You’re wrong about this. Trust in the CDC is not a single-variable scale and not a generically useful resource. Trust in the CDC is a mix of peoples’ estimation of the CDC’s competence, and their estimation of whether the CDC is biased towards under-response or over-response. It is severely harmful for people to over-estimate the CDC’s competence, or to fail to recognize that the CDC is biased towards under-response.
Having previously over-estimated CDC’s competence caused many parties which could have been bypassing the CDC to create and deploy tests, to fail to respond in time. I expect that decision-makers currently relying on the CDC’s competence will implement distancing measures and ban gatherings much too late.
The main reason we might want people to over-estimate the CDC’s competence is that this trust could be used to solve coordination problems. However, the coordination problems that CDC could plausibly solve—closing airports, banning public gatherings, and implementing quarantines—are problems that it solves using legal power, not using generic community trust. To the extent that community trust is required to implement such measures, knowing that the CDC has been consistently biased towards under-response will make it easier, to a greater degree than knowing that they’ve been incompetent will make it harder.
My evaluation is that reducing trust in the CDC has net-positive consequences. But note that, separately, I don’t think an evaluation of this depth is typically required before truthfully speaking about an organization’s credibility. I expect that nearly all of the time, when trading off between speaking truth and empowering an institution, speaking truth is the correct move, and those who think otherwise will be mistaken.
I can’t reply to all of this now, but in short, yes, it’s not a single variable scale, and yes, over-reliance on government was on net very harmful to this point. But no, most of the CDC’s influence isn’t legal powers, since the US legal system simply doesn’t work that way. The CDC cannot tell governors what to do, nor can the president—that’s all about their ability to persuade people that they should be listened to, and it’s going to be critical if and when they get their shit together.
I also think several object-level claims in the post are *wildly* off base in several places, in part showing a basic lack of understanding of the issues, and in part claiming retrospectively that they should have know things that no-one knew in advance. It claims The CDC should have approved testing that they weren’t part of the approval process for—no, HHS isn’t the same as CDC, nor is the FDA. It says the CDC needed to respond with tests quicker, but they evidently should have gone slower with distributing lab tests to ensure they didn’t have a false positive problem. The CDC correctly told people that focusing on masks would be a bad idea, because taking focus away from handwashing is really fucking stupid given relative efficacy and scalability of the two.
And your prior assumption that on balance it’s better to attack an institution instead of empowering it is predicated on the claims 1) being true, and 2) directly having a bearing on whether the institution should be trusted. In this case, I’ve noted that 1 is false, and for 2, I don’t think that directly attacking their credibility for admitted missteps is either necessary or helpful in telling the truth.
You’re right that the blocks to testing were largely caused by HHS and the FDA, not the CDC. We described that in the text, but I agree that there’s too large a risk someone skims the headings and misses that. I think it’s important to include because it’s entangled with things the CDC did do, but I’ve edited the heading to be clearer.
I think you’re confusing the CDC with the US government generally in many more places, and have failed to differentiate in ways that are misleading to readers. And as I said, I think you’re both blaming the CDC for things they got right, like discouraging use of already scarce masks by the uninfected public, and wrong to blame the CDC for mistakes that are only clear in retrospect.
You’re wrong about this. Trust in the CDC is not a single-variable scale and not a generically useful resource. Trust in the CDC is a mix of peoples’ estimation of the CDC’s competence, and their estimation of whether the CDC is biased towards under-response or over-response. It is severely harmful for people to over-estimate the CDC’s competence, or to fail to recognize that the CDC is biased towards under-response.
Having previously over-estimated CDC’s competence caused many parties which could have been bypassing the CDC to create and deploy tests, to fail to respond in time. I expect that decision-makers currently relying on the CDC’s competence will implement distancing measures and ban gatherings much too late.
The main reason we might want people to over-estimate the CDC’s competence is that this trust could be used to solve coordination problems. However, the coordination problems that CDC could plausibly solve—closing airports, banning public gatherings, and implementing quarantines—are problems that it solves using legal power, not using generic community trust. To the extent that community trust is required to implement such measures, knowing that the CDC has been consistently biased towards under-response will make it easier, to a greater degree than knowing that they’ve been incompetent will make it harder.
My evaluation is that reducing trust in the CDC has net-positive consequences. But note that, separately, I don’t think an evaluation of this depth is typically required before truthfully speaking about an organization’s credibility. I expect that nearly all of the time, when trading off between speaking truth and empowering an institution, speaking truth is the correct move, and those who think otherwise will be mistaken.
I can’t reply to all of this now, but in short, yes, it’s not a single variable scale, and yes, over-reliance on government was on net very harmful to this point. But no, most of the CDC’s influence isn’t legal powers, since the US legal system simply doesn’t work that way. The CDC cannot tell governors what to do, nor can the president—that’s all about their ability to persuade people that they should be listened to, and it’s going to be critical if and when they get their shit together.
I also think several object-level claims in the post are *wildly* off base in several places, in part showing a basic lack of understanding of the issues, and in part claiming retrospectively that they should have know things that no-one knew in advance. It claims The CDC should have approved testing that they weren’t part of the approval process for—no, HHS isn’t the same as CDC, nor is the FDA. It says the CDC needed to respond with tests quicker, but they evidently should have gone slower with distributing lab tests to ensure they didn’t have a false positive problem. The CDC correctly told people that focusing on masks would be a bad idea, because taking focus away from handwashing is really fucking stupid given relative efficacy and scalability of the two.
And your prior assumption that on balance it’s better to attack an institution instead of empowering it is predicated on the claims 1) being true, and 2) directly having a bearing on whether the institution should be trusted. In this case, I’ve noted that 1 is false, and for 2, I don’t think that directly attacking their credibility for admitted missteps is either necessary or helpful in telling the truth.
You’re right that the blocks to testing were largely caused by HHS and the FDA, not the CDC. We described that in the text, but I agree that there’s too large a risk someone skims the headings and misses that. I think it’s important to include because it’s entangled with things the CDC did do, but I’ve edited the heading to be clearer.
I think you’re confusing the CDC with the US government generally in many more places, and have failed to differentiate in ways that are misleading to readers. And as I said, I think you’re both blaming the CDC for things they got right, like discouraging use of already scarce masks by the uninfected public, and wrong to blame the CDC for mistakes that are only clear in retrospect.
Okay, what are those places?