3 ms·
Okay — but we have more concerns than a single virus. It’s entirely possible to engage in net-negative behaviors because you fixate on a singular goal — a huma
by zmgsabst 2y ago
Okay — but we have more concerns than a single virus.
It’s entirely possible to engage in net-negative behaviors because you fixate on a singular goal — a human version of the “paperclip optimizer”: we became “COVID optimizers” and produced suboptimal results.
Ethics and morals are time-honed heuristics to avoid those failures. “Freedom” is the heuristic that distributed risk assessment and planning out perform centralized versions — and we forgot that in our panic.
- nkrisc 2y agoAnd some day there may be another epidemic for which we optimize for freedom, and after which there will be no human left to enjoy the freedom (or those left will be too busy surviving to worry about things such as “freedom”). It is fortunate that the COVID-19 pandemic did not rise to that level. Maybe it couldn’t have, but that’s easier to say with the benefit of hindsight. Or some other catastrophe that threatens us. My point is that natural things do not care for artificial concepts such as “freedoms” and “rights” and “morality”.
- zmgsabst 2y agoYou say that as if the recommendations for freedom weren’t based on the initial medical data. But they were and you’re inventing a false dichotomy whereby we had to engage in totalitarianism contrary to evidence of COVID’s deadliness or some hypothetical infinite bad might have happened. That’s nothing but bullshit, from somebody who was wrong.
- cruffle_duffle 2y ago> Maybe it couldn’t have, but that’s easier to say with the benefit of hindsight. We knew within two weeks of most major shutdowns that Covid wasn’t even close to as bad as predicted by the Imperial College. Society decided to completely ignore that data and instead doubled down on its hysteria for more than three years.