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Which is actually quite valuable as transparency from decision makers makes it much easier to evaluate the quality of their decisions and to understand whether

Which is actually quite valuable as transparency from decision makers makes it much easier to evaluate the quality of their decisions and to understand whether they are being foolishly capricious or they are using facts and reasonable judgement about what should be done about an ongoing crisis. Then if you disagree with the government's position, you can base an objection on facts (e.g., one of these metrics is not set at an appropriate level or is not impactful enough to guide decision making) instead of just yelling that the government is wrong and should change what they are doing.

mwfunk 6y ago
IMO this might be the biggest benefit. Whenever I feel like the US is a failed state, the reason always seems to be people demanding 1-bit answers to 128-bit questions. This shows the criteria, quantifies everything, sources everything, and clearly shows what the goals are and what the current state is. If people want to argue about when to reopen, this turns the arguments into deciding what the criteria should be and how it should be measured, rather than bullshit like "I want everything to reopen now because that's what the angry man on TV told me to think". A lot of people screaming about reopening don't even seem to realize there are criteria and metrics involved, rather that it's just some arbitrary decision arbitrarily made by governors, which is why their whining is so useless. I'd be much more open to hearing people's reopen arguments if they came in the form of, "we don't need to care about this metric, because <blah> and this other metric can be lower, and this whole stage of the process doesn't need to exist, therefore we can think about reopening earlier." Instead you get neckbeards with AR-15s and Confederate flags (in Canadian border states!) screaming at public servants about...something. I don't know. They're mad and they want something to change but they have no ideas and they don't know how to communicate with people.

mwfunk 6y ago

IMO this might be the biggest benefit. Whenever I feel like the US is a failed state, the reason always seems to be people demanding 1-bit answers to 128-bit questions. This shows the criteria, quantifies everything, sources everything, and clearly shows what the goals are and what the current state is. If people want to argue about when to reopen, this turns the arguments into deciding what the criteria should be and how it should be measured, rather than bullshit like "I want everything to reopen now because that's what the angry man on TV told me to think". A lot of people screaming about reopening don't even seem to realize there are criteria and metrics involved, rather that it's just some arbitrary decision arbitrarily made by governors, which is why their whining is so useless. I'd be much more open to hearing people's reopen arguments if they came in the form of, "we don't need to care about this metric, because <blah> and this other metric can be lower, and this whole stage of the process doesn't need to exist, therefore we can think about reopening earlier." Instead you get neckbeards with AR-15s and Confederate flags (in Canadian border states!) screaming at public servants about...something. I don't know. They're mad and they want something to change but they have no ideas and they don't know how to communicate with people.