"It is vital that we are able to take yes for an answer from people who have previously answered no. What changed? Their minds changed. The social and political situations changed. The path of the pandemic changed. People came to their senses. We need to ensure they are happy with their decision to do this."
I think there is a bit of a problem here: how do you remove power from people who have drastically misused that power? If the CDC is essentially saying "Do what the Great Barrington people said two years ago", yet not even admitting "Yea, those guys whose careers we tried to destroy and censor etc. etc... they were right and we were wrong," and we are to say "Well, at least you are no longer abusing us anymore" how does that prevent future abuse? I mean, they are not really admitting they did anything wrong that matters, and are asking for more money and power. What mechanism is left for punishing bad behavior once people learn "Look, when it becomes abundantly obvious you screwed up, just apologize for something that doesn't matter and do what you demonized other people for doing before. Then people will be glad you stopped hurting them and will let you keep your power and position, and might give you more."
Doesn't one have to say its too little, too late, and remove people from office eventually? What's the mechanism for that if we are supposed to be happy that they are no longer doing the wrong thing?
I get that conditional on having abusing power hungry bastards lording over you it is probably the best strategy to gently train them to do it less when they feel like it, but it seems that going upstream a little to figure out what behavior helps avoid having those bastards in power in the first place, or removes them more quickly, seems desirable.
I am confident that few if anyone at CDC would retroactively endorse GBD's recommendations at the time they made them, even in hindsight, even in terms of pure outcomes. Nor anything close.
What I am saying is, if you call for removal *because they admit their mistake* or you get a lot louder when that happens, that is not a good move. You don't have to be happy about the situation. Nor do you need to stop doing the things you were doing before to try and effect change - I don't think this gives anyone a blanket all-is-forgiven.
The key is not to use *the admission* as the primary evidence to hang them with.
That's just it though, what are they actually admitting was a mistake? I read it pretty carefully and it doesn't seem like any of their actions that deserve hanging were apologized for. I don't see anything there about aggressively quashing dissent, or outright lying, or just making shit up, or throwing out the standard protocol for their lockdown policies.
It's like a school bus driver who crashes the bus into a gas station pump while drunk and high on meth, burning all the children inside alive and killing numerous bystanders admitting he really should have been more careful and not hopped the curb, but if he gets a better bus with superior mirrors he will do better in the future about curbs.
I am not at all convinced the people in charge of the CDC believes they made any mistakes, or did anything wrong, in terms of "Wow, we really made a mess of this." They might believe they made mistakes based on "People are really reacting poorly to what we did and we are losing credibility. Better lie better next time."
We want to treat people who mean well but fail differently, and more forgivingly, than those who do not mean well and partially succeed. If my kid breaks my coffee pot trying to make me breakfast I want her to tell me the truth about what happened and I don't want to horrify her away from ever making coffee. If my neighbor comes into my kitchen and breaks my coffee pot because they are drunk and looking for loose cash in the middle of the night, the truth is all well and good, but I really want to expel them from my kitchen no matter what. Change the locks too.
The problem is that while it is easy to tell which one is my kid and which is my neighbor, and I have a long and frequent association to work with, I can't really tell whether e.g. the head of the CDC actually means well for me or doing evil things, whether merely venal or super evil. How do you distinguish between the two, so that you can treat them differently?
I think the only reasonable way to tell is via what they apologize for. If your neighbor says "Sorry for breaking the coffee pot! I didn't mean to! I won't come into your kitchen anymore!" and then they don't break the coffee pot again, that's a really good sign. If they say "I am sorry things turned out this way, and I will do better in the future, especially if you give me a key to the door." that's not a good sign... one wonders if they even understand why you are upset. In a sense the vague apology is worse because it suggests they either don't know or don't care about the problems they caused, but are apologizing only because that's how you get people to stop yelling at you. The performance shows their desire to manipulate and not actual introspection and remorse.
You can forgive someone who realizes they made the wrong choice and harmed you, and apologizes such that you know they know. You can even forgive someone who just can't grasp that they made the wrong choice and harmed you, although you might still not want them to have the keys to your house. You probably shouldn't forgive someone who doesn't even care that they harmed you, and is only apologizing to get you to shut up without actually even identifying what they did that harmed you that they are sorry for. The content of the apology is how you recognize which is which.
OK, I think the only way (for me) to move forward is to assume everyone was doing what they thought was best at the time. Unless there is hard evidence assume people were doing what they thought was good. This would help fix a lot of our political divide too. (Assume everyone is doing what they think is best for our country.)
That’s the problem with the apology, however, and changing things and removing things without stating why particularly. Why are they changing their minds? What was wrong with their previous moves? What error did they commit that they recognize and vow not to make in the future? In fact the are not apologizing for specifics, but generally saying whoops and hoping no one really asks but forgives everything anyway. When people do that we shouldn’t assume they see the error of their ways. Again, it comes down to recognizing when someone had good intentions or not. Hard to do but not always impossible.
Right, I think it's just best to assume everyone had good intentions. I mean yeah, there are always 'power plays'. But even then, I think... well this person is doing the power play, because they think they are in a better position to drive the future, than the person/group they are discrediting... power playing against. They may have been wrong, and I'll remember that in the future, but I don't think people are trying to make things worse... even though that may be the result.
Zvi, sorry, I'm usually able to communicate well in written English but I don't understand this sentence, may I have a hint?
"It is greatly frowned upon and mostly illegal to do so, but this suggests that if you have men who dislike each other but most work together there is an obvious step one might take."
What is the step? Is there a typo in this sentence?
There is no typo in the sentence. I am suggesting that if Alex and Bob must work together as part of a group, but they hate each other, then you have some motive to avoid group compositions that would lose effectiveness in that situation.
1. When you wrote "if you have men..." I read that as "assume you are forming a working group by selecting only from a population of men". I think I get it now. Your hypothetical is that you are forming a working group by selecting from a mixed group.
2. Are you sure you didn't mean "must work together"? You wrote "most" with an O.
I don't get these periodic calls to bring back classic okcupid. It got outcompeted by tinder, and lost. Horribly. Women preferred tinder by miles (and men follow women.) Yes, women complain about Tinder, but by revealed preferences they loved it compared to okc.
If you cloned classic OKC, and even waved a magic wand to not worry about startup network effects, there'd be a few hundred lonely nerd profiles (and a bunch of spam bots, which a literal clone of classic OKC would lose horribly to; spam is a Red Queen Race.)
If you liked classic okcupid, good for you, but you're weird. Get used to it.
My wife and I stopped at the Levain Bakery on 74th street last time we were in NYC. It was pretty good, but it was almost closer to cake than what I would consider a traditional cookie. It is still recommended.
> The case for California state capacity as an EA cause area.
I love seeing this, though California might be too large. Getting a smaller political unit (or units) to work dramatically better may speed up the learning process.
I'd also love to see a cause area that looked like 'Make dictators act more like Singapore and/or turn into Switzerland'
I got back from Israel in mid March of 2020 and was diagnosed with Chickenpox like 2 days after I got home. Which was crazy because I had it when I was a kid.
This bit about Covid reactivating varicella and other viruses makes a lot of sense. I read articles about people with Covid having a varicella-like exanthem in early 2020: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/32305439/
There were no Covid tests and the time so I kept wondering if I had Covid or a second case of chickenpox. I hadn’t considered the possibility that it was both—had Covid and it reactivated varicella.
The research about markers for long Covid is encouraging. Perhaps I missed it, but is there any research about identifying the factors that make a person more susceptible to contracting long Covid?
Incentives matter, and one should encourage the admitting of mistakes versus the not-admitting of mistakes...
...at the same time, now I worry that the whole CDC Delenda Est thing is gonna get even more memory-holed via this CYA. The CDC has done a great job, look, they even admitted mistakes were made. They're gonna do better in the future, already planning to write a reform plan. P.S don't forget, Orange Man Bad. Did you know he cut Obama's pandemic preparedness office?
Better not to make mistakes in the first place, then there's nothing to admit or not-admit. If only someone had notified them they were making mistakes.
It's been very hard to explain to those wrapped in The Narrative the sheer systemic magnitude of some of the errors committed over the last few years; I feel like this only makes it harder, welcome and unexpected change though it is. Unsure how to resolve this tension. I'm all for pragmatic incremental change, but when up against exponential growth threats, one really does not have the time...
Speaking of California governance, I predict absolutely no observable change in my local revealed preferences of ongoing covid hawkery. Despite many individuals, organizations, and businesses using The CDC Says(tm) as their primary rhetorical trump card since the beginning. Will consider myself surprised if not a single local paper or politician condemns the CDC for Sacrificing Safety For Normalcy, or whatever. Masking of toddlers will continue outdoors, groceries will still be wiped down, everyone will continue to do hand sanitizer baptism (the one time it's okay to invade someone's 6ft personal space: to reach the Holy Water). I continue to get weekly reminders to Be Covid Ready, whatever that means. This continues to be low-grade epistemically depressing.
FYI: The German nuclear power plants running time has NOT been prolonged (yet). It’s still under consideration though. The news that a decision was reached were (sadly) wrong.
I am on mobile, so I don’t feel like writing much about it right now. But the whole discussion in Germany is pretty mind-bogglingly bad. You just have to accept that for many participants, fighting nuclear power is effectively a terminal value (and using this opportunity to prolong running times feels like a dirty trick their opponents are using against them).
Oh wow, today the German government indeed decided to prolong the running time of two nuclear reactors (for four months only though).
I have to admit that I am quite (positively) surprised that they (mostly the German Greens) were able to able to respond to reality instead of seeing the world through their ideological prism.
1.) I totally support wind power and pay ~$200/ yr to get all my electricity from the local wind farm. It's great! Makes me feel virtuous, when I use my electric chain saw to cut up wood for kindling.
2.) Offshore wind sounds great, but last time I looked it's about twice as expensive as onshore wind. (Which I think is mostly due to the fact that construction and maintenance costs are way higher offshore.) Googling I found this. "Is offshore wind cheaper than onshore wind?
According to the Energy Information Administration (EIA), offshore wind is 2.6 times more expensive as onshore wind power and is 3.4 times more expensive than power produced by a natural gas combined cycle plant."
You get the Chinese testing fish part wrong. This isn't heightened scrutiny, it's instead Xi Jinping Thought upping the ante on blame-shifting. "Anywhere but here."
Typo: "Prediction for next week: 560k deaths" I hope not
Yeah, caught that five seconds after hitting send.
"It is vital that we are able to take yes for an answer from people who have previously answered no. What changed? Their minds changed. The social and political situations changed. The path of the pandemic changed. People came to their senses. We need to ensure they are happy with their decision to do this."
I think there is a bit of a problem here: how do you remove power from people who have drastically misused that power? If the CDC is essentially saying "Do what the Great Barrington people said two years ago", yet not even admitting "Yea, those guys whose careers we tried to destroy and censor etc. etc... they were right and we were wrong," and we are to say "Well, at least you are no longer abusing us anymore" how does that prevent future abuse? I mean, they are not really admitting they did anything wrong that matters, and are asking for more money and power. What mechanism is left for punishing bad behavior once people learn "Look, when it becomes abundantly obvious you screwed up, just apologize for something that doesn't matter and do what you demonized other people for doing before. Then people will be glad you stopped hurting them and will let you keep your power and position, and might give you more."
Doesn't one have to say its too little, too late, and remove people from office eventually? What's the mechanism for that if we are supposed to be happy that they are no longer doing the wrong thing?
I get that conditional on having abusing power hungry bastards lording over you it is probably the best strategy to gently train them to do it less when they feel like it, but it seems that going upstream a little to figure out what behavior helps avoid having those bastards in power in the first place, or removes them more quickly, seems desirable.
I am confident that few if anyone at CDC would retroactively endorse GBD's recommendations at the time they made them, even in hindsight, even in terms of pure outcomes. Nor anything close.
What I am saying is, if you call for removal *because they admit their mistake* or you get a lot louder when that happens, that is not a good move. You don't have to be happy about the situation. Nor do you need to stop doing the things you were doing before to try and effect change - I don't think this gives anyone a blanket all-is-forgiven.
The key is not to use *the admission* as the primary evidence to hang them with.
That's just it though, what are they actually admitting was a mistake? I read it pretty carefully and it doesn't seem like any of their actions that deserve hanging were apologized for. I don't see anything there about aggressively quashing dissent, or outright lying, or just making shit up, or throwing out the standard protocol for their lockdown policies.
It's like a school bus driver who crashes the bus into a gas station pump while drunk and high on meth, burning all the children inside alive and killing numerous bystanders admitting he really should have been more careful and not hopped the curb, but if he gets a better bus with superior mirrors he will do better in the future about curbs.
I am not at all convinced the people in charge of the CDC believes they made any mistakes, or did anything wrong, in terms of "Wow, we really made a mess of this." They might believe they made mistakes based on "People are really reacting poorly to what we did and we are losing credibility. Better lie better next time."
Maybe a better framing is this:
We want to treat people who mean well but fail differently, and more forgivingly, than those who do not mean well and partially succeed. If my kid breaks my coffee pot trying to make me breakfast I want her to tell me the truth about what happened and I don't want to horrify her away from ever making coffee. If my neighbor comes into my kitchen and breaks my coffee pot because they are drunk and looking for loose cash in the middle of the night, the truth is all well and good, but I really want to expel them from my kitchen no matter what. Change the locks too.
The problem is that while it is easy to tell which one is my kid and which is my neighbor, and I have a long and frequent association to work with, I can't really tell whether e.g. the head of the CDC actually means well for me or doing evil things, whether merely venal or super evil. How do you distinguish between the two, so that you can treat them differently?
I think the only reasonable way to tell is via what they apologize for. If your neighbor says "Sorry for breaking the coffee pot! I didn't mean to! I won't come into your kitchen anymore!" and then they don't break the coffee pot again, that's a really good sign. If they say "I am sorry things turned out this way, and I will do better in the future, especially if you give me a key to the door." that's not a good sign... one wonders if they even understand why you are upset. In a sense the vague apology is worse because it suggests they either don't know or don't care about the problems they caused, but are apologizing only because that's how you get people to stop yelling at you. The performance shows their desire to manipulate and not actual introspection and remorse.
You can forgive someone who realizes they made the wrong choice and harmed you, and apologizes such that you know they know. You can even forgive someone who just can't grasp that they made the wrong choice and harmed you, although you might still not want them to have the keys to your house. You probably shouldn't forgive someone who doesn't even care that they harmed you, and is only apologizing to get you to shut up without actually even identifying what they did that harmed you that they are sorry for. The content of the apology is how you recognize which is which.
OK, I think the only way (for me) to move forward is to assume everyone was doing what they thought was best at the time. Unless there is hard evidence assume people were doing what they thought was good. This would help fix a lot of our political divide too. (Assume everyone is doing what they think is best for our country.)
That’s the problem with the apology, however, and changing things and removing things without stating why particularly. Why are they changing their minds? What was wrong with their previous moves? What error did they commit that they recognize and vow not to make in the future? In fact the are not apologizing for specifics, but generally saying whoops and hoping no one really asks but forgives everything anyway. When people do that we shouldn’t assume they see the error of their ways. Again, it comes down to recognizing when someone had good intentions or not. Hard to do but not always impossible.
Right, I think it's just best to assume everyone had good intentions. I mean yeah, there are always 'power plays'. But even then, I think... well this person is doing the power play, because they think they are in a better position to drive the future, than the person/group they are discrediting... power playing against. They may have been wrong, and I'll remember that in the future, but I don't think people are trying to make things worse... even though that may be the result.
Zvi, sorry, I'm usually able to communicate well in written English but I don't understand this sentence, may I have a hint?
"It is greatly frowned upon and mostly illegal to do so, but this suggests that if you have men who dislike each other but most work together there is an obvious step one might take."
What is the step? Is there a typo in this sentence?
There is no typo in the sentence. I am suggesting that if Alex and Bob must work together as part of a group, but they hate each other, then you have some motive to avoid group compositions that would lose effectiveness in that situation.
1. When you wrote "if you have men..." I read that as "assume you are forming a working group by selecting only from a population of men". I think I get it now. Your hypothetical is that you are forming a working group by selecting from a mixed group.
2. Are you sure you didn't mean "must work together"? You wrote "most" with an O.
Yeah read it as 'must'. 'most' was a typo.
I think "but most work" is supposed to be "but must work"
and I believe the implied rest of the thought is '...only hire men onto that team'
Huh, OK thanks. The 'obvious' conclusion was not obvious to me.
I don't get these periodic calls to bring back classic okcupid. It got outcompeted by tinder, and lost. Horribly. Women preferred tinder by miles (and men follow women.) Yes, women complain about Tinder, but by revealed preferences they loved it compared to okc.
If you cloned classic OKC, and even waved a magic wand to not worry about startup network effects, there'd be a few hundred lonely nerd profiles (and a bunch of spam bots, which a literal clone of classic OKC would lose horribly to; spam is a Red Queen Race.)
If you liked classic okcupid, good for you, but you're weird. Get used to it.
My wife and I stopped at the Levain Bakery on 74th street last time we were in NYC. It was pretty good, but it was almost closer to cake than what I would consider a traditional cookie. It is still recommended.
> The case for California state capacity as an EA cause area.
I love seeing this, though California might be too large. Getting a smaller political unit (or units) to work dramatically better may speed up the learning process.
I'd also love to see a cause area that looked like 'Make dictators act more like Singapore and/or turn into Switzerland'
Charter cities are sort of working on making more Singapore
Kinda. But I’d rather see governance improve where people already live. With the largest gains coming from dictatorships.
I got back from Israel in mid March of 2020 and was diagnosed with Chickenpox like 2 days after I got home. Which was crazy because I had it when I was a kid.
This bit about Covid reactivating varicella and other viruses makes a lot of sense. I read articles about people with Covid having a varicella-like exanthem in early 2020: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/32305439/
There were no Covid tests and the time so I kept wondering if I had Covid or a second case of chickenpox. I hadn’t considered the possibility that it was both—had Covid and it reactivated varicella.
The research about markers for long Covid is encouraging. Perhaps I missed it, but is there any research about identifying the factors that make a person more susceptible to contracting long Covid?
Incentives matter, and one should encourage the admitting of mistakes versus the not-admitting of mistakes...
...at the same time, now I worry that the whole CDC Delenda Est thing is gonna get even more memory-holed via this CYA. The CDC has done a great job, look, they even admitted mistakes were made. They're gonna do better in the future, already planning to write a reform plan. P.S don't forget, Orange Man Bad. Did you know he cut Obama's pandemic preparedness office?
Better not to make mistakes in the first place, then there's nothing to admit or not-admit. If only someone had notified them they were making mistakes.
It's been very hard to explain to those wrapped in The Narrative the sheer systemic magnitude of some of the errors committed over the last few years; I feel like this only makes it harder, welcome and unexpected change though it is. Unsure how to resolve this tension. I'm all for pragmatic incremental change, but when up against exponential growth threats, one really does not have the time...
Speaking of California governance, I predict absolutely no observable change in my local revealed preferences of ongoing covid hawkery. Despite many individuals, organizations, and businesses using The CDC Says(tm) as their primary rhetorical trump card since the beginning. Will consider myself surprised if not a single local paper or politician condemns the CDC for Sacrificing Safety For Normalcy, or whatever. Masking of toddlers will continue outdoors, groceries will still be wiped down, everyone will continue to do hand sanitizer baptism (the one time it's okay to invade someone's 6ft personal space: to reach the Holy Water). I continue to get weekly reminders to Be Covid Ready, whatever that means. This continues to be low-grade epistemically depressing.
FYI: The German nuclear power plants running time has NOT been prolonged (yet). It’s still under consideration though. The news that a decision was reached were (sadly) wrong.
I am on mobile, so I don’t feel like writing much about it right now. But the whole discussion in Germany is pretty mind-bogglingly bad. You just have to accept that for many participants, fighting nuclear power is effectively a terminal value (and using this opportunity to prolong running times feels like a dirty trick their opponents are using against them).
Oh wow, today the German government indeed decided to prolong the running time of two nuclear reactors (for four months only though).
I have to admit that I am quite (positively) surprised that they (mostly the German Greens) were able to able to respond to reality instead of seeing the world through their ideological prism.
Re: Offshore wind power.
1.) I totally support wind power and pay ~$200/ yr to get all my electricity from the local wind farm. It's great! Makes me feel virtuous, when I use my electric chain saw to cut up wood for kindling.
2.) Offshore wind sounds great, but last time I looked it's about twice as expensive as onshore wind. (Which I think is mostly due to the fact that construction and maintenance costs are way higher offshore.) Googling I found this. "Is offshore wind cheaper than onshore wind?
According to the Energy Information Administration (EIA), offshore wind is 2.6 times more expensive as onshore wind power and is 3.4 times more expensive than power produced by a natural gas combined cycle plant."
You get the Chinese testing fish part wrong. This isn't heightened scrutiny, it's instead Xi Jinping Thought upping the ante on blame-shifting. "Anywhere but here."