The coronavirus response has been so bad I no longer doubt many Sci-Fi premises. Before I often said to myself “you have tech that can do X and you still have problem Y. Ridiculous!”. But apparently, we can make a coronavirus vaccine in two days. But we still had over a year of lockdowns and millions of deaths. One in six hundred people in the USA have died of the virus but we blocked a vaccine because one in a million people who take it MIGHT develop treatable blood clots.
My standards for ‘realistic’ dysfunction have gotten a lot lower.
I remember Yudkowsky asking for a realistic explanation for why the Empire in Star Wars is stuck in an equilibrium where it builds destroyable gigantic weapons.
The heads of Government and the FDA don’t work like you do. Who knows the incentives that they have? It’s entirely possible that for them this is just a political play(moving chess pieces) that make sense for them while the well-being of the people take secondary place to a particular political move.
This wouldn’t be the first thing that this happens in any kind of government agency, but, at any rate, it’s too early to be skeptical. We need to see how this unfolds, may be the pausing don’t last as much.
The coronavirus response has been so bad I no longer doubt many Sci-Fi premises. Before I often said to myself “you have tech that can do X and you still have problem Y. Ridiculous!”. But apparently, we can make a coronavirus vaccine in two days. But we still had over a year of lockdowns and millions of deaths. One in six hundred people in the USA have died of the virus but we blocked a vaccine because one in a million people who take it MIGHT develop treatable blood clots.
My standards for ‘realistic’ dysfunction have gotten a lot lower.
On the flipside: WTF Star Trek?
I remember Yudkowsky asking for a realistic explanation for why the Empire in Star Wars is stuck in an equilibrium where it builds destroyable gigantic weapons.
The heads of Government and the FDA don’t work like you do. Who knows the incentives that they have? It’s entirely possible that for them this is just a political play(moving chess pieces) that make sense for them while the well-being of the people take secondary place to a particular political move.
This wouldn’t be the first thing that this happens in any kind of government agency, but, at any rate, it’s too early to be skeptical. We need to see how this unfolds, may be the pausing don’t last as much.