I would encourage you to make this a top-level post, I think there’s a lot of very useful content here and I’d like to be able to comment / refer back to it. I’m especially interested in exploring why these particular areas have so much fraud relative to other areas slash whether this is true—one question is whether these are areas where we call people who lie or misrepresent out as committing fraud, whereas in other places maybe we don’t as much do so.
The solutions on the other hand don’t seem viable to me. E.g. having a system where it will tell you how many out of X or more people are vaccinated, but won’t tell you if 1 particular person is vaccinated, sounds like something you do in math team practice or when nerd sniping at a party to figure out how to figure out exactly who is vaccinated, and/or a way to start a lot of fights and have a lot of really bad free rider problems and game theory experiments that mostly don’t end so well. Fascinating stuff, though. I’m curious how you think this functions in practice if there’s a bar on directly checking individuals, under your proposals.
Incentives are great and would certainly help with the ‘fuzzy math’ of having groups contain more vaccinated people, slash getting more people vaccinated, but I don’t think there’s any political/social ability to notice that going from 30% to 70% vaccinated in groups is ‘good enough’ in some sense and we should be OK with it, I think it needs to be effectively 100% or things won’t actually happen. And yes, you can say ‘but fraud!’ but in some sense that serves the function of letting everyone pretend it’s 100% slash not feel responsible for the fact that it’s not 100% or for the people still vulnerable.
So I guess another approach that would make vaccine passports palatable to everyone would be if we just went ahead and gave everybody something similar to the Excelsior pass (either on their phone or printed), where we’d attempt to implement that underlying logic of “x% vaccinated or y% capacity” in real time. The venue would stop allowing new people in when neither of those conditions are met, and nobody would see anybody’s personal information. And it would take away any motive for the prospective attendee to cheat. This could also be leveraged for contact tracing, and perhaps the expectation would be that you get a test if you don’t feel well, or if a contact tracer tracks you down.
I don’t think it would be too difficult to deploy something like this (all-in-one contact tracing/vaccination tracking/compliance app)
Yeah, so I guess my point is that in the spirit of “less wrong”, making a beeline for aggregate statistics appears to me to be the “least wrong”.
There’s also somewhat promising evidence that there’s going to be enough self selection that Bayes’ Theorem will have our backs even without incentives. Kinda like how there are a lot of uh, people like me in movie theaters on December 25th.
I would encourage you to make this a top-level post, I think there’s a lot of very useful content here and I’d like to be able to comment / refer back to it. I’m especially interested in exploring why these particular areas have so much fraud relative to other areas slash whether this is true—one question is whether these are areas where we call people who lie or misrepresent out as committing fraud, whereas in other places maybe we don’t as much do so.
The solutions on the other hand don’t seem viable to me. E.g. having a system where it will tell you how many out of X or more people are vaccinated, but won’t tell you if 1 particular person is vaccinated, sounds like something you do in math team practice or when nerd sniping at a party to figure out how to figure out exactly who is vaccinated, and/or a way to start a lot of fights and have a lot of really bad free rider problems and game theory experiments that mostly don’t end so well. Fascinating stuff, though. I’m curious how you think this functions in practice if there’s a bar on directly checking individuals, under your proposals.
Incentives are great and would certainly help with the ‘fuzzy math’ of having groups contain more vaccinated people, slash getting more people vaccinated, but I don’t think there’s any political/social ability to notice that going from 30% to 70% vaccinated in groups is ‘good enough’ in some sense and we should be OK with it, I think it needs to be effectively 100% or things won’t actually happen. And yes, you can say ‘but fraud!’ but in some sense that serves the function of letting everyone pretend it’s 100% slash not feel responsible for the fact that it’s not 100% or for the people still vulnerable.
So I guess another approach that would make vaccine passports palatable to everyone would be if we just went ahead and gave everybody something similar to the Excelsior pass (either on their phone or printed), where we’d attempt to implement that underlying logic of “x% vaccinated or y% capacity” in real time. The venue would stop allowing new people in when neither of those conditions are met, and nobody would see anybody’s personal information. And it would take away any motive for the prospective attendee to cheat. This could also be leveraged for contact tracing, and perhaps the expectation would be that you get a test if you don’t feel well, or if a contact tracer tracks you down.
I don’t think it would be too difficult to deploy something like this (all-in-one contact tracing/vaccination tracking/compliance app)
Yeah, so I guess my point is that in the spirit of “less wrong”, making a beeline for aggregate statistics appears to me to be the “least wrong”.
There’s also somewhat promising evidence that there’s going to be enough self selection that Bayes’ Theorem will have our backs even without incentives. Kinda like how there are a lot of uh, people like me in movie theaters on December 25th.