FeepingCreature
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User ID: 311
FeepingCreature
3yr ago
Well, then let's ask it outright:
How do we (as a society) socialize women to pursue nonsexual value? How do we create opportunities for this to occur?
Personally I think it has to look like absolutely bringing a hammer down on workplace relations, while also pursuing sex-blinded hiring/promotion policies. But that only addresses (if at all) the workplace situation, it does nothing for early socialization, social groups, etc. I have no idea how you'd do it for non-workplace groups.
Well, as mentioned, there was a 10% in that age group, so combined 20%. Chance of infection is the big one I'm not sure about, because we were looking at an exponential; at early doubling rates, a few weeks delay in imposing a lockdown could make the difference between single-digit percentage and near certainty. It's also unclear though how much of an effect mandated lockdowns would have had, given that some groups of people locked down voluntarily. I don't have a good mental model for spread here that accounts for groups with divergent risk preferences; how many degrees of distance really are there in a population? If Germany is a small-world network on a weekly scale, then assuming nobody locked down at all you'd see total spread in something like five hops. That's not what we saw, but we also don't have a good control for it. On the other hand, my parents are very pre-internet and would definitely not have done daily purchases, food etc., online. (Otherwise I'd have been very blasé about it; they had basically no other in-person social contacts through the early pandemic.) If it got to a point where there was a solid (single-digit per visit) chance of infection when visiting a supermarket, they would almost certainly have got it.
At the current stage I'm resigned to them getting it eventually; lethality is still down and they're multiply-vaccinated, so I just have to accept the diceroll. No reason not to push it out though; our tools for dealing with severe infections only improve over time.
Sidenote: IMO the strongest argument for school lockdowns is that schooling connects lots of otherwise-separate social groups. Same for WFH. I'm imagining a model of "societal layers", where each layer is a class of contact groups. Typical layers are friends/family, schools, and the workplace. Given ingroup isolation, you'd expect an infection to bounce through societal layers of connection to reach otherwise-isolated subgroups. In-person meeting, classroom, family, workplace, in-person meeting, etc. I don't know how much effect cutting one of those layers would have, but I believe cutting all but one of them would slow spread massively. Ie. if you have online schooling and WFH, then in-person meetings alone don't matter much. If you mandate social distancing and shut down schools, you can relax WFH, etc. On the other hand, if you don't do WFH and don't do social distancing, you might as well keep schools open.
FeepingCreature
3yr ago
Responsible disclosure might look a bit different if blackhats killed hundreds of thousands every year, and patches were unreliable, cost billions, and required worldwide effort.
FeepingCreature
3yr ago
Fair point.
FeepingCreature
3yr ago
I just used gnomes to make the actions of the person obviously not be in their control, for higher contrast.
I'm sorry for you, but none of that happened to me. My parents and me have still managed to avoid getting Covid. I haven't, or haven't met anyone who, slagged off on people who weren't gonna get vaccinated. (Aside from "well that's weird.") I've personally always considered "getting infected" to be equivalent or better to vaccination. On the other hand, my workplace forced a coworker with children and asthma (vaccinated, but still) to come in to work (when we're well set up for wfh) when we've had several infections in the company, and also took the absolute minimum of legally required steps. So I have a somewhat different reference class for Covid skeptics.
I went to an ACX meetup while in the middle of Covid. We were all vaccinated, otherwise healthy, and sat outside with good minimum distance. This was also the only time i was around a bunch of people with the Covid Warn app in the wild. I was also at LWCW, we did mandatory Covid tests on arrival and every morning, which seems to have avoided spread at the event. Maybe your social group is just .. not good.
FeepingCreature
3yr ago
I guess it depends on how used you are to ordering online? A lot of the risk area is shops.
If you're living somewhere with lots of foot traffic you also can't go anywhere, though that wasn't the case for me.
FeepingCreature
3yr ago
It's very challenging to take care of yourself without regularly being within six feet of many other humans.
FeepingCreature
3yr ago
I'm biased in the opposite direction: My parents are 65 years old. In that age group, there was a 10% chance of death given infection in 2020. If one of my parents (~19% chance) had died, it would unquestionably have been the worst thing that had ever happened to me. In comparison, the lockdowns are a tiny footnote of badness. Covid was on an exponential trajectory and there were no vaccines, so I am incredibly glad that the lockdowns happened.
FeepingCreature
3yr ago
If I say that Some Guy is actually braindead and is being piloted around by gnomes that live inside their brain, that doesn't reflect negatively on Guy (how could it? They're almost not a person!), and it doesn't really reflect badly on the gnomes either, so why does it seem like an attack?
I think because while it doesn't reflect badly in the world where it's right, it does reflect badly on Guy in the world where it's wrong. It's a paradoxical attack, that lands only if it misses.
FeepingCreature
3yr ago
Conversely, I've always interpreted coordination around medical emergencies, such as lockdowns, as one of the basic reasons to have a government to begin with.
FeepingCreature
3yr ago
I sort of agree, but this is mostly because we don't draw a clean mental distinction between principles and prices. It's the same function, differently parameterized, I guess.
Not sure how to handle that rhetorically though.
FeepingCreature
3yr ago
I think "is beyond absurd" works better as a principle argument than as a price argument. Generally, asserting "X and Y cannot be compared" to me is saying "I want to argue principles, not price."
FeepingCreature
3yr ago
Right, I think more like...
We have this picture. And it has a bunch of colored blobs on it. There's pink blobs, and brown blobs, and yellow blobs, and red blobs. What I'm saying is that we're about to open this picture in MSPaint and go absolutely hog wild on it for a billion years. It's not that ingroup bias isn't strong, it's that I doubt that there will be recognizeable racial ingroups even a century after the Singularity.
FeepingCreature
3yr ago
If you think it's okay to eat pork but not to eat human flesh, are you "haggling over the price"?
Yes. Sapience is a continuum.
I'm not saying haggling-over-price is bad! Prices matter! To me it's more a difference between, to use programmer terms, a comparison that's returning false and a function overload that doesn't match types.
FeepingCreature
3yr ago
"Haggling over the price" implies that the principle is invalid.
It implies that the principle is not in play. I think both lines and principles are valid, but cannot be argued with the same rhetoric tools.
I think most of us would object to even a purely voluntary decision to kill oneself under those circumstances
I'm not sure if I do. Though of course, if this is the only option on offer, we-as-society should figure out a way to do better.
FeepingCreature
3yr ago
No I don't, there's nothing wrong with price-haggling. You'll just use different arguments for it.
I think the kid with PTSD and the decaying immobile nonagenarian amputee are comparable. You think they're qualitatively different. Fine, make your case, or at least describe it with more detail than "beyond absurd". At least specify some sort of metric.You can't just construct reference classes by appeal to absurdity.
Then I'll just argue that suicide should not be forbidden. You can't stop me, mwahaha.
I'm not saying a line cannot be drawn, I'm saying there's two different arguments here. And for that matter, this argument still implies the line - presumably you would not say something like "people wil use any exception to argue for allowing decrepit Alzheimers patients to kill themselves." So your line is still there; you cannot construct a principled argument by saying "otherwise, the unprincipled line would be violated."
FeepingCreature
3yr ago
The notion that some kid with PTSD is in the same boat as a decaying immobile nonagenarian amputee is beyond absurd.
There are people who assert that suicide is always wrong. I think this argument is "haggling over the price."
FeepingCreature
3yr ago
If you don't have to live for your future self, to whom you owe the most out of anyone, why would you have to live for future children?
FeepingCreature
3yr ago
I should hope that the median human life does not involve begging for death! Intensity and locality of suffering has its own quality.
FeepingCreature
3yr ago
Thought experiment: you are a Ukrainian prisoner of war in Russia. God appears before you and informs you, objectively, that you will live to age 80 and you will consider your life worth living for almost every one of those remaining years. However, the Russians are going to horribly torture you for a week and in that time, you're gonna beg for death every day.
You have a good shot at killing yourself. Do you have a duty to future-you to not do it? Do your fellow prisoners have a duty to stop you? Personally, I think no. No future reward suffices to create a duty to endure present unbearable suffering.
FeepingCreature
3yr ago
Have you read Scott's Who By Very Slow Decay? When your remaining lifespan is expected negative value, suicide is sane.
I'm not sure if the current approaches result in better outcomes? My proposed approach is only half the puzzle; it can remove hindrances but can't solve lack of availability or interest.
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