If you stigmatise something and shame people for it, you tend to push people underground. At that point rational discourse can't exist because there are social pressures to not reveal the unpopular opinion, and thus discussion doesn't occur.
It's foolish to think that people have stopped dying from stupidity, it happens every day in every country on earth. And it's foolish to think you can cure "the sin" of stupidity by using shame. This doesn't mean we ignore people's bad decisions, but that we must be realistic about the utility of our response.
Would your strategy be to stigmatize indigenous Australians as stupid, or to stigmatize them in other ways (which ones?) in order to convince them to get vaccinated?
But the media, despite the fact that the most hesitant groups are people of color, have painted a portrait of the vaccine hesitant as bad white people (rural, politically conservative, Christian). So shaming and ridicule have been embraced. The media and most elites, many posters here included, love to hate rural citizens, at least those who they presume to be privileged (ie white). They do not realize they are criticizing the uneducated poor, largely disadvantaged black people in urban areas.
That's an extremely silly take.
It's like you think this is about compliance rather than, you know, ending the pandemic.
Would you please review https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and use HN as intended from now on? That means for intellectual curiosity.
Since it's too late to genuinely fix now, the best thing that can happen is shaming stupidity. Applying evolutionary pressure to individuals that take bad actions is an incredibly good idea. Making the unvaccinated modern lepers is good for society as a whole.
It's not compliance, it's acting rationally. Politically, I'm not even very far from the group most adamant about not getting vaccinated (card-carrying anti-Democrat, here), yet I still acknowledge that not getting vaccinated is an incredible act of stupidity. People who celebrate stupidity instead of acting rationally in times of plague should have evolutionary pressure applied.
It's too late to turn back time and fix the pandemic by forcing them to act rationally, but by applying pressure to prevent them from having success in society, we can make them much less likely to be around the next time this happens. The society of the United States has been doing things like this since it began quite successfully, and it would be ridiculous to stop doing it now.
Would that include stigmatizing people who insist on continuing a tactic that quite observably has flipped into being counterproductive?
As a society, we went from a period of it being socially acceptable to marry ridiculously young girls as an old man to the present day where it's unheard of. People will point to the law being the reason for this, but that's not actually the truth, really. The age of consent isn't really that high; in many states it's unrestricted at sixteen and much lower with loopholes. Also, in many cases, the raising of the age of consent is a historically-recent thing that followed the shaming.
We've managed to (largely) eradicate the case of "man finds a fourteen-to-sixteen year old girl and erases her future by making her responsible for children" in under a hundred years, and it came from shaming, not law.
I hear a lot of horrible stories about sexual abuse and enslavement in the modern world, so I'm not sure this has actually changed materially. I would be glad to see evidence that it actually has changed.
Is then also stupidity not to force vaccinated people to be tested regularly? "all available data" shows they spread the virus, therefore also being "crowd-harming"?
"How do vaccinated people spread Delta? What the science says"
Why should those with natural immunity be stigmatized?
Is this about immunity and getting out of a pandemic or is it about compliance and control or about something else entirely? Should be about the first, to me, and if so, natural immunity should not be stigmatized at all.
People who have had a ‘hybrid’ exposure to the virus. Specifically, they were infected with the coronavirus in 2020 and then immunized with mRNA vaccines…” *
Natural immunity is not nearly enough. Everyone should get vaccinated. Those who have had covid should get vaccinated so that they can get a chance of super-human SARS-variants protection. Those who have not caught covid so that they avoid the very high risk of long covid, and of course to reduce their risk of hospitalization by an order of magnitude.
* https://www.npr.org/sections/goatsandsoda/2021/09/07/1033677...
So no, "natural immunity" is not treated any differently from "artificial immunity", and it absolutely is about getting out of a pandemic without too many people dying. By the way, there is no difference. Immunity is immunity.
So I'm not saying your plan is ineffective, I'm saying your plan was already executed and finished. That's why we're at 80-something percent instead of what it would have been.
People stopped dying because of (their own) stupidity a long time ago. Selection can still occur if we stigmatize bad behaviors enough.
On the other hand, if we don't stigmatize it, people who are innocent of the sin of stupidity will be harmed. That said, selection would also do its good work in this case, just less effectively and with a sadder outcome for all.
The only way to have an intelligent nation that's pushing forward in terms of technological progress is to have a nation that embraces intelligence and shuns nonsensical stupidity.