Establish a culture of universal mask wearing in “hotspot” areas during outbreaks
I forgot to address the point about masks above. In April 2020 the important policy decision about masks was to increase mask productions as much as possible and the government spending a few billion for ramping up mask production.
Speaking about mask wearing being important during “hotspot” areas doesn’t suggest this need of producing as much masks as possible and thus was the wrong way to think about the issue at the time.
Why are you saying this? Appendix A, B,C, and D deal explicitly and at length with how to achieve such testing capacity. You may disagree with their approach, but it is laid out.
My issue is with the decisions that were made and not with how it’s laid out. That approach couldn’t achieve daily testing and didn’t in practice while there was a policy that would have provided daily testing that they didn’t advocate.
They explicitely said that their roadmap contains a consensus about all actions that were needed. If you say that you list all actions that are needed and you don’t list actions that would have produced daily testing that’s a statement against the necessity of daily testing.
The only way to get daily testing would have been cheap at-home-antibody-tests instead of just analysing samples in the lab.
Given that Glen Weyl has had reasonable criticisms of the rationalist community in the past, we should instead be maximally charitable.
Scott describes the level of his critcisms as something that someone who spend 10 minutes getting an impression of our community might think but 30 minutes would have been enough to learn that that the criticisms are wrong.
Those criticisms are partly about the rationality community believing in using science to find out what policies are good and it’s important to point out Weyl taking the other side and signing the roadmap that doesn’t speak about science as being important for making policy decisions in it’s key points.
It further lays out the benefits of a Fusion cell model that appears to integrate Top-Down with local decision making.
When it comes to a policy roadmap, you have to think about what possible policy choices there are and among the possible choices which one’s get selected. You don’t get any credit for saying you want “top-down with local decision making” as there’s nobody who’s against “top-down with local decision making”.
I can’t imagine any person reading the roadmap to read “we should do top-down with local decision making” and as a result take an action that he otherwise wouldn’t take.
I’m also not sure what “top-down with local decision making” means. Either I can make a local decision to produce vaccines in a crisis and give them to people or there’s a top-down decision about who’s allowed to give vaccines to people.
The same goes for tests. Either you do a top-down decision about which tests are allowed or you allow people locally to decide.
If people on the local level can only take those actions that are allowed by the top-down decisions you don’t have local decision making.
Again, it seems to me that your goal is to interpret this roadmap in an uncharitable way.
No, my goal isn’t to be uncharitable. My goal is that Weyl stops being a technocrat and actually speaks out when it matters and switches to being pro-science and anti-bureaucracy as those are the important conflicts that matter even after this crisis is over.
Being pro-science in turn means that when faced with a lot of uncertainty you advocate science as a way to deal with the uncertainty. Weyl criticises our community for being for believing in using science to find out which policies to persue and thus it’s fair to make that point here.
If you read Zvi, then you will find a policy position like reducing FDA regulation being important as a common refrain. The FDA would be a prime example of technocrats in the usual sense of the word. I googled for Weyl’s position on the FDA and the thing that comes up is that Weyl argues for a new organization that takes the wisdom of how the FDA is setup to regulate another domain similarly.
There’s an interesting interview between Peter Thiel and David Graeber in which they Thiel lamaents that given Graeber’s positions of being anti-bureaucracy he was unhireable at Yale. Glen Weyl criticising our community for technocracy instead of Yale where he teaches might be a lot easier for him but it’s avoiding the conflicts with those people who are actually responsible for bad technocracy.
When people formulate policy and someone advocates a way to make the policy more bureaucratic then necessary it’s important to stand up and challenge it. Especially, when people die as the result the lost flexibility that’s created.
I forgot to address the point about masks above. In April 2020 the important policy decision about masks was to increase mask productions as much as possible and the government spending a few billion for ramping up mask production.
Speaking about mask wearing being important during “hotspot” areas doesn’t suggest this need of producing as much masks as possible and thus was the wrong way to think about the issue at the time.
My issue is with the decisions that were made and not with how it’s laid out. That approach couldn’t achieve daily testing and didn’t in practice while there was a policy that would have provided daily testing that they didn’t advocate.
They explicitely said that their roadmap contains a consensus about all actions that were needed. If you say that you list all actions that are needed and you don’t list actions that would have produced daily testing that’s a statement against the necessity of daily testing.
The only way to get daily testing would have been cheap at-home-antibody-tests instead of just analysing samples in the lab.
Scott describes the level of his critcisms as something that someone who spend 10 minutes getting an impression of our community might think but 30 minutes would have been enough to learn that that the criticisms are wrong.
Those criticisms are partly about the rationality community believing in using science to find out what policies are good and it’s important to point out Weyl taking the other side and signing the roadmap that doesn’t speak about science as being important for making policy decisions in it’s key points.
When it comes to a policy roadmap, you have to think about what possible policy choices there are and among the possible choices which one’s get selected. You don’t get any credit for saying you want “top-down with local decision making” as there’s nobody who’s against “top-down with local decision making”.
I can’t imagine any person reading the roadmap to read “we should do top-down with local decision making” and as a result take an action that he otherwise wouldn’t take.
I’m also not sure what “top-down with local decision making” means. Either I can make a local decision to produce vaccines in a crisis and give them to people or there’s a top-down decision about who’s allowed to give vaccines to people.
The same goes for tests. Either you do a top-down decision about which tests are allowed or you allow people locally to decide.
If people on the local level can only take those actions that are allowed by the top-down decisions you don’t have local decision making.
No, my goal isn’t to be uncharitable. My goal is that Weyl stops being a technocrat and actually speaks out when it matters and switches to being pro-science and anti-bureaucracy as those are the important conflicts that matter even after this crisis is over.
Being pro-science in turn means that when faced with a lot of uncertainty you advocate science as a way to deal with the uncertainty. Weyl criticises our community for being for believing in using science to find out which policies to persue and thus it’s fair to make that point here.
If you read Zvi, then you will find a policy position like reducing FDA regulation being important as a common refrain. The FDA would be a prime example of technocrats in the usual sense of the word. I googled for Weyl’s position on the FDA and the thing that comes up is that Weyl argues for a new organization that takes the wisdom of how the FDA is setup to regulate another domain similarly.
There’s an interesting interview between Peter Thiel and David Graeber in which they Thiel lamaents that given Graeber’s positions of being anti-bureaucracy he was unhireable at Yale. Glen Weyl criticising our community for technocracy instead of Yale where he teaches might be a lot easier for him but it’s avoiding the conflicts with those people who are actually responsible for bad technocracy.
When people formulate policy and someone advocates a way to make the policy more bureaucratic then necessary it’s important to stand up and challenge it. Especially, when people die as the result the lost flexibility that’s created.