Did you miss the second part where I point out that an unmitigated COVID pandemic played out in my brother’s town to almost no consequence? “Everyone got COVID and survived” was not a hypothetical scenario.
your local retirement home abruptly lose half of the residents
Even in the 80+ category, the fatality rate is only 15%.
The difference between the two is quantitative, not qualitative, unless you explicitly or implicitly subscribe to the “humans are the only real agents” idea,
I would like to push back gently on this point. It’s entirely possible that what we mean by “agency” does not emerge until a certain threshold of complexity is passed, and that amoebas aren’t at the necessary level of complexity. Otherwise, why limit yourself to amoebas? Why not talk about the agency of electrons?
Could we convince aAlice that she’s wrong; that private-calm speech is much closer to our true preferences than public-emotional speech is?
Forget aAlice, how about convincing me, a fellow human, of this fact. Your statement that private/calm speech is closer to our actual values does not reflect how I understand myself, nor how I understand many of the people around me. People sometimes say things that they don’t mean when under emotional distress, but they also sometimes use emotional excitement as a means to express things they would otherwise inhibit.
Cf. this discussion of “truth shouters” and “cutlery loaders”. Your argument seems to assume that everyone is a cutlery loader, which is definitely Not True.
There has been some evidence both ways, but I think that the best argumentation has been that lockdowns were net-negative by a lot. Dumbledore’s Army linked this paper, which is not the same as the one that originally convinced me, but it’s also good and I don’t have the other link on hand.
In particular, analyses in favor of lockdowns tended to make two errors:
They compare a lockdown to a hypothetical situation in which there is no mitigation at all, rather than allowing for private, voluntary mitigation.
They assume that infections which do not occur during the lockdown never occur at all, rather than simply occurring later. Since we never got close to actually eradicating COVID, deaths during lockdown were mostly delayed rather than prevented. (The exception would be the cases where we delayed long enough to get good treatments or vaccines, or where we avoided medical system collapse, but even taking these into account the benefit is still smaller than assumed.)
Most importantly: relying on voluntary isolation allows people to choose their level of risk based on their vulnerability, their risk tolerance, and their ability to bear the costs. This is not perfect (you wind up with some people who would prefer to self-isolate but can’t do so for economic reasons), but it’s still miles better than forcing the same policy onto everyone.
In practice, your second-tier connectivity has a lot of overlaps so it’s not actually the square of the size of your Dunbar-sized immediate group. Additionally, by definition these are people that you don’t have direct relationships with, so your knowledge of what’s going on with them may be hazy.
Anecdotally, I know about 30 people who have gotten COVID, which includes one hospitalization and no deaths: a statistically average outcome. In my second-tier contacts I know… 4 or 5 deaths? I’m unsure, because the only way I can know about this at all is by hearing “[Person I don’t know] from [social activity I don’t go to] died of COVID”, and this makes it easy to never hear about it and to forget.
This is exactly right. By the time the vaccine became widely available, resistance to public health measures was already baked in and broke down along culture war lines, so nothing else really mattered at that point.
It applies already; the naive reading is correct. A major theme of Zvi’s recent covidposting has been to establish that Omicron is already everywhere, and the kinds of policies that might prevent that are already useless.
“One more disease among many”—this Wikipedia graphic suggests that respiratory diseases already kill about 3.6M people/year, and pre-COVID I barely spent even a thought on them, nor did I expend extraordinary efforts avoiding them. We could add COVID to the mix and bump the number up to 3.7M people/year, and neither of the above would change.
They key phrase in your comment is “sufficiently lethal”, and COVID ain’t.
I wished to make a similar point to your #1. If Omicron is both more contagious and less severe than Delta… that seems like a best-case scenario. Rather than being an important worsening of the pandemic, it could effectively end the pandemic by replacing most existing strains with something even less dangerous (and COVID is already not very dangerous). Though even if this is the case, I don’t expect our health and government authorities to admit it.
It would not have occurred to me to test the veracity of “eating dirt” taken literally as a description of putting dirt in your mouth and swallowing it. I always took “eating dirt” as synecdoche for the general practice of “allowing kids to get dirty and suffer exposure to mostly-harmless microbes”, and the references that you gathered above seem almost entirely to support that belief. Perhaps I’m not autistic enough to bother with the difference between “letting kids get dirty” and “letting kids literally put dirt in their mouth and swallow it”; perhaps this failure of hair-splitting caused me to have correct beliefs after all.
Both Tundra and Desert suffered from having too many predators and immediately driving all of the prey to extinction. In the actual world, herbivores evolve, and predators evolve and/or migrate into a ecosystem that already has an herbivore population at equilibrium. Would there be any way to do something like this in the future so that we don’t see so many dramatic population crashes?
I’m glad I’m not the only person who thought that book was awful. But you seem to have gotten further than I did: I read the first two chapters and quit.
I don’t think I disagree with this, except to note that it’s rarely the case that social standards are explicitly, consciously hypocritical. More often, people simply don’t notice the conflict between stated and actual standards.
Where I differ from many people is that, in case of a conflict between actual and stated standards of behavior, the correct thing to do is to endorse and formalize the actual standard, rather than trying to enforce the stated standard. This is because the stated standard, by virtue of never having actually been put into practice, is frequently insane if you try to actually practice it.
This article has an interesting intersection with one of LW’s other favorite topics: autism. Because autism (especially the high-functional, hyperverbal type common round these parts) is fairly described as an impairment in purely imitative learning, leading to an over-reliance on explicit verbal instruction...
which frequently leads to getting it wrong, especially in domains in which the explicit verbal instructions are lacking or in conflict with empirically observed behaviors. Your example of “everyone says you should obey the government while actually subverting it” is a good example of what seems to happen to high-functioning autists with respect to social rules, for example.
I somehow skimmed past the first line on my first read. I was sufficiently suspicious by the time I got to the end of the post that I went back to the top to see if I’d missed something, and by that time I knew exactly where the link would send me.
I was responding to the bit about “active shooter drills”, which are a thing that mostly occur in jittery suburban schools, ie. the kinds of schools least at risk of this kind of thing.
The fact about “school shootings” that usually gets ignored in these discussions is that almost none of them are of the type “single shooter trying to inflict mass casualties in a pre-planned attack,” the template that the media treats as prototypical. Those kinds of shootings are exceedingly rare, less than one per year, but they take up almost all of the media coverage.
The shootings that make up the bulk of the 25/year take place in urban schools, almost always involve black or occasionally Hispanic students, and fall under the broad umbrella of gang/drug violence. If you or your children go to a majority white/asian school, your chance of getting involved in a school shooting are lower by a factor of 100.
Strongly disagree. If you think of Virtue-with-a-capital-V as a Hellenic deity or a Platonic essence, then sure, Virtue doesn’t exist. But if “virtue” is like “honesty”, ie. a name for a particular pattern of action that is observable and which can be somewhat-objectively evaluated, then virtue absolutely exists, even if we might disagree about its identification.
Now, about the actual meat of your argument: you seem to have inverted the classical way of thinking of the virtues, which is that a person is virtuous precisely insofar as their virtues are habituated. You suggest that we award Virtue Points for initially acquiring some skill which is both difficult and praiseworthy, but stop awarding them thereafter. To the classical authors, this is backwards: the state in which you effortlessly always do the right thing is virtue, while the struggles to get there are merely the process of its acquisition.
(And yeah, this implies that some people are naturally more virtuous than others, just like some people are taller or smarter than others. C’est la vie.)
I don’t think the models are totally incompatible: your Virtue Points are just the delta between different levels of virtue. Nonetheless, I think it’s more useful to model virtue as a state and not as a series of events, and to think of yourself and others as virtuous based on their expressed habits, not on how much they’re struggling to acquire them.