Tophattingson
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User ID: 1078
Tophattingson
4mo ago
Yes, it only goes to less than that after adjusting for the Diamond Princess passenger list being unusually old, then consider the counterfactual that matches global population demographics.
Still, there are places that have more official covid deaths (and even more excess mortality) than the Diamond Princess (or any other statistical analysis of age-stratified mortality) should allow. Peru, for one. Back in mid-2021 when I was meticulously keeping track of the relevant stats, Peru had:
- Worst excess deaths per capita in the world.
- Worst official deaths per capita in the world. 0.6% of the population are official deaths from covid even though the age-stratified IFR for Peru shouldn't really permit this unless ~100% of the population were infected.
- One of the most extreme lockdowns in the world, which never actually brought cases down. In 2020, cases only went down after restrictions began to be lifted.
Mainstream reasons offered for this failure are ad-hoc, post-hoc, and treat things that are common to all undeveloped countries as somehow being the cause of Peru's unique poor performance. Something went horribly wrong in Peru. And the best hypothesis standing for what happened is those unusually extreme, early, and lengthy lockdowns.
I spent 6 years leading with figures and statistics. Perhaps those who locked us down could provide theirs first for once. After all, they're the ones who were in charge.
But if you insist...
When you crunch the numbers on age stratified covid mortality compared and remaining life expectancy by age, you find that each covid infection is equivalent to 15 life days being lost. Therefore the absolute best case scenario for lockdowns, going from 100% of the population being infected to 0%, only gives everyone an extra 0.04 QALY per capita. Add in the reality that even lockdown proponents did not suggest this sort of swing in percentage infected would occur, and it's more like 0.02 QALY per capita. This is an incredibly small budget.
For comparison if you do a lockdown that lasts 200 days (about the UK's duration of stay at home policy, but not all restrictions) and make the incredibly generous assumption that lockdowns only reduce quality of life by 5%, that is 0.03 QALY lost per capita.
Nothing about this approach to public health is novel. QALYs is standard public health fare. I am not the only one to make this sort of observation. Caplan has and gets referenced here, and so has Scott
This would have made 10 million Swedes be under stricter lockdown for the three months of so of the first wave. By our calculations above, it might have saved about 2500 lives, but let’s be really generous and extend the confidence interval to 6,000 - ie it might have prevented every single case in Sweden. Here’s what the Guesstimate model says:
10 million people x 3 months = 30 million lockdown months. Between 2500 and 6000 lives saved, by our previous estimates each life is worth about 15 QALYs (by combination of deaths, associated nonfatal cases, and associated long COVID cases), and each QALY contains 12 months, for a total of 720,000 QALMs. So every 52 months of stricter lockdown in counterfactual Sweden would have saved one month of healthy life. You will have to decide whether you think this is worth it, but it seems pretty harsh to me.
Maybe a more honest version of me would have rewritten the post to focus more on the emotional costs (the part which I made Conclusion 2). It really is a striking result that it's hard to justify the emotional costs of lockdown even given very optimistic assumptions about the number of lives saved / Long COVID cases prevented / etc. This argument is pretty unrelated to most of what people have talked about in the news, which is mostly (completely false) claims that lockdowns cause more suicides, lockdowns devastate businesses, etc. And it's so stupid - emotional damages! People being annoyed that they can't go to the bar (I realize for some people the emotional damages were deeper than that, but not everyone missed a family member's funeral - I think the part that really adds up is multiplying the inconvenience of not being able to go to the bar by 300 million people). Maybe a more courageous post would have looked more like "Hey, when you add this really simple thing in to the analysis, lockdowns are really obviously bad, right?" But it just felt too weird and transgressive to focus on something authorities weren't even talking about.
Those implementing lockdowns would either be aware of the QALY implications, in which case they were malicious, or not aware, in which case they were incompetent to such a degree that their refusal to immediately resign from their post was malicious.
I made a more realistic model with the final results of the UK's cumulative lockdowns here: https://www.getguesstimate.com/models/18492
Note this entire exercise depends on the axiom that lockdowns actually reduced covid deaths as advertised. The experience of Sweden would suggest otherwise.
It feels almost too late to bother, but I do hope to one day write this all out in a lengthy blog post that explains every step in excruciating detail. Any omission here is just because I'm not going to write that blog post today.
Tophattingson
4mo ago
The evidence of a full lockdowns is extremely obvious, virus particles are not magic and there must be some level of barrier that if consistently maintained would prevent their spread.
That's a hypothesis, not evidence...
The issue is that going full lockdown is basically impossible.
And that's why. If you can't test something how can you possibly claim to have evidence of what it would do?
Tophattingson
4mo ago
COVID lockdowns were a beautiful example of the most important thing in modern democracy, compromise. The lockdowns in many western nations were strong enough to be annoying at best and oppressive at their worst, while also not being nearly good enough to actually contain virus spread much.
Britain ceased to be a democracy for much of 2020 and 2021 due to a combination of cancelled elections and the executive usurping power in a self-coup via the Coronavirus Act 2020. Britain also saw some of the most strict, severe lockdowns in the world. Stricter than Korea, Japan, and at a national level (though some cities there were worse), China. The list of countries that were stricter than Britain is a mix of other western countries, alongside a few eclectic examples like Peru.
Full lockdowns are obviously successful in controlling spread. Virus particles aren't magic, they don't teleport from person to person. If people avoid interaction and have physical barriers and disinfectant, it will work. Even masks seem to work quite well ... except for the pesky issue that people aren't perfect. They don't wear it properly, it's not fit to their face, they take it off cause they're sweaty, they forget, they remove it to eat (ah yes, just like Eat Out To Help Out, it's nice of viruses to not spread when you're hungry), etc. So in actuality, masks weren't actually that useful.
Lockdowns are not the same thing as "people avoid interaction". There is no evidence that full lockdowns would "obviously" control the spread, starting with the problem that the lockdowns we had don't even correlate with reducing it let alone eliminating.
Tophattingson
4mo ago
Are you incapable of seeing the other perspective? 20 to 36 million people died of COVID.
Is this meant to be an argument in favour of the lockdowns that did nothing to stop them dying?
The vast majority of the world’s governments established lockdowns because something had to be done
Nuking ourselves would also have been something to do. Doesn't make it a good idea.
Most people accepted the fact that staying at home was a very small sacrifice compared to all the lives that could be saved, directly or indirectly.
Wrong.
- The immediate QALY loss of being locked down for more than a few weeks outweighs any possible QALY gains from reduced covid deaths.
- Lockdowns didn't reduce deaths anyway.
Covid era lockdowns are nothing compared to historical ones, when you could be summarily executed for crossing the wrong boundary.
There is absolutely no historical precedent for the totalitarianism of the Covid Lockdowns. None at all, as much as some of those responsible tried to claim as such for legitimacy. And the reason should be pretty obvious, too. A stay at home policy imposed on a subsistence agriculture society would be an omnicidal disruption to the food supply.
And now you have the ability to work, to talk to all your friends and family across the world, and endless entertainment.
If this justifies lockdown, then I would prefer burning the entire internet to the ground just to remove the justification.
Tophattingson
7mo ago
We don't need to rely on hypotheticals, we can just look at recent examples of other legislature stormings, such as in Hong Kong, Nepal, Mexico, Bangladesh etc. The answer is that it just doesn't get widespread condemnation unless Red Tribe does it.
The failure state of tyranny has the potential to be much more deadly. The highest crime-related murder rates in the world tend to cap out around 100 per 100,000 per year. The Khmer Rouge murder rate was something like 7,000 per 100,000 per year.
Even in Somalia it's not clear that the anarchy of the present is any worse than the tyranny of Siad Barre.
And of course, to bang my usual drum, lockdowns were tyranny, so that made the number of tyrannical states be at least 100 just a handful of years ago.
Tophattingson
7mo ago
We recently had much of the world fall into the failure state where the entire country was imprisoned by stay at home orders with lockdowns.
The enabling part of anarcho-tyranny is the tyranny part, not the anarchy part, because it describes the power of the state pressing on the scales. Can't go the other way.
Tophattingson
10mo ago
AI platforms as they currently exist are also incredibly fungible. To the average end user there is minimal difference between chatgpt, claude, grok etc. To an enthusiast, the main difference is how much they censor, evade, or try to avoid controversial prompts (of which grok is by far the least annoying here). Burning billions on the cutting edge doesn't give you any lasting advantage against 11th hour entries who spend 1/10th the amount to produce something 90% as good at half the price to their customers. And the amount getting invested already implies capturing a substantial amount of consumer spending at some point in the future just to break even. (Already you want $30 per person on Earth per year).
Nvidia itself will probably be fine, though it depends on if the crash just hits the cutting edge or if its so severe it becomes hard to even cover the cost of serving prompts.
Tophattingson
10mo ago
This wouldn't be particularly adversarial. The vaccines are kind of mediocre but fine. A bright spot in the covid pandemic is like the least stinky shit in a sewer. My disagreements are all with how states used vaccines to engage in yet more flagrant violations of human rights and violate medical ethics. I think we shouldn't invest into these tools, not as an isolated principle against mrna or viral vector treatments, but because of the risk the current institutions would use that investment just as they did in 2020-2022 for ill.
If the vaccines were released outside the context of lockdowns and other restrictions I would have nothing to say on them and there would have been no substantial opposition to them.
Covid vaccination has such a minor effect compared to other patient choices that you would never bother surveying for it unless you are doing so for political partisan reasons. Covid just isn't dangerous enough for that to matter.
To provide an example, heavy smoking (which is a lower threshold than you'd expect) costs the average heavy smoker about 10 QALY, so any amount you charge for being unvaccinated, you'd have to charge heavy smokers ~500 times more. Already this stretches the bounds of feasibility. Any cost high enough to cover the cost of repeatedly vaccinating yourself for covid (Yep, that's a thing still, are you up to date according to local recommendations?) will be greater than the additional insurance cost, unless the premium increases by so much that you bankrupt all smokers. Not to mention the "gay tax" you'll have to charge for HIV risk, which for sexually active gay men is also a much higher risk than covid.
Edit: For the sake of providing real-world numbers, with the caveat that the UK doesn't operate on an insurance model, official recommendations are 1 booster shot every 6 months for £100 each when offered privately. Therefore if you increase insurance premiums on the unvaccinated, they will need to be at least £200/y more to be more expensive than simply being unvaccinated. Therefore you'd want to look at charging heavy smokers an extra £100,000 a year, which is multiple times the average annual income in the UK.
I'm afraid no matter what you try to do to construct a rational basis for punishing covid vaccine dissidents, it will succumb to the simple fact that covid isn't dangerous enough to justify it, unless you are also willing to simultaneously hit other groups with orders of magnitude more severe punishments.
Tophattingson
10mo ago
I find it fair to prioritize people who were not complicit in causing the health care emergency.
Sure, but there is no existing policy for this, no past policy, and to bring it in for 2021 would obviously be perceived as an ad-hoc move to punish political enemies.
Further, if done in a dispassionate way, the main people who are complicit in causing a COVID emergency will be the elderly for the crime of being old.
It would be also compatible with free market solutions like some anti-vaxxers voluntarily paying a private ICU facility a premium to keep a fraction of a bed to compensate for their higher risk of overwhelming the medical system.
What is the risk of "overwhelming" a free market private medical system? This is like saying gluttonous people should have to pay restaurants a premium in case they show up when the restaurant is already full - a misunderstanding of what a free market would actually mean in terms of having the choice to turn away customers.
This is very different to my approach to other vaccines where the immunized do not spread the disease, and being unvaccinated means, in the more extreme cases, that you are actively playing for team Nurgle.
Again this would end up being ad-hoc because we don't actually treat behaviours that spread disease like this in proportion to their risk of spreading disease. Outside of obvious culture war examples like anal sex, consider that alive while immunosuppressed will do a lot of damage all by itself.
Tophattingson
10mo ago
Shouldn’t conservatives, i.e. the party of law and order, be a fan of measures which promote public safety?
Should Conservatives be a fan of law and order in Stalin's USSR?
This is just bad understanding of what conservatives believe. There are authorities worth following, and authorities that are not, differing slightly depending on form of conservatism.
Tophattingson
10mo ago
The problem with suddenly slapping a QALY triage system on covid vaccination is that covid just doesn't have that big an effect on QALY. About 1-2 weeks loss per infection on average. This pales in comparison to other risks, like smoking (loss measured in years) and even to politically polarised risks like being a sexually active gay man. If you were assembling a checklist or survey you use for the calculation you wouldn't bother putting covid vaccination on it over hundreds of other risk factors.
This policy would rightly be seen by its victims as a blatant and obvious political attack on them specifically rather than part of a calculated dispassionate healthcare strategy. So no different than the mandates themselves.
People travel less to places when they perceive a danger, even if the danger wasn't presented to them by any policy or authorities.
The danger was presented to them by policy and authorities because the prevalence of covid is effectively invisible to the average person in the absence of being told about it by authorities. What exactly would someone notice, absent being told, that would inform them that covid was around and uniquely dangerous? Approximately nothing. They'd notice people getting colds, as people always do, and old people dying at a fairly similar rate to what old people died at a decade or two ago, and short of carrying out their own far-reaching statistical survey on death rates they'd have no idea anything was amiss. This is roughly what happened in the Flu pandemics of the 50s and 60s - nobody really cared because there's no particular reason you'd notice an elevated risk.
This is hardly some tourists notice everyone who visits X mysteriously comes back in a body bag and therefore stop visiting X. There really is no danger that a layman would be able to detect were it not for authorities insisting there was a danger.
As a rough stand in for "People's unwillingness to go do things during a pandemic"
Not a good way to define it as we have been in a pandemic since some time in the 1980s.
Furthermore cutting out 2020 because "Biden wasn't in charge yet" when 2020 had by far the lowest amount of travel and activity
I thought I had explained this clearly enough, but to try to explain this again: The reason I have cut it out is because the initial dispute is that I believe Biden's actions during covid have done more damage to tourism than Trump's actions on immigration. Therefore, including Trump's actions during covid as part of Biden's actions would be unfair to Biden.
The dropoff of 10-15% suggests that 50% of all travel from foreign visitors has been curtailed by these chilling effects - much more than even the most generous example you can find of vaccine rules.
No, unless you have evidence that the dropoff is all foreign visitors.
until we get total numbers at year's end) has had fewer visitors in 2025 than 2023, an astonishing fact when you consider the earth's population has grown hundreds of millions over that time period.
There's a reason I selected average of 2021 to 2023 as the criteria. We skip 2020 because the Biden admin was not in charge then, so we include the remaining 3 years where pandemic-excused policies were relevant to tourists, though by 2023 they were pretty weak but not entirely absent.
You're welcome to provide data for the average of 2021 to 2023 against 2025 for Vegas.
Regardless, I specified "Visitors to the US" because the initial discussion was about international tourism, and "Visitors to Vegas" is a poor proxy for this because of domestic tourism. Most numbers I could find on the percentage of visitors to Vegas that are domestic tourists puts it somewhere between 70% and 80%.
To decouple the chilling effect from the desire not to travel during a pandemic is quite simple, just compare the total decline to the specific decline in places with legal restrictions, the difference will tell you approximately how many people didn't travel because they were banned, and how many didn't travel because they were afraid of the deadly global pandemic.
"Afraid of the deadly global pandemic" is not something independent of government policy, but instead the product of government policy. If a government makes people afraid to travel by telling them covid will kill them if they do, that's still the government's fault.
This is something we could agree on, but probably won't: The chilling effect of both covid restrictions and ICE deportations is the direct result of government policy, not something that happens without. Yet for some reason you think the chilling effect of covid restrictions is merely an organic "desire not to travel".
A good example seems to be Egypt, a country that is a tourist destination, centrally located, and had very light corona virus requirements (Between August 15th 2021 and June 16th 2022 you just had to show a negative test within the 3 days before arrival).
Not a comprehensive account of tourism restrictions, you need to also consider domestic restrictions that would affect the activities that tourists can do once in the country.
But regardless, we can use your method, with the actual source Wikipedia is using for these graphs.
Egypt's numbers as a percentage of 2019 visitors: 2020: 28% 2021: 62% 2022: 90%
Mexico's numbers as a percentage of 2019 visitors: 2020: 55% 2021: 71% 2022: 85%
Australia will be an example of an extreme restriction country. Numbers as a percentage of 2019 visitors via this dataset as OWID is incomplete: 2020: 19% 2021: 3% 2022: 39%
That some countries had returned to 90% of 2019 tourism numbers by 2022, while Australia remains down at 39%, strongly suggests that the overwhelming majority of the decline in tourism can be attributed to government policy. If the decline in tourism was instead mainly due to fear of covid, then tourists would have no reason to continue visiting Egypt while refusing to visit Australia.
Tophattingson
11mo ago
Most viable theories that could plausibly be investigated via this method are not theories of everything, but rather more modest ideas. I already have a few modest novel hypotheses of my own that I lack the resources to test, and thus they will remain just that:
- Is pollen more akin to a toxin, where at certain concentrations anyone will be affected, rather than just an allergen. The experience of Japan's hayfever epidemic suggests something like this, but it would take experiments to prove it. I actually fleshed this idea out, if anyone cares to know more.
- Do viral epidemics exhibit chaotic, rather than predictable behaviour, does this explain the failure of covid modelling, and does viral interference explain why countries with wildly divergent responses to covid saw identical results (i.e Sweden and UK both had the same first wave, despite the former doing approximately nothing and the latter turning itself into a totalitarian regime in the name of stopping the spread). Yes, of course I'm going to get one of these in. I also fleshed this idea out.
- Similar to IQ measuring g factor, is there a an athletic equivalent that measures "p factor" - positive correlations among various physical tests beyond those that would be expected just from age. That someone good at one physical activity will generally be good at other seemingly unrelated physical activities.
- Did coastal settlements during the era of subsistence farming have better nutrition due to their reliance on a source of protein for food? Were they healthier? Stronger? Did they have longer life expectancies and fewer famines?
- Historically, how many deaths due to famine/starvation during the era of subsistence farming were actually caused by onerous taxation? There are entire groups in history who seem to have uprooted themselves for the sake of tax evasion, so surely there must have been something that pushed them to do so?
- Can ideas from linguistics and semiotics about the development of language and symbols also be applied to cuisine. Why are certain patterns, like dumplings, widespread, whereas others, like rotten fish, are not, even in societies that would have access to the relevant foods. Are there cuisine isolates where the desired properties of food in terms of taste or texture are outright different, rather than trying to achieve the same result but with different access to food?
- Relative to other periods in human history, contemporary western societies are unusually elderly and unusually obese. Is some of the modern prevalence of pornography caused by the relative scarcity of ideal-age ideal-weight partners in general society to admire/ogle (even when clothed), which porn instead provides in abundance and then takes to 11?
Tophattingson
11mo ago
until roughly 2023
I personally date peak woke to October 7th 2023, and I believe that though there were trends that had started slowing the rise before then, the actual inflection point can be traced to Hamas's attack on Israel. Why something so seemingly specific and unrelated? It opened up a deep schism within woke between (to be as charitable as possible) those who support violent anti-colonial resistance by Palestinians, and those who object to Palestinian antisemitism. This rift is irreparable, as woke demands strident anti-racism as a core tenant which you cannot diverge on. Both sides now have mutually incompatible definitions of racism, and mutually accuse each other of being genocidally racist. Unlike previous splits, which tended to involve salami slicing off the least radical faction, this time they've split down the middle enough for all the energy woke once held to be consumed by infighting. It's unsustainable to be woke and a blood and soil ultranationalist at the same time.
Tophattingson
11mo ago
Horror is slowly lifting the cover but for monsters, so we already do that outside the context of porn.
Tophattingson
11mo ago
OF is actually a British site, though this is an easy mistake to make since the UK does not otherwise have big internet startups, and is instead known for cracking down on internet porn.
Tophattingson
11mo ago
so until a political leader comes along who shares our values, we're forced into alliances of convenience with whichever group isn't currently holding the whip [...] Tories when Labour are in power, Labour when the Tories are
Unnecessary. Both Tories and Labour back the OSA. Reform oppose the OSA.
Not a rightist, don't have a daughter. Way more concerned about the British regime fucking up their life with lockdowns 2 when the next spicy cold comes around than anyone not taking birth control or covid vaccines.
Hananiaism will always run aground on the problem that for every low human capital right-wing fad, there's something just as bad on offer from the left, with the added danger that it will also be state-mandated.
Tophattingson
1yr ago
On the other hand there are other parts of the gaming industry where the big breakthrough came from taking something relatively niche and low-budget and dumping huge amounts of money into it. To name two examples, Monster Hunter was fairly sizable as a franchise but was ticking over on PS2-era budgets by developing primarily for handhelds, then decided to go AAA for World and massively succeeded. Genshin Impact arrived in what was previously a low-budget Gacha gaming landscape and singlehandedly reshaped it, with a pricetag of $100m upfront and estimated $200m more a year since.
Tophattingson
1yr ago
Even though corruption will always exist to some degree, it's much better to live in a society where it's at least not blatant and generally seen as a bad thing that should be dealt with, as opposed to a country like Russia where it broadly runs rampant.
It depends. In the UK, I would vastly prefer the blatant corruption of money under the table to get construction contracts done over the stealth corruption of planning permission restrictions in favour of incumbent property-owning rentseekers.
Believing wrong things about 5G is less nuts than wanting to imprison the entire planet over a spicy cold. Your hatred of being "lumped in" with them is misplaced. They're wrong but they're better than the other, more dangerously wrong group that actually got to call the shots.
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