A case for ending lockdown

Ryan Kemper is attempting to construct a decision making framework. Right or wrong, I like that someones are trying.

It now occurs to me that the experts (epidemiologists?) have already done this, which would be a pretty good starting point. If so, why aren't we now debating their plans?

I want someone, anyone to state thresholds and benchmarks. Tell us the parameters and values. Then we can have a constructive debate.

Declining infection and death rate for X days.

Permissible level of activities to keep R Supply chain activity levels to keep people fed, production of essential goods.

Given the complete lack of a plan at the federal level, we can forgive the Ryan Kempers of the world for trying to make some sense of this craziness.

Also, it just now occurs to me the newly formed regional compacts most certainly are doing the same. I'll look to see my jurisdiction is publishing.

> it also doesn’t follow that one should discard a piece of information just because it comes from some dude’s blog.

It doesn’t follow that I have to give every speaker equal weight; this would result in me having to listen to millions of amateurs before hearing an actual expert. The simple reality is that due to the limitations of time and preferential attention given to those with experience and expertise, it’s perfectly reasonable to ignore random blogs.

> horrible lies and fakes from blogs or Facebook posts.

You can’t take the ultra-rational “listen to everyone on the merits” approach and dismiss things as “lies” without a shred of specificity or evidence in the same breath.

Yeah, that’s kind of the problem. Sick people can’t make an economy go.

Of course we can eventually re-open, we have to re-open eventually; we’ll starve if we don’t. But we have to actually make decisions and come up with strategies that’ll make it possible for us to re-open first. If we pretend that we can just reopen the economy without doing that first, people will get sicker and the economy won’t get better.

> this is a good example of people saying the response was overblown, because the response had its intended effect

"this" being the article.

The comments upon the article are a good example of someone (actually, a group of people, near unanimously [1]) saying ~"because the outcome was , we know (~it is proven, or logically conclusive)[1] that the cause was ", which is also poor logic. This seems quite tricky for people to see though, due in part to the ~"culture war" nature of the subject I suspect (change the subject, strict logical capabilities return to normal, or so goes the theory), as well as how beliefs ("facts") are formed in the mind - I've seen this ~"if nothing happened, it proves(!) our recommended measures worked!" meme repeated so often across both social and mainstream media, and it seems to me that it has kind of become an axiomatic belief, not to be questioned, even by scientific/logical people.

If a similar assertion was made but with the subject being something other than covid-19, I suspect references to the "garlic repels vampires" fallacy would be plentiful.

You can often detect other artifacts of this thinking in online discussions. In this case, there was a lot more detail in the paragraph than the single excerpted sentence:

> Weeks and months later, facts on the ground show that the purported collapse of the healthcare system did not occur. Moreover, this was not due to success in seriously curtailing the spread in hard-hit areas like New York, but was rather due to the aforementioned discovery that COVID-19, while extremely deadly in certain subsets of the population, was not nearly as deadly overall as previously thought. An analysis of the flawed IMHE model is outside the scope of this article, but suffice to say that the model is built on extremely dubious assumptions and represents an approach of blind curve-fitting rather than a true epidemiological model, and makes bizarre assumptions that result in an unrealistic symmetricality as far as death drop-off is concerned (see this excellent analysis by “LessWrong” user Zvi) [2]. Confronted with the reality of having “succeeded” in avoiding the collapse of the healthcare system, albeit arguably not due to the lockdown policy, policymakers have not lifted the lockdown restrictions in much of the country, but on the contrary appear to have shifted the goal to a goal of total containment: staying locked down until COVID-19 has been suppressed to such an extent that it becomes feasible to perform widespread location tracking (dubbed “contact tracing”). Indeed, the current policy seems to be one of “indefinite postponement”, the key assumption being that it is feasible to avoid exposure to SARS-CoV-2 until a safe and effective vaccine is developed and delivered to the global population, and that the indefinite lockdown will not lead to excess mortality. We strongly dispute these assumptions and believe that they don’t hold up to even the slightest scrutiny.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Groupthink

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Herd_mentality

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Group_decision-making

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Belief

Interestingly, this very same behavior can typically be seen on both sides of any culture war [3] related disagreement, if(!) one is willing and able to look for, and see it that is (which is far easier said than done, because of the very neurological phenomenon that causes the disagreement in the first place). And to make it even more tricky, it is incredibly easy for the mind to spot logic errors in one's ideological opponent, but very difficult to spot in oneself. So, both sides evaluate the other as ~"soooooo stupid".

[2] https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/QuzAwSTND6N4k7yNj/seemingly-...

[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Culture_war

As for myself, I have no stance on the matter, because epistemically, the actual(!) truth of the matter is essentially unknowable - all we can do is make educated guesses. I mostly just derive great enjoyment from observing the conversations, which illustrate the various ways that humans think, and how thinking seems to vary depending on the content of the variables involved.

I don't get it. Imagine an HN where random people who never did any software started flooding HN with articles about how the software people are lying to us all and just making big bucks. Software is easy, here is how to make great software. And every single one of them was just random near-garbage pulled from a couple minutes reading slides from Agile experts and the occasional wiki article about "software abstraction".

It would be downvoted so fast for being so wrong, and no one would engage with it for being so terribly wrong because disproving all the points is exhausting and not worth the time. Yet, you would think it OK on HN.

Maybe you downvote some of the wrong ones, but others get lots of comments, and soon all these wrong posts just get more attention and comments as people are arguing over half-made points in a blog post by a sales guy that "has a few software friends".

The long-term changes to HN would eventually push away people that care.

But we don't live in that world, maybe not yet. So instead we allow people who get so many basic facts wrong about an epidemic to post on HN, and @dang explained elsewhere why this makes sense (and I agree from a moderating standpoint to keep this content up) and I agree with it.

But we really only allow this content because it isn't the bulk of content on HN. If the bulk of content on HN resembled the above, I don't think we would like the community HN becomes.

Quite ironically, this is highly related to the virus itself. The virus isn't a problem on its own. It is a problem because it infects hundreds of millions of people very quickly, and we have poor means for slowing or stopping it at all.

Very much like misinformation.