7 ms·

The cognitive dissonance I'm seeing in the tech community on this issue is interesting. None of us had data in the beginning, and our leaders chose different p

by JPKab 7y ago

The cognitive dissonance I'm seeing in the tech community on this issue is interesting. None of us had data in the beginning, and our leaders chose different paths, some erring more on the side of caution. I agreed with these efforts personally, because the little data we did have at the time supported these actions of "locking down." More time has passed, more data has come in. Increasingly, I'm starting to be convinced that I was incorrect in my original assessment, and that the lockdown wasn't necessary in the broader United States and Europe, outside of dense urban areas. (It should be noted that if you remove NYC from the equation, the US really has had no issues with hospitals being remotely close to capacity.) Sweden ran an experiment, and so did the rest of the world. It could have gone either way. My oldest brother owns a small business, as a professional dog trainer for high-end clients. He had just expanded into a new facility with much more capacity, hiring employees and taking on a lot of debt. His new facility is idle now, and his business is in trouble. He is personally distraught. The lockdowns were an experiment on what would happen to a society if you shut down most commerce, except for the lucky few like HN readers who get to work from a laptop. I'm pretty appalled at the unwillingness of HN readers to, like me, admit that maybe, just maybe, we all made decisions with little data, and that the increasing data and time elapsed is showing that most of us, myself included, were incorrect. That's ok, because it's really not anything people should be blamed for. However, it is a very bad thing to be unwilling to change one's mind after new data comes in. This is where the politicization of the issue is problematic. Leaders feel like they are betraying their "tribe" if they change their mind. At this point, continuing the lockdowns without acknowledging nations that didn't lockdown and are doing well is a form of generational warfare: wealthier people, often older and at higher risk and with little to lose economically, against poorer, younger people in the midst of their prime working years. We, the HN readers, are in the managerial/professional class elites who don't get hurt the same way other people our age are getting hurt. But don't worry, if we keep this up, it's going to get all of us as well.

corpMaverick 7y ago
Well, we really didn't know. This time is giving us time to make better decisions. I am glad we didn't gamble, I still think it was the right decision.
- vanniv 7y ago
  We did gamble, though. We gambled that the virus was so bad that destroying our economy, wrecking the lives of 10s of millions of people, and seriously risking famine, was all worthwhile to slow the progress somewhat. And boy does it ever seem like we were wrong.
  - vanniv 7y ago
    And yet again, the YC downvote brigade is out, silencing all dissent from the death cult. You monsters won't be happy until 00 million are dead, all because you're afraid someone might have some freedom somewhere In the words of George Carlin: you are all diseased.
    - eric_b 7y ago
      There used to be a high percentage of free and critical thinkers in tech (90's/early 2000's era). Those days are sadly gone and now it's same agenda driven groupthink we see everywhere else. Sheep bleating in response to obvious ploys from the media and politicians. sigh (The sheep will commence downvoting me here in just a moment as well)
      - JPKab 7y ago
        The post you were replying to was flagged and removed. Likely due to it getting "meta", which is a trigger for the mods on here who do their best to keep out the flame wars. However, I actually agree with you on this one aspect: I do think the economic success of SV tech companies has changed the psychological profile of people who work in the industry via selection bias. It's really become the well-trodden path to money that attracts a larger percentage of people who aren't very independent minded, in my opinion. It's hard to find data on this, but I see this discrepancy quite readily when interacting with folks at Google/FB now vs. 12 years ago. Hopefully I'm not breaking the rules by posting on this. It's hard to tell.
- JPKab 7y ago
  All decisions are gambles, if you understand that risks are on all sides. Sweden evaluated the risks of not locking down vs. the risks of shutting down an economy, and made a gamble. We took the same exact game, but bet on the opposite side. As I said in my comment, none of us knew. It's just becoming increasingly apparent, based on data, that we didn't need to lock down as much as we did. The places that didn't lock down and were prophesied to be screwed, well, they just aren't. That's a tough pill to swallow for anyone. Just pointing out, we DID gamble. All of us did. HN readers are in a bubble. Most tech workers had college educated parents, or are recent immigrants to the USA. They don't understand the bulk of the nation they live in, let alone what it's like to be suddenly unemployed or have your small business shut down. Therefore, they only saw the one side of the gamble, and are blinded and insensitive to the economic destruction we have incurred by "playing it safe" on the medical front. I'm not disagreeing with the decision that was made. I'm disagreeing with doubling down on it out of pride and not wanting to admit we were wrong. We were wrong by the way. Keep that in your head, because it's true. The data is in. We were wrong. The rednecks holding "Don't Tread on me" flags, without any data, HAPPENED to be right on this one, because reality is messy and doesn't give a rats ass about your pride, or my pride. I WAS WRONG. I THOUGHT THE LOCKDOWNS WERE THE RIGHT MOVE AT THE TIME. The data says otherwise. I'm willing to admit this, but not many on here are. That's what happens when you live in a bubble. California's horrible wealth inequality (top in the US) makes this even worse. I have neighbors that drive pick-up trucks and run small businesses that have been shut down. If you live in Silicon Valley, you probably don't.
greedo 7y ago
We don't know what would have happened in the US if we hadn't locked down. Considering the human cost so far with a lockdown, I think 20/20 hindsight indicates that we made the right choice. We can't just assume that things would have remained the same without a lockdown. And if things had become worse than now, how would that have impacted the economy?
- orange_fritter 7y ago
  This is the paradox that we are in. When drastic measures work, some will assume that there was never any danger.
- JPKab 7y ago
  Actually, your kind of wrong. The USA didn't lock down. Individual states locked down, at different rates. Some didn't lock down at all. Take a look at the data and see if you can find a difference between the early and late lockdown states, particularly the ones that border each other. I'm amazed at how blind people on HN are to the fact that the entire nation didn't take a homogenous approach to this at all. We have 50 different strategies that we're deployed.
  - greedo 7y ago
    You can be pedantic all you want, but there was a lockdown. It wasn't Federally initiated, and each state locked down to differing degrees, at different times, but they locked down. No one said it was homogenous; it's amazing how blind people on HN are to strawman arguments. Trying to tease out the data your asking for isn't possible due to inadequate reporting, inadequate testing, and the fact that travel between states is free.
    - JPKab 7y ago
      I'm not being pedantic. In this case, a relevant factor that you consider irrelevant out of convenience is being ignored. Call it pedantic all you want. It matters. Not all states locked down, at all. That matters. Travel between states, for the most part, fell to record low rates. This happened voluntarily, before legally mandated lockdowns were triggered. You asked "what would have happened if we hadn't locked down." I pointed out that not all places locked down, and many locked down later. "Trying to tease out the data your asking for isn't possible due to inadequate reporting, inadequate testing, and the fact that travel between states is free" It's not hard to look at the Johns Hopkins data set, which contains data at the county level for the US. Not much "teasing out" to do there. It's right there. If we use admitted cases as a benchmark for actual infections, assuming it's proportional at a relatively constant level, it's not hard to do.
grawprog 7y ago
>The cognitive dissonance I'm seeing in the tech community on this issue is interesting. Fear does funny things to people. It makes them irrational and incapable of thinking clearly. It makes them susceptible to mass group behaviour and lowers their resistance to authority. The last three months has kept people in a constant state of fear and panic driven on entirely by the media. As people are getting over their fear, there's still that nagging voice in the back of their mind telling them they're going to die. Fear of death leads people to act in contradictory and irrational ways. Death is inevitable sooner or later. Getting over the fear of death helps you to stay rational during situations where everyone's panicking. As your fear lessens, you begin to question decisions you made during that fear state because usually they're not the best decisions. It's that whole fight or flight response thing. In the end as rational and reasonable humans think they are, as soom as stress overwhelms them to that point of panic and fear, the lizard brain takes over and people act on instinct. Fear is a powerful emotion, it protects us from threats and danger, but succumbing to it leaves you powerless and vulnerable to control. Nearly every dictator of the 20th century has come into power because their populations were afraid of something and they used that fear to take control. That's what the majority of the world's been doing for months. Different people tend to come down from that state at different rates but as this goes on and continues to be not the apocolypse that was pushed on everyone, more people will begin to question what they've allowed to happen. Inciting fear is a constant and age old tactic of those that would oppress to gain power over those they would oppress.
bagacrap 7y ago
great post. One nit: I would not classify the lockdown as "the side of caution". The worst case scenario of lockdown (societal collapse) is worse than the worst case scenario of Sweden style intervention.
zozbot234 7y ago
It's funny how the attitudes have flip-flopped from "it's just a flu, our leaders are just scaremongering" to "we've been far too complacent and our leaders should have taken action a lot earlier", and perhaps back again. I won't even pretend to understand this.
phreeza 7y ago
Isn't the measure of whether a decision was correct or incorrect always relative to the data available at the time? If I play Russian roulette and win, that doesn't mean it was the right choice to play in the first place. The politicisation of the issue is tragic for that exact reason, it has frozen people into their camps, making it harder to make correct choices given new evidence going forward.
credit_guy 7y ago
I'm in the same camp as you. Mind you, I live in NYC, where the lockdown was necessary, and probably still is. But with my NYC glasses on, I didn't think for a moment that the lockdown may not be necessary in other places. A few days ago, I started listening to a podcast where the panelists were all somehow assuming that flattening the curve preserves the integral (the area under the curve). I personally always thought that flattening the curve results in less overall deaths, because you avoid the deaths due to the overwhelmed hospital capacity. It appears now in NYC we are at the point where the hospitals can easily handle all the Covid19 cases, with room to spare. If you are in such a situation (hospitals below capacity), is the "area under the curve" a conserved quantity? I am still of the belief it is not: as time goes by, the medical community perfects the protocols to treat Covid19 treatments, so what it used to be a 1% fatality rate can become a 0.8% with the newest advances. However, while the "area under the curve" is not constant, it's almost constant. Is it then worth paying the economic price? Every single additional month under lockdown may drive a few more businesses into permanent destruction. Is that worth it? I'm not so sure anymore.
- jariel 7y ago
  0.8% is 160 000 greater New Yorkers and 2.7 Million Americans. That's all the Americans to have died in every war combined, roughly. That is a lot of people and I don't suggest most people would be willing to just allow that to happen. Are we not greater than that as a civilization?
  - SpicyLemonZest 7y ago
    People allow 2.7 million Americans to die every year. Not that this isn't a tragedy! We should work hard and urgently towards a world where nobody has to die, whether from heart disease or cancer or coronavirus. And the coronavirus presents a variety of high leverage options that are unavailable for other causes of death. But if destroying American society is the cost of containing the coronavirus, we can't pay it.
    - jhayward 7y ago
mindslight 7y ago
You're disregarding the pattern of irresponsibility that necessitated the reactionary shutdowns. The biggest contributor being the national government, which includes the mainstream media, basically denied there was a problem for over a month while it continued to grow. The state governors were basically forced into draconian shutdowns at the last minute, because it was the only option left to them. Imagine the political pushback if say, back in February, state governors issued simple orders that everyone had to wear masks when out of their house. Analyzing where we currently are within that context - do hospital workers have all the PPE they need? Are all companies now able to properly equip their workers? How about individuals? From what I've seen, most everyone in public is still running around in home made cloth masks, so it seems like we're still trying to regain our composure with basic supplies. This is one narrow metric and there are obviously other concerns such as how serious everyone is taking this - basically zero at the start of March, but decently now - which can buy us a lot. We could and should see more types of businesses opening up, but these businesses need to demonstrate that they will be taking appropriate hygienic precautions. I was in a bank last week, and despite all of their new procedures, the rep I sat down with was literally open-faced coughing into his elbow. He shouldn't have come into work, but economic pressure and expedience are still overriding common sense. We certainly shouldn't be talking about the current state of affairs as if they were a mistake, implying that it's reasonable to just let the economy dictate that everyone return to business as usual. The economy exists to serve humans, not the other way around. I feel for small business owners like your brother, but his actual problem is that black hole of debt. The appropriate way to help small businesses is to address the elephant in the room, rather than looking for justifications to go back to ignoring it for yet another decade.
- JPKab 7y ago
  I think you are forgetting that, minus NYC, the disaster didn't happen. Hospitals in states that dragged their feet like Georgia never even approached capacity. Excluding NYC, the US is on par with Germany. We never came close to being Italy. I thought for sure we were going to be. I saw data that led me to believe it. The data is richer now. There is more of it. I was wrong. Reality is telling us that for once, there is good news. This virus isn't as bad, and the lockdowns can be eased. That's the data NOW. My God, why is it that since Trump got elected, that every position on a factual argument turned into an ideological hill to die on. I changed my mind, yet it's like I'm wearing a maga hat for saying it. Regarding my brother's business: His debt was no issue when he had customers. The government shut down the economy for the first time in the history of the US. He didn't account for that when taking out the loan. This decision now seems unnecessary. If data starts to show that I'm wrong, I will AGAIN change my mind. I just wish others on here would try that themselves.

by JPKab 7y ago

corpMaverick 7y ago

Well, we really didn't know. This time is giving us time to make better decisions. I am glad we didn't gamble, I still think it was the right decision.

vanniv 7y ago
We did gamble, though. We gambled that the virus was so bad that destroying our economy, wrecking the lives of 10s of millions of people, and seriously risking famine, was all worthwhile to slow the progress somewhat. And boy does it ever seem like we were wrong.
- vanniv 7y ago
  And yet again, the YC downvote brigade is out, silencing all dissent from the death cult. You monsters won't be happy until 00 million are dead, all because you're afraid someone might have some freedom somewhere In the words of George Carlin: you are all diseased.
  - eric_b 7y ago
    There used to be a high percentage of free and critical thinkers in tech (90's/early 2000's era). Those days are sadly gone and now it's same agenda driven groupthink we see everywhere else. Sheep bleating in response to obvious ploys from the media and politicians. sigh (The sheep will commence downvoting me here in just a moment as well)
    - JPKab 7y ago
      The post you were replying to was flagged and removed. Likely due to it getting "meta", which is a trigger for the mods on here who do their best to keep out the flame wars. However, I actually agree with you on this one aspect: I do think the economic success of SV tech companies has changed the psychological profile of people who work in the industry via selection bias. It's really become the well-trodden path to money that attracts a larger percentage of people who aren't very independent minded, in my opinion. It's hard to find data on this, but I see this discrepancy quite readily when interacting with folks at Google/FB now vs. 12 years ago. Hopefully I'm not breaking the rules by posting on this. It's hard to tell.
JPKab 7y ago
All decisions are gambles, if you understand that risks are on all sides. Sweden evaluated the risks of not locking down vs. the risks of shutting down an economy, and made a gamble. We took the same exact game, but bet on the opposite side. As I said in my comment, none of us knew. It's just becoming increasingly apparent, based on data, that we didn't need to lock down as much as we did. The places that didn't lock down and were prophesied to be screwed, well, they just aren't. That's a tough pill to swallow for anyone. Just pointing out, we DID gamble. All of us did. HN readers are in a bubble. Most tech workers had college educated parents, or are recent immigrants to the USA. They don't understand the bulk of the nation they live in, let alone what it's like to be suddenly unemployed or have your small business shut down. Therefore, they only saw the one side of the gamble, and are blinded and insensitive to the economic destruction we have incurred by "playing it safe" on the medical front. I'm not disagreeing with the decision that was made. I'm disagreeing with doubling down on it out of pride and not wanting to admit we were wrong. We were wrong by the way. Keep that in your head, because it's true. The data is in. We were wrong. The rednecks holding "Don't Tread on me" flags, without any data, HAPPENED to be right on this one, because reality is messy and doesn't give a rats ass about your pride, or my pride. I WAS WRONG. I THOUGHT THE LOCKDOWNS WERE THE RIGHT MOVE AT THE TIME. The data says otherwise. I'm willing to admit this, but not many on here are. That's what happens when you live in a bubble. California's horrible wealth inequality (top in the US) makes this even worse. I have neighbors that drive pick-up trucks and run small businesses that have been shut down. If you live in Silicon Valley, you probably don't.

greedo 7y ago

We don't know what would have happened in the US if we hadn't locked down. Considering the human cost so far with a lockdown, I think 20/20 hindsight indicates that we made the right choice. We can't just assume that things would have remained the same without a lockdown. And if things had become worse than now, how would that have impacted the economy?

orange_fritter 7y ago
This is the paradox that we are in. When drastic measures work, some will assume that there was never any danger.
JPKab 7y ago
Actually, your kind of wrong. The USA didn't lock down. Individual states locked down, at different rates. Some didn't lock down at all. Take a look at the data and see if you can find a difference between the early and late lockdown states, particularly the ones that border each other. I'm amazed at how blind people on HN are to the fact that the entire nation didn't take a homogenous approach to this at all. We have 50 different strategies that we're deployed.
- greedo 7y ago
  You can be pedantic all you want, but there was a lockdown. It wasn't Federally initiated, and each state locked down to differing degrees, at different times, but they locked down. No one said it was homogenous; it's amazing how blind people on HN are to strawman arguments. Trying to tease out the data your asking for isn't possible due to inadequate reporting, inadequate testing, and the fact that travel between states is free.
  - JPKab 7y ago
    I'm not being pedantic. In this case, a relevant factor that you consider irrelevant out of convenience is being ignored. Call it pedantic all you want. It matters. Not all states locked down, at all. That matters. Travel between states, for the most part, fell to record low rates. This happened voluntarily, before legally mandated lockdowns were triggered. You asked "what would have happened if we hadn't locked down." I pointed out that not all places locked down, and many locked down later. "Trying to tease out the data your asking for isn't possible due to inadequate reporting, inadequate testing, and the fact that travel between states is free" It's not hard to look at the Johns Hopkins data set, which contains data at the county level for the US. Not much "teasing out" to do there. It's right there. If we use admitted cases as a benchmark for actual infections, assuming it's proportional at a relatively constant level, it's not hard to do.

grawprog 7y ago

>The cognitive dissonance I'm seeing in the tech community on this issue is interesting. Fear does funny things to people. It makes them irrational and incapable of thinking clearly. It makes them susceptible to mass group behaviour and lowers their resistance to authority. The last three months has kept people in a constant state of fear and panic driven on entirely by the media. As people are getting over their fear, there's still that nagging voice in the back of their mind telling them they're going to die. Fear of death leads people to act in contradictory and irrational ways. Death is inevitable sooner or later. Getting over the fear of death helps you to stay rational during situations where everyone's panicking. As your fear lessens, you begin to question decisions you made during that fear state because usually they're not the best decisions. It's that whole fight or flight response thing. In the end as rational and reasonable humans think they are, as soom as stress overwhelms them to that point of panic and fear, the lizard brain takes over and people act on instinct. Fear is a powerful emotion, it protects us from threats and danger, but succumbing to it leaves you powerless and vulnerable to control. Nearly every dictator of the 20th century has come into power because their populations were afraid of something and they used that fear to take control. That's what the majority of the world's been doing for months. Different people tend to come down from that state at different rates but as this goes on and continues to be not the apocolypse that was pushed on everyone, more people will begin to question what they've allowed to happen. Inciting fear is a constant and age old tactic of those that would oppress to gain power over those they would oppress.

bagacrap 7y ago

great post. One nit: I would not classify the lockdown as "the side of caution". The worst case scenario of lockdown (societal collapse) is worse than the worst case scenario of Sweden style intervention.

zozbot234 7y ago

It's funny how the attitudes have flip-flopped from "it's just a flu, our leaders are just scaremongering" to "we've been far too complacent and our leaders should have taken action a lot earlier", and perhaps back again. I won't even pretend to understand this.

phreeza 7y ago

Isn't the measure of whether a decision was correct or incorrect always relative to the data available at the time? If I play Russian roulette and win, that doesn't mean it was the right choice to play in the first place. The politicisation of the issue is tragic for that exact reason, it has frozen people into their camps, making it harder to make correct choices given new evidence going forward.

credit_guy 7y ago

I'm in the same camp as you. Mind you, I live in NYC, where the lockdown was necessary, and probably still is. But with my NYC glasses on, I didn't think for a moment that the lockdown may not be necessary in other places. A few days ago, I started listening to a podcast where the panelists were all somehow assuming that flattening the curve preserves the integral (the area under the curve). I personally always thought that flattening the curve results in less overall deaths, because you avoid the deaths due to the overwhelmed hospital capacity. It appears now in NYC we are at the point where the hospitals can easily handle all the Covid19 cases, with room to spare. If you are in such a situation (hospitals below capacity), is the "area under the curve" a conserved quantity? I am still of the belief it is not: as time goes by, the medical community perfects the protocols to treat Covid19 treatments, so what it used to be a 1% fatality rate can become a 0.8% with the newest advances. However, while the "area under the curve" is not constant, it's almost constant. Is it then worth paying the economic price? Every single additional month under lockdown may drive a few more businesses into permanent destruction. Is that worth it? I'm not so sure anymore.

jariel 7y ago
0.8% is 160 000 greater New Yorkers and 2.7 Million Americans. That's all the Americans to have died in every war combined, roughly. That is a lot of people and I don't suggest most people would be willing to just allow that to happen. Are we not greater than that as a civilization?
- SpicyLemonZest 7y ago
  People allow 2.7 million Americans to die every year. Not that this isn't a tragedy! We should work hard and urgently towards a world where nobody has to die, whether from heart disease or cancer or coronavirus. And the coronavirus presents a variety of high leverage options that are unavailable for other causes of death. But if destroying American society is the cost of containing the coronavirus, we can't pay it.
  - jhayward 7y ago

mindslight 7y ago

You're disregarding the pattern of irresponsibility that necessitated the reactionary shutdowns. The biggest contributor being the national government, which includes the mainstream media, basically denied there was a problem for over a month while it continued to grow. The state governors were basically forced into draconian shutdowns at the last minute, because it was the only option left to them. Imagine the political pushback if say, back in February, state governors issued simple orders that everyone had to wear masks when out of their house. Analyzing where we currently are within that context - do hospital workers have all the PPE they need? Are all companies now able to properly equip their workers? How about individuals? From what I've seen, most everyone in public is still running around in home made cloth masks, so it seems like we're still trying to regain our composure with basic supplies. This is one narrow metric and there are obviously other concerns such as how serious everyone is taking this - basically zero at the start of March, but decently now - which can buy us a lot. We could and should see more types of businesses opening up, but these businesses need to demonstrate that they will be taking appropriate hygienic precautions. I was in a bank last week, and despite all of their new procedures, the rep I sat down with was literally open-faced coughing into his elbow. He shouldn't have come into work, but economic pressure and expedience are still overriding common sense. We certainly shouldn't be talking about the current state of affairs as if they were a mistake, implying that it's reasonable to just let the economy dictate that everyone return to business as usual. The economy exists to serve humans, not the other way around. I feel for small business owners like your brother, but his actual problem is that black hole of debt. The appropriate way to help small businesses is to address the elephant in the room, rather than looking for justifications to go back to ignoring it for yet another decade.

JPKab 7y ago
I think you are forgetting that, minus NYC, the disaster didn't happen. Hospitals in states that dragged their feet like Georgia never even approached capacity. Excluding NYC, the US is on par with Germany. We never came close to being Italy. I thought for sure we were going to be. I saw data that led me to believe it. The data is richer now. There is more of it. I was wrong. Reality is telling us that for once, there is good news. This virus isn't as bad, and the lockdowns can be eased. That's the data NOW. My God, why is it that since Trump got elected, that every position on a factual argument turned into an ideological hill to die on. I changed my mind, yet it's like I'm wearing a maga hat for saying it. Regarding my brother's business: His debt was no issue when he had customers. The government shut down the economy for the first time in the history of the US. He didn't account for that when taking out the loan. This decision now seems unnecessary. If data starts to show that I'm wrong, I will AGAIN change my mind. I just wish others on here would try that themselves.