> the CDC is at worst going to do what it thinks is best for you

I don't want to get involved with what the CDC is doing here (because they're probably not doing anything too nefarious), but I would like to pull this point out. The intentions of an institution (or at least surface level justifications) are kind of unrelated to the point. What an institution thinks is best for someone and what that individual thinks is best for themselves are often quite different.

I'm reminded of the old CS Lewis quote here:

> Of all tyrannies, a tyranny exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive. It may be better to live under robber barons than under omnipotent moral busybodies. The robber baron’s cruelty may sometimes sleep, his cupidity may at some point be satiated; but those who torment us for our own good will torment us without end, for they do so with the approval of their own conscience.

Intentions and outcomes can certainly be different, but I think intentions provide a higher floor for the downside risk.

> but I think intentions provide a higher floor for the downside risk.

The quote at the end was supposed to convey the opposite message.

I think the risk C.S. describes there is the endless nature of the torment, not the severity. Stung by gadflies, not dismembered by a nemesis.

I don't approve of using the term conspiracies as a way to denounce the questioning of true intentions or possible problem areas.

Unless someone can prove that no one involved in the tuskegee "incident"[0] is no longer employed or influential at the CDC I will just resign myself to thinking that THEY are the conspiracy theorist, a conspiracy to seem infallible or at least incorruptible. Such a concept is of course ridiculous, don't turn off your brain with an appeal to authority.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tuskegee_Syphilis_Study

EDIT: spelling

>Unless someone can prove that no one involved in the tuskegee "incident"[0] is no longer employed or influential at the CDC I will just resign myself to thinking that THEY are the conspiracy theorist,

The Tuskegee Experiment started 90 years ago and ended 50 years ago. I don't know what proof you need, but the simple facts of human biology basically guarantee that anyone who had any power during that timeframe is no longer working at the CDC.

There are doctors, lawyers, administrators, and talking heads in their 80s who are well known and respected in their fields today. My knowledge of biology and arithmetic puts them at around 30 years old in the year 1972. That's the year the program ended.

If not the CDC then maybe we should just question everyone's motives and I apologize for trying the sensationalist approach.

EDIT. Maths. Unedit. Still maths

>maybe we should just question everyone's motives

At some point, you have to have some level of trust in society and its institutions. Or become a paranoid nutter.

Maybe the paranoid nutters are right (just because you're paranoid doesn't mean they aren't out to get you), but that's still no way to live.

The problem with paranoia is that it's one of those things that can be self-fulfilling the more common it is, as the paranoid nutters get into power and work together disable the conspiracies they perceive at everyone's expense, thus justifying and magnifying the beliefs of the paranoid nutjobs on the other side (and so on).

> At some point, you have to have some level of trust in society and its institutions. Or become a paranoid nutter.

I see this as a false dichotomy. It is possible to simply assume that everyone is doing their best, and that is "not necessarily great" due to poor system design and various other reasons, or it may be even worse due to some bad actors - but necessarily becoming a paranoid nutter is a false belief, and the commonality of such beliefs makes me suspicious that they are not entirely organic.

Not denouncing, just answering a loaded question by putting my finger in the barrel.

I think we can talk about our concerns in a realistic way without resorting to baseless speculation. It's fair to question whether the CDC should be using this data.

The thing about Tuskegee is that it wasn't a conspiracy. It started in 1932, in a time when the majority of Americans probably would have supported it if they knew about it. That doesn't make it OK, but it does make it a poor example of a conspiracy.

Systems and incentives are much better predictors of behavior.

Yes, we should talk about the system and incentives of the revolving-doors between massive corporations and government bodies meant to govern those corporations. With the cash/status/power incentives attached.

You don't need an explicit intentional criminal conspiracy when a "conspiracy of common interests" can produce similar results.

I don't believe conspiracy necessarily has to be for a goal that is against majority support. I.e. someone may conspire against a minority. Conspiracy is by virtue of not disclosing actions or their goals. I.e. the subjects of the study would definitely see it as a conspiracy against them.

The relevant argument here would be the extent to which this approach to scientific experimentation was normal at that point in time and how it compares to current protocols. I.e. whether CDC aligns with scientific research protocols and therefore the focus would be on whether these protocols are strong enough to warrant broad access to data without consent.

Acknowledged, I mostly don't want to talk past others who are hung up on conspiracies (pro or against). Much more fruitful is definitely the analysis of strategies and games and actors. Their power or influence and their motivations.

Thanks for your thoughtful response.

The Tuskegee Experiment ended 50 years ago. One would have to have had a rather long career to have been employed at the CDC both then and now.

Anthony Fauci has been at NIH since 1968. That might be a rare example, but long careers do happen.

Tuskegee, fwiw, was in 1932 - 1972

The career is long certainly but I think we all believe we are evolving in our careers. No one here would want to be accused of working in the same way or having the same knowledge in year 1 of their career compared to today.

The CDC has a lot to make up for - it also started in 1946, after tuskegee was started

>and is constrained by constitutional checks and balances.

You can't go a decade of American history without some sort of "yeah that's F'ed up" thing happening that was done with good intentions. Saying constitutional checks and balances prevent bad things from happening is like when the police say they investigated themselves. In reality the public needs to remain vigilant and press the issue.

> Unless you buy into conspiracies, the CDC is at worst going to do what it thinks is best for you, and is constrained by constitutional checks and balances.

Technically, someone buying into conspiracies would at most have a correlation to CDC activities, it couldn't exert a causal force.

Also, you don't actually know what the CDC is going to do, or how well it is constrained by constitutional checks and balances - you can speculate and form a belief, but you do not have actual knowledge.

>... The Mafia? Any other criminal or terrorist organization or individual? The police operating under an incorrect warrant? A creepy ex?

The mafia is easy. Pay them and they DGAF what you do. Creepy ex is more or less a non-issue because any threat of violence one person can bring can be matched by another one person.

It's the police, terrorists and other well resourced but potentially capricious organizations (like the CDC, or any other federal bureaucracy, obviously the trigger happy ones are higher on the list), the kind of organizations who can send a dozen thugs to kick in your door and who have diffused responsibility across so many people you can't "get even" that you don't want coming after you.

>the CDC is at worst going to do what it thinks is best for you,

Every horror in history was committed with the best of intentions.

Edit: and to be clear, I'm not too worried about the CDC themselves, I'm worried about the legions of useful idiots that will happily take whatever they say and run with it. If the CDC makes BS or politically charged recommendations there is a myriad of other institutions (government and otherwise) that will see that as their ticket to do whatever bad thing they were already fishing for a reason to do. I don't want anyone having my data. But given the choice I'd rather have people who want to sell me penis pills and time shares have my data than people who want to tell me how to live.

Those horrors in history were created through the combination of good intentions (also integral to the best of human history), and the dehumanization of subgroups. What exactly do you fear from the CDC, and who do you fear they will do it to? Not just a challenge, a genuine question.

>Those horrors in history were created through the combination of good intentions (also integral to the best of human history), and the dehumanization of subgroups

The CDC has a historical record of such things. What makes you think human beings are incapabale of repeating such crimes against humanity?

I don't. But so could elementary school teachers, the National Black Caucus, or the sanitation workers union. It's much more productive to talk about actual concerns. Do you have any to share?

>so could elementary school teachers

Is there any historical precedent of elementary school teachers committing crimes against humanity comparable to public health officials?

>It's much more productive to talk about actual concerns. Do you have any to share?

Are you not familiar with any of the historical atrocities committed by public health officials across the world since the beginning of "public health"?

The holocaust had decidedly not "good intentions". No, not even by its own definition, and definitely not in the sense the term is constantly abused as some magic bullet to refute any position that is otherwise unassailable.

'any threat of violence one person can bring can be matched by another one person.'

So thousands of people that are burgled, mugged and murdered by random criminals every year are a non-problem. Organised crime is a non problem.

You suffering a hypothetical potential for overreach by the CDC in some undefined timeframe is a real problem

It was public health officials, doctors and psychiatrists who helped lay the foundation for the holocaust, under the auspices of public health and fighting disease.

https://perspectives.ushmm.org/collection/public-health-unde....

He was just paraphrasing a famous quote.

Don't be obtuse.

The Nazis gassed people because they thought that eliminating the demographics they were gassing would lead to a better society. Sure the people at the top knew it was questionable but the guy loading the train had spent a decade reading newspapers full of junk and thought he was deporting undesirables.

The American Indians who's culture was systematically destroyed, all those people the eugenicists sterilized, the black communities that were turned into crap over the 50s and 60s, all of that was done by people trying to their little part make the world a better place.

You are being obtuse - in neither of the cases did anyone involved believe people being killed were killed for their own good. The 'other' were being killed so that the right people can benefit.

How is this comparable to the topic at hand?

Fine. You're right. That was unfair. I'm just annoyed that there is wholesale bullshit going on in this comment thread about the data and I applied that annoyance to you. Consider the comment withdrawn.

Thank you for being reasonable.

In all those cases there was a pre-existing, widespread social bias and open bigotry against the groups being targeted - which of course doesn't make it right, but does explain why such things were tolerated and even thought to be good ideas in those societies. But in most of those cases, I would argue that the intentions of the leadership enacting such policies did not do so out of pure-though-extremely-misguided intentions. They acted in various ways to disenfranchise and disempower (gross understatement in the case of the holocaust!) the groups being targeted, playing to the gallery and entrenching their own power.

As I read the sentiment in the US (as an outsider), I find it hard to believe the CDC are playing to the gallery here. I think there is a genuine intention on the part of the CDC (despite the CDC being a key bogeyman in many flavours of fever-dream). The problem is that the culture of secrecy and "for your own good" in the US is so entrenched (because it's soooo much easier than trying to educate folks), that combined with past mistakes, trust has been irrevocably eroded to the extent that everything is doubted by everyone.

My own view is that this is symptomatic of a huge malaise in the US and to a lesser (but growing) extent in the rest of the world. Can the idea of "society" function in the face of such mistrust in instututions? I doubt it. We are increasingly voluntarily partitioning ourselves into tribes/bantustans and shrinking the circle of trust. To my mind that model doesn't scale well with population. Bad times ahead.

That's a perfectly pointless and tautological argument, then. Because anything anybody ever did was considered by that person to be useful to themselves at that point of time.

It has nothing to do with the cliché about "good intentions", which rests on a theory of using some universally accepted "good" as cover or argument for some action, or even as the true motivation for actions that end up having unwanted side effects.

The Nazis did not use anything like that to advertise the Holocaust. In fact they did not advertise the Holocaust at all: while any thinking German had an inkling, official communications only ever spoke of "resettlements".

There was very little virtue signaling with the Nazis, in other words. Much like their brethren today, they very much knew they were the baddies and embraced that status with a certain sense of "so what?", hence skulls as insignia: it's an open acknowledgement that you reject common concepts of virtue with full knowledge, and that you enjoy using raw power to do so. "Owning the libs" 1.0, so to speak.