In most contexts, it’s probably good that the WHO can’t enforce quarantines on sovereign states, and this just happened to be an exception.
You’re far too willing to concede to their reformulation of the problem!
You can imagine a version of the world where literally we exhausted every other avenue (or every other avenue that isn’t even more tyrannical) and the only option left is either what actually happened or give the WHO unchecked authority to enforce quarantines over sovereign states. But there are a number of actions that are improvements without needing to give WHO more authority in that way:
The WHO can advise sovereign states to enforce quarantines.
This is already what public health departments usually do, including within a country. They usually advise local governments rather than have operational or legislative control of the state use of force
They can offer to broker multilateral agreements so that well-resourced states can have quarantine ships on site, and offer to take in everyone.
Instead of looking at the WHO, we can ask why individual states are not doing quarantines
The WHO or another third party can offer individuals money to self-quarantine
We can set up an international apparatus (can be an international body, nonprofit, or for-profit company) to manage these quarantines
etc, etc
In general, there’s massive slippage between “this specific solution that you never proposed has sufficiently, undesirable consequences, therefore the best realistic world is the status quo”
This is something I’ve encountered often with this fallacy in particular. Otherwise rational, well-meaning, disinterested, etc, people often miss that Bob’s making a complete reformulation of a problem from complaining about a bigger issue to a narrower fault analysis reframing. For example, in an earlier draft of this post, where I said
Another example I’ve encountered recently is (anonymizing) when a friend complained about a prosaic safety problem at a major AI company that went unfixed for multiple months. Someone else with background information “usefully” chimed in with a long explanation of organizational restrictions and why the team responsible [...]
But what I (and my friend) cared about was the prosaic safety problem not being fixed! And what this says about the company’s ability to proactively respond to and fix future problems. Your internal team management was never a serious concern for us to begin with!
Claude’s review thought the AI safety example was kinda reasonable prioritization of the team (“You can still rebut with “rational prioritization that produces this outcome is itself the problem,” but the response isn’t a non sequitur the way the headline or hantavirus replies are.”). But they ignored/missed that I never brought up the specific team. Without privileged information, I don’t know the underlying dynamic here. It could be that the team should have more headcount or compute. It could be that a different team should handle it. It could be a different answer altogether. The complaint is about the company not the team[1].
But it’s very easy/tempting for the mistaken levels of the fault analysis framing to suck up oxygen.
Now if the defense was that the company made the right choice (eg “in an ideal world we’d want to go carefully and address all safety issues like that. But due to competitive pressures, and also because this specific prosaic safety issue can’t realistically pose an x-risk, our company is being very reasonable in not devoting more resources to solving this problem over other safety issues and racing”), that’d be a much more valid defense. I still think it’s wrong, but at least it’d be valid!
You’re far too willing to concede to their reformulation of the problem!
You can imagine a version of the world where literally we exhausted every other avenue (or every other avenue that isn’t even more tyrannical) and the only option left is either what actually happened or give the WHO unchecked authority to enforce quarantines over sovereign states. But there are a number of actions that are improvements without needing to give WHO more authority in that way:
The WHO can advise sovereign states to enforce quarantines.
This is already what public health departments usually do, including within a country. They usually advise local governments rather than have operational or legislative control of the state use of force
They can offer to broker multilateral agreements so that well-resourced states can have quarantine ships on site, and offer to take in everyone.
Instead of looking at the WHO, we can ask why individual states are not doing quarantines
The WHO or another third party can offer individuals money to self-quarantine
We can set up an international apparatus (can be an international body, nonprofit, or for-profit company) to manage these quarantines
etc, etc
In general, there’s massive slippage between “this specific solution that you never proposed has sufficiently, undesirable consequences, therefore the best realistic world is the status quo”
This is something I’ve encountered often with this fallacy in particular. Otherwise rational, well-meaning, disinterested, etc, people often miss that Bob’s making a complete reformulation of a problem from complaining about a bigger issue to a narrower fault analysis reframing. For example, in an earlier draft of this post, where I said
Claude’s review thought the AI safety example was kinda reasonable prioritization of the team (“You can still rebut with “rational prioritization that produces this outcome is itself the problem,” but the response isn’t a non sequitur the way the headline or hantavirus replies are.”). But they ignored/missed that I never brought up the specific team. Without privileged information, I don’t know the underlying dynamic here. It could be that the team should have more headcount or compute. It could be that a different team should handle it. It could be a different answer altogether. The complaint is about the company not the team[1].
But it’s very easy/tempting for the mistaken levels of the fault analysis framing to suck up oxygen.
Now if the defense was that the company made the right choice (eg “in an ideal world we’d want to go carefully and address all safety issues like that. But due to competitive pressures, and also because this specific prosaic safety issue can’t realistically pose an x-risk, our company is being very reasonable in not devoting more resources to solving this problem over other safety issues and racing”), that’d be a much more valid defense. I still think it’s wrong, but at least it’d be valid!