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No one is looking to people who do weather modeling for policy advice. They do occasionally ask economists, but then generally ignore their advice due to being

No one is looking to people who do weather modeling for policy advice. They do occasionally ask economists, but then generally ignore their advice due to being politically unpopular. I suspect you greatly over-estimate how much politicians listened to epidemiologists during covid as well. A lot of decisions were more out of desire to be seen to be doing something, because the voters went to them and essentially demanded they do something.

bugglebeetle 3y ago
[flagged]
- __loam 3y ago
  It's also fun to see people here pretend there's not a huge field studying public health and the effect of these policies on things like the economy. Yeah, social distancing was bad for the economy. Having millions more deaths due to Covid and the total collapse of the healthcare system in this country would have also been bad for the economy.
  - throwawaymaths 3y ago
    Sure but if those experts were so smart, wouldn't they have been able to foresee the second order effect of crappy messaging and prevent conspiracy theories from taking hold? Or foresee the effects of labeling things that aren't conspiracy theories as conspiracy theories and ruining their own credibility?
    - __loam 3y ago
      Trying to address every insane rant on social media is completely impossible. Also, do you have any actual examples of them mislabeling "conspiracy theories"? I think the public health establishment did a fine job given the challenge they faced. It was never going to be perfect. The fact that we got a vaccine as quickly as we did, organized a mass vaccination campaign and all that did end the pandemic is proof that all the policies succeeded, not that they failed.
      - throwawaymaths 3y ago
        There was a concerted effort to label the lab leak as a conspiracy theory (there is email documentation of this effort) even though pretty much every biochem/bio PhD I know who has lab work experience... Myself included... was pretty certain it was a lab leak early on. The crappy messaging I'm referring to was the "don't get a mask"/"now masks are mandatory" flip flop. Literally anyone could have predicted what happened next.
        giantrobot 3y ago
        The problem with the term "lab leak" is it means different things to different people. To smooth brained shitheads it means "weaponized virus leaked from a lab in China". To scientists it means a leak of a virus under study by breached protocols or lax adherence to same. The smooth brained shitheads ran with their version of "lab leak" and poisoned all discussion of it. They were of course egged on by right wing opportunists around the world to push their favorite bullshit narratives. Scientists and government bureaucrats acting in good faith didn't pick up on the stochastic meaning of "lab leak" and tossed it into public discourse with no qualifiers or definition. This opened the door for just more opportunism by anyone pushing an agenda.
        __loam 3y ago
        Don't forget that the lab leak theory contributed demonstrably to violence against Asian Americans.
        throwawaymaths 3y ago
        I find that hard to believe (I am pacific islander, often mistaken for Asian, I encountered zero extra racism over the pandemic). Even if it were unambiguously from the wet market, I would expect the tiny amount of extra violence to have happened. Moreover, a big chunk of the "anti-asian hate" hysteria is actively funded by CCP. I'm also not personally convinced that declaring that "anti-asian hate" weirdly normalizes it and gets people who wouldn't be participating in that kind of activity to think "oh hey yeah that's a good idea".
    - ImaCake 3y ago
      They did. The reason for going hard and fast on quarantine and lockdown is to make them as quick as possible. A reminder that this worked really well in Australia, Nz, South Korea, China, Vietnam, etc etc.
      - ta8645 3y ago
        > A reminder that this worked really well in Australia, Nz, South Korea, China, Vietnam, etc etc. Even excluding all the confounding variables, your assertion can not be stated so unequivocally, considering there has not been time to do long term studies on the outcomes overall. There may have been an initial success, but will it be maintained overall with all factors considered? How will it look 5 and 10 years later? Maybe you're right, and maybe that conclusion will stand. But it is this absolute insistence that we know the answer already, that is part of the reason trust in institutions has been undermined.
        __loam 3y ago
        I don't think not having a perfect analysis of the long term impact of these policies is an excuse for the kind of "well if the experts are so smart, why didn't they..." kind of rhetoric you're espousing here.
        ImaCake 3y ago
        >but will it be maintained overall with all factors considered? Is a straight up death count not enough for you? Like seriously, there are few less ambigious outcomes in biostatistics than mortality. And by that measure, yes, short hard lockdowns with long term international border closures absolutely worked. If you are implying mental health, then maybe consider being able to live your life without fear before the vaccines was a great way to maintain mental health. Also, not having anyone you know die of the virus (this is still true for most Australians including myself).
        ta8645 3y ago
        > Is a straight up death count not enough for you? As opposed to what? And on what timescale? How can you be so absolutely sure that the numbers are what you think they are? That the counter-factual would have absolutely produced the death tolls you think they would? And how can you be so sure that the deaths that did happen weren't just more spread out and delayed, rather than averted? And at the end of the day, how can you be sure that suicides, and other missed medical procedures and tests won't result in greater long term deaths and suffering than would otherwise have been. In short, you're way more sure than you should be. You don't seem to have an ounce of doubt that you've assessed the situation correctly, or have been misinformed intentionally or otherwise. You have the faith of a true believer, rather than the measured skepticism of a scientist.
  - roenxi 3y ago
    Strictly speaking I agree with your comment, but there is a lot of framing I think needs to be added. The basic form of the implied argument here is [a bad thing was predicted], [we acted], [the bad thing didn't happen] => [the action helped]. That isn't a sound argument. 1) If social distancing were left as an advised and voluntary measure, what would the impact have been? Because that would have probably captured the same benefits without violating basic human rights (particularly the right to assemble, but also a few others). 2) The modelling that justified the lockdowns turned out to be imagining a disease far worse than COVID turned out to be. It is open to question what a collapse of the hospital system would look like in practice. Or indeed if it would have happened. 3) As far as I'm aware there isn't reliable evidence of the magnitude of lives saved or lost. We seem to have come out of COVID into a geopolitical situation that could be mistaken for the opening phase of a world war - a lot of damage was done by the COVID-era policies. If there is evidence that level of authoritarian policy was justified it isn't being waved around in this neck of the woods.
    - __loam 3y ago
      1) It was an extremely contagious disease that killed people of all ages basically at random unless you were under 20. We didn't know a lot about it, especially at the beginning. Extreme measures were warranted because we were in a state of emergency. Everyone paying attention who wasn't an ass hole understood this. 2) Do you have actual sources and analysis for this claim? I'm not trying to be a jerk here and say "source pls", but a lot of people did die, a lot of hospitals did fill up, and in places like Italy early in the pandemic, we did see it get pretty bad. 3) Even if we only had ballpark estimates here, we know millions of people died due to this disease. We also know that regardless of how we responded, our global economy was dependent on international trade and countries in Europe and China closed down regardless of what the United States did. Covid was always going to damage the global economy and inflame a whole cornucopia of dangerous idealogies. I'm glad we chose to act instead of pretending the problem would work itself out. Maybe it would have but it probably would have killed a shit load more people on the way out.
    - gls2ro 3y ago
      Not sure if this is a fallacy but if not it should be: It is IMO a logical error to judge the decision making of the past with data points from the present. So the question is: with the data the decision makers had back then and time pressure what would have been a better decision process? Highlight: with the data that they had back then, not with the data we know now.
Loquebantur 3y ago
"Policy makers", aka the government, should be weighing actions depending on their outcomes as projected by expert consensus. That weighing should be to optimize according to a pre-defined value system, which of course is a matter of political deliberation. To prefer personal interests (like not to have to wear a mask) over common interests (to protect against pandemic effects) incurs the negative consequences irrespective of whether one pretends to know better than the experts. To let others play dumb and act against society is to be dumb yourself.
- spookthesunset 3y ago
  what about deaf people who need to see faces? Or do we not care about those people. What about small children who need to see faces to properly develop? Or does that not matter. What about people who just think they are uncomfortable for whatever reason? Who are you to force others to wear a mask?
  - Loquebantur 3y ago
    Whataboutism very much, but to entertain you: Yes, what about them? You conflate individual discomforts with numerous people actually dying or suffering lasting physical damages. Who are you to pretend your personal idiosyncrasies and weird preferences were more important than society as a whole?
    - np_tedious 3y ago
      Despite the phrase used, this is not whataboutism. They are direct negative results of a practice with benefits in another domain. Weighing then against one another is a real and important thing to do Whataboutism is more like a redirection / distraction. "X is bad". "Yeah but what about Y that's even worse!" when they aren't even related

bugglebeetle 3y ago

[flagged]

__loam 3y ago
It's also fun to see people here pretend there's not a huge field studying public health and the effect of these policies on things like the economy. Yeah, social distancing was bad for the economy. Having millions more deaths due to Covid and the total collapse of the healthcare system in this country would have also been bad for the economy.
- throwawaymaths 3y ago
  Sure but if those experts were so smart, wouldn't they have been able to foresee the second order effect of crappy messaging and prevent conspiracy theories from taking hold? Or foresee the effects of labeling things that aren't conspiracy theories as conspiracy theories and ruining their own credibility?
  - __loam 3y ago
    Trying to address every insane rant on social media is completely impossible. Also, do you have any actual examples of them mislabeling "conspiracy theories"? I think the public health establishment did a fine job given the challenge they faced. It was never going to be perfect. The fact that we got a vaccine as quickly as we did, organized a mass vaccination campaign and all that did end the pandemic is proof that all the policies succeeded, not that they failed.
    - throwawaymaths 3y ago
      There was a concerted effort to label the lab leak as a conspiracy theory (there is email documentation of this effort) even though pretty much every biochem/bio PhD I know who has lab work experience... Myself included... was pretty certain it was a lab leak early on. The crappy messaging I'm referring to was the "don't get a mask"/"now masks are mandatory" flip flop. Literally anyone could have predicted what happened next.
      - giantrobot 3y ago
        The problem with the term "lab leak" is it means different things to different people. To smooth brained shitheads it means "weaponized virus leaked from a lab in China". To scientists it means a leak of a virus under study by breached protocols or lax adherence to same. The smooth brained shitheads ran with their version of "lab leak" and poisoned all discussion of it. They were of course egged on by right wing opportunists around the world to push their favorite bullshit narratives. Scientists and government bureaucrats acting in good faith didn't pick up on the stochastic meaning of "lab leak" and tossed it into public discourse with no qualifiers or definition. This opened the door for just more opportunism by anyone pushing an agenda.
        __loam 3y ago
        Don't forget that the lab leak theory contributed demonstrably to violence against Asian Americans.
        throwawaymaths 3y ago
        I find that hard to believe (I am pacific islander, often mistaken for Asian, I encountered zero extra racism over the pandemic). Even if it were unambiguously from the wet market, I would expect the tiny amount of extra violence to have happened. Moreover, a big chunk of the "anti-asian hate" hysteria is actively funded by CCP. I'm also not personally convinced that declaring that "anti-asian hate" weirdly normalizes it and gets people who wouldn't be participating in that kind of activity to think "oh hey yeah that's a good idea".
  - ImaCake 3y ago
    They did. The reason for going hard and fast on quarantine and lockdown is to make them as quick as possible. A reminder that this worked really well in Australia, Nz, South Korea, China, Vietnam, etc etc.
    - ta8645 3y ago
      > A reminder that this worked really well in Australia, Nz, South Korea, China, Vietnam, etc etc. Even excluding all the confounding variables, your assertion can not be stated so unequivocally, considering there has not been time to do long term studies on the outcomes overall. There may have been an initial success, but will it be maintained overall with all factors considered? How will it look 5 and 10 years later? Maybe you're right, and maybe that conclusion will stand. But it is this absolute insistence that we know the answer already, that is part of the reason trust in institutions has been undermined.
      - __loam 3y ago
        I don't think not having a perfect analysis of the long term impact of these policies is an excuse for the kind of "well if the experts are so smart, why didn't they..." kind of rhetoric you're espousing here.
      - ImaCake 3y ago
        >but will it be maintained overall with all factors considered? Is a straight up death count not enough for you? Like seriously, there are few less ambigious outcomes in biostatistics than mortality. And by that measure, yes, short hard lockdowns with long term international border closures absolutely worked. If you are implying mental health, then maybe consider being able to live your life without fear before the vaccines was a great way to maintain mental health. Also, not having anyone you know die of the virus (this is still true for most Australians including myself).
        ta8645 3y ago
        > Is a straight up death count not enough for you? As opposed to what? And on what timescale? How can you be so absolutely sure that the numbers are what you think they are? That the counter-factual would have absolutely produced the death tolls you think they would? And how can you be so sure that the deaths that did happen weren't just more spread out and delayed, rather than averted? And at the end of the day, how can you be sure that suicides, and other missed medical procedures and tests won't result in greater long term deaths and suffering than would otherwise have been. In short, you're way more sure than you should be. You don't seem to have an ounce of doubt that you've assessed the situation correctly, or have been misinformed intentionally or otherwise. You have the faith of a true believer, rather than the measured skepticism of a scientist.
- roenxi 3y ago
  Strictly speaking I agree with your comment, but there is a lot of framing I think needs to be added. The basic form of the implied argument here is [a bad thing was predicted], [we acted], [the bad thing didn't happen] => [the action helped]. That isn't a sound argument. 1) If social distancing were left as an advised and voluntary measure, what would the impact have been? Because that would have probably captured the same benefits without violating basic human rights (particularly the right to assemble, but also a few others). 2) The modelling that justified the lockdowns turned out to be imagining a disease far worse than COVID turned out to be. It is open to question what a collapse of the hospital system would look like in practice. Or indeed if it would have happened. 3) As far as I'm aware there isn't reliable evidence of the magnitude of lives saved or lost. We seem to have come out of COVID into a geopolitical situation that could be mistaken for the opening phase of a world war - a lot of damage was done by the COVID-era policies. If there is evidence that level of authoritarian policy was justified it isn't being waved around in this neck of the woods.
  - __loam 3y ago
    1) It was an extremely contagious disease that killed people of all ages basically at random unless you were under 20. We didn't know a lot about it, especially at the beginning. Extreme measures were warranted because we were in a state of emergency. Everyone paying attention who wasn't an ass hole understood this. 2) Do you have actual sources and analysis for this claim? I'm not trying to be a jerk here and say "source pls", but a lot of people did die, a lot of hospitals did fill up, and in places like Italy early in the pandemic, we did see it get pretty bad. 3) Even if we only had ballpark estimates here, we know millions of people died due to this disease. We also know that regardless of how we responded, our global economy was dependent on international trade and countries in Europe and China closed down regardless of what the United States did. Covid was always going to damage the global economy and inflame a whole cornucopia of dangerous idealogies. I'm glad we chose to act instead of pretending the problem would work itself out. Maybe it would have but it probably would have killed a shit load more people on the way out.
  - gls2ro 3y ago
    Not sure if this is a fallacy but if not it should be: It is IMO a logical error to judge the decision making of the past with data points from the present. So the question is: with the data the decision makers had back then and time pressure what would have been a better decision process? Highlight: with the data that they had back then, not with the data we know now.

Loquebantur 3y ago

"Policy makers", aka the government, should be weighing actions depending on their outcomes as projected by expert consensus. That weighing should be to optimize according to a pre-defined value system, which of course is a matter of political deliberation. To prefer personal interests (like not to have to wear a mask) over common interests (to protect against pandemic effects) incurs the negative consequences irrespective of whether one pretends to know better than the experts. To let others play dumb and act against society is to be dumb yourself.

spookthesunset 3y ago
what about deaf people who need to see faces? Or do we not care about those people. What about small children who need to see faces to properly develop? Or does that not matter. What about people who just think they are uncomfortable for whatever reason? Who are you to force others to wear a mask?
- Loquebantur 3y ago
  Whataboutism very much, but to entertain you: Yes, what about them? You conflate individual discomforts with numerous people actually dying or suffering lasting physical damages. Who are you to pretend your personal idiosyncrasies and weird preferences were more important than society as a whole?
  - np_tedious 3y ago
    Despite the phrase used, this is not whataboutism. They are direct negative results of a practice with benefits in another domain. Weighing then against one another is a real and important thing to do Whataboutism is more like a redirection / distraction. "X is bad". "Yeah but what about Y that's even worse!" when they aren't even related