The virus is clearly the problem but it isn't solvable until a vaccine comes which takes time - in the meantime you have to enter the realm of sociology. Messaging matters.
One moron in Austin doing something has zero bearing on the pathology of this disease. I wish they were not hypocrites, but looking more broadly, a mayor or councilperson isn't the problem in the large scale response to this epidemic.
Message matters, and saying "why do I have to do something smart if at least one person in a person of power is doing something dumb" is itself a message, and not a productive one.
concretely: hypocrites will exist for any principle or situation imaginable, so you can take it as a given, reason about a situation independently of them, and ignore them.
EXACTLY. That is the message being sent - it's unproductive! That is my exact point. Our leadership sends unproductive messages all the time -and when half the country doesn't think it's a big deal, they see rich people doing whatever, their confirmation bias kicks in and says "see if it was bad they wouldn't be doing X"
> concretely: hypocrites will exist for any principle or situation imaginable, so you can take it as a given, reason about a situation independently of them, and ignore them.
You can't ignore hypocrites if they have influence. If Trump was pro-mask a good deal of this country would have been too.
Leadership needs to lead or the message is undermined. What do we want? To stop covid or to fight a culture war?
It's unproductive and distracting to focus on a few people, even if they are leaders, making poor personal decisions in a crisis. It is not about them, it's about sars-covid-19 and the thousands of people dying from it every day, and the hundreds of thousands that will die if we don't get our collective act together.