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Donald Trump nominates RFK Jr. to be Secretary of Health and Human Services.
I am not naturally sympathetic to criticizing policy or personnel decisions on the grounds that they "embolden" the wrong people, but I am going to make an exception here. The sheer magnitude of human suffering prevented by vaccines and antibiotics is hard to comprehend. Due to complex structural and psychological reasons, the developers of these treatments capture a miniscule fraction of the total utility surplus created.
Enter the pharma skeptics: I do not know what RFK Jr.'s specific stance on vaccines is, besides "more skeptical than the liberal establishment will accept", but I do know how Twitter works. Twitter is real. It affects real events in actual reality, up to and including the US presidential election. Trans issues are getting dumped from the mainstream Democratic Party agenda because of how much it gets dunked on on Twitter.
In this Twitter thread, the entire concept of rewarding companies for treating disease is getting dunked on like it's a Lia Thomas podium. This is of course not the only example I could have pulled, but it shocked me both because of it's location (Alex Tabarrok's feed), and because of the sheer intensity of what can only be described as concentrated stupid.
But perhaps the most alarming implications are for democracy itself. RFK's endorsement likely won Trump the election, not least because it paved the way for the Rogan endorsement. Republicans won by increasing their share of the stupid vote. Indeed, no party can win a national election without winning large swaths of the stupid vote. There simply aren't enough smart people to win. Perhaps this explains the modern political environment. The decision between Democrat or Republican boils down to a decision on which party's concession to the stupid vote will do the least amount of damage.
But Tabarrok didn't say "we should reward companies for treating disease". What he actually said (if you scroll up a few posts) was:
When I read this in the political context of the ongoing vaccine debates, the implied connotation I get is something like: "Listen here, you ignorant yokels. You might like to think that you're 'self-sufficient', but you're not. You depend on me, my tribe, the educated elites. Without us, you'd be dead. Specifically, you are dependent on the stock valuations of big megacorps continuing to rise. You know; stocks, the global finance market, i.e. that same thing that is the engine of mass immigration, the offshoring of industrial labor, the woke-industrial complex, and so many other things that you find politically abhorrent."
Obviously, he didn't write those exact words. But that's how it comes off. And that's a poor way to endear people to your cause, regardless of the actual merit of your claims. So the backlash he got on twitter makes perfect sense to me.
I mean, yeah. That is the implied connotation, because it's true. It's true the same way that you or I would tell the guys who set up the Capitol Hill Autonomous Zone that their project is doomed without the support of public infrastructure. That's just not how the world works. If they can't tell the difference between investment in medical innovation being driven by the expectation of future profitable sales, and the nebulous forces driving the educated consensus on immigration, then they are just stupid.
“The people who disagree with me are stupid” is massively uncharitable, and well below what I expect of this place. That’s a stereotype of boo outgroup, and you’re saying it to the very word.
There’s a lot about what you’re saying that’s right! But you don’t seem to have understanding of the reasons people are critical of big pharma, and instead are just calling them dumb. It’s exactly the fact that people who criticize these things are immediately called every insulting name in the book that makes them become distrustful, resentful, and vengeful.
Are you trying to move past shady thinking here, or are you more interested in dunking on your outgroup? It would be much more productive to try and engage with what @Primaprimaprima said and develop a greater understanding of where your opponents are coming from — that will make you much better at being able to be both compassionate and convincing.
I suppose I could have called them, "unable or unwilling to understand the production function of medical goods, the capital structure of pharmaceutical corporations, the inherent unfairness of mass tort litigation, the difficulty for an individual consumer to determine the expected utility to himself of a given medical product, p-hacking, and the extent of the natural human disease burden," but that would be just padding the word count.
Doesn't all of this get side-stepped if we're talking about a system where that isn't the case at all? Surely the Soviets developed some genuine medical tech all on their own state dime.
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No, that’s not just padding out the word count: the two things you’ve said are not equivalent.
In particular, now you’re actually discussing the values, beliefs, and arguments behind your position, which is a dramatic difference from “all my opponents are dummy dumbs”.
And actually stating plainly your values means that people who are actually smart can now productively disagree with you: maybe someone can go “actually the production function of medical goods doesn’t work like that,” or “maybe tort litigation isn’t actually all that unfair,” or “it’s actually not that difficult for the average consumer to make an informed decision about the expected utility of a medical intervention” — and then what you’ve got is an actual discussion that can illuminate both sides!
And even if you’re right about 100% of your claims, the way you stated it before didn’t make you sound right: it made you sound like a bully relying on thought-terminating cliches. Someone whose arguments are well thought out and informed by evidence doesn’t need to act like that. Providing evidence, discussing trade offs, and engaging in constructive debate is what smart and credible people do. Calling people stupid is just, well, stupid.
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