71–79 of 79 posts
Anyone else surprised with how effective American media has been in burying the large anti-lockdown protests throughout Europe? If you're an average American discouraged by some of the more draconian health measures here, you'd feel pretty isolated and hopeless, not knowing how much solidarity exists throughout the world.
Anyone else surprised with how effective American media has been in burying the large anti-lockdown protests throughout Europe? If you're an average American discouraged by some of the more draconian health measures here, you'd feel pretty isolated and hopeless, not knowing how much solidarity exists throughout the world.
There weren’t any “draconian” health measures in the US. And that’s why 600000 people are dead and tens of millions will have long term health problems.
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It's sad that the U.S/Europe is not capable of implementing contact tracing. I don't want to be spied on by Big Brother more than anyone else, but I'll take that over the government telling me I'm not allowed to leave my house.
Maybe people just want the freedom to make their own decisions while taking proper precautions. Lockdowns in the US haven’t had any positive outcomes versus the freedom to live with masks and social distancing.
This is basically the argument from anti-maskers (the ones against mask mandates, not the ones arguing masks don't work): Don't treat us like children.
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I mean, that’s life? Sure, doubling my money in every investment is great, but unrealistic. Plenty of strategies work as long as every does it and everything works perfectly. The problem is finding a strategy that works in the real world. Lockdowns failed because they weren’t the right solution, because reality is what it is and they weren’t calibrated for the reality that locking down everyone’s lives for a month si…
> let people make their own risk calculations based on the available evidence and their own situation and there-in lies the heart of the issue - the assumption that most people are able to make a good assessment, and that the assessment takes into account the impact on a societal level, rather than an individual level. This simply does not happen. People are selfish. People only look out for themselves. Therefore, it…
Isn’t deciding the national budget, or when to go to war, or public policy just as difficult an assessment and the public just as incapable of making it? The president has incredibly power over others lives, can cause just as many deaths as covid, should the people be deciding that in their selfishness and stupidity? Your argument is just against democracy in general because so much of public policy is far more “dangerous” than covid.
Not to mention: the lockdown route didn’t work still didn’t work because it’s still unrealistic! We tried lockdowns, and they failed because Americans didn’t like them. That was completely predictable, and if our goal is results, and have to consider the fact that humans are some simple system that follow plans to the tee. We can’t make policy based on what works in frictionless vacuums, the real world is messier than that.
Anyone else surprised with how effective American media has been in burying the large anti-lockdown protests throughout Europe? If you're an average American discouraged by some of the more draconian health measures here, you'd feel pretty isolated and hopeless, not knowing how much solidarity exists throughout the world.
Not really - all the mainstream messaging platforms were literally wiping out links to Hunter Biden stories.
They don't care about impartiality, freedom or even the idea that the average person has the dignity of their own opinion or ability to consume information.
They've gone full Orwellian.
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there’s no concrete evidence that lockdowns themselves were the principle mitigative effect, because so many different mitigations were thrown at it in hopes at least one of them worked. more likely is the general reduction in social contact brought on by uncertainty and amorphous (and media-fueled) fear and anxiety, i.e., social distancing. perhaps in an ideal world, your scenario may have proven effective, but we d…
The mathematical models of a lockdown migration perfectly matches what what happened in Victoria. It's almost a perfect natural experiment in that regard. Parameterize an epidemic model with the leakage we saw measured in the Victorian lockdown and you get the same pattern.
if you look at the wealth of information we have with a skeptical eye, you’d see there isn’t much support for lockdowns for this pandemic (which is different from mitigations like context-sensitive distancing). what is quite evident is that a lot of people are scared out of their wits even a year on (e.g., people wearing 2 masks outside) and cynical about other people (trying to kill grandma with their selfishness), and as a result want to believe in technofascist panaceas with all their might.
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don't give up. there's plenty of us who actually have assessed the risks and weighed them apropriately, using our own brains rather than relying on others to assuage our fears. almost none of the publicly pronounced mitigations have much mitigative effect. the most reasonable mitigation is sensible distancing when you're going to spend extended time with non-household members in tight quarters, but that's not big eno…
> didn't really have any substantive effect it did, but the effort was not sustained, nor done consistently enough in the USA to have had return on the investment/cost. I would argue that a bigger, more stringent lockdown, for at least 1-2 months, would have produced vastly better results. It's not like you can half-mitigate the pandemic with a half-lockdown.
it isn’t just about whether we can stop this pandemic through technocratic means (sure, in theory, we could), but whether it makes sense for such a relatively weak pandemic (we shouldn’t). you can’t consider just the technocratic arena, but must also consider the inextricably-intertwined sociopolitical consequences as well.
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The mathematical models of a lockdown migration perfectly matches what what happened in Victoria. It's almost a perfect natural experiment in that regard. Parameterize an epidemic model with the leakage we saw measured in the Victorian lockdown and you get the same pattern.
a broken clock is right twice a day too, and we like to see what we want to see in data. even if what you believe were true, you’d have to show it wasn’t mere random coincidence. mathematical models are no match for human behavior. it’s easy to find a model that seems to match reality once or twice on a short time scale. it’s likely impossible (the P=NP problem) to find a reliable model long-term (see: trading algori…
Are you rejecting epidemiological models as a reasonable representation of reality? That's a pretty bold take - all models have limits, but epidemiological modelling is a pretty well established science that makes good predictions that repeatedly hold up.
There are mechanical reasons to think a lockdown should work (reduced contact means reduced transmission), good explanations for circumstances where they fail (exponential spread from any leakage means it doesn't take long to erase the gains from reduced transmission) and multiple locations where they have worked.
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a broken clock is right twice a day too, and we like to see what we want to see in data. even if what you believe were true, you’d have to show it wasn’t mere random coincidence. mathematical models are no match for human behavior. it’s easy to find a model that seems to match reality once or twice on a short time scale. it’s likely impossible (the P=NP problem) to find a reliable model long-term (see: trading algori…
I'm not entirely sure what evidence would satisfy you. Are you rejecting epidemiological models as a reasonable representation of reality? That's a pretty bold take - all models have limits, but epidemiological modelling is a pretty well established science that makes good predictions that repeatedly hold up. There are mechanical reasons to think a lockdown should work (reduced contact means reduced transmission), go…
even if you can get the math to line up with reality in this instance, at the very least an epidemiological model isn’t going to tell you why, with any certainty.
your reasonings are about why something should work to buttress your beliefs, but you haven’t yet enumerated why any alternative explanation (especially the simpler ones) should or shouldn’t work. that would differentiate your reasoning from popular zealotry.
the term ‘science’ has lost meaning in popular/political discussions because it tries to elide uncertainty in just this way.