many people model covid as some kind of ambient danger (like something in the air, uniformly distributed), not as something that jumps from specific humans to specific humans based on their physical proximity. It's like the "danger of covid" is some *global* variable that changes over time, and when the variable is high, you need to wear a face mask or otherwise you risk getting sick; and maybe there are separate global variables for "danger of covid for young people" and "danger of covid for old people", but whether we visit the grandparents or not has no impact on how big their danger is. If they happen to die two weeks after our visit, they simply died because of the global variable, not because of our actions, and we are actually glad that we had the opportunity to see them one more time before the fate took them.
Similarly, if someone died of covid, they were killed by covid, not by the people involved in the chain that brought the virus to them. Spreading a deadly virus is considered a victimeless crime (assuming you bring it in your body, as opposed to e.g. sending a mail).
I'm not sure if that model of covid as a global variable could explain this particular omission though.
Since when Scott's weighing up the emotional harms of lockdown vs the emotional harms of not lockdown, even if you assume granny died from catching Covid from the either, it still inflicts emotional harm.
You do seem to be assuming that there are zero other threat vectors to granny beyond the grandkids. There are many vectors for COVID beyond grandkids, and some largely unavoidable. Singling out grandkids as something that must be stopped is sort of strange, particularly since from the point of view of the grandparent seeing their grandkids might be the best cost/benefit trade off.
This sort of thing is why mandating behavior goes over so badly. People have wildly different preferences and optimal tradeoffs, not one size fits all, optimize for everyone at once preferences.
I don't think anyone was singling out grandkids as something that must be stopped. Some people said "no one should visit old people", some said "old people should only have essential visits, not including grandchildren", some said "old people should only have essential visits, including grandchildren", and some said "old people should still have all the visits". I don't think anyone said "old people should have all the visits *except* grandchildren".
I think that as a general rule when we count deaths as a bad thing, we're already including the emotional effects on the survivors in the measure of badness that is "one human death". And it's probably good that we do that, because otherwise we'd wind up doing some silly utilitarian consequence where e.g. the quick and painless death of an infant counts as a not-that-bad thing until a more sophisticated utilitarian says "hey, did you consider asking the mother how she feels" and we calculate ourselves back to where we intuitively started.
But if that is the general approach, then it would be double-counting to explicitly tack on emotional costs to the survivors as a separate term, unless the nature of the death makes those costs unusually high. And "old person gets sick and dies a few weeks later, family grieves and moves on" is pretty much the modal case for emotional costs of death.
Also, if you are going to make that an explicit term in your ethical calculus, I'm going to demand another explicit term for my father, who died of not-Covid last year and the emotional costs, to him and to us, were *hugely* exacerbated by the lockdown. And maybe I should be demanding that term in any event. Everybody dies, most everybody who died of Covid was going to die of something else in a few years anyway, but not even close to everybody has to spend the months leading up to their death locked in a room with only a few masked strangers and with their close friends and family excluded.
I'm pretty sure we don't count the effect on loved ones when calculating QALY. After all, it would be pretty weird if a hospital said "Sorry, you only have two grand kids. Not enough people love you enough for it to be worth treating you".
But Scott's previous post, in the section "Conclusion 2: Extremely Naive Attempt To Try To Quantify Emotional Costs Vs. Benefits" is explicitly using a model where the upside of lockdown is QALY saved, and the downside is emotional harm for every month spent in lockdown. That, in it's extremely naive way, covers your father under lockdowns causing emotional harm. But it doesn't cover the emotional harm to someone who lost a loved one they might have had five or ten more years with.
I don’t get your comment about Aus/NZ. The key tool we used once cases got too many to contact trace was lockdowns. We used them repeatedly and they worked every single time. A few times we tried to avoid them and things got out of control. See Melbourne last winter and Sydney now. It seems very solid evidence that lock downs work extremely well.
Solid evidence that lockdowns work extremely well in combination with tracing, which means they must be used early.
This is a thing most people don't understand, that the virus spreads exponentially, and most of the things you could do against it are approximately constant (except for the vaccine research), therefore it is important to do the dramatic steps early, when they have greater relative impact.
But from the political perspective, it is the other way round. If you don't have people dying by hundreds yet, the dramatic steps seem unnecessary. And when their necessity becomes obvious, then it's quite late.
Yes this is exactly right. When lockdowns make most sense they seem least necessary. Not thing though is Melbourne had 700 cases a day at one point and still managed to get it under control, which presumably was primarily due to the lockdown as tracing that many cases isn't really feasible I think.
This is what has confused me about every analysis I've seen, including Scott's. It seems obvious that there are basically two qualitatively different kinds of lockdown - ones that are intended to get cases counts to 0 and are stringent enough to do so (these work), and ones that are intended to reduce transmission somewhat but not with any particular goal in mind (these do not work).
Throwing out the working lockdowns and then trying to decide if lockdowns work seems really weird to me. Like trying to decide if seatbelts save lives by first throwing out every case where seatbelts were worn and nobody died.
Yes, I was one of the people I think Scott was referring to and I think, a lot of people (Including Scott, clearly) vastly misunderstood the argument I, and others were trying to make).
I'm not saying "the US *should* have locked down", I'm not even saying "lockdowns work".
I'm saying if you want to do an analysis on "If lockdowns work" you should include all the data that you have.
In retrospect I feel like the conflation between "Should we (In this case, the US) have locked down" and "How effective are lockdowns, in general" is responsible for a large part of discourse breakdown.
The problem is that you really need to have a good handle on the second question to begin answering the first, but people only really care about the first. The whole time I was reading Scotts post it felt like it was switching between those two questions which was quite confusing for me.
Emotional damage quickly overwhelms even shorter lockdowns as seen in Aus/NZ, with an additional complexity that neither country has made any substantial progress over the last 12 towards no longer having to do them every time a single case leaks through.
A) emotional damage is impossible to quantify, so you simply cannot say it overwhelms anything. You can choose the numbers to get any result you want, which is another way of saying nothing. Personally - and for many people I know - lockdown has been a net boon. Not without drawbacks, but not without significant benefits, too.
B) Aus/NZ have basically been living business as usual for most of the time that, say, Ontario has been in some kind of lockdown. People can go to shops, to bars, to the office, etc. *Even if* you put some large emotional damage factor on lockdowns, effective lockdowns dramatically minimize the amount of time you spend with any meaningful restrictions.
C) Aus (don't have the NZ numbers to hand) has had a death rate of 1/20th what e.g. Ontario has had. That's a huge difference.
A) What Scott is calling emotional damage certainly isn't impossible to quantify. See EQ-5D-5L, one of the questions is asking about ability to do normal activities, and the survey translates answers to such questions into a QALY impact. A disability which only made it impossible to attend school, work, see family etc would still be considered a severe disability, and have a correspondingly severe impact on quality of life.
B) It's possible for Aus/NZ to be better than Ontario, and for doing nothing at all to be better than both.
C) QALY impacts of restrictions due to what Scott calls "emotional damage" are likely to be multiple times the impact of what Covid could even potentially kill if entirely unmitigated.
A) That questionnaire doesn't measure what you want it to measure in any useful way. You may be surprised to learn, for instance, that people with severe mobility issues are often quite happy, even though this survey would say they're experiencing "emotional damage" under your interpretation.
B) I guess anything is possible. That would be truly astonishing. Keep in mind that even granting emotional damage, voluntary measures more or less equivalent to a lockdown (which is apparently what is observed) would have the same emotional damage as the equivalent lockdown.
C) Let's just do a little thought experiment, using Aus.
Their actual death toll was about 1000. The "unmitigated" death toll would have been more - let's say the Ontario lockdowns were totally useless, voluntary measures would have had the same effect, and apply that to Australia. You would then see 20,000 dead, or about 0.07% chance of dying.
The question then becomes: Would you play Russian Roulette on a gun with ~1500 chambers (AND have to voluntarily lockdown to the equivalent of Ontario's long, long lockdown) to avoid occasional targeted mandatory lockdowns and travel restrictions?
If you're saying there's not even voluntary measures equivalent of lockdowns, we could say the virus would kill about 1% of people. Would you play Russian Roulette on a gun with 100 chambers to avoid occasional mandatory lockdowns and travel restrictions?
Sounds like a pretty easy question to me.
D) Finally, the choice isn't between more lockdowns and less COVID, and less lockdowns and more COVID.
The choice is between 1) less lockdowns (but effective ones) and less COVID (Aus), 2) more lockdowns (but less effective ones) and more COVID, 3) no lockdowns (but voluntary behaviour modifications equivalent to lockdowns) and much more COVID.
Again, that seems like a pretty easy question - they're conveniently sorted in order of quality for you in that paragraph.
QALY assessments use mean effects. Everything involving quantifying covid uses mean. After all, the median covid patient has a mild illness at worst.
And yes, I would gladly play Russian Roulette on a gun with 1500 chambers to avoid living under lockdowns. And one with 100. Hell, I'd play it with a gun with 20. I expect the long-term effects of living in a country that accepts that the government has the authority to micromanage my life as it has done in the past 18 months (and in the process reduce me to a second class citizen as a consequence of my opposition to the government) to continue to have a devastating effect on my quality of life for decades to come.
> And yes, I would gladly play Russian Roulette on a gun with 1500 chambers to avoid living under lockdowns. And one with 100. Hell, I'd play it with a gun with 20.
Good lord... I am so, so glad you're not in charge.
I would also point out that something I didn't see considered in most analyses is that (again, take Ontario) not sufficiently controlling the disease overwhelms hospitals, causes PTSD in healthcare workers, forces the postponement of procedures etc., reduces quality of care across the board, and creates what is projected to be a years-long public health crisis with untold misery and suffering to thousands and thousands of people or more.
This was entirely avoidable with better (i.e. Aus-style) lockdowns.
Yes, the point about strict early lockdowns leading to more freedom later on is crucial. NZ hasn't had a single community transmission in over 4 month I think. The stress and anxiety that removes and almost total freedom it allows is also an immense 'emotional' benefit you would need to factor in to an analysis of these things.
Actually we regularly handle small clusters of cases without lockdowns as long as they are traceable back to an original source. And most lockdowns also only last a few days to get a handle on the contact tracing. The emotional benefits of months of covid free status totally outweighs the damage of short lockdowns I would think.
I would give anything for an Aus/NZ-style approach in Ontario. We're going to be counting the costs of our horrifically botched response for years. We've been under some kind of "lockdown" for over a year, constant epidemic community spread, hospitals collapsing...
It's close to the worst of all worlds here, lockdown tight enough to fuck everything up, but not enough to actually control the disease or prevent healthcare collapse.
Isn't it fascinating how conservatives, usually the ones more concerned about hygiene and infections, threw all of that overboard without blinking in this particular case, when the normal tendency would have been unusually useful to stay with?
"conservatives, usually the ones more concerned about hygiene and infections"
Your assumption there is based on that moral purity test by Haidt, isn't it? That conservatives have more of a disgust reaction and so forth? Given that this is yet another one of those studies that everyone argues over, and that the much-touted "conservatives are authoritarians! oops, sorry, we flipped the results by mistake, turns out liberals are authoritarians!" was publicised all over the place by the media when it was "conservatives are authoritarians, see Science says they're all fascists!" but the correction was left to wander like an orphan by the same organs, I'd be wary of "conservatives are all mysophobes, Science says so!"
I think you're working from an oversimplified misunderstanding of Haidt here. And trying to make a cheap tribal "gotcha" shot, which please don't.
The claim of Haidt et al is not that conservatives are explicitly and specifically concerned with the transmission of infectious diseases. The claim is that long-standing heuristics associated with disease transmission, are broadly and sometimes inappropriately applied as a general moral foundation. And there's probably something to that. But society-wide "lockdowns" have never been one of the standard heuristics for dealing with infectious diseases, so it's not surprising that conservatives would be less than reassured with a master action plan that makes them central to our strategy this time.
It would be as if a nation were invaded, the ministry of defense were to adopt a new plan where the invaders were met by wave after wave of cute girls flirting with them until they lay down their arms, and when conservatives say "that's not how we do this!", promoters of the cute-girls strategy say "Aha, isn't it fascinating how conservatives, usually the ones more concerned with the threat of foreign invasion, threw all of that overboard..."
The resistance to lockdowns is the *most* understandable part of it, but you would have thought masks would have fit perfectly into the worldview. "Strangers around you are dangerous and carry diseases - protect yourself!"
Citing even a handful of counterexamples would have greatly strengthened your counterargument there. You know this, but you didn't do it.
The relevant traditional heuristic for dealing with infectious disease is *quarantine*. The specific people who are believed to be infected, or to have been exposed to infection, are isolated for however long it takes to be confident they are not (or no longer) infected. Also, closing borders to outsiders.
Demanding that the entire domestic population isolate at the household level (except for "essential" business) for the duration of the plague or epidemic is, if not unprecedented, at least *very* unusual.
Quarantining the symptomatic doesn't work with covid because of asymptomatic transmission. So lockdowns are unusual but justifiable. So it depends on whether you are going to insist that unusual things are always wrongs even if they are justified.
Or maybe the real objection is that something else , such as closing borders, should have been done instead. But then then the sheer novelty of lockdowns isn't the problem.
That might be worth a debate, but it would be a distraction from the issue at hand in *this* discussion. We are discussing whether broad lockdowns as distinct from quarantine are "one of the standard heuristics for dealing with infectious disease", not whether they are justifiable. These are two different things. And we had good reason for discussing the one rather than the other, before we got sidetracked.
You explicitly asserted that broad lockdowns were one of the standard heuristics for dealing with infectious disease. I'm fairly certain that this is false, and I'm even more certain that your explanation as to why broad lockdowns are *justified* is nonresponsive.
Sweden screwed up massively, no doubt, and we're paying for it by maybe 5000-10000 unnecessary deaths. I'm very surprised that absolutely no-one is held to account for this fiasco.
I don't think that if there's more of a concern about hygiene and infections that it is that generalizable. It is more specifically a fear of infectious disease from the undesirable and weak portions of society infecting the strong and powerful portions of society. COVID wasn't that. It specifically hit the old, sick, and weak, and not the young and vigorous. Given that, it is not surprising at all to me that liberals would focus on preventing harm to the most vulnerable as a moral issue, while conservatives would consider it not just pointless but actually immoral to impose harms upon the strongest and youngest portions of society, and divert resources from them, in order to protect the weak and vulnerable, especially if doing so would overall weaken society as a whole.
I would bet good money that if this virus had impacted the young the way some diseases do, the conservative response would have been entirely different. But this virus acted more like a culling of the weak, which from some perspectives could be seen as unpleasant thing that ultimately makes the surviving herd stronger, and therefore should be borne with fortitude rather than interfered with (or at least, interfered with to the extent of imposing real costs upon the strong/young).
"It specifically hit the old, sick, and weak, and not the young and vigorous."
-I think it's all partisanship, zero principle. Conservatives supported higher insurance premiums for the elderly, but were also the most relentlessly opposed to "death panels".
And liberals were initially downplaying the severity of COVID ("Racism is the real virus! Let's all hug a Chinese person!") whilst (a subset of) conservatives were sounding the alarm early ("Hey, guys, there's this weird new virus in China, remind me again why we haven't closed the borders yet?").
It's not surprising that libertarians would object to restrictions on liberty. Which way your capital-C Conservatives will go spends on how much they are small-c conservative, and how much they are libertarian.
I'm surprised nobody has touched what I thought was the most interesting part of your post - the bit where you find two opposite impossible-to-measure outcomes completely overdetermine your complex model and any work you do refining anything other than these parameters is completely swallowed up. I built a similar model to you for lockdown and found the same result you did - your assumption around the emotional impact of lockdown dwarfed everything else you might assume about the disease, including deaths and the emotional impact of deaths (actually I found that if it seriously and permanently harmed productivity / capita by knocking people permanently into an unemployment trap then this was plausibly of the same magnitude(ish) as the emotional effects of lockdown if you assumed weak emotional effects, but emotional effects were still a big deal)
At the risk of raising yet another highly controversial topic, I tried to do what you did for lockdown with Brexit. I included maybe 20 parameters in my model, and then discovered that the 'will it increase or decrease economic growth over ten years relative to no Brexit' was literally the only parameter that made any difference whatsoever; for any reasonably set of preferences a difference in the answer to this question of 0.01% either way was greater than literally any possible combination of outcomes to the other 19 parameters.
Therefore I don't think this is an isolated example, and it seems likely that most big political decisions have this character (on a sample of n=2, but a couple of other rationality tropes are similar - x-risk, cryonics, EA and so on). I really think this must be an understudied problem in decision making, because otherwise it would be all anyone talked about when making decisions.
Let's go further down this rabbit hole: The emotional impact on most people depends on how they frame the situation, which in turn mostly depends on how the media frame it.
I mean, wearing a face mask and not being able to do whatever you want is annoying per se, but if you perceive the situation as "I am making a small sacrifice in order to save lives of thousands of people", then you kinda feel like a hero, and seeing other people wear masks makes you think about solidarity, how most humans are nice enough to be willing to endure a minor inconvenience in order to help others.
On the other hand, if you perceive the situation as "coronavirus is a hoax invented by evil Western scientists and spread by evil Western media, the masks suffocate our children, and most people are so stupid that they totally buy the obviously absurd government propaganda", then you feel helpless and angry, and seeing all the sheeple wearing masks drives you crazy.
So, uhm, the conclusion is that what the media report is more important than the actual reality, even from the perspective of calmly calculating the quality-adjusted life-years? And the most effective altruism is to make people believe whatever makes them most happy?
Needlessly pejorative in paragraph three. If you perceive coronavirus as a severe and deadly plague but crappy masks as being about as effective against it as reciting the Lord's Prayer, then being told to wear the masks drives you as crazy as being told to recite the Lord's Prayer every day.
In my experience, those who are most likely to describe some or all elements of the pandemic as a "hoax" will blame *Eastern* scientists for it, not Western. They're the most likely to believe the lab-leak theory.
Yep. I am in Eastern Europe, the local conspiracy theorists are mostly coordinated by media supported by Russia, so the targets to blame are the West in general, and the local pro-Western political parties or media.
For the record, I thought it was clear your conclusion was that lockdowns weren't worth the emotional cost, but I guess putting it in bold, TLDRing, and adding a witty partisan headline would have helped.
"This question was too multi-dimensional. As in, you could calculate everything right according to some model, and then someone else could say "but actually none of that matters, the real issue is X", and you would have a hard time proving it wasn't."
Scott, I hope you will never let something like this discourage you from treating a subject as multi-dimensional. It's easy to underestimate how different the utility functions of different people are. Some people will not care much if they (or others) die from Covid, but find the risks of LongCovid terrifying. It is quite tempting to say "they don't understand what they are talking about" in such cases, but I think that we should really not give into that temptation.
Giving a multi-dimensional treatment helps all readers, not just those who happen to have the same utility function as yourself. I remember your post "moral cost of chicken vs. beef". It convinced me that we have a strong moral obligation to replace beef with chicken. This was exactly the opposite conclusion from yours! (I had this opinion before reading your post and already acted on it, but your post made me much more certain about it.) This is just because we have different value functions.
I am not discouraging you from giving your opinion and conclusions. But I would be careful leaving things out because they seem not so relevant. (But obviously, there are limits to this.)
On your liberal vs. libertarian question, dont you think that in Iran the far majority of psychologists would make arguments for the positive psychological effects of Niqab? If then the one secular dude, who writes about Russell and Ataturk all the time, all of a sudden is the only guy to find evidence to the contrary, is that suspect?
"(...) To keep all populations outside the minority elite under an almost permanent state of oppression and make them love their servitude, (...) the main tools used to achieve that were some vaccines which altered the functions of the brain and the medicines that the State forced the population to consume. In Well’s opinion, this was not a conspiracy, but rather a ‘one-world brain’ which would function as a police of the mind."
"that's just a coincidence - if we had been in a world where academia leaned conservative"
There is a widespread liberal argument that this isn't a coincidence, but that academia leans liberal because liberal positions are more often factually correct and conservative positions are more often factually wrong.
As a fully-fledged member of the Blue Tribe, I can't possibly come to any neutral judgment on this, but it does seem to be worth consideration.
My point is slightly more subtle; it is that you shouldn't assume that this is untrue. If you assume that liberal and conservative positions are equally likely to be factually correct (on questions where there is a factually correct answer), then academia has to have a liberal bias.
But if you leave open the possibility that reality is more liberal (in the sense that measured facts are more likely to agree with liberal positions than conservative ones) then academia, full of people whose job is, at least in theory, to work out facts, is going to have more people supporting liberal than conservative positions.
"If" is doing a great deal of work there. It also matters who gets to do the measuring, who decides what the measure is, and what results are acceptable or not.
It won't matter if you're liberal, conservative, or believe the Royal Family are all lizard people if you're trying to work out "is 2+2=4?" or measuring the pH of acetic acid versus sodium hydroxide.
When we get on to questions of "does divorce affect children?" or the likes, then we get a lot of fighting, arguing, and "I've already made up my mind it's not harmful/is very harmful, so any results contrary to this will be massaged until they fit my narrative".
Absolutely. The question of whether the output of academia tends to agree with liberal biases because academia is biased or because reality is biased (to use the framing that the center point between conservative and liberal is neutral and anything else is biased) is a question to be studied, not one to be assumed, either way.
But I do think that the classic "both sides" media framing of issues runs a severe risk of argumentum ad temperantiam, and so of assuming that academia must be biased because it tends to favour one political side over the other.
"does divorce affect children?". I wanted to address this separately.
I think this is a badly-posed question, in that it's clear that children of divorced parents do less well than children of non-divorced parents, but that doesn't answer the question of whether the divorce causes the problem or whether the bad relationship causes both the divorce and the problems for the children. This is really important, because the solution in the first case is to encourage parents to stay together for the sake of the children, but the solution to the second is to encourage people to break up before they become parents.
While policies to encourage people to break up are hard to conceive, policies to encourage people to delay parenthood but also to encourage having children once you have a stable relationship are not.
e.g. you can't marry until you have lived together for two years after leaving full time education (you don't have to have sex, just cohabit), and if you conceive your first child after three years of marriage / five years of cohabitation (if you have an abortion, that still counts as conceiving a child), then the child tax credit would be doubled.
Academia doesn't just measure pH levels, it also asks questions like "How old is the Earth?" and "Could chimps and humans have a common ancestor?" Evens with questions as innocent as this you will already face backlash from conservatives.
That's part of the problem. Professors of Politics get some extra reflected truthiness from the Professors of Physics -- who are measuring actual objective things with micrometers -- that they don't deserve on their own merits. They're all called "academics" and we mentally assume just because the "academics" in the Schools of Engineering or Medicine are dealing with precise well-defined actual measurements of real-world data -- why, so must be in some vaguely similar sense the "academics" in the Schools of Humanity, because, well, they're both "academics," right?
I think the replication crisis in science is probably worth considering as counter evidence to this point. At least as far as the squishy sciences go, where reality doesn't step in and smack you down for sloppy work, there is very little stopping people from putting out work that simply says what they want to be true other than getting it past other people who want to see work published that confirms what they want to be true.
In other words, the vast majority of academia has very little contact with reality and facts such that would select for academics that are better at finding facts or truth. It is much closer to a religious order where people decide what is fact with very little input from reality.
When I hear an argument so far from the spirit of skeptical inquiry as that one, I despair that the academy is slowly sliding into a new Dark Ages founded on fatuous scholasticism. During the last Dark Ages, it turned out almost every smart person believed in the Virgin Birth and spontaneous generation of life, and everyone understood *that* was no coincidence, it was simple because those things were so self-evidently true that no one need bother gathering evidence to prove it.
I think my argument was really badly expressed if you think it was far from the spirit of skeptical inquiry.
My point was intended to be a warning against the argumentum ad temperantiam fallacy - we should not assume that liberals and conservatives must be equally likely to be right and wrong, so if academia happens to independently reach results that align more often with liberal positions than conservative ones, we should not discard that out of hand for that reason.
Is it plausible that academic results lean liberal because academia leans liberal? Sure. But the opposite causation is also plausible, and instead of assuming either, we should gather evidence and test both hypotheses.
You are completely correct that simply a tendency towards one side or the other isn't by itself a sign of a problem, just as a tendency for one race or another to be over or under represented in a particular field isn't itself a sign of racism or some other nonsense. Economics, for example, has historically been a bit more balanced between left and right because economics demonstrates that markets work a lot better than the anti-market left tends to believe.
This is where I think you go astray: "academia happens to independently reach results". Fundamentally, this is not how academia works for the majority of fields, probably the super majority. There are not a whole bunch of scientists sitting in their offices working away without interaction with outsiders, suddenly producing a study to surprise everyone. At nearly every step of the process there is outside input and veto points, where if your work doesn't comport with what others want to see it gets shut down. I will list a few:
1: You end up doing what your advisor does. I am told this is a big deal in the hard sciences, but even in the squishy social sciences this can come up since there is very little gain in publishing from studying a lot outside your specialization compared to staying within. So your early work, which is largely working on your dissertation advisors' interests, tends to define your later work until you have enough clout to have your own students working on your ideas.
2: You gain little from working outside your specialization. This deserves mention, as while you absolutely learn more and gain more access to truth by researching outside your narrow specialization, it doesn't help you publish much. Academia has a strong "not invented here" bias, where "here" is the specific subspecialty conversation in the journals. Especially if your specialization is very narrow, you had better then work within their specific oeuvre or they aren't going to want to hear it.
3: Funding. Holy crap, this is a big one. People get funded based on what they are planning on working on and what hypothesis are being tested. Not working on what people in the decision positions are interested in? Hope you have a crap ton of money to self fund. There is a reason why so many applications have "Implications for global warming" and the like even though there are zero: you need to frame your work as being relevant to what political interests decide who gets the money.
4: Publishing. While exciting and surprising results are likely to get published, those exciting and surprising results have to be exciting to the editor you send the paper to, and then exciting to the reviewers for the journal. If the editor doesn't care, or finds the topic or conclusions unappealing, you get desk rejected. If the reviewers, who are usually much older academics who volunteer or younger academics who are submitting to the journal as well and have to review to be considered, don't like the paper for silly reasons, you get rejected. Never mind good reasons, any number of reasons get you punted. Journals get orders of magnitude more submissions than they can print, so editors have a strong bias towards rejection without really looking at the reviewers' reasons too closely, even if they disagree.
Ever hear of "strategic citation?" This is a tactic for getting favorable reviews where you cite papers from academics more likely to be sympathetic to your paper's findings so that they are more likely to be chosen as reviewers. It is pretty standard practice that you have to do this if you want to get published. What you really don't want is to get your paper sent for review to someone whose work you disagree with, especially if you are poking holes in their work. Maybe they will be good and honorable and recognize your good work and how it affects theirs in an honest light. More often they will just protect their work and legacy (and career, and future funding) but torpedoing your stuff. May the gods show mercy upon you in this case.
5: Future job prospects: You know what really sucks? Applying for a job at a university where you are being judged by someone who has a grudge against your advisor or even you because your work challenges theirs. This person gets a vote on whether to hire you, and whether you get tenure. Boy, I hope they are good and honorable people! Academics is a small world.
Of course, you can leave academia and do your work. But... whoops... did you criticize the work of the CDC? Not working there! Produce some work that is controversial with regard to the modern political climate? Not working at... anywhere in Silicon Valley certainly, or DC, or.... you get the idea.
That's 5 things, and there are many more. You can see though how the fields where you can't do a bunch of the work yourself and then demonstrate "Aha! Fools! My fusion death robots work after all! I will destroy you all!" are going to tend towards very narrow acceptable views and results completely divorced from reality, because reality is not the arbiter of what is good work or not.
Compare academia to engineering or programming. The latter two are filled with people who can demonstrate that their ideas work independent of other people's opinions, and often have to. Programming especially grows so fast because it is super cheap so you dodge a large number of those veto points.
No, it's not even in the same class of plausibility, let alone equally plausible. Human tribalism, wish-fulfillment urges, and remarkable abilities to bullshit ourselves all tell us -- as does history itself, e.g. the way phrenology, trephination for madness, and lobotomies were all at one time academically respectable -- that the hypothesis that a group leans one way because of group identity/ ribal reasons is far more likely than that the hypothesis that they all just happen to have independently arrived at the truth.
Feynman had some cogent comments on this. He observed that the only way empirical science works is if individual practioners are fiercely skeptical, most especially of their own ideas, because of the ease with which people fool themselves. For the academy to have any hope of arriving at the truth of whether reality is liberal or conservative, they should be the single greatest critics of the hypothesis that it conforms to their own preferences.
<i>When I hear an argument so far from the spirit of skeptical inquiry as that one, I despair that the academy is slowly sliding into a new Dark Ages founded on fatuous scholasticism. During the last Dark Ages, it turned out almost every smart person believed in the Virgin Birth and spontaneous generation of life, and everyone understood *that* was no coincidence, it was simple because those things were so self-evidently true that no one need bother gathering evidence to prove it.</i>
I'd just like to draw attention to the irony here of you deploring "an argument far from the spirit of sceptical enquiry" whilst uncritically regurgitating "people in the past were all stooopid" stereotypes.
It just occurred to me: If 10 academics say one thing, and 1 academic says the opposite, we should give the dissenter more weight than one academic with the mainstream view (because the latter are influenced by conformism, while the former has to swim against the current), but less weight than the 10 mainstream ones collectively. Part of the disagreement about how we should weight the dissenters is because it's often unspecified whether we are discussing its weighting vs. the mainstream side as a whole, or the weighting of a dissenter vs. a mainstream person.
Scott has discussed similar questions: who makes better arguments, people with socially dominant beliefs, or people with fringe beliefs? https://web.archive.org/web/20131229235216/http://squid314.livejournal.com/333353.html By default, we should expect the mainstream view to be more likely to be right than a fringe view. On the other hand, fringe people are likely to make better arguments on average.
Further extending this: Often there is significant conformism in academia. And science journalism especially often removes qualifications and nuance. In these cases we should expect the academics' position to be closer to the truth than their diametric opposite; however, arguably we should expect the truth to be a weaker version than what the academics (and especially science journalists) say. If the range of opinions commonly discussed in society don't wander too far from the academic mainstream (nowhere near its opposite), it's not even necessarily unlikely that what we see as opposing opinions are closer to the truth.
One instance where political bias is indeed unambiguously bias is when it involves normative judgments deriving from terminal values. The job of science is to find the truth about facts; but I see strong signs that academics' terminal values affect their evaluation of facts on controversial issues. Furthermore, the terminal moral values of academics differ from those of the average person; and a priori academics are likely to be right about facts than others, but not about moral values (as a moral non-cognitivist, I don't even think that being right or wrong about moral values makes sense).
<i>There is a widespread liberal argument that this isn't a coincidence, but that academia leans liberal because liberal positions are more often factually correct and conservative positions are more often factually wrong.</i>
As a reactionary Blue Tribe member (unless we're using "Blue Tribe" as a synonym for liberal, of course, in which case I'm a member of whichever colour Tribe the reactionaries hang out at), I have a few objections, in descending order of glibness:
(1) Why does this same logic never get applied to any other under-represented groups? I'm not aware of any even remotely mainstream academics suggesting it might be "worth considering" that blacks or women or poor people are underrepresented in academia because they're just not smart enough to hack it, so the fact that it's OK to consider this hypothesis when it comes to conservatives comes across as an unprincipled exception.
(2) What counts as a "liberal" or "conservative" position often changes quite drastically with time. E.g., when I was growing up the standard liberal position was in favour of protectionism vs. free trade, until Donald Trump came out in favour of protectionism and everybody suddenly decided that the whole notion was racist and wrong. Maybe there was some brilliant economics paper which came out at exactly the same time and completely annihilated the case for protectionism, but if so, I certainly didn't hear of it.
(3) Having spent most of the last ten years of my life in academia at some level or another, I don't think academia selects for truth-seeking ability, it selects for the ability to come up with novel and counter-intuitive arguments (because this is how you get published) without stepping on your colleagues' or bosses' toes (because otherwise they might not give you a good reference when you apply to the next short-term ultra-competitive job). Even if the consensus of a particular academic field does wander onto the truth, it will inevitably wander away from it again, due to the aforementioned need for novelty. Accordingly I wouldn't attach much weight to arguments from academic consensus.
(1): Political views are partly informed by factual questions. As such, it's plausible that academics know the facts better, and the facts support liberal views. (I.e. they don't become academics because they are liberal, they become liberal because they are academics.) It's not plausible that knowing the facts makes one's skin become white.
Of course this theory is questionable. Academics are only obviously well-informed about a narrow area, not about all the various sorts of facts relevant to politics. Furthermore, political views are informed not only by facts but also values, and there is no obvious reason that academics' values are better. It's possible that academics' values aren't different from those of the general population, and their political views only differ because of different factual beliefs, but I think their values differ from the general population too.
Re: discounting a conservative/libertarian's study against lockdowns and not discounting a presumed-liberals study in favour of lockdowns - it's not as simple as just "study aligns with beliefs". There are a number of factors all pointing in the same direction.
It seems obvious on the face of it that *of course lockdowns work to some degree*, and the question is just how much. It would actually be pretty bizarre if lockdowns didn't attenuate the transmission of an airborne agent. It would be like finding a study that flossing didn't prevent tooth decay - it seems pretty obvious that it must, so we will naturally be skeptical of the result.
There is a general consensus that lockdowns work, so they have to provide enough evidence to show they're right and everyone else is wrong.
It's also true that the "conservative/libertarian" position on many science-related issues is patently false/absurd. Climate change isn't real, for instance.
So it's not one pointer like it seems, it's a few which conspire. It's "study aligns with prior beliefs" (possible bias to find desired result), it's "group is known for lying about science" (low prior credibility for members), "result contradicts obvious likelihood" (higher burden of proof), and "study at odds with general scientific consensus" (higher burden of proof).
The liberal, pro-lockdown study in the hypothetical case of a researcher who's equally biased only has to contend with "study aligns with prior beliefs", and in fact any doubt is *attenuated* by "group is known for trusting science", "result in line with obvious likelihood", and "study concurs with general consensus".
Of course, the study can be good or bad quite apart from all of that, but I think that's the explanation for why "conservative/libertarian finds evidence lockdowns are bad" seems on the face of it worse than the liberal pro-lockdown study without reading either. It applies more or less equally to the pro-gun/anti-gun position, or a number of other issues split along red tribe/blue tribe lines.
"It seems obvious on the face of it that *of course lockdowns work to some degree*, and the question is just how much. It would actually be pretty bizarre if lockdowns didn't attenuate the transmission of an airborne agent. It would be like finding a study that flossing didn't prevent tooth decay - it seems pretty obvious that it must, so we will naturally be skeptical of the result."
I think you are way over simplifying things here. A lockdown order isn't equivalent to people flossing more. Its equivalent to telling people to floss more. The distinction matters. Maybe the way you told people to floss makes them less likely to brush or use mouth wash. In that case focusing so much on flossing might make tooth decay worse.
The equivalent problem with lockdowns is that there are other things that save people from a disease. Going outside or going to a gym and exercising and being in shape might increase your chance for catching the disease, but decrease the deadliness of the disease by a sufficient amount to make the activity worth it.
If it was extremely difficult for a well-connected, intelligent, and thoughtful person such as yourself to analyze the pros and cons with the benefit of a full year of hindsight, imagine how hard it was for the public health authorities, and government, to do so last spring and summer.
That is, I think two additional conclusions you might reasonably draw are:
(1) It's really REALLY hard to get public health measures bang-on correct, when you are looking forward and dealing with an infectious virus, the human immune system, and dynamically responsive human populations in an ideologically, economically, and intellectually diverse population of 300 million. Perhaps "didn't utterly screw it up" is about the highest standard of success we can reasonably expect, and we should critique our public health authorities and government appropriately*.
(2) Maybe a lot of governing of 300 million people with a view towards eliminating bad luck and improving everyone's lot in subtle and difficult to measure ways -- like their emotional well-being! -- is incredibly difficult to get right, and our default expectations about that should be deeply skeptical, no matter how persuasive the hypotheses are -- and we should craft our political institutions with an eye to that skepticism.
---------------
* It isn't cost-free to have expectations for government that are much higher than it can reasonably achieve, because when it routinely falls far below expectations, that leads to broad cynicism about even the things it might be able to do well *and* it leads politicians to start lying a great deal more, on the grounds that it might actually turn out to be easier to obfuscate the data to avoid the lie's exposure than it is to get genuine results done that are good enough to win re-election. I think we see both these trends in politics today, and I think both can at least in part be traced back to unreasonably high expectations among voters about what government can actually be reasonably expecte to get done and get done right.
Valid points; they fail, however, to get at the basic question of why virtually every prominent developed country instantly dropped long-developed pandemic plans at the behest of (what seems in retrospect to be) transparently obvious Chinese propaganda.
There was one country which didn't, which was the UK. They had an emergency plan that was developed by the highest standards, and they followed it.
For a few weeks. Then they found out that the virus is subtly different than the virus that the plan was based on, and that following the plan had lead to a catastrophe. They thrashed it, and started following what everyone else did.
If there is a lesson from the pandemic, then it is that we have very limited ways of preparing for catastrophes. Not because we are lazy or dumb, but because elaborate plans will depend too much on unpredictable details.
(Of course, there are a few things that work broadly in lots of emergency, and you should do those. Like having some fast-response teams to do whatever is necessary, but do it fast. Have clear command structures in emergencies. Have fallback means of communication. Encourage everyone to have a 7-day emergency supply at home. And so on.)
The emergency plan the UK dropped did not lead to an unexpected catastrophe. The plan involved scenarios with higher IFR than covid-19, and correspondingly higher deaths than entirely unmitigated covid-19 could cause.
My understanding is that the UK did not shut down initially because the plan told them to sit it out with only mild measures. What they got wrong is that hospitalized people stay in hospital for a really long time, and their plan assumed that it's just a few day, like it's usually for the flu.
They switched to the same strategy as the rest of Europe (shutdowns etc), but notably later. Since they were later, this worked less good. They needed to stay on strict measures longer than the rest of Europe, since their numbers took longer to go down. I think this is the direct consequence of them following the pandemic plan.
Also, UK was hit relatively late in Europe. Other late-hit countries had generally much lower death tolls in the first wave, like Ireland, Germany, the Netherlands, the Scandinavian countries (except Sweden, of course). Basically all countries in the north. Those countries pretty much avoided the first wave, and UK could have done the same if they had acted the same way as other countries.
I wonder why emails were more helpful than comments on the post. I have a couple of hypotheses.
1. Commenting may be a form of status signaling, in which you align yourself with one side and bash the other. Hence, it is less prone to neutrality than an email.
2. Emails are generally longer and more detailed than comments, and hence can be more helpful/insightful.
3. Researchers in the field, who on average would have more informed and accurate things to say, may be reluctant to discuss their stands on a public forum, and hence emailed Scott directly.
Although 3 seems to be the most important reason, I wonder if 1 and 2 played a part at all.
I wonder if the point about "300 million people going to the bar" is valid here.
Imagine that there are 1000 billion creatures in the universe. If the pain of the death of one person is is roughly equal to the inconvenience caused by stopping 300 million people from going to the bar, then this calculus can be extrapolated to "death of one person= slight ticklish sensation for a second to 1000 billion people". Can we really say that the two are morally equal?
I think pain is mostly personal, and cannot be "added up" across persons.
Maybe pain can be comparable only when the two inconveniences are somewhat comparable? Like the death of one person = ten persons getting their legs chopped off or something.
As a society, we (most modern societies) consider that putting people in prison when they kill someone is "justice". Lockdowns and dying from a virus seem to fit that pattern too. In that case, I would say that we already agree that there is a balance to be found.
Yes maybe the response could have been more nuanced. For instance, people who could produce a letter from a medical professional saying that they're severely distressed should have been allowed to travel out of town to stay with their families or something. However, if the average experience was boredom at home, then that for me is a bearable expense to save 500,000 lives
I don't really agree with your numbers. I estimate that I lost at least 50% of the year and a half since the beginning of the pandemic. That's 0.75 QALY. Let's be generous and say 0.5. People that died from COVID had 8 QALY left. That means that a person dying would be the equivalent of 16 people going through the lockdown. In France, 600 persons went through the lockdown for every person that died. So the lockdown would have to prevent more than 29 out of 30 deaths to be "worth it" (16/600 ~= 1/30).
There's another very cynical but very real point to be made: I live in France. We have socialized healthcare and socialized retirement. That means that old people and people that can't pay medical expenses live thanks to the population that works. By putting most of the burden of the pandemic on the youth (50 years and less) (which has already been the case since the economy is stagnating and natality is slowing down), we are also taking a big risk for the future of the country.
> I estimate that I lost at least 50% of the year and a half since the beginning of the pandemic. That's 0.75 QALY.
That would imply you were **dead** for 9 months.
You are overestimating the impact, in QALY terms. Using a HRQoL instrument, I did an estimate of a person who would be pretty negatively impacted by a 'lockdown' and got a transformed score of 0.69. So your loss is on the order of 0.25 QALY (270 days by (1-0.69).
Can you link the tool? And that's a good point, your calculation seems more realistic. I think my point still stands, but just not as strong as before. Thanks for the precision.
It's not much further down the same road, well-paved with good intentions, before we start observing that the comparison obviously depends on the nature of the people suffering -- surely the suffering of a beautiful young person with exquisite artistic sensibilities and a lifetime of contribution ahead of her should be counted more than the suffering of an old ugly person with no friends, who's had a stroke and is now severely mentally disabled and drooling at the mouth and besides probably has fewer than 5 QALYs left?
From there it's but a short hop to justify all kinds of utilitarian good of the many versus good of the few decisions, such as euthanizing those who lives are not worth the social effort needed to maintain them (or who are perhaps merely consuming social resources, or causing crime and/or social disunion in excess of their social contribution), or starving the kulaks to death in order to serve the greater good of the Five Year Plan, or buying and selling men of a lower race if by doing so we allow the superior race to achieve heights of aesthetic achievement that are well worth the degradation of the slave, and many more Faustian bargains as well.
These sorts of hypotheticals start to seem silly at some point. Are we going to get to the point where we start wondering, If Superman and Jesus had a fight, who do you suppose would win?
I'm only addressing the following point in Scott's post
>And it's so stupid - emotional damages! People being annoyed that they can't go to the bar (I realize for some people the emotional damages were deeper than that, but not everyone missed a family member's funeral - I think the part that really adds up is multiplying the inconvenience of not being able to go to the bar by 300 million people). Maybe a more courageous post would have looked more like "Hey, when you add this really simple thing in to the analysis, lockdowns are really obviously bad, right?" But it just felt too weird and transgressive to focus on something authorities weren't even talking about.
And "hypotheticals start to seem silly" is precisely my point
I think "people being annoyed that they can't go to the bar" is a gross misrepresentation of what most people went through. I could do the same on the opposite side and say that the emotional damages are more like solitary confinement, which is recognized as a form of torture by the UN. The truth is somewhere in between, varying from person to person.
> And "hypotheticals start to seem silly" is precisely my point
I don't think they are. I live in France, where currently 112k people died of COVID. I don't know how many would have died without a lockdown. But I sure hope it's more than 100k, because having 600 people going through a year and half of that to save just one life isn't, in my opinion, worth it. There's nothing hypothetical about that. The question that the government asks themselves is "who do we sacrifice to save who, and how many to save how many?". I hope they're looking into an objective measure and not doing everything they can to save the most lives they can, especially since they failed miserably.
I doubt that pro-lockdown authors are facing a lot of heckling and anti-lockdown authors are facing little. Rather, concern about a deadly viral pandemic and concern about how strangers will treat you on the street/internet are probably correlated. Both have ambiguous and unclear yet occasionally fatal or life-ruining danger, for which the main defense is to stay inside.
Also, the question of whether a conservative producing conservative science or a liberal producing liberal science, etc, can be trusted, I suspect you have to ask this on a case-by-case basis, and I don't think that any one ideology is more trustworthy. Find a few scientists who seem to be particularly honest, credible, diligent, listen to what they say and ignore everyone else.
For me, the huge issue with lockdown is not emotional damage, but something related : it's establishing a precedent for a central power to monitor and control personal behaviors and limit essential freedoms to achieve difficult to measure societal benefits... This is a very bad precedent, like anti terrorist measures but even worse. The west looks a lot like China did 5 years ago, when all progressive media were telling how Orwellian it was. The same media now preach safety above everything else without worrying much about citizen tracking and restrictions...we are on a very bad slope here, and we sleep faster and faster regardless of the actual epidemy strength... Which make the epidemy looks more like a convenient excuse...
About math and models, more specifically predictive models:
I think worth mentioning that math is not the hard part in predictive models. You make your hypotheses, you set your parameters, you do the math, you read the results. The math here is often simple. Or maybe it is not, if you want a beautiful solution as closed-form expressions; but we do not need that to read the results, we only need an accurate enough numeric value. The models are usually a set of differential equations or some kind of discrete dynamic system: our everyday computers can solve most of them numerically in the matter of seconds.
The hard part, really, are the hypotheses and parameters. About parameters, John von Neumann put it this way: “With four parameters I can fit an elephant, and with five I can make him wiggle his trunk.”
But the real stopper is hypotheses. Models have a boatload of them, most of them implicit.
For example, when people were about computing the herd immunity threshold: the main parameter was the average number of people anybody may contaminate. Key word: average. Introverts will meet fewer people, with a lower risk of contamination, the opposite for extroverts. Does it average out? No: common sens tells us that extroverts will be contaminated early, then immune, hence slowing the propagation. And models designed to test that common sense confirm it: random graphs where 90% of the nodes have two links and 10% have 12 have a lower herd immunity threshold than graphs where all nodes have three links.
Furthermore, some epidemiologists knew that. There were articles about it published, even before the current crisis IIRC. But when you look at the models, the average is the only distribution parameters. That translates into the implicit hypothesis “everyone's as much an extrovert as everyone else”. Which does not match reality. But since it is implicit, it is rarely discussed.
The important thing to remember about predictive models is that they can tell us what can possibly happen, but they are too many uncertainties for them to tell us what will happen.
If you can read French, or stomach an automatic translation (it should work reasonably well for that kind of text), the following blog article, and the related articles, tells it better than me:
It connects with the Euler remark: when Euler says “𝑒^𝑖π+1=0 therefore God”, he really is saying “𝑒^𝑖π+1=0 AND beauty implies God, therefore God”. We can call bullshit on the implicit hypothesis, which is not math.
I can argue that the Nazis caused the Manhattan project, which caused civil nuclear power earlier, which might allow us to barely escape the worst of climate change. So, Nazis good? Certainly not, it was not on purpose.
The conclusion I take is that History is chaotic, and worrying about hypothetical indirect consequences too far removed is a waste of time. Cannabis may decrease intelligence? Maybe, but people more relaxed may hit their kids less, making the next generation smarter.
The lockdowns, by changing our relation to work and welfare, may have opened the road to Universal Basic Income and Universal Healthcare, and caused the end of poverty before 2040. Or they may have strengthened the choke-hold of tech corporations on society and led us to the standard cyberpunk dystopia.
I do not have a strong argument for it, but my intuition tells me that we need to assume that the indirect chaotic effects average to 0, because otherwise we cannot do anything. It is not very satisfying; but if psychohistory was easy, it would have been invented already.
You certainly remember that after 9/11, authorities have pushed for security theater, widening the powers of the executive branch and law enforcement, and it happened again after each episode of terrorism. For example, the Crypto Wars were re-kindled by the need to decrypt a terrorist's phone.
The phenomenon is simple: power attracts people who want power, if they can get more of it they will, and events that scare the population are a good occasion to consolidate power.
As you pointed out, lockdowns in Europe were probably more strict than in the United States. To implement them, governments had to have emergency laws voted. When the emergency subsided, some of these laws ended, and some of them have been kept and made permanent.
One of the concern I and many other people had about the lockdowns were exactly this: they being the excuse to weaken legal protections for fundamental rights, with a good measure of ratchet effect: once the population of an area had been locked down under police control to save lives from a pandemic, and society has not collapsed, we can be locked down under police control again for other reasons, say a terrorist manhunt, or protests against an unpopular reform of tax pensions.
It was especially visible in France, where the implementation of the lockdown were quite stupid, to the point that German newspapers called us Authoritarian Absurdistan. Parks and forests were forbidden. To go to groceries, we had to fill and sign a form for ourselves; police chiefs have bragged how many people they have fined at the very doors of convenience stores. And whoever complained about it were swiftly called covid denialists and compared to Trumpist anti-maskers.
The weakening of fundamental freedoms and checks-and-balances, both in law and in mentalities, is a long-term consequence of the lockdowns that I fear might feel deeply.
Indeed. And all this for a relatively mild epidemy (if it was ebola like, the situation would be very different). At this stage, every flu could justify some of the covid restrictions, i would not be surprised if mask wearing inside public places are enforced every winter...when looking back at the h1n1 scare, the sars one, the h5n1, and so on, it become tempting to think some administrations wanted a covid - like crisis: something not too bad, but bad enough to shift the cursor of western individual freedoms...
We are carrying out a real-time experiment on this in Australia as we speak. Both Melbourne and Sydney are having lockdowns because of delta outbreaks. Melbourne lockdown was very quick and strict, Sydney hesitated. As a result, Melbourne looks very close to proving conclusively that it is possible for a 5 million people city to control delta and (hopefully, with a little luck) bring it down to 0. Sydney at this point seems to be losing control.
The difference between the 2 cities is the ideology of the state governments, Labor in Melbourne, right-wing Liberal in Sydney.
The utility arithmetic of emotional consequences doesn't sit right with me...
I don't think you can assign a negligible negative utility to some experience, then just naively multiply that utility by the number of people having that experience to create some huge negative utility.
For instance: If a genie would let me save one person's life on the condition that a hundred people had to stub their toes, I would take that deal in a heartbeat. My decision doesn't change if it's a million people. Or a billion. Or a trillion.
Somehow, my intuition is that if a utility is small enough, it doesn't simply add up over several people.
Similarly, I *don't care* if a billion people are sad about not getting to go to night clubs for a year, if that's the price to pay for saving lives. For the same reason that I would happily sacrifice a billion servings of caviar to stop covid. "Oh no I don't get to eat caviar" times a billion. Get over yourself you spoiled brat. Night clubs are a luxury, and you should be happy to give up that luxury for the opportunity to save lives.
And still not so many people donate to stuff like vaccination or water treatment projects, which typically save many lives in developing countries. Problem is that it's quite easy to say for a few dollar you save a life, and expect of course it's a no brainer, everybody will agree....But it's an anonymous life, and moral rationalist overestimate the value of an anonymous life to most people. You get hardened, quite automatically, against compassion for abstract suffering, because the donations accumulate, and in the end your compassion result in a real hit to your standard of living for an abstract benefit to people you will never interract with. It also feels very scam-like, so trigger instinctive resistance to being exploited.
Personally, I am also extremely hostile to the message "give, your selfish bastard" when the guy saying it either will not give anything, or do not suffer much from what is given, or plead for a cause that is much more important for him than for random people. I could give up caviar and clubs cause I do not like them anyway. But I understand some people do like it, and would be reluctant to give up things objectively as trivial, but which I care about...
Maybe write a post about the emotional damage subject specifically? You're right that it would be transgressive. Anyone who brings it up is in for some shaming as being selfishly concerned with their own comfort "while people are dying!"
These kinds of calculations always subtly ignore the value of simply not being forced to do something. You don't have to be a raging libertarian to realize that "mere" personal freedom has some real moral value. Not being forced to do something is an inherent good.
That's why I think it's much better to do trade-off-type thought experiments to judge the rationality of lockdowns. Find some phenomena, X, that roughly matches the distribution of mortality risk as covid (plus some padding for the "unknowns", if you want), and then 1) see how much effort people currently expend avoiding such risks and then compare it to relative hardship of lockdowns, and/or 2) ask people if they'd vote to lockdown to avoid the risks of X. (Of course, when polling you have to avoid mentioning covid, lest you taint it with politics.)
I feel like your analysis had an asymmetry, where you acknowledge that R reduced mainly because of voluntary behavior changes rather than lockdowns, but then attribute all the costs to lockdowns when most of the costs were also caused by voluntary behavior rather than government policy.
I feel dumber for having read this. Sweden, Afganistan, other places that simply ignored covid, provide irrefutable proof that covid while a real cold/flu like disease, us no more dangerous than flu. There are no excess deaths, or the effect is very small. Death rates are roughly same as 2017, 2018
Any kind of statistics other than overall amount of people dying, are meaningless. US gov got initially freaked out by COVID, and threw tons if money at it. Where there is free money, there is grifting.
Situation: 10 grandmas walk into ER, presenting fever, headache and coughing. These are symptoms of both flu, and covid. But treating COVID patient milks insurance for 100k, while treating flu patient hardly milks 20k. Do you think our hospitals are going to classify these 10 grandmas with flu, or with covid? "But but but the PCR test show covid". Do you undetstand how PCR test works? Its exponential magnification. With 45 cycles you will detect covid on a ham sandwich with 50% probability. With 50 cycles every test on any substance will come out as covid.
I would like to see the evidence about lockdowns not destroying businesses as well. I was working for an economic development company in the second half of 2020, and we saw many businesses failing in the region. Not a huge percentage more than usually fail, but that was coupled with a very low rate of new business formation. Instead of the normal churn of closings and openings resulting in small net positive growth, there was significant loss of businesses.
Second half of 2020 is when lockdowns were gone though, right? Depending on what you mean by lockdown. In any case, most of the economic effects of 2020 were probably due to the reactions of the general public to the pandemic, and it's questionable to try to attribute all of that to the government policies (which is what I assume "lockdown" refers to).
Not in Pennsylvania. Lockdowns and hard limits on businesses continued till 2021.
As to whether it was just public reaction, that might be some of it, but the desired level of self quarantine varied quite a bit by region. There was a lot of... tension... between citizens and the government due to ridiculously draconian rules locking things down. The long duration was a big reason for business failures, as firms were running out of working capital, due to being closed or forced to run at severely reduced capacity.
Bit of a question for you: how do you go from "Second half of 2020 is when lockdowns were gone though, right?" to "most of the economic effects of 2020 were probably due to the reactions of the general public to the pandemic, and it's questionable to try to attribute all of that to the government policies"? The structure of those two seems to assume there cannot be any effect of lockdown policy, as by the second half they were gone and 2020 was all private reactions anyway.
I mean, I get that you're saying that the specific incident was not predictable (though animals crawling into boxes and breaking things is a recurring problem that should be predictable enough to warrant putting some mesh over every opening), but that doesn't mean you can't prepare for a general class of "something bad happens to one specific box of equipment, how does the rest of the system cope?". A plan that needs everything to go right is very fragile, good plans allow for a couple of things to go wrong, and have generalised contingencies.
My question is: Why isn't anyone else doing this specific analysis? You would think that governments, universities, etc. would be motivated to do this type of analysis. (Maybe they are, and I just don't read the right blogs to see those posts?)
My semi-flippant response is that this sort of heavy meta-analysis will get you close to the right answer. And doing something that will inevitably lead you near the right answer means that you might end up finding out you were wrong. And for many institutions, admitting you were wrong is *bad*
my semi-flippant response would be 'appearing to be right to the right people is far more important than actually being right'
Is no one else doing this specific analysis? I feel like it's one I've seen a lot of examples of in my social networks.
I haven't seen anyone try to publish something this general, but the problem for publication is that if you attempt something this general, you'll really have to look at *everything*. Instead, published work has to focus on one method and/or one measure, and those published studies are the fodder for this sort of thing.
The British Government has been repeatedly requested by backbench MPs in the ruling party to provide a cost/benefit analysis of lockdowns and other restrictions. They have, in turn, repeatedly refused to do them. Perhaps this situation would be a starting point for where to look?
The govt's reasoning ended up being that a cost/benefit analysis is too hard to do. But if it's too hard to know if doing something is a good idea or not, standard practice would surely be to not do it?
"if it's too hard to know if doing something is a good idea or not, standard practice would surely be to not do it?"
If it's too hard to know if doing X is a good idea or not, then it's *also* too hard to know if doing not-X is a good idea or not. Unless you have some principled way of determining which thing is X and which thing is not-X, and always doing the not-X when you can't determine which is good, this isn't going to be a viable "standard practice".
See Huemer's "In Praise of Passivity"; https://www.econlib.org/archives/2014/01/in_praise_of_pa.html
Except there's an obvious (and probably arguably pretty reasonable) status quo bias, i.e. not-doing-X-if-X-is-not-something-we-are-already-doing.
And this is usually what we would do.
What distinguishes this case in particular is that the downsides of the "not-X" scenario are going to be obvious, quantifiable and horrible (N deaths, with the tally updated every day) and the downsides of the X scenario are going to be diffuse, non-obvious and (as this post shows) unquantifiable.
Sure! That's probably the most common impetus for 'we need to do something, THIS is something, let's do THIS' generally and I would expect it to be an extremely constraining force on any relevant decision makers.
Yes, but doing something just because it exists is the politician's fallacy.
President Reagan: "Don't just do something, stand there!"
When in doubt, do the thing that won’t get you fired if you are wrong.
This sounds flippant but I think it’s actually a quite strong explanation of what’s going on.
Also worth noting - while I can’t praise the UK’s handling of COVID (remember they gave up on contact tracing in favor of a herd immunity strategy early on, which led to them being one of the worst countries in the world for deaths), I think they are an example of what happens when politicians simply let public sentiment (or their perception of public sentiment) steer their actions; the public wasn’t asking for a cost/benefit at the time, and wasn’t interested in choosing actions in such a framework. (See “pause AZ because it might kill 1/1000 of the people it saves”, “forbid human challenge trials”, or “delay approval for vaccines that are clearly effective in other countries”.). The public was terrified, and Something Must Be Done.
The core mechanic I’ve seen is that a rational response to changing data looks like indecisive flip-flopping to the public, and feels like such to politicians. Public health policy folks are aware of this too. And the low rationality of the public strongly constrains what paths you can take, particularly once you’ve picked an initial direction.
"while I can’t praise the UK’s handling of COVID (remember they gave up on contact tracing in favor of a herd immunity strategy early on, which led to them being one of the worst countries in the world for deaths)"
My impression is that many countries didn't successfully do contact tracing, only a few did. Am I mistaken?
I suppose it depends on what you mean by "successfully". I think the UK did
worse at it than most EU states, and better than the US, though they started off well enough. The issue is that contact tracing is harder the more cases you have, so it's a strategy where you really need to strongly commit early on. Countries like New Zealand (kind of a special case given it's a relatively low-population island country) and S Korea would be some examples where they pushed hard to do contact tracing and seem to have kept a lid on things more convincingly than other countries.
I would argue (as Scott alludes to in his post) that in hindsight, a better approach would have been to do much more intensive contact tracing from the beginning, and this should be one of the lessons we keep in mind for future outbreaks.
I wasn't claiming that the UK was uniquely bad at contact tracing though -- the "in favor of herd immunity" bit was what I think is most damning. In other words, they started off with a plausibly sound strategy in place, and then abandoned it for the worst possible strategy; the delta there is very pronounced.
I'm not sure if your examples of what the public wants are supposed to refer to the UK, but I don't think they work if they are. The UK never paused AZ use, although it did restrict its use to older people, and did allow human challenge trials (I'm not sure about the timing of vaccine approvals).
People writing about lockdowns on blogs? There are a lot of people doing this sort of analysis. I've read dozens of them, almost all of which conclude lockdowns are bad and not worth the cost, usually due to weak evidence for the counterfactual but sometimes for other reasons like the impact on education.
Here's a response to Scott posted on the Daily Sceptic, which started out as a UK blog for lockdown sceptics and thanks to the never-ending restrictions is now evolving into something more. It posts analysis of lockdowns and related topics literally every day:
https://dailysceptic.org/2021/07/17/a-response-to-scott-alexander-on-lockdowns/
The tl;dr of the article is: where's the studies showing no impact on mortality; models like CoronaGame aren't "actual evidence", claims about Sweden aren't using age-adjusted mortality and don't use all the data throughout 2020, educational/remote learning impact ignored.
Which, in fairness, is the sort of thing this new blog post is reflecting upon - the difficulty of capturing all the evidence, all the angles and arguments etc.
Here's another article providing a response to a pro-lockdown analysis:
https://dailysceptic.org/2021/07/21/new-paper-claims-lockdowns-do-not-cause-more-health-harms-than-they-prevent-but-it-misses-the-big-picture/
tldr: new paper claims lockdowns don't cause worse health outcomes but ignores all non-health aspects; paper argues no excess deaths in short term which is probably true but what about the long term when you consider restricted healthcare access e.g. missed cancer screenings; the alternative scenario is presented as doing nothing vs focused protection (daily sceptic/lockdown sceptics as a site tends to be in favour of Great Barrington).
I would say that the destruction of schooling is not only an emotional impact but a much more serious pragmatic one, especially given that schools have not at any point been important to health outcomes due to COVID's overwhelming preference for the old and sick. So it seems like it should play a key role in any analysis.
At any rate, if you aren't aware of this sort of analysis it's not because it hasn't been happening but because you aren't moving in the right social circles to find it.
Re Schooling; Walking the dogs the other day, I was thinking about dog years and time sense. (Do dogs experience time ~7x faster than we do, a daily walk for me is once a week for them?) And this is certainly true of children. I'm sure we can all remember how long the years were when we were 5-10 years old. So a five year old missing a year is a way more important than a 50 year old missing a year.
I'm not sure that it's they experience time more slowly, but the time expereinced represents a greater proportion of their total memory of time so seems longer, and this sense of "more time" persists because as we get older al time experienced is less of a fraction of the total so it seems faster after the fact, and we remember it seeming faster. Plus the younger we were, the less total information we had to carry, so time seems longer. I.e. Imagine you are locked in a white room for an hour as a child versus an adult. As an adult, you could probably pass the time by thinking about things/remembering things, but as a child you are mostly focusing on your environment/current situation so it seems much longer in hindsight. But it would be hard to see how you were actually expereincing time moving slower in the present moment. I think adults spend more time thinking and perhaps for many of them more time doing tedious, non-memorable repetivie tasks, so it seems like time was longer when everything was relatively new and less internal thinking relative to external perception was done.
Universities, maybe, but why would governments be motivated to do this type of analysis? Governments are driven by the politician's syllogism, "something must be done, this is something, therefore this must be done". In March/April 2020, most Western governments were not in a position to do anything obviously and immediately useful, therefore they had to do something mostly useless(*). Performing an analysis that might reveal the thing they are doing as mostly useless, is not in their political interest.
They could and should have done research on how to selectively target the lockdowns to make them more useful and less harmful in June/July, but that's not quite the same thing as the top-level "are lockdowns net good or bad" that Scott was looking at. It's also more difficult and doing it right has a Copenhagen-ethics mad-sciency vibe.
* And maybe also some long-term useful stuff behind the scenes, but they had to to something visible and immediate.
What's the market for them? The usual answer to "Why isn't someone doing X?" is "There is nobody who is willing to pay enough to have X done that the people skilled in the art of X are willing to shift their efforts from whatever else they're doing to earn grocery money to X."
As a statistician, I'm very skeptical of people who crenulate their zeugmas. Just because you have some asymptotic zuegmoyal theory doesn't mean that it applies well to finite samples. If you're going to be a Crenulist, at least verify that Epstein's theory holds in your data set!
Can you do the crenulation with pinking shears?
Ridiculous. Spoken like a true Fulminator.
Aha – you have revealed yourself as an anti-Fulminator!
So what the author should do, start thinking about finite-sample umpirics? I thought the results like ET are not really relevant unless you are in a field like pulpology where you have a good idea of the underlying umpire principles (and you can draw a rephantasm on blackboard, look at the arms and see them flow). But I have understood that with this kind of moebius, we don't know the umpire, and there are so many plausible rephantasms you don't really have good reason to choose any over other?
I am more of armorical omnitronics person, so the way we were taught to think about crenulation in our armorical statistics class, the Crenulist approach can provide reasonable approximations, as long as you choose appropriate Bacon hamburger crenulates for myriads so that you don't overzeugma them, and plot the paranoids to check for any holisticity. There are tribbleworld R packages for that kind thing.
But hauscootzes!
Big fan of tribbleworld.
But what would Andrew Gelman say? Surely he’s written about such matters
So I guess you could say it’s complicated.
Yeah, I know. I’m a chronic smart ass
It was an enjoyable read though. You would have had to make it a lot more boring and a lot longer to get away with tl;dr
> One thing I found helpful was to ask Person A what they thought of Person B's work, relay it to Person B, Person B would say something like "he's neglecting to consider that you need to fulminate the synecdoche", then I would relay that back to Person A, and after enough of this I would get a meaningful sense of where they disagreed (or occasionally one of them would just admit they had made a mistake).
This is *EXACTLY* the model I've found myself stumbling into working on my Georgism follow-up. I've got all the Georgists on one side telling me everything checks out, and then a bunch of skeptics on the other, and all of them have impeccable credentials and PhD's in econ or tons of professional experience, and I'm just a guy who read a book and wrote about it on the internet that one time.
So far the above method seems to work. Speaking of:
@Erusian, if you're around I'd like to get in touch off-site so I can send you some of the best arguments about the practicalities of land assessment so I can start the claim->response->counter-claim->counter-response cycle, if you're up for it. Email me at lars dot doucet at gmail dot com if you're game.
@Scott please signal boost this followup! I don't have the bandwidth for another blog (sorry Lars) but absolutely want to read the followup.
(Same goes for any of the other skeptics, to be clear).
Are you familiar with David Ricardo's pre-Georgist critique of the idea, responding to Smith?
Critique of which idea specifically? LVT?
Okay I think I found the article by Ricardo you're referring to, assuming the "idea" you referred to is LVT specifically.
So I am (somewhat) familiar with it, though indirectly. I knew Ricardo and Smith laid the foundation for George but I was a bit fuzzy on their exact positions on LVT. I was pretty sure Smith supported something like it but wasn't sure about Ricardo. A friend pointed out a section from "Taxation: The Lost History" by Terence Dwyer that quotes from the Ricardo piece I think you're mentioning, if you want to confirm:
-------
> The doctrine that a tax on rent cannot be shifted is given its classical formulation at the hands of Ricardo (Ch. X, Pgf1-3). The tax is on infra-marginal surplus, which does not enter into price, and hence cannot be shifted. However, Ricardo (Ch. XIV, Pgf6), unlike Smith, did not favor the special taxation of rents, in part because it seemed to him a violation of horizontal equity (treating equals equally). Ricardo (Ch. X, Pgf2-3) also objected to the practical difficulty of assessment and the consequent danger of taxing the returns to capital sunk in the soil, but he also recognized that landlords would soon separate land rent from quasi-rent on sunk capital if such a tax were put into practice. McCulloch (1863: BK 1, Ch. 1, 42-44) pressed this objection with even greater vigor against Smith's (BK V, Ch. 2, Pgf47) argument. There is, however, another objection Ricardo (Ch. XIV, Pgf6) mentioned:
> > If it be considered that land, regarded as a fit subject for exclusive taxation, would not only be reduced in price, to compensate for the risk of that taxation, but in proportion to the indefinite nature and uncertain value of the risk would become a fit subject for speculations, partaking more of the nature of gambling than of sober trade, it will appear probable that the hands into which land would ... be most apt to fall would be the hands ... of the gambler than of ... the sober-minded proprietor, who is likely to employ his land to the greatest advantage.
> Ricardo implied here that a tax on rent is *not* neutral, that it will cause land to be less efficiently used. What is startling is that this argument is the opposite of what later writers tended (correctly) to assume. Later debaters, both for and against the taxation of land values, have agreed that such a tax deters land speculation by raising the holding charges paid by the speculator or other under-user of land. It is hard to disagree with Carl Shoup's (1960: 82) conclusion that Ricardo's argument here is "forced" and that his real objection to rent taxation is based on concern for property rights.
-------
I haven't double checked that with the original source to make sure it's a fair characterization, but I'll be sure to look up the Ricardo citation now that I (presumably) know which work I should be looking for, and add it to my reading list independently.
The bit of Ricardo I was thinking of is in the _Principles_ and amounts to "land would end up being owned not by those who could use it best but by those with the most political influence." It's an early public choice argument.
Seems like a testable hypothesis! I love those.
Incidentally David, would you be interested in joining the ranks of Georgism-skeptics whilst I as paidhi* intermediate between the two species? You can email me at lars dot doucet at gmail dot com if you don't want to expose your own address on a public forum.
*The foreigner series is hands down my favorite sci-fi work. Glad to encounter another fan in the wild!
I think _The Paladin_ may be my favorite Cherryh book, but there is a lot more of the Foreigner series.
A while back I reread Cherryh's first book. It has an introduction by Andre Norton, saying she wished she could write like that.
I was impressed. It was true — the book felt like a Norton book only better. But Norton was a very successful author, Cherryh a nobody, and Norton had the honesty to not only realize but say in print that Cherryh was better than she was.
I'm not all that interested in an organized debate over Georgism. If I want to go into that argument, I can always correspond with my friend and ex-colleague Nick Tideman, who has to be one of the more sophisticated supporters.
Will do. I have an email I check occasionally: theerusian at gmail.com.
For what it's worth, my reaction to Georgism is basically, "This all makes sense, at least in a general way. But it doesn't appear to actually describe any empirical reality I've experienced or read about or heard of." I've come to have the opinion that the Georgists describe a real problem but their solutions don't work as advertised.
Much thanks. I think the readers will benefit from your perspective. Also, in case anyone was worried, I'm not planning on singling out Erusian as the token skeptic with the burden of speaking for the entire opposition, I just feel a particular obligation to especially hear out *this* community's specific objections.
The Georgist land value tax is equivalent to the government owning all land and auctioning off its use to the highest bidder (perhaps with a right of first refusal). This should be enough to be very suspicious of it.
But market – and auction! – design are important, and an entire branch of academic economics too. The earlier review itself mentioned one possible feature of such a possible design, i.e. only hold the 'auction' when the current owners sell or transfer 'land'.
And property taxes already act as a _partial_ land value tax, and potentially some of them could be higher than what even a 'perfect total land value tax' would be assessed at. People (or other owners) do in fact lose their 'land' too, e.g. when they fail to pay their property taxes.
Actually, I think the feature was to only demand payment of the tax when the 'land' is sold, but there's obviously a lot of ways a land value tax could be designed.
that's a feature, not a bug.
As opposed to the current system, where the government also owns the land, but gives it to people that it likes and charges them some arbitrary value to hold it?
At the end of the day, the state owns defacto owns the land. We observe that this is true, because if you don't pay your taxes it reverts.
We also observe that this is true because sovereign property supersedes real estate. You own property because your sovereign says you do. That's why Native American tribal land titles aren't enforceable and USA land titles are.
Suppose a Lenape court decided that the purchase of Manhattan Island in 1626 was invalid and therefore all land titles on that island are invalid and it reverts to the heirs of the prior owner, ie the Lenape tribe in common. I don't think their attempts to turn up with bailiffs and demand the Empire State Building would work.
And that's because Manhattan does not belong to its present landowners as a result of a succession of title; it belongs to its present landowners because the United States government says it does and the US government has the capacity to enforce that - ie it is the sovereign power over Manhattan.
This isn't a moral or an ethical position, it's a factual one. You can't restrain government with some outside force, you have to get governments to restrain themselves.
There is no Federal property tax so under this argument the individual states own the land, not the Federal government.
The issue with this and Gadsden's argument is that it immediately reverts to the most extreme interpretation. The state could take something from you, therefore you don't own it.
If you apply that consistently you get all kind of nonsense. For example, the state can execute you. Therefore, you're already dead. In a sense this is true: you live so long as the state doesn't kill you and you will always eventually die. Yet most people put a high premium on "being alive" and see it as something important and worth protecting. Likewise for owning things.
I'm only arguing against the most extreme version of libertarian proprietarianism.
Or the most extreme versions of liberal human rights rhetoric.
Governments, if good, are shaped by the people (to quote Jefferson "Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed"), and the people value being alive and owning things, which is the most secure protection for life and property.
The point here is that you can't stop the state from having power, but you can (and should) shape how it uses it.
On the wider point about real property, I think people value security in their own home, and it should in general be really hard to push people out of their home, and that this should be regardless of whether they own it or rent it.
AIUI, the main point about George and LVT is that he objects to landlords. Owner-occupiers are not landlords, and exempting them or applying LVT more loosely (eg, let an owner-occupier roll up LVT into a charge on their estate secured against the property, so if you're property rich but income poor, you can just not pay and then the house gets sold to pay off the tax arrears when you die) does not seem incompatible with the underlying principles of Georgist LVT.
Of course you can stop the state from having power. States have wide variance in how much power they have. The state in Somalia has no power. The state in the US has power but less than in Great Britain. The state in Great Britain has power but less than in North Korea. The state in North Korea does in fact own all the land.
Again, the issue is you're turning a spectrum into an absolute and then arguing from that absolute. But no one's granting you the absolute you want because it's wrong. I'm not an extreme libertarian but I think your objections to their point are pretty facile.
As for Georgism: There are some Georgists who argue that. There are also Georgists who actually do argue for the government to literally own all land. Iirc, George himself argued that the government charging rent on all land was ideal but the tax would be more practical to implement.
I think it's much more common for the government to either sell the land to the highest bidder, or leave it in the hands of the people who got there before the government showed up in force. Selling vs. leasing or quasi-leasing to the highest bidder is debatable, back-room deals where one favored buyer gets the land at a pittance are usually bad, but taking the land away from the people who already own/use it because you have a Great Theory about how to put it to better use is the thing that should set off alarms.
Yes, a strong government has the power to take land away from people. And to take everything else away from people, including life and liberty. Saying "therefore, everything and everyone is really government property and should be treated as such", also should set off alarms.
Fair enough.
I'm not gonna try to do a fully nuanced theory of land ownership; I just want people to recognize that all land ownership is predicated on theft, somewhere up the line.
If you live in the USA, there is a 99.3% chance you are living on stolen land (Except parts of Pennsylvania, because William Penn was baller as fuck), and the people we stole it from probably stole it in turn, all the way back to the first people across the ice bridge. There are few plots of land on the planet without some skeletons down there somewhere.
Property rights in general can get kinda sticky of you try to be maximally conscientious; land rights are fucked from the get go unless you are pure realpolitik.
This depends entirely on your theory of property rights.
Adversarial-collaboration-by-proxy is a wonderful way to get more insight into where exactly the disagreements that matter are, and which disagreements are popular but not important (or of marginal impact).
I took this approach, mediating between a "AGW skeptic" and a "Climate activist" and learned a lot. It seems that one side loses patience very quickly when being called on to explain why the 1940s got colder over the last 20 years.
Yes, you read that correctly. Check historical temperatures for 100 years ago as reported in 2000 and compare with them with values now reported - they differ.
Anyway, that may not be as important as I think it is, its just an example of the kind of thing that emerges through Adversarial-collaboration-by-proxy.
If I'm recalling correctly, Stewart Brand, when moderating a discussion, does not allow debate to begin until each participant has described the other's position to that person's satisfaction. An excellent habit.
So, the discussion will be a long attempt by someone else to explain my position and my telling them that they are wrong because [X]. Which, with careful choice of X, allows me to expand on my point in response to their claims. Meanwhile, I'll just claim that their position is incomprehensible and not worth debating. I'll never admit that they truly understand my position, so the only plausible end point is their giving up.
This is in fact a "debate", but a perverse one unless neither side uses that hack. If you can find an environment where neither party will try to hack the rules, there may be some merit to it, but I don't think it is a general solution.
Isn't that why you have a moderator?
I'd imagine if you tried that a couple times, Brand declarers you to be a big dummy and loser by default.
Brand declaring me a dummy does not necessarily mean that the audience will believe me to be a dummy, and so Brand declaring me to be a loser does not necessarily make me a loser. That requires particular skill on the moderator's part, and a more nuanced policy than originally described.
And as even generally described, the policy would seem to place Brand at a disadvantage because for that part of the (pre)debate, he has implicitly ceded to me the authority to decide whether other people are smart enough to discuss the matter with me. If I'm even approximately as smart and careful as the moderator, and ruthless enough to "cheat", it seems like I ought to be able to take control of the debate unless the moderator wants to reveal himself as a dummy who will throw a tantrum and quit if things don't go his way.
Many many years from now the verdict will be that lockdown effectiveness was not worth the negative externalities inherent to the lockdown, regardless of the marginal benefit some lockdown statistics have shown. I know that no one will, but feel free to screencap this and throw it back in my face at some long distant future date, so long as you acknowledge my ability to do the same.
That seems highly unlikely if you include the net present value of the vastly expanded ability to work from home. Almost every company I know of that has office work types jobs is saying they are going hybrid. That's a lot less time commuting and a lot more free hours over the next decades. A lot less stress, etc.
I think it's points like these that our host was getting at.
That net present value you're focusing on has significant negative externalities in commercial real estate, business, down-sizing, reduced hours and a million others that it seems like you're choosing to ignore. And they go beyond the economic externalities I just listed, and I could go on.
The pandemic was a bad thing. Period. Pardon me for being among those who still see it as being a net-loss for humanity and believing - I think correctly - that certain actions indeed made it worse. Feel free to screencap it, like I said.
Am I right that you aren't inclined to credit the pandemic for anything positive? If the rapid advance of mRNA technology is the boon that some claim it might be for cancer etc. would you change your mind?
"...is the boon that some claim it might be..."
I stopped reading right there. You are going to provide a hypothetical as a 'postitive'? Really?
You started the conversation with "many many years from now", right? The trouble with the future is that we have very few non-hypothetical observations of it.
I have evidence of negative externalities from the lockdowns occurring right now. So do lots of other people. Sorry, I'm not going to accept future cancer treatments from mRNA technology that apparently isn't keeping people from contracting covid now as relevant observations of positive future externalities.
You'd have to make the case that the hypothetical advance wouldn't have happened in world that didn't lockdown. It would be complicated.
It seems exceedingly unlikely that, coincidentally, mRNA would be first deployed in 2021 even if there was no coronavirus. Do you think if the virus hit us years ago, there wouldn't be mRNA vaccines for it - it hit us just in perfect time for a coincidental breakthrough?
Well, I happen to think that they designed the working vaccine in 2 days mainly thainks to the previous years of research, but that wasn't my main point. My point was that it's not easy to conclude that *with* the pandemic but without lockdowns, it wouldn't have mappened.
There is truth in both directions. People were pushing mRNA tech for a long time. However, it was plagued by problems like, er, being too dangerous relative to the phalanx of not-very-dangerous things that remain for people to be vaccinated against, which is why it suddenly emerged onto the scene during COVID when all the normal rules were thrown out of the window.
I suspect that if there had been a big pandemic any time between 2005 and 2035, it would have been the first deployment of mRNA vaccines, though it might have taken a year or two longer had the pandemic been in the early part of that period.
I think with adenovirus vectors (the technology between AstraZeneca, Johnson&Johnson, and Sputnik V) we actually did have the weird coincidental situation of the first adenovirus vector vaccine being approved in late 2019: "The rVSV-ZEBOV vaccine was approved for medical use in the European Union in November 2019, and in the United States in December 2019"
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Viral_vector_vaccine
I dunno, it seems relatively straightforward. The lockdowns caused considerable pain, which resulted in enormous social pressure (and government $$) to provide a vaccine very early and the mRNA vaccines always had the inherent advantage of being very fast, since you can build one as soon as you sequence the viral RNA.
It's hard to imagine the guaranteed immediate several billion dollar market *didn't* significantly accelerate the mRNA vaccine development. After all, Moderna's revenue according t o a quick check with Google business is up 1100% year over year. Hard to imagine all those people did *not* respond to financial incentives that large. I would guess there were a lot of 100-hour workweeks.
Are you trying to say that producing a given amount with less work, less commuting and less real estate are *bad* things, overall?
I'm saying that - economically speaking alone - there are 'negative externalities' that came with (and are coming with) the less commuting, less use of commercial real estate utopia you're giving as an example. And that's just economically speaking...
This argument is a classic example of the Broken Window Fallacy. There is no economic value in activity (like long commutes) that can be completely avoided without any reduction in economic output.
There are likely some negative consequences to some people, but there are greater positive consequences to other people, such that it's a benefit on the net.
Also, those "other people" aren't actually other people. When there are many small efficiency improvements around that harm some people a bit, and benefit others more than they harm the former, many if not most people will end up on the losing side of some of these situations and on the winning side of others, probably benefiting on the net. Attempting to forestall these sorts of changes is a recipe for a stagnating society on the long run.
You ignore the fucking MASSIVE externality that is used highway space and lost, unproductive time and space in yours.
> commercial real estate
Unless buildings were torn down or something, that one sounds like a *pecuniary* externality to me -- rents going down is a negative externality for landlords but a positive one for tenants (and rents going up would be vice versa)
Sunk opportunity costs for landlords are not net positives for tenants that aren't in the market to begin with because they've realized they can work from home. A tenant doesn't benefit from rents going down unless they decide to sign a lease, which many are not doing and may never do again. Reduced rents don't benefit people who aren't renting.
" A tenant doesn't benefit from rents going down unless they decide to sign a lease, which many are not doing and may never do again. Reduced rents don't benefit people who aren't renting."
That literally makes zero sense.
A tenant does not extract the benefit of a lower rental rate if they aren't a tenant. Tenants don't extract the benefit of lower rental rates if they aren't renting, now or in the future. I think that's pretty self-explanatory.
Investing is a risk. Most real estate investors didn't price a pandemic into the risk, but neither did Zoom investors.
I'm a multifamily investor and one of our properties in a tourist town struggled mightily. Nonetheless I'm glad fewer people died as a result of not coming here. We lost a year of cash flow, but we'll still do fine on the back end.
For example, explain how reduced rents on storefront Manhattan property with 75% vacancy rate benefits renters? I would tell you, as many in that market will tell you right now, that 75% vacancy rate DOESN'T BENEFIT anyone, that includes the people that couldn't give a damn.
If the vacancy rate is 75% the problem is the rents are too high. The reasons behind NYC high vacancy rates are very interesting. Louis Rossmann has done some very interesting work on that.
The rents are at 50% of what they were 15 months ago. Wrong again. I'm sure if they were giving it away and there were no takers your response would be the same.
Do you expect the 75% vacancy rate to persist in Manhattan? I expect that in 5 years from now, the retail vacancy rate in Manhattan will be under 10%, as measured by the New York City Comptroller (see https://comptroller.nyc.gov/reports/retail-vacancy-in-new-york-city/).
I think that, most likely, the largest effects, both positive and negative, to come out of the pandemic will be things which have a small but permanent / long-lasting effect (e.g. a culture shift to more remote work, a more authoritarian culture, increased polarization and international tensions), rather than effects that were time-limited to the pandemic itself (not being able to go to the bar for a year, an 20% increase in mortality over a year or so).
Those vacancies _could_ benefit lots of people, e.g. were those units to be rezoned for other purposes (for which people are willing to pay a rent profitable to the potential new owners).
Those 75% vacant Manhattan "storefronts" aren't really storefronts - they are billboards masquerading as storefronts.
In any case, every class of good has a friction rate of "vacancy" that it needs for the market to function well. With housing, it's usually in the high single percent, and with unskilled labor it's usually in the low single percent. With street space, it's usually more like 50-75% (one of the advantages self-driving cars are claiming is that they can reduce that vacancy rate).
Storefronts functioning as billboards for global brands may well have a different sort of natural vacancy rate, but the renters of those billboards do benefit from lower rents, just like drivers on toll roads benefit from lower tolls, even when the road is 75% vacant (as needed for drivers to go fast).
> negative externalities in commercial real estate, business, down-sizing, reduced hours
How is the first a negative? It seems like broken window fallacy. Same with reduced hours -- if work isn't necessary, then trying to save it is about the same as supporting jobs where people dig holes and fill them again.
> That net present value you're focusing on has significant negative externalities in commercial real estate, business, down-sizing, reduced hours and a million others that it seems like you're choosing to ignore.
And a million going the other way that you're ignoring: less time wasted commuting, less traffic congestion, less pollution from commutes, and so on.
I highly doubt this. "x many lives were saved when society came together" is always going to be more morally satisfying than "300 million people couldn't go to the bar".
That is a vastly asymmetric and sophomoric interpretation.
When people look back at history, almost all verdicts are both asymmetric and sophomoric.
Then Mr. Slow will be vindicated in his moral satisfaction that '300 million people couldn't go to a bar'.
Then why has no one written a take on Prohibition that showed how many lives were saved from drunk driving/alcohol violence/alcohol poisoning/etc.? Or perhaps the point is, that take would look so convincing, and everyone who could write it is so against Prohibition, that none of them want to?
Prohibition was such a success it was never tried elsewhere outside the Middle East, was repealed in less than 15 years, and took an amendment to the constitution to undo its mind-boggling stupidity. I.E., the negative externalities of prohibition did, in fact, outweigh the 'lives saved' supposedly of the temperance movement.
"X many live were saved when society came together' was apparently not more morally satisfying than '300 million people couldn't go to the bar'.
It was in fact repeatedly tried in various parts of the world, and remains in place in large parts of South Asia.
That would explain why it's so easy to get a bottle of just about anything I want in Tamil Nadu. I like my virtue signaling like I like my prohibition, effective.
Tamil Nadu? Really? The area that according to Wikipedia no longer practices prohibition and where the government actually sells alcohol? That's your counter example?
Finland and Norway also enacted prohibition for some years, during the same period as the US.
That's a great point. Let me do a quick brain dump.
Researchers have repeatedly shown us that drinking even moderate amounts of alcohol is bad for health, and that hundreds of thousands of people die everywhere because of the wide availability of alcohol.
https://www.thelancet.com/action/showPdf?pii=S0140-6736%2818%2931310-2
However, the general consensus today seems to be that prohibition is bad, and that people should be allowed to do what they want. Of course corporations minting billions of dollars selling alcohol fund all kinds of studies saying "alcohol is good for your kidneys" or whatever. Everybody knows it's bad. But they're just hoping against hope that it's not "that" bad because "everybody else is doing it".
I think people mostly tend to justify the status quo, which is precisely what the brain does to justify our instincts and our actions anyway. If the world didn't shut down at all, people would say "of course we can't shut everything down. Use your common sense and wear a mask if you want to stay safe." But because the world has largely shut down, people say "of course we had to shut down. The economy is not that important. We had to save lives."
There seems to be some kind of an invisible line that puts alcohol on the "bad but not *that* bad" side, and cigarettes and heroin on the "too bad, need to stop" side. And this line kind of makes sense. I suppose the powers to be placed no lockdown on the "too bad, can't risk it" side, especially after looking at other countries reeling from a massive number of deaths.
sJust to modify that slightly - the consensus is that drinking really quite moderate amounts (1-2 units/day, with no sudden swings) is beneficial to health, but the effect swings dramatically negative as you drink more than this.
This is the famous "J curve", which is still disputed, but is I believe generally still accepted:
https://www.jacc.org/doi/full/10.1016/j.jacc.2017.06.054
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/9949793/
The paper that I cited, which was touted as the most comprehensive study ever done and published in a top journal and all that, explicitly claims that drinking even small amounts is bad (unless you suffer from cardiac problems), and that the analysis done in papers that support moderate amounts of drinking is uniformly flawed
I'm pretty underwhelmed by that paper. I am in general by massive meta-analyses anyway, but if you look at the raw data plots from which they draw their final curves, it's a giant forest of outliers. Making any kind of firm conclusion is pretty iffy.
In addition, the conclusion that any amount of alcohol is bad is true only for the statistical average person in all the many countries and demographics they studied. But no actual person is a statistical average person, just as no actual family actually has the 1.8 children a statistical average family might have. A better conclusion would be that if your personal risk factors are higher for diabetes and heart disease, then just as other studies have shown, moderate drinking is probably good for you. But if your personal health and family history suggests your major risk factors are cancers, that would suggest abstinence is best for you.
This paper is definitely interesting, and underlines the point that there is a significant health burden globally (across the 195 countries studies) from alcohol consumption.
On the other hand, it also shows quite clear J-curves for example with consumption vs deaths from ischaemic heart disease (most common cause of death aged >65 in western countries) and diabetes (affecting 20%+ aged >65 in western countries).
That's why I looked at the studies closer to my circumstances for guidance. The increased cancer risk with alcohol consumption is the most personally concerning for me, so I'll do some more looking into that.
Well-informed people have defended Prohibition quantitatively. There were substantial health benefits from lower alcohol consumption. Other well-informed people have scoffed at these arguments.
One issue is that the costs of drinking differed by ethnicity: Italians and Jews don't feel a huge urge to binge drink once they've had one drink, while English and Irish, not to mention Swedes and American Indians, often do. Germans seem to fall in the middle, and had a beer-drinking culture that seemed to moderate the problems caused by alcohol better than the hard-liquor drinking culture of Northwestern Europeans.
So you hear a lot of different opinions about the costs and benefits of Prohibition, but it's hard to figure out the overall effect because of subtle but substantial differences in resistance to the effects of alcohol for complex reasons of nature and nurture.
This may or may not be true. But I would agree that we need a few years post covid to allow the political pressure to die down to get more trustworthy results.
"...we need a few years post covid to allow the political pressure to die down to get more trustworthy results."
I'm not sure this will ever happen again moving forward. Which is a shame.
Why would the future have any greater insight than the present does? The only surefire test would be to rewind history and run the past two years over again with e.g. no lockdowns at all, and see what happened. If after a year of no particular action you had 680,000 (American) deaths instead of 625,000, or even as high as 780,000 -- which is I think the instinctive assumption of most people, for the same reason that we assume the weather today will be a lot like it was yesterday, sheer inertia -- then it does seem problematic. On the other hand, if with no particular action we had 2 million deaths instead of 625,000, then it would take a pretty high valuation of freedom of movement and/or economic growth to say saving a million lives wasn't worth it at all.
Of course, we can't do this experiment. And since there were no states or countries that took no defensive measures at all, and indeed most of them took pretty similar measures (or measures equally draconian but adapted to their special political (China) or geographical (New Zealand) situation, there's no natural experiment like this. We're in the business of looking at rather small differences in measures or timing of measures and trying to extrapolate all the way out to the stark regime of doing almost nothing. As Twain observed quite some time ago, with a sufficient length of extrapolation you can prove almost any silly thing.
I think a more reasonable expectation is that it will be a subject of endless academic debate, like over whether nuking Hiroshima and Nagasaki was "worth it."
You seem like the sort of person I'd like to make some bets with if we could have a trusted third party hold the funds and adjudicate the bet.
This lockdown effectiveness question is too vague and will take too long to settle one way or the other, so I'm not interested in that. But what other things do you believe with such gusto that might be proven right or wrong in a reasonable amount of time? Let's get some bets on the record!
I think there is a substantial difference between someone who leans liberal or leans conservative and someone who is an ideologue. If someone like Tyler Cowen - who leans libertarian/conservative - comes out in favor of lockdowns that voice carries more weight with me. Alternatively Freddie DeBoer's writings on human ability, testing and education in general carry more weight with me as he is from the very far left. But in both cases they are calling them as they see them. They are not insisting on finding facts that fit their existing ideology. Or if they are, when the facts don't support their ideology they are open to saying, "My theories don't work in this instance."
I agree that when someone criticizes their own side's position then it's cause for special interest/concern. But I'm more confused about the opposite question - how do you adjust when somebody supports their own side's ideology? Like, obviously this is suspicious. But how suspicious? And if you're too quick to discount it, then don't you risk never listening to any heterodox opinions (since heterodox people register as "having ideologies", and someone who just says "normal things" doesn't seem like an ideologue, even if they are very consistently and vocally normal?)
I'll give you an example. We were worried my mother in law needed a hearing aid. We tried to get an appointment with an audiologist which proved to be an issue in her rural area. But we got an appointment at the local Miracle Ear franchise. They did a very thorough test and said her hearing was fine. Now they are in the business of selling hearing aids - if they say you don't need one you REALLY don't need one.
If they said she needed one I would have gone along with that as well. But I have less confidence. If you want to convince me of something your argument needs to be less convincing if you're advocating for something that's not in your best interest.
And look at you giving Miracle Ear free (and effective!) advertising. It can make damn good business sense not to sell your product if that in turn engenders positive associations and future business down the road. As a not small side effect you can employ honest brokers who care deeply about people getting the best possible outcome for their hearing and not just selling snake oil for a quick buck.
For some reason I'm not able to pin down, the libertarian, lockdown-bad, guns-good person seems to be more of an ideologue than the socialist, lockdown-good, guns-bad person. Although both of them seem to belong to distinct schools of thought, the lockdown-good narrative is definitely more mainstream (globally, at least) than the lockdown-bad one. I think it takes more ideologue-ness and resistance to criticism to step outside the mainstream and preach your gospel than it takes to stay within the mainstream and spew mainstream ideas.
For instance, I am a capitalist in the generic sense of the word. However, if I was a capitalist in Soviet Russia under Stalin, I would be a Real Capitalist.
The flip side of that is that there are two reasons to reject the orthodoxy. One is ideology, conforming to a different and currently out of fashion orthodoxy, and for that your point is right. But the other reason is that the evidence or arguments are not consistent with the orthodoxy and you have a strong commitment to truth, in which case your views deserve more weight than average, not less.
So I would give more weight to conservative or libertarian opinions from someone whose background was one in which they were heterodox than from someone who grew up somewhere where they were the local orthodoxy.
Should I then give less weight to your opinions, given that they generally agree your father?
(Joking, of course)
Yes, you should! I think the reason to mostly restore any 'weight loss' thru that mechanism would be by reading his arguments for those opinions, which allow you to rely less on a 'general ideological weighting function'.
I was told, at second hand, that someone who observed me and my father skiing when I was a teen reported that we spent all our time arguing, so the mere fact that he held an opinion isn't a strong reason to expect me to hold it.
You should give less weight to my opinions on climate change or drug legalization because they justify my opposing policies I have other reasons to oppose, just as you should give less weight to the current orthodoxy on climate change for analogous reasons.
http://daviddfriedman.blogspot.com/2014/11/a-revealing-cartoon.html
In both cases you have to actually look at the arguments, not depend on the reputation of those who make them.
"Spending all your time arguing" is compatible with Freud's "narcissism of small differences". Academics usually spend most of their time arguing with the people that agree with them about subject matter, methodology, question framing, and everything else except for one or two bits of disagreement, and much less arguing with the people that disagree about more.
Let me address your second point. I think it is intuitively plausible (and historically mostly accurate) that most beliefs espoused by the society you live in are largely correct. If we take an extreme example, say Nazi Germany, most of the beliefs that were espoused by society were morally fine. Be fearful of God, sacrifice for your country, we should work hard to achieve our potential, etc. There were only a handful of beliefs that were clearly wrong: Jews- bad, a racially superior race should take over the Earth, etc. Hence, even in Nazi Germany, an honest dissident would only be at loggerheads with the government and society over just a handful of points.
Hence, the more you are out of the mainstream, the larger the pool of issues that you disagree with everyone over, and hence the larger the possibility that you're not being intellectually humble (and probably just grandstanding to signal moral or intellectual superiority). Of course it is possible that you're right about one thing that everyone is wrong about. However, it is astronomically unlikely that you're right about everything that you're in disagreement with society and the government over.
Disclaimer, if it wasn't clear from my comment: I'm obviously not saying Nazis were good. It is needless to say that Nazis were horrible. I'm only given an extremal example about how society is mostly right about most things, even in the worst of times.
Related: Should we trust someone's writing less if it has obvious ideological slant?
My intuition is 'yes': If the author is clearly angry, has an axe to grind, and his writing is peppered with value judgments and with snark towards opposing views, I'm not inclined to trust it at all. If it is written in an dispassionate fashion, withholding strong judgments, I'm inclined to trust it more, *even if* I know that the author has the same political views as the previous, angry person.
But it's not obvious that I should do this. If you are an ideologue, focused on convincing people of your views rather than finding out the truth, then it makes strategic sense to write in a way that sounds objective and dispassionate, but it's actually biased.
However, I believe that intentional, calculating deception on the part of the author is less common than semi-conscious bias. Someone who writes in a dispassionate fashion will be more inclined to actually consider the evidence for his statements. Flippant dismissal of opponents often acts as a substitute for argument; an unproven statement stands out more in an analysis that attempts to sound objective.
Further related: Can we make people's writing less biased by *requiring* them to write in an unbiased-sounding fashion? I have an idea that one way to reduce political bias in social sciences would be to make it inappropriate to include normative judgments in academic papers. Would this make them closer to the truth, or just hide their biases better? I have an intuition that even if the academics involved would hold the same political views, those would influence their research somewhat less. Again, normative judgments can fill in for evidence when the latter is scarce. I also expect that it would reduce peer pressure a bit: if research and politics were clearly expected to be separated (even just in the official parts of conducting the business), it would be more obviously inappropriate to criticize a research paper on the basis that it doesn't come down in favor of the right political side.
You can also make progress when arguing with someone in good faith by asking for them to steelman the argument. The same goes for both sides of the argument obviously.
There's a certain type of person who, regardless of ideology, is just inclined to rebel against any received wisdom. I have a friend like that. It doesn't matter what the topic is - lockdowns, politics, music - he's just reflexively against whatever is popular unless it's something his young son likes.
Do you happen to play Age of Empires?
I ask because you share your name with a streamer of it
Oh sorry I'm not that person. My handle is just a play on the name "John Snow" from the Game of Thrones
*Jon Snow
John Snow of course is the famous founding figure of epidemiology: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Snow
Damn. I kinda figured but it'd be cool.
You know slothing, John Slow!
Hah. Whichever of these definitions you are referring to, you're probably right
https://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=Slothing
Dismissing the science of someone when the science agrees with their politics and their politics is the opposite of yours is basically just a description of why many conservatives don't trust a single word academia says and are considered anti-science morons. I fail to see how liberals who dismiss anti-lockdown studies by a libertarian are any different and think they should all be considered equally anti-science.
The issue is more akin to bewaring the man of one study [0]. If most studies say one thing and then a scientist with political bias produces results agreeing with their bias, then you should probably discount that study.
[0]: https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/12/12/beware-the-man-of-one-study/
Like that Hoover Institution lawyer guy who predicted no more than 5,000 would die from Covid based on his advanced understanding of evolution.
That just means liberal academics win any "debate" by default. Having fully captured academia they are now paid by the government to churn out liberal biased studies all day every day, so anyone who tries to decide who's right by simply counting studies will always end up with concluding that the left must be correct about any imaginable issue.
For that heuristic to be useful, all papers and analysis must be of roughly equal quality. But it's not the case. Consider the paper Scott mentioned last time - the Flaxman et al paper concluding lockdowns work. This paper is one of my go-to examples for academic corruption because it's bad in just so many ways. It creates a model the authors know is a work of fiction and which bears no resemblance to reality, and we know this because they tell us so in the paper itself, yet it racked up 1300+ citations and the number is still growing fast.
In such an environment any paper written by a libertarian or conservative is going to end up looking like a lone isolated viewpoint simply because the average libertarian would much rather be founding a startup than pumping out nonsensical papers in an academic office all day.
My impression is that libertarianism is *more* common within academia than outside of it. The vast majority of non-academics line up with one of the major political parties, while academics more often adopt specific ideologies that are at best tiny niches outside, like libertarianism, socialism, etc.
Isn’t not about dismissal it’s about credence.
IT's less dismissal, and more extra scrutiny.
If we get 99 results of A, and one result of B from a guy with a big 'ol B tattooed on his forehead, I'm not gonna take him at his word.
Unfortunately, I don't have the expertise to actually fairly evaluate the arguments in this case, so I just have to go with the consensus.
I think the only thing you can do, unless you know a lot about the person — for instance that he has sometimes argued against his side's position when he thought it was wrong — is evaluate the argument itself, giving no significant weight to the fact that someone knowledgeable made it.
One thing you're forgetting is the propaganda angle. On reddit, it's pretty common to see a 'I used to believe X but now I believe Y', even though the user history shows that to be obliviously untrue. It's too the point where I've started instinctively trusting someone criticizing their own side's position _less_
Obviously this is only a problem with anonymous /pseudonymous sources.
If one side offers a thesis and the other responds with an antithesis and they are both well-thought out and well-supported by evidence ... well, then there is probably a synthesis out there somewhere that could make sense of why both the thesis and the antithesis are somewhat true.
Maybe it's just my own ideological filter at work, but to me, it seems pretty clear from what you wrote that they said, that the libertarian was the reasonable one and the liberal was not.
The most extreme statement you could find for the libertarian was one comparing lockdowns to house arrest. But I don't see how this statement is extreme. It's just a factual assertion, right? For long periods in the whole world people have been prevented either from leaving their homes entirely, by the police (if self isolating), or from leaving a small zone around their house of a few km, (if not self isolating). This is extremely similar to what house arrest means - you may not leave your house and if you do the police will force you to go back. Thus this statement doesn't seem extreme or even ideological but more like a statement of fact.
The most extreme statement you could find for the liberal called relaxing lockdowns equivalent to "human sacrifice". This is VERY extreme. Firstly human sacrifice is a deliberate murder of someone, whereas living normal life and unknowingly spreading a virus is neither murder nor a knowing act under any moral code that existed anywhere up until about April 2020. And partly because relaxing lockdowns = normal existence. So whoever said that is equating living a normal life i.e. the null state with making human sacrifices i.e. a state that is so barbaric it hasn't existed in the west for thousands of years. That actually looks like quite a good foundational definition of extreme.
I think your level of suspicion is artificially increased by your apparent belief that only one guy finds that lockdowns don't work, which is a conclusion I still find somewhat baffling. I've read dozens of papers, long blog posts, essays etc finding they don't work, especially if by "don't work" you're willing to consider the failure of the modelled counter-factuals to happen at all. I could rattle off dozens of talking points immediately, so how is it possible we ended up living in such different informational worlds?
Re: house arrest:
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/yCWPkLi8wJvewPbEp/the-noncentral-fallacy-the-worst-argument-in-the-world
The noncentral fallacy: "X is in a category whose archetypal member gives us a certain emotional reaction. Therefore, we should apply that emotional reaction to X, even though it is not a central category member."
The archetypical example of house arrest without due process occurs when there is no pandemic (so meeting people is not unusually dangerous), and is intended to punish the arrestee—while the arrestee's guilt is not proven, and/or the action it punishes isn't (or shouldn't be) a crime (a typical example is a dissenter in a dictatorship). Calling lockdowns house arrest is a rhetorical tactic that attempts to transfer the emotional judgment of such obviously illegitimate house arrests of innocent people to the lockdowns—even though there arguments for the coronavirus lockdowns that don't apply to the archetypical case of putting innocent people in house arrests.
There are good arguments for and against the lockdowns, but the use of such rhetorical tricks reduces someone's credibility in my mind (on either side).
All you're saying is that because you personally agree with putting people under house arrest at the moment, it's therefore not "really" house arrest, and thus blah blah some claim about fallacies.
How about this: I am under house arrest right now, because someone in my household tested positive. I have not tested positive, nor am I sick, but I am now expected to not leave the house at all for any reason for 10 days, and there is no route of appeal whatsoever, in fact it required nothing more than someone putting my name and phone number into an automated system.
I have committed no crime, the state has no evidence I am posing any harm to others, the justice system is not involved at any point, and we have zero support for even managing the basics of living, something which people under house arrest do get! In fact the display on our cooker broke a few days ago yet the cooker firm won't visit to repair it because of the scary COVID, so we can't even easily prepare food now.
What's happening to me IS in fact house arrest, I do in fact feel like it's a despotic regime, and I am deeply unimpressed by your attempt to rewrite the definition so that something is only house arrest if you personally disapprove of the motivations.
Certainly, describing it as house arrest is orders of magnitude less politically extreme and biased than calling ending lockdowns "human sacrifice".
I didn't say that I supported lockdowns; I'm ambivalent about them. I didn't say that the one who talked about "human sacrifice" language wasn't also obviously biased. I didn't even say that lockdowns weren't house arrest. What I'm saying is that calling lockdowns house arrest is loaded language, and someone who opposes lockdowns should argue why they are wrong, instead of using loaded terms.
Compare an example from the post by Scott I linked: someone who says "Nelson Mandela was a criminal" is factually correct (he committed a crime by dissenting against the apartheid system); nevertheless, someone who says that sentence is most likely trying to muddy the waters: he's trying to get the listener to apply the judgment we apply to a typical criminal to Mandela—even though the typical criminal has committed crimes that most of us disapprove of, while Mandela has committed a crime most of us don't disapprove of. Again, calling someone a criminal for committing an atypical crime that most of us don't disapprove of is truthful, but it's loaded language; it signals that the speaker has an axe to grind, and is trying to use rhetorical tricks in lieu of arguments. I'm generally inclined to consider such speakers less trustworthy.
What do *you* think is someone's motive to choose to use the term "house arrest" instead of "lockdown" or "stay-at-home order"?
For all we know he used all those terms - Scott didn't link to the articles he had in mind, so the only info we have is that some economist wrote articles critical of lockdown that did indeed argue against them but which also compared them to house arrest. This was described as extreme, seems we both agree that's not actually that extreme, and so it boils down to is it "loaded language" or not? I mean, sure, I guess? But it's mostly loaded in my view because someone who loves lockdowns wouldn't use that term, not because there's anything wrong with it or even because it's biased, but because it puts in stark terms what they really are, and they'd rather avoid thinking about what exactly they're supporting.
Or put another way, can a factually true statement become "loaded" or suspicious simply because other people get upset when it's used? Maybe that's the definition of loaded. Not very useful concept if so, though.
I think it’s right to be suspicious about this.
The way I think about it is that people who have political positions significantly far from the median position are likely to care strongly about politics, since people who don’t care much about politics tend to just take on whatever the typical view is among their peers. And people who care strongly about politics are more likely to have bias in their results that have political implications (whether intentionally or not).
That’s not to say that people who have strong political views close to the median are any less likely to produce biased results. It’s just that it’s hard to distinguish them from people who don’t have particularly strong views (which is the vast majority of people, in my experience), so a result from someone with unusual political views rightly stands out as being particularly deserving of skepticism.
"The way I think about it is that people who have political positions significantly far from the median position are likely to care strongly about politics, since people who don’t care much about politics tend to just take on whatever the typical view is among their peers."
Alternatively, they might care strongly about truth and not much about politics, hence be willing to say things they think are true even if those things are politically out of favor.
This is the feeling I get lately about expressing my opinions publicly in general. I always imagine the response “Well, of course you believe X- you’re Y.” And I am. I have pretty much the opinions a person like me, demographically speaking, is likely to have. So even if they’re honest is there even any point to expressing my thoughts?
On the other hand, it’s not total alignment with stereotypes, and I’m wary of expressing opinions that would get me lumped in with other people whose identities are on-paper similar to mine, but who are vastly different from me in important ways. Some of those people are ideologues, and some kind of scare me even if we’re living very similar lives and have a lot of similar values and beliefs.
I think this is a driver of political polarization; media (social and otherwise) flattens and reduces us to a few bullet points, which others will use to apply their own categories and assumptions, which you might then have to exert a lot of effort to correct, if that’s even possible. So what we tend to do is signal loudly which side we’d rather be associated with, even when that preference is marginal. You’re never expressing your nuanced ideas- it’s more like all you can do is choose whose extremists scare you less.
I don't find it very suspicious. When a smart person holds an heterodox opinion, one of the first questions I ask is why this particular person noticed the problem with orthodoxy but all the other people who are as smart as he is did not notice anything. A single smart person making a mistake is much more likely than a multitude of smart people all making the same mistake.
But something like "that person has a different ideology than his peers, so he doesn't have the same blindspots" is a perfectly reasonable explanation that does not require any weird coincidence.
There's an interesting question about how many sides to consider here. If you don't look too closely, libertarians can *look* like conservatives who have some unusual openness to ideas that criticize "their" side. But once you identify libertarians as a third group with their own distinctive ideology, they often don't look so open any more. Similarly, at first, Glenn Greenwald might *look* like a leftist with some unusual openness to ideas that criticize "his" side. But when you see Matt Taibbi, Tulsi Gabbard, and a group of others that have a similar constellation of views, you begin to wonder if there's another niche with a distinctive ideology.
I don't quite know how to think about whether Tyler Cowen or Freddi DeBoer might fall into these sorts of things, or whether this even really adds anything, or just takes away the original apparent insight.
Tyler Cowen and Freddie deBoer are relatively special in that you can just evaluate their arguments directly. I haven't read (or watched or listened to) Taibbi and Gabbard enough to judge, but Greenwald seems much more an intermediary for other ideas than Cowen or deBoer – IMO.
As far as whether a conservative prognostician arguing against lockdowns is more "marked" than a liberal one arguing in favor, I don't think it's necessarily determinative, but I do think it's relevant that under ordinary circumstances, nobody favors lockdowns at all. It's not that lockdowns in general are a liberal position which you'd expect liberal people to be in support of unless the evidence weighed really heavily against it, it's only due to extraordinary circumstances that anyone supports lockdowns.
This is a distinctly America-centric perspective, but I think you could tell a similar story about other countries, where conservatives are biased against taking the pandemic seriously, not because this is an inherently conservative position, but because an important figure, Trump in America's case, took a stand on downplaying the pandemic. If Bob Woodward can be taken at his word on the subject, Trump's efforts at downplaying it don't even reflect his own best understanding of the pandemic at the time, since he thought having people take it less seriously was better for the economy, and likely him by extension. If we had had a different Republican politician in office, someone like George W. Bush perhaps, then taking the pandmic seriously might never have become a tribal signifier in the first place.
This is a very good point. "I don't like the government telling me what to do" is very much the libertarian position and not the conservative position*. America is unusual in having libertarianism associated so closely with conservatism.
* Throne and altar conservatism for example.
I partially agree with this, but I don't think it answers everything asked in the post.
There are two issues here, imo. First, instead of the pro-Xer vs anti-Xer dichotomy in the post, there is also the possibility of non-Xers. In Scott's example, the conservative academic is clearly a pro-gunner releasing a pro-gun paper, but the liberal academic could plausibly be a non-gunner, or close to it -- someone who just isn't personally interested in guns rather than an anti-gunner who invests a lot of time and energy into anti-gun causes. In theory, you should discount a pro-Xer's pro-X paper about as much as an anti-Xer's anti-X paper (i.e. somewhat but not entirely), but a non-Xer's paper, pro or anti, should carry more weight.
It sounds like your argument is that in this case, liberals are non-lockdowners releasing pro-lockdown papers, so it's natural to give them more weight. But the problem is, over the course of the pandemic, lockdowns clearly did become politicized. I know that in my peer group, support for lockdowns was the default, not based on an extensive review of the evidence. People simply listened to trusted authorities and followed their intuitions. So it probably is fair to assume that at least for papers written near the middle or end of the pandemic, liberal writers are pro-lockdown to begin with.
So in the lockdown case, not the general case, the reason Scott feels the way he does is probably just a mix of his personal priors about lockdowns and the fact that it's very natural to apply extra scrutiny to minority positions.
It's not just Woodward's word, I watched the interview, and Trump showed a good informal understanding of the pandemic.
The upshot seems to be that human societies are complicated, social science is insanely hard, politics is even harder, and even the smartest and most honest politician has to rely on a combination of judgment, intuition, and common sense to implement their policies. That's why open debate and epistemic humility are important.
Yeah, most of the time people support their own side's ideological positions. Unless you know everything about crenulating zeugmas you're going to have to either A) if orthodox, discount because orthodox ideologues are sometimes sloppy due to most of their peers being relatively uncritical towards the work, or B) if heterodox, discount because it could be a clever arguer trying to sell you a box that you do not want.
Of course, you could be dealing with a clever arguer also in case A, so maybe you should discount orthodox arguments slightly more anyway. I have no idea, this problem stumps me. I feel you.
At least this was a good reason to post that cute bat again. More covid posts, please.
One issue I have about emotional costs is the comparison point. It's a global pandemic, an intrinsically "bad" event, and life is going to be less "good" than before. There's going to be long term trauma about how poorly it was perceived to be handled and how ill prepared we were for it. Some of the measurements of quality of life are good at showing the impact of the pandemic, but not the cost effectiveness of lockdowns.
Yeah, I agree that a lot of the time the baseline for those comparisons seems to ignore the entire global pandemic and think the choice is between lockdown and 2019. It stands out to see "missed a family member's funeral" used as an example of emotional damage from lockdown, while the benefits of "_postponed_ a family member's funeral" is pushed to the "it's complicated" section of the original post. (Granted, that's not an impact on hundreds of millions in the US, probably, but hundreds of thousands times an extra decade or so with parents and grandparents is nothing to sneeze at.)
That jumped out to me too.
> One thing I found helpful was to ask Person A what they thought of Person B's work, relay it to Person B, Person B would say something like "he's neglecting to consider that you need to fulminate the synecdoche", then I would relay that back to Person A, and after enough of this I would get a meaningful sense of where they disagreed (or occasionally one of them would just admit they had made a mistake).
It sounds like you kind of rediscovered the Delphi method? RAND came up with a consensus-building framework specifically for opposed experts back in the 60's and it seems to work *really* well. I wish all political and economic arguments were given that treatment. Original article here:
https://www.rand.org/pubs/papers/P3558.html
To be honest, I found this post much more interesting than the post it is about.
I have been trying to get this across to everyone who will listen, for over a year now, and I haven't been successful but I can't stop because it's extremely important to my continued survival:
The question "do lockdowns work?" is incoherent and unanswerable, because both "lockdown" and "work" are and will always be underspecified.
You can't aggregate over millions of people, summarize death counts or economic costs or whatever, generate an average, and use that number to judge things. As you point out above, this question is much too multifaceted to do that
But I'll make a stronger claim: you can't even do this in principle. One might be tempted to say "aha, well, maybe there's 50 dimensions but we can analyze all of them and come to conclusions" but you can't! Because people have varied lives and, no matter what conclusion you will come to, somebody somewhere will say "if we did it your way, I would not be alive right now. Eff you" and there is absolutely nothing you can say to that person to change their mind.
There is no way in principle to settle this argument. It is a bona fide conflict, and the way it gets settled is the guy who gets to decide, decides, and then says "tough if you don't like it". That is in fact what our society did last year, and I didn't like it.
All of the mainstream, public scientific discussion about the pandemic is bullshit. It just is. It is not the case that a whole bunch of honest, concerned, and curious scientists all decided to dive in and see what happens. I know we here like to think that's the case, because we here actually do do that. But the rest of the world does not. The rest of the world does the science they're paid to do. If it gives the results that the people in power want, then they get published and publicized. If it does not, they do not. As a result, you end up with a bunch of 'science' supporting what the people in power have already decided they want to do, and the people in power use that 'science' to wash their hands of any responsibility for people being mad at them.
You can see this happen in real time if you pay attention. This is a relatively trivial example, but it is very accessible: Dr Fauci's overnight 180 on masks, and everyone acting like this didn't happen (but was totally fine if it did). Prior to his flip, Fauci and the rest of the medico-political establishment told us that The Science Says Don't Use Masks, and the news dutifully reported that. Then, overnight, Fauci says that The Science Says Use Masks, and the news dutifully reported on that. When questioned on it, all they say is "we're just following the science, and the science evolved". But we know that's a lie. Why? Because Fauci said it was a lie under oath to congress.
In reality, the actual fact of the matter, which I expect most of you here either knew or just assumed, was political. They were afraid of a run on masks, which would put medical practitioners at risk, and so they told the public not to wear masks. Then, when they were satisfied that the medical practitioners were well supplied, like magic, 'the science changed'. In reality, the government gave out an arbitrary order ("do not buy masks") in order to achieve a domestic policy goal ("don't let hospitals run out of PPE"), and instead of just saying that, they lied to our faces and bastardized 'science'.
In fact (I'm not gonna go look this up, so apologies if my memory is wrong), I think that was the conclusion you came to in your original mask post. The public health advice prior to covid was "do not wear masks", and the reasons for this was a) people wear them wrong and it wastes them; and b) that takes them away from people who actually need them.
What is the point of my work-procrastinating rambling? My point is that fundamentally you cannot use 'science' to determine if 'lockdowns work'. The overwhelming majority of the 'science' on this is science in nothing but name. If you do _actual_ science to try and get an _actual_ answer, everyone will ignore that answer with some variation of "yeah but no because thing I care about". You can ask extraordinarily specific questions like "did imposing a 8pm curfew reduce the number of deaths by 500 or more". Even that isn't really a great question, because imposing a curfew doesn't mean people comply with it, and so it equivocates the question of "does adhering to a curfew work" with the question of "does imposing a curfew _policy_ work" which, despite appearances, are two very different questions.
Maybe, if we constrain ourselves the platonic world of abstract thought, that cannot interact with the outside world in any way, we could come up with The Correct Answer to the question of lockdowns. But that's not particularly useful. Implied in the question of "do lockdowns work", is the hidden question "should we implement lockdowns". But as is abundantly clear by now, the decision process we use to implement lockdowns is completely disconnected from the actual answer to the question of whether or not they work. The whole question is poorly defined, and the answer doesn't exist
I agree with this wholeheartedly, with the addition of - there are lots of OTHER questions about the pandemic that are well-defined, do have potential answers, and could very heavily improve our future responses to them, that we could all be working on instead!
I agree, although I can't think of any particularly relevant ones off hand.
But also, I am extremely pessimistic about the functionality of our institutions. We _could_ be working on them instead, but it won't happen. It would be really great if it did, but it won't.
Institutions is a perfect one: so the question would be "how to convince Americans to demand reforms to the CDC and FDA to improve our response to future pandemics?" Not to be a nagging scold, but to me, that's one example of what Scott (and everyone else here) should be working on.
See, I don't think that's possible. In fact, when I'm feeling charitable I think Scott's prior post on that subject hits the nail on the head. Those organizations are too beholden to politics to be trustworthy, responsible, and useful. It sucks. That's why I'm generally speaking against large political institutions and for small, bottom-up efforts
I am fine with that, what I am asking for is for us, commenters and Scott, to focus on answering the question "How to convince people to support a small, bottom-up effort to either create a better response to a future pandemic, or persuade enough people to reform/abolish-rebuild the institutions that are supposed to do that"
Isn't that what these posts and discussion threads are? We're all debating with each other, trying to reach some kind of meta-conclusions about the robustness of science, knowledge, institutions etc. Lockdowns happen to be the proximal topic today but the discussions aren't so different to other threads Scott has hosted.
Personally I'm in the abolition camp. All public health bodies have totally destroyed their own credibility, which it turned out wasn't that high amongst people in the know even before now. Which organization has NOT done a 180 degree turn on supposedly critical issues and then pretended it didn't happen, by now? Fauci isn't the only senior public health official who is a liar. Most countries have them, though they weren't all brazen enough to literally admit that in national newspapers.
If you want to be a group of experts advising the public on something, then it seems obvious to me that fostering trust is goal number 1. All other goals you may have depend on it unless you become totalitarian and just try to take over the world. Public health has gone all-in on totalitarianism in the past year and it just leads to malicious compliance, ignoring their suggestions and eventually more politicians will try to do what Trump did and just defund them. Because it's the right thing to do.
It strikes me that the Front Line COVID Care Alliance (https://covid19criticalcare.com/) appears to be one of the "small, bottom-up" efforts, but it seems like the larger institutions (government, media) are doing everything they can to discredit it.
The FLCCA was founded an actual ICU doctor treating actual critical COVID patients to reflect the latest information for creating COVID protocols. They don't seem to have any agenda other than providing the latest information about the best-performing treatments in as observed in the field.
The best evidence they don't have ulterior motives is that they're mostly suggesting cheap, readily available drugs that profit no one. In fact, they're actually warning patients not to get scammed into spending too much money on doctors or treatment.
Again, this is a group of doctors treating actual COVID patients trying to provide information to other doctors and patients, including collecting and interpreting as much breaking medical literature as possible.
And yet there's a weird amount of resistance to them.
Some of it is the inevitable protest that tHeyAREN'tUsiINGenoUghlarGEscaLedouBLEBlindTRIals! but the reasons for why they can't base everything on a large scale double-blind trial is patiently explained on their FAQs, which no one seems to read.
But most of the resistance seems to be a weird orthodoxy that nothing except lockdowns and masks and vaccines should even be discussed, with social media sites and search engines actively blocking many posts on the topic.
It's *weird.*
This seems like a very pessimistic viewpoint - if anything beholden to politics cannot be trustworthy, responsible, and useful, then it seems like we just have to hope for a benevolent dictator, rather than having governing institutions with any sort of social input into them.
I think the scope and scale of the institutional failure on covid has actually mentally damaged all of us, and our unwillingness to look into the Lovecraftian depths of that failure has made us also reluctant to consider reforms, because we'd have to look at the failures to do so. I still think we should.
This is likely not a very popular position, but speaking personally, I find the institutional failure of last year so egregious that I now believe I have a moral obligation to stymie their efforts, no matter what it is they're trying to do. They must be punished for their failure and this is the only tool available to me.
I actively sabotage covid efforts now. I'll stop when our politicians grovel on TV
Well sure, I can see why it's not popular, but do you think we could find a compromise position that A) you would support, B) would be effective at fixing those institutions and C) popular enough to gain support? I think finding that would be more important than determining if lockdowns work or not.
For the sake of adding a datapoint, I have done likewise. I'll also add the caveat that I don't think merely "reformed" institutions would solve the problem. Rather, no institutions having the relevant powers is preferable due to (imo) the risk of misuse being greater than the risk of no use.
Just a correction - Fauci never said "don't use masks" or "masks don't work". All he ever said was "we have no evidence that masks work and there is no reason for ordinary people to use masks", which sounds frustratingly similar, and proves that the medical establishment is bad at communication. But he, and people of similar scientific stature, never lied or even said the things we now think are false.
> But he, and people of similar scientific stature, never lied or even said the things we now think are false.
This is obviously not true; I almost feel like I'm in a "we were never at war with Eurasia" situation. I mean even if restrict to Fauci himself, do "we" now think all of this is true?
https://www.newsweek.com/fauci-said-masks-not-really-effective-keeping-out-virus-email-reveals-1596703
"The typical mask you buy in the drug store is not really effective in keeping out virus, which is small enough to pass through material. It might, however, provide some slight benefit in keep out gross droplets if someone coughs or sneezes on you."
I think a lot depends on what "really effective" means. I would rather say now that sanitizing your hands is basically irrelevant for this particular virus (though relevant for others). I think most people here will say that the typical modern masks (which weren't available in drug stores in March, 2020) likely have some moderate percentage reduction in probability of transmission, but it's not clear how big or small.
It really is unclear how effective masks are, and the big thing that has changed is just that conventional wisdom says "we don't know how effective they are, and it's really easy, so might as well wear them" where it used to be "we don't know how effective they are, and the medical establishment never advises doing anything that we don't know the effectiveness of".
It's this latter thing that was the big problem.
The masks issue is extremely frustrating because if you read the pre-COVID literature or do any post-COVID analysis of the mask mandates issue, then they conclude mask mandates don't work. Pre-COVID: there are medical papers arguing this. Post-COVID: where are all the graphs showing sharp drops in incidence 3 days after mask mandates are introduced?
So when the medical world was asked about masks at the start, they appear to have been correctly summarizing the state of knowledge until that point. They said eh, masks, well, we don't have any convincing evidence they work actually. It wasn't just Fauci, they were all saying that. And it appears they were justified to do so.
But then something went wrong, and it's not entirely clear how it happened, but it seems that for political or ideological reasons the idea of universal mask wearing suddenly became very attractive. I think this is not very surprising given the prevailing ideology in public health (collectivism), because these people just love the idea of "society coming together", "solidarity" etc, and they suddenly realized that they could say anything at all and politicians and the public would do it. Hence: universal mask wearing. A WHO spokesperson actually admitted that this was the result of political lobbying to a BBC journalist at some point! The journo put it on Twitter but, what a surprise, didn't make it into a full story. So then of course they had the problem of inverting their position. That's when they came up with this idea of the "noble lie".
Beyond the inconsistency with pre-COVID medical evidence there are other problems with the official timeline:
1. There was no need to lie to ensure medical workers got masks.
Virtually all masks were being made abroad, I recall reading early on that there was only a single company making surgical/N95 masks in the USA and in the beginning they were refusing to increase production anyway because they had been burned before by "fad" demand spikes for masks. So the supplies were all coming in via ports and government could simply have nationalized any in-flight shipments using existing customs infrastructure, then signed long term contracts at above cost to monopolize the future supply. People just didn't have access to masks at scale early on in the epidemic, and if they had done, it would have been trivial to pass a law stating that governments and health care providers get first dibs.
2. It assumes that ~all health experts worldwide can say "masks are ineffective and not very important" yet ~all healthcare workers worldwide themselves will know this is a lie and ignore it, without blowing the whistle to the press, even though masks are supposedly life saving. This is a ridiculous assumption.
3. Even if we take their claims at face value, it means public health experts see lying as such a low cost strategy that they'll deploy it even for managing very short term issues like supply chain imbalances, despite the obvious long term damage it would do to their credibility. Or in other words, it says that public health feels so powerful that the normal rules of accountability and honesty just don't apply to them. This is a terrible message to send to the world!
Fully agree with this on all points but just want to add one more datapoint - in email communications in Feb 05, Fauci stated a belief that masks in the sense that mask mandates want them used don't work, which is not consistent with his alleged "conspiracy" to sequester masks for healthcare providers. https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/20793561-leopold-nih-foia-anthony-fauci-emails page 3027
> So when the medical world was asked about masks at the start, they appear to have been correctly summarizing the state of knowledge until that point. They said eh, masks, well, we don't have any convincing evidence they work actually. It wasn't just Fauci, they were all saying that. And it appears they were justified to do so.
Frankly, I can't even imagine a world in which they would be justified in saying so. We were dealing with a new virus whose transmission vectors were completely unknown. Why *wouldn't* you recommend masks *just in case* until we know more about this new pathogen? Clearly masks work to some extent or healthcare staff wouldn't wear them at all.
As of now, healthcare workers are wearing masks to accommodate the customers (patients) who want them to wear masks. It is a signal that we take covid Very Seriously here.
Source: for work I am privy to some of the conversations about this and how most of the office workers and RNs are various degrees of upset over having to wear a mask despite being vaxxed.
> As of now, healthcare workers are wearing masks to accommodate the customers (patients) who want them to wear masks.
That's not what I meant. Hospital staff were wearing masks long before COVID in certain wards or when doing certain work. Clearly masks work to stem the spread of infection. That's just a fact.
Then COVID came and it was apparently killing people at alarming rates, and we didn't really know how it was transmitted. What moderately intelligent person in their right mind when faced with these basic facts would recommend *against* masks? A health professional is very aware of the precautionary principle.
The only explanation that makes sense of Fauci's recommendations against mask use was his stated fear of shortages.
There's long-standing public health policy in the "evidence-based" world that you *shouldn't* recommend *anything* unless you have empirical studies showing it works. This has been the source of a lot of our problems, that a more Bayesian approach would do better at.
> "we have no evidence that masks work and there is no reason for ordinary people to use masks", which sounds frustratingly similar
There is no meaningful difference between a country's leading healthy authority saying "don't wear masks" and "there is no reason for ordinary people to use masks".
Furthermore, Fauci didn't just leave it at that, he also said that wearing a mask could be *worse* than not wearing one, because people fiddle with it, touch their face, and so on.
So yeah, saying that Fauci said "don't use masks" is a very fair abbreviation of his recommendations at the time.
The "people fiddle with it" is a case where the science really did change. We were genuinely worried about surface transmission at the early stages of the pandemic and then fairly quickly learned it was unlikely to be significant. Therefore people playing with their masks in public (which is absolutely something that happens a lot) is not the problem it seemed like it could be. Maybe it's still a problem for other diseases, but it doesn't seem to be a concern for COVID-19.
If only other public policies and perceptions had updated in the same way. Too much wasted effort on spraying down the streets, cleaning the subways, etc. that are irrelevant to COVID-19.
But I'll make a stronger claim: you can't even do this in principle. One might be tempted to say "aha, well, maybe there's 50 dimensions but we can analyze all of them and come to conclusions" but you can't! Because people have varied lives and, no matter what conclusion you will come to, somebody somewhere will say "if we did it your way, I would not be alive right now. Eff you" and there is absolutely nothing you can say to that person to change their mind.
You can do a writeup where you try to determine position on all of these 50 dimensions, and end up with: "Lockdowns helped with X, Y, Z; they made Q, W, E worse, and also had effects 1, 2, 3 which are hard to classify as good or bad". Let's say it is backed up by a prediction market, and population generally believes in prediction market's accuarcy, so there's no dispute over facts.
It is possible that after reading this, exactly half of the population believes "Lockdowns worked" - which means "they were net positive". But it's unlikely. It'll probably be skewed. The answer still won't be "objective" - but it can be meaningful. Are serial murderers bad? Vast majority of the population will have one answer. Technically it won't be a fact, but...
crap I forgot to quote, now it's unreadable, eh. First paragraph is a citation.
What about smaller questions: Does locking down golf courses and beaches work?
I suspect we can say now with some confidence that the lockdowns of expansive outdoor recreation in the spring of 2020 were a bad idea spread.
It's worth reviewing the almost transparent propaganda tools that were used to promote shutting beaches, such as printing pictures in newspapers of seemingly ultra-crowded beaches taken with super long telephoto lenses that compress distance unrealistically.
> But we know that's a lie. Why? Because Fauci said it was a lie under oath to congress.
Do you have a source for this?
I don't know about that case, but Fauci admitted he was lying about herd immunity in a NYT interview. That wasn't, of course, the way he put it, but he said he was changing his estimate on the basis of poll results showing more people willing to get vaccinated. That means that either his previous estimate or his new estimate was a lie (or perhaps both), since the poll results don't change anything relevant to what is required for herd immunity, only for what he wanted people to believe was required.
Actual quote :
"In a telephone interview the next day, Dr. Fauci acknowledged that he had slowly but deliberately been moving the goal posts. He is doing so, he said, partly based on new science, and partly on his gut feeling that the country is finally ready to hear what he really thinks.".
Partly based on new science. So he's partly lying, and you are too.
Fauci did not "admit he is lying". So someone else is.
This was intensely satisfying and I completely agree.
I really liked this comment, thanks for sharing.
+1 utilon
Yes, they were worried about a run on masks which would result in medical practitioners not having an adequate supply. But that wasn't the only or even the primary reason the CDC initially recommended against mask use. Simply, most epidemiologists didn't think covid was transmitted through aerosols. I remember this vividly, because I was trying to find out whether this was the case, and I though it was, and was surprised that most research claimed otherwise at that time (March 2020). In fact, I could only find one paper relating to aerosolization of the original SARS in a Toronto hospital because of the HVAC system and because of intubation. So the thinking back them was that doctors needed masks because they were intubating, but that the spread was mostly through fomites and heavy droplets that didn't travel far. I thought this was clearly mistaken, but THAT was the primary reason why masks were initially not recommended.
But even if Fauci wilfully lied, I don't see how you can go from this one data point to "you can't use science to determine if lockdowns worked." That sounds like the type of conflict theory argumentation we should strive to avoid.
TL;DR version: lockdowns: good/bad? - is a waste of time that we could be spending on a more important question: how to persuade people to demand a better overall pandemic response (and prevention) in the future. Your post about it was great and fascinating and I loved reading it, but I will straight up paypal you money today if you produce one as good about "finding the best way to demand better next time."
Long version:
I think this is the key point: "But the smartest people I talked to kept - is "derailing" the right word? - derailing onto more interesting and important pull-the-rope-sideways plans. "
And:
"none of that turned out to matter at all compared to some question about stoned driving vs. substituting-for-drunk-driving, which nobody started out caring about."
Because that's exactly the truth - lockdowns yes/no is a very interesting (and extremely difficult) question to answer. But really, for the question of "how should we fight pandemics" it doesn't matter that much - there are other interventions that will have a massively larger effect (and in fact will make doing the research to determine if lockdowns work really hard, as you discovered) that this is like trying to figure out if you should amputate the left or right leg of the guy who got run over by the wheat thresher. The real answer, for society, is taking precautions to avoid the "got run over" scenario, or "let a pandemic get so bad you are debating lockdowns" scenario. The various "Titanic deck chair rearrangement" plans don't move the needle very much.
In fact, given the pandemic's ability to inspire Americans to polarize even the most mundane things, I think that the true answer to your question: "lockdowns? yes/no?" is actually "I think you should stop asking this question." I say this is as a libertarian, first amendment maximalist who has indeed been following this issue and happily debating it with others for a year and a half: this is a rabbit hole that doesn't have... whatever rewards rabbit holes are supposed to have at the bottom of them.
I don't mean to diminish the importance or quality of your work (or anyone else your reference), but for the goal of having the public know what good pandemic response is, this just doesn't help. (I intend no moral or judgement criticism here AT ALL) It is so hard to isolate, so amenable to data cheating, mistakes and incredibly confounding errors (maybe lockdowns work in areas where people believe they work and therefore cooperate, but don't in places where they hate that kind of thing?) that time spent worrying about it just convinces the average person that the question DOES matter, and that other questions (that really do matter more) don't. That is, those people who tried to derail you are exactly right: every minute that you (and all the researchers you cited) spent trying to figure out the truth of this question was time that could have been spent mobilizing public demand for the truly effective pandemic solutions (which surprisingly seem to be far less controversial, and easier to prove they work in practice), for a net benefit.
By any objective, scientific - and indeed, conventional-wisdom-approved measure, there are lots of things (again, many uncontroversial and agreed upon) we could have done better on the pandemic. Politicians and bureaucrats from both parties (or even unaligned) flubbed it to previously unimaginable levels (I used to think the CDC was great!). So the fact that we have no mass movement to Do Better Next Time (and stunningly little promise that any changes have been made, or that anyone at all was held accountable for failures) is shocking, and trying to fix that seems like a much more fruitful use of (anyone's) time.
If someone could figure that out, I would love it. I would love it so much that I would send them money right now to work on it.
Upfront: I'm not trying to criticize you but I'm writing off the cuff and might be blunter than is optimal
> In fact, given the pandemic's ability to inspire Americans to polarize even the most mundane things
I don't think that Americans did this. I think that this was done to Americans. I have no evidence for this beyond reasoning from first principles, so feel free to discount my position as unsupported. But to me it seems abundantly clear that politicians and their catspaws on both sides of the aisle actively and intentionally polarized this issue because they perceived it to be useful to winning the election. It is a pet peeve of mine when people just blanket complain about 'Americans being polarized', as if it's just a moral failing on the American people. It isn't. It's a systemic and intentional failure
> It is so hard to isolate, so amenable to data cheating, mistakes and incredibly confounding errors (maybe lockdowns work in areas where people believe they work and therefore cooperate, but don't in places where they hate that kind of thing?)
This is an incredibly good example that highlights one of the other things I've been trying to highlight (and raised in my post): For every question "does <x policy> work?", there are two separate and independent questions lurking there. Question 1 is "Does taking X action work?" and Question 2 is "does government implementing policy X work?". A lot of people arguing for particular policy positions appear to act as if they just assume that those are the same question. The idea that, for example, they might pass a policy that sees widespread resistance, comes across to them (or at least, comes across to me that it comes across to them) as just an aberration. "Oh, well, just stop them from doing that then". That's not a good policy implementation strategy, and frequently results in literal fascism.
Which, as an aside: Even the Nazis and Commies didn't get 100% compliance with their policies, where noncompliance was punished by your family getting murdered. So I really and truly don't understand why Americans seem to take a utopian optimism towards policy implementation.
You question is great at highlighting the distinction between my questions A and B, because it highlights two different scenarios where the difference between questions A and B is itself different, which underscores the point.
> By any objective, scientific - and indeed, conventional-wisdom-approved measure, there are lots of things (again, many uncontroversial and agreed upon) we could have done better on the pandemic. Politicians and bureaucrats from both parties (or even unaligned) flubbed it to previously unimaginable levels (I used to think the CDC was great!). So the fact that we have no mass movement to Do Better Next Time (and stunningly little promise that any changes have been made, or that anyone at all was held accountable for failures) is shocking, and trying to fix that seems like a much more fruitful use of (anyone's) time.
I remain incredibly skeptical and pessimistic about our institutions, and assert that they didn't flub anything; they accomplished exactly what they wanted to, it's just that their real goals were not their publicly stated goals
(And, for the record, I am not alleging some kind of nefarious conspiracy, although I think things that would qualify as that did happen. For the most part, I am alleging that the primary motivation for the various policies passed was optics. Politicians wanted to look like they were doing something, and to cover their asses when what they did didn't work)
As for the no mass movement thing, I agree with you that it's horrendous that we don't have one. I disagree that this is surprising. I cannot think of a mass movement in my lifetime that was actually focused on something of substance, despite there being lots of substance that needs mass moving. It's always focused on bullshit trivialities.
Further: Most Americans (appear to) believe one of the following:
1) "Our response" (by which they mostly mean the local response wherever they live) was actually good, so why would we protest anything?
2) "Our response" (by which, again, they mostly mean the local response wherever they live) would have been good, except for the fact that Republicans (or Democrats, depending on the state) stopped it. We'll be totally fine next time as long as we keep those people out of power.
It is dumbfounding to me that people think this, because the data to the contrary is obvious and everywhere. I know it is a Republican talking point but, Cuomo's poor nursing home decisions caused tens of thousands of deaths, and yet most of the people I hear talking about him think he did a great job and wish other governors had done as great of a job. Because nobody is reading the dry stats, they're watching the emotionally-laden news, and the emotionally-laden news is telling them that Cuomo did well. (Perhaps because his brother is the newscaster).
But the fact that most people think this way seems pretty obvious by inspection to me
I think I have a different position than either of you. It's not weird or wrong that Americans became polarized on this. Lockdowns were really really awful and unpleasant for a lot of people and it's reasonable that it produces strong emotions, and fear of getting coronavirus (plus actually getting coronavirus) is also really really awful and unpleasant for a lot of people and it's reasonable that it produces strong emotions. There wasn't a lot of great data proving that one thing vs. the other was definitely worse for everyone. I don't think it was some kind of inexcusable failure that we ended up having strong polarized feelings about this.
I agree that it is not surprising that we became polarized about it, (though there are certainly other tiny, strange things about it that became strangely Red or Blue coded for no underlying reason), my overall complaint is that we DID become polarized about it out of proportion to the real possible cost/benefit, at the cost of demanding (polarized or not) solutions that would actually have helped. As evidenced by pols constantly fundraising on the lockdowns/masks culture-war issues, but very few fundraising on "I will ensure that half a million americans never die in a pandemic ever again by doing the following 3 effective reforms"
It really seems like there *should* have been a constituency for "open the playgrounds and close the bars". But somehow polarization ensured there wasn't.
I personally believe that shutting down gyms, parks, hiking trails, and other recreational/exercise facilities, actively increased the death count.
In fact, one mystery I currently consider to be unsolved is why my city (Austin TX) has a mortality rate (~80/100k; from memory, might be wrong) less than half of the national average (~180/100k; from memory, might be wrong). My two candidate explanations are age and fitness. People here are very outdoorsy and active and the obesity rates (at least, based on my entirely unscientific study of who I see when I go outside) are very low. Gyms and such were shut down for like 6 weeks, and outdoors locations, even when they were formally shut down, the shut downs were never enforced.
I suspect, but cannot reasonably demonstrate, that this was causal of our low mortality rates
(Terminology note: "mortality rate" as I'm using it is deaths over population, whereas "fatality rate" as I'm using it is deaths over infected)
(inb4 mortality rate is just a proxy measure for case rate. Austin's case rate is solidly average with, at the time of this writing, approximately 10% of the city confirmed recovered. Further, you're going to have to trust me on this but I've done the math on fatality rates and they show similarly low numbers; I think it was 0.9% vs 1.5% US average or something like this)
Have you done this calculation on other central cities? My guess is that central cities in general will have lower age distributions and higher fitness distributions than suburbs and rural areas, and so central cities in general will have lower mortality rates than the nation as a whole. The main exceptions would be New York (hit hard early on) and possibly Rust Belt cities (higher age distributions). Cities that have incorporated most of their suburbs (San Antonio, Nashville, Jacksonville) might also be counterexamples.
I haven't looked at the numbers to verify. But if Austin has lower mortality rate than Dallas, Seattle, Washington, Boston, Atlanta, then that would be something that needs further explanation about uniquenesses of Austin itself.
The Bay Area still hasn't been hit that hard, either. Smart, rich, skinny people have done better on average than others. For example, in Los Angeles, the places where entertainment industry people live have notably lower rates of cases and deaths than places where working class Latinos live.
But, it might also be that in the future Boyle Heights will be approaching herd immunity while Malibu finally gets slammed. The future is hard to predict with something this novel and this volatile.
This is pretty obviously true. For example, Utah had the 4th highest number of people getting COVID per capita, but the 6th lowest death rate in the country. And Utah didn't doing testing particularly well and with a conservative population (many of whom were anti-mask and anti-lockdown, and the "lockdown" in Utah was quite mild), they likely had tons of undetected cases. But despite lots of people getting COVID, they had less deaths and hospitalizations because they have the youngest median population in the country and most people are relatively fit and outdoorsy.
That was indeed a constituency in the UK, and we ended up there for a while.
Being maximally charitable to the lockdown people, one olive branch I can extend is that my fear of covid went to zero as soon as I recovered from it. It is hard for me to remember the fear I had before that happened but, I felt very differently before I caught it.
Although I am proud to say, my position on lockdowns has been relatively consistent. Even when I thought 50 million Americans would die, my position was "we need these but they'll never happen and it would be really bad if they do". Then they did happen, and it was really bad, and the only thing I changed my mind on was the need
I'll go a step further than this: I think that political polarisation on important issues like this is normal and healthy. Half of our society devotes itself to finding evidence to support a policy shift in one direction, while the other half does the same in the other direction, and between the two we (hopefully) optimise our approach, at least along that axis. Same reason we have adversarial trials.
I recall a similar political polarisation arising around the proper degree of response to terrorism, another freedom-vs-security tradeoff, post-9/11.
I am 100% there with you on political diversity of opinion. I don't think anyone would have a problem with polarisation if that "[and then] we (hopefully) optimise our approach" step happened regularly and reliably. I think the issue people have is that the polarization starts to become "the" thing for most people involved, to the detriment of their ability to optimize our approach.
I agree with Scott: It's not clear to me even at this point after 18 months what policies have proved worth the cost other than hurrying-up vaccine development. And I wonder if even vaccines weren't mostly a lucky break -- we happened to have had a lot of development of a new technology in recent years that turned out to be extremely effective against this particular pandemic -- that might not work in the next pandemic.
Keep in mind that not only was this a novel pandemic, but its roller-coaster-like nature has made it hard to learn lessons. It's a lot easier to learn how to respond to something when its rate of incidence doesn't much change unless we do something. Instead, covid is almost always going either up or down, so making a policy change and carefully measuring the response is hard to do because the rollercoaster car is either going up or down, no matter what the policy. Ideally, we could figure out that policy X will make the rollercoaster go up at only 60 degrees of incline instead of the 70 degrees without policy X, but that's not easy to measure.
Also, with or without government policies, people make their own responses. For example, the Swedish state didn't shut down its movie theaters in 2020, but pretty shortly the theater owners shut down themselves because Swedes had stopped going to the movies: and that was either because of fear of Covid or because Hollywood wasn't releasing any new blockbusters or some combination or something else.
So it's reasonable for people to argue over lockdowns because it's a damn hard problem to get convincing data upon.
My approach might be to try to rank elements of lockdowns from probably good to probably bad based on what we know now: e.g.,
Shutting down ski resort apres-ski bars: probably a good idea.
Shutting down ski slopes: hard to say.
Shutting down golf courses and beaches: probably bad ideas.
W.R.T. vaccines I hate to say it but the jury is still out on those.
It's apparent that we don't really know what the safety profile of the vaccines actually is. Governments and manufacturers have been quietly updating the warning labels to discuss problems like blood clotting, which were not detected during the trials. So the question becomes one of scale and cost/benefit analysis, which is the sort of analysis that can be difficult especially when the numbers are all very small.
Consider that we have no reliable data on the prevalence of vaccine injuries. In the USA the VAERS system appears to be seriously backlogged and the CDC is (unsurprisingly) apparently not in any hurry to unbacklog it. This week it contains 12,300 reports of deaths following vaccination vs just 6,000 a week ago. In normal times VAERS reports are rare so it's not surprising there's a backlog, although their failure to clear it properly is damning because the COVID vaccination programme now has the dubious distinction of having more death reports than all other vaccination programmes combined, at least since VAERS data started being collected.
The raw numbers are hard to use because prior studies have suggested that only a tiny proportion of all side effect experiences are reported to systems like VAERs. On the other hand, maybe in COVID times people's awareness of the reporting systems is higher, who knows. I've personally had some experiences that make me think the official data is grossly under-counting, but I can't prove that, it's just anecdotal.
Also, people like to cite trials but it appears that [drug] trials in general may under-estimate side-effects for unclear reasons, by like 3x-4x:
https://sebastianrushworth.com/2021/07/19/do-drug-trials-underestimate-side-effects/
And finally, if you look at the meltdown over the publishing of the "2 deaths caused for every 3 deaths saved" paper a few weeks ago, it's pretty clear that you simply aren't going to be allowed to publish any research in journals on the cost/benefit profile of vaccines.
So the state of knowledge on vaccines looks pretty weak to me. Clearly, these programmes were not advertised as "the most dangerous vaccines in history by miles" although that's what comparative data is now saying. It will be quite some years before our society has regained enough rationality to actually be honest about what's happening right now.
Correction: I did some more reading and it appears the CDC lowered the count to ~6,000 again after raising it to ~12,000? They appear to have inflated the death count by an extra 6,000 deaths and then decided those reports shouldn't have been there, and didn't notice until after publication?! Or at least it's not really clear what's going on there.
I am not sure this is actually more re-assuring!
"It's not clear to me even at this point after 18 months what policies have proved worth the cost other than hurrying-up vaccine development. "
Not to be rude, but are you joking? Are you implying that we, as humans, are still just in the dark on what we could've done better on the pandemic?
First, to start with, for the one you at least admit exists: vaccine development, there were tons of "hurrying-up" that could've been done, not just in development, but deployment, regulatory approval, earlier/faster testing and trials, human challenge trials, bigger pre-purchase commitments, supply chain enhancement, approving lower-quality vaccines as stop-gaps, spending more on manufacturing, the list literally goes on! The death toll was thousands per day, speeding the arrival of "Everyone Gets Vaccines Day" by one day saves thousands of lives. The cost/benefit equations become not even worth calculating because they're so obviously, ludicrously slanted towards "spend a billion bucks and get vaccines out a day earlier." Are we (America) having this conversation? Are we talking about punishing/firing/executing the people who didn't make these slam dunk, life-saving decisions? No, we're fighting over long term, generalized, half-assed lockdowns that (might) move the needle a few points either way.
Second, nothing about Test/trace/isolate? The stuff that everyone who has ever heard of a pandemic thought the CDC was there to do, and in fact had all these plans and tons of docs, scientists, epidemiologist, nobel prize winners - were begging us to do, from way back in early 2020? Not even worthy of mention? It absolutely would've worked, conditional on committing to do it (and figuring out how to ensure that "commitment" happens is ANOTHER more-worthy pandemic question to consider). You approve/manufacture as many tests (rapider-the-betterer, easier to use, home use, etc...) as possible. You don't ACCIDENTALLY CONTAMINATE 180,000 TESTS AT THE CDC. You don't FORBID ANYONE, INCLUDING MASSIVE TESTING CORPORATIONS, TO PRODUCE TESTS. You test as many people as possible, symptomatic to start, then as much as possible, hiring as many tracers as you can, for double average wages. When you get a positive, you test their contacts as best you can, and isolate them for 2 weeks with full support (cover their pay, cover their doordash/grocery delivery, whatever). You start this right at the beginning - we had the info necessary to see that we'd need it, because so many people (that no one paid attention to) were screaming it. And If you aren't keeping up, (nothing works perfectly) and some place does break out, you institute a 2 week "for reals" lockdown, where everyone really does stay at home, you focus test/trace on the area and food/water/medical support/national guard and pay everyone's paychecks.... for two weeks. You start letting out people who test negative as you work through the pop and then after 2 weeks, the virus is going to be mostly cleared from that population and regular old TTI will handle it - and you go back to "no lockdown at all" - or maybe just "no obviously crazy superspreader events like competitive kissing festivals". Not what we (or anyone else) here are calling "lockdowns" - the half-assed, too-weak to work, too-strong to not cause large harms, for like a year - thing.
That might sound like a lot of money, but it's chump change compared to what we spent on "stimulus" that didn't even do anything to reduce spread. TTI with full isolation compensation is a discount pandemic response. This would work, really. Not perfectly, but it would've, for vastly less money than stimulus and the cost of unchecked spread, and the economic cost of the lockdowns. There is no debate that this would work, because obviously it would work! If you track the spread of the disease, identify where it exists, and cut it off from contacting others well.... it works, the same way to apples fall from trees. You can say "well, it was political impossible" but we it WAS politically possible to spend WAY more, lockdown WAY more, damage the economy WAY more - and retain a CDC with a budget of billions for decades that would respond to the worst threat to American civilians in the history of the country with.... nothing.
There's a bunch of other things that I think would've helped too, (people should go do some high-powered RCTs on say, ivermectin) but faster vaccines and TTI cover most of it. Terrorists killed 3k on 9/11 and we spent trillions doing things that we know almost certainly didn't help. Covid in Feb 2020 is obviously modeled by people as ignorant and unaware as Peter Navarro (!!!) to kill over 250k people (pessimistic scenario!!!) and we spent almost nothing actually fighting it (due credit for Warp Speed) and ..... no one cares, politically? Ho hum, what could we have done? Let's debate lockdowns!
Again, yes, I'm ranting on my soapbox. Yes, I'm sure I seem really annoying. But come on! We FAILED. We fucked up so bad it's damaged our brains and made us unwilling to even look at the scope of the failure, and made us want to just instead contemplate the design of the caskets we're burying the dead in. We aren't addressing the problem.
But this (a pandemic) is going to happen again, and I'm no insane doomsaying Cassandra (quite the opposite), I have good evidence - because it is literally happening RIGHT NOW. The Delta variant is, if you want to define it, a new pandemic - yes, it's relatively similar to original covid, and thankfully the vaccines give some broad response to it, but it's a mutation. It's traits are a mutation - it seems to be more communicable, mostly. But nothing at all in evolution says that variant Theta or Lambda won't have immune escape (or radically higher mortality, or something). Everyone seems to agree now that doing gain of function research (we can debate if we were at Wuhan Virology, but who cares?) on highly transmissable coronavirus is a bad idea. But we are doing GOF research on a massive scale in the millions of human laboratories who are currently infected with alpha/delta/whatever, because the virus in them is interacting and reproducing alongside their natural immunity (or from vaccines) and providing evolutionary pressure to find way around it. We literally already know this has happened, and resulted in partial reduction in the quality of immunity granted by natural/vaccine.
We still have people researching in the field to see if some pesky bat generates a new virus to infect us, but we have millions of humans cycling quintillions of viral generations that have already produced a number of variants that have .... gained... some functions. The "next" pandemic is already happening, and thank god it shares some immune profile with the previous one, and I'm confident it (delta) won't actually be *that* bad in the US. But we aren't doing anything, other than the vaccine companies preparing boosters - and good on them for doing so. Are we really cool with that being the only thing? There are so many more questions more vital than "do American-style long-term lockdowns work?" and one of them is "why is there no war to make sure this never happens again, even though it is, right now, happening again?" And even if you don't count the variants as "next pandemic", we've had sars1, mers, sars2, etc... in just a few decades. SOMETHING else will pop up in 5/10/15 years.
I am FINE with the idea that I'm crazy, and I'm seeing ghosts that aren't there. I'd be thrilled if you could convince me. But.... tell me honestly, does it look like I'm wrong? Please do, because I really, really want to be wrong.
I hear you, and I agree wholeheartedly.
Australia, where I live, has come close to not having the pandemic, but then because it seems like politicians don't actually understand the meaning of the word "quarantine" we kept letting people into the country after eradicating Covid temporarily, and surprise surprise we got more cases. We're now in our 5th lockdown, of which only 1 should have been necessary, and we lockdown seriously here - there's now been almost 12 months cumulatively where I've only left the house for food shopping.
The vaccine supply is far lower than it should be, because like everyone else we were too cheapskate to pay what it cost to get enough early, and now are paying in lockdowns and deaths instead.
I wish I could seriously punish the people responsible for all the fuckups, and I am sorely tempted to vote against every incumbent on principle come the next elections, but this isn't a partisan issue, it's a general incompetence issue, and the current opposition probably wouldn't have done any better than the current government so voting feels like far too weak a signal.
>Lockdowns were really really awful and unpleasant for a lot of people and it's reasonable that it produces strong emotions, and fear of getting coronavirus (plus actually getting coronavirus) is also really really awful and unpleasant for a lot of people and it's reasonable that it produces strong emotions.
That description seems calculated to appear symmetrical, but the situation was highly asymmetrical and I think it was the asymmetry that drove much of the polarization.
Lockdowns are moderately unpleasant for almost everyone, and while there is substantial individual variation, it's a distribution around a central mean. Covid is completely harmless to almost everyone, and really really really bad for a few people. And fear of Covid, is the sort of thing normal people don't deal with by complex risk-analysis math, but by a quick instinctive sorting into the categories of "completely harmless", "intolerably dangerous", or (sometimes, not everyone has the knack for this) "dangerous but worth the risk".
The infectiousness and virulence of Covid, baseline Covid in particular, is right at the fuzzy border of those three categories in the estimation of most people. And at a part of the border where the fuzziness correlates with tribal characteristics like e.g. Red Tribe mostly working blue-collar jobs and Blue Tribe mostly working desk jobs. So once people do the instinctive sort, the "completely harmless" crowd is obviously going to feel lockdowns are a grievous imposition and the "intolerably dangerous" crowd is going to feel them a trivial sacrifice for the common good, they're going to see most of their tribal mates standing with them on that, and instant polarization.
Nah, not critical or blunt at all - I think you are right on all fronts.
Regarding the "polarization" thing, I think I was just speaking sloppily. For the context of my argument, it doesn't matter if polarization is "natural" or "imposed" - I'd include the "politicians and catspaws" in "Americans" in this case.
" I am not alleging some kind of nefarious conspiracy"
Same here. I'd be less worried if it were a conspiracy. I think it's just institutional lack-of-focus, incompetence and no accountability.
"I remain incredibly skeptical and pessimistic about our institutions, and assert that they didn't flub anything; they accomplished exactly what they wanted to, it's just that their real goals were not their publicly stated goals"
Oh, I think you are right. Which is why one way you could frame my question-we-should-be-answering is "how to convince Americans to demand that they try to achieve their publicly stated goals?"
"As for the no mass movement thing, I agree with you that it's horrendous that we don't have one. I disagree that this is surprising."
You are right here too. I am just trying to move the conversation here (on Scott's blog) to that question: how to mobilize public opinion to demand fixes to matters of substance - specifically in this case, pandemic responses.
> Oh, I think you are right. Which is why one way you could frame my question-we-should-be-answering is "how to convince Americans to demand that they try to achieve their publicly stated goals?"
It is my personal belief that demands will never accomplish this, because the people in power can just say no.
I think more extreme measures are the only viable measures to changing anything. I also thing that more extreme measures would be both disastrous and, ultimately, ineffective, so I don't advocate those either.
I don't have a good solution.
It sounds like you're trying to push everyone to have a discussion about how to "make the trains run on time".
You see that the politically controlled institutions are failing and you want to make them succeed.
I see the fact that the institutions are run by politics as the core of the problem.
Institutions run by politics are significantly harder to improve. Usually when said institutions fail their budge goes up.
I think you're underestimating the level of "reform" I'm willing to go with. My niceness is tactical. If peaceful happy democratic reform can give us a CDC and FDA that prevents half a million dead americans, then I'm good with that. If cranky but peaceful abolition/rebuilding does that, then great. But protecting citizens from external threats is the first and sometimes last true role of the state. Failing to do this undermines the legitimacy of the entire institution, if I were in ancient China, I'd be talking about the mandate of heaven. If not-so-peaceful means are necessary to nudge our governmental system from one that CAN'T stop half a million civilian deaths to one that CAN... then... well.... that's what I'm saying: I am trying to push you to have a discussion about making that train run on time... because there are half a million dead bodies if it's late. Just saying "oh well they're run by politics guess we can't do anything" is a cop out. I am pushing you (and everyone else) to have a discussion about how you fix that, GIVEN that constraint.
So a Chinese approach? Current regime gets and has maintained the Mandate of Heaven? Some hell at the beginning, and the rest has been relatively chill.
Re: Do better. I again want to signal boost the idea of Po-Shen Loh, https://www.novid.org/about
Mandatory lock-downs stink. Voluntary lock-down has all the right feedback. You just need to know when it's 'dangerous' for you to go out. Which is what novid tries to do.
If you're pursuing elimination, rather than a steady state of misery and moderate death, then you care a lot about the minority of arseholes who are either woefully misinformed or horrifically callous and selfish. Strict border controls + extremely tough lockdowns where being out of your house gets you arrested whenever cases appear locally, means that a locality can actually have business mostly as usual unless and until the "strict border controls" part fails.
It's interesting to see the question of "how much more do you trust someone arguing against their typical ideological bias" in a very different context than I'm used to seeing it in. I work in a corporate business environment, and the analogy my boss likes to use is "PETA vs. the butcher", in that those are two people which you would expect to have very different opinions on the sanctity of animal life.
So yeah, assigning additional credibility towards people arguing against their typical positions is meaningful - but exactly how much additional credibility to give something, and how much more seriously to take the argument, is a very interesting question. On first glance it's the sort of thing that seems unavoidably subjective; every individual arguing against their ideological bent is going to have a varying degree of attachment to their "tribe" and therefore the emotional or social costs of believing things that go against their prior attachments - and thus the amount of additional 'virtue' we would assign them for 'having done science correctly' - would similarly seem to vary on a case by case basis.
Do you award extra 'virtue points' if the head of the NRA argues for gun control in a specific scenario, vs someone who's just a member, vs someone who's just Republican?
What about the opposite scenario, where the head of the NRA argues for total lack of gun control? My statistics background says "this is the null hypothesis, there's no additional information to be gleaned here" but is there ever a point where someone is so ideologically committed to certain positions that even otherwise good-seeming arguments that they are making should be discounted or taken with a grain of salt? Maybe if they're trying to sell you something?
An interesting question that I'm going to be thinking about!
An example I've seen recently is that all the big oil/gas companies apparently came around to "carbon taxes are the way to fix climate change" view over the past few years, so they could say "see, we support ways to fix climate change!" But it turns out they did this because they figured out this was both the least popular way to fix climate change, and a totally serious policy idea among serious people, so they could be sure that they would look serious, even as no politician would ever actually try to implement it. If they had supported something less unpopular, it might actually have happened.
That's entirely possible, but in the interest of fairness there's another explanation, which is that certainty is *good* in finance. You can lend to a project that knows its risks, but it's much harder to lend to a project that doesn't (even if your base case risk for the latter is lower!) Carbon taxes provide a lot of certainty for budgeting (much more so than, say, cap and trade programs).
(Disclosure, I'm a banker who works in energy and infrastructure financing)
Also, the former approach can backfire:
"the [Canadian] federal minimum price started at $20 per tonne of CO2 equivalent in 2019. As of this April it’s $40, rising to $50 in 2022 and increasing by $15 annually until it reaches $170 in 2030"
https://www.theglobeandmail.com/canada/article-canada-carbon-tax-explained/#:~:text=How%20much%20is%20Canada's%20carbon,it%20reaches%20%24170%20in%202030.
Fully agree. Business doesn't give a damn what the rules are, whether you need to rub blue mud or green into your belly button to be considered A-OK by the current shibboleths, but what they absolutely need to function is some degree of stability and transparency in the rules. Otherwise, you can't plan, and there are such massive inefficiencies in your operations that you can't compete on the basis of competence, you have to do it on the basis of connections (to lawmakers and enforcers).
How do you know that was their motivation? I associate oil and gas people with being pretty free market capitalist, and carbon taxes seem like the most free market capitalist compatible way to do things, so I'd expect them to settle on that position by default. You're asserting they're playing 4D chess and I'd like to understand the evidence for that.
A senior lobbyist for Exxon was caught on camera saying it:
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2021/jun/30/exxonmobil-lobbyists-oil-giant-carbon-tax-pr-ploy
Thanks, I hereby adjust my priors for cynicism in the oil and gas industry!
"Keith McCoy, a senior director in Exxon’s Washington government affairs team, was recorded on video in May saying that the company backs a carbon tax “as an easy talking point” and an “advocacy tool” because “there is not an appetite for a carbon tax” and that Republican legislators who oppose taxes in principle will never let it happen.
“Nobody is going to propose a tax on all Americans, and the cynical side of me says, yeah, we kind of know that – but it gives us a talking point that we can say, well, what is ExxonMobil for? Well, we’re for a carbon tax,” he said.
Later, McCoy reiterates the point: “Carbon tax is not going to happen.”"
From the article that JP linked.
Seems pretty weak evidence that this was a considered corporate strategy. Sounds like one guy giving his personal opinion.
Interesting post. Three comments:
1. What you describe doing in representing A to B and then B to A corresponds pretty closely to the job of paidhi in C.J.Cherryh's (very good) sf Foreigner series. The paidhi first acts as A's agent in representing his position to B, then switches roles and acts as B's agent in representing his position to A.
2. Your experience trying to figure out the net effect of either lockdowns or Marijuana legalization is similar to mine looking at the effect of climate change. There are a whole lot of possible effects, positive and negative, and what one mostly sees is a calculation based on a subset biased towards the result the person calculating wants or expects. Nordhaus gives a lot of weight to very speculative calculations on low probability high cost effects of climate change but, so far as I can tell, never considers low probability high cost effects of preventing climate change — even though the obvious one, the end of the current interglacial, is a climate effect that has happened multiple times over the last few million years.
There is one way of including emotional effects in the calculation — leaving individuals free to decide for themselves whether to quarantine. They have the right incentive with regard to emotional costs, since they are the ones bearing them. It's an imperfect solution because they have too weak an incentive to take precautions — if they get Covid, much of the cost goes to them but much to other people to whom they might pass it. And all of the cost if they already have it and don't take precautions goes to others.
My family in fact quarantined more tightly than the rules require until we were vaccinated.
CJ Cherryh Foreigner references = +10 internet points.
Also, I think you have it exactly right with comparison to climate change: the question is fascinating academically, and intriguing politically - because, crucially, within the extremely limited framework that almost everyone operates in, which is: "how exactly bad will climate change be, if the only solutions we have are drastic or less drastic carbon reductions?"
But in the same way as "lockdowns?", the question becomes less interesting when you take the wider look at solutions to the general problem: "well, if one of the solutions is something cheaper/easier like nuclear power, lots of solar panels, carbon capture, some mild geo-engineering, some flood walls" then the intensity of the question fades away. If I can spend (magic numbers) 1 trillion bucks on that stuff to prevent the negative effects of climate change, I don't actually care if the cost of unmitigated climate change is 10T or 20T, and fascinating academic debates about it lose their luster.
Similarly, if I can spend 1T on test/trace/isolate, radically fast vaccine deployment and better safety protocols on virology labs and reduce pandemic severity by 90%, I am suddenly not really interested in whether lockdowns cause 10% more or less harm than not-lockdowns.
On your problem with fancy statistics ... . I tried to follow the controversy over the Lott and Mustard paper on the effect of concealed carry, eventually stopped when the statistical arguments got above my level. Like you I have taught low level statistics and, while my mathematical background is much stronger than yours, my statistical background probably is not.
I think someone else has already made this point, but if the significance of an observation requires more than Scott Alexander / David Friedman / John Schilling etc level statistical technique to tease out of the data, then the significance of the observation is probably too weak to make a major policy decision around and it is probably unwise to burn your political capital on pushing that policy on the unwilling.
I loved someone made that observation with respect to the vaccines and that first, famous chart that came out showing infections just ended - became a flat line - after 14 days, something to the effect that: "That is the type of result you want - one obvious to anyone who sees your data, not requiring a lot of statistical techniques to tease out."
And sure enough, those things have been a Godsend, the Delta variant's protestations to the contrary notwithstanding.
This xkcd graph is the one you mean, perhaps?
https://xkcd.com/2400/
"Apparently pro-lockdown academics who get too close to the public spotlight have been getting harassed by lockdown opponents, and this is a known problem that pro-lockdown academics are well aware of. I was depressed to hear that, though in retrospect it makes sense."
I'm very new to this blog. I love the smart writing. But man do I wonder sometimes what alternate universe the author lives in to not know this stuff has been going on for a year and a half now. Federal, state, county and city health directors have received death threats, with armed protestors sometimes showing up at their house. The health director instantly becomes the most reviled person in their region. Many have quit over it.
There's an idea many people have that the biggest harassment to get people to shut up is coming from the racial left. This idea doesn't have much basis in reality, but it is widespread.
If I understand correctly, Kenny Easwarans point wasn't that Radical Left doesn't do harassment. The point was that it's not the biggest one, while being framed like it.
Current narrative focuses on social justice inspired harassments too much because it's still somewhat new and hot phenomena. You can't get lots of clicks for news of a radical right-winger harrasing gay people and sending death threats to feminists because everyone kind of knows that it's what radical right-wingers do. It's bad, unjustified and kind of shameful, so we prefere not to talk about it too much. There is no real controversy here.
But when we see how some left-wing activist behave themselves somewhat similarly towards their political opponents - now this is interesting. In what sense such actions are justified and in what sense they are not? How it affects our society in grand scale? Intelligent people can argue different positions here, while feeling smart, talking about consequentialism, paradox of tolerance, power dynamics, and other different political and ethical theories.
As far as I can tell, harassment from the radical right usually takes the form of hate mail and threats of extralegal violence; but the violence rarely pans out, and the authorities protect you from it. Harassment from the left usually takes the form of attempts at career damage, it sometimes pans out, and you usually have no legal recourse. (This tool is largely unavailable to the right.) It's unclear which one is worse.
And *now* we're stuck in the position of small-threat-of-murder/rape vs moderate-threat-of-career-damage (or the attendant psychological ramifications of threats of both) - it's turtles all the way down...
I'm not convinced that I've seen this difference. It seems to me that both sides usually do both, and the results are pretty similar (usually the violence doesn't pan out, and career damage does or doesn't depending on the employer). I can think of several people who got their career harm from right-wing mobs (Milo Yiannopoulos and Will Wilkinson are the immediate ones that come to mind, but older cases like Steven Salaita also seem relevant).
You seem to be unaware of YouTube banning videos and whole channels based on people even talking about the science of the lockdown and pandemic handling in general. Is that the case?
Wait, is there a right or left aspect to that?
To the extent that there is a left or right aspect to toeing the official COVID line, yes there is. The left wing is the "do what the government says" side, for those of you playing at home. That some on the left willing to question their own side have been banned as well does not diminish who is doing the banning.
Another note: The harassment of people with mainstream positions is generally spread out across more people, so I expect a random person who espouses a mainstream position to be less likely to be seriously harassed. There is just not enough capacity to harass everyone who expresses a mainstream view.
An exception is when a person expressing a common view is somehow special. E.g. I can easily imagine a pro-lockdown high-level health official getting harassed. I'd actually expect an anti-lockdown academic to get harassed for the same reason: while opposition to lockdowns is not rare in general, if it's rare among academics, then an opposing academic makes a prominent target.
This is a really good point. It's also a part of why something that seems unexceptionable to a member of the majority can be seen as part of a systematic annoyance by a minority - if black people are 10% of the population and white people are 90%, and a white person asks to touch the hair of the first black person they meet, then average black people will have this interaction happen 9 times while the average white person won't even realize there's a pattern.
A public official like a health director is a perfectly fair target for protestors (but not death threats). Academics are a different matter, but I've seen "called me names on twitter" referred to as harassment too often to take such claims at face value.
One interesting question you can ask someone is what burden of proof would they require to admit they are wrong.
I'm not sure how much it tells, when it comes to complex empirical questions. Knowing how common it is that different analyses of evidence come to very different conclusions, I'd often be very reluctant to promise to admit that I'd been definitely wrong on the basis of empirical evidence alone. For all I know, the next day someone may come along and present an equally convincing analysis suggesting I'm right. If I have theoretical reasons for my beliefs, I would often only be sure to change my view if, in addition to empirical counter-evidence, someone presented a theoretical explanation of why the empirical evidence differs from my prediction, with evidence to support that theoretical explanation.
It sounds like you have articulated quite well the general burden of proof to shift you from a position you hold strongly (and I tend to agree with it) - you require *both* empirical evidence contrary to your prediction, and an alternate theory that did correctly predict the observed empirical result (while still explaining all past results)
"It sounds like you have articulated quite well the general burden of proof to shift you from a position you hold strongly" Specifically, I'd apply what I said when I hold my current position based on theoretical arguments, not just empirical evidence. Essentially what I'm saying is that, when it's so hard to make sense of the empirical observations, I prioritize theoretical arguments over empirical evidence. To make me admit that I'm wrong, you would need either unambiguous and overwhelming empirical evidence, or theoretical arguments that match empirical observations—but unambiguous, overwhelming empirical evidence is unlikely to exist against a position I hold strongly, because if it did, I would have probably already heard about it and adjusted for it.
Do you really believe that the mathematician with his zeugmas, crenelated or not, started off with a totally unbiased mind, a tabula-rasa, and let the math lead him to a conclusion? Or do you believe that he started off with some emotion, instinct-driven position and found the data and the math to justify it?
You can’t perform any meaningful post-facto analysis of the pluses and minuses of lockdowns because you can’t perform a test with one America locked down and one not locked down. Comparing states is a worthless exercise – the social, economic and cultural differences between, say, California and Alabama, are simply too great. The researchers who have tried to do that just prove my contention: they begin with a belief and try to find the data to support it, ignoring the fatal limitations of the exercise.
The same is true with data for marijuana usage: we know with some degree of confidence the typical health and behavioral impacts of marijuana usage, but we cannot possibly forecast the net benefits\harms caused to American society at large, and all those who pretend we can and that they have the right methodology, have started out intending to prove their instinctive belief (even when they’re adamant they haven’t) and produced nothing of value.
So, what do we do when decisions have to be made, like about lockdowns? Well, we start off with what we know for sure:
Covid is an infectious disease spread by contact. Covid is potentially fatal or highly debilitating. We have very limited facilities for treating patients with serious cases of Covid. People will respond to images of hospitals denying admission and people dying at home in great distress by self-locking down. Such ad-hoc quarantining will be chaotic and lack legal protections, and will cause great economic damage.
We don’t need Zeugmas to be sure of any of this. All we need to do is to confidently state the common-sense facts, draw the obvious conclusions and act accordingly. For the most part, that, thankfully, is what we did.
Moderators: This is just plain rude. Is this acceptable here?
This is my least favorite kind of argument. "Complicated analyses can be biased, so instead we should just use my common sense intuitions, which can definitely never be biased, even though other people have the exact opposite common sense intuitions I do. And you can just dismiss them when they say what common sense tells them, because my common sense tells me it's wrong, and surely you can't dismiss my common sense."
Oddly enough, you've argued for the virtues of common sense elsewhere - prediction markets for example.
Common sense that's based on known and irrefutable facts is the soundest type of opinion. If your common sense is based on made-up facts and fake news, if it's common nonsense as so much is, of course, I can dismiss it (I'm not saying your is).
> If your common sense is based on made-up facts and fake news
But the problem is, in a dispute where multiple sides or participants are _all_ appealing to 'common sense, it's not obvious which 'facts' are made-up and which 'news' is fake.
I prefer the idea of 'reasonableness' as described by David Chapman – https://metarationality.com/reasonableness – i.e. reasoning that's not 'rational', or maybe a-rational, but _not_ 'irrational'. One problem in appealing to 'common sense' is that it often doesn't seem to be particularly common!
We let the fake news peddlers win when we doubt our ability to arrive at the facts of a situation - and that's exactly what they want: nothing is securely grounded in reality, no facts are true, every opinion is just as worthy as any other.
But I reject that. Take the two topics Scott touched on: Covid and marijuana. There are enough facts known about each to make common-sense judgments and arrive at sensible opinions, supporting lockdowns in the case of Covid and legalization in the case of marijuana.
Scott was making the argument too complex. The kind of data he's looking for can't ever be reliably found. A great deal of social science research seems to be reaching too far for data that doesn't exist and we give too much credence and respect to mathematicians and statisticians who are using decidedly shaky data sets. All the Zeugmas and equations in the world won't overturn my common-sense conclusion that a creature with a beak and wings, one that waddles and quacks, is a duck and not an elephant.
I probably believe similar things you do. But I can't "reject" the things in the first paragraph. It's not that truth exists - but it really can't be credibly determined which side has it at present. There's no argument to bridge different, eh, "sets of beliefs".
There are cynical 'peddlers', but then there are true believers too.
Prediction markets provide a solution. Theoretically, one which doesn't contradict any of the prevailing "sets of beliefs". Arguments for them are... non-ideological? Something like that. Pure deduction, math, basically.
If they work like e.g. Scott believes them to work, and current "sets of beliefs" will reach such consensus, then there's a trustless solution. The problem wasn't such a big deal in the past because we were mostly covered by authoritative sources of truth - but that wasn't really principled in the first place (kinda very wrong, really), and it's unlikely to somehow emerge again. I think "The Revolt of The Public and the Crisis of Authority in the New Millennium" gets the base problem right.
As for the lockdowns themselves, frankly, I have no idea. I like them for a heterodox reason tho; I want stuff to move forward and I believe mass lockdowns (which were kinda magic blackswan for me btw. - I'd never expect such a thing could actually happen, and certainly not be sustained for more than a week or two) help.
They should've accelerated death of retail (which is a relic of the past), they made remote work slightly less of a niche (unfortunately somehow, despite how long the situation took, it'll still massively backslide I think). They might've pushed us a little closer to the UBI. Hopefully also automation, if people believe human labor is less reliable now.
I'm sad The Conversation didn't focus on remote work, apart from acute 'lockdowns' aspect now that it was widespread for a while. Why aren't people making the connection with climate change, housing, commute(=time lost) and so on? Widespread push for remote work to become a standard for all mental work seems so obviously necessary if one believes any of these are problems.
I think your understanding, as described in this comment, is uncharitable. I don't think almost anyone is, deliberately, a "fake news peddler" – nor does anyone want it to be the case that "nothing is securely grounded in reality, no facts are true, every opinion is just as worthy as any other". In fact, AFAICT, that's exactly backwards – almost everyone believes that _something_ IS "securely grounded in reality", that there are true facts, but that THEIR own opinions are MORE worthy than those of the people with which they disagree.
I appreciate Scott looking at arguments and 'making' them complex – the most interesting arguments or subjects/topics/whatever ARE often complex. And anything with even a hint of consequentialism is necessarily going to be complex and complicated – the world is big, good data is expensive, and our own understanding is severely limited. I generally appreciate people NOT being satisfied with 'common sense' and exploring the MUCH larger space of possible hypotheses, and examining the relevant evidence in as much excruciating detail as they can manage.
Let me clarify what I said and what I mean: of course, the real world is a complex place and many events in it can be understood only as a result of detailed analysis based on extensive data. Some of what Scott does in this area is very interesting and worthwhile and I appreciate and enjoy it as much as you do.
But sometimes meaningful data just can't be obtained. For example, measuring the outcomes in those states that locked down with those that didn't and using those comparisons to decide if lockdowns were right or wrong as national policy across states and communities that widely differ. Or trying to draw up a comprehensive balance sheet that captures every bit of the good and the bad of marijuana legalization. Both of these are examples of Scott wrestling with decisions that didn’t require such complexity. I called what was needed instead “common sense” and I seemed to have touched a nerve here with that term.
But what I mean by common-sense isn’t rustics in cloth caps quoting from Old Moore’s Almanac, although it seems to have been interpreted in that way, but smart people using known and secure facts about the world to form opinions and make decisions that pass the test of being obviously true. What I’m complaining about is when people ignore such common sense and spout unreliable and often worthless data to justify opinions that are, just on the face of it, idiotic.
We were awash in such idiotic opinions about locking down, many of them from smart people who were saying things that made me cringe – and some of them still do. There are those who can prove that global heating is fake, that vaccines cause autism, that immigrants commit the majority of crime. You can prove anything and you can make any idea no matter how absurd seem reasonable – just look at what QAnon cultists think.
We have to be careful about worshiping data, about trying too hard to nail everything down. “Striving to better, we oft mar what’s well”, as King Lear said. Sometimes we just can’t interrogate the world to get every scrap of reliable data, and sometimes common sense, as defined above, is the best guide to what’s true and what’s isn’t.
I don't think prediction markets are associated with common sense - you can bet based on your common sense, I can bet based on my sophisticated model, and whichever of our strategies was better will win.
I think political science has pretty roundly disproven your second paragraph - see all those studies showing that people with better science education/knowledge are *more* likely to be polarized around scientific issues, not less.
Have you read my original lockdown post (or any of my other Much More Than You Wanted To Know posts)? I feel like that might be the quickest antidote to what you're saying.
Actually, your point about people with better science education/knowledge supports my argument: too much knowledge can be a bad thing. In the social sciences, in particular, you can rummage around published research and find results to prove almost anything.
The main point of my post was to argue for making decisions based on what is solidly known, what you might call common sense, and not go searching for what probably can never be known, or what is arrived at through decidedly shaky and often biased means.
Yes, I agree. I feel like there is a whole class of arguments like this, which boil down to "Determining the truth is hard, so I won't even try". Even if you can't fully understand an argument or formulate a counter-argument yourself, there are plenty of steps to try to partially understand it rather than just giving up -- some of which you described in this post.
I like common sense, but common sense works when it does work because it's based on familiarity with a lot of similar cases. Coronavirus was a pretty unusual case.
Common sense is just a nice way of saying "mental inertia," and the only genuine utility it has lies in reducing the chances of falling for scams that rely on strange theories that require unusual coincidences to be true, e.g. it keeps you safe(r) from tinfoil hat conspiracy beliefs.
But you will never make money using common sense, since you will always buy when everyone else is buying (prices are high) and sell when everyone else is selling (prices are low). You will never innovate or invent, because common sense will tell you that the innovation or invention is impossible or unwise, since ipso facto it defies the conventional wisdom.
I'm pretty confused here. It sounds like you said "we can't possibly figure out whether a given policy is a good idea or not", and then you said "so we'll just use common sense to figure out whether a given policy is a good idea or not", which seems like a flat contradiction to me.
I don't see how I can coherently choose which policy to support other than "try to predict which will have the best results". Even if I'm not very good at predicting that, taking my best stab at it still seems obviously better than any other strategy of choosing policies.
There's no escape from consequentialism!
Was Max Davies *trying* to escape from consequentialism? I thought he said that people will self-quarantine anyway, but mandating a quarantine would cause less economic damage, and therefore we should mandate one. That sounded pretty consequentialist to me.
I'm really not sure what they were doing or trying to do. I was just agreeing with your comment.
> It sounds like you said "we can't possibly figure out whether a given policy is a good idea or not", and then you said "so we'll just use common sense to figure out whether a given policy is a good idea or not", which seems like a flat contradiction to me.
I would steelman his argument as:
"we can't possibly figure out whether a given policy is a good idea or not given all possible variables, downstream effects and feedback loops, so we'll just figure out what policy looks good based on the well understood foundational principles at play"
In this case, the foundational principles being how viruses spread via contact, therefore we should reduce all possible points of contact and not make it a choice so people are forced to go to work by idiot bosses.
> and not make it a choice so people are forced to go to work by idiot bosses.
I of course meant that people are *not* forced to go to work by idiot bosses.
Quoting Max Davies:
"
People will respond to images of hospitals denying admission and people dying at home in great distress by self-locking down. Such ad-hoc quarantining will be chaotic and lack legal protections, and will cause great economic damage.
"
That is where your common sense chain of logic breaks down completely.
People responded by staying at home long before American hospitals denied people admission and BEFORE politicians responded with mandatory lockdowns.
Politicians were actually *encouraging* people to go out to their community events because businesses were hurting because of the VOLUNTARY stay at home behavior.
One description of why the unknown unknowns can be high impact and unpredictable:
Suppose the US had absolutely no lockdowns. This would probably make the population dislike the incumbent Republican government more, which would probably lead to the Democrats win with a huge majority in the election. Whether this is good or bad is up to your interpretation, but it could plausibly have an impact much larger than the marginal impact of the lockdowns.
On the other side, suppose the US had stronger lockdowns with more bipartisan support from the federal government. This might lead to the incumbent Republican party staying in power in the election, especially if the stricter lockdowns had a large impact on keeping case counts down. Similarly, this could also plausibly have an impact much larger than the marginal impact of the lockdowns.
Of course, the assumptions behind both of those scenarios could be incorrect, but they're at least *plausible*, making the whole situation impossible to evaluate to a binary yes/no.
Whether such effects should be taken into account depends on the reason for discussing whether lockdowns were beneficial on the net. Reasons I can think of can include (1) whether we should use lockdowns in a similar situation in the future, (2) whose early predictions were right, or (3) which party we should praise (and reward with our votes) for its COVID policies.
I don't think the sort of indirect effects you discuss should be relevant to any of these, even if they trump the more direct effects. The effects on elections will be different at a different place or at a different time. Predictions probably didn't intend to cover indirect effects through the elections. And if, say, you're a Democrat, you probably don't want to reward Republicans with your vote in the next election because they benefited the world (in your opinion) by losing the election; likewise, if you're a Republican, you don't want to punish Republicans for losing the election by voting Democrat the next time.
"If a professor comes up with some study that shows guns decrease crime, and that professor is a gun owner, goes hunting every day, and donates to conservative organizations, is that suspicious? What if another professor shows that guns increase crime, and this professor has never owned a gun in her life, hates hunting, and donates to liberal organizations? It feels like "enthusiastic gun owner" is more of a "marked" group than "non-gun-owner", but that's just a coincidence - if we had been in a world where academia leaned conservative and most professors owned guns, it would be the opposite. But should we really discount the fact that the pro-gun study professor has an NRA bumper sticker on his car? I’m still not sure how to think about this."
This strikes me as the fundamental crisis both of rationality and our current moment. My sense is that most people have already surrendered to the view that political or class alignment overshadows all evidence of unbiased analysis or opinion. And its not like there aren't plenty of real examples of this! But if we can't find any way past this problem we are probably screwed.
When there is enough uncertainty, model outcomes reflect the biases of the author a surprising amount of the time. I'd do a study on this but I'm biased that this is clearly true.
Here is some advice, if you don't like questionable statistical manipulation then never look closely at some areas of climate science. This is particularly true for the ones that make it through the media's new and alarming results filter.
A lot of statistical manipulation can be a sign of a very difficult problem, it can also be a sign that the less complex models weren't giving answers the author liked. For some problems where there were literally new statistical methods invented for analysis it would be nice to see a progression of different model outcomes and how the results were affected. Sometimes raw data is just crap, and you can't polish it no matter how hard you try.
I'm very surprised and sorry that <i>"it just felt too weird and transgressive to focus on something authorities weren't even talking about."</i> That's one of the biggest reasons I started following your writing, Scott - you've been willing to focus on weird but important aspects of situations, even when authorities aren't talking about them!
+1 This. I imagine it is difficult though.
Thirding this post. Pulling sideways is far, far more interesting than endlessly relitigating whatever the latest partisan war is
+3 at this point
The toughest thing about this topic for me is the fact that for many conservative places (like Indiana where I live), "lockdown" was largely hypothetical! Yes, stuff closed for a bit, but for most of COVID you could go most places and largely wouldn't even be asked to wear a mask.
How do you study the effects of a mask "mandate" (read: suggestion) that more than half the population simply ignored? Surveys seem like a very thin way of learning things like "a quarter of the people at the grocery store don't wear masks" and "lots of people never stopped getting together at all."
I really wish all discussions of this topic would ban the word "lockdown" for precisely this reason!
Sadly, some terms really just seem to be extremely memetically infectious, e.g. 'garner'. 'Lockdown' too is just too convenient for almost everyone. I'm not even sure that it would do any good to invent another circumlocution.
And now that we're complaining about terms – 'COVID' isn't quite right; 'SARS-CoV-2' is better!
I like to distinguish between lockdown orders and lockdownlike behaviour.
We need a word to describe the things a whole lot of governments actually did. We don't have nearly so much need for a word to describe a thing that almost nobody actually did or is likely to do. "Lockdown" is the word that is in common use for the thing that we need a word for, and I don't think it is worth the bother of trying to force a transition to a new term just because "Lockdown" seems etymologically impure in this context.
But using "lockdown" to describe whatever is in common between the covid policies of Texas, Singapore, China, Australia, UK, and San Francisco is like using "democracy" to describe whatever is in common between the government forms of Texas, Singapore, China, Australia, UK, and San Francisco! It's not a useful category.
Possibly I'm missing something, but I think Texas, Singapore, China, Australia, the UK, and San Francisco all had at one time or another the thing where the government orders people to stay in their homes unless they had an approved reason for going out. Granted, in Texas and China that was imposed at the city or county/province level. That, plus closures of a broad range of businesses, and schools, and bans on public gatherings, seems like a useful category. The fact that specifics (and severity of enforcement) differed within members of this category, doesn't mean it isn't a useful category.
"People are allowed to leave their homes when they want to" vs "People can only leave their homes for approved purposes", is noteworthy and worth talking about in ways that "here is the list of specific approved purposes for leaving your home" isn't,
In the United States, every single place that ever had an order had "going out for a walk" as an approved purpose. And most places only had the relevant order for something like 6-10 weeks. The vast majority of the political argumentation about government-mandated pandemic response measures was after most of these stay-at-home orders were gone
It seems to me that "business closures" are one policy to discuss, "bans on public gatherings" are another, "mask mandates" are another, and "stay at home orders" (with or without the outdoor exercise exception) are another.
There's nothing gained by lumping them all together as "lockdown" any more than you gain something by lumping together Singaporean one-party elections, Chinese style one-party decision making with mass membership in the party, US style two party bicameralism (with more or less restrictions on how to register), and Australian style mandatory voting with transferable vote as a single thing called "democracy".
>In the United States, every single place that ever had an order had "going out for a walk" as an approved purpose.
Even prisoners in solitary confinement are usually allowed to walk back and forth in the exercise yard for half an hour every day. If you're allowed to "go out for a walk" but not to go anywhere or come within six feet of anyone, I'm not giving you any credit for allowing me to decide when and on which empty street to take my allotted walk.
We need a word for the situation where you are only allowed to leave your home is to take a walk on an empty street (or other short list of approved things), because that is a thing that happened and it is controversial that it needs to be talked about. We have a word, "lockdown", which is being used for that purpose and for no other purpose in any related context. I am sympathetic to your view that we could have chosen a better word, but it's too late for that and this word will do the job.
Scott's original post did discuss, with charts, that mask mandates didn't obviously lead to more mask wearing.
I could tell that paper was exhausting to write, and thank you for going through with it, even if the results weren't quite what you wanted in terms of clarity.
I find topics like this to be intellectual catnip personally. The fact that it really seems like no clarity is feasible, or maybe even possible, just makes the meta-investigation of investigations of such topics themselves fascinating.
By chance my RSS feed today turned up https://ourworldindata.org/child-mortality-big-problem-in-brief
Quick back of an envelope gives me that if the whole world was as prosperous as W. Europe (where I am) that would save ~3m child deaths/ annum
3m/ annum is roughly the C19 death rate over the last year. I have no idea what would have happened if we'd done nothing and carried on. If we'd doubled the death rate but the economy had carried on growing normally we'd be at break even.
The correlation between wealth (GDP/capita) and longevity, both in life expectancy and child mortality, is overwhelming. I saw some talk about this in 'phase 2' of the conversation last year but it seems to have been forgotten
The argument is actually much stronger than that - you get most of the benefit well before you get to W. European levels, so you can get most of the benefit for a small fraction of the cost! You can see that in the data on that site itself (Disclosure, I'm real big on effective altruism, it's pretty front of mind for me constantly).
Like how "emotional damage" overwhelms the calculation when it comes to lockdowns in developed countries, poverty overwhelms the calculation when it comes to lockdowns in rest of world. Well, that, and younger populations can have an order of magnitude lower IFR too.
"Other times I just went for maximally stupid models and saw what happened"
I think you're probably being too harsh on this as a good judgment method, at least in this case. Lockdowns are, in general, very 'maximal' policies; they are not "adding a penny tax to drinks at the bar" or "restrict advertisements for tourism" which are the much more typical policies you might see a government introduce. They are a great cudgel of a policy.
As you state, this is helpful in bounding things, but given the political interests, and the immense difficulty of teasing out impacts, it should bound people to a great degree. If the broad policy of preventing interactions fails to produce broad results, we should be quite suspicious of very careful, complex models. Given the replication crisis and similar scandals, I think a skeptical instinct in these cases would prove a better judge overall.
If one was studying lockdowns, why choose red vs blue states? Why not instead choose US vs China? Because that's an emotional ouchie for many.
I would argue that the targeted comparison reveals a lot about the motives of an author. Even red and blue states aren't that much different. They each have large percentages of the opposition who behave according to their tribal tendencies regardless of government edicts. I'm no fan of China but the real question to me is whether hard core China-style lockdowns are what is needed once widespread transmission is underway, not these flip a red/blue coin and micro-analyze the results.
I live in Florida and we have been bombarded by the national media with partisan accusations constantly. No state mask mandates! Curiously my county was under mandatory mask orders for over a year, as was almost every metropolitan area in Florida. Florida left the decision making to the local areas. Florida-Man-Moron. Aaaaaghh, people on beaches! It was all so tiring and wasteful to read.
Nobody won against covid. Tabulating the losses to 50.1/49.9 is not very interesting. Open a county level national map, set it to cumulative cases/deaths per population and scroll around. The timing was different, but the cumulative results were pretty uniform. There was a big dry forest and it burned down.
Why not US vs Japan or South Korea? Less ouchie, and more reliable data.
> If one was studying lockdowns, why choose red vs blue states? Why not instead choose US vs China?
Surely because red states and blue states have fewer extra variables than the US vs China?
How you can you do a USA vs China comparison when the "data" out of China is completely untrustworthy?
Bingo.
"One thing some people fairly called me out on was asymmetric political bias adjustment."
Yeah, I think you are correcting in the wrong direction.
Who gets better at arguing and defending their points: Someone who is surrounded by people that agree with them, or someone who is in a hostile ideological environment?
I think if you want to be an openly conservative or libertarian academic you have to be *better* than your peers within your field. Otherwise you'll get washed out. Just like anytime you see a racial minority succeeding in a field with discrimination, they are almost always above average in that field because they are operating with a handicap.
Economics is the exception, and you should go look up the actual numbers. I can't cuz I'm on mobile right now, but if I remember correctly it's still a clear liberal majority. It's just more like a 2:1 ratio of liberal:conservative. Which demonstrates how bonkers the rest of academia is when they complain about how "conservative" the economics field is.
The University of Chicago law school has the reputation of being conservative. After spending most of ten years there, my guess is that, in every presidential election of my lifetime, the Democrat would have won. Note that both Obama and Cass Sunstein were on the faculty.
Just the other day I saw the ratio 4:1 for economists at American universities in some graph on some website. No idea where I saw it, how many institutions it covered, when it was from, who made it or how reliable it was so please do add a whole wheelbarrow of salt to this claim but the number stuck out because the ratio was that much higher than I'd have imagined.
Also on the Tyler Cowen point specifically ... Cowen is a huge germaphobe. And I know a few professors in the GMU econ sphere that are pretty convinced his personal germaphobe views have been a major impact on his views of the pandemic.
It's less of a libertarian being against lockdowns then it is a germaphobe being in favor of lockdowns, and coincidentally libertarian on some other things that don't have much impact on him.
For a purported "huge germaphobe," Tyler sure visits a lot of Third World countries.
That surprises me too, but I don't think anyone has claimed that germaphobia is an entirely rational set of reactions.
I heard Trump was also a huge germophobe, which doesn't seem to have affected his views very much.
This reminds me of the many claims that "conservatism comes from purity intutitions against disease" and such - there's sometimes okay evidence for them, but somehow the instinctive fear of disease doesn't translate into intellectual policies on disease the way you would expect.
I heard an interview with a journalist who covered Trump for New York Magazine—Olivia Nuzzi—, who claimed that Trump wasn’t a germophobe, he just thought poor people were gross.
It seems Trumps germaphobia is somewhere along the lines of finding sneezing/coughing gross, and not wanting to shake hands with people that just coughed or are sick.
https://www.politico.com/story/2019/07/07/donald-trump-germaphobe-1399258
After the pandemic his "germaphobic" views seem to be the default. And now that I think back on it, Trump did last all the way into October before catching Covid.
The descriptions I heard of Cowen's level of germaphobia were a bit ... more. I generally like Cowen and would feel bad describing some of his reactions publicly. It would feel even more like attacking him than what I have already said.
"the instinctive fear of disease doesn't translate into intellectual policies on disease the way you would expect."
I don't think it is instinctive fear that matters as much as the specific fear of covid-19. I'm not sure why one germaphobe got triggered by covid and another one didn't.
Cole has the right of it; even economics is very slanted left. Increasingly so as the American Economic Association has recently been jumping up and down cheerleading for social justice issues. It took a while, but econ has started down the road to sociology along with the other sciences.
And yea... Tyler Cowen has been awful on the whole pandemic thing.
But then you get into people who are just contrarians.
No you don't.
I guess it depends on how strong the pressure is among academics to conform to the mainstream opinion on a particular issue.
On the one hand, there is your argument that we should correct in favor of the contrarian opinion. If most researchers are biased in favor of the mainstream, liberal-associated opinion, there are likely to be good arguments or evidence for the contrarian view that don't get publicity.
On the other hand, if there are 2 conservative academics espousing the contrarian view, and 100 liberal academics espousing the mainstream view, and the pressure to conform on the issue at hand isn't extreme, then it's more likely that the 2 conservatives are wrong because they are biased than that all the 100 liberals are wrong because they are biased. The liberals may be biased as much as the conservatives (or more, because of the peer pressure), but out of the 100 there will surely be at least a few who come to the right conclusion and are willing to say it (again, if the pressure against it isn't extreme).
Indeed, the contrarian, conservative-associated position is more persuasive if there are a few liberals who come out in its favor.
In most cases I think people would recognize that ~2,500% under representation of a group might imply at least some kind of discrimination.
So the 2 vs 100 numbers might not be representative of the true numbers on each side. If it was 100 liberal academics vs 50 conservative academics and they all held views along party lines would you be quicker to recognize that it's just a partisan topic?
Scott: Thanks for the effort you devoted to the article. I do not think we are near a final accounting on this issue. And, I doubt that we will ever achieve real clarity because some information that would be very good to have was never gathered, such as: We did not do random tests of healthy individuals to determine what the real rate of infection was; There were nowhere near enough autopsies performed to be able to get an accurate picture of dying with COVID vs dying from COVID.
Further we do not have a good grip on many collateral issues:
"Study: Hospitalizations for eating disorders spike among adolescents during COVID" by University of Michigan
https://medicalxpress.com/news/2021-07-hospitalizations-disorders-spike-adolescents-covid.html
"The number of adolescents admitted to the hospital for severe illness from eating disorders has increased significantly during the COVID-19 pandemic, new research suggests. At one center, the number of hospital admissions among adolescents with eating disorders more than doubled during the first 12 months of the pandemic, according to the study that appears in a pre-publication of Pediatrics. The 125 hospitalizations among patients ages 10-23 at Michigan Medicine in those 12 months reflect a significant increase over previous years, as admissions related to eating disorders during the same timeframe between 2017 and 2019 averaged 56 per year."
"Emergency Department Visits for Suspected Suicide Attempts Among Persons Aged 12–25 Years Before and During the COVID-19 Pandemic — United States, January 2019–May 2021" Weekly / June 18, 2021 / 70(24);888–894 On June 11, 2021, this report was posted online as an MMWR Early Release.
https://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/volumes/70/wr/mm7024e1.htm?s_cid=mm7024e1_w
"In May 2020, during the COVID-19 pandemic, ED visits for suspected suicide attempts began to increase among adolescents aged 12–17 years, especially girls. During February 21–March 20, 2021, suspected suicide attempt ED visits were 50.6% higher among girls aged 12–17 years than during the same period in 2019; among boys aged 12–17 years, suspected suicide attempt ED visits increased 3.7%."
"COVID and schools: the evidence for reopening safely" | 07 July 2021 | News Feature | https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-021-01826-x
Also U.S. drug overdose deaths surged 30% during the pandemic:
https://www.marketwatch.com/story/u-s-drug-overdose-deaths-soared-nearly-30-in-2020-driven-by-synthetic-opioids-11626358537?rss=1
From that article: "The estimated 93,331 deaths from drug overdoses last year, a record high, represent the sharpest annual increase in at least three decades, and compare with an estimated toll of 72,151 deaths in 2019, "
If the extra 20,000 deaths are attributed to the lockdown. it might change the cost benefit ratio dramatically.
And the problem with *anything* like this is that it's very hard to tell how much to attribute it to government lockdown policy and how much to that fact that many members of the general public drastically changed their individual behavior.
Re. Bias adjustment: I'd say it's valid, in that anyone who breaks from the consensus needs to be more harshly evaluated, even if that consensus might be political in nature; Like how market skeptic economists get raked over the coals
> For example, one person brought up that I (as a younger person) might be underestimating the emotional distress older people feel about COVID, because they (unlike me) are at serious risk of death.
Isn't it the opposite? For me (and my young friends), and lots of people around 25 (in France), the conclusion is that we sacrificed a big chunk of our mental health and youth to protect the physical health of old people.
If you have a good memory, you can play blindfolded chess against 10 GMs and score 50%. Just pair them up and let them play each other with you as a conduit. Derren Brown does this on TV with a twist (he takes 11 and defeats 1 to end up with a winning record).
Sounds like what you want to do/have done!
I don't think "emotional damage" is the right term. It wrongfully implies that the damage of being unable to do normal activities like going to a bar is somehow different from health damage. It's not. The reason we dislike being ill isn't because it gives us some abstract "bad health" state. We dislike it because it stops us doing normal things. That's what health actually means to most people. Ability to do normal activities is a critical component of QALY - a disability that has no harm beyond making you unable to go to work, unable to do recreation, and unable to see your extended family would be considered a devastating health impact, not just be called "emotional damage".
> a disability that has no harm beyond making you unable to go to work, unable to do recreation, and unable to see your extended family would be considered a devastating health impact, not just be called "emotional damage".
That's a really good point, thanks for bringing it up.
Wow. This seems like the start of a really relevant thought experiment. Have I not read this anywhere else? Considering both sides of it as though they were both diseases clarifies the trade-off. If I imagine that I can reduce the impact of the coronavirus by giving almost everybody this other disease, which doesn't do any harm beyond debilitating symptoms mimicking lockdown... Would I choose to counter Pandemic C by releasing Pandemic L into the population?
And the rhetorical move can be reversed: What if both were government policies? Imagine we lived in a horrifying dystopia where the police more or less randomly sprayed people with a toxic gas that harmed them the same way coronavirus does. A lot of people don't even notice the effects, but, also, a lot of people die. This is legal, and it's politically impossible to completely stop the toxic gas policy. But there's a ballot initiative to mandate lockdowns, and if it's implemented, it would decrease toxic gas incidents by exactly as much as lockdowns decrease coronavirus cases. Would I vote to counter the toxic gas policy by implementing lockdowns?
The main reason I struck this realisation is because for QALY calculations, medication side effect impacts are treated no differently than an equal impact arising from illness in the first place. From that, I realised there's no reason to consider the side effects of public health interventions as incomparable to the side effects of medication.
The random spraying of toxic gas immediately make me think of tobacco. Still way too acceptable in way too many places.
It's slower to act and is done by regular private citizens, but kills way more than covid.
I figured I'd check on "[tobacco] kills way more than COVID".
The WHO claims that ~8 million die annually worldwide from tobacco. A bit over 4 million people have died of COVID to date; about half of them in the first year of the pandemic (March 2020-March 2021). (Source, some Forbes article I googled.)
Either of those stats might wildly misrepresent the numbers; c.f. the debate re: the accuracy of Indian statistics. Hard to judge.
Of tobacco mortalities, ~7/8 are of smokers, who, depending on your ontology of addiction, may have accepted the risks of tobacco use. On the other hand, COVID mortalities may cluster in those who avoid precautionary measures, etc., so that might not be that different.
It's easy to imagine that in a world without interventions many more people would have died from COVID (e.g., a world without lockdowns where Mainland China had much higher levels of death). But then, it's easy to imagine that in a world without interventions the level of smoking would also be way higher.
The big difference, IMO, is that tobacco use & concomitant death is probably pretty constant from year to year, while COVID seems unlikely to stick around in the exact same way. And tobacco is, as you note, part of ongoing society, while COVID is an unusually bad pandemic disease.
On the other hand, tobacco users do report enjoying tobacco, and basically nobody reports enjoying COVID.
Even second-hand smoke overwhelmingly harms people who live with smokers, many of them voluntarily.
Nobody enjoys COVID, but people enjoy activities that put them at risk of COVID.
My initial intuition in response to this was that I find deprivation through social rules less destructive than the same deprivation applied internally.
Suppose for example that I've been (perhaps unjustly) placed on the no-fly list. The government says to me, "would you rather that we forbid you from buying a ticket, boarding a flight, etc., or would you rather be hypnotically programmed with a debilitating fear of flying, such that you won't ever want to get in a plane again, no matter the incentive?" I think I'd choose the former—and the same in plenty of other cases I can imagine.
I'm not exactly sure why that is, but it does seem like an interesting angle for investigation.
Gas masks.
Wow. How on earth have I never encountered this angle before? This is a really excellent point.
Disagree entirely.
The reason we dislike being ill is because it feels horrible. Even a simple cold is *miserable* - even though it doesn't prevent you from doing your normal stuff. Your head hurts, your nose is all sore from blowing it, you can't breathe properly, you keep sneezing, your eyes are watery, your throat hurts from post-nasal drip. People with incurable cancer can mostly do their normal stuff, but they suffer from pain and malaise and the horrible creeping knowledge of imminent doom.
Illnesses that don't physically prevent you from doing normal things are still quite unpleasant.
Not all illnesses are the same. Yes, many included pain, nausea, or general discomfort as symptoms, but there are ones that might mimic lockdowns - eg. severely immunocompromised people, who spend their whole life about as justly afraid of contagion as an old person in a Covid hotspot, but are actually perfectly healthy (assuming no other concurrent diseases) for as long as they can avoid any exposure to pathogens.
It's interesting how different the perspectives on something like the cold can be. For me, while it's unpleasant to have it, I'd be far from describing it as miserable. The main restriction is definitely having to pace myself for simple things like going on a walk or for groceries, and being exhausted afterwards. Having to forego some social events. Not being able to do anything productive. I'd gladly take more felt symptoms to avoid those, and if a cold only made me feel worse I would judge it as much less severe…
Don't agree at all. The reason we don't like being seriously ill -- and I don't mean with a cold or some other trifling inconvenience the youngest crowd may understand as "sick" but with something genuinely nasty like cancer or emphysema or malaria -- is because it physically hurts, a lot, and even if you get better you have to endure a lot of painful and humiliating medical intervention, and because people start treating you weird, as if you don't exist, or are an object instead of a human, and because it puts the serious fear of God into you that you won't get better, you'll just die in pain and anxiety, and even if you do you'll suffer permanent disability or pain.
The fact that you're not going to be able to meet up with the guys this Saturday to go to the bar and watch the game is about the least important fear that attends, say, a diagnosis of lung cancer or being bit by a rabid bat. You're grateful if you just get to the point where you can breathe without pain or talk a walk around the block.
Regardless of the weighting of emotional damage relative to sickness, we need to be able to categorize different kinds of harms in some way: one will use different studies to quantify sickness and to quantify emotional damage. If you don't like term "emotional damage", what term do you suggest for what it refers to?
Seeing rationalists everywhere, not sure if Baader Meinhoffing: https://metaforecastings.com/about-us/
Probably this is a metafore for life.
Their "design flexibility" bucket on their "process" page just steals the SketchUp logo straight out.
> it's so dumb that it couldn't lie even if it wanted to
Don't you mean "couldn't even tell the truth if it wanted to"? Why would you expect a dumb model to tell the truth?
Because there are lots of 'dumb' models that are (varying degrees of) approximately true
There are also lots of 'dumb' models that are (varying degrees of) completely false. What's your point?
Scott's point in using a 'dumb' model was precisely to avoid arguments about complex or complicated statistical methods, i.e. quickly and 'cheaply' evaluate the plausibility of some kind of causal claim in a way that others could follow and evaluate without background knowledge of esoteric statistics.
What was your point?
My point is that Scott's model is clearly not only "dumb" in the sense of "simple", but also "dumb" in the sense of bad. He does a "best fit" line on data where statistically there is no reason to just draw a single line.
While Scott may have eliminated some researcher bias, so does flipping a coin. I would rather he had just flipped a coin.
> While Scott may have eliminated some researcher bias, so does flipping a coin. I would rather he had just flipped a coin.
My bad! I thought you were serious.
I am being serious. There's nothing virtuous about using a bad model in itself. Scott's model is not particularly good, I don't think it is better than "no model at all", i.e. flipping a coin.
"Not lying" (even though that's just a metaphor) doesn't imply any superior ability to get at truth. One can just say nothing. In modelling terms, 'saying nothing' would be to produce something that is uninformative or just patently silly.
So IF a simple model seems to shows something interesting and plausible you should give it some bonus points for likelihood of truthiness. Whereas a more complex model with many tunable parameters can be manipulated by the researcher (or just internally over-fit itself) to produce seemingly more interesting stuff much more of the time - even if it's nonsense ('lying').
Simple models have the advantages of being easier to interpret not being "p-hackable" (able to tweak parameters to achieve a desired result). The latter, in particular, can easily happen by accident: it's natural to continually add stuff to a model until it produces a result that matches your expectations.
Simple models work where reality is simple. There is a reason "back and white thinking" is decried, it is because "black and white thinking" is an example of a simple model failing.
Because more complex models tend to have more degrees of researcher freedom in them and be harder for other people to understand, which opens up more avenues for designing the model to get the conclusion you want whilst hiding that you're doing so.
Thanks for writing this one and the earlier one, Scott. There is a lot of clear thinking still to be done about the global Covid issue and moving it forward is important. Also nice technique for getting researchers to talk to each other.
This got too g-d-n long but I think I had a point.
Part of the challenge of analyzing lockdowns in the United States, and some commenters have mentioned it somewhat - I am not sure anywhere in the US "really" did a "real" lockdown. There were narrowings, yes, there were some stoppages - school! work! but the combination of society, government and policy delivered something other than "lockdown." Some call it closures, I'm sure there are other names. Some smaller locales (e.g. Indian reservation) had curfews and "only residents allowed in" policies but this was not widespread.
So, in the US, lockdown it was not, and so the dramatic mental references that attach to that word are not as pertinent. Economic damage, business damage, livelihood damage, educational damage, relationship damage, all to varying extents. We don't need the word "lockdown" to communicate that there were bad consequences. Some of the bad consequences derived from the partial nature of the restrictions; we didn't shut enough down for long enough to make enough difference, and it's possible that fewer shut-days would have been required to achieve the same outcome or better, if the shut-days and open-days were distributed differently.
I remember late Feb/early March 2020 because I had just left a job and moved to a different state. I had enough money to get by while finishing the move and for the first time in a long time I was not freaking out about 100 things. So when I'd get up in the morning and hear birds and there were no contrails and little traffic and then we'd go to the park and walk around trying to be socially distanced, it was like a gift. Which felt dirty in a way, because people were dying, suffering, struggling, but for my specific situation it felt like, ok, this is what it takes to lift the miserable rat race lifestyle off of us and let's make sure we never accept it back. For many people that lift did not occur at all but for some it did. Air quality improved dramatically where I was. My suspicion is that people who could work from home, had some conscience for their fellow man and were able to act on that by conducting isolation, and tended to left/center-left politics, may have felt that lift more than other groups. And so now for some people the word "lockdown" means "that lift." When the people with the means to do so undertook more of a "welfare of humanity" project than perhaps ever before, and it was one uniquely suited to the "personal is political" stance; making personal choices for the benefit of humanity, writ very large. It hit a lot of buttons.
That began to sour a few weeks in though when people were still going out in public but not as often and some of the social graces eroded; people who had gotten very good at pretending not to fear each other now showed furtive glances in stores, plus, what if someone coughed on me? And it had never been good for people without financial security, work-from-home, decent daycare. Then the "welfare of humanity" project shifted to a laser focus on the experience of these essential workers, who needed to be helped. Then the welfare of humanity project, which was already coming apart, became aligned with social justice in the United States and became even more "welfare of humanity." But by now "lockdown" meant "welfare of humanity" for enough people that discussing it was difficult. "Lockdown" did not mean "welfare of humanity" for everyone by any stretch; even with what we had in the US which was not lockdown, even that did not mean welfare of humanity project.
So we have to face that "welfare of humanity" project did cause suffering, did cause harm, and there are a few levels to that. The tradeoff level is tempting because it gets over with faster. But we skip the "what is harm" and "what is welfare of humanity" and "what was lockdown" definitions at our peril.
An element of the harm which I don't see mentioned much is an increase in paranoia in multiple quarters. Paranoia of government, of international politics, of other people. Maybe sublimated fear of Covid itself, maybe just looking at the policy challenges and disagreements and struggle. The "wow, they're incompetent" reaction hit people differently and I think depended somewhat on how much an individual was invested in "welfare of humanity," Some people already thought the government was incompetent and were maybe saddened but not surprised. Others found themselves in contexts where paranoia/criticism was embraced, for the first time they saw behind the Oz curtain. That had some low-information aspects though but I think it partly spawned the Jan 6 capitol situation, and this a-ha moment was pretty widespread. It became "a-ha" versus "welfare of humanity" and there we linger at the social level. Covid-era has caused wakeup calls in different ways for different people; some who had some trust in society prior to Covid looked at "welfare of humanity" and "shutdowns" and realized they were at the mercy of people they didn't trust, and reacted to that.
I think "welfare of humanity" jumped the shark in early summer 2020 but I have not yet mapped exactly how. The "a-ha" has not always reflected reality and has moved further away in fact, but to me it is less hollow, it still has fuel, and so the rabid mistrust will continue. But "welfare of humanity" euphoria causes hangover, but since it also coincides with a left goal, or many left goals, it cannot be put down either. In July 2021 now it is paranoia versus hangover, with some liberal policy accomplishments.
In Covid terms though, still the US is a society that had arguments about philosophy while doing not enough of the right things not enough of the time, while people died. We did not correctly name the task at hand and take effective action. And Covid went away a little bit but not forever, and now it is coming back. "Welfare of humanity" won't work anymore but "paranoia" doesn't protect from disease either.
Some of the most antisocial impulses of the "welfare of humanity" theory turn to paranoia themselves; "I am surrounded by idiots who don't understand data or science, I am smarter but alone, I could save you but you won't listen, why should I try to save you when you will not save yourselves" etc. That may or may not touch down to reality in various places, but it still operates coherently as the narrative of the hangover of "welfare of humanity."
So we have a lot of paranoia now and the disease is still spreading. Let's see, what comes next? It is important to try to figure out what reduced disease spread, because disease spread is a big negative. Looking at localities that had low transmission rates while being adjacent to localities with high transmission, those are the places I want to look at, because whatever they were doing probably umbrella-ed themselves against what would other wise have been higher numbers; that one is worth analyzing.
The answers may be different for different contexts. What to do at the level of a nursing home? What to do at the level of a town? How about metropolis? Neighborhood? Home? We have approached this looking for the one type of policy solution that everyone would agree on ("welfare of humanity!") but this a) jumped the shark and b) wasn't granular enough anyway. Some of the social enthusiasm from "WoH" went to "vaccines!" But when the authorities say very seriously that x will be enough, film buffs know, it is too early in the film, x will not be enough, they are just saying that so the populace doesn't panic. I got the vaccine but I believe the success against the variants stuff is overestimated; I thought things wouldn't be getting truly weird again until later in the fall but my timeline was wrong, I think it's happening sooner than that.
The question "should we lockdown again, and in what context" is interesting partly because we have to admit we never did that, and the various closures did hurt a lot of people, and welfare of humanity is in the hangover stage, paranoia is rampant, fires are burning, and people are still getting sick. So as for me I think, no, we should not do again what we did this last time, we need to learn what we can from the experiences that have been recorded and become equipped to craft functional solutions at state/local levels. Will that happen? Highly unlikely, partly because "paranoia" funnelled into "That is not a disease!" Yes, it is still a disease, yes, we need to deal with it, will we need some types of closures at some point in the future, maybe, but whoever does them should try to do it better this time. Policy? Voluntary action? Without "welfare of humanity" lifting people up, how many people will do voluntary restrictions this time? Are all those folks mostly vaccinated now anyway? How will the breakthrough infection rate decrease the impact of partial restrictions now?
I'm vulnerable to stories of overwhelmed hospitals. Other people have their different tipping points. There is a chance though that politicians/social leaders will be unwilling to touch restrictions even when it might help, because "welfare of humanity" is in hangover and "paranoia" is afoot. And in addition to the narrative wars there are actual germs around which still have to be dealt with.
It might be satisfying to conclude that "lockdown/welfare" didn't work. For me I think it didn't happen and again finding local communities that fared better than expected would be where the clues would live. Given it didn't happen here, indeed, it didn't work enough. That deserves noticing, that in spite of all the sacrifices people did make, mostly it wasn't a lockdown and it didn't solve everything. If we have to make sacrifices again we need to make smarter sacrifices.
This was too long but the sense of trying to see facts behind a tornado of narrative is very strong. The test-and-trace folks could do a lot of good if there were enough of them. I appreciate Scott taking a swing at it though because it helps show where to look next.
I just want to think you for writing all this.
You are welcome. Everyone is welcome. We need to get better at this whole pandemic survival thing. Communicating can help.
> mostly (completely false) claims that lockdowns cause more suicides, lockdowns devastate businesses, etc.
As far as I can tell the first is (probably) not true (though we don't really know, who knows if the toll takes a few years to set in, Tyler Cowen thinks emotional connections that were cut during the pandemic won't recover), whereas the second is probably not entirely false, at least as a first approximation?
>And it's so stupid - emotional damages! People being annoyed that they can't go to the bar
A few sentences later you write how weird it is that the libertarian people are writing angry op-eds, where did you think this anger came from? I mean "emotional damages" seems like such an obvious thing; this is obviously what people are also emotional about when they hate lockdowns; why else would they be emotional? No offense, but how is this in any way surprising?
>and it's good they are replaced by resilient ones.
I'm confused, why would they be replaced by better ones? As any economist will tell you, the alternative to something suboptimal is often not something perfect but nothing at all...
I strongly disagree with you here, because I think you’re missing the class of businesses that did best in the pandemic. In the US at least, after the initial shock the stock market did shockingly well. One of the explanations for this is that businesses traded on the stock market generally have the capital to weather COVID. And then all of their local competitors without the capital die out, and their market share increases making them worth more long term.
Closures seem predominantly based on capital rather than quality. While I don’t claim this is 100% of the cause, I think it’s a heavy contributor. And generally I think most mom and pop places are better than, say, McDonalds. But if you like the food most mega-chains serve, I guess we just have differing tastes.
> a restaurant that can survive a pandemic is probably better than one that can't.
I don't think that's right. A restaurant that can survive a pandemic is one that makes easily packaged food that can be easily delivered and/or served outside. Those features are sometimes good after the pandemic, but there are restaurants that *can't* survive a pandemic no matter *how* good they are, because their value depends on coziness and conviviality and social mixing.
The pandemic isn't a uniform depressant for all restaurants, but is distortionary in various ways.
You can blame the restaurants dying on the combination of pandemic and responses, but it's very far from clear that *lockdown* was the relevant cause, as opposed to just the general loss of customers you'd expect for a location undergoing a disaster even with zero government intervention.
Edit: s/emotional connections/social connections/
"why else would they be emotional?"
Well, I realize that I'm atypical, but in my case I was and am furious that the government even has the right to do that. I read somewhere that the core reason Sweden never had a lockdown is that it's literally unconstitutional for their government to impose that kind of controls on the citizens. It ought to be similarly unconstitutional here.
Maybe it ought to be unconstitutional, but such a constitutional interpretation would likely throw out all zoning and fire code regulations as well.
I checked this out (cursorily) and it looks like Sweden doesn't have zoning laws, but does have extremely stringent (relative to the US, anyway) fire code regulations.
Don't "lockdowns" often *help* businesses when compared to the alternate uncertain world where a large fraction of people are avoiding public spaces *without* a lockdown? With a lockdown, it's very easy to put in place a loan program for shuttered businesses and an expansion of unemployment benefits for workers (as most developed countries did). But without a lockdown, it's much harder to target those things to the businesses that need them, since many think they are operating, even though they still have to deal with reduced customer activity.
>Don't "lockdowns" often *help* businesses when compared to the alternate uncertain world where a large fraction of people are avoiding public spaces *without* a lockdown?
Maybe, I mean nobody knows. You could still pay businesses to close though; or help companies that are not 100% closed.
Great post, well-written, fascinating, as always — but I'm sorry, I've been completely sidetracked by something you mentioned.
There's a chance cannabis decreases IQ? By how much is it posited to do this, and is it permanent? Because I smoked a lot of marijuana back in the day, and my IQ is the only good thing about me*, and I would like to know how much dumber I possibly made myself.
*Actually, I'm kind, handsome, charming, and humble, too, but I won't mention that stuff.
See the start of Section II of https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/01/05/marijuana-much-more-than-you-wanted-to-know/ for the very little I know about this.
I think this is a great post simply for admitting the complexity of the situation. The only thing I've found odd about this whole thing is that nobody – yourself included as I recall – contrasted the response to this pandemic to the response to the Spanish flu a hundred years ago. Hundreds of thousands of people died in America alone, and in a very COVID-like way, yet as far as I know there were never any involuntary restrictions anywhere, people just went "well that sucks and is terrifying" and went about their normal day until the flu became nothing more than... the flu. (I've seen an Everett True cartoon where Everett canes the living shit out of a guy for not voluntarily wearing a mask, but that's about the peak for stringency of enforcement to my limited understanding.) However, I'm far from an expert on this, and I've been hoping in vain all this time for someone who does know to do a carfeul compare-and-contrast on this.
"it's so dumb that it couldn't lie even if it wanted to"
I have an aunt like that.
If I'm not mistaken, a lot of why the Spanish Flu didn't get a huge response is because a lot of countries were in the middle of a world war and didn't want to show any weakness. Not to their own populace nor to the enemy. The entire reason we know it as the Spanish Flu is because Spain was basically the only country reporting honestly on it while everyone else downplayed or denied it.
That said, I also seem to recall there being local lockdowns, but I'd have to go digging to find a source on that...
This doesn't really intuitively check out for me: my personal gestalt impression from stuff I've read in the past is that US media and society were open and concerned about the influenza, and the US also entered WWI (a pretty distant, foreign war) almost at the same time the flu became serious, so it wasn't like they had an ongoing war footing giving reason to clamp down on that stuff so the boches wouldn't think they were weak and invade.
Maybe what you say was true of the European states, it wouldn't surprise me. It doesn't seem to explain much about the American response, though.
I thought I'd heard the opposite about 1918 - that although they were pretty limited in what they could do (because there was no Zoom and most people were poor manual laborers so they could hardly close workplaces) they did a medium amount.
This article suggests they closed most schools ( https://www.pbs.org/newshour/health/analysis-why-some-schools-stayed-open-during-the-1918-flu-pandemic ) and this article on the Anti-Mask League Of San Francisco suggests that mask restrictions were at least onerous enough to annoy a lot of people ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anti-Mask_League_of_San_Francisco )
Thanks! I have to admit my takeaway from the Anti-Mask League article was the opposite, though: "The ordinance it protested lasted less than one month before being repealed."
The (surprisingly still quite low on detail) Wiki article about the Spanish flu itself also seems to suggest that the NYC health commissioner didn't go further than to mandate staggered business opening times and shift starts to improve crowding in the subway.
The school article does an odd thing, but I suppose reasonable from its purpose, where it provides a lot of detail on NYC and Chicago keeping schools open but just asserts without defending it that most schools were closed – I'm sure it's true, but the lack of detail or support does make it hard to evaluate. It does strike me as interesting that large population centers deviated from the norm and (apparently?) didn't generate national outrage.
In any case, I think my main takeaways from these sources and generally what information I can find is, firstly, that the *federal* response was nil or effectively nil: the whole flu response was handled not even on the state but the municipal level. This is at all events very different to the present case. Secondly, I would still like to see a real, thorough and thoughtful compare-and-contrast on the whole thing.
I really love meta posts like this. You have a really interesting way of thinking about things. I don't always agree with your specific opinions but I am always fascinated by how you think about them.
History always ends up oversimplifying stuff, because actual history is far too complex to document in detail. I expect we will eventually converge on just using total deaths per million within jurisdictions over a fixed period (not yet over) as the sole metric of success.
Thank you for both the original and meta analyses!
Re the bias question: the expert class is almost by definition devoid of poor people, young people, and uneducated people. So it doesn't seem conspiratorial to suggest that the harm done by lockdowns to those groups of people is probably underestimated in expert analysis.
Wouldn't it be strange if that were _not_ the case? This seems like a more important issue to me than specific ideological biases, like "that guy writes in Mother Jones" or "that lady owns a lot of guns."
I'm skeptical of things like this because, for example, the expert class doesn't have many black people in it but they sure do seem to think about them a lot.
Being able to "think about" something does not mean that you have an accurate analysis of that subject. Many experts think about the poor, that doesn't mean that they understand them very well.
I don't think there's been an adequate accounting of the many ways that lockdowns greatly improved a lot of people's lives, partly because it's taboo to talk about a lot of people having a nice time while others are dying, and partly because even if it was asked about, people are reluctant to admit it because of said taboo.
Yet SOOO many women I know will secretly say that 2020 was one of the best years of their life, that the lockdown was a huge relief, and that it vastly improved their physical and mental health. A lot of guys do too, but definitely way more women. Granted, I am talking about middle class people who didn't lose their jobs. They just suddenly got an extra 15 hours of their life back each week, which was previously spent in unpaid but required labor (commute, etc.). And now because of the lockdowns, they have far greater bargaining power and flexibility at work. I understand the impact was very stratified based on demographics, but I think there is a major underestimation of all the positives, because it's just not very nice to talk about how a bunch of relatively secure middle class suburban people suddenly had more enjoyable lives, while older people were scared and essential workers were having a terrible time.
I don't know if there will ever be good research on this so long as it's taboo to admit, and someone who lost a family member or job is going to scream at you and tell you what an enormous jerk you are.
The junior associates at my firm are all getting a $15k raise and the ability to work flexibility from home or reduced hours -- things that were unthinkable pre-pandemic -- just to induce them not to leave. For them, it looks to me like the whole thing net positive, and not by a small amount.
I was initially appalled by the lockdowns. I could not believe that this country is so senior-focused that we were going to sacrifice the livelihoods of young and poor people on the alter of keeping a bunch of near-death retired people safe, when they were the ones who could most easily stay home. However, I'll admit that 2020 was a fantastic year for me personally, and continues to have positive impacts on my life. Most people I know say the same.
Also, are people really as polarized on Covid as some of these comments are making it seem? Not in my experience. There is a hysterical small percent on either tail end who are get very upset, but the vast majority of people are not and have never been like that. Most people complied with the orders without much grumbling, but also didn't particularly care whether others followed them or not. Out of about 300 familial, professional, and friendship associations I have that span the entire political spectrum, I knew maybe 7 or 8 who took adamant and angry stances on one side of the other. Most everyone else was sort of mildly but not overly concerned and rather live and let live about it. Every right wing Republican I know got the vaccine, and a large portion of the left-wing people would admit privately that they thought the whole thing was overblown and they weren't particularly concerned about catching Covid (and most of them broke the lockdown rules anyway). I think the supposed polarization is a bit of a internet creation. You can ask someone a yes or no question on a survey, but are they measuring the strength of the response and how strongly one feels about their answer?
I was also surprised that the two Astral Codex surveys on Covid asked questions solely about negative impacts on the respondent's life and not a single question about positive impacts.
I'll include a question on impact (including the possibility of positive impact) on my survey in December.
Why do you predict it would be better for women?
My observation is that women, on the whole, find the work world more stressful than men, and get a lot less out of it with respect to ego gratification or whatever you want to call it that causes (some) men to be very driven about their work. More women than men would prefer to work less. My profession is about 20/80 female/male, and while most of us women in the profession would be considered on the extreme side of high-earning and career-oriented (for women), many of them would quit their job without a second thought if they felt they had enough money -- the status and prestige and competition aspects don't seem that important to them. Whereas plenty of the men have to be basically dragged out kicking and screaming when they're getting close to 80 and still want to keep working. I just think many women would prefer a slower-paced life with more time at home and less time on the job (and spending 2 hours a day getting ready for work and commuting counts as "on the job" time even though it isn't productive or compensated for). I definitely know plenty of men that feel this way too, and have greatly enjoyed the extra time they've had for family and exercise and being in nature, but that seems almost universal among white-collar women.
My office told people to go home and stay home last spring, but allowed people to come back in if they wanted to by summer. Only about 20% of people came back and they were all men. This year, the office is strongly encouraging and needling people to come back in, but lots still haven't, and there is still a gender skew because about 60% of the men have come back in, but hardly any of the women. So I think that pretty clearly indicates their preferences. Most of them say that given the option, they would prefer to go in to the office only about once or twice a month.
Clearly though, I am not talking about essential workers here. Though even there, among the few I know, I heard a lot more resentment among the women about having to go in to work every day while white collar people got to stay home.
Also, the scant polling I've seen on the topic shows that women and young people were a lot more likely to cite positive impacts to their wellbeing from the lockdowns.
I am one of those men who consider job a necessary evil to pay the bills. My commute was already very short, but I still enjoy working from home. I can eat lunch with my family, as opposed to buying something expensive in a restaurant. I can use the breaks to exercise or do the dishes, which means more free time in the evening.
On the other hand, closed kindergartens were a source of stress. It is difficult to work from home when you also have kids at home and they use every excuse to interrupt. (My three years old daughter sees me without the headphone, she yells "you are not wearing the collar, you are not actually working" and climbs on my back, while I try to write code.)
Looking at my colleagues and their preferences, I get an impression that it is mostly *managers* who want to return to the office. I assume that one of the perks of being a manager is that you can act dominant, which is hard to do when you are alone in the room.
Yes, I get that impression too.
And the small kids aspect is definitely relevant, as the *only* people who went back into the office last summer were the men who had small kids at home.
I thought it was interesting that most of the media stories about white-collar women focused on the ones who live in high-density areas in tiny apartments, and how stressed and miserable they were stuck with their small children in small apartments. That makes sense, however, I didn't really read *anything* about the much larger quantities of women with kids who live in the suburbs or small towns, who found being home with their kids enjoyable (they could go outside and play) and who appreciated not having to spend mornings frantically getting kids dressed, packed lunches, and out the door or evenings and weekends driving them around to activities. Although I technically live in a metro area, it is suburbs, and a large majority of the women I know (and plenty of the men) found the whole thing to be a big relief and improvement to their quality of life.
And people with pets, not young kids, REALLY loved it.
Talking about women who prefer to be home with their kids is a taboo much older than covid, for culture war reasons.
You may want to separate mental from physical well-being.
One thing this person didn't mention that I've heard from some women is that wearing masks in public spaces helped ease a lot of the pressure women often face to look pretty and smile and have men comment on their appearance. (Though for some waitstaff I hear it created more pressure from men asking them to take off their mask to show their pretty smile.)
Another gendered aspect of the difference is that women very often are the ones shuttling kids around to many activities on the way to and from work. I wouldn't personally know how losing those shuttling duties compares to 24/7 childcare duties.
I heard this from lots of women as well. That it was freeing to be able to walk around in public space without being judged (in either a positive or negative or sexual or not sense) based on their appearance. Being able to not be looked at. And also just plain old extra time saved not feeling like they had to wear makeup. A lot of women expend large amounts of time and energy on a daily basis to making themselves look presentable to society, and that burden was removed when they could stay home and could still basically "hide" behind their mask.
I'm a little uncomfortable with this vein of thought because it would seem to run logically into the arena of maybe a good portion of women really would prefer wearing burqas?! Which I don't really want to contemplate. But admittedly I heard people talk about liking masking for that reason, and there were millions of memes on enjoying be able to be comfortable and not dress up/put on makeup/do hair.
It also goes against the (former? Ideologies move so quickly nowadays, I can't always keep up) feminist talking point that women dress up sexily to please themselves, not men.
I always thought that was a silly talking point and obviously false. Lesbians are not known to dress up and make themselves uncomfortable at equal or higher rates than straight women. Besides, anyone who has ever lived with women and knows how comparatively slobby yet comfy we tend to be when we're home by ourselves (or with just those we feel comfortable with) knows that's utter nonsense. I lived in an attic apartment above 15 sorority girls in college, and I assure you they were not walking around their house in heels with done up hair when they were home, just to please themselves. They were in pajama pants and slippers with their hair in a bun. But when they got done up for a night out, watch out!
Introverts are another category of people who found working from home to be a blessing.
>Yet SOOO many women I know will secretly say that 2020 was one of the best years of their life, that the lockdown was a huge relief, and that it vastly improved their physical and mental health.
Does that include the women who were locked in with their abusive husbands 24/7?
I think you may be typical-minding, or at least typical-lifing, here. "Work from home and socialize on Zoom" is a thing that works really well for a decent fraction of the population, maybe including everyone you know. But I think you're jumping too easily to dismissing all the rest as "a hysterical small percent" plus some trivial grumbling.
No, not at all. Of course the pandemic had profoundly negative impacts on many people. But the article Scott referenced, where there was extensive weighing of the various costs and who they fell on, didn't include, as far as I saw, any counter-balancing of *benefits*. Surveys I've seen show that about 80 something percent of Americans name some negative impacts, but 70 something percent also name some benefits. So it isn't a trivial amount. And I think the benefits are underweighed (to the extent they're taken into account at all, when tallying costs) by the taboo aspect of anyone benefiting from what was a tragedy for others.
If I had to guess, my estimate would be that the pandemic/lock-downs were severely negative for 15-20% of the population (because of job loss, serious illness or death in relatives or network, or the unpleasantness of lockdown in a big city), mostly negative but only moderately or mildly so for another 45ish percent, and net positive in anything from a mild to strong manner for the remaining 35-40ish percent. There are a LOT of suburban and small town white collar/office workers in this country, who didn't lose their jobs and who experienced an increase in quality of life after the initial toilet paper and fear period.
If we're tallying up costs of lock-downs and who they fell upon, don't we have to subtract out benefits to get a full picture?
Of course, *absolutely no one* was weighing or considering any such benefits to lock-down or remote work when making the initial policy and public health decisions. So perhaps because that wasn't a goal or aim of lock-downs, it shouldn't be taken into account when trying to retrospectively aggregate the costs and how well they "worked"? I can see that argument. Certainly it didn't cross my mind -- as I mentioned, I was initially anti-lockdown and only foresaw economic disaster. It did not cross my mind that they could be beneficial to my or anyone else's life.
But if you take unintended negative consequences into account, it seems like you should take unintended positives into account too.
If marijuana reduced collective IQ by 1 or 2 points but made everyone a lot more chill, I think it'd probably be worth it.
Alas, I think it only makes you chiller while you're on it, whereas (if the studies I looked at were true) it permanently decreases IQ.
I really enjoyed this meta process reflection on doing that long piece. I hope you do this kind of thing again, the process reflection, not necessarily the long piece, though that was good too.
It's an important insight that when you get closer to something, you find the naive concerns about it are irrelevant to what's actually going on. I find this is true across a wide range of topics and disciplines. Consequently I highly recommend getting close to things as soon as possible.
For example, if you think you might want to be a lawyer, go shadow three different ones for a day right away, rather than spending extra time studying for your SATs so you can get into a pre-law program, so you can get into law school, so you can get an internship, so you can get hired 20 years from now and then finally discover that you hate something about the job that nobody ever mentions. (John Taylor Gatto was big on this, and recommended "a thousand different apprenticeships" starting in elementary school as part of his education reform platform)
Or consider the debates about ethics in self driving cars; should they swerve to hit the aged nun or continue off the cliff? Great for journalist thinkpieces, but completely irrelevant to the ways that self driving cars are actually programmed.
Heinlein recommends getting close to lots of things: "A human being should be able to change a diaper, plan an invasion, butcher a hog, conn a ship, design a building, write a sonnet, balance accounts, build a wall, set a bone, comfort the dying, take orders, give orders, cooperate, act alone, solve equations, analyse a new problem, pitch manure, program a computer, cook a tasty meal, fight efficiently, die gallantly. Specialization is for insects."
But I find it's also important within narrow specialties; I've seen people argue about a flaw in a piece of hardware in endless meetings without ever having laid eyes on one. When I started carrying one around to all the meetings, the problem was understood much faster. Or when I've gone off daydreaming for days about a potentially difficult part of a problem, only later actually making an attempt at a solution and finding the hard parts are elsewhere.
I'd say the effect is roughly logarithmic; huge gains when you go from zero encounters to one, then diminishing returns as you spend more time with a thing and become an expert in it. But it's amazing how long people will go before getting those first few encounters.
+1 utilon
While your black traffic fatality information was indeed really interesting and impressive, and while I'm glad you noticed it and sad that other people who could have gotten it taken more seriously didn't also notice it, you're doing the thing where you bring controversial statements about race into a totally unrelated thread again. Banned for one month.
This was a really interesting and helpful post and I'd enjoy reading more like it.
Also, it made my day that Scott has apparently had classical rhetorical terms drilled into him at some point, just as I have.
Scott, you have been talking to the wrong Australians. I am surrounded by them and they don't share the views you report: quite the contrary.
Re: the CS/AI/stats thing - I've tended to notice that something similar applies in psephology (study of elections). Nate Silver was primarily a statistician, not a political scientist.
Over here in Australia, our best-known psephologist (employed by our public broadcaster, the ABC to analyse redistricting and provide election coverage) was primarily a computer scientist who went into election research on a whim:
https://www.abc.net.au/news/redirects/backstory/television/2019-05-14/antony-green-on-30-years-of-analysing-elections/11110578
Another well known election analyst in Aus was primarily an invertebrate ecologist (Kevin Bonham).
One who used to write a lot about psephology and polls (now moved onto COVID-19 stuff) graduated in econometrics (Bryan Palmer, pseudonym Mark Graph).
One who used to have an active pseph blog but is now mostly on Twitter (Pollytics/Possum Comitatus, aka Scott Steel) was primarily an economist.
I know at least one pseudonymous pseph who was primarily a philosopher (unable to reveal which, it's in confidence).
Of the remaining well known ones, I think three are primarily political scientists (Peter Brent, Ben Raue and Malcolm Mackerras). So that's a 4-3 in favour of non-polisci to polisci (or 5-3, if you count the pseudonymous one) amongst Australian psephologists.
I think there's probably something - maybe the uncertainty, maybe the politics, maybe the status - about fields like election analysis and live pandemic epidemiology which attracts people from other fields to come and contribute.
"was primarily an invertebrate ecologist "
I can't think of a better qualification for understanding politicians. :P
A few have spines. They are under siege in the US right now though.
“This question was too multi-dimensional.”
^ this (this whole section) is a concise summary of what it’s like to work in data science, and it makes me sad.
Dunking on my industry less- when I read the section in the original article on emotional distress, I was like “agreed, but, my personal experience of the pandemic was WAY less emotional distress than pre-pandemic, because all the weird social-and-institutional-pressure-y obligations were gone, and there are a bunch of people like me I’ve talked to, and how do we quantify that” and then I was like “ah yes we’ve gotten to the part of data science where we try to pin a number on the pain of a coercive society, sounds like an average Tuesday when KRs are due at work”
whoops, that was more, not less
My feeling is that, if the validity of a study hinges upon the right way to "crenulate the zeugma", then it is very likely that the study is too tentative and/or the effect is too weak, and should not be used as the basis for public policy.
Since this is the second time I've seen a comment to this effect I wanted to offer a different perspective:
A lot of systems there's a ton of variables that have no effect and a few variables that have a huge effect. But because you don't know what the variables are you have to start by blindly groping towards correlations and only as you start to understand the system do you gain the ability to grasp cause and effect. But once you start tuning the variables on purpose the actual effect is huge.
This actually appears in a lot of scientific fields - someone discovers a subtle correlation between optical systems and wavelengths and even though the original correlation is incredibly weak, it enables incredible technologies like lasers.
I do agree that if the whole question is "US style lockdowns: YES/NO?" then you ought to see a large effect before selecting "YES", I also think there's room to believe that subtle statistical insights have the potential to make it possible to select the subset of policies that produce the most positive effects with the fewest negative ones.
>Whenever I talked to Aussies or New Zealanders, they just really wanted to stress that they had ascended beyond such primitive mortal concerns, defeated the virus their own way, and were somewhat annoyed that the rest of us were squabbling about the relative merits of our inferior plans rather than focusing on how great they were. Sorry, guys.
We Aussies boned up the initial phase as badly as anyone else (refusing to close all borders long after it had spread beyond the PRC), we were just lucky it came here late. An amount of the rest I am unable to quantify is downstream of that.
Re the emotional damage, I find it striking that you're overlooking the biggest source of emotional anti-utilities on the pro-lockdown side. The pain of loosing a loved one years before they would otherwise have died.
There is some weird taboo against mentioning this.
I remember some people complaining on Facebook, saying how sad their kids will be because they are not allowed to visit their grandparents during lockdown. And I was like: huh, wouldn't they be *more* sad if their grandparents *died* as a consequence of their visit? But there were like twenty people already debating in that thread, and no one mentioned anything like this.
If I try to imagine what kind of mental model could make a person think like this... I suppose many people model covid as some kind of ambient danger (like something in the air, uniformly distributed), not as something that jumps from specific humans to specific humans based on their physical proximity. It's like the "danger of covid" is some *global* variable that changes over time, and when the variable is high, you need to wear a face mask or otherwise you risk getting sick; and maybe there are separate global variables for "danger of covid for young people" and "danger of covid for old people", but whether we visit the grandparents or not has no impact on how big their danger is. If they happen to die two weeks after our visit, they simply died because of the global variable, not because of our actions, and we are actually glad that we had the opportunity to see them one more time before the fate took them.
Similarly, if someone died of covid, they were killed by covid, not by the people involved in the chain that brought the virus to them. Spreading a deadly virus is considered a victimeless crime (assuming you bring it in your body, as opposed to e.g. sending a mail).
I'm not sure if that model of covid as a global variable could explain this particular omission though.
Since when Scott's weighing up the emotional harms of lockdown vs the emotional harms of not lockdown, even if you assume granny died from catching Covid from the either, it still inflicts emotional harm.
You do seem to be assuming that there are zero other threat vectors to granny beyond the grandkids. There are many vectors for COVID beyond grandkids, and some largely unavoidable. Singling out grandkids as something that must be stopped is sort of strange, particularly since from the point of view of the grandparent seeing their grandkids might be the best cost/benefit trade off.
This sort of thing is why mandating behavior goes over so badly. People have wildly different preferences and optimal tradeoffs, not one size fits all, optimize for everyone at once preferences.
I don't think anyone was singling out grandkids as something that must be stopped. Some people said "no one should visit old people", some said "old people should only have essential visits, not including grandchildren", some said "old people should only have essential visits, including grandchildren", and some said "old people should still have all the visits". I don't think anyone said "old people should have all the visits *except* grandchildren".
In other words, everyone was saying "We get to decide whether or not you should see specific people, not you." Kind of an important point there.
I think that as a general rule when we count deaths as a bad thing, we're already including the emotional effects on the survivors in the measure of badness that is "one human death". And it's probably good that we do that, because otherwise we'd wind up doing some silly utilitarian consequence where e.g. the quick and painless death of an infant counts as a not-that-bad thing until a more sophisticated utilitarian says "hey, did you consider asking the mother how she feels" and we calculate ourselves back to where we intuitively started.
But if that is the general approach, then it would be double-counting to explicitly tack on emotional costs to the survivors as a separate term, unless the nature of the death makes those costs unusually high. And "old person gets sick and dies a few weeks later, family grieves and moves on" is pretty much the modal case for emotional costs of death.
Also, if you are going to make that an explicit term in your ethical calculus, I'm going to demand another explicit term for my father, who died of not-Covid last year and the emotional costs, to him and to us, were *hugely* exacerbated by the lockdown. And maybe I should be demanding that term in any event. Everybody dies, most everybody who died of Covid was going to die of something else in a few years anyway, but not even close to everybody has to spend the months leading up to their death locked in a room with only a few masked strangers and with their close friends and family excluded.
I'm pretty sure we don't count the effect on loved ones when calculating QALY. After all, it would be pretty weird if a hospital said "Sorry, you only have two grand kids. Not enough people love you enough for it to be worth treating you".
But Scott's previous post, in the section "Conclusion 2: Extremely Naive Attempt To Try To Quantify Emotional Costs Vs. Benefits" is explicitly using a model where the upside of lockdown is QALY saved, and the downside is emotional harm for every month spent in lockdown. That, in it's extremely naive way, covers your father under lockdowns causing emotional harm. But it doesn't cover the emotional harm to someone who lost a loved one they might have had five or ten more years with.
I don’t get your comment about Aus/NZ. The key tool we used once cases got too many to contact trace was lockdowns. We used them repeatedly and they worked every single time. A few times we tried to avoid them and things got out of control. See Melbourne last winter and Sydney now. It seems very solid evidence that lock downs work extremely well.
Solid evidence that lockdowns work extremely well in combination with tracing, which means they must be used early.
This is a thing most people don't understand, that the virus spreads exponentially, and most of the things you could do against it are approximately constant (except for the vaccine research), therefore it is important to do the dramatic steps early, when they have greater relative impact.
But from the political perspective, it is the other way round. If you don't have people dying by hundreds yet, the dramatic steps seem unnecessary. And when their necessity becomes obvious, then it's quite late.
Yes this is exactly right. When lockdowns make most sense they seem least necessary. Not thing though is Melbourne had 700 cases a day at one point and still managed to get it under control, which presumably was primarily due to the lockdown as tracing that many cases isn't really feasible I think.
This is what has confused me about every analysis I've seen, including Scott's. It seems obvious that there are basically two qualitatively different kinds of lockdown - ones that are intended to get cases counts to 0 and are stringent enough to do so (these work), and ones that are intended to reduce transmission somewhat but not with any particular goal in mind (these do not work).
Throwing out the working lockdowns and then trying to decide if lockdowns work seems really weird to me. Like trying to decide if seatbelts save lives by first throwing out every case where seatbelts were worn and nobody died.
Yes, I was one of the people I think Scott was referring to and I think, a lot of people (Including Scott, clearly) vastly misunderstood the argument I, and others were trying to make).
I'm not saying "the US *should* have locked down", I'm not even saying "lockdowns work".
I'm saying if you want to do an analysis on "If lockdowns work" you should include all the data that you have.
In retrospect I feel like the conflation between "Should we (In this case, the US) have locked down" and "How effective are lockdowns, in general" is responsible for a large part of discourse breakdown.
The problem is that you really need to have a good handle on the second question to begin answering the first, but people only really care about the first. The whole time I was reading Scotts post it felt like it was switching between those two questions which was quite confusing for me.
Emotional damage quickly overwhelms even shorter lockdowns as seen in Aus/NZ, with an additional complexity that neither country has made any substantial progress over the last 12 towards no longer having to do them every time a single case leaks through.
A) emotional damage is impossible to quantify, so you simply cannot say it overwhelms anything. You can choose the numbers to get any result you want, which is another way of saying nothing. Personally - and for many people I know - lockdown has been a net boon. Not without drawbacks, but not without significant benefits, too.
B) Aus/NZ have basically been living business as usual for most of the time that, say, Ontario has been in some kind of lockdown. People can go to shops, to bars, to the office, etc. *Even if* you put some large emotional damage factor on lockdowns, effective lockdowns dramatically minimize the amount of time you spend with any meaningful restrictions.
C) Aus (don't have the NZ numbers to hand) has had a death rate of 1/20th what e.g. Ontario has had. That's a huge difference.
A) What Scott is calling emotional damage certainly isn't impossible to quantify. See EQ-5D-5L, one of the questions is asking about ability to do normal activities, and the survey translates answers to such questions into a QALY impact. A disability which only made it impossible to attend school, work, see family etc would still be considered a severe disability, and have a correspondingly severe impact on quality of life.
B) It's possible for Aus/NZ to be better than Ontario, and for doing nothing at all to be better than both.
C) QALY impacts of restrictions due to what Scott calls "emotional damage" are likely to be multiple times the impact of what Covid could even potentially kill if entirely unmitigated.
A) That questionnaire doesn't measure what you want it to measure in any useful way. You may be surprised to learn, for instance, that people with severe mobility issues are often quite happy, even though this survey would say they're experiencing "emotional damage" under your interpretation.
B) I guess anything is possible. That would be truly astonishing. Keep in mind that even granting emotional damage, voluntary measures more or less equivalent to a lockdown (which is apparently what is observed) would have the same emotional damage as the equivalent lockdown.
C) Let's just do a little thought experiment, using Aus.
Their actual death toll was about 1000. The "unmitigated" death toll would have been more - let's say the Ontario lockdowns were totally useless, voluntary measures would have had the same effect, and apply that to Australia. You would then see 20,000 dead, or about 0.07% chance of dying.
The question then becomes: Would you play Russian Roulette on a gun with ~1500 chambers (AND have to voluntarily lockdown to the equivalent of Ontario's long, long lockdown) to avoid occasional targeted mandatory lockdowns and travel restrictions?
If you're saying there's not even voluntary measures equivalent of lockdowns, we could say the virus would kill about 1% of people. Would you play Russian Roulette on a gun with 100 chambers to avoid occasional mandatory lockdowns and travel restrictions?
Sounds like a pretty easy question to me.
D) Finally, the choice isn't between more lockdowns and less COVID, and less lockdowns and more COVID.
The choice is between 1) less lockdowns (but effective ones) and less COVID (Aus), 2) more lockdowns (but less effective ones) and more COVID, 3) no lockdowns (but voluntary behaviour modifications equivalent to lockdowns) and much more COVID.
Again, that seems like a pretty easy question - they're conveniently sorted in order of quality for you in that paragraph.
QALY assessments use mean effects. Everything involving quantifying covid uses mean. After all, the median covid patient has a mild illness at worst.
And yes, I would gladly play Russian Roulette on a gun with 1500 chambers to avoid living under lockdowns. And one with 100. Hell, I'd play it with a gun with 20. I expect the long-term effects of living in a country that accepts that the government has the authority to micromanage my life as it has done in the past 18 months (and in the process reduce me to a second class citizen as a consequence of my opposition to the government) to continue to have a devastating effect on my quality of life for decades to come.
> And yes, I would gladly play Russian Roulette on a gun with 1500 chambers to avoid living under lockdowns. And one with 100. Hell, I'd play it with a gun with 20.
Good lord... I am so, so glad you're not in charge.
I would also point out that something I didn't see considered in most analyses is that (again, take Ontario) not sufficiently controlling the disease overwhelms hospitals, causes PTSD in healthcare workers, forces the postponement of procedures etc., reduces quality of care across the board, and creates what is projected to be a years-long public health crisis with untold misery and suffering to thousands and thousands of people or more.
This was entirely avoidable with better (i.e. Aus-style) lockdowns.
Yes, the point about strict early lockdowns leading to more freedom later on is crucial. NZ hasn't had a single community transmission in over 4 month I think. The stress and anxiety that removes and almost total freedom it allows is also an immense 'emotional' benefit you would need to factor in to an analysis of these things.
Actually we regularly handle small clusters of cases without lockdowns as long as they are traceable back to an original source. And most lockdowns also only last a few days to get a handle on the contact tracing. The emotional benefits of months of covid free status totally outweighs the damage of short lockdowns I would think.
I would give anything for an Aus/NZ-style approach in Ontario. We're going to be counting the costs of our horrifically botched response for years. We've been under some kind of "lockdown" for over a year, constant epidemic community spread, hospitals collapsing...
It's close to the worst of all worlds here, lockdown tight enough to fuck everything up, but not enough to actually control the disease or prevent healthcare collapse.
I'm sorry yeah that's tough. At least your vaccine roll out seems to be going better than ours.
Isn't it fascinating how conservatives, usually the ones more concerned about hygiene and infections, threw all of that overboard without blinking in this particular case, when the normal tendency would have been unusually useful to stay with?
"conservatives, usually the ones more concerned about hygiene and infections"
Your assumption there is based on that moral purity test by Haidt, isn't it? That conservatives have more of a disgust reaction and so forth? Given that this is yet another one of those studies that everyone argues over, and that the much-touted "conservatives are authoritarians! oops, sorry, we flipped the results by mistake, turns out liberals are authoritarians!" was publicised all over the place by the media when it was "conservatives are authoritarians, see Science says they're all fascists!" but the correction was left to wander like an orphan by the same organs, I'd be wary of "conservatives are all mysophobes, Science says so!"
I think you're working from an oversimplified misunderstanding of Haidt here. And trying to make a cheap tribal "gotcha" shot, which please don't.
The claim of Haidt et al is not that conservatives are explicitly and specifically concerned with the transmission of infectious diseases. The claim is that long-standing heuristics associated with disease transmission, are broadly and sometimes inappropriately applied as a general moral foundation. And there's probably something to that. But society-wide "lockdowns" have never been one of the standard heuristics for dealing with infectious diseases, so it's not surprising that conservatives would be less than reassured with a master action plan that makes them central to our strategy this time.
It would be as if a nation were invaded, the ministry of defense were to adopt a new plan where the invaders were met by wave after wave of cute girls flirting with them until they lay down their arms, and when conservatives say "that's not how we do this!", promoters of the cute-girls strategy say "Aha, isn't it fascinating how conservatives, usually the ones more concerned with the threat of foreign invasion, threw all of that overboard..."
The resistance to lockdowns is the *most* understandable part of it, but you would have thought masks would have fit perfectly into the worldview. "Strangers around you are dangerous and carry diseases - protect yourself!"
"But society-wide "lockdowns" have never been one of the standard heuristics for dealing with infectious disease"
That is false.
Citing even a handful of counterexamples would have greatly strengthened your counterargument there. You know this, but you didn't do it.
The relevant traditional heuristic for dealing with infectious disease is *quarantine*. The specific people who are believed to be infected, or to have been exposed to infection, are isolated for however long it takes to be confident they are not (or no longer) infected. Also, closing borders to outsiders.
Demanding that the entire domestic population isolate at the household level (except for "essential" business) for the duration of the plague or epidemic is, if not unprecedented, at least *very* unusual.
Quarantining the symptomatic doesn't work with covid because of asymptomatic transmission. So lockdowns are unusual but justifiable. So it depends on whether you are going to insist that unusual things are always wrongs even if they are justified.
Or maybe the real objection is that something else , such as closing borders, should have been done instead. But then then the sheer novelty of lockdowns isn't the problem.
"Quarantining the symptomatic doesn't work with covid because of asymptomatic transmission."
Quarantining all those who tested positive plus contacts did result in the elimination of COVID in Hong Kong several times.
"So lockdowns are unusual but justifiable."
No; they made no sense (at least, the way they were implemented in most countries). The airports weren't even closed.
> Quarantining all those who tested positive plus contacts did result in the elimination of COVID in Hong Kong several times.
If you have a contact tracing system, by all means use it.
> The airports weren't even closed.
That may be a real issue, but has nothing to do with lockdowns being new.
>So lockdowns are unusual but justifiable.
That might be worth a debate, but it would be a distraction from the issue at hand in *this* discussion. We are discussing whether broad lockdowns as distinct from quarantine are "one of the standard heuristics for dealing with infectious disease", not whether they are justifiable. These are two different things. And we had good reason for discussing the one rather than the other, before we got sidetracked.
You explicitly asserted that broad lockdowns were one of the standard heuristics for dealing with infectious disease. I'm fairly certain that this is false, and I'm even more certain that your explanation as to why broad lockdowns are *justified* is nonresponsive.
I don't accept that broad lockdowns are all that distinct from quarantines. We are discussing that as well. And whether "new" actually is "bad".
"Don't be afraid of COVID". "Despite reports to the contrary, Sweden is paying heavily for its decision not to lockdown."
-Donald Trump.
Sweden screwed up massively, no doubt, and we're paying for it by maybe 5000-10000 unnecessary deaths. I'm very surprised that absolutely no-one is held to account for this fiasco.
I think the point was that Trump flip-flopped, too.
I don't think that if there's more of a concern about hygiene and infections that it is that generalizable. It is more specifically a fear of infectious disease from the undesirable and weak portions of society infecting the strong and powerful portions of society. COVID wasn't that. It specifically hit the old, sick, and weak, and not the young and vigorous. Given that, it is not surprising at all to me that liberals would focus on preventing harm to the most vulnerable as a moral issue, while conservatives would consider it not just pointless but actually immoral to impose harms upon the strongest and youngest portions of society, and divert resources from them, in order to protect the weak and vulnerable, especially if doing so would overall weaken society as a whole.
I would bet good money that if this virus had impacted the young the way some diseases do, the conservative response would have been entirely different. But this virus acted more like a culling of the weak, which from some perspectives could be seen as unpleasant thing that ultimately makes the surviving herd stronger, and therefore should be borne with fortitude rather than interfered with (or at least, interfered with to the extent of imposing real costs upon the strong/young).
"It specifically hit the old, sick, and weak, and not the young and vigorous."
-I think it's all partisanship, zero principle. Conservatives supported higher insurance premiums for the elderly, but were also the most relentlessly opposed to "death panels".
And liberals were initially downplaying the severity of COVID ("Racism is the real virus! Let's all hug a Chinese person!") whilst (a subset of) conservatives were sounding the alarm early ("Hey, guys, there's this weird new virus in China, remind me again why we haven't closed the borders yet?").
It's possible that the idea of conservatives being more concerned with contamination is something of a guess, and not very predictive.
It was always absurd fiction. Conservatives' moral foundations were always about the dangers of men, not viruses.
It's not surprising that libertarians would object to restrictions on liberty. Which way your capital-C Conservatives will go spends on how much they are small-c conservative, and how much they are libertarian.
"usually the ones more concerned about hygiene and infections"
No. Polling pre-pandemic was clear that it was liberals who were more concerned about infectious disease.
See here: https://news.gallup.com/poll/189161/americans-cite-cyberterrorism-among-top-three-threats.aspx
I'm surprised nobody has touched what I thought was the most interesting part of your post - the bit where you find two opposite impossible-to-measure outcomes completely overdetermine your complex model and any work you do refining anything other than these parameters is completely swallowed up. I built a similar model to you for lockdown and found the same result you did - your assumption around the emotional impact of lockdown dwarfed everything else you might assume about the disease, including deaths and the emotional impact of deaths (actually I found that if it seriously and permanently harmed productivity / capita by knocking people permanently into an unemployment trap then this was plausibly of the same magnitude(ish) as the emotional effects of lockdown if you assumed weak emotional effects, but emotional effects were still a big deal)
At the risk of raising yet another highly controversial topic, I tried to do what you did for lockdown with Brexit. I included maybe 20 parameters in my model, and then discovered that the 'will it increase or decrease economic growth over ten years relative to no Brexit' was literally the only parameter that made any difference whatsoever; for any reasonably set of preferences a difference in the answer to this question of 0.01% either way was greater than literally any possible combination of outcomes to the other 19 parameters.
Therefore I don't think this is an isolated example, and it seems likely that most big political decisions have this character (on a sample of n=2, but a couple of other rationality tropes are similar - x-risk, cryonics, EA and so on). I really think this must be an understudied problem in decision making, because otherwise it would be all anyone talked about when making decisions.
Let's go further down this rabbit hole: The emotional impact on most people depends on how they frame the situation, which in turn mostly depends on how the media frame it.
I mean, wearing a face mask and not being able to do whatever you want is annoying per se, but if you perceive the situation as "I am making a small sacrifice in order to save lives of thousands of people", then you kinda feel like a hero, and seeing other people wear masks makes you think about solidarity, how most humans are nice enough to be willing to endure a minor inconvenience in order to help others.
On the other hand, if you perceive the situation as "coronavirus is a hoax invented by evil Western scientists and spread by evil Western media, the masks suffocate our children, and most people are so stupid that they totally buy the obviously absurd government propaganda", then you feel helpless and angry, and seeing all the sheeple wearing masks drives you crazy.
So, uhm, the conclusion is that what the media report is more important than the actual reality, even from the perspective of calmly calculating the quality-adjusted life-years? And the most effective altruism is to make people believe whatever makes them most happy?
Needlessly pejorative in paragraph three. If you perceive coronavirus as a severe and deadly plague but crappy masks as being about as effective against it as reciting the Lord's Prayer, then being told to wear the masks drives you as crazy as being told to recite the Lord's Prayer every day.
Sadly, the third paragraph is based on actual Facebook comments.
In my experience, those who are most likely to describe some or all elements of the pandemic as a "hoax" will blame *Eastern* scientists for it, not Western. They're the most likely to believe the lab-leak theory.
Depends on where you are, I presume.
Yep. I am in Eastern Europe, the local conspiracy theorists are mostly coordinated by media supported by Russia, so the targets to blame are the West in general, and the local pro-Western political parties or media.
But the broader sentiment is held by more than just those Facebook commenters, so this looks a lot like nutpicking to me.
For the record, I thought it was clear your conclusion was that lockdowns weren't worth the emotional cost, but I guess putting it in bold, TLDRing, and adding a witty partisan headline would have helped.
"This question was too multi-dimensional. As in, you could calculate everything right according to some model, and then someone else could say "but actually none of that matters, the real issue is X", and you would have a hard time proving it wasn't."
Scott, I hope you will never let something like this discourage you from treating a subject as multi-dimensional. It's easy to underestimate how different the utility functions of different people are. Some people will not care much if they (or others) die from Covid, but find the risks of LongCovid terrifying. It is quite tempting to say "they don't understand what they are talking about" in such cases, but I think that we should really not give into that temptation.
Giving a multi-dimensional treatment helps all readers, not just those who happen to have the same utility function as yourself. I remember your post "moral cost of chicken vs. beef". It convinced me that we have a strong moral obligation to replace beef with chicken. This was exactly the opposite conclusion from yours! (I had this opinion before reading your post and already acted on it, but your post made me much more certain about it.) This is just because we have different value functions.
I am not discouraging you from giving your opinion and conclusions. But I would be careful leaving things out because they seem not so relevant. (But obviously, there are limits to this.)
On your liberal vs. libertarian question, dont you think that in Iran the far majority of psychologists would make arguments for the positive psychological effects of Niqab? If then the one secular dude, who writes about Russell and Ataturk all the time, all of a sudden is the only guy to find evidence to the contrary, is that suspect?
E.g. is a minority likely more biased than the establishment?
A senior stateman reveals the inside story on how Adorno, Huxley and Rees conspired to destroy America and impose a New World Order: https://monthlyreview.org/castro/the-world-government-part-1/
"(...) To keep all populations outside the minority elite under an almost permanent state of oppression and make them love their servitude, (...) the main tools used to achieve that were some vaccines which altered the functions of the brain and the medicines that the State forced the population to consume. In Well’s opinion, this was not a conspiracy, but rather a ‘one-world brain’ which would function as a police of the mind."
"that's just a coincidence - if we had been in a world where academia leaned conservative"
There is a widespread liberal argument that this isn't a coincidence, but that academia leans liberal because liberal positions are more often factually correct and conservative positions are more often factually wrong.
As a fully-fledged member of the Blue Tribe, I can't possibly come to any neutral judgment on this, but it does seem to be worth consideration.
As Stephen Colbert said on his satirical Comedy Central show, “Reality has a well known liberal bias.”
My point is slightly more subtle; it is that you shouldn't assume that this is untrue. If you assume that liberal and conservative positions are equally likely to be factually correct (on questions where there is a factually correct answer), then academia has to have a liberal bias.
And I hit enter by mistake.
But if you leave open the possibility that reality is more liberal (in the sense that measured facts are more likely to agree with liberal positions than conservative ones) then academia, full of people whose job is, at least in theory, to work out facts, is going to have more people supporting liberal than conservative positions.
"If" is doing a great deal of work there. It also matters who gets to do the measuring, who decides what the measure is, and what results are acceptable or not.
It won't matter if you're liberal, conservative, or believe the Royal Family are all lizard people if you're trying to work out "is 2+2=4?" or measuring the pH of acetic acid versus sodium hydroxide.
When we get on to questions of "does divorce affect children?" or the likes, then we get a lot of fighting, arguing, and "I've already made up my mind it's not harmful/is very harmful, so any results contrary to this will be massaged until they fit my narrative".
Absolutely. The question of whether the output of academia tends to agree with liberal biases because academia is biased or because reality is biased (to use the framing that the center point between conservative and liberal is neutral and anything else is biased) is a question to be studied, not one to be assumed, either way.
But I do think that the classic "both sides" media framing of issues runs a severe risk of argumentum ad temperantiam, and so of assuming that academia must be biased because it tends to favour one political side over the other.
"does divorce affect children?". I wanted to address this separately.
I think this is a badly-posed question, in that it's clear that children of divorced parents do less well than children of non-divorced parents, but that doesn't answer the question of whether the divorce causes the problem or whether the bad relationship causes both the divorce and the problems for the children. This is really important, because the solution in the first case is to encourage parents to stay together for the sake of the children, but the solution to the second is to encourage people to break up before they become parents.
While policies to encourage people to break up are hard to conceive, policies to encourage people to delay parenthood but also to encourage having children once you have a stable relationship are not.
e.g. you can't marry until you have lived together for two years after leaving full time education (you don't have to have sex, just cohabit), and if you conceive your first child after three years of marriage / five years of cohabitation (if you have an abortion, that still counts as conceiving a child), then the child tax credit would be doubled.
Academia doesn't just measure pH levels, it also asks questions like "How old is the Earth?" and "Could chimps and humans have a common ancestor?" Evens with questions as innocent as this you will already face backlash from conservatives.
That's part of the problem. Professors of Politics get some extra reflected truthiness from the Professors of Physics -- who are measuring actual objective things with micrometers -- that they don't deserve on their own merits. They're all called "academics" and we mentally assume just because the "academics" in the Schools of Engineering or Medicine are dealing with precise well-defined actual measurements of real-world data -- why, so must be in some vaguely similar sense the "academics" in the Schools of Humanity, because, well, they're both "academics," right?
I mean, this is definitely true...
I think the replication crisis in science is probably worth considering as counter evidence to this point. At least as far as the squishy sciences go, where reality doesn't step in and smack you down for sloppy work, there is very little stopping people from putting out work that simply says what they want to be true other than getting it past other people who want to see work published that confirms what they want to be true.
In other words, the vast majority of academia has very little contact with reality and facts such that would select for academics that are better at finding facts or truth. It is much closer to a religious order where people decide what is fact with very little input from reality.
When I hear an argument so far from the spirit of skeptical inquiry as that one, I despair that the academy is slowly sliding into a new Dark Ages founded on fatuous scholasticism. During the last Dark Ages, it turned out almost every smart person believed in the Virgin Birth and spontaneous generation of life, and everyone understood *that* was no coincidence, it was simple because those things were so self-evidently true that no one need bother gathering evidence to prove it.
I think my argument was really badly expressed if you think it was far from the spirit of skeptical inquiry.
My point was intended to be a warning against the argumentum ad temperantiam fallacy - we should not assume that liberals and conservatives must be equally likely to be right and wrong, so if academia happens to independently reach results that align more often with liberal positions than conservative ones, we should not discard that out of hand for that reason.
Is it plausible that academic results lean liberal because academia leans liberal? Sure. But the opposite causation is also plausible, and instead of assuming either, we should gather evidence and test both hypotheses.
You are completely correct that simply a tendency towards one side or the other isn't by itself a sign of a problem, just as a tendency for one race or another to be over or under represented in a particular field isn't itself a sign of racism or some other nonsense. Economics, for example, has historically been a bit more balanced between left and right because economics demonstrates that markets work a lot better than the anti-market left tends to believe.
This is where I think you go astray: "academia happens to independently reach results". Fundamentally, this is not how academia works for the majority of fields, probably the super majority. There are not a whole bunch of scientists sitting in their offices working away without interaction with outsiders, suddenly producing a study to surprise everyone. At nearly every step of the process there is outside input and veto points, where if your work doesn't comport with what others want to see it gets shut down. I will list a few:
1: You end up doing what your advisor does. I am told this is a big deal in the hard sciences, but even in the squishy social sciences this can come up since there is very little gain in publishing from studying a lot outside your specialization compared to staying within. So your early work, which is largely working on your dissertation advisors' interests, tends to define your later work until you have enough clout to have your own students working on your ideas.
2: You gain little from working outside your specialization. This deserves mention, as while you absolutely learn more and gain more access to truth by researching outside your narrow specialization, it doesn't help you publish much. Academia has a strong "not invented here" bias, where "here" is the specific subspecialty conversation in the journals. Especially if your specialization is very narrow, you had better then work within their specific oeuvre or they aren't going to want to hear it.
3: Funding. Holy crap, this is a big one. People get funded based on what they are planning on working on and what hypothesis are being tested. Not working on what people in the decision positions are interested in? Hope you have a crap ton of money to self fund. There is a reason why so many applications have "Implications for global warming" and the like even though there are zero: you need to frame your work as being relevant to what political interests decide who gets the money.
4: Publishing. While exciting and surprising results are likely to get published, those exciting and surprising results have to be exciting to the editor you send the paper to, and then exciting to the reviewers for the journal. If the editor doesn't care, or finds the topic or conclusions unappealing, you get desk rejected. If the reviewers, who are usually much older academics who volunteer or younger academics who are submitting to the journal as well and have to review to be considered, don't like the paper for silly reasons, you get rejected. Never mind good reasons, any number of reasons get you punted. Journals get orders of magnitude more submissions than they can print, so editors have a strong bias towards rejection without really looking at the reviewers' reasons too closely, even if they disagree.
Ever hear of "strategic citation?" This is a tactic for getting favorable reviews where you cite papers from academics more likely to be sympathetic to your paper's findings so that they are more likely to be chosen as reviewers. It is pretty standard practice that you have to do this if you want to get published. What you really don't want is to get your paper sent for review to someone whose work you disagree with, especially if you are poking holes in their work. Maybe they will be good and honorable and recognize your good work and how it affects theirs in an honest light. More often they will just protect their work and legacy (and career, and future funding) but torpedoing your stuff. May the gods show mercy upon you in this case.
5: Future job prospects: You know what really sucks? Applying for a job at a university where you are being judged by someone who has a grudge against your advisor or even you because your work challenges theirs. This person gets a vote on whether to hire you, and whether you get tenure. Boy, I hope they are good and honorable people! Academics is a small world.
Of course, you can leave academia and do your work. But... whoops... did you criticize the work of the CDC? Not working there! Produce some work that is controversial with regard to the modern political climate? Not working at... anywhere in Silicon Valley certainly, or DC, or.... you get the idea.
That's 5 things, and there are many more. You can see though how the fields where you can't do a bunch of the work yourself and then demonstrate "Aha! Fools! My fusion death robots work after all! I will destroy you all!" are going to tend towards very narrow acceptable views and results completely divorced from reality, because reality is not the arbiter of what is good work or not.
Compare academia to engineering or programming. The latter two are filled with people who can demonstrate that their ideas work independent of other people's opinions, and often have to. Programming especially grows so fast because it is super cheap so you dodge a large number of those veto points.
No, it's not even in the same class of plausibility, let alone equally plausible. Human tribalism, wish-fulfillment urges, and remarkable abilities to bullshit ourselves all tell us -- as does history itself, e.g. the way phrenology, trephination for madness, and lobotomies were all at one time academically respectable -- that the hypothesis that a group leans one way because of group identity/ ribal reasons is far more likely than that the hypothesis that they all just happen to have independently arrived at the truth.
Feynman had some cogent comments on this. He observed that the only way empirical science works is if individual practioners are fiercely skeptical, most especially of their own ideas, because of the ease with which people fool themselves. For the academy to have any hope of arriving at the truth of whether reality is liberal or conservative, they should be the single greatest critics of the hypothesis that it conforms to their own preferences.
<i>When I hear an argument so far from the spirit of skeptical inquiry as that one, I despair that the academy is slowly sliding into a new Dark Ages founded on fatuous scholasticism. During the last Dark Ages, it turned out almost every smart person believed in the Virgin Birth and spontaneous generation of life, and everyone understood *that* was no coincidence, it was simple because those things were so self-evidently true that no one need bother gathering evidence to prove it.</i>
I'd just like to draw attention to the irony here of you deploring "an argument far from the spirit of sceptical enquiry" whilst uncritically regurgitating "people in the past were all stooopid" stereotypes.
It just occurred to me: If 10 academics say one thing, and 1 academic says the opposite, we should give the dissenter more weight than one academic with the mainstream view (because the latter are influenced by conformism, while the former has to swim against the current), but less weight than the 10 mainstream ones collectively. Part of the disagreement about how we should weight the dissenters is because it's often unspecified whether we are discussing its weighting vs. the mainstream side as a whole, or the weighting of a dissenter vs. a mainstream person.
Scott has discussed similar questions: who makes better arguments, people with socially dominant beliefs, or people with fringe beliefs? https://web.archive.org/web/20131229235216/http://squid314.livejournal.com/333353.html By default, we should expect the mainstream view to be more likely to be right than a fringe view. On the other hand, fringe people are likely to make better arguments on average.
Further extending this: Often there is significant conformism in academia. And science journalism especially often removes qualifications and nuance. In these cases we should expect the academics' position to be closer to the truth than their diametric opposite; however, arguably we should expect the truth to be a weaker version than what the academics (and especially science journalists) say. If the range of opinions commonly discussed in society don't wander too far from the academic mainstream (nowhere near its opposite), it's not even necessarily unlikely that what we see as opposing opinions are closer to the truth.
One instance where political bias is indeed unambiguously bias is when it involves normative judgments deriving from terminal values. The job of science is to find the truth about facts; but I see strong signs that academics' terminal values affect their evaluation of facts on controversial issues. Furthermore, the terminal moral values of academics differ from those of the average person; and a priori academics are likely to be right about facts than others, but not about moral values (as a moral non-cognitivist, I don't even think that being right or wrong about moral values makes sense).
<i>There is a widespread liberal argument that this isn't a coincidence, but that academia leans liberal because liberal positions are more often factually correct and conservative positions are more often factually wrong.</i>
As a reactionary Blue Tribe member (unless we're using "Blue Tribe" as a synonym for liberal, of course, in which case I'm a member of whichever colour Tribe the reactionaries hang out at), I have a few objections, in descending order of glibness:
(1) Why does this same logic never get applied to any other under-represented groups? I'm not aware of any even remotely mainstream academics suggesting it might be "worth considering" that blacks or women or poor people are underrepresented in academia because they're just not smart enough to hack it, so the fact that it's OK to consider this hypothesis when it comes to conservatives comes across as an unprincipled exception.
(2) What counts as a "liberal" or "conservative" position often changes quite drastically with time. E.g., when I was growing up the standard liberal position was in favour of protectionism vs. free trade, until Donald Trump came out in favour of protectionism and everybody suddenly decided that the whole notion was racist and wrong. Maybe there was some brilliant economics paper which came out at exactly the same time and completely annihilated the case for protectionism, but if so, I certainly didn't hear of it.
(3) Having spent most of the last ten years of my life in academia at some level or another, I don't think academia selects for truth-seeking ability, it selects for the ability to come up with novel and counter-intuitive arguments (because this is how you get published) without stepping on your colleagues' or bosses' toes (because otherwise they might not give you a good reference when you apply to the next short-term ultra-competitive job). Even if the consensus of a particular academic field does wander onto the truth, it will inevitably wander away from it again, due to the aforementioned need for novelty. Accordingly I wouldn't attach much weight to arguments from academic consensus.
(1): Political views are partly informed by factual questions. As such, it's plausible that academics know the facts better, and the facts support liberal views. (I.e. they don't become academics because they are liberal, they become liberal because they are academics.) It's not plausible that knowing the facts makes one's skin become white.
Of course this theory is questionable. Academics are only obviously well-informed about a narrow area, not about all the various sorts of facts relevant to politics. Furthermore, political views are informed not only by facts but also values, and there is no obvious reason that academics' values are better. It's possible that academics' values aren't different from those of the general population, and their political views only differ because of different factual beliefs, but I think their values differ from the general population too.
Re: discounting a conservative/libertarian's study against lockdowns and not discounting a presumed-liberals study in favour of lockdowns - it's not as simple as just "study aligns with beliefs". There are a number of factors all pointing in the same direction.
It seems obvious on the face of it that *of course lockdowns work to some degree*, and the question is just how much. It would actually be pretty bizarre if lockdowns didn't attenuate the transmission of an airborne agent. It would be like finding a study that flossing didn't prevent tooth decay - it seems pretty obvious that it must, so we will naturally be skeptical of the result.
There is a general consensus that lockdowns work, so they have to provide enough evidence to show they're right and everyone else is wrong.
It's also true that the "conservative/libertarian" position on many science-related issues is patently false/absurd. Climate change isn't real, for instance.
So it's not one pointer like it seems, it's a few which conspire. It's "study aligns with prior beliefs" (possible bias to find desired result), it's "group is known for lying about science" (low prior credibility for members), "result contradicts obvious likelihood" (higher burden of proof), and "study at odds with general scientific consensus" (higher burden of proof).
The liberal, pro-lockdown study in the hypothetical case of a researcher who's equally biased only has to contend with "study aligns with prior beliefs", and in fact any doubt is *attenuated* by "group is known for trusting science", "result in line with obvious likelihood", and "study concurs with general consensus".
Of course, the study can be good or bad quite apart from all of that, but I think that's the explanation for why "conservative/libertarian finds evidence lockdowns are bad" seems on the face of it worse than the liberal pro-lockdown study without reading either. It applies more or less equally to the pro-gun/anti-gun position, or a number of other issues split along red tribe/blue tribe lines.
"It seems obvious on the face of it that *of course lockdowns work to some degree*, and the question is just how much. It would actually be pretty bizarre if lockdowns didn't attenuate the transmission of an airborne agent. It would be like finding a study that flossing didn't prevent tooth decay - it seems pretty obvious that it must, so we will naturally be skeptical of the result."
I think you are way over simplifying things here. A lockdown order isn't equivalent to people flossing more. Its equivalent to telling people to floss more. The distinction matters. Maybe the way you told people to floss makes them less likely to brush or use mouth wash. In that case focusing so much on flossing might make tooth decay worse.
The equivalent problem with lockdowns is that there are other things that save people from a disease. Going outside or going to a gym and exercising and being in shape might increase your chance for catching the disease, but decrease the deadliness of the disease by a sufficient amount to make the activity worth it.
If it was extremely difficult for a well-connected, intelligent, and thoughtful person such as yourself to analyze the pros and cons with the benefit of a full year of hindsight, imagine how hard it was for the public health authorities, and government, to do so last spring and summer.
That is, I think two additional conclusions you might reasonably draw are:
(1) It's really REALLY hard to get public health measures bang-on correct, when you are looking forward and dealing with an infectious virus, the human immune system, and dynamically responsive human populations in an ideologically, economically, and intellectually diverse population of 300 million. Perhaps "didn't utterly screw it up" is about the highest standard of success we can reasonably expect, and we should critique our public health authorities and government appropriately*.
(2) Maybe a lot of governing of 300 million people with a view towards eliminating bad luck and improving everyone's lot in subtle and difficult to measure ways -- like their emotional well-being! -- is incredibly difficult to get right, and our default expectations about that should be deeply skeptical, no matter how persuasive the hypotheses are -- and we should craft our political institutions with an eye to that skepticism.
---------------
* It isn't cost-free to have expectations for government that are much higher than it can reasonably achieve, because when it routinely falls far below expectations, that leads to broad cynicism about even the things it might be able to do well *and* it leads politicians to start lying a great deal more, on the grounds that it might actually turn out to be easier to obfuscate the data to avoid the lie's exposure than it is to get genuine results done that are good enough to win re-election. I think we see both these trends in politics today, and I think both can at least in part be traced back to unreasonably high expectations among voters about what government can actually be reasonably expecte to get done and get done right.
Valid points; they fail, however, to get at the basic question of why virtually every prominent developed country instantly dropped long-developed pandemic plans at the behest of (what seems in retrospect to be) transparently obvious Chinese propaganda.
What plans?
There was one country which didn't, which was the UK. They had an emergency plan that was developed by the highest standards, and they followed it.
For a few weeks. Then they found out that the virus is subtly different than the virus that the plan was based on, and that following the plan had lead to a catastrophe. They thrashed it, and started following what everyone else did.
If there is a lesson from the pandemic, then it is that we have very limited ways of preparing for catastrophes. Not because we are lazy or dumb, but because elaborate plans will depend too much on unpredictable details.
(Of course, there are a few things that work broadly in lots of emergency, and you should do those. Like having some fast-response teams to do whatever is necessary, but do it fast. Have clear command structures in emergencies. Have fallback means of communication. Encourage everyone to have a 7-day emergency supply at home. And so on.)
The emergency plan the UK dropped did not lead to an unexpected catastrophe. The plan involved scenarios with higher IFR than covid-19, and correspondingly higher deaths than entirely unmitigated covid-19 could cause.
My understanding is that the UK did not shut down initially because the plan told them to sit it out with only mild measures. What they got wrong is that hospitalized people stay in hospital for a really long time, and their plan assumed that it's just a few day, like it's usually for the flu.
They switched to the same strategy as the rest of Europe (shutdowns etc), but notably later. Since they were later, this worked less good. They needed to stay on strict measures longer than the rest of Europe, since their numbers took longer to go down. I think this is the direct consequence of them following the pandemic plan.
Also, UK was hit relatively late in Europe. Other late-hit countries had generally much lower death tolls in the first wave, like Ireland, Germany, the Netherlands, the Scandinavian countries (except Sweden, of course). Basically all countries in the north. Those countries pretty much avoided the first wave, and UK could have done the same if they had acted the same way as other countries.
I wonder why emails were more helpful than comments on the post. I have a couple of hypotheses.
1. Commenting may be a form of status signaling, in which you align yourself with one side and bash the other. Hence, it is less prone to neutrality than an email.
2. Emails are generally longer and more detailed than comments, and hence can be more helpful/insightful.
3. Researchers in the field, who on average would have more informed and accurate things to say, may be reluctant to discuss their stands on a public forum, and hence emailed Scott directly.
Although 3 seems to be the most important reason, I wonder if 1 and 2 played a part at all.
I wonder if the point about "300 million people going to the bar" is valid here.
Imagine that there are 1000 billion creatures in the universe. If the pain of the death of one person is is roughly equal to the inconvenience caused by stopping 300 million people from going to the bar, then this calculus can be extrapolated to "death of one person= slight ticklish sensation for a second to 1000 billion people". Can we really say that the two are morally equal?
I think pain is mostly personal, and cannot be "added up" across persons.
Maybe pain can be comparable only when the two inconveniences are somewhat comparable? Like the death of one person = ten persons getting their legs chopped off or something.
As a society, we (most modern societies) consider that putting people in prison when they kill someone is "justice". Lockdowns and dying from a virus seem to fit that pattern too. In that case, I would say that we already agree that there is a balance to be found.
Yes maybe the response could have been more nuanced. For instance, people who could produce a letter from a medical professional saying that they're severely distressed should have been allowed to travel out of town to stay with their families or something. However, if the average experience was boredom at home, then that for me is a bearable expense to save 500,000 lives
I don't really agree with your numbers. I estimate that I lost at least 50% of the year and a half since the beginning of the pandemic. That's 0.75 QALY. Let's be generous and say 0.5. People that died from COVID had 8 QALY left. That means that a person dying would be the equivalent of 16 people going through the lockdown. In France, 600 persons went through the lockdown for every person that died. So the lockdown would have to prevent more than 29 out of 30 deaths to be "worth it" (16/600 ~= 1/30).
There's another very cynical but very real point to be made: I live in France. We have socialized healthcare and socialized retirement. That means that old people and people that can't pay medical expenses live thanks to the population that works. By putting most of the burden of the pandemic on the youth (50 years and less) (which has already been the case since the economy is stagnating and natality is slowing down), we are also taking a big risk for the future of the country.
> I estimate that I lost at least 50% of the year and a half since the beginning of the pandemic. That's 0.75 QALY.
That would imply you were **dead** for 9 months.
You are overestimating the impact, in QALY terms. Using a HRQoL instrument, I did an estimate of a person who would be pretty negatively impacted by a 'lockdown' and got a transformed score of 0.69. So your loss is on the order of 0.25 QALY (270 days by (1-0.69).
Can you link the tool? And that's a good point, your calculation seems more realistic. I think my point still stands, but just not as strong as before. Thanks for the precision.
It's not much further down the same road, well-paved with good intentions, before we start observing that the comparison obviously depends on the nature of the people suffering -- surely the suffering of a beautiful young person with exquisite artistic sensibilities and a lifetime of contribution ahead of her should be counted more than the suffering of an old ugly person with no friends, who's had a stroke and is now severely mentally disabled and drooling at the mouth and besides probably has fewer than 5 QALYs left?
From there it's but a short hop to justify all kinds of utilitarian good of the many versus good of the few decisions, such as euthanizing those who lives are not worth the social effort needed to maintain them (or who are perhaps merely consuming social resources, or causing crime and/or social disunion in excess of their social contribution), or starving the kulaks to death in order to serve the greater good of the Five Year Plan, or buying and selling men of a lower race if by doing so we allow the superior race to achieve heights of aesthetic achievement that are well worth the degradation of the slave, and many more Faustian bargains as well.
These sorts of hypotheticals start to seem silly at some point. Are we going to get to the point where we start wondering, If Superman and Jesus had a fight, who do you suppose would win?
Sorry. I think that was my sinus headache talking. Not at all charitable
Sorry about your headache
Yeah sorry I was a jerk
I'm only addressing the following point in Scott's post
>And it's so stupid - emotional damages! People being annoyed that they can't go to the bar (I realize for some people the emotional damages were deeper than that, but not everyone missed a family member's funeral - I think the part that really adds up is multiplying the inconvenience of not being able to go to the bar by 300 million people). Maybe a more courageous post would have looked more like "Hey, when you add this really simple thing in to the analysis, lockdowns are really obviously bad, right?" But it just felt too weird and transgressive to focus on something authorities weren't even talking about.
And "hypotheticals start to seem silly" is precisely my point
I think "people being annoyed that they can't go to the bar" is a gross misrepresentation of what most people went through. I could do the same on the opposite side and say that the emotional damages are more like solitary confinement, which is recognized as a form of torture by the UN. The truth is somewhere in between, varying from person to person.
> And "hypotheticals start to seem silly" is precisely my point
I don't think they are. I live in France, where currently 112k people died of COVID. I don't know how many would have died without a lockdown. But I sure hope it's more than 100k, because having 600 people going through a year and half of that to save just one life isn't, in my opinion, worth it. There's nothing hypothetical about that. The question that the government asks themselves is "who do we sacrifice to save who, and how many to save how many?". I hope they're looking into an objective measure and not doing everything they can to save the most lives they can, especially since they failed miserably.
I doubt that pro-lockdown authors are facing a lot of heckling and anti-lockdown authors are facing little. Rather, concern about a deadly viral pandemic and concern about how strangers will treat you on the street/internet are probably correlated. Both have ambiguous and unclear yet occasionally fatal or life-ruining danger, for which the main defense is to stay inside.
Also, the question of whether a conservative producing conservative science or a liberal producing liberal science, etc, can be trusted, I suspect you have to ask this on a case-by-case basis, and I don't think that any one ideology is more trustworthy. Find a few scientists who seem to be particularly honest, credible, diligent, listen to what they say and ignore everyone else.
For me, the huge issue with lockdown is not emotional damage, but something related : it's establishing a precedent for a central power to monitor and control personal behaviors and limit essential freedoms to achieve difficult to measure societal benefits... This is a very bad precedent, like anti terrorist measures but even worse. The west looks a lot like China did 5 years ago, when all progressive media were telling how Orwellian it was. The same media now preach safety above everything else without worrying much about citizen tracking and restrictions...we are on a very bad slope here, and we sleep faster and faster regardless of the actual epidemy strength... Which make the epidemy looks more like a convenient excuse...
About math and models, more specifically predictive models:
I think worth mentioning that math is not the hard part in predictive models. You make your hypotheses, you set your parameters, you do the math, you read the results. The math here is often simple. Or maybe it is not, if you want a beautiful solution as closed-form expressions; but we do not need that to read the results, we only need an accurate enough numeric value. The models are usually a set of differential equations or some kind of discrete dynamic system: our everyday computers can solve most of them numerically in the matter of seconds.
The hard part, really, are the hypotheses and parameters. About parameters, John von Neumann put it this way: “With four parameters I can fit an elephant, and with five I can make him wiggle his trunk.”
But the real stopper is hypotheses. Models have a boatload of them, most of them implicit.
For example, when people were about computing the herd immunity threshold: the main parameter was the average number of people anybody may contaminate. Key word: average. Introverts will meet fewer people, with a lower risk of contamination, the opposite for extroverts. Does it average out? No: common sens tells us that extroverts will be contaminated early, then immune, hence slowing the propagation. And models designed to test that common sense confirm it: random graphs where 90% of the nodes have two links and 10% have 12 have a lower herd immunity threshold than graphs where all nodes have three links.
Furthermore, some epidemiologists knew that. There were articles about it published, even before the current crisis IIRC. But when you look at the models, the average is the only distribution parameters. That translates into the implicit hypothesis “everyone's as much an extrovert as everyone else”. Which does not match reality. But since it is implicit, it is rarely discussed.
The important thing to remember about predictive models is that they can tell us what can possibly happen, but they are too many uncertainties for them to tell us what will happen.
If you can read French, or stomach an automatic translation (it should work reasonably well for that kind of text), the following blog article, and the related articles, tells it better than me:
http://www.madore.org/~david/weblog/d.2020-04-14.2650.html
It connects with the Euler remark: when Euler says “𝑒^𝑖π+1=0 therefore God”, he really is saying “𝑒^𝑖π+1=0 AND beauty implies God, therefore God”. We can call bullshit on the implicit hypothesis, which is not math.
About unexpected consequences:
I can argue that the Nazis caused the Manhattan project, which caused civil nuclear power earlier, which might allow us to barely escape the worst of climate change. So, Nazis good? Certainly not, it was not on purpose.
The conclusion I take is that History is chaotic, and worrying about hypothetical indirect consequences too far removed is a waste of time. Cannabis may decrease intelligence? Maybe, but people more relaxed may hit their kids less, making the next generation smarter.
The lockdowns, by changing our relation to work and welfare, may have opened the road to Universal Basic Income and Universal Healthcare, and caused the end of poverty before 2040. Or they may have strengthened the choke-hold of tech corporations on society and led us to the standard cyberpunk dystopia.
I do not have a strong argument for it, but my intuition tells me that we need to assume that the indirect chaotic effects average to 0, because otherwise we cannot do anything. It is not very satisfying; but if psychohistory was easy, it would have been invented already.
About another concern with regard to lockdowns:
You certainly remember that after 9/11, authorities have pushed for security theater, widening the powers of the executive branch and law enforcement, and it happened again after each episode of terrorism. For example, the Crypto Wars were re-kindled by the need to decrypt a terrorist's phone.
The phenomenon is simple: power attracts people who want power, if they can get more of it they will, and events that scare the population are a good occasion to consolidate power.
As you pointed out, lockdowns in Europe were probably more strict than in the United States. To implement them, governments had to have emergency laws voted. When the emergency subsided, some of these laws ended, and some of them have been kept and made permanent.
One of the concern I and many other people had about the lockdowns were exactly this: they being the excuse to weaken legal protections for fundamental rights, with a good measure of ratchet effect: once the population of an area had been locked down under police control to save lives from a pandemic, and society has not collapsed, we can be locked down under police control again for other reasons, say a terrorist manhunt, or protests against an unpopular reform of tax pensions.
It was especially visible in France, where the implementation of the lockdown were quite stupid, to the point that German newspapers called us Authoritarian Absurdistan. Parks and forests were forbidden. To go to groceries, we had to fill and sign a form for ourselves; police chiefs have bragged how many people they have fined at the very doors of convenience stores. And whoever complained about it were swiftly called covid denialists and compared to Trumpist anti-maskers.
The weakening of fundamental freedoms and checks-and-balances, both in law and in mentalities, is a long-term consequence of the lockdowns that I fear might feel deeply.
Indeed. And all this for a relatively mild epidemy (if it was ebola like, the situation would be very different). At this stage, every flu could justify some of the covid restrictions, i would not be surprised if mask wearing inside public places are enforced every winter...when looking back at the h1n1 scare, the sars one, the h5n1, and so on, it become tempting to think some administrations wanted a covid - like crisis: something not too bad, but bad enough to shift the cursor of western individual freedoms...
We are carrying out a real-time experiment on this in Australia as we speak. Both Melbourne and Sydney are having lockdowns because of delta outbreaks. Melbourne lockdown was very quick and strict, Sydney hesitated. As a result, Melbourne looks very close to proving conclusively that it is possible for a 5 million people city to control delta and (hopefully, with a little luck) bring it down to 0. Sydney at this point seems to be losing control.
The difference between the 2 cities is the ideology of the state governments, Labor in Melbourne, right-wing Liberal in Sydney.
The utility arithmetic of emotional consequences doesn't sit right with me...
I don't think you can assign a negligible negative utility to some experience, then just naively multiply that utility by the number of people having that experience to create some huge negative utility.
For instance: If a genie would let me save one person's life on the condition that a hundred people had to stub their toes, I would take that deal in a heartbeat. My decision doesn't change if it's a million people. Or a billion. Or a trillion.
Somehow, my intuition is that if a utility is small enough, it doesn't simply add up over several people.
Similarly, I *don't care* if a billion people are sad about not getting to go to night clubs for a year, if that's the price to pay for saving lives. For the same reason that I would happily sacrifice a billion servings of caviar to stop covid. "Oh no I don't get to eat caviar" times a billion. Get over yourself you spoiled brat. Night clubs are a luxury, and you should be happy to give up that luxury for the opportunity to save lives.
And still not so many people donate to stuff like vaccination or water treatment projects, which typically save many lives in developing countries. Problem is that it's quite easy to say for a few dollar you save a life, and expect of course it's a no brainer, everybody will agree....But it's an anonymous life, and moral rationalist overestimate the value of an anonymous life to most people. You get hardened, quite automatically, against compassion for abstract suffering, because the donations accumulate, and in the end your compassion result in a real hit to your standard of living for an abstract benefit to people you will never interract with. It also feels very scam-like, so trigger instinctive resistance to being exploited.
Personally, I am also extremely hostile to the message "give, your selfish bastard" when the guy saying it either will not give anything, or do not suffer much from what is given, or plead for a cause that is much more important for him than for random people. I could give up caviar and clubs cause I do not like them anyway. But I understand some people do like it, and would be reluctant to give up things objectively as trivial, but which I care about...
Maybe write a post about the emotional damage subject specifically? You're right that it would be transgressive. Anyone who brings it up is in for some shaming as being selfishly concerned with their own comfort "while people are dying!"
These kinds of calculations always subtly ignore the value of simply not being forced to do something. You don't have to be a raging libertarian to realize that "mere" personal freedom has some real moral value. Not being forced to do something is an inherent good.
That's why I think it's much better to do trade-off-type thought experiments to judge the rationality of lockdowns. Find some phenomena, X, that roughly matches the distribution of mortality risk as covid (plus some padding for the "unknowns", if you want), and then 1) see how much effort people currently expend avoiding such risks and then compare it to relative hardship of lockdowns, and/or 2) ask people if they'd vote to lockdown to avoid the risks of X. (Of course, when polling you have to avoid mentioning covid, lest you taint it with politics.)
Asked this question on LessWrong: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/Rm5FdDz8rv9kiqdSQ/do-we-have-a-term-for-the-issue-with-quantifying-policy
I feel like your analysis had an asymmetry, where you acknowledge that R reduced mainly because of voluntary behavior changes rather than lockdowns, but then attribute all the costs to lockdowns when most of the costs were also caused by voluntary behavior rather than government policy.
I feel dumber for having read this. Sweden, Afganistan, other places that simply ignored covid, provide irrefutable proof that covid while a real cold/flu like disease, us no more dangerous than flu. There are no excess deaths, or the effect is very small. Death rates are roughly same as 2017, 2018
Any kind of statistics other than overall amount of people dying, are meaningless. US gov got initially freaked out by COVID, and threw tons if money at it. Where there is free money, there is grifting.
Situation: 10 grandmas walk into ER, presenting fever, headache and coughing. These are symptoms of both flu, and covid. But treating COVID patient milks insurance for 100k, while treating flu patient hardly milks 20k. Do you think our hospitals are going to classify these 10 grandmas with flu, or with covid? "But but but the PCR test show covid". Do you undetstand how PCR test works? Its exponential magnification. With 45 cycles you will detect covid on a ham sandwich with 50% probability. With 50 cycles every test on any substance will come out as covid.