Mostly meta, mostly with the motivation of explaining a vote in case it would otherwise seem like an attack:
I believe you that you’re pointing this out because you want to avoid very unjust and harmful outcomes that might not be easily anticipated just by looking at the first step. And that’s good!
But you’re also leaning hard on a highly-publicized, highly-emotionally-charged single incident in a discussion about broad public policy. And that’s bad. Not only can it raise others’ emotions in ways that impede truthseeking, but it’s easy to make serious errors extrapolating that way in the first place.
I have downvoted this comment for that reason—but I want to contrast that your other comments have been quite good. In particular, you brought up the same issue in a more nuanced and explained way in another comment; that comment also included a lot of other useful perspective, and got an upvote from me.
I also think it’s very possible that you have further information we don’t (possibly intuitive, experiential information that is hard to unpack or transmit; and in fact you have already pointed at much of this in the other comment!) that does point in the direction of, say, “‘vaccine passports’ deployed in certain ways would cause people to forge them, and then cause enforcers to detect this and escalate the situation in such a way as to cause violent disasters” (or something similar—don’t anchor on that if you have a better idea!). If so, I would encourage you to keep trying to reify that connection if you can (though certainly don’t think you have to keep sinking energy into it regardless of anything), but also to try not to be too impulsive if people start picking it apart or depicting worlds in which not all the links hold up.
[Some edits and corrections shortly after posting.]
I appreciate the explanation of the downvote (no harm no foul) and I’ll try to tweak it if I get a chance. I probably do have experiential information that’s hard to unpack (without starting to break confidentiality, based on my line of work—which is annoying, because I absolutely never wanted to play the “I could tell you, but then I’d have to wipe your memory tomorrow” card, but here we are).
I do think the potential for escalation of conflict is a real concern; and that’s another reason for keeping the implementation as discreet as possible. For a restaurant, I could imagine a combined vaccine status/capacity logging/contact tracing app that has the same look and feel to everyone involved as a handy way of making reservations in 30 minute increments once the capacity reaches a certain level. This would involve giving everyone a QR code, and I believe this would probably be easier to enforce because it’s a lot easier to catch “two people being in the same place at the same time”
My main “meta-points” in all of this are:
a) Keeping the code open source, like Jeffrey Zients suggests, is incredibly important. b) We should try to come up with a set of guidelines of what it would mean for vaccine passports to be a failure (e.g., no measurable effect on case rates, evidence of rampant forgery, etc)
Mostly meta, mostly with the motivation of explaining a vote in case it would otherwise seem like an attack:
I believe you that you’re pointing this out because you want to avoid very unjust and harmful outcomes that might not be easily anticipated just by looking at the first step. And that’s good!
But you’re also leaning hard on a highly-publicized, highly-emotionally-charged single incident in a discussion about broad public policy. And that’s bad. Not only can it raise others’ emotions in ways that impede truthseeking, but it’s easy to make serious errors extrapolating that way in the first place.
I have downvoted this comment for that reason—but I want to contrast that your other comments have been quite good. In particular, you brought up the same issue in a more nuanced and explained way in another comment; that comment also included a lot of other useful perspective, and got an upvote from me.
I also think it’s very possible that you have further information we don’t (possibly intuitive, experiential information that is hard to unpack or transmit; and in fact you have already pointed at much of this in the other comment!) that does point in the direction of, say, “‘vaccine passports’ deployed in certain ways would cause people to forge them, and then cause enforcers to detect this and escalate the situation in such a way as to cause violent disasters” (or something similar—don’t anchor on that if you have a better idea!). If so, I would encourage you to keep trying to reify that connection if you can (though certainly don’t think you have to keep sinking energy into it regardless of anything), but also to try not to be too impulsive if people start picking it apart or depicting worlds in which not all the links hold up.
[Some edits and corrections shortly after posting.]
I appreciate the explanation of the downvote (no harm no foul) and I’ll try to tweak it if I get a chance. I probably do have experiential information that’s hard to unpack (without starting to break confidentiality, based on my line of work—which is annoying, because I absolutely never wanted to play the “I could tell you, but then I’d have to wipe your memory tomorrow” card, but here we are).
I do think the potential for escalation of conflict is a real concern; and that’s another reason for keeping the implementation as discreet as possible. For a restaurant, I could imagine a combined vaccine status/capacity logging/contact tracing app that has the same look and feel to everyone involved as a handy way of making reservations in 30 minute increments once the capacity reaches a certain level. This would involve giving everyone a QR code, and I believe this would probably be easier to enforce because it’s a lot easier to catch “two people being in the same place at the same time”
My main “meta-points” in all of this are:
a) Keeping the code open source, like Jeffrey Zients suggests, is incredibly important.
b) We should try to come up with a set of guidelines of what it would mean for vaccine passports to be a failure (e.g., no measurable effect on case rates, evidence of rampant forgery, etc)