I go back and forth on whether simply sufficiently bad consequences would be enough to change my mind.
This makes me far more convinced that we need to address the infohazard concerns, which I tried to raise, rather than debate consequences directly—which everyone seems to agree are plausibly very bad, likely just fine, and somewhat unclear. There is a process issue that I see here—as far as I’ve read, you as an author decided that there were significant potential concerns, decided that they might be minimal enough to be fine, and then—without discussing the issue—unilaterally chose to post anyways.
This seems like the very definition of Unilateralist’s curse, and if we can’t get this right here on lesswrong, I’m terrified of how we’ll do with AI risk.
Secondarily, for ” Compelling evidence that we were wrong on any individual assertion would of course change my mind on sharing that particular assertion,” I’ll point to the bizarre blaming of the CDC for HHS and FDA’s failure to allow independent testing.
And for the final point, about masks, there is no compelling reason to say they should be encouraging their use given that the vast majority of people don’t know how to use them and from what I have seen/heard from people in biosecurity in the US, are almost all misusing them, so the possible benefit is minimal at best. But even if they are on net effective, would be due to a reasonable disagreement about social priorities during a potential pandemic.
However, I think that you should be more charitable than even that in your post. If there is compelling reason to think that the decisions made were eminently reasonable given the information CDC had at the time, blaming them for not knowing what you know now, with far more information, seems like a poor reason to say we should not trust them. And other than their general hesitation to be alarmist, which is a real failing but one that is a good decision for institutional reasons, “I can see this was dumb in hindsight” seems to cover most of the remaining points you made.
This makes me far more convinced that we need to address the infohazard concerns, which I tried to raise, rather than debate consequences directly—which everyone seems to agree are plausibly very bad, likely just fine, and somewhat unclear. There is a process issue that I see here—as far as I’ve read, you as an author decided that there were significant potential concerns, decided that they might be minimal enough to be fine, and then—without discussing the issue—unilaterally chose to post anyways.
This seems like the very definition of Unilateralist’s curse, and if we can’t get this right here on lesswrong, I’m terrified of how we’ll do with AI risk.
Secondarily, for ” Compelling evidence that we were wrong on any individual assertion would of course change my mind on sharing that particular assertion,” I’ll point to the bizarre blaming of the CDC for HHS and FDA’s failure to allow independent testing.
And for the final point, about masks, there is no compelling reason to say they should be encouraging their use given that the vast majority of people don’t know how to use them and from what I have seen/heard from people in biosecurity in the US, are almost all misusing them, so the possible benefit is minimal at best. But even if they are on net effective, would be due to a reasonable disagreement about social priorities during a potential pandemic.
However, I think that you should be more charitable than even that in your post. If there is compelling reason to think that the decisions made were eminently reasonable given the information CDC had at the time, blaming them for not knowing what you know now, with far more information, seems like a poor reason to say we should not trust them. And other than their general hesitation to be alarmist, which is a real failing but one that is a good decision for institutional reasons, “I can see this was dumb in hindsight” seems to cover most of the remaining points you made.