7 ms·

I think it's a different reason. Let's analyze the outcomes from game theory perspective, along two dimensions: virus becomes pandemic or not, and governments d

• DonHopkins 7y ago
  The idea of dividing the outcome up into two binary "it works" and "it doesn't work" is a logical fallacy. It's like the ridiculous anti-gun control arguments that say because a measure doesn't stop 100% of gun deaths, it's not worth doing at all.
  • tomrod 7y ago
    Gotta cut the strategy space somewhere.
• jcadam 7y ago
  Also in the case of 4a it's hard to define "it works." Because it's hard to know to what degree any actions taken mitigated the severity of the pandemic.
  • jaynetics 7y ago
    Is it? Just compare countries with similar properties that took measures at different points in time. Japan and Germany might not be the best to compare here, but consider: Japan, schools closed etc. at 200 cases. 8 days later: 400 cases. Germany, no action whatsoever at 200 cases, 8 days later: 1600 cases.
    • C1sc0cat 7y ago
      Japan is an island, Germany is in the Schengen area and has lots of travellers to and from Italy and other European countries
      • jaynetics 7y ago
        Both have community spread, and Japan has lots of visitors from China. Even direct flights from Hubei were only stopped relatively recently. But yeah, European countries should make for better comparisons soon.
      • AstralStorm 7y ago
        I raise you that Japan has higher population density, especially vulnerable old people. Which is more important? Nobody knows. (And it wasn't closed to travel until recently either.)
        • C1sc0cat 7y ago
          You have not got lots of people going on holiday to Italian ski resorts on cheap flights / driving and going back home.
      • rat9988 7y ago
        Japan's density is way higher though.
        • sumedh 7y ago
          and they have lot of old people.
• WilliamEdward 7y ago
  But there is obviously a pandemic. I mean the WHO just called it a pandemic. How is 1) even an option? Do they just pretend it doesn't exist? Do they hope it doesn't kill too many people? People wont buy it, that's for sure.
  • tomp 7y ago
    I'm talking from the perspective of 1-2 months ago. Now it's too late for any preventive action anyways.
• Sosh101 7y ago
  And 1 requires much less effort and coordination than 4a.
• rcMgD2BwE72F 7y ago
  But all their experts have been telling them that (1) cannot happen, for quite some time. Another explanation is that government don't realize how much their words and actions have an effect on people's behavior, or they only focus on the worst possible effects ("what if people don't understand or react badly?"). In which case, they downplay the danger only to delay their decision. Because they're afraid of themselves (and can't have trust in the population).
  • tomp 7y ago
    > But all their experts have been telling them that (1) cannot happen, for quite some time. No, the experts are subject to the same game-theoretic play... e.g. WHO declared it a pandemic only yesterday. The only ones who suggested the correct action (ban all flights from China already during Chinese New Year) are the ones with no skin in the game / no decision-making power / no relevance, who are therefore not subject to the game.
• Rastonbury 7y ago
  That's now how game theory works, the pandemic is not another player who is 2nd guessing the government or vice versa. Instead governments are weighing the probabilities (think a probability tree, according to your scenarios) you kind of point to this in your conclusion.
  • tomp 7y ago
    The point of Game Theory is to analyze the situation according to the actual payoff function for each player, not according to the socially (Pareto) optimal outcome. The 2 players here are the government, and the voters. The socially optimal scenario is action REGARDLESS of whether it's a pandemic or not (in a hyper-globalized world it would hurt a bit, but only the first time, after that the tourists, supply chains, etc. would adapt) but the voters penalize that outcome (they see action with no pandemic as overreaction not as successful prevention) so governments avoid it.
    • AstralStorm 7y ago
      This is the problem of simplistic analysis. The question here is which actions of what severity, not simple act or not. There are many ways to handle this, from maximum quarantine and cancellation of medical appointments, through closing mass gatherings (e.g. schools), rationing, enforced testing, closing public transportation, controlling private transportation, closing airports, sea and river ports, mandatory sampling for tests etc. Each choice comes with a value for disruption and voter groups it will affect, and value for monetary cost. Game theory is not too helpful here, as disruption does not directly affect discontent and definitely not your chances of getting elected. These are much more complex decisions with many more actions between here and then.
    • Rastonbury 7y ago
      It still isn't game theory, the government acts first, the voters act after after observing the outcome. There is no subsequent game. It is simply up to the government to estimate probability and expected payoff. Optimal action for government is to take the least amount of action to prevent the voters from thinking its a pandemic. It isn't a game theory scenario, there are no nash equilibria.
• rorykoehler 7y ago
  you will never know if it worked or not though. 4a & 2 look the same after the fact
  • yardie 7y ago
    After Y2K I tried to raise this point that all the work did pay off. I guess people were expecting a control case somewhere, like a random power station in the middle of nowhere crashing, to show what happens if a system remained unpatched. After a while, I started to doubt myself as well. Even going to "Y2k was a hoax", for a brief period. But talking to more programmers from that period snapped me out of it.
    • DonHopkins 7y ago
      You have to take the long term view... https://medium.com/@donhopkins/cobol-forever-1a49f7d28a39 https://medium.com/@donhopkins/cobol-forever-1a49f7d28a39
• yread 7y ago
  But banning direct flights from Italy was definitely not the right action especially since the tourists were just rerouted through other European airports. All the epidimiologists are saying that closing borders doesn't help since the beginning
  • addHocker 7y ago
    Dishonest. THe epidemiologists are recommending closing borders, if and only if there is proper enforced quarantine established at those checkpoints who remain open. The ones recommending a complete, (aka non-discrimnatory open border practice), are the WHO which is basically a discredited ccp mouthpiece by now. They even pressured the Coronavirus COVID-19 Global Cases Graph from Johns Hopkins University (JHU) to rename Taiwan into Taipe & Chinese Environment. Live on twitter. The very party who caused this epidemic with mismanagement from the start, gets now barely vailed praise from its WHO for not beeing weak and democratic like the west. Including racistic harassment of all non-chinese wanting to travel to china at this point.
• BiteCode_dev 7y ago
  Exactly. Besides, it's a lose/lose proposition for the gov anyway. If they do act, people will blame them for the cost of the action. If they don't, people will blame then for the cost of not acting. Nobody will pat them on the back, except a few intellectuals, for acting. In fact, economically, the virus spreading is an opportunity to fire people you couldn't fire before, get rid of an old population costing money and have an excuse for a lot of things like passing certain types of law. People will not focus on that, their attention is elsewhere, and you can always invoke the circumstances if they do. We have created a system in which it's not in the interest of the gov to solve the problem. And in which the population lives in a way that makes it hard to do the right thing by themselves.
  • peterburkimsher 7y ago
    At the risk of being down-voted, I'm not trying to start a political debate. I'd just like to know, as someone outside the USA, how this is affecting the election campaigns there. Are personal costs of the pandemic encouraging people to support subsidised healthcare, and therefore a left-wing party? Or is the xenophobic rhetoric of "blame China/Europe/travellers/etc" causing people to support a right-wing party? I also haven't seen a full discussion of the chain of cause and effect. There was a shift from the primary sector to tertiary services, which led to urbanisation to find demand for services. Young people living in cities can make more friends than before, and this is good! It also means that there are more people living in close quarters, who can spread disease more effectively. I'm willing to face the risks of urban life instead of subsistence farming, but I wonder if other generations resent that.
    • BiteCode_dev 7y ago
      I'm not in the US either. I see a lot of what you mention on online mediums. But it's usually quite different than what's really happening IRL. People love to play the panic game online, but I've seen only quiet order around me. Yesterday, my entire neighborhood has been evacuated because of a bomb, we were all grouped in an hospital, where we were questioned about possible fever. In airports, I see people wearing masks, facing cancelled flights. I see stores with huge queues to buy stock of food. It all happens in a calm and civil manner. Maybe I'm optimistic, but I'm nicely surprised by the way people act right now, despite all the blame we want to place.
• the8472 7y ago
  > 4a) pandemic, action, it works -> government was "right", saved lives, spared the economy -> reelected This is too optimistic. If it works then people see a tiny death rate and a shutdown forced by the government. The greatest success will look like an overreaction.
  • DennisP 7y ago
    Unless there are other countries that had more serious problems.
    • Lendal 7y ago
      Yes, unless your govt is hyper-nationalist and labels the pandemic as a "foreign virus". (Of course dirty foreigners are going to get sick—They're dirty.) We have no fear of pandemics here. We're superior. God protects us. Except for our non-conforming neighbors. They're rat-infested slums, so of course they will get the foreign virus too. God will protect us in our region though because we're clean and white, and we support the hyper-nationalist worldview of Dear Leader. So it's a complicated problem, with many dynamics at play.
  • gambiting 7y ago
    Yeah I'm not so sure. In Poland the actions are on the "extreme" side so far, and not many people complain, because sights and news from Italy are constantly brought up as comparison. It's constantly "unless we want to be as screwed as Italy is, we need to do X" and not many people complain about X.
    • rimliu 7y ago
      Same in Lithuania. Closing schools, clubs, gyms, canceling all public events and gatherings. So far we have only three confirmed cases (all came back from Italy), but the public is mostly supportive("finally!"). And that is even our health minister is at the bottom of the popularity rankings and the current goverment is not loved at all.
  • jcims 7y ago
• JoshTko 7y ago
  This is exactly why we will also take no action on climate change.
• teekert 7y ago
  I think we should not attribute to malice what we can explain by not being able to get your sht together. Belgium did't have a government for a very long time because they couldn't get the sht together. I think they are just overwhelmed and scared.
  • DonHopkins 7y ago
    Not attributing it to malice is white-washing, after Steven Miller or somebody equally racist ordered an immigration judge Christopher Santoro to issue an order to take down all Spanish Coronavirus prevention posters from immigration courts. In their way of thinking, the more immigrants who get the virus, the more Trump can say "I told you so" about his border wall. It's biological warfare, in support of a lie. That and giving smallpox-infested blankets to Native Americans was 100% genocidal malice, not a lack of having their shit together. The problem is that they DO have their shit together, and it's racist xenophobic mendacious destructive shit. The Trump DOJ’s Crazy Back-and-Forth on Coronavirus Prevention Posters https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2020/03/what-was-trump-dojs-problem-with-covid-prevention-posters.html https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2020/03/what-was-trump-dojs-... CDC director breaks with Trump on claim that border wall will help stop coronavirus https://www.politico.com/news/2020/03/10/cdc-director-border-wall-coronavirus-125007 https://www.politico.com/news/2020/03/10/cdc-director-border...
• _jal 7y ago
  > So, politicians choose (1), no action, as the most likely winning scenario. I have serious doubts about this model, but will play along. What explains: (a) The exceptions - some countries are acting and doing well. Others are doing better after a delay. (b) Past, more aggressive actions - many countries, the US included, have responded much more quickly and competently to acute disease crises.
  • hef19898 7y ago
    Just that the majority if governments in Europe are taking steps, pretty radical ones at that. For no other pandemic, SARS, MERS, various flus or Ebola was anything even near to what's done now. I wouldn't like to be the one to meet the decision, so. Because the cost of closing down a country for a couple of weeks is enormous. So when do put these actions in place? I have no idea, but it seems to be pretty difficult to get the timing right. There is no point in crying wolf over these actions online, or even worse about what should have been done in hindsight. There are whole staffs doing nothing else right now, experts in their respective fields. So the best we, as a public, can do right now is to get out of these people's way. We follow guidelines like washing hands and reducing contact. We go self quarantine. We take steps we can in our social and professional environment. We send our employees into WFH or close certain cites if that's not possible. We work with authorities to come up with plans and contingencies if our companies are relevant in that regard.
  • tomatotomato37 7y ago
    Politicians are humans with imperfect immune systems too. It's hard to be logical and play realpolitik when getting it wrong kills you or your family
• avip 7y ago
  Nothing in your analysis makes any sense. First, there's no "no pandemic" case. Not anymore. Second, your conclusion says that "politicians choose (1)" but that is not the case at all - almost every country in Europe, Asia, middle east had taken measures, with varying severity, and significant economic cost. Last but not least, the whole framing is extremely simplistic and follows the "politicians are evil" reddit-like logic.
  • normalnorm 7y ago
    > First, there's no "no pandemic" case. Not anymore. I am not saying that the analysis is correct, but information that is disclosed now has no bearing on an explanation of the actions of actors in the past. > Last but not least, the whole framing is extremely simplistic and follows the "politicians are evil" reddit-like logic. Politicians are people who happen to really care about being reelected. If you have any contact with them, you will realize that this is the ulterior motive of all of their actions. In a sense, as it should be. Being our democratic-elected representatives, it seems reasonable to me that they behave as slaves to the preferences of those who elected them. Like everything else, this creates a bunch of perverse incentives. You would have to be very naive to overlook these things, and imagine that powerful politicians will no put reelection above all things. The ones that didn't did not get reelected, and are not powerful politicians.
  • toolz 7y ago
    The original post probably uses pandemic in the colloquial sense, not by the WHOs definition which seems widely disagreed on. Remember the last WHO pandemic was the swine flu, which turned out to be more mild than the seasonal flu.
  • TravHatesMe 7y ago
    I would say it follows a "politicians act in their own best interest" logic. People with jobs in other industries have similar behavior, but I suppose the politicians have greater impact on society, so most people rally around the cynical view of politicians.
  • empath75 7y ago
    They're doing it now, but it's too late. They needed to do it a month earlier at least.
• ryanmercer 7y ago
  This is a fantastic, and wholly plausible, explanation best summed up as "damned if you do, damned if you don't".
• warpspin 7y ago
  > (i.e. their action was "correct" but not "correct enough") because their neighboring countries (e.g. Germany - not technically a neighbor but within Schengen Zone) failed to act. The Italian cluster most likely stems from an initial infection in Germany which occurred 10 days before the first flight bans anywhere. Italy probably failed, because it reduced testing to only include symptomatic cases at a critical time ( https://www.adnkronos.com/fatti/cronaca/2020/02/27/coronavirus-tamponi-solo-sintomatici_9kGJbocQHyJCgAyPtCvrAJ.html https://www.adnkronos.com/fatti/cronaca/2020/02/27/coronavir... ), not because Germany did not disallow flights at a time where it was already community spreading in Europe.
• codingdave 7y ago
  You may be right.... but it is time to start voting out politicians who put their own careers above the well-being of their constituents.
  • macintux 7y ago
    Unfortunately, in the US system at least, you don’t get to vote out a politician. All you can do is vote in a different person. That distinction makes for a world of difference in voting behavior.
• alfromspace 7y ago
  Wait, been I've been told "you can't just shut down travel", and that closing borders doesn't work, for reasons that are completely self-evident. So I'm utterly mystified that there are virtually no cases and 0 deaths in countries like Russia and Mongolia that closed their borders.
  • XorNot 7y ago
    Two countries doing minimal or no testing are not reporting any cases? Shocking.
    • alfromspace 7y ago
      I'm sure they have just as many cases as we do here in the US, where we're extremely diligent about testing. History will prove you correct.
• alex_young 7y ago
  This may be true if politicians are selfishly focused on reelection, and it’s one of the core reasons western democracies have term limits. In times of crisis our system needs leaders who do the right thing over the popular thing, even when it means risking losing office. This is called statesmanship. Voters would do well to remember this when choosing leaders, it’s an increasingly rare quality we select for.
  • gizmodo59 7y ago
    The president may have term limit but the party might want to continue to be in control of the senate and congress (or the equivalent in other countries)
• newsbinator 7y ago
  Even supposing politicians all act 100% selfishly, they'd still want to do everything possible to mitigate the effects of the pandemic: for themselves and their own families, even if for nobody else.
  • pfdietz 7y ago
    So, they want to hole up, then let the pandemic burn to completion as quickly as possible, so they can then emerge. They want everyone else to be exposed so they are no longer dangerous (either dead or immune).
• koonsolo 7y ago
  > So, politicians choose (1), no action, as the most likely winning scenario. I'm from Belgium myself, so I can chime in. Our minister of health is a docter herself, and is advised by a panel of experts including a professor of virology. They know very well what they are doing with the current 400 known infections. Closing schools makes no sense currently because of following factors: - kids are not the main factor in spreading the virus, as seen in other countries. - Putting kids with their grandparents is probaly worse for death toll compared to keeping them in schools. Look at the exponential growth curve of for example Denmark https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/2020_coronavirus_pandemic_in_Denmark https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/2020_coronavirus_pandemic_in... And compare that to the pretty linear growth curve of Belgium https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/2020_coronavirus_pandemic_in_Belgium https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/2020_coronavirus_pandemic_in... So please stop treating this as game theory. Our country is doing the best thing in this situation. Edit: denmark link and rude language
  • deleted 7y ago
    [deleted]
  • dang 7y ago
    > So please stop your bullshit about game theory. Your comment is fine except for that attack. Please don't stoop to that here, regardless of how strongly emotions are running. It helps no one and only makes this place worse. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
    • koonsolo 7y ago
      You are right, fixed this in an edit.
      • dang 7y ago
        Appreciated!
  • ekzy 7y ago
    You posted the belgium link twice. Here's Denmark https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/2020_coronavirus_pandemic_in_Denmark https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/2020_coronavirus_pandemic_in...
• MagnumOpus 7y ago
  > Italy, which did act in time, but still failed because their neighboring countries (e.g. Germany - not technically a neighbor but within Schengen Zone) failed to act This is incorrect. Italy closed borders on Jan 31st. The Chinese visitor to the Webasto company meeting came to Germany on Jan 19th. It is easily evident that Germany closing its borders at the same time as Italy would not have prevented this transmission. You should probably increase your skepticism about the media where you read this.
• xkcd-sucks 7y ago
  This analysis could just as well be applied to "war on terror" -- The response to which was opposite, and a lot of people profited by it (careers, contracts, etc). What makes them different?