If you are keeping schools open in light of the graphs above, and think you are not giving up, I don’t even know how to respond.
I think the French lockdown probably won’t work without school closures, and this probably will be noticed soon when the data comes through establishing that it doesn’t work, and I think that it’s extremely dumb to not close schools given that the risk for closing vs not closing at this point is extremely asymmetric, but this isn’t ‘giving up’ knowingly (and I infer that you’re suggesting Macron may be trying to show that he is trying while actually giving up) - this is simply Macron and his cabinet not intuitively understanding asymmetric risk and not realizing that it’s much better to do far more than what was sufficient, compared to doing something that just stands an okay chance of being sufficient to suppress, in order to avoid costs later.
I think that there is a current tendency—and I see it in some of your statements about the beliefs of the ‘doom patrol’ - to use signalling explanations almost everywhere, and sometimes that shades into accepting a lower burden of proof, even if the explanation doesn’t quite fit. For example, the European experience over the summer is mostly a story of a hideous but predictable failure to understand the asymmetric risk and costs of opening up / investing more vs less in tracing, testing and enforcement.
Signalling plays a role in explaining this irrationality, certainly, but as I explained in last week’s comment wedging everything into a box of ‘signalling explanations’ doesn’t always work. Maybe it makes more sense in the US, where the coronavirus response has been much more politicised. Stefan Schubert has a great blog post on this tendency:
It seems to me that it’s pretty common that signalling explanations are unsatisfactory. They’re often logically complex, and it’s tricky to identify exactly what evidence is needed to demonstrate them.
And yet even unsatisfactory signalling explanations are often popular, especially with a certain crowd. It feels like you’re removing the scales from our eyes; like you’re letting us see our true selves, warts and all. And I worry that this feels a bit too good to some: that they forget about checking the details of how the signalling explanations are supposed to work. Thus they devise just-so stories, or fall for them.
This sort of signalling paradigm also has an in-built self-defence, in that critics are suspected of hypocrisy or naïveté. They lack the intellectual honesty that you need to see the world for what it really is, the thinking goes
I think that a few of your explanations fall into this category.
They’re pushing the line that even after both of you have an effective vaccine you still need to socially distance.
Isn’t this… true? Given that an effective vaccine will take time to distribute (best guess 25 million doses by early next spring), that there will be a long period where we’re approaching herd immunity and the risk is steadily decreasing as more people become immune, Fauci is probably worried about people risk compensating during this interval, so he’s trying to emphasise that a vaccine won’t be perfectly protective and might take a while, maybe exaggerating both claims, while not outright lying. I agree that this type of thinking can shade into doom-mongering and sometimes outright lying about how long vaccines might take but this seems like solidly consequentialist lying to promote social distancing (SL 2), not bullshitting (SL 3). Maybe they’ve gotten the behavioural response wrong, and it’s much better go be truthful, clear and give people reasonable hope (I think it is), but that’s a difference in strategy, not pure SL3 bullshit. Why are you so confident that it’s the latter?
I don’t think this is something being said in order to influence behavior, or even to influence beliefs. That is not the mindset we are dealing with at this point. It’s not about truth. It’s not about consequentialism. We have left not only simulacra level 1 but also simulacra level 2 fully behind. It’s about systems that instinctively and continuously pull in the direction of more fear, more doom, more warnings, because that is what is rewarded and high status and respectable and serious and so on, whereas giving people hope of any kind is the opposite. That’s all this is.
That’s a bold claim to make about someone with a history like Fauci’s, and since ‘the priority with first vaccinations is to prevent symptoms and preventing infection is a bonus’ is actually true, if misleading, I don’t think it’s warranted.
This just sounds exactly like generic public health messaging aimed at getting people to wear masks now by making them not focus on the prospect of a vaccine. Plus it might even be important to know, especially when you consider that vaccination will happen slowly and Fauci doesn’t want people to risk compensate after some people around them have been vaccinated but they haven’t been. I don’t think Fauci is thinking beyond saying whatever he needs to say to drive up mask compliance right now, which is SL 2. Your explanation that Dr Fauci has lost track of whether or not vaccines actually prevent infection might be true—but it strikes me as weird and confusing, something you’d expect of a more visibly disordered person, and the kind of thing you’d need more evidence of than what he said in that little clip. I think those explanations absolutely have their place, especially for explaining some horrible public health messaging by some politicians and public-facing experts and most of the media, but I think this particular example is overuse of signalling explanations in the way argued for in the article I linked above. At the very least I think the SL2 consequentalist lying explanation is simpler and has a plausible story behind it, so I don’t know why you’d go for the less clear SL3 explanation with apparent certainty.
Essentially, Europe chose to declare victory and leave home without eradication, and the problem returned, first slowly, now all at once, as it was bound to do without precautions.
We did take plenty of precautions, they were just wholly inadequate relative to the potential damage of a second wave. A lot of this was not understanding the asymmetric risk. Most of Europe had precautions that might work and testing and tracing systems that were catching some of the infected and various shifting rules about social distancing and it was at least unclear if they would be sufficient. I can’t speak about other countries, but people in the UK were intellectually extremely nervous about the reopening and most people consistently polled saying it was too soon to reopen. For a while it worked—including in July when there was a brief increase in the UK that was reversed successfully. The number of people I see around me wearing masks has been increasing steadily ever since the start of the pandemic. So it was easy and convenient to say, ‘it’s a risk worth taking, it’s worked out so far’ at least for a while—even though any sane calculation of the risks should have said we ought to have invested vastly more than we did in testing, tracing, enforcement, supported isolation etc. even if things looked like they were under control.
Not that giving up is obviously the wrong thing to do! But that does not seem to be Macron’s plan.
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We are going to lock you down if you misbehave, so if you misbehave all you’re doing is locking yourself down. She’s right, of course, that things will keep getting worse until we change the trajectory and make them start getting better, but no the interventions to regain control are exactly the same either way. You either get R below 1, or you don’t. Except that the more it got out of control first, the more voluntary adjustments you’ll see, and the more people will be immune, so the more out of control it gets the easier it is to control later. …
And also the longer you wait, the longer you have to spend with stricter measures.
The measures don’t need to be stricter unless you can’t tolerate as long with high infection rates, in which case you need infection rates to go down much faster. I don’t know if makes me and Tyler Cowen and most epidemiologists part of the ‘doom patrol’ if we say that you’ll need a longer interval of either voluntary behaviour change to avoid infection or a longer lockdown the more you wait.
(Note that I’m not denying that there are such doomers. Some of the things you mention, like people explicitly denying coronavirus treatment has made the disease less deadly and left hospitals much better able to cope, aren’t really things in Europe or the UK and I was amazed to learn people in the US are claiming things that insane, but we have our own fools demanding pointless sacrifices—witness the recent ban Wales put on buying ‘nonessential goods’ within supermarkets)
If by ‘giving up’ you mean ‘not changing the government mandated measures currently on offer to be more like a lockdown’, given the situation France is in right now, it seems undeniably the wrong thing to do to rely on voluntary behaviour changes and hope that there’s no spike that overwhelms hospitals (again, asymmetric risk!) - worse for the economy, lives and certainly for other knock-on effects like hospital overloading. A lot of estimations of the marginal cost of suppression measures completely miss the point that the costs and benefits just don’t separate out neatly, as I argue here. Tyler Cowen:
I think back to when I was 12 or 13, and asked to play the Avalon Hill board game Blitzkrieg. Now, as the name might indicate, you win Blitzkrieg by being very aggressive. My first real game was with a guy named Tim Rice, at the Westwood Chess Club, and he just crushed me, literally blitzing me off the board. I had made the mistake of approaching Blitzkrieg like chess, setting up my forces for various future careful maneuvers. I was back on my heels before I knew what had happened.
Due to its potential for exponential growth, Covid-19 is more like Blitzkrieg than it is like chess. You are either winning or losing (badly), and you would prefer to be winning. A good response is about trying to leap over into that winning space, and then staying there. If you find that current prevention is failing a cost-benefit test, that doesn’t mean the answer is less prevention, which might fail a cost-benefit test all the more, due to the power of the non-local virus multiplication properties to shut down your economy and also take lives and instill fear.
You still need to come up with a way of beating Covid back.
‘Giving up’ is not actually giving up. At least in Europe, given the state of public behaviour and opinion about the virus, ‘giving up’ just means Sweden’s ‘voluntary suppression’ in practice. There is no outcome where we uniformly line up to variolate ourselves and smoothly approach herd immunity. The people who try to work out the costs and benefits of ‘lockdowns’ are making a meaningless false comparison between ‘normal economy’ and ’lockdown:
First and foremost, the declaration does not present the most important point right now, which is to say October 2020: By the middle of next year, and quite possibly sooner, the world will be in a much better position to combat Covid-19. The arrival of some mix of vaccines and therapeutics will improve the situation, so it makes sense to shift cases and infection risks into the future while being somewhat protective now. To allow large numbers of people today to die of Covid, in wealthy countries, is akin to charging the hill and taking casualties two days before the end of World War I.
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What exactly does the word “allow” mean in this context? Again the passivity is evident, as if humans should just line up in the proper order of virus exposure and submit to nature’s will. How about instead we channel our inner Ayn Rand and stress the role of human agency? Something like: “Herd immunity will come from a combination of exposure to the virus through natural infection and the widespread use of vaccines. Here are some ways to maximize the role of vaccines in that process.”>In that sense, as things stand, there is no “normal” to be found. An attempt to pursue it would most likely lead to panic over the numbers of cases and hospitalizations, and would almost certainly make a second lockdown more likely. There is no ideal of liberty at the end of the tunnel here.
In Europe, we will have more lockdowns. I’m not making the claim that this is what we should do, or that this is what’s best for the economy given the dreadful situation we’ve landed ourselves in, or that’s what we’ll almost certainly end up doing given political realities—though I think these are all true. What I’m saying is that, whether (almost certainly) by governments caving to political pressure or (if they hold out endlessly like Sweden) by voluntary behaviour change, we’ll shut down the economy in an attempt to avoid catching the virus. Anything else is inconceivable and requires lemming-like behaviour from politicians and ordinary people.
So, given that it’s going to happen, would you rather it be chaotic and late and uncoordinated, or sharper and earlier and hopefully shorter? If we’re talking about government policy, there really isn’t all that much compromise on the marginal costs of lockdowns vs the economy to be had if you’re currently in the middle of a sufficiently rapid acceleration.
I think that it’s extremely dumb to not close schools given that the risk for closing vs not closing at this point is extremely asymmetric
Having a lockdown costs political capital. Having the school continuing to be open means it costs less political capital and there’s more room for having the lockdown for a longer period of time. It’s not an easy tradeoff.
They’re pushing the line that even after both of you have an effective vaccine you still need to socially distance.
Fauci isn’t the leader of The Doom Patrol or even, arguably, a member of it. Yes, he might be ‘consequentially’ lying at SL2 instead of fully bullshitting at SL3, but that seems much less true of the typical members of The Doom Patrol.
You could have also, charitably, interpreted “even after both [?] of you have an effective vaccine” as ‘a vaccine is widely available and it’s been administered to enough people to create (strongly) effective immunity’. We already have several vaccines that seem to work. And, after you’ve received the vaccine, it certainly seems reasonable to infer that one’s own need to socially distance is significantly less than before.
Your explanation that Dr Fauci has lost track of whether or not vaccines actually prevent infection might be true—but it strikes me as weird and confusing, something you’d expect of a more visibly disordered person, and the kind of thing you’d need more evidence of than what he said in that little clip.
That makes sense given that you seem skeptical of signaling explanations in general. But it also seems like you’re arguing that no one operates at SLs beyond 2 without being a “visibly disordered person”, which doesn’t seem true in general.
My own view is that intelligence and expertise generally make it easier (and thus, all else equal, more likely) for someone to operate at higher SLs. Like rationalization, it often seems like smarter people are much better at this than others; not vice versa.
But again, for Fauci specifically, I agree – in this case – he’s probably at SL2. But the rest of The Doom Patrol seems pretty clearly and reasonably at SL3 most of the time.
We did take plenty of precautions, they were just wholly inadequate relative to the potential damage of a second wave. A lot of this was not understanding the asymmetric risk. Most of Europe had precautions that might work and testing and tracing systems that were catching some of the infected and various shifting rules about social distancing and it was at least unclear if they would be sufficient.
I think Zvi’s implicitly assuming that ‘we’ (his readers) mostly know that the precautions were not sufficient. As-of when this post was written, that certainly seems like a reasonable conclusion regardless of anyone’s previous thinking.
I don’t know if makes me and Tyler Cowen and most epidemiologists part of the ‘doom patrol’ if we say that you’ll need a longer interval of either voluntary behaviour change to avoid infection or a longer lockdown the more you wait.
You don’t seem like a member of The Doom Patrol, and Cowen definitely isn’t, but I’m ignorant of “most epidemiologists” – you and Cowen are open to discussing SL1, the object level!
I’m not sure why a lockdown would need to be longer “the more you wait”. Wouldn’t the strictest lockdown only need to last a little longer than the length of the virus’s ‘infection cycle’?
Assuming that the ‘strictest’ lockdown isn’t possible, which seems reasonable for most places, then I can see the logic of this claim and think it’s sensible.
At least in Europe, given the state of public behaviour and opinion about the virus, ‘giving up’ just means Sweden’s ‘voluntary suppression’ in practice.
This is a good point and the mistake you describe is one I’ve seen fairly frequently. But I don’t think Zvi disagrees.
But, just like a ‘government’ can give up but not its people, so too can some people give up, but not others. And ‘giving up’ isn’t really a binary decision, for governments or people.
I think the French lockdown probably won’t work without school closures, and this probably will be noticed soon when the data comes through establishing that it doesn’t work, and I think that it’s extremely dumb to not close schools given that the risk for closing vs not closing at this point is extremely asymmetric, but this isn’t ‘giving up’ knowingly (and I infer that you’re suggesting Macron may be trying to show that he is trying while actually giving up) - this is simply Macron and his cabinet not intuitively understanding asymmetric risk and not realizing that it’s much better to do far more than what was sufficient, compared to doing something that just stands an okay chance of being sufficient to suppress, in order to avoid costs later.
I think that there is a current tendency—and I see it in some of your statements about the beliefs of the ‘doom patrol’ - to use signalling explanations almost everywhere, and sometimes that shades into accepting a lower burden of proof, even if the explanation doesn’t quite fit. For example, the European experience over the summer is mostly a story of a hideous but predictable failure to understand the asymmetric risk and costs of opening up / investing more vs less in tracing, testing and enforcement.
Signalling plays a role in explaining this irrationality, certainly, but as I explained in last week’s comment wedging everything into a box of ‘signalling explanations’ doesn’t always work. Maybe it makes more sense in the US, where the coronavirus response has been much more politicised. Stefan Schubert has a great blog post on this tendency:
I think that a few of your explanations fall into this category.
Isn’t this… true? Given that an effective vaccine will take time to distribute (best guess 25 million doses by early next spring), that there will be a long period where we’re approaching herd immunity and the risk is steadily decreasing as more people become immune, Fauci is probably worried about people risk compensating during this interval, so he’s trying to emphasise that a vaccine won’t be perfectly protective and might take a while, maybe exaggerating both claims, while not outright lying. I agree that this type of thinking can shade into doom-mongering and sometimes outright lying about how long vaccines might take but this seems like solidly consequentialist lying to promote social distancing (SL 2), not bullshitting (SL 3). Maybe they’ve gotten the behavioural response wrong, and it’s much better go be truthful, clear and give people reasonable hope (I think it is), but that’s a difference in strategy, not pure SL3 bullshit. Why are you so confident that it’s the latter?
That’s a bold claim to make about someone with a history like Fauci’s, and since ‘the priority with first vaccinations is to prevent symptoms and preventing infection is a bonus’ is actually true, if misleading, I don’t think it’s warranted.
This just sounds exactly like generic public health messaging aimed at getting people to wear masks now by making them not focus on the prospect of a vaccine. Plus it might even be important to know, especially when you consider that vaccination will happen slowly and Fauci doesn’t want people to risk compensate after some people around them have been vaccinated but they haven’t been. I don’t think Fauci is thinking beyond saying whatever he needs to say to drive up mask compliance right now, which is SL 2. Your explanation that Dr Fauci has lost track of whether or not vaccines actually prevent infection might be true—but it strikes me as weird and confusing, something you’d expect of a more visibly disordered person, and the kind of thing you’d need more evidence of than what he said in that little clip. I think those explanations absolutely have their place, especially for explaining some horrible public health messaging by some politicians and public-facing experts and most of the media, but I think this particular example is overuse of signalling explanations in the way argued for in the article I linked above. At the very least I think the SL2 consequentalist lying explanation is simpler and has a plausible story behind it, so I don’t know why you’d go for the less clear SL3 explanation with apparent certainty.
We did take plenty of precautions, they were just wholly inadequate relative to the potential damage of a second wave. A lot of this was not understanding the asymmetric risk. Most of Europe had precautions that might work and testing and tracing systems that were catching some of the infected and various shifting rules about social distancing and it was at least unclear if they would be sufficient. I can’t speak about other countries, but people in the UK were intellectually extremely nervous about the reopening and most people consistently polled saying it was too soon to reopen. For a while it worked—including in July when there was a brief increase in the UK that was reversed successfully. The number of people I see around me wearing masks has been increasing steadily ever since the start of the pandemic. So it was easy and convenient to say, ‘it’s a risk worth taking, it’s worked out so far’ at least for a while—even though any sane calculation of the risks should have said we ought to have invested vastly more than we did in testing, tracing, enforcement, supported isolation etc. even if things looked like they were under control.
And also the longer you wait, the longer you have to spend with stricter measures.
The measures don’t need to be stricter unless you can’t tolerate as long with high infection rates, in which case you need infection rates to go down much faster. I don’t know if makes me and Tyler Cowen and most epidemiologists part of the ‘doom patrol’ if we say that you’ll need a longer interval of either voluntary behaviour change to avoid infection or a longer lockdown the more you wait.
(Note that I’m not denying that there are such doomers. Some of the things you mention, like people explicitly denying coronavirus treatment has made the disease less deadly and left hospitals much better able to cope, aren’t really things in Europe or the UK and I was amazed to learn people in the US are claiming things that insane, but we have our own fools demanding pointless sacrifices—witness the recent ban Wales put on buying ‘nonessential goods’ within supermarkets)
If by ‘giving up’ you mean ‘not changing the government mandated measures currently on offer to be more like a lockdown’, given the situation France is in right now, it seems undeniably the wrong thing to do to rely on voluntary behaviour changes and hope that there’s no spike that overwhelms hospitals (again, asymmetric risk!) - worse for the economy, lives and certainly for other knock-on effects like hospital overloading. A lot of estimations of the marginal cost of suppression measures completely miss the point that the costs and benefits just don’t separate out neatly, as I argue here. Tyler Cowen:
‘Giving up’ is not actually giving up. At least in Europe, given the state of public behaviour and opinion about the virus, ‘giving up’ just means Sweden’s ‘voluntary suppression’ in practice. There is no outcome where we uniformly line up to variolate ourselves and smoothly approach herd immunity. The people who try to work out the costs and benefits of ‘lockdowns’ are making a meaningless false comparison between ‘normal economy’ and ’lockdown:
...
In Europe, we will have more lockdowns. I’m not making the claim that this is what we should do, or that this is what’s best for the economy given the dreadful situation we’ve landed ourselves in, or that’s what we’ll almost certainly end up doing given political realities—though I think these are all true. What I’m saying is that, whether (almost certainly) by governments caving to political pressure or (if they hold out endlessly like Sweden) by voluntary behaviour change, we’ll shut down the economy in an attempt to avoid catching the virus. Anything else is inconceivable and requires lemming-like behaviour from politicians and ordinary people.
So, given that it’s going to happen, would you rather it be chaotic and late and uncoordinated, or sharper and earlier and hopefully shorter? If we’re talking about government policy, there really isn’t all that much compromise on the marginal costs of lockdowns vs the economy to be had if you’re currently in the middle of a sufficiently rapid acceleration.
Having a lockdown costs political capital. Having the school continuing to be open means it costs less political capital and there’s more room for having the lockdown for a longer period of time. It’s not an easy tradeoff.
I think your argument about this line is unfair:
Fauci isn’t the leader of The Doom Patrol or even, arguably, a member of it. Yes, he might be ‘consequentially’ lying at SL2 instead of fully bullshitting at SL3, but that seems much less true of the typical members of The Doom Patrol.
You could have also, charitably, interpreted “even after both [?] of you have an effective vaccine” as ‘a vaccine is widely available and it’s been administered to enough people to create (strongly) effective immunity’. We already have several vaccines that seem to work. And, after you’ve received the vaccine, it certainly seems reasonable to infer that one’s own need to socially distance is significantly less than before.
That makes sense given that you seem skeptical of signaling explanations in general. But it also seems like you’re arguing that no one operates at SLs beyond 2 without being a “visibly disordered person”, which doesn’t seem true in general.
My own view is that intelligence and expertise generally make it easier (and thus, all else equal, more likely) for someone to operate at higher SLs. Like rationalization, it often seems like smarter people are much better at this than others; not vice versa.
But again, for Fauci specifically, I agree – in this case – he’s probably at SL2. But the rest of The Doom Patrol seems pretty clearly and reasonably at SL3 most of the time.
I think Zvi’s implicitly assuming that ‘we’ (his readers) mostly know that the precautions were not sufficient. As-of when this post was written, that certainly seems like a reasonable conclusion regardless of anyone’s previous thinking.
You don’t seem like a member of The Doom Patrol, and Cowen definitely isn’t, but I’m ignorant of “most epidemiologists” – you and Cowen are open to discussing SL1, the object level!
I’m not sure why a lockdown would need to be longer “the more you wait”. Wouldn’t the strictest lockdown only need to last a little longer than the length of the virus’s ‘infection cycle’?
Assuming that the ‘strictest’ lockdown isn’t possible, which seems reasonable for most places, then I can see the logic of this claim and think it’s sensible.
This is a good point and the mistake you describe is one I’ve seen fairly frequently. But I don’t think Zvi disagrees.
But, just like a ‘government’ can give up but not its people, so too can some people give up, but not others. And ‘giving up’ isn’t really a binary decision, for governments or people.