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PaperclipPerfector  10mo ago (text post)   31934 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of July 17, 2023

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Fair enough, you of course not have to get into a discussion of values if you do not want to, but let me see where you disagree with me here...

  1. Some number of people died from covid. You seem to agree with this.

  2. A smaller number of people would have died from covid if more stringent anti-covid interventions had been pursued. Do you agree with this?

If you agree with both, then we are already basically just discussing values, basically the value of saving some life-years as opposed to the value of other things.

(2) seems potentially false to me. We needed to reach herd immunity via infection so there is no evidence that lockdown measures saved any lives.

Add in deaths from lockdowns like deaths of despair and they probably costs lives.

A smaller number of people would have died from covid if more stringent anti-covid interventions had been pursued.

Possibly. Some more stringent anti-Covid measures may have prevented Covid deaths. Some more stringent ones probably fall under security theatre (they never closed the beaches where I live, but there were Western jurisdictions where beaches were closed: I haven't seen any evidence to suggest that closing beaches prevented so much as a single Covid death). And, obviously, some more stringent anti-Covid measures may have succeeded in the narrow goal of preventing Covid deaths but caused more deaths through second-order effects, or otherwise failed to pass a cost-benefit analysis.

The thing is, we usually think in terms of died / didn’t die, and you’re using those terms We talk about things like “saving lives” when the literal autistic meaning would be “delaying death”. Which is why we talk about life-years. I’m not telling you anything you don’t know here but please bear with me.

Problem is, the dichotomy makes sense for a young person. The difference between dying at 20 and at 90 is a big difference, so big that we can think about it in terms of “life or death”. But in the case of someone who’s 90 and bedridden, it becomes increasingly absurd. A big part of the feeling of fakeness came about because authorities used very strong rhetoric about saving lives to describe protecting people who were clearly at death’s door. Nobody was interested in debating the value of saving life-years.

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