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This seems like accelerationism, not a solution to CDC’s issues. No, hiring more “conservatives” in a bureaucracy doesn’t balance the political polarity. Our c

This seems like accelerationism, not a solution to CDC’s issues. No, hiring more “conservatives” in a bureaucracy doesn’t balance the political polarity. Our current authority trust problems aren’t fixed by political stance (eg. Trump advocating the COVID vaccine, Fauci is a Republican). There is a strong anti-science, anti-academic, anti-government, anti-expert streak in the US political right. It is not exclusive to the right, but the right massively outranks the left in these characteristics. And pro-conspiracy/paranoia propensity is high, so I suspect facts simply won’t break through to some people. The problems the CDC had aren’t related to politics. It: - failed to build a test for COVID in the critical first weeks, - failed to allow many US labs to import and work with COVID samples, and - has continuously given dictates (eg. about masks) which were too simple. They didn’t trust Americans to say that “masks might work, but we want to reserve the best masks for medical workers and those at highest risk of death”. Michael Lewis had a book which describes how the CDC and FDA are simply too risk averse as the pandemic started (and before). They were unable and unwilling to change. Also, the problem I see isn’t that the CDC doesn’t hire conservatives. It’s more that conservatives don’t enter lots of fields in large numbers. Academia, journalism, science, art are dominated by liberals because conservatives don’t encourage their kids into those fields because modern conservatives don’t value these jobs. That and training for these jobs can easily disabuse people of several tribal attributes of conservatism (eg. It’s hard to be a biologist, geologist, or evolutionist and remain a Young Earth Creationist). It’s hard to retain a literal interpretation of the Bible after learning about other religions and myth stories.

nervlord 5y ago
autoexec 5y ago
> The problems the CDC had aren’t related to politics. Some of them were certainly related to politics. The trump administration sidelined the CDC, pressured the CDC to change their recommendations, suppressed reports, publicly contradicted their statements etc. Biden has managed to influence their recommendations as well. The shortened isolation times were the result of a direct request governors made to Biden. At first the CDC said it was changed because of the science, then they backpedaled and said it was just what they thought Americans would tolerate. Political interference in the CDC has been weakening our faith in them. I agree it'd be a terrible idea for the CDC to try to "balance things out" by adding more variation in the political influences. They should really just stick to facts and science and try to eliminate the politics as much as possible.
- dragonwriter 5y ago
  > They should really just stick to facts and science and try to eliminate the politics as much as possible. It's worth noting that, for public health measures, social considerations like effects of planned enforcement measures and expected public response given those measures, including both compliance, failure to alter behavior to comply, and altering behavior directly against the policy (rather than what the policy would do if there was magic perfect compliance with no enforcement effort) is a key set of facts. (And, in the CDCs case, also includes expected enforcement, resistance, nonenforcement, and outright hostile policy responses by State governments, which the CDC does not control but are structurally going to be responsible, realistic, for much of the concrete implementation of CDC guidance.) The CDC can't both stick to relevant facts and science and ignore politics, because public health has an enormous social component, of which politics is a central part.
  - autoexec 5y ago
    That's a fair point, but they don't have to compromise the truth. "The science we have says to do X, but if you can't do that at the very least do Y and here is the outcome you can expect as a result of failing to X" Keep to hard science and let politicians use that information to make less than perfect policy decisions. That way, people can at least trust the CDC to always tell us what we should be doing and we can blame or sympathize with politicians for making less than ideal choices to satisfy corporate interests or out of a lack of faith in the American people. That's much better than the CDC saying "The science says do Y" and then facing a massive amount of backlash as groups of experts say "That's a lie. The science says X" while advocates for Y say "See everybody! We were right!" and many people are left wondering who to trust. As a bonus, those who can do X, could choose to do the best thing no matter what the government policies are, including other nations with less petulant citizens who look to the CDC as a trustworthy source of information.

nervlord 5y ago

autoexec 5y ago

> The problems the CDC had aren’t related to politics. Some of them were certainly related to politics. The trump administration sidelined the CDC, pressured the CDC to change their recommendations, suppressed reports, publicly contradicted their statements etc. Biden has managed to influence their recommendations as well. The shortened isolation times were the result of a direct request governors made to Biden. At first the CDC said it was changed because of the science, then they backpedaled and said it was just what they thought Americans would tolerate. Political interference in the CDC has been weakening our faith in them. I agree it'd be a terrible idea for the CDC to try to "balance things out" by adding more variation in the political influences. They should really just stick to facts and science and try to eliminate the politics as much as possible.

dragonwriter 5y ago
> They should really just stick to facts and science and try to eliminate the politics as much as possible. It's worth noting that, for public health measures, social considerations like effects of planned enforcement measures and expected public response given those measures, including both compliance, failure to alter behavior to comply, and altering behavior directly against the policy (rather than what the policy would do if there was magic perfect compliance with no enforcement effort) is a key set of facts. (And, in the CDCs case, also includes expected enforcement, resistance, nonenforcement, and outright hostile policy responses by State governments, which the CDC does not control but are structurally going to be responsible, realistic, for much of the concrete implementation of CDC guidance.) The CDC can't both stick to relevant facts and science and ignore politics, because public health has an enormous social component, of which politics is a central part.
- autoexec 5y ago
  That's a fair point, but they don't have to compromise the truth. "The science we have says to do X, but if you can't do that at the very least do Y and here is the outcome you can expect as a result of failing to X" Keep to hard science and let politicians use that information to make less than perfect policy decisions. That way, people can at least trust the CDC to always tell us what we should be doing and we can blame or sympathize with politicians for making less than ideal choices to satisfy corporate interests or out of a lack of faith in the American people. That's much better than the CDC saying "The science says do Y" and then facing a massive amount of backlash as groups of experts say "That's a lie. The science says X" while advocates for Y say "See everybody! We were right!" and many people are left wondering who to trust. As a bonus, those who can do X, could choose to do the best thing no matter what the government policies are, including other nations with less petulant citizens who look to the CDC as a trustworthy source of information.