Tophattingson
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User ID: 1078
Tophattingson
1d ago
Peru drew my attention by topping the league tables for lockdown deaths per capita for much of 2020 and 2021 And by a huge margin, too. A fact that so-called expects were curiously incurious about considering how severe Peru's lockdown was. So I looked into it a little. Nothing in great detail, only what's available via a cursory look at what restrictions were in place, for how long, and what the results were.
You should see some of the strange excuses for Peru's bad performance that came up in the rare case it even was mentioned. Basically saying Peru did bad because it's a developing country... While neglecting that every developing country did less bad, and that the top 10 at the time was all developed countries with the sole exception of Peru way out front.
Tophattingson
4d ago
I reached the same verdict in the UK when:
- Some groups organised protests against Israel on October 7/8, when there was no specific Israeli action to protest against, but instead as a seeming celebration of Hamas's attack.
- Rather than distance themselves from these groups or refuse to work with them, subsequent larger protests supposedly involving "moderates" let them in on the organization too.
- At no stage has there been internal condemnation or exclusion of protesters that go too far by these "moderate" organisations.
Maybe you could claim this is just guilt by association but organised anti-zionism here does not exist as a movement distinct from anti-semitism. In no other area of politics would supposedly very different groups with completely incompatible motives act in lockstep. The National Front doesn't march hand in hand with the Tories, for instance. So I can only conclude they are not, in fact, different. As for the argument that they can't be excluded for strategic turnout reasons, if your hundreds of thousands strong movement needs them that badly to function, then they can't be a minority of bad apples, can they?
And of course theres the issue where effectively every group claiming to be motivated by human rights was demonstrated to be lying back in 2020, but that's more a me thing.
Tophattingson
5d ago
I am asking what they would think of the Nazis in 1945 in retrospect, because most of them do have retrospective opinions on the Nazis still.
Tophattingson
5d ago
Does Rawls propose a statute of limitations on morality?
I am also talking about those affluent liberals. They do not believe what you claim they do, because they don't support the Nazi underdogs you imply they would.
Tophattingson
5d ago
This can be demonstrated untrue by asking those you think hold to this belief system their opinion on Nazi Germany in 1945. Unsurprisingly, no, they do not flip to liking the Nazis once the Nazis are being unambiguously punched down upon. They just like Hamas and like Iran.
Tophattingson
5d ago
Iran did not accidentally hit bystanders. In this analogy what Iran did was ignore the mother then deliberately take the baby out the crib to dropkick it.
Tophattingson
5d ago
Iran did not actually have to shoot through a crowd. It's not as if missiles damage everything they fly over. So this analogy is way too favourable to the actual actions.
Tophattingson
5d ago
Iran has effectively already declared war on the entire world. It got most the way there back with the Houthis even.
I struggle to comprehend why the world hasn't already come down on them like a sack of bricks. But at least in Europe it seems our leaders are more interested in milking this for domestic TDS points than considering retaliation as an option. Even in the case of the UK which has been directly attacked by Iran for no identifiable reason. Our state media promotes the idea that Iran has no agency and Iranian attacks on everyone are actually Trump's fault, so maybe this is what Iran is gambling on.
Tophattingson
5d ago
They already have one.
Tophattingson
5d ago
Inverse cause and effect. That origin story is selected by the regime to back up their diplomatic decisions, rather than their diplomatic decisions being caused by the origin story.
A counter-coup that would have almost certainly played out the same way without US involvement after the sham parliamentary dissolution referendum made it almost inevitable is not a good basis for starting up an eternal blood feud 26 years later. There's so many other similar (really worse) slights Iran could choose to blood feud over. To name 3:
1921 Coup, backed by Britain, that put the Pahlavi dynasty in charge in the first place.
1941 Soviet/British invasion of Iran and subsequent rural starvation
1946 Iran crisis where the soviets tried to sever a few occupied puppet states off Iran
Why not blood feud against Russia instead?
Tophattingson
7d ago
The point of the lockdowns was to lessen the load on the hospitals so they would not be overloaded and forced to triage.
The UK did lockdowns. Did not overload hospitals. But achieved the same negative outcomes we would have gotten from overloaded hospitals, as they just stopped treating patients instead.
Given the lack of empirical evidence that lockdowns slowed the spread in the UK compared to countries that did not lock down, why even propose this as the "point" of lockdowns? What mechanism is there for lockdowns to achieve this when they don't slow covid? Less traffic accidents to deal with?
Further, you have to factor in the fact that no modern society is willing to turn the sick or injured away from hospitals.
This is not true.
Firstly because no hospital invests infinite resources in a given patient.
Secondly because NICE specifically prevents certain treatments from being offered in the UK on the basis that they are not cost-effective.
You can look back now and make a reasonable argument that the lockdowns were a mistake. But at the time, I don't see how the politicians could have really done anything different. They are accountable to the public if nothing else, and most people were watching the situation pretty closely.
Well the end result was most of the politicians responsible got booted out by the public as a result of the catastrophic economic and social effects of their lockdowns, even if most voters failed to recognize that lockdowns were the cause.
So everyone had the same question burning on their lips: "If a lockdown can slow this down, then why are we not doing it?"
Who gave them the impression that lockdowns would slow it down?
Without a compelling narrative, your statistics are powerless against such sentiments.
Sweden had no such difficulty in not locking down. They simply chose not to lock down, and wow, lockdowns didn't happen. What a surprise.
Tophattingson
7d ago
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.
Tophattingson
7d 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
7d 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
7d 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
7d 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
2mo 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
2mo 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
5mo 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
6mo 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
6mo 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.
There are plenty of ways a disease can spread without human contact without breaking physics.
I am not suggesting that any of these specifically apply to covid. Only that you shouldn't assume diseases follow such a trivial model as you outlined. And the empirical failure of modelling which assumes as you do to predict what happens should be a clue that maybe there's a missing piece of the puzzle here.
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