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Staying open is not a panacea for small businesses. Nobody is travelling, nobody is spending. My parents have a small shop (in Spain) and they had to close befo

by yiyus 7y ago

Staying open is not a panacea for small businesses. Nobody is travelling, nobody is spending. My parents have a small shop (in Spain) and they had to close before the lockdown started because they were not selling anything. And, by that time, things were much better that they are now around here.

slg 7y ago
You are certainly right, but it is a question of blame. If the government shuts down your business and it never recovers you will likely blame the government. If the government lets you stay open and your business still fails you will likely blame the virus. EDIT: This is being downvoted, so let me make a clarification that I am explaining the government's potential reasoning but I am not excusing or agreeing with it.
- bad_user 7y ago
  If the government doesn't shut down businesses, we get hundreds of thousands of unnecessary deaths in addition to the economic crisis, which is here anyway. Spain's hospitals are collapsing, sick people are now laid on the ground, they are improvising by making new beds in expo halls, etc. It's not just Italy now, we're seeing how bad it gets and it only takes another week or two for the rest of the world.
- mistermann 7y ago
  It seems to me that the root cause in all these things is a lack of appreciation for the manner in which people think. And further, that we (both our leaders as well as people in general) assign practically zero importance to this aspect of the problem. It seems to me that we almost don't even recognize that it's there (and here one must be careful: yes, if someone points this phenomenon out, we can all see it then - but change the topic of discussion to something else, and watch that knowledge seemingly vanish). In this case, I propose that a better definition of the problem is: people disagree on which variable to optimize. But neurotypicals don't think in terms of "optimizing a variable" (precise, logical thinking), for a given set of variables. Rather, they think in terms of what is "the right thing to do" (fuzzy, heuristic-based thinking), in a given situation. System 1 vs System 2: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thinking,_Fast_and_Slow#Two_systems https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thinking,_Fast_and_Slow#Two_sy... Everyone "thinks" (see: recursion) they think in System 2 (conscious, logical), because this is what we perceive, in infinitely high resolution - it seems like what we think and believe is purely the result of disciplined, rational thought, but it is not. Not even close. And it's not just those who are less intellectually capable than us....it's all of us. Now, it is obvious of course that the degree to which each individual person suffers from this will vary significantly. If we had a means of measuring this, this would give us a metric of the variance of this phenomenon between people at the personal population level. I would call this the relative variance of X. But there's another metric that is far less obvious: the ~absolute variance - this metric compares variance not between the peoples of Earth, but between them and a purely rational, emotion-free actor. It seems to me that the second metric would be an extremely interesting thing to know, and perhaps extremely useful. But alas, we have no data source. I wonder though: might there be a way to come up with an estimate that is plausibly accurate?

by yiyus 7y ago

slg 7y ago

You are certainly right, but it is a question of blame. If the government shuts down your business and it never recovers you will likely blame the government. If the government lets you stay open and your business still fails you will likely blame the virus. EDIT: This is being downvoted, so let me make a clarification that I am explaining the government's potential reasoning but I am not excusing or agreeing with it.

bad_user 7y ago
If the government doesn't shut down businesses, we get hundreds of thousands of unnecessary deaths in addition to the economic crisis, which is here anyway. Spain's hospitals are collapsing, sick people are now laid on the ground, they are improvising by making new beds in expo halls, etc. It's not just Italy now, we're seeing how bad it gets and it only takes another week or two for the rest of the world.
mistermann 7y ago
It seems to me that the root cause in all these things is a lack of appreciation for the manner in which people think. And further, that we (both our leaders as well as people in general) assign practically zero importance to this aspect of the problem. It seems to me that we almost don't even recognize that it's there (and here one must be careful: yes, if someone points this phenomenon out, we can all see it then - but change the topic of discussion to something else, and watch that knowledge seemingly vanish). In this case, I propose that a better definition of the problem is: people disagree on which variable to optimize. But neurotypicals don't think in terms of "optimizing a variable" (precise, logical thinking), for a given set of variables. Rather, they think in terms of what is "the right thing to do" (fuzzy, heuristic-based thinking), in a given situation. System 1 vs System 2: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thinking,_Fast_and_Slow#Two_systems https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thinking,_Fast_and_Slow#Two_sy... Everyone "thinks" (see: recursion) they think in System 2 (conscious, logical), because this is what we perceive, in infinitely high resolution - it seems like what we think and believe is purely the result of disciplined, rational thought, but it is not. Not even close. And it's not just those who are less intellectually capable than us....it's all of us. Now, it is obvious of course that the degree to which each individual person suffers from this will vary significantly. If we had a means of measuring this, this would give us a metric of the variance of this phenomenon between people at the personal population level. I would call this the relative variance of X. But there's another metric that is far less obvious: the ~absolute variance - this metric compares variance not between the peoples of Earth, but between them and a purely rational, emotion-free actor. It seems to me that the second metric would be an extremely interesting thing to know, and perhaps extremely useful. But alas, we have no data source. I wonder though: might there be a way to come up with an estimate that is plausibly accurate?