I admire the question! It shows that you saw the larger point and found another example by which to test the general principles. If I’m wrong, I’d be happy to learn something.
In this case, I observed a direct instance of this with High School sports annual checkup requirement, and back then I started to dig in my heels, but my reaction produced a sensical (if abstractly saddening) explanation, roughly:
If you get hurt playing a sport and sue, this requirement by the school selfishly protects the ongoing functioning of the school from your possible stupid lawsuit, and requiring this lowers the school’s insurance costs, and you don’t have to… you just don’t get to play sports if you don’t. Look, everyone already understands that sports are a luxury for the rich since even in public schools they require fees anyway. You capitulate and play… or refuse and don’t get to personally enjoy something fun and active and mostly healthy (though slightly personally dangerous).
Accepting a dysfunctional tort system as irreparable… and being selfish… you pay the “government dysfunction tax” and move along? It costs little. It protects the school’s budget. Its designers are able to acknowledge reality on the down low… sure… why not play along.
That was back then. Covid radicalized me to some degree.
It now seems abti-social-enough-to-deserve-moral-chiding to silently tolerate obvious-to-me dysfunction in my democratically elected government, because sometimes it really matters.
It would be better to stopfucking over the poor in ways that rich smart people can tolerate.
It would be better to stop lying by default about public matters.
Maybe other people don’t want to hold themselves to this standard, but I personally want to be able to look in the mirror without flinching.
“I’m hurting you (by restricting your legal moves under threat of punishment) for your own good” is not a valid policy justification in government as far as I can tell. It is an incorrigible pattern.
Anyone who falls back to that justification for the coercive use of government power has essentially admitted (whether they realize it or not) that their subjectively assessed strongest argument is inadequate, and so they are probably wrong.
On corrigibility: individuals know more about their situation and are affected more by their own choices, and when the law is locally counter-productive, they can’t propagate the local information in their head, which serves them and their interests (and thus is likely to serve any thoughtful person in very similar local circumstances in a generally valid way), back intothe overarching legal framework.
Thus every unusual circumstance becomes potentially quite painful in the presence of “paternalist” laws with no opt-out, that takes no feedback, and requires public discussion to change…
...and there are few mechanisms to shrink the scope and complexity of laws, which mostly grow over time, and so the default is for things to worsen over time.
Government (with a smarmy smile): I’m sorry, you have to X now. Self: Why? Government (rolling eyes at “another one of those people”): X is for your own good. Self: Nice! Yay for defaults that are selfishly beneficial to the average default accepting person… I will opt-out then. Government (exasperation fading into contempt): There is no opt-out. Self: Of course there is. We live in a good country. I’m not your slave. I’m also not the slave of your boss’s boss’s boss. Neither are you (unless you’re on an H1-B or something I guess (in which case you have my extreme sympathy)). So (barring other bad laws) you could also opt-out without super high costs if it mattered enough to you. Paternalist laws in (1) good countries are helpful-by-default when the country is benevolently run, but (2) they also need to have opt-outs for normally good and free people, and (3) sometimes they aren’t even beneficial when the government is actually out to get you. I judge X to not be selfishly beneficial to me for reasons that would take a while to explain… but one of the joy’s of being free is not needing to explain such things in cases like this… so where is my opt-out? Government (adopting a threatening tone): There. Is. No. Opt. Out.
This is where the “Self” character has various choices.
The lies have been revealed as lies in the text of the game… Now what?
When I project myself into that role, under a “radicalized by covid” frame that rejects stupid evil government not just as invalid, but as “morally praiseworthy to point out the problems of” then if I was the Self then I’d be tempted to “become the unit test case” and fight for my rights, until “the unit test that is me” turns green by me getting the thing that I think “helps me most”, rather than what the authoritarian thinks “helps me most”?
But I try to refrain from public self defense mostly (which is perhaps a higher standard than universalizes well).
The reason to refrain is a collection of obvious-to-me problems. What if I win but the victory doesn’t propagate up to the root cause and then back down to others, who are less powerful, in a helpful way? That isn’t morally praiseworthy… that would just advance my privileged legal status.
Also, I’d be very entangled, and it looks kind of selfish. So the signal isn’t very clear. Also, if I fail maybe it was because I was a bad test case and my flaws, in my case, might contaminate reasoning about the larger point (that I’m pretty sure is correct)?
So a cleaner thing, in terms of raising the civic sanity waterline, is to notice other people in the role of a self standing up to an evil and stupid government, and praise and defend them, while articulating the coherent principle, with the goal of propagating the general principle back into <any part of the system able to learn at all that remains hidden deep inside an otherwise sclerotic and dysfunctional and oligarchic disaster of the formerly good government of a nation I care about>.
A debate on what the previously-infected should be recommended etc. is valid imo, but has little to do with the questions around the *sociology* of the unvaccinated. I think it’s one of those talking points for the very-online/polarized, rather than a big deal for many out there.
So, I agree with the sociological point here. I am sort of “very online” I guess?
Also most unvaccinated people are dealing with real problems and deserve sympathy and sociological humanization and help. Maybe 3% of them would volunteer something like my critique, on their own?
However, I’m pretty sure they would “get it” almost instantly, and see me as a reasonably honest ally, and see that what I’m trying to fight for is each of them having a voice in their own goddamn medical treatment or else the right to opt out of an incoherent authoritarian socio-medical regime.
I have not acquired my position from anyone else that I’m aware of…
Except in the broad cultural sense that I am thoughtful, and reasonably well informed, and can do math, and have some leisure time, and am culturally downstream of Locke and Hobbes and Jefferson and Condorcet and the rest.
From my perspective, Zeynep is the one who is “really online”. I’ve tweeted 1481 times in 10 years. Zeynep has tweeted ~109,500 times over 12 years.
The thing I’m articulating is not a “talking point”. No one handed me media briefer just before I showed up on CNN or Fox or whatever other propaganda outlet people-who-watch-TV pay attention to lately.
I’m not in favor of polarization. I’m in favor of its opposite, subject to constraints of fairness, justice, and actual rationality (not the US government’s current official standard of rationality, which is abysmal because it is mostly used to justify obvious corruption).
I’m just trying to say something I think true and important for America (focusing on clean and clear political test cases that are currently failing for people other than me) and that I think America needs to remember if America is to have any hope of remaining a virtuous and free people engaged in virtuous self rule.
If Zeynep has heard other people say the same thing as me, and wants to propose that we are in a conspiracy with each other...
I could be wrong. I’m imperfect in many ways, and thinking perfectly is literally computationally intractable… so… if you see clearly articulable flaws in my current set of heuristics and hunches and cherished attachments, it would be nice to update to something that feels less “austerely demanding” :-/
Sorry, I should have emphasized that I’m actually in favor of mandating annual physical exams at some point in the future, as an alternative to vaccine mandates, because it would add a certain amount of flexibility. The government could just ask “Did this person get their physical exam?” and medical professionals could assess whether a person is “OK”, where the definition of “OK” might vary depending on current knowledge and individual circumstances.
I’m confident that we’ll start acquiring a lot more knowledge that will allow us to make assessments of how immune people are, without having to measure antibody levels every time - age, weight, sex, prior infection, whether they’re taking immunosuppressive medications, etc. At the same time, that starts to get into some deeply personal health information. So having that information “siloed” in a physical exam (a “black box” from the government’s perspective) ought to be more agreeable to those of us who want something that “feels” more normal but doesn’t disregard the lessons of the past 20 months.
How do you feel about mandating an annual physical?
I admire the question! It shows that you saw the larger point and found another example by which to test the general principles. If I’m wrong, I’d be happy to learn something.
In this case, I observed a direct instance of this with High School sports annual checkup requirement, and back then I started to dig in my heels, but my reaction produced a sensical (if abstractly saddening) explanation, roughly:
Accepting a dysfunctional tort system as irreparable… and being selfish… you pay the “government dysfunction tax” and move along? It costs little. It protects the school’s budget. Its designers are able to acknowledge reality on the down low… sure… why not play along.
That was back then. Covid radicalized me to some degree.
It now seems abti-social-enough-to-deserve-moral-chiding to silently tolerate obvious-to-me dysfunction in my democratically elected government, because sometimes it really matters.
It would be better to stop fucking over the poor in ways that rich smart people can tolerate.
It would be better to stop lying by default about public matters.
Maybe other people don’t want to hold themselves to this standard, but I personally want to be able to look in the mirror without flinching.
“I’m hurting you (by restricting your legal moves under threat of punishment) for your own good” is not a valid policy justification in government as far as I can tell. It is an incorrigible pattern.
Anyone who falls back to that justification for the coercive use of government power has essentially admitted (whether they realize it or not) that their subjectively assessed strongest argument is inadequate, and so they are probably wrong.
On corrigibility: individuals know more about their situation and are affected more by their own choices, and when the law is locally counter-productive, they can’t propagate the local information in their head, which serves them and their interests (and thus is likely to serve any thoughtful person in very similar local circumstances in a generally valid way), back into the overarching legal framework.
Thus every unusual circumstance becomes potentially quite painful in the presence of “paternalist” laws with no opt-out, that takes no feedback, and requires public discussion to change…
...and there are few mechanisms to shrink the scope and complexity of laws, which mostly grow over time, and so the default is for things to worsen over time.
This is where the “Self” character has various choices.
The lies have been revealed as lies in the text of the game… Now what?
When I project myself into that role, under a “radicalized by covid” frame that rejects stupid evil government not just as invalid, but as “morally praiseworthy to point out the problems of” then if I was the Self then I’d be tempted to “become the unit test case” and fight for my rights, until “the unit test that is me” turns green by me getting the thing that I think “helps me most”, rather than what the authoritarian thinks “helps me most”?
But I try to refrain from public self defense mostly (which is perhaps a higher standard than universalizes well).
The reason to refrain is a collection of obvious-to-me problems. What if I win but the victory doesn’t propagate up to the root cause and then back down to others, who are less powerful, in a helpful way? That isn’t morally praiseworthy… that would just advance my privileged legal status.
Also, I’d be very entangled, and it looks kind of selfish. So the signal isn’t very clear. Also, if I fail maybe it was because I was a bad test case and my flaws, in my case, might contaminate reasoning about the larger point (that I’m pretty sure is correct)?
So a cleaner thing, in terms of raising the civic sanity waterline, is to notice other people in the role of a self standing up to an evil and stupid government, and praise and defend them, while articulating the coherent principle, with the goal of propagating the general principle back into <any part of the system able to learn at all that remains hidden deep inside an otherwise sclerotic and dysfunctional and oligarchic disaster of the formerly good government of a nation I care about>.
An interesting rebuttal to my position might be this point from Zeynep.
So, I agree with the sociological point here. I am sort of “very online” I guess?
Also most unvaccinated people are dealing with real problems and deserve sympathy and sociological humanization and help. Maybe 3% of them would volunteer something like my critique, on their own?
However, I’m pretty sure they would “get it” almost instantly, and see me as a reasonably honest ally, and see that what I’m trying to fight for is each of them having a voice in their own goddamn medical treatment or else the right to opt out of an incoherent authoritarian socio-medical regime.
I have not acquired my position from anyone else that I’m aware of…
Except in the broad cultural sense that I am thoughtful, and reasonably well informed, and can do math, and have some leisure time, and am culturally downstream of Locke and Hobbes and Jefferson and Condorcet and the rest.
From my perspective, Zeynep is the one who is “really online”. I’ve tweeted 1481 times in 10 years. Zeynep has tweeted ~109,500 times over 12 years.
The thing I’m articulating is not a “talking point”. No one handed me media briefer just before I showed up on CNN or Fox or whatever other propaganda outlet people-who-watch-TV pay attention to lately.
I’m not in favor of polarization. I’m in favor of its opposite, subject to constraints of fairness, justice, and actual rationality (not the US government’s current official standard of rationality, which is abysmal because it is mostly used to justify obvious corruption).
I’m just trying to say something I think true and important for America (focusing on clean and clear political test cases that are currently failing for people other than me) and that I think America needs to remember if America is to have any hope of remaining a virtuous and free people engaged in virtuous self rule.
If Zeynep has heard other people say the same thing as me, and wants to propose that we are in a conspiracy with each other...
...my counter-proposal is that great minds think alike, and our conspiracy communicates with each other in public, across centuries, about abstract ideals with coherently rigorous applications to the details of good governance, in general.
I could be wrong. I’m imperfect in many ways, and thinking perfectly is literally computationally intractable… so… if you see clearly articulable flaws in my current set of heuristics and hunches and cherished attachments, it would be nice to update to something that feels less “austerely demanding” :-/
Sorry, I should have emphasized that I’m actually in favor of mandating annual physical exams at some point in the future, as an alternative to vaccine mandates, because it would add a certain amount of flexibility. The government could just ask “Did this person get their physical exam?” and medical professionals could assess whether a person is “OK”, where the definition of “OK” might vary depending on current knowledge and individual circumstances.
I’m confident that we’ll start acquiring a lot more knowledge that will allow us to make assessments of how immune people are, without having to measure antibody levels every time - age, weight, sex, prior infection, whether they’re taking immunosuppressive medications, etc. At the same time, that starts to get into some deeply personal health information. So having that information “siloed” in a physical exam (a “black box” from the government’s perspective) ought to be more agreeable to those of us who want something that “feels” more normal but doesn’t disregard the lessons of the past 20 months.