arblify

Your questions are all reasonable. I'm not personally opposed to quantitative decision-making, but I'm also painfully aware of the limitations of quantitative methods, especially when applied under pressure. I would argue that a blind faith in mathematics is just as wrongheaded as the magical thinking you're describing.

To give a clear example of why I'm skeptical, look at the use of quantitative methods to conduct governance in the banking industry. It's not that we shouldn't have used numerical methods, it's just that they ended up being woefully insufficient because of how they were applied. There's no reason we couldn't make the same mistake here in a premature bid for some kind of certainty.

I'm not suggesting having no metrics, I'm talking about hard targets. Acknowledging that there are things we don't know about the problem and that we're not overcommitting to a course of action based on some specific target is reasonable.

At the same time, to your point, I would like to see clear explanations of "these are the aspects of the disease we are trying to understand (virality, mortality, etc)," these are the constraints on our healthcare system, these are the economic effects, here are the tradeoffs we're trying to make. All of that stuff is good, but it's a complex problem and assuming that we know enough at this point to set a clear numerical goal seems wrong to me. Describing general parameters for our data gathering and decision-making is good, though, and I agree that I'd like to see more of it.

Once you commit to some success metric, you're going to be stuck with it even it proves to be a bad metric. Let's say we all agree the "2 weeks with decreasing number of deaths" is a good target. Then we go back to work, and we discover that going back triggers a rapid spread and kills a bunch of people and starts to overwhelm hospitals. Now we need a new metric.

This is a novel scientific problem. Caution and study are warranted. People's lives are at stake.

I think you're right, we do need a plan, but we need trained epidemiologists and other public health figures to define that plan. Many features of disease spread are counterintuitive and we need people with training to help us, the public, understand the problem and reasonable solutions. When people like Michael Osterholm tell me that it is possible one or two million people will die in the United States, I believe him and I'm willing to go along with the plan. That said, I would like to see more clear definition of where the risk lies, how we can take small chances that have a low chance of going catastrophically wrong, and how we can responsibly try to revert to some kind of normality.

It actually does mean something, which is that freedom is not unlimited. Your freedom of action ends at the point where it harms someone else. Classically, "your right to throw your fist ends at my face." It's the same reason (legally) you can't point a firearm at me.

What we have here is the problem that merely by breathing around someone, you can cause them harm. Unfortunately we lack the ability to determine whether or not you will, but given the contagiousness of this disease if you are infected (or become infected) it is quite likely.