But we are already inundated by outrage journalism, cancel culture, and public shaming. The last thing we need is more of that. We've already got enough things to be stressed, worried, anxious, and angry about.
The vast majority of people will respect the good advice coming from leadership, and those people are the ones who deserve our attention, in a positive way.
Look at this like engineering. With a large enough system, you are always going to have some components that fail. When your network has a million machines, you don't get upset when a server goes down, you just engineer some tolerance into your network, define processes to handle them, and go on with your life.
I have been constantly gratified by how many people are doing the right thing and those are the people that I want to focus my own attention on. I think we will all get through this with a little more sanity and emotional health if we can take a break from the perennial game of torches and pitchforks for a while.
People seem to be taking it seriously here, but I'm sure there are plenty of places where people are not.
Mandatory breakup of large groups is actually the lighter of the tools the government could use here. Intentionally endangering other people's lives is usually punished by jail, and even unintentional but reckless endangerment can be fine- or jail-worthy.
Wash your hands and stay away from each other, people.
Regardless, if true, we made our bed, now we get to sleep in it. As you sow, so shall you reap.
I wish Jack Dorsey at Twitter would take a look at the absolute shit-show that is "Trends for You" in the Explore section. It's nothing but the most outraged people trying to whip everyone into a frenzy. I try to resist going in there, but every once in a while can't help but be sucked in and almost always regret it.
I finally figured out a good solution for that. Click the gear and turn off personalized trends. Then set the country to a language you don't speak.
I don't know a lick of Latvian, but now Twitter is all about telling me what's going on over there.
Seems like overkill.
You can make the same argument about seatbelts. The majority of people wear seatbelts because they've been asked to and they understand the danger of not wearing a seatbelt, for both themselves and their fellow passengers. But some fraction of people simply don't care, and well-intentioned people even have a tendency to say "oh just this one time." And that's why we need enforcement.
Look at this like engineering. With a large enough system, you are always going to have some components that fail. When your network has a million machines, you don't get upset when a server goes down, you just engineer some tolerance into your network, define processes to handle them, and go on with your life.
Human life is not redundant. Moreover unless you're able to outright deny people medical care for their negligence (which we can't do), unnecessary Coronavirus cases put more burden on everyone. Just like seatbelts -- even if you don't personally care if you get severely injured in a car accident, the EMTs don't have the ability to just leave your selfish ass dying on the side of the road, even if you want them to. You just wasted a lot of other people's time, energy, and money as a result of your carelessness.
If you can take simple measures to prevent components from failing, you should, especially when component failure is an expensive and intrusive proposition, even if it doesn't mean the total failure of the system.
Not to mention the fact that humans are notoriously bad at making rational utility-maximizing decisions. People often only come to regret their actions only after they've been forced to face serious consequences for their actions. Yes, this is slightly paternalistic, but it's yet another argument in favor of enforcing quarantine-like laws with actual penalties.
What you accept and what you choose to spend your precious finite attention on are not the same thing.
If anything, what I suggest is the opposite of what you're saying. I do accept that some small fraction of people will do dumb shit, as they have through time immemorial. And, because I accept that, I feel no need to waste my time and emotional energy reading about it on social media and getting all outraged about it.
> And that's why we need enforcement.
Sure, but what we don't need is every social media site plastering pictures of people not wearing seatbelts with headlines like "Look at this horrid fucker not wearing their seatbelt! How can they be so thoughtless?!"
> Moreover unless you're able to outright deny people medical care for their negligence (which we can't do), unnecessary Coronavirus cases put more burden on everyone.
I fully understand the implications of non-compliance with social distancing measures. I don't agree with people who aren't doing it.
What I am saying is that it is not beneficial to crowd social media with stories of those people. After you read a Reddit thread about some selfish assholes partying up in Miami... then what? What is the action? I'm not going to personally fly to Miami and scold them. Me consuming that story has added nothing of value to my life, nor has it materially addressed the problem in any way.
All it does us make me feel angry and shitty. I've got enough bad feelings floating around because of, you know, the global pandemic. I don't need impotent manufactured outrage on top of that. What I and others need to get through the day are reminders of all of the good that people are doing.
And those same reminders are also a good way to encourage people to do what they're supposed to do. Do you want to live in a world where we teach people who to be by giving them heroes to aspire to, or by having the threat of public shaming and punishment looming over them 24/7?
When I read this sort of angry screed it scares me because it suggests to me that people are unstable, that behavior and reasoning can suddenly change due to switching contexts.
As a society we have accepted that a safe and responsible motorcycle operator should be allowed to do their thing, and that the freedom (and convenience) is worth the increased risk compared to a car.
Moreover, how much of an increased risk does a responsible motorcycle operator actually pose compared to a car operator, without other vehicles involved?
IMO you should be subject to serious and increased legal penalties for reckless driving (failing to signal, etc.) when a safely-operated motorcycle is nearby. And likewise for motorcyclists who speed down the highway threading between lanes should.
You're also not the first person on the Internet to bring up the motorcycle false equivalence as a counterargument to disease control methods like this. Not sure what to make of that.
it suggests to me that people are unstable, that behavior and reasoning can suddenly change due to switching contexts
This is pretty much true in my experience. You can look up a field called "behavioral economics" if you don't want to take my word for it.
angry screed
Why do I even bother? Is everything you disagree with an "angry screed"?
No. But my threshold may be lower than it used to be, because I'm worrying lately about how other people react to stress under current circumstances.
"As a society we have accepted that a safe and responsible motorcycle operator should be allowed to do their thing"
I'm not sure if you can really prove that "as a society we have accepted..." something, but assuming we have, my point was how arbitrary it is. We draw a little box around different things, and motorcycles only have to be safe relative to motorcycle norms, while cars have to be safe relative to car norms. And norms differ from country to country.
That doesn't mean I'm necessarily on a crusade to break down that sort of compartmentalization, I just alternately read people questioning it and people taking it for granted, so I tend to think of the other side either way.
Hate and shame feeds reactionary behavior and is counter productive. If you disagree with someone, empathize with them as a human being and explain how their behavior is hurting others
It’s also worth noting that these are mild measures compared to the other stick societies like to use, criminal law. If people felt confident that rapists were prosecuted not just in cases where their victims number in the dozens (Weinstein, Crosby), they wouldn’t feel the need to use social and economic pressure.
It's also nothing new: "In Ancient Greece the Athenians had a procedure known as "ostracism" in which all citizens could write a person's name on a shard of broken pottery (called ostraka) and place it in a large container in a public place. If an individual's name was written a sufficient number of times, he was "ostracized"—banished from the city for ten years. This was normally practiced against individuals who had behaved in some way that offended the community."
That same mechanism amplified by social media is no longer as adaptive. It's natural and fairly reasonable to snap at someone if they are rude to you. But if you jam a bullhorn in their face and yell into that, it's no longer appropriate. The emotion and impulse are the same, but the technology changes the manifestation of them.
And while he sees that it’s impossible to stop every single rapist, he’s willing to settle for victims just not bothering him with it.
Shame and tell everyone whenever possible to stay the fuck inside because those are going to be the people that make you stay in lockdown for 6 months instead of 2.
Otherwise this will be 10x worse in the US
Sounds good!? But healthy young people aren't building up antibodies.
Which means when we end social distancing, the virus will start spreading just like it did before.
The goal here isn't to prevent everyone from getting it. The goal is to slowly build up heard immunity, in a way that doesn't overly burden the healthcare system, and to hopefully learn some new treatments along the way.
If new cases flatline, that's good! If we can avoid everyone getting it, that's even better! If the globe can get a handle on things, we don't need to solely consider worst-case scenarios.
If you live, remember to vote progressively on housing and other things that your generation has a death grip on.
If you pass, my condolences: It wasn't personal, merely generational.
With some remaining respect,
Young People
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2020-03-18/99-of-tho...
Median age is 80.5. That's actually near the life expectancy of an Italian male.
99% of fatalities were among people with a prior illness.
About half of the deaths were people suffering from three or more other illnesses.
To put it very bluntly, a lot of the folks dying from COVID-19 were already dying. COVID-19 is the straw that broke the camel's back.
About half of those infected in New York City are under 50
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/03/19/nyregion/coronavirus-new-...
...preliminary figures released on Wednesday by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention show that adults ages 20 to 44 represent nearly one-third of U.S. coronavirus patients whose ages are known.
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/03/20/health/coronavirus-millen...
In any case, it's not me who you're calling "deadly" wrong, it's the Italian Ministry of Health.
Sure they're not fatalities, but do you really want to go to an overcrowded hospital for COVID-19? (Will be worse when ventilators run out and hospitalization can't help you nearly as much)
Where does this fear mongering come from? I’m absolutely sick of people dropping this bullshit without anything to show people what they’re referring to. It’s certainly harmful to society and coordinating anything but the first attempted response.
Wash your damn hands.
Just a look at China now, and then on Italy. Seriously, what.the.fuck
The problem with "outrage culture" isn't the outrage; it's the target of the outrage. This is real stuff, consequential, non-trivial. It's good to be outraged when people behave outrageously. It's not so good when what you're trying to do is get a stranger fired for a tweet you could easily have ignored. This isn't that.
As the Internet just becomes another part of the real world (down from the lofty "alternate universe" it was imagined it would be in the cyberpunk era), I'm 100% on board with people having real-world consequences for bad online behavior.
We do not know the outcome because it lies in the future, but the human mind provides the host such a high resolution image of it that it can easily be mistaken for actual reality if one isn't disciplined.
I'm not strongly committed to the argument that it's good. A better word might be "appropriate" or "justified." The point is that this kind of outrage is very different from what we normally call "outrage culture." The implication in a phrase like "outrage culture" isn't that outrage is an invalid human emotion; it's that it's not being tuned/targeted correctly.
I have a theory that cultures that value (and I mean truly value) clean, rational thinking, will be superior in not only reacting to these sorts of crises, but preventing them in the first place.
If one looks very carefully at the nature of most of the discussions taking place in the memeplex on covid-19 and a variety of other hot button topics, one thing you will notice is that there is a breathtaking amount of not just confusion, but delusion. People's internal mental models of the world do not match observable reality - it's been this way for a very long time (well, it's always been this way technically, and always will, to a degree), and it seems to me that it's getting worse at an increasing rate.
I think this is a material problem, I believe it can be observed (manually, and perhaps somehow algorithmically - we have petabytes of data to mine), and I believe something can be done about it. But first, people have to be willing to look.
https://www.mtsu.edu/first-amendment/article/940/counterspee...
Instead of the California approach, where you say "don't this, except for reasons 1 ... n", he's attacking the demand side. You can go out, but you don't have anywhere to go.
All of the problems get worse if you make people panic. My buddy who lives in northern upstate NY was just telling me about all of the people "bugging out" and taking their RVs up to the Adirondacks. If you tell people it's martial law, people will flee NYC Metro for wherever.
The other thing is that people will always be out. How do you deal with homeless people? Arrest them? How do you deal with people who claim to be medical people? How do you identify Trader Joe's employees? Are the police going to setup roadblocks? How do the police maintain a rosette stone of who is worthy of travel and who isnt?
Facebook and Google sometimes use the expression "one in a million" to describe edge/exception cases which occur every day when you serve many users. The density of NYC is a real-world equivalent, there are continuous exceptions that cannot be centrally predicted and must be micro-locally responded.
There has to be non-zero social interaction of young people who are least at risk, and can recover most quickly. Otherwise the only people being exposed will be essential workers. After recovery, these young people can volunteer to train/run errands for hospitals, reducing load on the system and keeping them active.
In times of crisis, civilians working with each other can make a difference. Wish they had used the language "physical distancing" since people can still coordinate socially (including online).
I know in my neighborhood, everyone is outside but we are all maintaining 2 meter distance. Some neighbors even brought up their grills and stayed seperate but can talk (at a distance).
They're fining (~$140) and detaining people who don't follow the rules in France.
https://translate.google.com/translate?sl=fr&tl=en&u=https%3...
It would logically follow that if the quarantine is legal, penalties for violating it are also legal.
---------------
Most of those cases are quite old, but they're still the ruling precedent on the topic as far as my (limited) knowledge goes.
For one that went to the Supreme Court in 1902 and continues to be cited:
Compagnie Francaise de Navigation a Vapeur v. Louisiana Board of Health
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Compagnie_Francaise_de_Navigat...
Which might be reasonable if there are flagrant violators and things continue to get worse.
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/03/18/nyregion/Coronavirus-broo...
"Concern over the spread of coronavirus in Hasidic communities had already been raised by a series of large weddings held this week. On Tuesday, the Fire Department broke up one wedding celebration in Williamsburg that had more than 200 guests."
> Then people won't take the rules seriously.
What should the government do to these people? Arrest them?
Already there are news headlines saying "US jails begin releasing prisoners to stem Covid-19 infections"[1][2]
and from that article, specifically relating to New York:
"New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio said on Wednesday that city officials will this week identify individuals for release, including people who were arrested for minor crimes and those most vulnerable to infection due to underlying health problems.
"His announcement came hours after a guard and a prisoner tested positive for coronavirus at Rikers Island prison..
"Other New York prisons, such as Sing Sing, have had inmates test positive for coronavirus and one employee for the state's corrections department has died from it."
These prisons are breeding grounds for disease: "sinks often lack soap and hand sanitiser is considered contraband due to its alcohol content", and medical care in US prisons is often atrocious.
So by imprisoning people in overcrowded, unsanitary conditions you might effectively be giving them a death sentence and possibly putting the other inmates at risk from the people that came in from the outside world.
Another good article on the serious vulnerability of prisons during this outbreak: [3]
[1] - https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-us-canada-51947802
[2] - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22632901
[3] - https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2020/3/17/21181515/c...
In France, people get a fine for being outside without a good reason. In some cases, they also get arrested. Police can be dissuasive, even if (almost) no one will be put into jail.
Why not? Couldn't you postpone the prison time for a later point in time? Or make them pay fees right away (and a high fee).
Not homeless and income or wealth > 100k? 1% annual gross income or net wealth (greater of both) per occurrence with a 1% daily compounding interest rate of the principal amount until paid in full. If third incident mandatory minimum of 5 years imprisonment and $1,000,000 fine or 50% wealth whichevers greater. Non payment prevents release.
It was packed to the grills with schoolchildren in the playground, and their parents watching.
People aren't taking the rules seriously until you shut things down.
Does the state have the power to control my movement from my own home to the end of the street for my daily walk?
Yes and no. I was curious, too.
https://www.statnews.com/2020/03/17/mass-quarantine-lockdown...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Martial_law_in_the_United_Stat...
"The Privilege of the Writ of Habeas Corpus shall not be suspended, unless when in Cases of Rebellion or Invasion the public Safety may require it."
I guess the legal argument comes down to a lack of a comma between 'invasion' and 'the public safety'. Or whether a virus constitutes 'invasion'.
- 1st: Right to peacefully assemble
- 14th “nor shall any state deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law”
5th has similar text to 14th.
To be clear: I’m not arguing that the various govts. can’t impose quarantines or isolation orders, I’m just outlining which parts of the constitution are relevant to the legal questions.
That being said, it's a big scary step and there are lots of little steps likely to be taken before we get that far. You can see this in action in Italy.
Then people won't take the rules seriously.
Lots of people in this country still don't believe or understand how much damage this virus can inflict.