| ▲ | rayiner 7 days ago |
| The second point is critical. Relevant testimony from the former head of the NIH during the pandemic, Francis Collins: https://www.bladenjournal.com/opinion/72679/confession-of-a-... > “If you’re a public-health person and you’re trying to make a decision, you have this very narrow view of what the right decision is.” “So you attach infinite value to stopping the disease and saving a life. You attach zero value to whether this actually totally disrupts people’s lives, ruins the economy, and has many kids kept out of school in a way that they never quite recover from.” |
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| ▲ | dekhn 7 days ago | parent | next [-] |
| I'm pretty happy Collins came to that conclusion and learned from it. I don't expect public health officials to have a utilitarian function that maximizes global health considering second order effects. This should have been stated more clearly at the beginning of the epidemic. |
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| ▲ | Levitz 7 days ago | parent | next [-] | | >I don't expect public health officials to have a utilitarian function that maximizes global health considering second order effects. Why not? It sounds to me that is the ideal scenario. If I go to the doctor I want them to maximize for health, it's up to me to make health concessions In the same way, we have an entire political class who should be able to look at the health of the population and gauge which measures are worth taking and which aren't, no? | | |
| ▲ | dekhn 7 days ago | parent [-] | | Ideally, i guess, in some mental models, we'd love to have some sort of super powerful system that can compute a global utility function that considers second (and third, etc) order effects accurately enough to plan out actions that maximize the global utility (without violating ethical norms) until we are immortal and have unlimited energy resources and ability to manipulate matter. In practice, we instead have centers that focus on first-order effects and who advocate for their position (from an authority based on scientific knowledge, and preparation for emergencies) which are then evaluated and mixed with other centers by political leaders to incorporate the best attempt at considering second and further effects. Everybody has a different utilitarian model and we don't have enough data or algorithms to predict second or third order effects (we usually fall back on "wisdom" from prior experience). |
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| ▲ | gotoeleven 7 days ago | parent | prev [-] | | Some people were saying we should consider second order effects from the very beginning. I believe the term used for these people was "grandma killers." | | |
| ▲ | immibis 5 days ago | parent [-] | | Those were the same people causing the second order effects. And the second order effects they caused killed my grandma. So I don't see the problem with referring to them as such. |
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| ▲ | lmm 7 days ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| While I agree with the fundamental point, I find that a kind of ironic choice of examples. I wonder what kind of person attaches so much value to keeping kids in school whether it's good for them or not. |
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| ▲ | rayiner 7 days ago | parent | next [-] | | It was well established before COVID that missing in-school days has a major adverse effect on learning. Keeping kids out of school had exactly the predicted effect—reading and math scores fell significantly: https://www.gse.harvard.edu/ideas/news/24/01/despite-progres.... We also knew early on that COVID posed little risk to kids themselves. So it was entirely rational for parents, especially of young children, to value keeping those kids in school over the negligible health risks (to the kids) of COVID exposure. | | |
| ▲ | jhedwards 7 days ago | parent | next [-] | | The point (as I understand it) was not to protect the kids themselves from covid, but that kids are active vectors of illness: they get sick easily and rapidly spread it to everyone around them. Sending kids to school during a pandemic is basically asking to fast-track that sickness to everyone in the community. | | |
| ▲ | willy_k 7 days ago | parent | next [-] | | That’s why you focus resources on protecting those who you don’t want kids to spread it to, the sick and the elderly, a la the suppressed Great Barrington Declaration. | | |
| ▲ | anigbrowl 6 days ago | parent | next [-] | | It wasn't 'suppressed'; it was announced to wide acclaim, others took issue with its premises, and there were significantly more of the latter than the former. There was considerable skepticism of the sponsorship of the libtertarian AEIR, and the fact that hundreds of thousands of people had already died in the US by the time of its publication probably had a lot to do with its lack of popularity. | |
| ▲ | immibis 5 days ago | parent | prev [-] | | Or uh, we could stop the virus in its tracks and go back to normal? This was the New Zealand plan, and it worked. |
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| ▲ | nradov 7 days ago | parent | prev [-] | | There was never any scientific basis for that belief. It was just made up without conducting experiments. And if fact we saw that some countries like Sweden kept primary schools open throughout the pandemic (without mask mandates) and it was fine. | | |
| ▲ | gamerdonkey 7 days ago | parent [-] | | > There was never any scientific basis for that belief. This is an incorrect statement that can be fixed with minutes of research. https://www.pnas.org/doi/abs/10.1073/pnas.0610941104
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S00916... One might argue about the quality of the research or point out contradicting studies, but saying there was zero basis is flat-out false. Adding that the idea was "made up" is a great example of bending the idea of science to prop up a point. | | |
| ▲ | mike_hearn 7 days ago | parent [-] | | COVID is not the Spanish Flu or asthma. Rayiner's point was about SARS-CoV-2 and he is correct. You can read papers published in 2020 to see. | | |
| ▲ | willy_k 6 days ago | parent [-] | | And COVID and the Spanish Flu essentially targeted opposite populations, the former being dangerous to those with compromised immune function while the latter turned strong immune systems against the body in a “cytokine storm”. |
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| ▲ | lmm 7 days ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | Fewer days in school reducing test scores is very much expected. Going from that to claiming an adverse effect on learning, much less an overall harm, is quite a leap. | | |
| ▲ | rayiner 7 days ago | parent [-] | | Test scores accurately measure learning. That’s one of the most robustly supported facts in all of education, and something virtually nobody in Asia or Europe disagrees with. | | |
| ▲ | stefan_ 7 days ago | parent | next [-] | | Which is why reorganizing all school systems around teaching the standardized test and judging teachers by these results has been such an overwhelming success that "virtually nobody [..] disagrees with". | | |
| ▲ | umanwizard 7 days ago | parent [-] | | The US has probably the least test-focused education system in the developed world (you don’t need to take any exam to graduate high school except in some cases an extremely easy one as a formality). Would you claim the US education system is better than the UK, France or Germany? | | |
| ▲ | mrguyorama 7 days ago | parent | next [-] | | There is no "US" education system in reality. There is a "Maine" education system, and a "Colorado" education system, and a "Florida" education system. They have wildly different rules, designs, systems, and results. | |
| ▲ | MisterTea 6 days ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | > The US has probably the least test-focused education system in the developed world And there I was, in American schools being told test scores were 80% of my grade with homework accounting for 10% and class projects another 10%. Both high school and university. Fucking liars. | | |
| ▲ | umanwizard 5 days ago | parent [-] | | Presumably random exams made up by your teachers, not nationwide or statewide standardized tests, though. |
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| ▲ | lmm 7 days ago | parent | prev [-] | | The fact that we even have year-by-year, grade-by-grade test figures for the US implies it's significantly more test-focused than the UK, where those tests simply don't exist for most grades. | | |
| ▲ | willy_k 7 days ago | parent | next [-] | | Are you talking about finals or standardized tests? Because from my experience at least, the latter has minimal impact on the track that kids follow (could put on you advanced math or reading track but there is opportunity for mobility regardless) and only the SAT/ACT (highest score of however many times on chooses to take them) is used to determine where someone can go to college. But test scores (even MCAT/LSAT) will never determine what someone can study, just where, which is not the case in the UK per my understanding. | |
| ▲ | umanwizard 7 days ago | parent | prev [-] | | Whether you get any qualification at all in the UK is entirely determined by high-stakes standardized tests, at least on the main academic track (GCSE and A levels) | | |
| ▲ | lmm 6 days ago | parent [-] | | Sure. But students have very little influence on the system. How test-focused a schooling system is isn't going to depend on how much test results affect the students, it's going to depend on how much test results affect the teachers and especially the administrators. |
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| ▲ | davorak 7 days ago | parent | prev [-] | | > Test scores accurately measure learning. I think you claim to much here. Or are using odd definitions, to me at least. Sure you can extract something about what has been learned with properly made tests administered correctly. It is the tool that is used because it is the tool we have, not because it 'measures learning' in all the ways we want to measure. |
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| ▲ | Elinvynia 7 days ago | parent | prev [-] | | I'm sure the brain damage that COVID still causes (there are 3x more cases this year than in 2020, fun fact) is more of a danger to kids than staying home. |
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| ▲ | readthenotes1 7 days ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | Or masking kids when it's actively harmful to them? | |
| ▲ | cpursley 7 days ago | parent | prev [-] | | I think most reasonable and quite frankly, honest, people understood now and then, that taking the kids out of school would fuck them up pretty bad. When the actual science was suggesting we take care of the medically vulnerable and elderly. But hey, there’s an election to win! | | |
| ▲ | tzs 7 days ago | parent [-] | | Who do you think closed schools in order to try to get an electoral advantage? |
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| ▲ | kenjackson 7 days ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| I don't think anyone attached zero value to everything else. The legit question is how do you weigh all of the factors. How do you weigh making things slightly worse for a bunch of people and way worse for some, etc... It reminds me of a comedian snippet I saw recently who was asking the crowd... "Has life gotten back to how it was before Covid", and one person in the audience yells out, "No"... and the comedian says, "OK, tell me one thing you had before Covid that you don't have now"? And the person says, "My family". The comedian goes -- "Oh yeah, I guess that was the point of it all wasn't it..." |
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| ▲ | Eextra953 7 days ago | parent | prev [-] |
| I am taking a graduate level public health course and this trade off is literally covered in the first lecture its something they call prevention paradox. It's surprising to see that the head of the NIH would say something like this when it's literally part of the curriculum for public health. I'm so tired of political opinions masqueraded as we know better than the experts or we know better than the scientist. |
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| ▲ | slices 7 days ago | parent [-] | | how many public health officials acted with awareness of the prevention paradox during covid? |
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