“What’s scary is when I try to put a probability on ‘this turns into a broader thing that outlives Covid and people have to show the computer has them in good standing to get on a train’ or something like that. I still think it’s a super low probability thing, maybe 2% (it’s a Fermi answer, but a considered one), but that’s 2% of a really, really bad outcome.”
I’m sorry, but the 2% strikes me as pure optimism. If the government gets vaccine passports approved for anything, the probability is very high that we’re stuck with them for the long haul, and that use will gradually expand over time from slippery slope effects.
As a comparison, think about all the civil liberties lost after 9/11 and how you never got most of them back. Eliezer Yudkowski wrote that it was a vast underestimate to think that the overreaction to 9/11 would be ten times worse than the event itself. Every bias that caused the overreaction to terrorism is also present and causing the overreaction to Covid. Vaccine passports are part of that overreaction!
Think about how governments learned to shout ‘terrorism!’ any time they wanted more power and how those powers always ended up being used against more than just terrorists. In the US you guys had the NSA snooping on everything and everyone, terrorists or no. Here in the UK one very sinister example is the 2001 Anti-Terrorist Act which our then-government solemnly promised would only be used against terrorists. Within a few years it was being used to seize assets from Icelandic banks for the crime of being inconveniently bankrupt. You simply cannot trust governments to only use their new powers against the original target. Once you add a tool to their toolbox, that tool gets used.
Now really think about what it would take to be the politician or bureaucrat that tried to scrap vaccine passports. You’re up against fear of blame and the Copenhagen interpretation of ethics: whoever makes that decision is at risk of being blamed for every person who ever gets sick again. They will be demonised by the other side as pro-virus. Then there’s simple status quo bias: once the passports exist scrapping them then becomes a change in the status quo and subject to inertia, akrasia, and the difficulty of coming to consensus.
I hope you now understand why I am fundamentally opposed to vaccine passports. I hope I have persuaded you too. This is a terrible, dangerous idea, and the time to stop them is before they become the status quo.
“What’s scary is when I try to put a probability on ‘this turns into a broader thing that outlives Covid and people have to show the computer has them in good standing to get on a train’ or something like that. I still think it’s a super low probability thing, maybe 2% (it’s a Fermi answer, but a considered one), but that’s 2% of a really, really bad outcome.”
I’m sorry, but the 2% strikes me as pure optimism. If the government gets vaccine passports approved for anything, the probability is very high that we’re stuck with them for the long haul, and that use will gradually expand over time from slippery slope effects.
As a comparison, think about all the civil liberties lost after 9/11 and how you never got most of them back. Eliezer Yudkowski wrote that it was a vast underestimate to think that the overreaction to 9/11 would be ten times worse than the event itself. Every bias that caused the overreaction to terrorism is also present and causing the overreaction to Covid. Vaccine passports are part of that overreaction!
Think about how governments learned to shout ‘terrorism!’ any time they wanted more power and how those powers always ended up being used against more than just terrorists. In the US you guys had the NSA snooping on everything and everyone, terrorists or no. Here in the UK one very sinister example is the 2001 Anti-Terrorist Act which our then-government solemnly promised would only be used against terrorists. Within a few years it was being used to seize assets from Icelandic banks for the crime of being inconveniently bankrupt. You simply cannot trust governments to only use their new powers against the original target. Once you add a tool to their toolbox, that tool gets used.
Now really think about what it would take to be the politician or bureaucrat that tried to scrap vaccine passports. You’re up against fear of blame and the Copenhagen interpretation of ethics: whoever makes that decision is at risk of being blamed for every person who ever gets sick again. They will be demonised by the other side as pro-virus. Then there’s simple status quo bias: once the passports exist scrapping them then becomes a change in the status quo and subject to inertia, akrasia, and the difficulty of coming to consensus.
I hope you now understand why I am fundamentally opposed to vaccine passports. I hope I have persuaded you too. This is a terrible, dangerous idea, and the time to stop them is before they become the status quo.