4 ms·

I can tell you "from the field" that there are plenty of real people who really do feel the lockdowns are being overdone and doing more harm than good, yes, eve

by jerf 7y ago

I can tell you "from the field" that there are plenty of real people who really do feel the lockdowns are being overdone and doing more harm than good, yes, even accounting for the possibility of an increased infection rate. The damage being done by the lockdown is a big number, and quite concrete; the damage that would have been done if we didn't lock down is a widely variable number under any honest analysis and the minimum of that range quite likely extends below the concrete costs of the lockdown, even as the maximum dwarfs it. It's not a situation amenable to quite as easy a choice as many here seem to be implying. And those costs are bourne unevenly, which doesn't make the debate any easier. For those of who, like me, are nearly unaffected (so far), it's pretty easy to argue that the costs of the lockdown don't really matter. It doesn't have to be one or the other, of course. It would be far from the first time that a true grassroots movement was taken over by some non-grassroots group for their own purposes. I will point out that one of the reasons this may seem to be exploding suddenly though is that everybody is being exposed to the same conditions at the same time. Under those circumstances it should actually be expected that large social changes occur in relative lockstep at a pace that wouldn't have been possible during "normal" times. Mere speed of motion is not really a reason to be suspicious that the entire thing is being manufactured. And note I am specifically speaking about that argument and no other. There is plenty of evidence that the sites in question are too organized to be a simultaneous grass-roots effort springing up in multiple states at once at this speed with this similarity. That is also so unsurprising as to be something you should expect in advance. I'm just suggesting that it's not a good idea to therefore conclude there isn't a significant group of people who really do feel this way; marginalizing that group of real people will if any tend to empower these fake organizations by making them the only place those people feel like they can get any respect.

reilly3000 7y ago
Read Krebs' article, there is fairly clear evidence that there was a coordinated effort to create these groups and promote them. There was sentiments, but no grassroots movement that was co-opted, this started as astroturf and received coordinated support. Think about the implications of a foreign power being able to spread disease and death with disinformation. Is it 'war' if a million people end up dead, even if no bullets were fired? Who are the combatants, and how, as Americans could we win that war? There is a strong case for reopening ASAP and the pressure is becoming more real by the day. Its perfectly reasonable to be skeptical about the overreach of Government power, and even to take action against it. That said, in this time, with the scale of the infection in the US, opening too soon is an unnecessary danger to millions of people.
kelnos 7y ago
> The damage being done by the lockdown is a big number, and quite concrete; the damage that would have been done if we didn't lock down is a widely variable number under any honest analysis and the minimum of that range quite likely extends below the concrete costs of the lockdown It's really interesting to see that view phrased that way, because I see it oppositely: the "damage" as you put it, is "human lives lost" in one case, and financial and economic losses in the other. The latter can certainly cause the loss of human life, but I haven't seen anything but hand-wavy attempts to quantify it. While the potential death toll due to relaxing shelter-in-place and social distancing measures isn't absolutely known either, I find the estimated ranges to be both persuasive and unacceptable. We can make people whole financially (though I admit I have little confidence that this will be accomplished all that well) after the fact, but we can't bring people back from the dead.
- austhrow743 7y ago
  >The latter can certainly cause the loss of human life, but I haven't seen anything but hand-wavy attempts to quantify it. GiveWell calculates lives/dollars for its charities and I think the most efficient one is like $3k/life. Not some used up, only 2 years left neither of them good life either. That of a child.
- jerf 7y ago
  "and financial and economic losses in the other. The latter can certainly cause the loss of human life, but I haven't seen anything but hand-wavy attempts to quantify it." There's a few reasons for that. One is that people are very reluctant to hear than there is a finite limit to the amount of money that other people should spend to save their lives. Another is that it is highly situation-dependent, so there really isn't one solid number. Nevertheless, yes, at scale your mental conception of "economic damage" is probably incorrect. You are probably, if you mentally examine your conceptions, basically taking all the economic damage as coming out of "discretionary income"; who cares if we all lock ourselves up for a while and as a result, people can't buy the 65" new flatscreen TV they wanted and have to stick with what they have? Were that the truth, yes, economic damage would be something we could basically wave away. It is not the truth. The economic impact does not entirely come out of discretionary income. Connect some other pieces in, such as the HN favorite "Most households can't handle an unexpected expense of a $1000." Connect in the fact that poverty isn't just not buying flatscreens, but food insecurity, childhood stress that we've had links to studies showing the long-term negative impact of, and the general badness of poverty. Economic damage is true damage, and will in the long term kill people. Moreover, we are choosing economic damage now that will persist for months or years, still hurting people, after the coronavirus would have been gone. It also hurts the poor more than the rich; frankly the coronavirus up to this point has hardly affected me personally at all, but that doesn't mean I should underestimate how it is affecting others. At the moment I can't name anyone who has been totally, utterly "fired" to the point that they are guaranteed they have no job to come back to, I can name many names of people currently not being paid, who may or may not all be made up by government checks. Also note I'm not making a new argument, I'm still just defending my original claim that the range of possible outcomes is so wide that there are non-trivial options where coronavirus would have hurt less than a full lockdown. (Especially if you include other options, like, "tell everyone to wear masks, even impromptu ones made of T-Shirts over your face, wash your hands, limit social gatherings and cut schools (huge germ transmitters), but otherwise let the economy go. There's a lot of reason to believe that would have worked fairly well, beyond the scope I can go into right now.) But economic damage really will hurt people. (On the other, other hand, it has been observed that the total death rate in the US is down right now, which also factors in somehow.) Basically, I'm saying there's plenty of other contexts where we have no problem saying that economic hardship is really, really bad. It should be the same in this context, too. Otherwise, the next time someone is talking about how bad poverty is for someone, intellectual honesty would compel you to dismiss that argument the same way you are dismissing the idea right now that economy hardship is bad. If you are unwilling to agree with the proposition that "economic hardship isn't really a big deal in the long run" in that context, you shouldn't be agreeing with it in this one either.

by jerf 7y ago

reilly3000 7y ago

Read Krebs' article, there is fairly clear evidence that there was a coordinated effort to create these groups and promote them. There was sentiments, but no grassroots movement that was co-opted, this started as astroturf and received coordinated support. Think about the implications of a foreign power being able to spread disease and death with disinformation. Is it 'war' if a million people end up dead, even if no bullets were fired? Who are the combatants, and how, as Americans could we win that war? There is a strong case for reopening ASAP and the pressure is becoming more real by the day. Its perfectly reasonable to be skeptical about the overreach of Government power, and even to take action against it. That said, in this time, with the scale of the infection in the US, opening too soon is an unnecessary danger to millions of people.

kelnos 7y ago

> The damage being done by the lockdown is a big number, and quite concrete; the damage that would have been done if we didn't lock down is a widely variable number under any honest analysis and the minimum of that range quite likely extends below the concrete costs of the lockdown It's really interesting to see that view phrased that way, because I see it oppositely: the "damage" as you put it, is "human lives lost" in one case, and financial and economic losses in the other. The latter can certainly cause the loss of human life, but I haven't seen anything but hand-wavy attempts to quantify it. While the potential death toll due to relaxing shelter-in-place and social distancing measures isn't absolutely known either, I find the estimated ranges to be both persuasive and unacceptable. We can make people whole financially (though I admit I have little confidence that this will be accomplished all that well) after the fact, but we can't bring people back from the dead.

austhrow743 7y ago
>The latter can certainly cause the loss of human life, but I haven't seen anything but hand-wavy attempts to quantify it. GiveWell calculates lives/dollars for its charities and I think the most efficient one is like $3k/life. Not some used up, only 2 years left neither of them good life either. That of a child.
jerf 7y ago
"and financial and economic losses in the other. The latter can certainly cause the loss of human life, but I haven't seen anything but hand-wavy attempts to quantify it." There's a few reasons for that. One is that people are very reluctant to hear than there is a finite limit to the amount of money that other people should spend to save their lives. Another is that it is highly situation-dependent, so there really isn't one solid number. Nevertheless, yes, at scale your mental conception of "economic damage" is probably incorrect. You are probably, if you mentally examine your conceptions, basically taking all the economic damage as coming out of "discretionary income"; who cares if we all lock ourselves up for a while and as a result, people can't buy the 65" new flatscreen TV they wanted and have to stick with what they have? Were that the truth, yes, economic damage would be something we could basically wave away. It is not the truth. The economic impact does not entirely come out of discretionary income. Connect some other pieces in, such as the HN favorite "Most households can't handle an unexpected expense of a $1000." Connect in the fact that poverty isn't just not buying flatscreens, but food insecurity, childhood stress that we've had links to studies showing the long-term negative impact of, and the general badness of poverty. Economic damage is true damage, and will in the long term kill people. Moreover, we are choosing economic damage now that will persist for months or years, still hurting people, after the coronavirus would have been gone. It also hurts the poor more than the rich; frankly the coronavirus up to this point has hardly affected me personally at all, but that doesn't mean I should underestimate how it is affecting others. At the moment I can't name anyone who has been totally, utterly "fired" to the point that they are guaranteed they have no job to come back to, I can name many names of people currently not being paid, who may or may not all be made up by government checks. Also note I'm not making a new argument, I'm still just defending my original claim that the range of possible outcomes is so wide that there are non-trivial options where coronavirus would have hurt less than a full lockdown. (Especially if you include other options, like, "tell everyone to wear masks, even impromptu ones made of T-Shirts over your face, wash your hands, limit social gatherings and cut schools (huge germ transmitters), but otherwise let the economy go. There's a lot of reason to believe that would have worked fairly well, beyond the scope I can go into right now.) But economic damage really will hurt people. (On the other, other hand, it has been observed that the total death rate in the US is down right now, which also factors in somehow.) Basically, I'm saying there's plenty of other contexts where we have no problem saying that economic hardship is really, really bad. It should be the same in this context, too. Otherwise, the next time someone is talking about how bad poverty is for someone, intellectual honesty would compel you to dismiss that argument the same way you are dismissing the idea right now that economy hardship is bad. If you are unwilling to agree with the proposition that "economic hardship isn't really a big deal in the long run" in that context, you shouldn't be agreeing with it in this one either.