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naraburns  nihil supernum  1yr ago (text post)   34444 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of March 13, 2023

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This shouldn't be surprising. There have always been interest groups and think-tanks taking funds to study all manner of issues that they argue will become a Big Deal. And then, when tire meets the road, the people who are actually in charge of things disregard these nerds and play it by ear and make their decisions based on whatever their existing biases are.

A really good example of this was Covid where some 30+ different organizations in the US government had plans and preparation for a potential pandemic. The US had even been praised as being the most prepared country in the world for such an event by the Nuclear Threat Initiative and WEF prior to Covid. And when it mattered, the US more or less just did whatever was politically/tribally expedient every step of the way.

It's such a consistent phenomena that sometimes I wonder what the point is in funding super niche organizations like Yud's.

The existence of a plan drawn up by official expertologists doesn't somehow short circuit the fact that Americans place authority with elected politicians. And remember, the official expert scientific data driven plan in my country (also rated highly for pandemic preparedness) was to do literally nothing.

I recall that said policy reversal/panic was back when the news from China implied a ~1% case fatality rate.

I'm no virologist, but in that scenario I'd probably have advocated for a short lockdown too, albeit if any of my other traits were conserved I'd have called it off in a month.

I am fairly convinced that Western lockdown policies only happened because a fearful public health apparatus followed China's playbook in a panic. Nobody gets fired for following the general consensus.

Exactly how much better we could have done at the time is unclear to me. Notably, it took seemingly forever to acknowledge it's airborne spread, and challenge vaccine trials would have probably saved lives and ended it sooner. But this is something that will probably never get a firm answer.

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