18 ms·

New Defaults

275 points by kaboro 6y ago

deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
cphoover 6y ago
Interesting read... but kinda came off as two articles in one, with an attempt to piece them together... The first part around the behavioral implications of defaults, and the second, which was a reaction to the state of pandemic response around the globe, free-speech, disinformation, and the perceived failures in roll-out of Moderna's mRNA vaccine, and how if we somehow retrain our "defaults" we can somehow overcome these issues. I enjoyed reading this, but it did seem a bit disjointed.
drchopchop 6y ago
>I suspect a similar story can be told about our slide to defaulting that free speech is bad, that the status quo should be the priority, and that perfect is preferable to good. These are mistakes, even as they are understandable. After all, misinformation is a bad thing, change is uncertain, and no one wants to be the one that screwed up. Everyone has good intentions; the mistake is in valuing intentions over outcomes. This, I think, is the flaw in this argument. People do not always have good intentions, and they are polluting the informational landscape to the point where it's dramatically impacting society. The principles he's asking for are indeed happening right now, but in a nefarious way: "Free speech is a good thing" - Sure, but that means 4chan, QAnon, anti-vaxxers, and the like also get loud, free speech now. "Status quo is bad" - The previous status quo of large, centralized media groups is gone, and with it basic levels of journalistic ethics and transparency. "Move fast, value experimentation" - Changes are happening to the way information is produced disseminated much faster than societal constructs can keep up. I didn't have to worry 20 years ago about my relatives treating "Hillary Clinton runs a sex dungeon in a pizza shop" FB memes with the same weight as NBC Nightly News. Fixing these issues, whether by government, tech industry, or otherwise, will involve some level of "authoritarianism".
- mrfusion 6y ago
  > ..the peculiar evil of silencing the expression of an opinion is that it is robbing the human race; posterity as well as the existing generation; those who dissent from the opinion, still more than those who hold it. If the opinion is right, they are deprived of the opportunity of exchanging error for truth; if wrong, they lose, what is almost as great a benefit, the clearer perception and livelier impression of truth produced by its collision with error. John Stuart Mill https://www.utilitarianism.com/ol/two.html https://www.utilitarianism.com/ol/two.html
  - drchopchop 6y ago
    Should all expressions of opinion be given equal weight? Is an average person able to evaluate what's factually correct, and what's not? Just think of all the assumptions that you need to make when you figure out "should I take a COVID-19 vaccine": * Is this vaccine safe? What do I know about the companies that are making it? * What even is a vaccine? Are they all the same? How do the different ones work? * Is COVID-19 even real? Have I personally witnessed people getting sick? Is there statistical evidence that large amounts of people are getting sick? Is the death rate worse than the average flu? * How do we even know this is transmitted between people? Do masks work? What even is a virus? How do they grow and replicate? * Are doctors lying to me? Do they have an incentive to? How do I fact-check these claims when I can't travel around the country and see with my own eyes? * et cetera You have to rely on some assumptions to be able to answer these questions, which is the whole point of having an educational system at all, and necessarily prioritizes ones that we have deemed "correct". Is this authoritarian? Should we just let children loose on Twitter after they're born and have them re-derive all information for first principles again?
    - mrfusion 6y ago
      Perhaps you and I have lived with this miracle too long to be properly appreciative. Freedom is a fragile thing and is never more than one generation away from extinction. It is not ours by inheritance; it must be fought for and defended constantly by each generation, for it comes only once to a people. Those who have known freedom and then lost it have never known it again. -- Ronald Reagan
raghavtoshniwal 6y ago
The FDA rushing the approval of vaccine that might turn out to be unsafe harms their credibility in the long run. The worst case scenario of a hastily approved vaccine is so high that it probably makes sense to bear the cost and take the health/economic hit. Also this is the first major use of mRNA vaccine, scientists and experts were not sure how well it would work. Administering it without trials could have led to a nightmare scenario for a few individuals and anti-vaccine stance for a larger chunk of population. Ben is probably right, the status quo should change, but I am not sure if the 'opportunity cost' calculus he makes is accurate in this case.
- pdonis 6y ago
  > The worst case scenario of a hastily approved vaccine is so high that it probably makes sense to bear the cost and take the health/economic hit. I'm not so sure. See my response to ivanbakel upthread.
- renewiltord 6y ago
  Well, the worst case scenario of not approving the vaccine is that the virus mutates into an airborne monstrosity with near instant fatality. So not approving the vaccine also makes no sense. Ultimately, any optimization strategy that depends on using just the worst case without the probability of the worst case to optimize on is going to rapidly find itself unable to optimize because the worst case has cost infinity with every path.
- xyzzyz 6y ago
  > The FDA rushing the approval of vaccine that might turn out to be unsafe harms their credibility in the long run. FDA has just paid for this risk of losing credibility with hundreds of thousands of lives. Was it a good price? > The worst case scenario of a hastily approved vaccine is so high that it probably makes sense to bear the cost and take the health/economic hit. Really? You ran the numbers? Show your work.
  - cageface 6y ago
    It's very likely we're going to see another pandemic with a much more lethal pathogen in our lifetimes. Counting on overnight development of vaccines and throwing out proper testing to bail us out is a mistake.
mrfusion 6y ago
Am I misreading or is this article suggesting forced medical detention is a good idea?
- _dark_matter_ 6y ago
  You are misreading. The article is suggesting that forced medical detention was _effective_. It is also arguing that free-market forces are effective (the opposite extreme).
Spivak 6y ago
There is a point the author doesn't touch on which I think ends up undermining his central thesis. One's motivation for setting a default matters. If you're acting in good faith and selecting a default because you genuinely believe (and/or have data to show) that it's what all but a small group of outliers choose then there's no issue. If you're acting in bad faith and selecting a default to shape behavior or to get a particular outcome then you're abusing your position of (relative) power as a decider for other people. > Second, it should be the default that the status quo is a bad thing. The author wants this default changed because he doesn't like the status-quo. Look, I don't like it either but assuming that people don't like the current state of things in literally every single aspect of life unless stated otherwise compared to "I want to change X,Y,Z." is way off base.
gizmo 6y ago
This is a great article, and I agree with the core point about defaults and opportunity cost, but with the main example of China's handling of covid it asserts that the draconian lockdown is the reason mortality in China is lower. It even asserts that to claim otherwise is dishonest. But the data isn't so clear. Countries in South America locked down hard and early but it had no effect on the pandemic spread. And all Asian countries, without a single exception, have outperformed Europe, US, and SA by more than an order of magnitude, despite countries having responded to the crisis in different ways. How can this be? I think it's much more honest to say that we don't have the answers. We have questions. It's been a year, and the questions keep mounting. We don't know why Belgium got hit hard but Germany did not. Why Slovenia didn't have a first wave, but did get a second wave. Why did every African country do well despite limited ability to lock down or distance? Why did all of Asia do well? Why is the correlation between NPI and future infections/hospitalizations so weak? And frankly I find the combination of a mounting pile of unanswered questions one the one hand and a call for censorship of dissenting voices on the other very disturbing.
- gnusty_gnurc 6y ago
  > I think it's much more honest to say that we don't have the answers. This is virtually impossible given how much government, politicians, and even individuals have staked their identity and reputation on being correct and knowledgeable. That's the most evil aspect of authoritarianism and despotism. The inability to admit failure, limitation and falibility. This is why Fauci and friends always couch their responses to criticism with dismissive explanations. I'm constantly frustrated with the unimpeachable self-confidence that's so pervasive now. It's only worse when their failures are so apparent.
  - JackFr 6y ago
    >This is virtually impossible given how much government, politicians, and even individuals have staked their identity and reputation on being correct and knowledgeable. In the short term, absolutely. One hopes 5-10 years down the road, a disinterested analysis can get a comprehensive if not conclusive picture. > I'm constantly frustrated with the unimpeachable self-confidence that's so pervasive now. I couldn't a agree more. I have no doubts about the absolute best intentions of those making public policy, but their arrogance and utter lack of circumspection with such obvious failures does nothing but further undermine their long-term credibility.
devy 6y ago
Ben Thompson tried to compare China with over 1.4 billion people with Taiwan with only 24 million people and vehemently arguing that the Taiwan's governance is better is very disingenuous at best. Imaging the comparing the governance of large corporation vs. a small startup, it's just different. The complexity and nuances of managing human organization will increase drastically when the headcount increases. That's just common sense. Also Ben is based in Taiwan, he should know better. The current Tsai Ing-wen's regime actually oppressed free press and freedom of speech by terminating CTi News TV broasting license due to political reasons (since CTi New airs opposing views to her government and is generally seen as close to the mainland China).[1] I don't agree with Ben's first rule of new default either: First, it should be the default that free speech is a good thing, that more information is better than less information, and that the solution to misinformation is improving our ability to tell the difference, not futilely trying to be China-lite without any of the upside. The more information is NOT better at all. Information overload will cause great harm and push people to the extreme ideology, as we've seen in social media (facebook, twitter, google etc.) the self-reinforced bubble. And there are physical drawbacks to those too. The more noise and junk information the less likely you can make an informative decision. Garbage in garbage out! [1]: https://www.bbc.com/zhongwen/simp/chinese-news-55000536 https://www.bbc.com/zhongwen/simp/chinese-news-55000536
- sooheon 6y ago
  > Information overload will cause great harm and push people to the extreme ideology, as we've seen in social media (facebook, twitter, google etc.) the self-reinforced bubble Now that we understand this piece of information, is the best way to solve the problem more information, or to forget that we ever learned it?
  - devy 6y ago
    > Now that we understand this piece of information No, a large portion 72 million Americans don't. They still believe fringe theories and conspiracies like 5G signal caused COVID-19 or election was stolen.
    - 6y ago
ivanbakel 6y ago
This post unfortunately fails to honestly engage with its own counterarguments. Note to the author: you can't make a thinkpiece balanced by bringing up opposing points if you're just going to dismiss them out-of-hand. >Second, it should be the default that the status quo is a bad thing; instead of justifying why something should be done, the burden of proof should rest on those who believe things should remain the same. This is ignorant of the cost of change. That cost is the main reason why society collectively assumes that "the system works". Arguments for change have to first attack that notion - as communists, fascists, and all other kinds of anti-conservatives do. None of them believe that change, in and of itself, is valuable. Likewise, the author's talk of opportunity cost neglects the price of failure - in doing a retrospective analysis (like the one of vaccine development), it's easy to ignore the counterfactuals that never actually happened. But leaving them out means that your analysis is meaningless. Would the author be convinced to write the same article if the vaccine had been rolled out in January, and as a result the world suffered a second thalidomide scandal?
- pdonis 6y ago
  > Would the author be convinced to write the same article if the vaccine had been rolled out in January, and as a result the world suffered a second thalidomide scandal? A better comparison would be the swine flu vaccine in 1976. According to Wikipedia [1], about 45 million people were vaccinated and 362 of them suffered Guillan-Barre syndrome. Only 1 person died of the actual swine flu. But that comparison actually makes Ben's case stronger. What if all 330 million people in the US had been vaccinated against COVID, and 1 in 100,000 of them (about the same proportion as for the 1976 vaccine) had serious side effects? Even if all of those side effects were fatal (and they wouldn't be), that would still be only 3,300 deaths--less than 1 percent of the US COVID death count currently reported. And even leaving aside that not all side effects would be fatal, that death count is clearly an overestimate, since in the US people would be given the choice whether to be vaccinated, and not all Americans would take it. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1976_swine_flu_outbreak https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1976_swine_flu_outbreak
  - ivanbakel 6y ago
cma 6y ago
> I am here to tell you that those practices are wrong, at least for the U.S. They are a form of detainment without due process, contrary to the spirit of the Constitution and, more important, to American notions of individual rights. Yes, those who test positive should have greater options for self-isolation than they currently do. But if a family wishes to stick together and care for each other, it is not the province of the government to tell them otherwise. If we had widespread ebola or if coronavirus was as deadly as smallpox I don't think many people would be making this argument, and we already have plenty of case law.
- ghaff 6y ago
  At least some of the case law is over 100 years old, e.g. a state making a smallpox vaccine mandatory being considered allowable. And I'd point out that SCOTUS, a bit later, also upheld voluntary sterilization of people with diminished mental capacity. So I'm not sure what all today's SCOTUS would uphold with respect to state action.
- xyzzyz 6y ago
  If we had widespread Ebola, people would stay home on their own, without the state forcing them to. The whole reason people flout the restriction is because their personal risk is very low. For people under 45, catching covid presents similar risk of dying to a year of driving a car. If government tried to ban driving, arguing that it is for my safety, I would be pissed and would not accept that law. However, if 10% of drivers died every year, I wouldn’t need government to stop me from driving, I’d stay the hell away from the killing machine myself.
  - ryandrake 6y ago
    > If we had widespread Ebola, people would stay home on their own, without the state forcing them to. Sadly, I'm not so sure of this, anymore. 350K+ deaths in the USA alone has called into question the public's ability to assess risk and do the right thing. I don't see why it would be any different for something like Ebola. You'd still have the same viral Facebook videos calling it a hoax and a conspiracy. You'd have the same toothless, unenforced "orders" from the government to quarantine. You'd have the same people refusing to cooperate Because Freedom. I don't see why anything would be different except for the number of deaths.
chrischapman 6y ago
> Defaults are powerful! No kidding! Just look at where we are with personal data. The default is opt-out - it should be opt-in. And for consent, the default is 'assumed' consent - it should be 'informed' consent.
- oblio 6y ago
  Yeah, as far as letters go, it's a 3 character difference. You know: "opt-in/out". So it seems easy. However switching that little switch would mean killing businesses worth tens of billions of dollars. We're talking about millions of people losing their jobs and their privileged positions. I'm not saying this because I agree with them, I'm just pointing out that threatening their livelihood will cause a vicious reaction. People have been killed for less. Wars have been started for less.
  - staplers 6y ago
    We're talking about millions of people losing their jobs and their privileged positions. How did the world and society exist without big-brother surveillance?!?
    - oblio 6y ago
      Don't misread/misrepresent what I'm saying ;-) My point is that there are many of those people I mention, they're rich, smart and quite powerful. Many of them are on this exact site, by the way. They're not going to give up what they got without a fight.
      - staplers 6y ago
        Sounds like I'm interpreting it perfectly. You are implying surveillance capitalism is necessary because "certain people" can threaten, harass, maybe kill citizens into participating because it makes "certain people" rich. My sarcasm implies it's unnecessary. Further it is a net-negative to society and everyone knows it. Look at tobacco, oil, or coal.. eventually they lose their grip. Get real.
ilaksh 6y ago
Great article. It seems as though we need more people with really solid problem solving skills. Because I have found that people who do not know how to solve problems tend to root strongly for the status quo. I think it's because they know if they admit that there is a problem, they will not be able to address it. So they would rather rationalize the way things are.
a3w 6y ago
What is a 401K? Proposal: Articles that are hard to read for non-US citizens should be marked [US&A] -- Borat
- HideousKojima 6y ago
  It's a kind of retirement investment fund. Contributions to it aren't taxed until you retire, and employers will often match employee contributions to it up to a limit.
gringoDan 6y ago
I think that the relevant axis on which to evaluate countries' default attitude towards COVID and technological progress isn't authoritarianism vs. freedom, but rather peacetime vs. wartime mindset. FDA approval processes (and many of the other governmental processes in liberal democracies) are built around peacetime opportunity costs. They prioritize safety over rushing to get a vaccine out the door. When the opportunity cost changes (i.e., there is a new global pandemic and lives are on the line) those institutions have trouble updating their behavior accordingly. Conversely, authoritarian regimes are much more militant. You see this in China's approach not only to the virus, but in audacious economic initiatives (e.g. Belt & Road) and the defense of its political ideology on the world stage. That mindset is actually similar to the democracies that have responded best to COVID. Israel (very much a "wartime" country - mandatory military service, surrounded by its enemies, etc.) is blowing the rest of the world out of the water in its vaccination implementation. In normal times, it is a powerhouse of innovation, largely due to elite technological groups in the military. South Korea (another country with mandatory military service, enemy with nukes to the north) had a great COVID response. And Taiwan, a country that faces constant existential threat from China, > [E]xhibited the exact same sort can-do attitude alongside a free press, elections, and pig intestines in the legislature. The US last had a "wartime" mindset during WW2. Many of the innovations in the following period (nuclear physics, space race, computers, etc.) can be directly attributed to the massive mobilization effort and public-private partnerships of the time. So the question to ask is: How do we cultivate the wartime mindset that leads to innovation? And if COVID can't catalyze this, what can?
- crummy 6y ago
  The peacetime vs wartime mindset doesn't really fit with New Zealand's response. Maybe that's an outlier though.
- titanomachy 6y ago
  A good first step would be a government that doesn't waste months denying the existence of the crisis in the first place.
jdmichal 6y ago
> The issue is that the money market fund was the default choice, which meant that while the new program helped people save more, it also led folks who would have chosen better-performing funds to earn far less than they would have. Defaults are powerful! Does the data actually back this up? It seems to me like the cited data could also support that everyone who would have otherwise opted in still went and selected stocks. I can't see the full paper cited, but the abstract says: > Second, a substantial fraction of 401(k) participants hired under automatic enrollment retain both the default contribution rate and fund allocation even though few employees hired before automatic enrollment picked this particular outcome. This seems to be specifically not stating the conclusion that the article did.
- ghaff 6y ago
  They discuss this. From the paper: "the fraction of participants contributing to only one fund in the NEW relative to the other cohorts cannot be explained entirely by a shift in the composition of participants due to the substantial effects of automatic enrollment on 401(k) participation." So the increased participation may have caused a shift to some degree. (Maybe those less likely to participate normally often choose a more conservative investment?) But not entirely. https://www.nber.org/system/files/working_papers/w7682/w7682.pdf https://www.nber.org/system/files/working_papers/w7682/w7682...
  - jdmichal 6y ago
    Thanks!
breatheoften 6y ago
> Yes, those who test positive should have greater options for self-isolation than they currently do. Nothing along these lines even remotely happened. The boogey man of 'forcing people to quarantine' can be avoided while still creating incentives and expectations that individuals should opt-into a plan that concentrates risk and concentrates isolation requirements around known risks. A positive test in the West comes with vague advice to quarantine at home. It should've instead come with a pre-paid package providing hotel+food+income-supplement that continued for the quarantine period so long as you don't violate the isolation expectations ... Incentives, not punitive measures, would've sufficed to make it possible, easy, and expected for people to _avoid_ spreading to their co-dwellers/neighbors or anyone they come into contact with by necessity for basic survival needs.
OliverGilan 6y ago
People are going to focus on discussion with COVID but to me the big takeaway from this great article is the lessons not learned. Whenever discussing stagnation or regulatory deadlock in the US the default response is to handwring about the dangers things like the FDA protect us from. It’s refreshing to see someone eloquently write about how there is inherent risk that regulation also exposes us too. There’s no one extreme that is perfect but I personally would prefer rapid progress with some mistakes as opposed to what we seem to be experiencing now.
- PaulDavisThe1st 6y ago
  Are you old enough to have seen the thalidomide children of the mid-1970s?
- evgen 6y ago
  This article is standard punditry of false dichotomies and excluded middles to frame an argument in a manner that assumes the outcome the writer wants to lead you to. I was expecting better to be honest. The problem with 'move fast and break things' is that when we are talking about real lives and real consequences then then things that tend to get broken are other people. Make no mistake, it is always 'other people' that pundits like this are talking about. They are never going to pay the costs of the negative externalities, it is always going to be someone else's life, someone else's child, someone else's home, neighborhood, or vocation. If someone like this author was actually interested in working to fix the problem they would start by trying to provide regulators with the resources they need to actually keep up with a fast changing world filled with tech-bros out to 'disrupt' any industry where they think they can make themselves a middle-man in a transaction. Make it interesting and worthwhile for smart people to work on improving the regulatory process and adapting it to current realities and maybe we can start to make progress that is both rapid and safe.
- UncleMeat 6y ago
  The problem is the assumption that deregulation causes rapid progress. Regulation can inhibit progress, and I think almost everybody would agree that there are some regulations that cause more harm than good. But deregulation does not imply enormous leaps forward. Antitrust regulations, for example, protect progress by helping prevent large companies from eating up all the competition and safely stagnating.
PaulDavisThe1st 6y ago
I just do not understand how somebody like Ben Thompson, clearly at ease with the internet age, can continue to place so much emphasis on what a handful of large corporate information outlets do or do not do. >the default is to push for censorship, if not by the government — thanks to that pesky First Amendment — then instead by private corporations. It's the goddam internet. You don't have to write on FB. You don't have to write on Twitter (and please don't try to actually write on Twitter). Dozens of companies will offer you essentially one-click wordpress installations for you, with 10 more clicks to customize it to match your aesthetic inclinations. Write your stuff there .... oh wait, just like Stratechery does. Nobody is coming for your blog. And, in the foreseeable future, nobody will come for your blog. You can write whatever you want. Getting people to read it might be slightly harder than if you use some corporatist social media platform, but arguing along those lines merely cements those platforms in their pseudo-monopolist places, which is hardly desirable for all manner of reasons. Is it a good thing that FB/Twitter et al. can make wrong-headed decisions about the content they allow on their platforms? It's not great. But compared to the information overload issues mentioned here by other commenters, it's not obviously bad either. And it does nothing to reduce your freedom of speech. Ben Thompson could post articles on Stratechery that make non-libellous false claims about anything he wants, and nobody will stop him. He could this every day for the rest of his life and nobody will stop him. He doesn't like the monopolistic aspects of current social media giants, but continues to insist that they are so important that any "censorship" on these platforms is a significant social issue. I find this contradictory, and naive, and in almost every sense, simply wrong.
- Reedx 6y ago
  But Twitter/FB/YouTube effectively drive the national conversation and consciousness at this point. Ben is correct to place emphasis there.
  - ghaff 6y ago
    I think you might be surprised by how many people don't really use those platforms to any significant extent and, to the degree they do use them, it's mostly for entertainment and staying in touch with friends. >drive the national conversation and consciousness I honestly don't see that.
ckemere 6y ago
I think that the suggestion of a challenge-based Phase 3 trial is poorly elucidated, not for the reasons mentioned in other threads (the risk of severe reactions) but because they probably would have revealed in more detail what the Phase 2/3 trials actually did reveal, that the vaccine is not 100% effective in preventing infection. (Full disclosure - I participated in the Moderna Phase 3 trial and will get vaccinated ASAP if it turns out I was in the placebo group.) The incentives for Moderna/Pfizer/AZ are a bit complex here. If they did a challenge study and discovered that 25% of vaccinated individuals were infected but had lower viral loads, that might have made it more difficult to get approved. Instead, doing what they are doing - rolling out vaccination with zero public health monitoring of folks after the fact allows them to avoid having to deal with that. Moreover, for the anti-vaxxers, who currently seem to have focused in on the fact that a tiny fraction of folks appear to have an anaphylactic response to the lipid nanoshell on the mRNA, it would have been easy to say "Oh, the vaccine doesn't actually work at all." It's unfortunate, but certainly not the first time where incentives are aligned to favor ignorance rather than maximum knowledge. I think the really interesting question I have is whether Moderna will continue to follow their Phase 3 participants after they are all unblinded and vaccinated. If they do, and do a good job of assessing changes in antibodies, then I'll be really impressed with their ethics.
- xapata 6y ago
  > tiny fraction of folks appear to have an anaphylactic response It's one thing to know it's a tiny fraction, another to have a friend in the hospital overnight. I'll take my vaccine anyway, but ... yikes.
- notJim 6y ago
  Do we have comparable results for challenge trials with other vaccines? I thought the 90% numbers for the COVID vaccines sounded bad until I read that other vaccines we routinely use are in the 80s. Additionally, AFAIK we don't actually know if the vaccines prevent COVID infections at all, we just know they prevent severe illness. If a challenge trial provided enough evidence of that, why wouldn't that be sufficient?
xapata 6y ago
> Second, it should be the default that the status quo is a bad thing; > Third, it should be the default to move fast, and value experimentation over perfection. These two bullets are the same. Rather, the latter is both necessary and sufficient for the former. Without experimentation (implying the evaluation of success and the intent to abandon unsuccessful methods), defaulting to status quo is preferable.
SubuSS 6y ago
> Second, it should be the default that the status quo is a bad thing; > Third, it should be the default to move fast, and value experimentation over perfection. These points are making me twitch: We have seen so many examples (even in the software world) of companies trying to move fast and eventually figure it is far better to be thoughtful about changes both major and minor. Imagine tossing a coin that has a 0.001:99.999 probability split. Just 0.001% chance that you will be killed vs 99+% chance that you won't. Believe me, you don't want to be tossing this coin in a macro scale OR way too many times. Individually we make these choices every day and get out scratch free, BUT once you bring in enough coin tosses, there is an irrefutable point that one of it is going to end up killing you. Individually the hope is that you won't take enough chances like that before you naturally die off. As conservative as it sounds, keeping status quo is the safer option for a society. There is a reason we see folks turning conservative once they have generated enough wealth - the need to never be poor again far outweighs the need to be wealthy.
- satyrnein 6y ago
  Yeah, I think they are overstated. The status quo should be questioned and forced to justify itself, but not just ignored thoughtlessly. We should move fast and tolerate risk when the cost of delay is very high (like thousands of people dead per day) but not when it's low.
- titanomachy 6y ago
  I had a similar feeling. I think the point that TFA is making is that our world is changing quickly and profoundly enough that "we've always done it this way and we know it works ok" is not as useful a heuristic as it might once have been. We shouldn't thoughtlessly discard proven ways of doing things, but we may need to update the weight that we give them. What worked well in 1990 isn't as likely to work today as 1960's practices were in 1990.
- carbonguy 6y ago
  I too took particular issue with the second point; among other possible criticisms, the categorical statement that "the status quo is a bad thing" seems to completely miss the idea of "embedded wisdom." Surely this idea should be familiar to anybody who's spent enough time reading about software development? I suppose the point could be interpreted to mean "investigate the assumptions of the status quo and find out which ones are no longer valid" - but then, that's not what Thompson wrote. As to points one and three - I don't buy that "free speech is good" is no longer the default and I don't see much in this essay that shows otherwise. The example given (Youtube censoring perspectives that contradict the WHO, despite the WHO itself having disseminated falsehoods) leads directly to the questions: should Youtube not have been allowed to make that decision? And if not, how should they have been prevented? As to the third point - revisiting the example just discussed, surely the WHO's communications (of which Thompson seems critical) could be seen as an example of an organization hewing to the very default he asserts as valuable? Move fast with your communications, value early release over perfect certainty, etc.
christiansakai 6y ago
I wonder if in near future, the war against the West is best taken by this approach, misinformation and pandemic. Seems like this is the holy grail of weapon most effective against Western thinking. If a nation X and Y and Z can work together to cook more virus and more misinformation and intentionally release it in Western countries, that would spell doom. This is the Prisoner's Dilemma for Western countries.
- mistermann 6y ago
  I agree, we seem extremely vulnerable to psychological attack, it's as if a small disturbance can be introduced and our societies turn it into a frenzy of arguing.
- bun_at_work 6y ago
  I can't speak to the effectiveness of weaponizing them (or rather, don't want to), but misinformation is most definitely the Achilles Heel of democracy. For the people to govern themselves effectively, they must be accurately informed. When they aren't accurately informed we have the "fake news" plague that is damaging US and most western democracies.
pachico 6y ago
Allow me to digress for a second by saying that this page is a pleasure to read in a mobile device, which is a very rare virtue, I'm afraid.
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
mchusma 6y ago
Good article. Its hard not to see the FDA as responsible for >50% of the deaths in the US. Using our prior knowledge about vaccines, we could reasonably expect them to be safe and effective, with no long term side effects (there has only been 1 long term effect ever recorded). So the right thing to do here was not ban the vaccine, which was what happened. Instead, they should have focused on informed consent and to limit the max size of the rollout. Informed consent mitigates any ethical concerns and limiting the rollout minimizes the chance of something being horribly wrong. For example something like 10 people max in week 1, 100 people max in week 2, 500 people max in week 3, up to no restrictions after 8 weeks or so. This has nearly equivalent safety checks and balances as separate phase 1, 2, and 3 trials, but moves much faster. If we followed this approach, then we would have Moderna's vaccine available on a widespread basis by April or so. Yes, manufacturing needed to be improved, so Moderna couldn't have shipped 100M doses in Q2 2020, but we probably could have had everyone over 75 vaccinated before the second wave with moderna alone. Doing the same for J&J, Astrazeneca, Pfizer, and Novavax means in hindsight we would not have any serious COVID issues right now.
Paul-ish 6y ago
If the COVID-19 vaccine is botched, multiple generations will lose trust in the medical community. The medical would lose their cultural authority and their rhetorical high ground against the anti-vaccine crowd and other health disinformation hucksters. The damage from a loss of trust is difficult to understate. Modern healthcare may be expensive and advances may be slow, but it generally works and people trust their doctor.
- johnisgood 6y ago
  Well, there has been a couple of deaths after having received the vaccine.
  - deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
sfeng 6y ago
It's not hard to understand why we didn't do challenge trials. The people making these decisions are not blamed for the 250k people who died, but they would be blamed for five or ten who died as a result of their decisions. It takes exceptional, almost irrational, courage to defy that threat and do it anyway. Unfortunately if you are a life-long member of the political system it is unlikely that courage is one of your great skills.
gumby 6y ago
There's a missing externality (opportunity cost) in the FDA's vaccine calculus: if the vaccine does have an unexpected and negative side effect it could affect willingness to inoculate for other and even more lethal illnesses. It's not like the FDA doesn't understand that people suffer every day a new medication isn't approved. In fact they've been experimenting, -- yes slowly -- with adaptive trial designs that are more flexible than the stereotype of rigid Phase I/II/III
deathanatos 6y ago
> Second, it should be the default that the status quo is a bad thing; instead of justifying why something should be done, the burden of proof should rest on those who believe things should remain the same. This is a downright dangerous view. My job as an engineer is managing complex systems, quite often in maintenance mode. I have fielded my ideas that come from people that do not understand the full complexity of the system, and thus, cannot understand why their idea is bad. It's not just that I (as a maintainer) have to explain why their idea will not work: I first have to teach them enough about the system for them to actually understand the system, and then explain how their idea would interact with the system, and the consequence of that; that's often closer to "here's how you can mentally simulate the system" and perhaps a little of "and a naïve simulation would think this, but remember parts A, B, and C have properties a, b, and c, and those interact to do X, which is slightly surprising (albeit straightforward once you think about it)" There's often precious little time for that, and it can often suck the limited oxygen out of the debate and thus, out of other ideas that might be better. It is much more useful, in almost every situation I've ever been in, for ideas that are being suggested to be well-researched in the status quo. "The system should be documented!" you might cry: it is. For example, we maintain a system that uses a load balancer. It's documented (as part of the system) that the load balancer is part of the system. It's documented (as part of the load balancer) how the LB works. And then we hit issues such as "SNAT port exhaustion" that requires you to have read enough of the documentation that you have a mental model of "load balancer" that is more detailed than "it balances the load" and realizes that an SNAT LB would have operating limits and that the symptoms we were seeing could be the result of all this coming to a confluence. It's not trivial. (And, there is a difference between this point and the later "value experimentation over perfection", which I do agree with. Experimentation, to collect data to aid good arguments to changing the status quo is of course a good idea. But the second point strikes me as "the status is inherently bad" and one should not even seek to understand it, as implied by the author's suggestion about where the burden of proof should be. And I don't even like Chesterton's Fence, and here I'm having to basically argue for it!)
tpoacher 6y ago
Presenting what is effectively 'opinions' as 'scientific-looking graphs' is one of my biggest pet-peeves (up there with its 'nicely drawn cartoon arguing a point as proof of that argument' equivalent). In theory people will argue that it's just a way to make things more 'visual' and 'approachable' to the lay public, but 9/10 times it comes across to me as just a dishonest way to make your audience 'think past the sale'. Here's an example: Presence of | / graphs | / | / | / | / | / | / | / | / | / | / |/ ----------------------------- Likelihood of dishonest intent Must be a universally true fact, right? I mean, there's a graph and everything. I think I also saw a cartoon somewhere...
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]

275 points by kaboro 6y ago

deleted 6y ago

[deleted]

Interesting read... but kinda came off as two articles in one, with an attempt to piece them together... The first part around the behavioral implications of defaults, and the second, which was a reaction to the state of pandemic response around the globe, free-speech, disinformation, and the perceived failures in roll-out of Moderna's mRNA vaccine, and how if we somehow retrain our "defaults" we can somehow overcome these issues. I enjoyed reading this, but it did seem a bit disjointed.

drchopchop 6y ago

>I suspect a similar story can be told about our slide to defaulting that free speech is bad, that the status quo should be the priority, and that perfect is preferable to good. These are mistakes, even as they are understandable. After all, misinformation is a bad thing, change is uncertain, and no one wants to be the one that screwed up. Everyone has good intentions; the mistake is in valuing intentions over outcomes. This, I think, is the flaw in this argument. People do not always have good intentions, and they are polluting the informational landscape to the point where it's dramatically impacting society. The principles he's asking for are indeed happening right now, but in a nefarious way: "Free speech is a good thing" - Sure, but that means 4chan, QAnon, anti-vaxxers, and the like also get loud, free speech now. "Status quo is bad" - The previous status quo of large, centralized media groups is gone, and with it basic levels of journalistic ethics and transparency. "Move fast, value experimentation" - Changes are happening to the way information is produced disseminated much faster than societal constructs can keep up. I didn't have to worry 20 years ago about my relatives treating "Hillary Clinton runs a sex dungeon in a pizza shop" FB memes with the same weight as NBC Nightly News. Fixing these issues, whether by government, tech industry, or otherwise, will involve some level of "authoritarianism".

mrfusion 6y ago
> ..the peculiar evil of silencing the expression of an opinion is that it is robbing the human race; posterity as well as the existing generation; those who dissent from the opinion, still more than those who hold it. If the opinion is right, they are deprived of the opportunity of exchanging error for truth; if wrong, they lose, what is almost as great a benefit, the clearer perception and livelier impression of truth produced by its collision with error. John Stuart Mill https://www.utilitarianism.com/ol/two.html https://www.utilitarianism.com/ol/two.html
- drchopchop 6y ago
  Should all expressions of opinion be given equal weight? Is an average person able to evaluate what's factually correct, and what's not? Just think of all the assumptions that you need to make when you figure out "should I take a COVID-19 vaccine": * Is this vaccine safe? What do I know about the companies that are making it? * What even is a vaccine? Are they all the same? How do the different ones work? * Is COVID-19 even real? Have I personally witnessed people getting sick? Is there statistical evidence that large amounts of people are getting sick? Is the death rate worse than the average flu? * How do we even know this is transmitted between people? Do masks work? What even is a virus? How do they grow and replicate? * Are doctors lying to me? Do they have an incentive to? How do I fact-check these claims when I can't travel around the country and see with my own eyes? * et cetera You have to rely on some assumptions to be able to answer these questions, which is the whole point of having an educational system at all, and necessarily prioritizes ones that we have deemed "correct". Is this authoritarian? Should we just let children loose on Twitter after they're born and have them re-derive all information for first principles again?
  - mrfusion 6y ago
    Perhaps you and I have lived with this miracle too long to be properly appreciative. Freedom is a fragile thing and is never more than one generation away from extinction. It is not ours by inheritance; it must be fought for and defended constantly by each generation, for it comes only once to a people. Those who have known freedom and then lost it have never known it again. -- Ronald Reagan

raghavtoshniwal 6y ago

The FDA rushing the approval of vaccine that might turn out to be unsafe harms their credibility in the long run. The worst case scenario of a hastily approved vaccine is so high that it probably makes sense to bear the cost and take the health/economic hit. Also this is the first major use of mRNA vaccine, scientists and experts were not sure how well it would work. Administering it without trials could have led to a nightmare scenario for a few individuals and anti-vaccine stance for a larger chunk of population. Ben is probably right, the status quo should change, but I am not sure if the 'opportunity cost' calculus he makes is accurate in this case.

pdonis 6y ago
> The worst case scenario of a hastily approved vaccine is so high that it probably makes sense to bear the cost and take the health/economic hit. I'm not so sure. See my response to ivanbakel upthread.
renewiltord 6y ago
Well, the worst case scenario of not approving the vaccine is that the virus mutates into an airborne monstrosity with near instant fatality. So not approving the vaccine also makes no sense. Ultimately, any optimization strategy that depends on using just the worst case without the probability of the worst case to optimize on is going to rapidly find itself unable to optimize because the worst case has cost infinity with every path.
xyzzyz 6y ago
> The FDA rushing the approval of vaccine that might turn out to be unsafe harms their credibility in the long run. FDA has just paid for this risk of losing credibility with hundreds of thousands of lives. Was it a good price? > The worst case scenario of a hastily approved vaccine is so high that it probably makes sense to bear the cost and take the health/economic hit. Really? You ran the numbers? Show your work.
- cageface 6y ago
  It's very likely we're going to see another pandemic with a much more lethal pathogen in our lifetimes. Counting on overnight development of vaccines and throwing out proper testing to bail us out is a mistake.

mrfusion 6y ago

Am I misreading or is this article suggesting forced medical detention is a good idea?

_dark_matter_ 6y ago
You are misreading. The article is suggesting that forced medical detention was _effective_. It is also arguing that free-market forces are effective (the opposite extreme).

Spivak 6y ago

There is a point the author doesn't touch on which I think ends up undermining his central thesis. One's motivation for setting a default matters. If you're acting in good faith and selecting a default because you genuinely believe (and/or have data to show) that it's what all but a small group of outliers choose then there's no issue. If you're acting in bad faith and selecting a default to shape behavior or to get a particular outcome then you're abusing your position of (relative) power as a decider for other people. > Second, it should be the default that the status quo is a bad thing. The author wants this default changed because he doesn't like the status-quo. Look, I don't like it either but assuming that people don't like the current state of things in literally every single aspect of life unless stated otherwise compared to "I want to change X,Y,Z." is way off base.

gizmo 6y ago

This is a great article, and I agree with the core point about defaults and opportunity cost, but with the main example of China's handling of covid it asserts that the draconian lockdown is the reason mortality in China is lower. It even asserts that to claim otherwise is dishonest. But the data isn't so clear. Countries in South America locked down hard and early but it had no effect on the pandemic spread. And all Asian countries, without a single exception, have outperformed Europe, US, and SA by more than an order of magnitude, despite countries having responded to the crisis in different ways. How can this be? I think it's much more honest to say that we don't have the answers. We have questions. It's been a year, and the questions keep mounting. We don't know why Belgium got hit hard but Germany did not. Why Slovenia didn't have a first wave, but did get a second wave. Why did every African country do well despite limited ability to lock down or distance? Why did all of Asia do well? Why is the correlation between NPI and future infections/hospitalizations so weak? And frankly I find the combination of a mounting pile of unanswered questions one the one hand and a call for censorship of dissenting voices on the other very disturbing.

gnusty_gnurc 6y ago
> I think it's much more honest to say that we don't have the answers. This is virtually impossible given how much government, politicians, and even individuals have staked their identity and reputation on being correct and knowledgeable. That's the most evil aspect of authoritarianism and despotism. The inability to admit failure, limitation and falibility. This is why Fauci and friends always couch their responses to criticism with dismissive explanations. I'm constantly frustrated with the unimpeachable self-confidence that's so pervasive now. It's only worse when their failures are so apparent.
- JackFr 6y ago
  >This is virtually impossible given how much government, politicians, and even individuals have staked their identity and reputation on being correct and knowledgeable. In the short term, absolutely. One hopes 5-10 years down the road, a disinterested analysis can get a comprehensive if not conclusive picture. > I'm constantly frustrated with the unimpeachable self-confidence that's so pervasive now. I couldn't a agree more. I have no doubts about the absolute best intentions of those making public policy, but their arrogance and utter lack of circumspection with such obvious failures does nothing but further undermine their long-term credibility.

devy 6y ago

Ben Thompson tried to compare China with over 1.4 billion people with Taiwan with only 24 million people and vehemently arguing that the Taiwan's governance is better is very disingenuous at best. Imaging the comparing the governance of large corporation vs. a small startup, it's just different. The complexity and nuances of managing human organization will increase drastically when the headcount increases. That's just common sense. Also Ben is based in Taiwan, he should know better. The current Tsai Ing-wen's regime actually oppressed free press and freedom of speech by terminating CTi News TV broasting license due to political reasons (since CTi New airs opposing views to her government and is generally seen as close to the mainland China).[1] I don't agree with Ben's first rule of new default either: First, it should be the default that free speech is a good thing, that more information is better than less information, and that the solution to misinformation is improving our ability to tell the difference, not futilely trying to be China-lite without any of the upside. The more information is NOT better at all. Information overload will cause great harm and push people to the extreme ideology, as we've seen in social media (facebook, twitter, google etc.) the self-reinforced bubble. And there are physical drawbacks to those too. The more noise and junk information the less likely you can make an informative decision. Garbage in garbage out! [1]: https://www.bbc.com/zhongwen/simp/chinese-news-55000536 https://www.bbc.com/zhongwen/simp/chinese-news-55000536

sooheon 6y ago
> Information overload will cause great harm and push people to the extreme ideology, as we've seen in social media (facebook, twitter, google etc.) the self-reinforced bubble Now that we understand this piece of information, is the best way to solve the problem more information, or to forget that we ever learned it?
- devy 6y ago
  > Now that we understand this piece of information No, a large portion 72 million Americans don't. They still believe fringe theories and conspiracies like 5G signal caused COVID-19 or election was stolen.
  - 6y ago

ivanbakel 6y ago

This post unfortunately fails to honestly engage with its own counterarguments. Note to the author: you can't make a thinkpiece balanced by bringing up opposing points if you're just going to dismiss them out-of-hand. >Second, it should be the default that the status quo is a bad thing; instead of justifying why something should be done, the burden of proof should rest on those who believe things should remain the same. This is ignorant of the cost of change. That cost is the main reason why society collectively assumes that "the system works". Arguments for change have to first attack that notion - as communists, fascists, and all other kinds of anti-conservatives do. None of them believe that change, in and of itself, is valuable. Likewise, the author's talk of opportunity cost neglects the price of failure - in doing a retrospective analysis (like the one of vaccine development), it's easy to ignore the counterfactuals that never actually happened. But leaving them out means that your analysis is meaningless. Would the author be convinced to write the same article if the vaccine had been rolled out in January, and as a result the world suffered a second thalidomide scandal?

pdonis 6y ago
> Would the author be convinced to write the same article if the vaccine had been rolled out in January, and as a result the world suffered a second thalidomide scandal? A better comparison would be the swine flu vaccine in 1976. According to Wikipedia [1], about 45 million people were vaccinated and 362 of them suffered Guillan-Barre syndrome. Only 1 person died of the actual swine flu. But that comparison actually makes Ben's case stronger. What if all 330 million people in the US had been vaccinated against COVID, and 1 in 100,000 of them (about the same proportion as for the 1976 vaccine) had serious side effects? Even if all of those side effects were fatal (and they wouldn't be), that would still be only 3,300 deaths--less than 1 percent of the US COVID death count currently reported. And even leaving aside that not all side effects would be fatal, that death count is clearly an overestimate, since in the US people would be given the choice whether to be vaccinated, and not all Americans would take it. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1976_swine_flu_outbreak https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1976_swine_flu_outbreak
- ivanbakel 6y ago

cma 6y ago

> I am here to tell you that those practices are wrong, at least for the U.S. They are a form of detainment without due process, contrary to the spirit of the Constitution and, more important, to American notions of individual rights. Yes, those who test positive should have greater options for self-isolation than they currently do. But if a family wishes to stick together and care for each other, it is not the province of the government to tell them otherwise. If we had widespread ebola or if coronavirus was as deadly as smallpox I don't think many people would be making this argument, and we already have plenty of case law.

ghaff 6y ago
At least some of the case law is over 100 years old, e.g. a state making a smallpox vaccine mandatory being considered allowable. And I'd point out that SCOTUS, a bit later, also upheld voluntary sterilization of people with diminished mental capacity. So I'm not sure what all today's SCOTUS would uphold with respect to state action.
xyzzyz 6y ago
If we had widespread Ebola, people would stay home on their own, without the state forcing them to. The whole reason people flout the restriction is because their personal risk is very low. For people under 45, catching covid presents similar risk of dying to a year of driving a car. If government tried to ban driving, arguing that it is for my safety, I would be pissed and would not accept that law. However, if 10% of drivers died every year, I wouldn’t need government to stop me from driving, I’d stay the hell away from the killing machine myself.
- ryandrake 6y ago
  > If we had widespread Ebola, people would stay home on their own, without the state forcing them to. Sadly, I'm not so sure of this, anymore. 350K+ deaths in the USA alone has called into question the public's ability to assess risk and do the right thing. I don't see why it would be any different for something like Ebola. You'd still have the same viral Facebook videos calling it a hoax and a conspiracy. You'd have the same toothless, unenforced "orders" from the government to quarantine. You'd have the same people refusing to cooperate Because Freedom. I don't see why anything would be different except for the number of deaths.

chrischapman 6y ago

> Defaults are powerful! No kidding! Just look at where we are with personal data. The default is opt-out - it should be opt-in. And for consent, the default is 'assumed' consent - it should be 'informed' consent.

oblio 6y ago
Yeah, as far as letters go, it's a 3 character difference. You know: "opt-in/out". So it seems easy. However switching that little switch would mean killing businesses worth tens of billions of dollars. We're talking about millions of people losing their jobs and their privileged positions. I'm not saying this because I agree with them, I'm just pointing out that threatening their livelihood will cause a vicious reaction. People have been killed for less. Wars have been started for less.
- staplers 6y ago
  We're talking about millions of people losing their jobs and their privileged positions. How did the world and society exist without big-brother surveillance?!?
  - oblio 6y ago
    Don't misread/misrepresent what I'm saying ;-) My point is that there are many of those people I mention, they're rich, smart and quite powerful. Many of them are on this exact site, by the way. They're not going to give up what they got without a fight.
    - staplers 6y ago
      Sounds like I'm interpreting it perfectly. You are implying surveillance capitalism is necessary because "certain people" can threaten, harass, maybe kill citizens into participating because it makes "certain people" rich. My sarcasm implies it's unnecessary. Further it is a net-negative to society and everyone knows it. Look at tobacco, oil, or coal.. eventually they lose their grip. Get real.

ilaksh 6y ago

Great article. It seems as though we need more people with really solid problem solving skills. Because I have found that people who do not know how to solve problems tend to root strongly for the status quo. I think it's because they know if they admit that there is a problem, they will not be able to address it. So they would rather rationalize the way things are.

a3w 6y ago

What is a 401K? Proposal: Articles that are hard to read for non-US citizens should be marked [US&A] -- Borat

HideousKojima 6y ago
It's a kind of retirement investment fund. Contributions to it aren't taxed until you retire, and employers will often match employee contributions to it up to a limit.

gringoDan 6y ago

I think that the relevant axis on which to evaluate countries' default attitude towards COVID and technological progress isn't authoritarianism vs. freedom, but rather peacetime vs. wartime mindset. FDA approval processes (and many of the other governmental processes in liberal democracies) are built around peacetime opportunity costs. They prioritize safety over rushing to get a vaccine out the door. When the opportunity cost changes (i.e., there is a new global pandemic and lives are on the line) those institutions have trouble updating their behavior accordingly. Conversely, authoritarian regimes are much more militant. You see this in China's approach not only to the virus, but in audacious economic initiatives (e.g. Belt & Road) and the defense of its political ideology on the world stage. That mindset is actually similar to the democracies that have responded best to COVID. Israel (very much a "wartime" country - mandatory military service, surrounded by its enemies, etc.) is blowing the rest of the world out of the water in its vaccination implementation. In normal times, it is a powerhouse of innovation, largely due to elite technological groups in the military. South Korea (another country with mandatory military service, enemy with nukes to the north) had a great COVID response. And Taiwan, a country that faces constant existential threat from China, > [E]xhibited the exact same sort can-do attitude alongside a free press, elections, and pig intestines in the legislature. The US last had a "wartime" mindset during WW2. Many of the innovations in the following period (nuclear physics, space race, computers, etc.) can be directly attributed to the massive mobilization effort and public-private partnerships of the time. So the question to ask is: How do we cultivate the wartime mindset that leads to innovation? And if COVID can't catalyze this, what can?

crummy 6y ago
The peacetime vs wartime mindset doesn't really fit with New Zealand's response. Maybe that's an outlier though.
titanomachy 6y ago
A good first step would be a government that doesn't waste months denying the existence of the crisis in the first place.

jdmichal 6y ago

> The issue is that the money market fund was the default choice, which meant that while the new program helped people save more, it also led folks who would have chosen better-performing funds to earn far less than they would have. Defaults are powerful! Does the data actually back this up? It seems to me like the cited data could also support that everyone who would have otherwise opted in still went and selected stocks. I can't see the full paper cited, but the abstract says: > Second, a substantial fraction of 401(k) participants hired under automatic enrollment retain both the default contribution rate and fund allocation even though few employees hired before automatic enrollment picked this particular outcome. This seems to be specifically not stating the conclusion that the article did.

ghaff 6y ago
They discuss this. From the paper: "the fraction of participants contributing to only one fund in the NEW relative to the other cohorts cannot be explained entirely by a shift in the composition of participants due to the substantial effects of automatic enrollment on 401(k) participation." So the increased participation may have caused a shift to some degree. (Maybe those less likely to participate normally often choose a more conservative investment?) But not entirely. https://www.nber.org/system/files/working_papers/w7682/w7682.pdf https://www.nber.org/system/files/working_papers/w7682/w7682...
- jdmichal 6y ago
  Thanks!

breatheoften 6y ago

> Yes, those who test positive should have greater options for self-isolation than they currently do. Nothing along these lines even remotely happened. The boogey man of 'forcing people to quarantine' can be avoided while still creating incentives and expectations that individuals should opt-into a plan that concentrates risk and concentrates isolation requirements around known risks. A positive test in the West comes with vague advice to quarantine at home. It should've instead come with a pre-paid package providing hotel+food+income-supplement that continued for the quarantine period so long as you don't violate the isolation expectations ... Incentives, not punitive measures, would've sufficed to make it possible, easy, and expected for people to _avoid_ spreading to their co-dwellers/neighbors or anyone they come into contact with by necessity for basic survival needs.

OliverGilan 6y ago

People are going to focus on discussion with COVID but to me the big takeaway from this great article is the lessons not learned. Whenever discussing stagnation or regulatory deadlock in the US the default response is to handwring about the dangers things like the FDA protect us from. It’s refreshing to see someone eloquently write about how there is inherent risk that regulation also exposes us too. There’s no one extreme that is perfect but I personally would prefer rapid progress with some mistakes as opposed to what we seem to be experiencing now.

PaulDavisThe1st 6y ago
Are you old enough to have seen the thalidomide children of the mid-1970s?
evgen 6y ago
This article is standard punditry of false dichotomies and excluded middles to frame an argument in a manner that assumes the outcome the writer wants to lead you to. I was expecting better to be honest. The problem with 'move fast and break things' is that when we are talking about real lives and real consequences then then things that tend to get broken are other people. Make no mistake, it is always 'other people' that pundits like this are talking about. They are never going to pay the costs of the negative externalities, it is always going to be someone else's life, someone else's child, someone else's home, neighborhood, or vocation. If someone like this author was actually interested in working to fix the problem they would start by trying to provide regulators with the resources they need to actually keep up with a fast changing world filled with tech-bros out to 'disrupt' any industry where they think they can make themselves a middle-man in a transaction. Make it interesting and worthwhile for smart people to work on improving the regulatory process and adapting it to current realities and maybe we can start to make progress that is both rapid and safe.
UncleMeat 6y ago
The problem is the assumption that deregulation causes rapid progress. Regulation can inhibit progress, and I think almost everybody would agree that there are some regulations that cause more harm than good. But deregulation does not imply enormous leaps forward. Antitrust regulations, for example, protect progress by helping prevent large companies from eating up all the competition and safely stagnating.

PaulDavisThe1st 6y ago

I just do not understand how somebody like Ben Thompson, clearly at ease with the internet age, can continue to place so much emphasis on what a handful of large corporate information outlets do or do not do. >the default is to push for censorship, if not by the government — thanks to that pesky First Amendment — then instead by private corporations. It's the goddam internet. You don't have to write on FB. You don't have to write on Twitter (and please don't try to actually write on Twitter). Dozens of companies will offer you essentially one-click wordpress installations for you, with 10 more clicks to customize it to match your aesthetic inclinations. Write your stuff there .... oh wait, just like Stratechery does. Nobody is coming for your blog. And, in the foreseeable future, nobody will come for your blog. You can write whatever you want. Getting people to read it might be slightly harder than if you use some corporatist social media platform, but arguing along those lines merely cements those platforms in their pseudo-monopolist places, which is hardly desirable for all manner of reasons. Is it a good thing that FB/Twitter et al. can make wrong-headed decisions about the content they allow on their platforms? It's not great. But compared to the information overload issues mentioned here by other commenters, it's not obviously bad either. And it does nothing to reduce your freedom of speech. Ben Thompson could post articles on Stratechery that make non-libellous false claims about anything he wants, and nobody will stop him. He could this every day for the rest of his life and nobody will stop him. He doesn't like the monopolistic aspects of current social media giants, but continues to insist that they are so important that any "censorship" on these platforms is a significant social issue. I find this contradictory, and naive, and in almost every sense, simply wrong.

Reedx 6y ago
But Twitter/FB/YouTube effectively drive the national conversation and consciousness at this point. Ben is correct to place emphasis there.
- ghaff 6y ago
  I think you might be surprised by how many people don't really use those platforms to any significant extent and, to the degree they do use them, it's mostly for entertainment and staying in touch with friends. >drive the national conversation and consciousness I honestly don't see that.

ckemere 6y ago

I think that the suggestion of a challenge-based Phase 3 trial is poorly elucidated, not for the reasons mentioned in other threads (the risk of severe reactions) but because they probably would have revealed in more detail what the Phase 2/3 trials actually did reveal, that the vaccine is not 100% effective in preventing infection. (Full disclosure - I participated in the Moderna Phase 3 trial and will get vaccinated ASAP if it turns out I was in the placebo group.) The incentives for Moderna/Pfizer/AZ are a bit complex here. If they did a challenge study and discovered that 25% of vaccinated individuals were infected but had lower viral loads, that might have made it more difficult to get approved. Instead, doing what they are doing - rolling out vaccination with zero public health monitoring of folks after the fact allows them to avoid having to deal with that. Moreover, for the anti-vaxxers, who currently seem to have focused in on the fact that a tiny fraction of folks appear to have an anaphylactic response to the lipid nanoshell on the mRNA, it would have been easy to say "Oh, the vaccine doesn't actually work at all." It's unfortunate, but certainly not the first time where incentives are aligned to favor ignorance rather than maximum knowledge. I think the really interesting question I have is whether Moderna will continue to follow their Phase 3 participants after they are all unblinded and vaccinated. If they do, and do a good job of assessing changes in antibodies, then I'll be really impressed with their ethics.

xapata 6y ago
> tiny fraction of folks appear to have an anaphylactic response It's one thing to know it's a tiny fraction, another to have a friend in the hospital overnight. I'll take my vaccine anyway, but ... yikes.
notJim 6y ago
Do we have comparable results for challenge trials with other vaccines? I thought the 90% numbers for the COVID vaccines sounded bad until I read that other vaccines we routinely use are in the 80s. Additionally, AFAIK we don't actually know if the vaccines prevent COVID infections at all, we just know they prevent severe illness. If a challenge trial provided enough evidence of that, why wouldn't that be sufficient?

xapata 6y ago

> Second, it should be the default that the status quo is a bad thing; > Third, it should be the default to move fast, and value experimentation over perfection. These two bullets are the same. Rather, the latter is both necessary and sufficient for the former. Without experimentation (implying the evaluation of success and the intent to abandon unsuccessful methods), defaulting to status quo is preferable.

SubuSS 6y ago

> Second, it should be the default that the status quo is a bad thing; > Third, it should be the default to move fast, and value experimentation over perfection. These points are making me twitch: We have seen so many examples (even in the software world) of companies trying to move fast and eventually figure it is far better to be thoughtful about changes both major and minor. Imagine tossing a coin that has a 0.001:99.999 probability split. Just 0.001% chance that you will be killed vs 99+% chance that you won't. Believe me, you don't want to be tossing this coin in a macro scale OR way too many times. Individually we make these choices every day and get out scratch free, BUT once you bring in enough coin tosses, there is an irrefutable point that one of it is going to end up killing you. Individually the hope is that you won't take enough chances like that before you naturally die off. As conservative as it sounds, keeping status quo is the safer option for a society. There is a reason we see folks turning conservative once they have generated enough wealth - the need to never be poor again far outweighs the need to be wealthy.

satyrnein 6y ago
Yeah, I think they are overstated. The status quo should be questioned and forced to justify itself, but not just ignored thoughtlessly. We should move fast and tolerate risk when the cost of delay is very high (like thousands of people dead per day) but not when it's low.
titanomachy 6y ago
I had a similar feeling. I think the point that TFA is making is that our world is changing quickly and profoundly enough that "we've always done it this way and we know it works ok" is not as useful a heuristic as it might once have been. We shouldn't thoughtlessly discard proven ways of doing things, but we may need to update the weight that we give them. What worked well in 1990 isn't as likely to work today as 1960's practices were in 1990.
carbonguy 6y ago
I too took particular issue with the second point; among other possible criticisms, the categorical statement that "the status quo is a bad thing" seems to completely miss the idea of "embedded wisdom." Surely this idea should be familiar to anybody who's spent enough time reading about software development? I suppose the point could be interpreted to mean "investigate the assumptions of the status quo and find out which ones are no longer valid" - but then, that's not what Thompson wrote. As to points one and three - I don't buy that "free speech is good" is no longer the default and I don't see much in this essay that shows otherwise. The example given (Youtube censoring perspectives that contradict the WHO, despite the WHO itself having disseminated falsehoods) leads directly to the questions: should Youtube not have been allowed to make that decision? And if not, how should they have been prevented? As to the third point - revisiting the example just discussed, surely the WHO's communications (of which Thompson seems critical) could be seen as an example of an organization hewing to the very default he asserts as valuable? Move fast with your communications, value early release over perfect certainty, etc.

christiansakai 6y ago

I wonder if in near future, the war against the West is best taken by this approach, misinformation and pandemic. Seems like this is the holy grail of weapon most effective against Western thinking. If a nation X and Y and Z can work together to cook more virus and more misinformation and intentionally release it in Western countries, that would spell doom. This is the Prisoner's Dilemma for Western countries.

mistermann 6y ago
I agree, we seem extremely vulnerable to psychological attack, it's as if a small disturbance can be introduced and our societies turn it into a frenzy of arguing.
bun_at_work 6y ago
I can't speak to the effectiveness of weaponizing them (or rather, don't want to), but misinformation is most definitely the Achilles Heel of democracy. For the people to govern themselves effectively, they must be accurately informed. When they aren't accurately informed we have the "fake news" plague that is damaging US and most western democracies.

pachico 6y ago

Allow me to digress for a second by saying that this page is a pleasure to read in a mobile device, which is a very rare virtue, I'm afraid.

deleted 6y ago

[deleted]

mchusma 6y ago

Good article. Its hard not to see the FDA as responsible for >50% of the deaths in the US. Using our prior knowledge about vaccines, we could reasonably expect them to be safe and effective, with no long term side effects (there has only been 1 long term effect ever recorded). So the right thing to do here was not ban the vaccine, which was what happened. Instead, they should have focused on informed consent and to limit the max size of the rollout. Informed consent mitigates any ethical concerns and limiting the rollout minimizes the chance of something being horribly wrong. For example something like 10 people max in week 1, 100 people max in week 2, 500 people max in week 3, up to no restrictions after 8 weeks or so. This has nearly equivalent safety checks and balances as separate phase 1, 2, and 3 trials, but moves much faster. If we followed this approach, then we would have Moderna's vaccine available on a widespread basis by April or so. Yes, manufacturing needed to be improved, so Moderna couldn't have shipped 100M doses in Q2 2020, but we probably could have had everyone over 75 vaccinated before the second wave with moderna alone. Doing the same for J&J, Astrazeneca, Pfizer, and Novavax means in hindsight we would not have any serious COVID issues right now.

Paul-ish 6y ago

If the COVID-19 vaccine is botched, multiple generations will lose trust in the medical community. The medical would lose their cultural authority and their rhetorical high ground against the anti-vaccine crowd and other health disinformation hucksters. The damage from a loss of trust is difficult to understate. Modern healthcare may be expensive and advances may be slow, but it generally works and people trust their doctor.

johnisgood 6y ago
Well, there has been a couple of deaths after having received the vaccine.
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]

sfeng 6y ago

It's not hard to understand why we didn't do challenge trials. The people making these decisions are not blamed for the 250k people who died, but they would be blamed for five or ten who died as a result of their decisions. It takes exceptional, almost irrational, courage to defy that threat and do it anyway. Unfortunately if you are a life-long member of the political system it is unlikely that courage is one of your great skills.

gumby 6y ago

There's a missing externality (opportunity cost) in the FDA's vaccine calculus: if the vaccine does have an unexpected and negative side effect it could affect willingness to inoculate for other and even more lethal illnesses. It's not like the FDA doesn't understand that people suffer every day a new medication isn't approved. In fact they've been experimenting, -- yes slowly -- with adaptive trial designs that are more flexible than the stereotype of rigid Phase I/II/III

deathanatos 6y ago

> Second, it should be the default that the status quo is a bad thing; instead of justifying why something should be done, the burden of proof should rest on those who believe things should remain the same. This is a downright dangerous view. My job as an engineer is managing complex systems, quite often in maintenance mode. I have fielded my ideas that come from people that do not understand the full complexity of the system, and thus, cannot understand why their idea is bad. It's not just that I (as a maintainer) have to explain why their idea will not work: I first have to teach them enough about the system for them to actually understand the system, and then explain how their idea would interact with the system, and the consequence of that; that's often closer to "here's how you can mentally simulate the system" and perhaps a little of "and a naïve simulation would think this, but remember parts A, B, and C have properties a, b, and c, and those interact to do X, which is slightly surprising (albeit straightforward once you think about it)" There's often precious little time for that, and it can often suck the limited oxygen out of the debate and thus, out of other ideas that might be better. It is much more useful, in almost every situation I've ever been in, for ideas that are being suggested to be well-researched in the status quo. "The system should be documented!" you might cry: it is. For example, we maintain a system that uses a load balancer. It's documented (as part of the system) that the load balancer is part of the system. It's documented (as part of the load balancer) how the LB works. And then we hit issues such as "SNAT port exhaustion" that requires you to have read enough of the documentation that you have a mental model of "load balancer" that is more detailed than "it balances the load" and realizes that an SNAT LB would have operating limits and that the symptoms we were seeing could be the result of all this coming to a confluence. It's not trivial. (And, there is a difference between this point and the later "value experimentation over perfection", which I do agree with. Experimentation, to collect data to aid good arguments to changing the status quo is of course a good idea. But the second point strikes me as "the status is inherently bad" and one should not even seek to understand it, as implied by the author's suggestion about where the burden of proof should be. And I don't even like Chesterton's Fence, and here I'm having to basically argue for it!)

tpoacher 6y ago

Presenting what is effectively 'opinions' as 'scientific-looking graphs' is one of my biggest pet-peeves (up there with its 'nicely drawn cartoon arguing a point as proof of that argument' equivalent). In theory people will argue that it's just a way to make things more 'visual' and 'approachable' to the lay public, but 9/10 times it comes across to me as just a dishonest way to make your audience 'think past the sale'. Here's an example: Presence of | / graphs | / | / | / | / | / | / | / | / | / | / |/ ----------------------------- Likelihood of dishonest intent Must be a universally true fact, right? I mean, there's a graph and everything. I think I also saw a cartoon somewhere...

deleted 6y ago

[deleted]