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A seldom expressed idea is that maybe we acted close to optimally throughout this whole thing. I hesitated to write that, because I know someone will bring up a
by Buttons840 3y ago
A seldom expressed idea is that maybe we acted close to optimally throughout this whole thing. I hesitated to write that, because I know someone will bring up a case where an official lied or there was widespread corruption (and I still welcome such arguments)...
But, some mistakes pushed us towards too much lock-down, and some mistakes pushed us towards too little lock-down, and perhaps they balanced out to something close to optimal. Not only in the case of lock-downs, but in other things too: surely some executive acted with primary concern for profits, and surely some others spread baseless anti-vax conspiracies. Maybe they balance out?
Maybe society is like a huge machine learning model. It has many errors, sometimes it estimates too high, sometimes it estimates too low. We are always striving to correct both types of errors, but the errors do not stop us from finding an approximate middle path which is often good enough.
- 6502nerdface 3y ago> A seldom expressed idea is that maybe we acted close to optimally throughout this whole thing. He doesn't go so far as to say "optimal," but Janan Ganesh recently made a similar point in the Financial Times: https://on.ft.com/45SVbyD https://on.ft.com/45SVbyD Health policy aside, we clearly stimulated too much, but if you look at what the administration and lawmakers were saying back then they said things like "we'd rather err on the side of too much stimulus rather than too little," a sentiment that I think most people agreed with at the time, and, well, that's what we got.
- pinkmuffinere 3y ago"any solution is optimal for an appropriately defined cost function"
- throwway120385 3y agoIn other words, whether something is "optimal" or not depends on your values and the trade-offs that you're willing to make.