Comments

  • Coronavirus
    Yeah, but how did it start going off the shelves in the first place? I understand what is happening now, in terms of the psychology involved, but I don't get how it started. — Echarmion

    Although I think
    ↪dclements
    observation is valid, there is also a numbers explanation that toilet paper takes up a lot of shelf space with little value density, so things are optimized to be "just enough" in both the front and the back storage ... and the regional storage as well. So, even a slight up tick due to people "stocking up" creates a depletion of toilet paper first in certain locations, which then causes the run on toilet paper in other locations as word gets around, and then social media drives the phenomena globally. A reddit poster clued me into this; toilet paper dynamics was not something I previously identified as a global important phenomena, but I've been trying to lean quick.

    However, there's also a symbolic explanation that people realize the shits hitting the fan, metaphorically, and the toilet paper buying is a symbolic talisman of sorts that offers some protection.
  • Coronavirus
    I haven't said anything at all about radically reducing the human population deliberately, or anything about how such a thing (done in what most would think an acceptable way) would be possible or even desirable. So, it looks like it isn't I who is failing to follow the conversation. — Janus

    I have more time now, as I've solved my organizational strategy problems.

    What you haven't followed about this conversation is that we have been discussing an evolving situation. When we started, containment measures were still possible to significantly slow the global spread of the virus. You were arguing that "stopping flights", the obvious and effective tool to maintain a global containment strategy, would have higher costs than benefits.

    Obviously, in hindsight it's easy to change your position to "oh, oh, yes it would have been useful then, I wasn't saying stopping flights would not be a reasonable cost to pay to stop the pandemic. But when we started discussing, stopping flights was still feasible to slow the pandemic. If that was your position, why didn't you say so? (hint: it wasn't your position)

    Moreover, we were discussing my point that flights should have been stopped even before then when it was still possible to mostly contain to China, even in December when the first cases of a new SARS virus was known (that China covered it up as long as possible, which is just even more reason to ban all flight as soon as we do know as we shouldn't trust China to tell us the extent of the problem; they fooled us once with SARS-1, now fooled us again with SARS-2! how is that possible!! but this isn't aimed at you, but the bureaucrats who thought letting China have their way about lights would be better for the stock market anyway). That the sooner flights are stopped to maintain containment, not only the better for containment, but the better for the air industry as things can continue more normally elsewhere (compared to continuing flights, letting containment fail, and create the situation now where there are flight bans and collapse in air travelers on top of the far more devastating affects of global and simultaneous pandemic).

    So, what were your points about the economic cost of stopping flying actually about? Which windows, starting in December when the first cases were known, until now was stopping flying a bad idea due to the economic costs of that and when was it a good idea? And please cite yourself saying so when we started discussing this topic.

    Or rather, your position was clearly stopping flights was a high cost and it was reasonable to let flights continue, as you did not realize what the pandemic meant. Now that you do, you've reconfigured your belief system to believe that you can plausibly switch positions without it being obvious.

    But it is obvious, it's bad faith, and simply foolish to not just admit you were wrong about stopping flights something to be economically worried about. You should admit that my position that stopping the flights has a very small, easily managed cost, compared to the benefits of maintaining containment as long and as well as possible.

    So, when exactly, when we started discussing, did you mention that you were "for stopping flights" in a containment strategy, but are only advocating keeping flights open once containment has failed (which it had not yet done when we started discussing) and it's too late to have significant impact now.

    So, you're certainly now against Trump's ban of flights from Europe?

    As for the depopulation.

    My position is that there's no "feasible" way to depopulate, I was clear the first time and re-explained a second time.

    So when you say:

    On the other hand, if it were decided to simply euthanaze 80 or 90 percent of the population how exactly do think that would adversely affect the natural environment? — Janus

    My question is "how do you feasibly do that?"; how do you feasibly euthanaze 80 or 90 percent of the population.

    Now, your original comment was:

    The basic problem, that which is creating the conditions for runaway capitalism, industrial farming practices, resource depletion, soil, land and ocean degradation and pollution, is overpopulation. — Janus

    When you say "the basic problem" that implies that that's the basic problem to solve; that action should be taken about the basic problem, which you are proposing is population.

    My counter argument was that of Impact = Population x Technology x Affluence, we cannot feasibly act on population, but we can on Technology and Affluence. I.e. that the basic problem is technology and affluence, not population.

    Now if by "problem" you mean "something that can't feasibly be solved" and therefore is simply a condition and not a problem. I completely agree that a high population is a necessary condition to get to high impact with our current technology and affluence configurations.

    Of course, if you don't really understand what you're saying nor really understand what I say in response, I'd say that's not following the conversation doubly so.

    Re-read carefully out exchange from the beginning and try to remember that the situation when we started is not the situation we have now. At what point do your points about "stopping flying would have terrible economic implications" make any sense. Are you saying that now Trump banning flights from Europe will have those terrible consequences? Or not now but if he did it last week or next week? Or are you arguing that flights shouldn't be banned only before the crisis started and then only after the crisis is resolved, but that for sure flights should have been stopped in a reasonable containment strategy? I.e. you agree with my position all along.
  • Coronavirus
    Just doing some poking around and had clear up some misinformation. You even had me convinced for a second there. — NOS4A2

    That's real progress. You have glimpsed for a single second what removing propaganda beliefs from your mind looks like.

    Perhaps there is hope for you yet.

    I don't have much time at the moment, lot's to do to reorganize my organization's strategy in light of the pandemic. However, I live in a Nordic country precisely because public policy, institutions, individuals in those institutions, and culture are the most resilient to this sort of event, which has been viewed as inevitable by the community that does the relevant systems analysis of global stability.

    I moved here over 10 years ago (before the 2008 financial crash, that I also knew was coming and was discussing on the previous forum in 2006; although a big risk, clearly solvable by printing money, but one never knows). Why build something long term somewhere if the location is not resilient to global disruptions that are mathematically guaranteed?

    Now at that time I lived in Canada, which has a lot of the same institutions and cooperative culture as the European countries ... but is next to the US with lot's of interdependence. Additionally, at that time, there was a conservative government in Canada with a "crazy light" version of the tea-party beliefs, so I could also not be sure those institutions would remain for long. So, on the whole, not a risk worth taking (unless my goal was to "fight the good fight" in Canada, which it isn't, I have have much more important things to do, and a stable home-base is a critical criteria to be able to do my work over the long term in order to accumulate the value).

    I provide this little anecdote as food for thought of the advantages of unbiased critical thinking: strategic decisions can mitigate adverse events literally decades away. Because I live in a Nordic country, I have few worries in this situation. There has not even been any panic buying; plenty of toilet paper still at the shop yesterday, and I bought only one package as I would normally do. Why? Because everyone here knows society will continue to function pretty well even in severe crisis because the government design makes sense and is filled with high-competence individuals running all the institutions we could possibly want in this situation; if there is a resource shortage, critical resources will be distributed in a reasonable way in a timely and organized manner, and neighbors will help each other out for the small stuff rather than, say ... hmm, I don't know, riot because of running out of money without any of the institutions that are needed to be already in place to take care of vulnerable members society in good times (because of a moral duty to them) and in bad times (because the breakdown of society isn't good for anyone, and forcing a lot of people to live "on the edge" is ripe pickings for social breakdown when a strong gust pushes them over; rioting and crime are a completely reasonable response if there is no reasonable social contract to point to, only coercive submission to sign the dotted line; and the riots and the crime, will be coming quick, since young hooligans fear not the virus but will find it very interesting that a lot of old people are suddenly "away from home" and the authorities are distracted, followed by marshal law not far behind and lot's of gun injuries to treat on-top of the virus; but we'll see how crime plays out in the US compared to the Nordics, we'll need to check in on this later too). If I'm right, there's not really any safe place to be, which is why, the time to "get the hell out of dodge" was over a decade ago as to be able to build up new social relations in a more stable place. Yes, I've paid higher taxes, especially for a CEO of a corporation compared to my counterparts in the US (remembering even the taxes they do pay and aren't hidden in offshore arrangement, a large part goes to inefficient imperial financing even if you want empire, such as storing new tanks in the desert or paying mercenaries absurd fees, so this must be discounted in a fair analysis; for in terms of defense, mandatory conscription is effective and inexpensive) ... but, since I don't run a fortune 500 country I can't go to some bunker on a island, and so I believe many of my counter-parts will soon be of the opinion that it's difficult to put a price on a reasonable government design -- that they weren't "long term greedy" enough.

    But let's check in on these predictions in a few weeks time.

    As for you're "clearing things up".

    You are confusing "words" with "other words" that aren't the same thing.

    The Fortune article I cite, yes does refer to a budget cut for the CDC in 2019 that is also in your graph. Note that 2019 is before 2020, the year we are now in. Also note that "cutting the budget" to get rid of non-corrupt people, and then increasing the budget as a favour to the cronies now in charge is classic corruption tactics. Trump has been increasing the budget deficit to a trillion, so the "fiscal responsibility" of republicans is not really the issue, the issue is corrupt use of all that money, which requires, from time to time, getting rid of competent managers through temporary budget measures.

    But that's not the important part for people who know how to think.

    Just because Ziemer’s position was discontinued does not mean everyone who was part of the team was fired or that all of the functions of the directorate ceased. According to reporting by the Atlantic and the Washington Post, some team members were shifted to other groups, and others took over some of Ziemer’s duties. An NSC spokesman at the time said that the administration “remains committed to global health, global health security and biodefense, and will continue to address these issues with the same resolve under the new structure. — NOS4A2

    For a critical thinker, the obvious implication Rear Admiral Ziemer quitting is that he is protesting mismanagement, such as, perhaps, the head of the CDC and FDA being replaced by sycophants.

    It's not just a budget question. Mismanagement is much worse than budget cuts; and the implication of Ziemers (without a hand-off to a replacement) is that the whole thing is starting to stink, and he won't be apart of it.

    Now, Fortune can't say this because there's Ziemer didn't go into the behind the scenes details (he will certainly be doing that at a congressional hearing sooner or later), but it's assumed by critical thinkers that competent people quitting an organization unexpectedly is an extremely negative sign.

    Likewise, any critical thinker does not conclude that "his team being disbanded" is easily mitigated by moving some of those people elsewhere and adding "defend against global pandemic" to various job descriptions.

    A team is more than the sum of it's parts.

    Furthermore, the Fortune article is specifically talking about running out of budget of the pandemic program. That a program loses budget does not mean that the institution as a whole loses budget, the money can be put elsewhere (in thing like, oh I don't know, corrupt handouts to friends).

    I don't know why you want to cover Trump's ass on this issue, but I can assure you it's just too big on this occasion. The crisis has been clearly developing since January, and only a few days ago Trump seemed to believe that keeping people on the cruise ship would have some impact on the "numbers" (rather than being a drop in the exponentially expanding bucket), that the numbers staying low by a gimmick of keeping people on a ship was a good plan, and that saying such a stupid analysis of things out loud doesn't just betray total ignorance and incompetence and "losing grip on the situation" but also a complete lack of caring for the people on-board.

    He went from downplaying it as similar magnitude as the flu ... to banning all flights from Europe (too late for containment) and calling an emergency.

    If you read my comments because "you were almost convinced", remember that I started when containment was still possible and the "official policy" ... but, true to critical thinking form, I accurately predicted that containment was actually abandoned as a policy since policy makers thought "letting it burn through the population" would, yes kill a lot of people, but keep things normal and the stock market humming; because, under normal circumstances, sacrificing people's health for the stock market is completely usual and ordinary decision to make (because the cause and effect are sufficiently separated that a large portion of the population can be made to believe poison isn't bad, maybe even good for them ... or, at least, the free market feeding people poison is good for investors, maybe even some God given right).

    Read my first comment I posted here carefully:

    "In my view Trump has now secured the essential state power mechanisms (why he's now so happy on TV) thanks to unquestioning loyalty of the Republican base that have kept all the Republican senators and congress members in line, and avoided a revolution of the moderate Republicans teaming with the Democrats to impeach him.

    So great for Trump. And a great day for Trump supporters for sure.

    However, supporting an incompetent statesman who falls in love with dictators is not necessarily a good future for any American, including Republicans. When a real crisis comes, history has shown that governments filled with loyal sycophants simply lose their grip on the situation."
    — boethius - April 2018 - Re: Kavanaugh and Ford     — boethius

    Two years ago I predicted Trump was totally secure against impeachment removing him as he clearly had the Republican party by their sweaty balls as well as having the few women senators in there "grabbed by the pussy". This prediction has already proved to be correct.

    I also predicted: "supporting an incompetent statesman who falls in love with dictators is not necessarily a good future for any American, including Republicans" and that "governments filled with loyal sycophants simply lose their grip on the situation".

    So, let's check-in in a few weeks what you think of these predictions after this "foreign virus" hits closer to home.
  • Coronavirus
    The thing is once the virus gets into many countries, the only way to eradicate if that is at all possible will be to cease all air travel, because otherwise closed communities where it is eradicated will be re-infected. — Janus

    You haven't been following this conversation, and I no longer have time for you.
  • Coronavirus
    "It is not the virus itself, but rather the fear and panic related to the virus and the associated altered economic behaviour that could be a damaging tipping point, forcing the global economy onto a darker path," said Katrina Ell, a senior economist at Moody's Analytics. — BBC

    What's that "behavior" terrible for the economy? People not wanting themselves or their loved one's to die for a preventable reason.

    If people had just "taken it", carried on as usual and not bothered about shaving a few points off the demographics, things would be merrily steaming along.

    Why the neoliberal intellectuals are so shocked is that governments actually have to act in the interests of the public over the stock market in this instance. It is too quick and traumatic experience to not react once that becomes clear. Which is why Western governments, each in turn, wait until the emergency status is reached before reacting; what's happening just doesn't compute in neoliberal land. People should just rollover and die for the sake of the stock market, why aren't they just sucking it up and dying!
  • Coronavirus
    Well surely if "international travel" includes "international trade" then I think those "crazy affects" are almost certain...eventually (you are right that temporary measures may not have a huge impact, but if temporary is 1 year or more, it seems that more than 3% of the worlds population would die as a result (about 34 countries are dependent on food imports, for example). — ZhouBoTong

    No where is it implied that air travel means all international trade.

    But, to clarify the matter, a pandemic is not arrested by stopping all international trade, whether in the air, at sea or over the internet, but by stopping vectors of the pathogen.

    Let me be as precise and erudite as you desire me to be. Effective containment on the global scale, once a pathogen is endemic in a region, simply cannot be done without extreme restrictions on air travel.

    We don't know exactly how the virus is transmitted, exactly how close you need to be ... but we do know that you can't get sick from someone on another continent. For you to get it from them, in the short term, one of you, or something, needs to fly.

    As for trade, we don't know if a bunch of factory workers in china coughing all day on amazon packages can't transmit the disease. WHO says cash can be a vector, seems reasonable you could put cash in a package and it would still be a vector. So it would have needed to be checked. If it did, then yes, to contain the virus international shipping needs to be paused too. However, it's an easy technical problem to solve, as most goods can be decontaminated relatively easily or just left to sit for whatever times is needed, and the decontamination process, such as just heating, can be streamlined for anything essential.

    Even if stopping air travel doesn't maintain containment, the pandemic would be significantly slowed down: buying time to prepare, research, organize, optimize a strategy, as well as stagger the regions the virus hits as containment fails at different times. Yes, big hit to the airlines and disruptive to a small section of upper middle class people who happen to be flying international at or around that time.

    Way less economically disruptive than what's happening now though. Flying is only one of many industries, and if containment was implemented early and effectively, flights could continue between all other regions, instead we now have global collapse in air travelers due to bans or cancels ... and the collapse of the rest of the global economy ... and hundreds of thousands to millions of people dying, in the near term future to be precise, for a preventable reason.
  • Coronavirus
    I'm saying the effects of stopping all international flights would likely have incalculable short, medium and long term effects on economies, and that humanity may just not have the economic and, more importantly energy, resources to recover civilization from a catastrophic collapse. I'm not saying that would necessarily be the case, but that neither you nor I have any way of knowing whether it would be the case or even how likely such an outcome would be. — Janus

    Ok, let's see in 3 weeks if you still think stopping all the flights when it would have prevented or significantly slowed the pandemic is what would have had the "incalculable short, medium and long term effects" leading to "catastrophic collapse", whereas the "let the pandemic run free" scenario we're now living, that includes air travel bans and significantly reduced air passengers in general, has less economic consequences.
  • Coronavirus
    I can't speak for Boethius, but if there is a collapse of civilisation, there could be some quite adverse effects in the short term, like mass fires, nuclear explosions, wreckless destruction of ecosystems.
    — Punshhh

    Sure there could be such adverse effects, but they are not necessary concomitants of civilizational collapse. The one worry would be decommissioning of nuclear facilities.     — Janus

    I thought
    ↪Punshhh
    had adequately explained my point; unfortunately not.

    When I say "there's no feasible way to lower population significantly (to 0.1 - 0.2 of current levels) without collapsing the ecosystem" I mean there's no feasible way.

    How do you actually get rid of all those people? Why is suddenly the world devoid of complex second order consequence in such a plan?

    Please explain how you reduce the population by 80 to 90 percent without the destruction of the environment as either the mechanism of population reduction or an immediate consequence. People are just gonna get a letter in the post and walk into the sea?
  • Coronavirus
    Do any human beings actually support this principle? — Metaphysician Undercover

    Yes.

    People who believe only in maximizing their own gain, do not want society to frustrate their efforts. Completely coherently with this worldview they will argue that their profits should be prioritized over any given definition of the public good. If they are diversified in the stock market, they will argue that whatever policy increases the value of the stock market is good.

    However, although it is a perfectly coherent worldview, it does not create a coherent public position on any given topic. You'll need a public and private position so to speak.

    Mostly, the counter argument to any given definition of the public good that the profits in question represent a threat to, is the framework of "rights". That there is a "right" to sell whatever it is and to do whatever actions are needed to maximize that selling that has become legal due to previous victories of this world view, such as deceptive marketing, lobbying etc. That a corporation is a person with political rights is the pinnacle of achievement in this way of counter arguing against the public good. It's such a habitual tactic that what's obviously wrong with this line of reasoning -- that all laws and rights only make sense as deriving from some public good, as if they derive from private interest there can be no coherent set of laws in ever private interests are competing with each other, which is the whole premise of the whole alchemic project of stupid we call modern economics, that also jumps in to support this world view most of the time, as it is in the interest of the economist to get paid to do so -- and therefore, rights and laws can not, in some coherent ideology of governance, be by definition against the public good. So, this sort of conversation doesn't ever go anywhere, it is just a tactic to confuse people who are unable to see it is taking the concept of individual rights out of context, and that individual rights are themselves there to mitigate the harm of an unequal society, protecting the weak from the strong and something is argumentatively wrong if they are being used to protect the strong from the weak.

    Mostly, however, people supporting the neoliberal ideology, simply are not able to formulate the concept of the public good to begin with. They empathize with the investor class and it simply makes sense that profits should be protected ... even if it means massive social programs of trillions in bailouts to the banks, subsidies of all kinds paid by the public, obvious harms to the public both short and long term -- they may recognize that there is something off, but they can never quite put their finger on it.

    But, today, I can use obvious examples of what I'm talking about.

    When I read this headline today I was genuinely surprised Trump was "Shaken into action", and curious what measures weren't too late. Then I started to read...

    Aboard Air Force One, Trump Was Shaken Into Action on Virus

    We’re tracking the latest on the coronavirus outbreak and the global response. Sign up here for our daily newsletter on what you need to know.

    As Air Force One sped toward Washington on Monday, the historic impact of the coronavirus outbreak became inescapable for President Donald Trump.

    Televisions on his plane were tuned to Fox News, which broadcast dire graphics illustrating the single worst day for stock markets since the 2008 financial crisis. Matt Gaetz, a Florida GOP congressman who had accompanied Trump to a series of fundraising events in Orlando, had isolated himself in an empty cabin on the jet after learning he’d had contact with someone infected by the virus at a political conference.     — Bloomberg news

    Article is behind a paywall, but only talks about the stock market and Trump's efforts to help it.

    The writer sees no problem that Trump only took real notice of the pandemic thing, which is supposed to happen to poor people that are never mentioned in this article as needing actions towards, when the stock market crashed. The writer sees zero problem with the framing that it is through the lens of the stock market to judge the priorities: first fiscal support, lower interest rates, bailout fund, tax cuts ... and never even mentioning addressing the pandemic.

    Also notice the dramatization of Trump's own personal danger, taking in the "oh shit, I could get this thing" that certainly crossed the minds of the entire investor class as well; so they can empathize with Trump empathizing with them in a very visceral, stuck in a human body sort of way.

    Why?

    Because the neoliberal theory, that sounds good to the neoliberal investor class and propagandists, that developed and "went viral" last couple of weeks was, seeing the economic horror entailed by containment ... let's just let nature take it's course! Get back to normal as quickly as possible so the stock market can get back to climbing as usual.

    Instead of addressing this catastrophic policy, neoliberals will just ignore it or defend it as "a reasonable thing", just too hard to stop those planes and shrink those airline dividends, it was too horrifying to consider, and, crucially as seen in the article, jump right to the bailouts that are now needed; not for the gig economy workers of course, not for people to be able to stay home and not spread the virus while working heaven forbid, nor for small businesses many already destroyed by their first key event now cancelled.

    It sounded good,"let it run it's course", but I'll let events prove or disprove the theory that it really is good for the investor class.

    There was no pushback because there was no model of the economy developed by epidemiologists for letting it "run wild", as I have mentioned. Epidemiologists assume the priority is preservation of life. Hearing this, and terrifying recommendations of stopping flights, the neoliberal ideology instinctively assumes it's another one of those cases like the "environment" or "toxic chemicals" or "health care for blacks and white trash" or "education of the poor" that can just be ignored and "nature can just run its course" in all those situations. The problem is that those things can be ignored, not because "nature runs it's course" in some neo-eugenics view of the world, but because cause and effect are separated by some distance and propaganda can always intervene between those two points in time to convince enough people that the lies were never said, if they were said it was reasonable to say, that the alternatives were also lies, and the lies are still true anyways when you think about it.

    It is simply habit that anything that protects the investor class short term can be defended and no one defending that will ever face consequences. As normally changes are relatively slow and investors can just shift assets if ever the public does seem to be getting a small victory on some issue and discussion can thus shift to protecting those new assets.

    This is a unique situation where the "we need to balance action for the public good against the economy" position faces immediate consequences and propaganda has a much harder time making people believe it's because of the muslims or something like that, and there was no time to shift assets and the economic and political fallout is a profound existential threat to the status quo. They'll still try, it will be interesting to see if they succeed.
  • Coronavirus
    Your overly long analysis simply ignores the fact that economies are part of the natural ecology of the Earth. The financial economy is really a function of the energy economy, regardless of how much wishful thinking goes into portraying the system as otherwise. And the idea that the economy is not complicated is absurd. — Janus

    Well, it seems my overly long analysis wasn't long enough.

    I'm responding to your point that "stopping the planes" would have some crazy economic consequences that would have easily outweighed the consequences of the disease, or at least it's reasonable to have such a posture in an age where opinions carry no onus to defend them critically and are just a "right" and none better than another.

    I defined my use of the term economy as "that which keeps people alive" and I was quite clear I'm talking about short term measures.

    If you want to bring the entire ecosystem into it, which is of course valid in the long term, but in the short term that people get food to eat and water to drink is something that is simply happening and could continue to happen even without planes flying. It's quite simple to keep people alive in a "can't fly crisis" that was created by governments to avoid a much worse crisis of "total exhaustion of the medical system, long term harm to the medical system, and hundreds of thousands to millions of unnecessary deaths ... and, oh yeah almost forgot, an economic depression level event".

    Yes, the whole phenomena that is happening on earth as we speak could only be described by a very, very, very, very long vector of parameters and an equally impressive computer program to change the state of that vector. It's complicated in that sense, just like "throwing a ball" is complicated in the sense of all the calculations and nerve interaction and motor protein movement and cell metabolism that is happening for that phenomena to happen; it is simple to throw a ball in the sense that people throw balls all the time no problem.

    It is simple to keep everyone alive without planes, even long term, who cares about plane travel.

    It will be difficult to mange the tsunami of suffering that is upon us, it will be stressful to decide who lives and who dies, complicated to manage limited resources to face unsolvable problems, as well lives destroyed by the economic disruptions; granted, in an economy I seek to fundamentally change, but not like this, not like this.

    The "not flying" would have been bad for airline and related stocks but good for the "not dying part".

    However, since everything I have been talking about is about to unfold in the next couple of weeks where you live, I'm going to let your immediate short term experience speak on my behalf.

    It is a rare time that this conversation here on the forum is not anonymous; my arguments I have developed here will be screaming in your face.

    I will remind you in exactly 3 weeks about this topic and whether you still think the economic disruption, however you want to think of the economy, and more importantly the loss of life, that will be far, far from over, was at the same level of cost or risk as the economic disruption of stopping the planes when the window of opportunity to keep the growth rate of the pandemic -- or even stop if from being a pandemic in the first place -- was still open.
  • The Diagonal or Staircase Paradox
    For those who don't speak math, the last bit: "letting the staircase get closer and closer to the line" doesn't entail "the length of the staircase gets closer and closer to the length of the line" since the staircase has discontinuous jumps in it. — fdrake

    For those that don't speak half-math, the staircase has corners where the tangent to the corner is not defined. A tangent, in 2D, is a line that is "stuck" up against the object you're interested in, intersecting one point but no other points, at least "locally", but, crucially, in only one way. Ex. if you stick a line against a circle it can only be in one way, forming a T with the radius line; a line with a different angle to the radius will intersect more points in the circle, no way to escape it.

    Discontinuous above refers to points with undefined tangents, not an actual cut in the line that draws the staircase, which is a continuous line in the normal sense of being able to draw it continuously without lifting the pencil off the paper.

    It is in trying to draw the derivative, all the tangent values, where the discontinuities appear. The tangent to the vertical part of the staircase is also just a vertical line, then meets a point without a undefined tangent at the corner, and then suddenly switches to the tangent being just a horizontal line following the horizontal part of the staircase; of course best to use a coordinate system at some angle to the staircase as otherwise the vertical lines are at the same x coordinate as the corners and it's not so clear what the jumping is.

    A corner has no unique tangent line, which means has no derivative, which means what seems similar and doable in other calculus contexts does not work with the staircase, basically.

    A better paradox, I think, is accept it just stays the same length, but we allow the staircase to get such small steps that it "occupies" the same area as the line, in the sense of not allowing the staircase steps to cross some definition of the "closest" lines adjacent to the approximating line, i.e. building the staircase to stay in a lane of area zero, but still insist it has length 2.
  • Coronavirus
    In your usage, how would you define "neoliberal"? — Metaphysician Undercover

    This is probably best to split off in another thread, but I use neoliberal to refer to the broad western (and now global) governing consensus based on three main pillars: A. GDP growth is the top priority metric determining policy, B. that globalized free-trade of goods and capital, and also people to an extent, is a policy goal C. most importantly that corporate profits should be prioritized over any given concept of the public good (that the idea of the public good should be removed from public discourse whenever possible, and simply replaced with corporate profits as the metric of the public good, such as viewing the increase in the stock market index as the increase in the public good)

    Based on these objectives, whenever the environment or people's health or threats to democracy due to the concentration of power is in conflict with corporate profits then those ills should ideally just be accepted, and if not, then policy should err on the side of corporate profits and only changed with overwhelming evidence, intense and high-effort public mobilization and as many obstacles in the judicial and political system as possible, and the bare-minimum policies put in place for the strictest minimum public or environmental welfare reasons (which is always denied to be related things even when it's necessary to accept that the public welfare exists from time to time).

    There are then many different variation to justifying this governing framework. For instance, some may truly believe laissez-faire free trade not only works but current economies approach that ideal as an explanation for anything viewed as "good" and anything that exists that is "bad" is truly believed to be caused by non-laissez-faire government interventions.

    However, mostly the justifying framework is "there's no other choice" and different ways to justify that position.
  • Coronavirus
    Case in point:

    2h ago:

    British Airways has cancelled all flights to and from Italy, Reuters is reporting. — BBC

    The travel bans are happening anyway (since letting people die for preventable reasons to protect the economy only sounds good as a neoliberal sound bite, but isn't viable public policy in the short term; it works well when consequences are longer term and propaganda can intervene in the interim to make people believe obvious lies).

    The travel bans are now simply too late to have a big game changing effect (still helps a bit though).

    So what did the "bring on the virus bro! policy of BJ" accomplish? Two, maybe three weeks, of normal (but increasing abnormal as time went by) flight operations.

    Is that really a big benefit compared to the massive costs of importing an epidemic as soon as possible in a sort of "man against the elements, fist shaking into the wind" proud-to-be-ignorant pseudo-moral stand?

    Rhetorical question of course, I will let the next few weeks verify this claim for anyone with any doubts.
  • Coronavirus
    I'm not confusing anything. On the contrary you seem to be completely discounting the real negative effects, leaving entirely aside considerations of the share markets, that curtailing all international travel would have on economies. Effects which would arguably be so great that governments would have no hope of propping up all those who would otherwise become bankrupt. You seem to be blithely ignoring the inter-connectedness and fragility of the global economic system. — Janus

    The explanation you propose of why you are not confused, is exactly the confusion I am talking about.

    The economy, viewed as thing that keeps people alive, is not complicated. People need food, water, shelter, clothing and a list of things diminishing in difficulty to provide in a short term crisis.

    Shutting down international travel simply doesn't have the crazy affects that you describe, especially temporarily. And all the negative affects, because it is temporary, can be easily dealt with by simply allowing the companies affected to temporarily lay off employees with the government paying unemployment through existing or new schemes. Without employees to pay, costs are very low to simply put a business on hold and whatever ongoing costs can't be avoided, could be just bailed out.

    Such a travel freeze could have come into affect at first for a period of, say 3 weeks, time to come up with an effective containment strategy for the outbreak. Travel bans and strict quarantine measures would then be in place when travel resumes.

    The current attitude is that "containment was never possible, so it wasn't a mistake not-to-try". This is wrong. Not only was containment possible full stop (as was achieved with Sars, Mers and ebola), effective containment could have radically slowed the spread of the virus globally.

    Without simply stopping international travel, however, then yes, containment is impossible.

    So, had travel been stopped, the cost of paying unemployment, bailing out airlines and tightly related industries, extending low-interest loans to severely affected industries, etc. is quite low. By having an effective containment strategy, international travel could then resume between countries with no cases. So a lot of the world gets back to normal with very little disruption to the business of the airlines.

    More critically, entire sectors of domestic economies would not be essentially arrested simultaneously around the globe at the same time.

    Italy has just implemented severe internal restrictions on gatherings, shopping, restaurants, etc. (what the news calls a quarantine but is not really a quarantine, just lot's of restrictions). The economic impact of this is extremely high.

    For the sake of trying to keep things normal for airlines, these intense measures will be soon essentially global,, affecting all sectors simultaneously.

    This is orders of magnitude (several orders of magnitude) higher economic damage and far harder to deal with than simply bailing out a few large airline and air-related companies (like airports etc.).

    Instead of a few dozen billions of dollars, maybe a few hundred depending on how early and effective the plan was put into place, to deal with temporary disruption of shutting down international travel (essentially insignificant problem for central banks) now the damage is likely a worldwide economic depression.

    So, by not making the hard decisions of stopping international air travel for 2-3 weeks the time to get a handle on things, followed by a travel ban of all countries that have cases in that time, followed by a gradually restarting travel with effective containment and testing measures ... a big cost but far lower than the economic impacts in just Italy (which is just a single country).

    Time would have also allowed for far better understanding of how the virus transmits, what treatment strategies are effective, and most importantly scaling up production of the items, starting with simple masks, that could be first distributed to medical communities around the world and second distributed to the population, so that when epidemics to arrive in a country, transmissibility can instantly lowered through everyone wearing a mask and the medical community would not be powerless against themselves becoming infected, infecting others, lowering moral and care workers available (a ridiculous thing to let happen when there was a window of opportunity to avoid it).

    Right now we don't know if reinfection is possible (reports but no way to confirm compared testing errors), nor do we know the long term life-cycle of the virus (it could lay dormant in other organs), nor do we know of the long term health consequences (it could cause long term damage to lungs and other organs). Without such knowledge there's no way to calculate the cost benefit of favouring "the economy" compared to lives to begin with. Nor do we know how exactly the virus propagates and with what relative probabilities (such as surfaces, asympotamics etc., all critical to know to have an effective containment strategy). Stopping global travel to get a better understanding has all sorts of benefits along with slowing things down to enable better preparation.

    Claiming "well we didn't know how it spread so of course we couldn't contain it" is not an argument, as it could have been much better contained the time to figure those things out.

    Finally, effective global containment, even if it did transition to a pandemic, would have staggered the peak in each region and country, allowing the global medical community to help each other and human and equipment resources moved around from peak to peak. This is a massive benefit for dealing with the pandemic our leaders decided to forego in favour of simultaneous, short term, medical overload and for much worse economic effects. Staggering the epidemics in each region would have not caused a economic crash, as the global economic affect of only one region being disrupted at a time is far lower than all regions simultaneously.

    Our leaders listened closely to airline CEO's, as Trump and Pence are simply proud of, but it turns out airline CEO's didn't have any understanding of epidemiology nor the massive economic consequences of their desire to ignore the problem as long as possible. Our leader listened to neoliberal economists who provided the non-containment case of "it's only old people", but it turns out none of them had ever teamed up with an actual scientist and mathematician to model the "let's let it go out of control" fallout (because economists aren't real scientists that expect their propaganda to ever have meet up with facts that are shot term enough for large amounts of people to notice).

    It's true, with a fatality rate of "only 1 to 4" percent, from an economic perspective we could just let those people die and continue as normal, maybe even good for the stock market at resources go from older spend-thrift people to their younger spendy inheritors.

    However, people simply don't accept "just letting a few million people die in our country" as public policy, and, despite the complacency and bravado of their leaders at first, quickly demand action is taken when their loved one's start dying in terrible conditions. As I mention in an early comment, complacency was also political suicide. People aren't going to be happy about "choosing the stock market over lives" and that goal wasn't even achieved due to no epidemiologist ever bothering to investigate under what conditions might it seem just letting people die is a good idea economically but actually is a really bad idea when model things things through competently. Epidemiologist thought their job was to save lives, not the stock market, and that's why they failed the politicians in conveying in the perspective of the stock market (that letting thing run rampant is actually worse for the stock market; had leaders understood this, action would have been swift, immediate and effective).

    The basic problem, that which is creating the conditions for runaway capitalism, industrial farming practices, resource depletion, soil, land and ocean degradation and pollution, is overpopulation. It is the continuing growth of the human population that necessitates endless growth economies. It is also arguable that such a growth would never have been possible without fossil fuels, the supply of which has already peaked. — Janus

    Yes, I agree with capitalism being the basic problem. With a social safety net, these "hard decisions" are not even that hard decisions, as the institutions are in place to make sure no one dies of economic disruptions.

    However, I disagree that population is the problem. Of the equation "Impact = Population x Technology x Affluence" there's no feasible way to lower population significantly (to 0.1 - 0.2 of current levels) without collapsing the ecosystem ... which is what we're trying to avoid. However, our technology and affluence can be easily (compared to global genocide) reduced by a factors on the order 0.1. Indeed, I would argue it's possible to reorganize economies to benefit nature and have a positive impact overall (through radically different ways of living). This is a discussion for another thread though.

    The current epidemic will help the environmental movement I believe, but only because it will unmask neoliberalism as an incapable governing ideology. If world leaders did not have this ideology they would have moved instinctively and decisively motivated by the preservation of human life (and in turn, preserved the global economy though they would not have known that at the time); therefore, the disease of neoliberalism would not have needed to be cured by a world wide pandemic due to incompetence, corruption, and a deluded neoliberal inspired belief that "getting it over with" would be good for the economy even if a few old people die.

    We're about to witness a significant (i.e. noticeable decrease in capacity) part of the medical community die for no reason around the globe, which isn't good for anyone.
  • Coronavirus
    Agreed, but the issue then becomes how does a country remain free of the virus when other countries have pandemics, or it is endemic? Surely there would have to be multiple travel bans. I realise that this might not be so much of an issue once a good vaccine has been produced, but there is no certainty that this will save the day. — Punshhh

    Yes, the effective action would have been stopping nearly all international travel, with strict quarantine for necessary repatriation or other necessary travel.

    Going back to the apparent welcoming of the pandemic, this is also evidenced in the lack of provision for asymptomatic subjects and the spread via them. It seems that it had been accepted from an early stage that the pandemic can't be avoided and that it is better to preserve economies than fight its spread dramatically. — Punshhh

    Yes, very early Western governments decided to stop any effective containment.

    That it would be "best for the economy" to do so, however, is wishful and fallacious thinking which I'll get into in my response to
    ↪Janus
    (but short answer is that letting hospitals get overloaded followed by mass quarantine measures shutting down a large part of the local economy, is much worse economically than shutting down air-travel and related industries; staggering the epidemics in time, with adequate preparation, by shutting down air-travel would have been a big hit to the airlines and related industries, but simply bailing those out is much cheaper than the complete economic meltdown we're now facing due to the choice to never do reasonable containment; large scale local travel restrictions is a much larger economic impact affecting all industries and of course the worldwide simultaneous spread and crisis results in crash of air travel anyways).

    It was explained today by the UKs chief medical officer that the greatest risk in the UK is if the health service becomes overwhelmed. So the strategy is to ensure that the peak infection occurs during the summer when the health service is best placed to cope.[/quote]

    This is not the strategy. To do such a strategy (a good idea) requires stopping nearly all international travel, which they are not even stopping from Northern Italy. UK officials simply kept us updated in real time of how useful idiots go about reasoning. They have not, as will be clear in a couple of weeks, chosen a path "good for the economy but at the cost of some lives", rather they have chosen to maximize cost to both the economy and lives. That they presented their complacency to themselves as a some sort of choice, with pros and cons on both sides, does not mean that analysis is correct.

    Italy went from a few cases to country wide quarantine measures in 3 weeks; all other countries in Europe will follow suite unless they take the same measures preemptively. All of Europe under quarantine conditions has a far higher economic impact than had all travel been stopped from China early on, rigorous quarantine measures for all remaining international traffic, scale-up of testing, and rigorous contact tracing implemented for cases that slip through the net. What Italians are now living, and soon the rest of Europe and US, is far more disruptive than aggressive travel restrictions early in the outbreak. Although China certainly realized early on the scale of the problem and that the best national security response would be to infect the rest of the world while doing intense travel restrictions internally, the rest of the world (in particular Europeans that do have some leaders capable of basic reasoning) did not have to play along; they chose to because they are weak-willed and the useful-idiot reflex to downplay threats to the public is so strong that they were unable to reason to the logical conclusion that letting things play out would be much worse for the status quo than a few more weeks of complacent status quo.
  • Coronavirus
    some people who carry the virus with no symptoms, including no increase in temperature. — Punshhh

    Yes, that it can transmit easily in networks of young people (without anyone getting serious) and it can transmit from people without symptoms, is why measures need to be super extreme to lower the growth rate. Extreme measures is bad for business though, and (usually) facts can simply be ignored without any short-term consequences (for our politicians); that approach to epistemology obviously shouldn't be applied to things with short term consequences like a pandemic, but unfortunately it seems you can't have your useful-idiots on idiot mode only some of the time, it's an all or nothing epistemic posture.

    It also should be noted that this uncontrolled pandemic is worse for business than had the virus been contained competently. "Get it over quickly" makes sense only in the useful-idiot framework of reasoning; there's many second order consequences that make the uncontrolled pandemic worse. Unfortunately, pandemic experts had not investigated this approach, they assume the goal would be to save people's lives and so have not developed the models needed to estimate all the economic dislocations caused by essentially welcoming the pandemic. Propagandists charged with maintaining the status quo have also not investigated the possibility that a global unmitigated pandemic is a very effective way to change the status quo, a much bigger change than is achieved by making sure planes fly as long as possible.
  • Coronavirus
    I'm quite optimistic about the approach so far in the Netherlands. Less cases today (which are results from testing on Sunday) than the day before, peaking for now at 77 new cases on Saturday. No exponential growth so far unless they're not taking testing seriously. I was actually expecting triple digits in new cases by now. — Benkei

    Yes we'll see if "containment light" is going to be effective.

    The problem from a mathematical perspective is that, without intense travel restrictions and automatic quarantine of travelers and mass testing, new transmission chains just get imported in.

    At the moment I find it fairly likely that growth rate is simply tracking the growth rate in ability to test, as you mention.

    The pattern so far is that cases start, then there is a couple weeks without too many cases nor too many deaths, but this is simply due to the disease taking a fairly long time to kill, especially with good care which is available at the start; the deaths then jump suddenly when triage begins, followed by extreme measures when the health system is overloaded a week later. The danger with this "we're paid to be passive idiots approach, and our tradition is only to act in the public interest when our hands are absolutely forced by years and years of campaigning and protests and overwhelming evidence, as we protect business as usual" strategy is that by the time deaths start to be overwhelming there maybe x10 the cases already in the pipeline. The doubling every six days should be a conservative estimate, so if you wait until the medical system is overwhelmed before taking action, you've likely already locked in a few doubling times of critical cases already ongoing (i.e. people already sick developing towards critical) not to mention the new cases that will still emerge even with intense measures.

    Only South Korea seems to have managed effectively so far with a statistically significant amount of cases, so we should just repeat their policies: everyone has a mask outside the home all the time, very widespread testing to catch new transmission lines followed by aggressive contact tracing, maximizing self-isolation and social distancing; government taking control of the production and distribution of masks. And this was put into place very rapidly after the first cases.

    The Italy approach of diddle-daddle spectacularly failed within 3 weeks. Any policy maker should view that as "wait-and-see" is not an effective attitude right now.
  • Coronavirus
    Informative posts by you in this thread. Thanks. — Benkei

    You're welcome.

    Watching coronovirus unfold is like watching a dozen nuclear bombs go off in slow motion around the world. So slow compared to a nuclear weapon that it was extremely easy for policy makers to walk over and turn them off.

    The habit of disregarding human life in favour of fantastical neoliberal reasoning to do what big business wants (... or then a dictatorial communist country that has a lot of money), in this case not shut down air travel, is so strong with the political class that it overrides everything else.

    They are not even able to to think things through to the obvious conclusion that the inaction on this issue is A. political suicide and B. will affect them personally as well.

    It went from "calm down, calm down, think of the stock-market, no one panic" to "we need a plan to protect congress from coronavirus" headspinningly fast.

    Neoliberal zombie-think at it's finest.

    It's also interesting that the private calculus about the disease can run against what is socially advised. My dad is in a higher risk category, he's 70 years old and has chronic respiratory problems. If he develops corona now he's still assured to get the best health care the Dutch system can provide. If he gets it during the peak, this is not likely. — Benkei

    The only viable plan is trying to maintain essentially complete isolation of elders for as long as possible.

    Though this is hypothetically possible, at the moment the disease is in the exponential phase. Due to the incubation period there is no way to pull off such a plan. Italy went from first confirmed cases to being overwhelmed and triaging in a span of 2 weeks with a paltry 6000 cases. Sine our leaders did nothing substantitive to slow the virus (such as stopping all international air traffic to give containment and contact tracing a viable chance to significantly slow the virus, if not stop it) and continue to do nothing substantive, we will have millions of cases within a few weeks.

    The "incompetence" is so great that when the dust settles, the reasonable conclusion to make is that China knowingly played down the virus to maintain air travel (while understanding internally what they were dealing with) in order to ensure a global pandemic as an act of biological warfare against every other country (as if they succeeded in containment to China, only their own economy would be significantly impacted; instead, they let the virus loose globally and then succeeded in containment within China, which was certainly a deliberate act, by pretending "everything was fine" for as long as possible; it's of course easy to cooperate and be transparent with data after this policy objective was achieved and global containment failed), and, second, that Western governments decided to do nothing to slow the virus after China let it loose as an act of biological warfare against their own populations.
  • Coronavirus
    There will likely already be supply chain disruptions in various industries and product lines, due to China being a major supplier. Add to that the likelihood that, if many people are infected, the workforce will be diminished, and also the economic effects on the retail, food and travel sectors, I think it's pretty clear that it's not all just about the stock market (although the latter is of course also very significant). — Janus

    What you say here might seem reasonable, but thinking it through it is the result of confusing two kinds definitions of the economy.

    "Supply line disruptions" for anything important is made much worse by "letting the virus ride" which is the current policy in the US, UK, Europe as a whole and globally. China is of course now implementing systematic quarantine and testing of air travelers from essentially everywhere as well as turning away people likely infected (what they insisted the West not do, which was an easy sell to Trump).

    Let's focus on one resource: medical masks.

    Supply line disruptions of medical masks are essentially guaranteed by letting the virus go out of control. It would be only through aggressive measures of containment that the growth of the virus would be slowed so that production and distribution of masks could be scaled to match need.

    Medical masks need to be changed several times a day; so we're talking about a lot of masks, and medical facilities are already starting to ration masks and the pandemic has barely even begun.

    Without a proper supply of masks, two things happen (both terrible). First, hospitals becomes a spreader of the disease as people coming in with false-positive tests, or for any other reason, are now highly likely to get the disease from staff and other patients. Second, lack of masks means exponential growth of the virus within the medical community at exactly the same time as it peaks in the general population. Even if masks aren't 100% effective (which they aren't) by protecting medical staff as best as we can, it means infection within the medical community peaks after the peak in the general population.

    Exponential infection of the medical community has a deleterious affect on outcomes for the community as a whole. Surviving the virus is highly dependent on care. Sickness in the medical community peaking in parallel to the general population means the scenario with the least possible care available when people need it; obviously that's bad, but it gets worse. Experience is generally correlated with age, meaning the most experienced doctors, nurses and paramedics will be the hardest hit either dying or taking a long time to recover, which causes another second order effect of collapse of moral in the medical community.

    By slowing the spread globally, through essentially stopping all long distance travel internationally and domestically and then maintaining travel restrictions, the mask issue could easily be solved.

    With the magic of the internet, essentially all business travel can be replaced by online meetings.

    The negative part of stopping travel is the stocks of the airline and tourist industry. However, it's essentially impossible to describe a scenario where such economic knock-on effects will manage to kill more people than the pandemic, especially considering it's easy to do things to stabilize the situation economically for airline and tourist employees.

    So, if our priority is saving lives, then the "hard" decisions around travel aren't even hard decisions, it's just the obvious thing to do.

    If we view the purpose of the economy as "that which allows people to live" then it's essentially impossible to conceive of a scenario where the knock-on effects of doing what's actually effective in slowing the virus (not token measures like "banning meeting above 1000 people") will somehow kill more people than the virus. Especially considering there are easy policy measures available to make sure people disrupted economically don't just die of starvation from not having money.

    However, the measures needed to ensure people don't die from economic disruption have another word to describe them: socialism. Obviously, a pandemic of a lethal virus is one problem the market is unable to prepare for or fix; socialist policies such as a UBI for people unemployed by travel restrictions and tourism plummeting, and of course free medical care to ensure everyone can be proactive with seeking care, are the only effective effective measures.

    Restricting travel, especially if it was done early when containment was still possible, is the difference between several million deaths and one hundred million deaths, which this virus could easily cause in the current laissez-fair global response.

    Do not be fooled by the onslaught of propaganda that will try to spin all the deaths as "inevitable". In the current "mask crisis" scenario we are currently in, I would estimate it's a safe bet that 80 to 90% of the deaths would have been preventable in a situation sufficient "travel restriction" scenario. People like to say "ah, travel restrictions don't work" but that's only if it's done half-asked. Obviously, it's quite easy to control travel between places with no land connection by simply stopping all flights and rigorous quarantining of any essential travel.

    It is only if we look at the economy's purpose as "that which provides dividends to investors" that it starts to make sense to "let the virus ride". Yes, doing so will kill millions, potentially dozens of millions, of people unnecessarily, but it is the fastest route back to getting things back to normal economically. "Quick and painful" is also the only route that does not require socialists policies of bailing out small business and individuals unemployed in the alternative "slow it down scenario"; obviously, if slowing it down is effective, the whole process takes a lot longer; much longer than can be reasonably asked of individuals and small business to simply "take the hit" with their own resources. Of course, there's already programs in place of permanent bailouts to the banks in the form of unlimited low-interest financing that other big business can easily access too; big business also has in general more resources to deal with a temporary disruption than does small business.

    So quick and painful, "was really bad, worse than 'anyone could have predicted', but in the rear-view mirror now, things are getting back on track economically, finally!" is indeed the optimum choice if the purpose of the economy is to create dividends to shareholders.

    However, if the primary purpose of the economy is to "keep people alive" then it's difficult to argue that letting 20 to 100 million people die is "worth it" to get the economy back to normal as quickly as possible.

    Nothing terrible happens if the next iphone is delayed; people get it next year rather than this year.

    Very, very, very terrible things are about to happen due to world leaders deciding to allow the unmitigated global spread of the coronavirus. Designing policy so that the peak is very early and so the medical community will experience a mask shortage is simply stupid. Masks aren't hard to make, by delaying by 1-2 months, the scaling of production and distribution of masks could be achieved at a global scale. Asking the medical community to deal with a respiratory viral pandemic without enough masks is like asking a modern army to fight a war without bullets, or, perhaps more apt, asking Republican politicians to raise money without corruption.

    And everything I've described is basically admitted. Boris Johnson just came out and said "well, it's going to spread anyways". Yes, it will spread anyways, but there are massive difference in outcome depending on if something is done to slow it down or not. By saying "it's going to spread anyways", implying "so let's get it over with", he is thinking about the stocks and not the people; he is saying in no uncertain terms, "it's better to sacrifice a lot of people so global business can get back to normal as quickly as possible".
  • Coronavirus
    I agree with your analysis, and would only add that it is not only the volatility of the stock market but the complexity and fragile nature of global supply networks. — Janus

    Though my stockmarkatocracy mention was more aimed at how decisions are being made in the US (though also need to mention Trump has also worked out the essentials ... and, precociously, is already blaming Obama for the testing snafu), nevertheless the virus would not disrupt major supply chains ... of anything essential.

    The virus doesn't destroy machinery and doesn't kill enough people that key skills would disappear. Most of what is produced is completely frivolous and not required in anyway, so maintaining critical production is not, from an engineering perspective, a big challenge.

    Extreme measures to maintain containment, such as China has done definitely would slow the virus down; I don't believe their numbers but I do believe welding people into buildings and barricading streets and having the barest minimum outside interaction does slow the virus considerably.

    Slowing the virus down means spreading cases over far more health care resources over time.

    The reason things are being downplayed, and countries like the US and UK simply jumping from containment to "delay" (with token policies like banning large gatherings, which won't do much statistically) is, as far as I can see, is due to incompetence with the testing (total fiasco) as well as a reaction to the stock market crashes as well as a principled stand that the stock market index is more important than people's lives. What's best for the stock market is for everything to continue as usual and if 15% of old people die, tough luck for them.

    However, the Western governments now, US in particular, really don't seem to understand how bad it's going to be. China also downplayed and lived in denial at first, but they did not then take extreme measures because denial turned out to be warranted and "it's not so bad". The only reasonable prediction to make is that Western governments doing exactly the same thing as happened in Wuhan (downplaying, keeping things "normal", until it's out of control) will result in the exact same outcome. There are tough decisions that could be made (and could have been made) that would slow the virus and make it easier for health care providers to deal with it, the fact of the matter is Western leaders, particularly the US, can stomach lot's of people dying unnecessarily more than they can stomach stock market index decreases. The interest rate changes happened very fast (no snafu's there), as that's where the priorities are. Trump is downplaying and saying it's just a mild flue and the numbers are wrong etc. in reaction to the stock market as if people believed it, even if it wasn't true, well then the stock market wouldn't mind a bunch of them dying if they kept calm and carried on; zero thoughts of the people that are and will be affected.
  • Coronavirus
    Abandoning containment is now official.

    The UK response to coronavirus was already moving into its second “delay” phase, rather than seeking to simply “contain” the disease, Prof Whitty told British MPs.

    “We have moved from a situation where we are mainly in contain, with some delay built in, to we are now mainly delay,” said Britain’s chief medical officer, although elements of the contain process would remain in place.     — Theguardian - 14 minutes ago
  • The Road to 2020 - American Elections
    Canada's too — fishfry

    Ah yes, another amazing piece of statistical analysis from the "American Thinker" by a blogger considering one single anecdote compared to the alternative course of events in the US that he simply imagines.
  • Coronavirus
    That it seems to be just on the boundary makes deciding on policy even harder. — Echarmion

    Yes, it seems to be the mathematically perfect virus to break our systems.

    With Sars, Mers, and Ebola, I was actually wondering if pandemic viruses simply couldn't compete with the information age. It seems we have the answer.

    Of course, had the previous pandemic expert not quit due to funding cuts and his team disbanded (the main guy in charge of stopping Sars, Mers and Ebola) ... then maybe Coronavirus would be just another in the list. Since China is a corrupt and incompetent political system, it actually depends on less corrupt pressure from the West for making key decisions. For instance, without more accurate data and pressure from the West, unlikely China would have started any programs to reduce air pollution (so had the Pandemic prevention team had the same funding to be "on the ball" in China, may would have played out very differently; what's clear is the Chinese officials in charge didn't know what they were dealing with; I expect a few Western pandemic experts in the mix would have reacted much faster).

    Since we're unable to do anything about that short term, it does seem reasonable to not shut everything down. Especially since the symptoms are indistinguishable from a common cold, at least early on, so you really would have to shut down everything. — Echarmion

    Yes, it is the only choice in the current system, especially for the US that does not have social safety net policies and systems that can encourage more self-isolation for cough symptoms (such as the UK announcing today sick leave will be paid from day one; health care In Europe is free so few have the habit "of simply never going to the doctor" and few are in the position of "have to work, even to death, anyways, no choice" etc.). So, it will be a very interesting systems-analysis case to compare how things play out in Europe compared to the US after the pandemic (that one, among many, reasons to have a social safety net system is to have the institutions already in place to deal with these sorts of black-swan events).
  • Coronavirus
    Though all the numbers I've presented are at the upper bound (so, it could turn out to be not-so-bad), the main reason I conclude that it likely is that bad is the world-cases-map.

    https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2020/world/coronavirus-maps.html

    (Which you can see for free if you use firefox and turn off javascript)

    With Sars, it would popup somewhere, containment would work really well, it would be hiding out and then popup somewhere else, containment would work. Whole process took months and months.

    Whereas looking at this map, we went from "new disease in China, a lot of cases, some deaths, but containment is working" in January, to now cases all over the world and in the most advanced economies that have the best resources for containment.

    It's like nothing that has ever been seen in the modern era; the virus has completely broken our containment policies, equipment, and practices. Once clusters start to overlap (spreading into each other), then even the "slow down" measures will no longer be effective (other than the "shutdown the global economy" option, which, from what I can see, the current policy is to not do that, just sit back and let it happen).
  • Coronavirus
    Unless my numbers are wrong, CFR in South Korea is only about .7 % at the moment (over 5000 cases, 35 deaths). — Echarmion

    Yes, it does seem that with proper care most critical cases survive. Though we have seen deaths can jump very high in a single day, so deaths could jump in Korea. There is a long phase where a patient can be kept paralyzed on a respirator with a slight chance of recovery, but if that equipment is needed for someone with a higher chance then it's time to pull the plug.

    What's so worrisome to the epidemiologists is that there's a large percentage of cases that require such care, so where we'll see a lot of deaths is when health systems are overloaded and forced into triage.

    It is suspected that deaths are very under-reported in Iran for instance. China we may never know.

    So, yes, on the one hand, South Korea has managed to slow the Virus spread, but on the other hand they have not succeeded in containment (no one has) and they have taken high-effort, highly-disruptively extreme measures that other countries simply don's have the resources to do and many may not be willing to do (if the cat is out of the bag and travel just makes clusters pop up somewhere else as one cluster is being dealt with).

    I have no doubt that if extreme policies where done globally, then we would probably have a manageable spread of the virus that wouldn't overload most health systems. But quarantining whole cities, massive testing, self-isolation, travel restrictions, no open schools, no large events, etc. is really a very high economic cost. If such measures don't even succeed in containment, likely economists are telling the politicians that "the value of peoples lives we're talking about (especially retired people that actually cost the public purse) is far lower than the economic disruptions". Which is why we're hearing on the corporate news, like Bloomberg, that "the economic disease can be worse than the actual disease".

    Of course, Bloomberg and the economists are right, but only because of the structural precarity that capitalism places people under. If you want to govern based on the value of the stock market, it's needed from time to time to sacrifice large amounts of people on that flashy altar.

    Under such a decision making framework, the correct response is to make more-or-less token measures and plan out the blame-game phase (cough-cough, Pence).

    Once "you got a cough, don't come to work, be responsible, stay isolated!" turns to "you're not that sick, you need to come to work, everyone needs to work, I'll find someone else!", is when the floodgates open so to speak. Since containment has failed globally, this switch-over in pubic attitude will happen in a two or three months in my estimation (of course, in the US there's no switch to make as that knob is placed permanently on 'you need to work to survive'); the US also uses a lot of take-away food, which is run by young people who may get sick "but need to work", and people simply need to eat, so I expect takeaway will become a main vector in the US.
  • Coronavirus
    ↪Echarmion


    Yes, delay is the goal of the current policies of closing schools and banning large events.

    However, unless policies are global and significant, such as shut all schools in the world, shutdown international travel, and maximize self quarantine and work from home ... there maybe little way to delay much now that containment has failed.

    Also, it's completely unclear at this point if summer will abate the virus as summer does with the flue.

    Delay is good anyways of course.

    We seem right before the uncontrollable and exponential global growth phase. My guess is that the pattern that developed in Wuhan will repeat on a global scale but much worse as there's no way to take the radical measures China did on a global scale, but we will see if current or new policies are effective for slowing the virus globally in the next weeks.
  • Coronavirus
    ↪Michael


    Really depends on age. A bad outcome radically increases with age ... which will also help spread the virus exponentially when the younger generations realize it's not a huge threat to them and need to go about their business at some point.

    If you're young, main problem of travel is potentially being trapped in quarantine ... but Western governments seem to have decided to stop trying to maintain containment, but they may turn that policy on and off randomly for PR reasons.
  • Coronavirus
    A pandemic is probable if containment fails, which is itself likely due to at least the two facts that asymptomatic infected people are apparently infectious, and that countries are unlikely to close their borders and tell everyone to stay at home, because to do so would have devastating effects on the world's economies. — Janus

    Essentially all the experts agree containment has failed and it's already a pandemic. Already a week or two ago some top experts predicting 70% of the world population catching the virus within 1 year.

    That cases keep rising in South Korea, a relatively easy country to control borders and using as extreme quarantine and testing measures as they can, means there's basically no way to contain the virus. Hence, very predicable that containment has failed in Italy and is failing everywhere else.

    There are 94,170 cases and 3,219 deaths, putting the case fatality rate at 3.418%. However, 39,764 still have the disease, with 6,773 in serious or critical condition. If we just look at the 54,406 closed cases, there are 51,187 recoveries to the 3,219 deaths. Almost 6% of closed cases closed in death. — Michael

    It's not valid to conclude 6% because death closes a case much earlier than recovery, so statistically biases such a calculation towards death. Of course, you're correct that simply dividing the total cases by deaths is also not valid.

    Furthermore, there can be lot's of mild cases that have gone undetected.

    However, total cases and deaths is only part of the story even if we have accurate data (and trusting the Chinese and Iranian data, that make up most of the sample size to date, is simply unwise; the WHO takes it on face value for political reasons and not scientific reasons).

    In the case of China, it can still be seen from space that their economy is not anywhere close "back to normal" as one would expect if they're only have on the order of a hundred new cases per day in a country of a billion people. Likewise, an even further crackdown on "spreading rumors" would not be needed; everyone would be on social media happy they aren't sick, containment in Wuhan worked and praising the party for saving the day.

    Hence, the speculation is there is a full blown epidemic in all of China at this point.

    Also remember China locked millions of people in their houses, there could be lot's and lot's of dead people just lying in their apartment (if the problems below occurred it's the easiest option ... then just fish them out slowly and claim they never existed).

    The other hugely important statistic is the percent of people needing intensive care, in particular oxygen and respirators. There's only a limited amount of this equipment and, in particular respirators, require very intensive care, and even more intensive care when put in "best chance of survival mode" (that may require paralyzing the patient to avoid their breathing fighting the respirator).

    Likewise, maintaining a quarantine effectively requires specialized equipment.

    So, running out of treatment equipment means mortality rises and running out of quarantine equipment means lot's of health professionals get sick too (added to the likelihood of just getting it at home or out and about).

    The fatality rate is an order or magnitude higher than the flue, the survival rate needing intensive care maybe 2 orders of magnitude higher than the flue, and the virulence maybe several factors higher than the flue (as high as 7, compared to 1.6 for the flue) and of course there's not a large portion of the global population that simply doesn't get the flue any given season (due to still having immunity from last seasons).

    The virus may survive on surfaces up to 9 days (compared to 2 hours for the flue ... which means you can get this disease in the mail ... which in turn means if you test a Amazon warehouse you may find coronavirus, so you don't as to not make such a massive economic disruption so instead you just keep online the most efficient way to spread the virus exponentially through, perhaps low probability but super high impact, totally random infections that make entirely unexpected and unexplained clusters), incubation maybe as high as 3 weeks, it seems now highly likely asymptomatic carriers can spread the disease, and there's some evidence people can simply catch the disease again even once they have recovered.

    All of the above is also complicated by the fact people will continue to need care for other things. This creates 2 issues. First, people come into the hospital for other reasons but happen to have coronavirus, transmit it to health workers who then transmit it to other patients and visitors in hospital for other reasons. When a place get's contaminated, they aren't disinfecting the entire place for no reason; it's just that bad in terms of persistence in the environment which quickly becomes an impossible task at a large scale. Second problem is that as health services are strained, people start dying from other things due to lack of care, so those people must be added as casualties of the pandemic. There is lot's of pneumonia anyways.

    All this combines to create a complete global health catastrophe. Although there's already plenty of global health catastrophes due to poor policies, so what's one more, this one was likely preventable with policies previously in place, so is unfortunate in that regard.

    Basically it's the mutabu virus, just played out in China with the US as a "don't place sycophant in charge" thematic sub-plot, and changing the main plot to preserve face rather than "the weapon" ... and infecting the entire world instead of blowing up a small town, is what I'm saying.

    This may seem preemptively overly dramatic, but 700 million people are already in quarantine, self isolation or restricted travel in China, which is 10% of the global population and happened within the span of months; it's fairly reasonable to expect the same to happen to the rest of the globe within the next few months now that containment within China has completely failed and the rest of the world is where China was about 2 months ago.

    The speed of this outbreak also means that it's unlikely the virus will lose much in lethality, as evolving to be less lethal as viruses normally do is an evolutionary process that takes time ... but such quick spreading doesn't create less strains than had it proliferated over a longer amount of time and so different strains may emerge that can infect people again (on-top of it, potentially being the case, that many can get the same strain again).

    The only viable way to even slow down the virus significantly at this point requires basically shutting down the global economy. We're in the down-playing and denial phase from Western governments, in my opinion, to avoid pressure to take radical measures until it is too late for those to serve any purpose (as they calculate it's unavoidable anyways, no reason to harm the economy more than necessary in the process).
  • The Philosophy of Commensurablism
    I'm looking for more than just one thing here. There's literally a bulleted list of them in the OP. I'm interested primarily the first, but also in the second. You seemed upset that I was asking people to read closely just for the second. I clarified that close reading is more needed for the first, which I care more about than the second. — Pfhorrest

    Re-read the conversation. You say first that I'm not reading carefully to give good feedback (to avoid false negatives), then that I'm not paying attention to your first point of whether your reasons are clear or not, then that my feedback is in fact useful, and finally that careful reading is only needed for the first point, which I've already stated is very much related to the others.

    My basic point in my last comment is that criticizing my feedback is a completely useless exercise. There's just no point to it. Engage with my feedback if you find it useful or ignore it if you don't.

    And then you replied to just the first part of that, ignoring the second, and said a bunch of other stuff too, and I've just been replying to you since. — Pfhorrest

    Well this is what happens when you want to both criticize my feedback and form grounds to dismissing it ... but also engage with it simultaneously. You can't do both effectively.

    I'm not asking people to read carefully for the lineage stuff, but for the clarity of the ideas presented. And I do eventually want to debate the ideas, when they are ones that are actually my own original ideas, or little-known ones, which is why I'm asking what ideas are new to people. — Pfhorrest

    Well is "eventually" mean now or eventually. You should make this clear in the OP.

    What I don't want is for every attempt to talk about anything to be immediately interrupted by a repetition of some argument that has been going on for 2000 years. If I'm saying something that's old to you and has already been argued to death, I've probably also heard whatever argument you're about to make in response, I'll probably address it later, and I don't want to derail the whole conversation getting into that right away. — Pfhorrest

    You make it pretty clear you want to know where the ideas you present might come from, if they're over 2000 years old, that's simply the case. The Hellenistic philosophers were amazingly sophisticated thinkers, there's no reason to dismiss them; in particular if you're interested in the history of ideas and where your ideas can be traced to.

    If debates have been going for more than 2000 years, probably they are about something pretty relevant. If you're familiar with them, it's a lot more efficient to just say where you are positioned in relation to them, then assume that I'm able to assume that you already know these arguments and assume that I'm furthermore able to deduce where you stand in relation to them and also just assume that you'll get around to commenting on them later but that for now it would be a waste of time.

    Now, if you want to stop discussing the discussion and get more into the substance, I will review your substantive points and respond to them in a bit.
  • The Philosophy of Commensurablism
    I really don't get where you're coming from.

    You say:

    I am looking first and foremost to know if my positions are being communicated clearly, which does depend on reading the text carefully, including everything that it's built upon. If you are willing to do that, I would appreciate it. A cursory reading that seems not to understand, but only because it was a cursory reading and not through unclear writing on my part, just gives me false negatives. — Pfhorrest

    Now you say:

    I already said, three times now, that I do plan on adding a bit of disambiguation about the word "objectivism", and I will mention Rand in it, precisely because you brought it up. That was useful feedback of the kind I'm looking for, and I think I already said thanks for that, but if not, thanks for that. — Pfhorrest

    Seems straight up contradictory.

    What's the purpose of this discussion about the discussion? If my feedback is useful -- to a point you'll add a disambiguation in your text, based on the point I bring up -- then why not want more of it?

    I mentioned Rand because you used the term "objectivism", which is closely associated with Rand. Why not just provide the disambiguation and move onto the next point. I mentioned absolutism as an alternative label, which you agree can mean exactly the same thing as what you mean by "objectivist"; I didn't argue that you "need" to do that, just offering an alternative if you don't want to disambiguate with Randianism.

    As I said, I am not just trying to trace lineages, or even primarily looking for that. The very first thing I ask for is:

    Is it clear what my views are, and my reasons for holding them?     — Pfhorrest

    I did not miss this point, I just agree with you that lineage of ideas is the quickest way to make your ideas clear, which is why I ask how you relate to such-and-such thinker that seems to have similar ideas (such as the Hellenistic philosophers in their discussion on skepticism, in the previous essay).

    All kinds of words used throughout philosophy are used in a bunch of different ways by different writers in different places and times (I say that right in my text, as you can see quoted above). The best that we can do is try to use one in a way that's as unambiguous as possible and then say specifically what exactly we mean by it when we use it. Which I do. — Pfhorrest

    I disagree here. Though it's not an important point as I don't mind if people makeup their own terminology, but the more social conventions used (relative a given community the discussion is taking place in) the faster you can be understood. Using no conventions would be basically inventing a new language; sure, doable and linguists could figure it out, but the effort is enormous. Using the language of the forum, in this case English, is obviously a much faster way to be understood on the forum, and using philosophical conventions and jargon is another way to speed things up (but not as much of a speedup compared to using English rather than some entirely invented language; hence, the not caring so much in principle, just that since you want to disambiguate, what words are arguably "the best" is a useful debate).

    I don't think I've heard any praise at all yet. (Apologies to anyone who did, if I forgot you already). — Pfhorrest

    Terrible fan service, but I'm not going to tell you how to run your business.

    However, my point didn't mention what you do when hear praise, only my observation of your behavior when you hear something other than praise.

    My point is that your OP is an unreasonable demand if you want to do something other than collect people's cursory impressions, but actually want to argue with people the substance.

    If you want to debate the substance, just post the essays and defend your ideas against criticism. Most likely the lineage commentary would come about as a side-affect in any-case.

    If you don't want to do that, however, it's simply unreasonable to demand other forum participants read through everything very carefully and accuse them of not reading or understanding as a basis to dismiss their feedback; you could just say "hmm, I may look into referencing that thinker" or "don't see a reason to mention that thinker; can't mention them all".

    I'm mentioning what seems relevant thinkers who are associated with your arguments, since that's what you're asking. There's nothing to debate about other than your idea that "only a careful reading won't produce false negatives" which you then immediately disprove yourself: my cursory reading has already produced a double negative positive that you plan to integrate. If you just answer the questions on face value (i.e. ah no, not trying to go in Rand's direction at all, I'll clarify that), you'd can just get more feedback without getting into an argument about the quality of the feedback.

    I have studied Locke, and Dewey, and James, and Peirce. Though Locke long predates the latter three, who were the first pragmatists, so I'm not sure why you're including him as a pragmatist. In any case, I am heavily influenced by them, Peirce more so than the others. — Pfhorrest

    For instance, above is a perfectly reasonable response to my feedback and question. Otherwise, it's much more difficult to know what you mean by pragmatism if you don't position yourself relative an existing pragmatists (for all I know you are just taking the word from common speech and making an entirely new "pragmatism" out of it without even knowing the word was coined by a philosophical school to begin with; something that happens all the time, so by referencing heavy influences it's much clearer where you're trying to go).

    As for Locke, why would I assume you dismiss previous thinkers? Maybe you feel "Locke" got it more essentially right than later pragmatists, or then just later additions were not really resolving anything important. Likewise, that you think Locke is entirely irrelevant is also informative (that presumably Dewey and Pierce are making essential and critical reformulations and additions). I cannot possibly know without asking. That's why I'm formulating my comments as questions.
  • The Philosophy of Commensurablism
    I am looking first and foremost to know if my positions are being communicated clearly, which does depend on reading the text carefully, including everything that it's built upon. If you are willing to do that, I would appreciate it. A cursory reading that seems not to understand, but only because it was a cursory reading and not through unclear writing on my part, just gives me false negatives. — Pfhorrest

    As you may suspect, I'm not going to invest the time to carefully read your essays only to try to trace the lineage of each of the ideas presented.

    There are many participants on the forum that have a very good grasp of the history of philosophy, that they are not investing their time either, but you're feedback is mainly from people with not much more knowledge of the subject matter as yourself, who you then debate with all while denying you want to debate, you should perhaps view as an indication that your request is not very reasonable.

    A cursory reading, however, should provide plenty of positive identification as well as false negatives, that you can then look into.

    And if you're interested to make you writing robust, you are well served by looking into both the positives, false negatives, false positives as well as the positively negative, to then not only (perhaps) learn from those thinkers mentioned but also to be able to report back where you stand with relation to those thinkers.

    For instance, you know And Rand is fairly popular in libertarian circles; simply positioning yourself clearly (moreover if you want to retain the word objectivist) will make things much clearer and easier for anyone wanting to engage with your material.

    Other authors you may want to look into is, obviously, Kant.

    Kant's transcendental idealism is constructed precisely to be able to manage an absolutist (or objective if you insist) view of truth from a position of limited knowledge. Which seems a similar view as to what you are trying to build.

    While dealing with the problem of things relating to situations; if all moral truths, even absolute, relate only to one particular situation and no relations between those moral truths, then it's difficult to conceive of finding such an infinite list of moral principles for each conceivable situation. Therefore, the truths, if any, that we could possibly find must transcend all situations and be universally applicable; again, from our position of limited knowledge, the categorical imperative Kant advances as the principles to judge other principles. Without transcendent principles, even if we have a moral truth for a particular situation it's very difficult to actually verify we are actually in such a situation, and if no moral principles transcend many situations, then even slight differences in situation may render a moral principle invalid; i.e. even if we do know some moral principle matches some situation we cannot know at one point a modification of that situation invalidates the principles without either the complete infinite list of principles or then some rules to apply our principles (i.e. principles that transcend all situations); and, given that situations do not remain static but change with time, if we do not know the domain of the validity of a principle then it's essentially useless. I don't remember Kant making such an argument explicitly (though I wouldn't be surprised if he did), but it's a problem his philosophy solves.

    As a Kantian, my main motivation in reading your work carefully would be to defend Kantianism against your attacks on transcendentalism. Precise philology and history of ideas does not interest me so much, just to know enough to understand a broad spectrum of key references to be able to get up to speed on any particular arguments, so as to then get as quickly as possible into it's intrinsic merits or faults.

    Of course, you don't need to use the usual philology references, it just makes it longer to understand for someone familiar with philosophical material. Making your own terminology is fine, though may actually take more time in debates than the initial investment of the most understandable terminology.

    However, since you asking for where the ideas may originate from I'd recommend you at least feign interest in the subject matter of your own OP, rather than just insist people read everything very, very carefully whenever you hear something other than praise.

    Since you seem very insistent you're against transcendentalism, it would be useful, if your purpose is to clarify your ideas for critical scrutiny, to simply state a position clearly relative to the most famous transcendentalist (and of course relative your interpretation of Kant's transcendentalism, of which many are readily available).

    Another word you use is pragmatism. Again, reading and positioning yourself relative to pragmatists such as Locke and Dewey would be a useful exercise. Since pragmatism is something you seem definitely for and not against, this may also be fruitful ground to develop your position further.
  • The Philosophy of Commensurablism
    ...did you actually read the essay at all? I am definitely doing that. Though maybe your weird understanding of the word "objective" is throwing you off of that. — Pfhorrest

    I did read your essay, but not carefully as you're only desiring feedback on where the ideas come from, or then to identify them as new, according to your OP, and am happy to help.

    A careful reading would also require reading all the previous essays where you define your terms, as you mention above. Again, I'd be happy to look into carefully if that's what your post was about. What I wouldn't be happy about is making some effort and then having the response "ah, am only looking for grammar feedback at the moment".

    You seem to want to use the word "absolute" to mean what I'm using "objective" to mean, and while you're not alone in that (there is a lot of confused terminology in this area), "absolute" is also used often in contrast to what is sometimes called "situational" ethical models, where the "absolutist" says that certain kinds of actions are always right or wrong, while the "situationist" say that whether an action is right or wrong depends on the context of the situation, but for any particular action in any particular situation there is still an objective (universal, mind-independent, non-relativist) answer to whether that is right or wrong. I am not an absolutist in that sense, and don't want to be mistaken for one, so since there are other words besides "absolute" for the thing that I do support, like "objective", I prefer to use those. — Pfhorrest

    That's why I say "if you don't want to associate yourself with Rand and the 'objectivists' " you could use the term absolutism. Sure, you'll have to clarify that you mean absolute truths in terms of principles not physical actions regardless of the situation (as essentially all absolutists agree on).

    However, if you want to keep to the word objectivist, my first comment was:

    it seems to me the first thing to clarify is what you are retaining from previous "objectivists" and where you differ. — boethius

    You can of course do neither, perhaps as a wink and a nod to the other objectivists that you're building some meta theory that will in the least empathize with their desire to be taken seriously in the critical thinking community, but you do that at the risk of these sorts of edge-wise witticisms built up over several comments. It's a choice, depending on what you want to achieve.
  • The Philosophy of Commensurablism
    I am aware of Ayn Rand but not drawing anything from her philosophy specifically. There are a lot of different kinds of lower-case “objectivisms” in philosophy, like moral objectivism, which just hold that something or another is objective. I’m just using it in that general sense. — Pfhorrest

    Since Randianism is a popular faction in US style Liberterianism, then "objectivist" is making a strong association.

    If you don't want that association, empirical is the more normal philosophical word for drawing conclusions from what we normal would call an "objective view of reality".

    "Moral objectivism" is basically an oxymoron.

    Though it can make sense to say one is trying to be "objective about the moral implications of a situation", it is usually agreed there is no objective procedure to arrive at moral values (comparable to the objective procedures found in empirical science), and so unless you are advancing that there are in fact objective procedures to resolve moral questions, which you don't seem to be doing, then using objective to describe values may lead to confusion for your readers.

    That there are, nevertheless, absolute moral truths ("true" answers about, at least the foundational, moral questions), and though there may not be an objective procedure any two clear headed people could use to come to an agreement about there that there is nevertheless either other ways to the truths or truths nonetheless even if we can't get to them, is usually simply called "moral absolutistism" which is opposed to "moral relativism". Moral absolutists will accuse moral relativists of believing that moral relativism itself is a claim purporting to be absolutely true and thus a moral absolutist disposition, just in denial about it (a debate which goes back to Hellenistic skepticism as previously mentioned, though only on principle and without a cultural relativistic element of modern relativists).

    Moral relativism should not be confused with pluralism, which is simply the observation by moral absolutists that it is not incompatible with a common sense approach to culture (that cultural diversity is not intrinsically bad nor is it intrinsically incoherent for moral absolutists to respect different cultures insofar as they represent an attempt to get closer to the absolute truths that do exist).

    As for the word critical, essentially every philosophy will claim to pass critical scrutiny, so it's not really describing any particular philosophy as such, just the critical thinking method generally of considering the positions available; which for philosophical debate, such as in this forum, is usually a shared premise. The question of course is what positions do pass critical scrutiny.

    Although you aren't asking for criticism of your content, I would recommend thinking hard about how to know a position is extreme without relation to the status quo, and, second, if there is any reason to believe some truths are not extreme relative the alternatives, either because it is a legitimate binary question and only two extremes available or then the truth simply happens to lie on some global maxima of a topological space of possibilities.
  • The Philosophy of Commensurablism
    - Are any of these views new to you? Even if I attribute them to someone else, I'd like to know if you'd never heard of them before. — Pfhorrest

    You call your philosophy "critical objectivism". Are you aware And Rand called her philosophy objectivism? Is it just a coincidence? If not, why do you not mention how your philosophy relates to Randianism?

    If indeed, your goal is to credit previous thinkers when convenient and not make a confused jumble of terminology, it seems to me the first thing to clarify is what you are retaining from previous "objectivists" and where you differ.
  • Is society itself an ideology?
    So I think we are basically in agreement except that wanting/having children is a "fact of life". — schopenhauer1

    Yes, we seem to agree on the basic framework that society runs on ideology.

    By "fact of life" I mean to reference that most people with children or who see children around may not have thought through the philosophical implications.

    It is an aside, however, to what extent people can be justified holding a position without thinking through the justification. My statement wasn't well written if it is not clear I was not taking a position relative this issue. Apologetics for people who haven't thought their actions through much is not a subject that interests me -- though not because the answers are clear to these questions but simply because the only person who can benefit from such arguments is someone who does have the time and desire to think about the subject and so is no longer in the category of "not having thought about it".

    That is taking that a bit too literally. Anyone can debate whether procreation is good. After all, procreation certainly affects the progeny born into existence. Although I don't think anyone can force their idea of procreating or not on someone else, it is ironic that indeed the parent is forcing procreation on a new person, whether or not that parent's neighbor disapproves or not. So again, anyone can have this conversation, whether if one can actually procreate or not. — schopenhauer1

    Though I agree that people who can't have children can still talk about it, and so indirectly affect others who can, it would certainly seem to me a position of less moral responsibility than actually deciding to have children or not, in the "face-value" framework of conceiving children in itself as the most important political act.

    My main purpose in my response, however, is to make a moral equivalence between having children and all actions that maintain and perpetuate society.

    But why is the assumption that we should contribute to continuing humanity? That is the exact ideological assumption I am questioning. Perhaps we should contribute to reducing ALL suffering unto a future person by simply not having said person (who will eventually suffer)? — schopenhauer1

    In my last comments I have been outlining (in my view) how a justification for having children can be argued; although it is indeed a very weight decision in itself, it follows from the broader question of valuing humanity as a whole or not. If humanity has value, and we conclude we should continue it, then it follows children are consistent with such a value system.

    I have not yet argued for these premises, that humanity does have value and should be continued.

    We could of course move onto this question, but so far my goal here is to give an idea of how ideology does not exclude coherent ideology which in turn does not exclude an ideology being true. That indeed, everything is ideological, and the word only has meaning when contrasting with the status quo (which at best is simply a short hand way to say "I'm going to now describe some ideas the majority does not agree with" and at worst is the ideology of denying the status quo is an ideology -- such as maximizing profits is simply rationality beyond reproach and not an ideology in itself), and in a philosophical context is simply equivalent to "world view". We are still left with all the same questions of whether the ideology or world view in question has merit or not, is sound or not, and is true or not. It's not a useless word in the philosophical context, it makes sense to contrast "my ideological foundations to yours"; but my main point so far is that identifying something as ideological does not provide us any further information than that we are considering the ideas in question together; it remains to be seen if those ideas have justification or are really true.

    I don't get how you are using "true" in this post. What makes an ideology "true"? Any answer you provide will beg the question, even unto the simple answer "it helps us survive" as even that ideology can be questioned as to why we should contribute to that cause rather than reduction of suffering (which would equate to preventing any new person from being born to experience suffering). — schopenhauer1

    Yes, this is exactly why, as with my discussion here with @alcontali, I have been arguing there are no "epistemic givens"; perhaps none at all (even within our own minds), but in the least there are no epistemic givens in philosophical debate. What I believe makes something true or false is itself part of my ideology, and if you don't share the same criteria of what's true and false in your ideology, then you will not be convinced by the same reasoning. If we find common ground, we cannot conclude that "therefore that common ground is true" but only we have shared ideology, if only partly.

    However, that we are unable to convince each other of anything without sharing premises that we can always beg the question about, does not imply there is no true positions. It does not even mean that we can't be truly convinced that we really do have the truth about something. Though I accept that you see my ideology (wherever we disagree) as one ideology among many, I see my ideology (certainly the critical foundations of it) as really true, otherwise I would not believe it; and I expect you to see things the same way for the key parts of your ideology.
  • Coronavirus
    The cuts started in 2018, as the White House focused on eliminating funding to Obama-era disease security programs. In March of that year, Rear Adm. Timothy Ziemer, whose job it was to lead the U.S. response in the event of a pandemic, abruptly left the administration and his global health security team was disbanded.

    That same year, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) was forced to slash its efforts to prevent global disease outbreak by 80% as its funding for the program began to run out. The agency, at the time, opted to focus on 10 priority countries and scale back in others, including China.

    Also cut was the Complex Crises Fund, a $30 million emergency response pool that was at the secretary of state’s disposal to deploy disease experts and others in the event of a crisis.     — Fortune
  • Coronavirus
    A good day to reminisce:

    In my view Trump has now secured the essential state power mechanisms (why he's now so happy on TV) thanks to unquestioning loyalty of the Republican base that have kept all the Republican senators and congress members in line, and avoided a revolution of the moderate Republicans teaming with the Democrats to impeach him.

    So great for Trump. And a great day for Trump supporters for sure.

    However, supporting an incompetent statesman who falls in love with dictators is not necessarily a good future for any American, including Republicans. When a real crisis comes, history has shown that governments filled with loyal sycophants simply lose their grip on the situation.     — boethius - April 2018 - Re: Kavanaugh and Ford
  • Is society itself an ideology?
    So to take this implication further, I believe this to be the utmost important political decision. I see political ideology as ideas that one believes not just oneself, but other should follow. — schopenhauer1

    I am essentially in agreement.

    However, for me it is not a problem to categorize all beliefs as ideological and all decisions as ideologically based.

    I'll make a small tangent to elucidate the negative connotation of the word ideology, which I want to avoid in this conversation, as I think you do as well, and so if there is not even a slight hint of negative connotation of ideology influencing your argument, then the following is for the benefit of others.

    The idea that "ideology is bad", generally speaking, comes from propagandists defending the status quo. For instance, if a business makes some controversial decision that many don't like. We might ask "was it for ideological reasons?" which has the implicit alternative that if it wasn't "for ideological reasons" then it was just some marketing calculation intended to maximize profits by drumming up controversy and increasing loyalty in at least some people by building an us-vs-them feeling.

    However, of course, maximizing profits is also an ideology. By categorizing any other decision making basis as "ideological", and thus not justifiable at best and simply irrational at worst, is simply a subtle trick to emphasize "don't go outside the lines".

    So yes, deciding to have children is ideological based and implicitly accepts a large part of society's ideology.

    However, I would argue that "a large part" of society's ideology is a prerequisite for having children because it happens to be true. Though I view all decisions as ideological, that does not mean all ideology is false. "You shouldn't eat poisonous mushrooms" is a part of society's ideology I've inherited, and I imagine you as well, but doesn't mean it's false.

    Now, I agree
    ↪TheMadFool
    that most people don't give the ideology they've inherited much thought, obviously simply going along with it in a "it's worked until now at least" sense isn't necessarily contradictory. Of course, most people who don't think much about it, just a normal thing people wanting and having children (a fact of life as it were), probably don't even argue that far. So it is an interesting debate whether such an assumption without attempting to justify it is a justifiable assumption; but of course, it can only be debated from outside by people that are reflecting on the issue and considering both proposals. So, probably best to discuss those proposals in themselves first.

    So, although we agree that it an ideological choice, I would not agree completely with:

    Thus, forcing other people into society should be the first thing debated. Everything else is secondary to this as everything else literally, comes from this. — schopenhauer1

    At least not in terms of a face-value interpretation, of relation to parents conceiving children, as it excludes people who cannot have children from participating in what is essential and not secondary.

    A reformulation I would agree with, is that the fundamental issue is "whether it is worthwhile to continue humanity or not", and, if yes, then several principles follow as a corollary. The most important would be preserving the environmental conditions that make humanity possible, not simply because that's the foundation for humanity's project but we have responsibility to other living creatures and not just ourselves. The idea that "sometimes people should have children" also follows from deciding to continue humanity. And, for some, the best way to contribute to continuing humanity does involves having children, while others may see the best way for them as other activities.

    Of course, most people who have children may not think in these terms or even intuitively share this world view; for instance may not care too much about the environment and want children anyway to satisfy their own parental desire or increase their social standing.

    However, as I mention above, I believe we can't escape a large part of society's ideology because it happens to be true (and going without it leads quickly to death) but I also believe that whatever is false we inherit we can escape from. Deciding to have children is not an intrinsic commitment to perpetuate false beliefs society has. The "true ideology" may overlap a large part of society's ideology, either defined as the status quo or then just the collection of what everyone happens to believe, and the true ideology may include valuing the continuation of humanity.
  • Sustainable Energy and the Economy (the Green New Deal)
    I fear that giving the government that much power is not worth the loss of freedom and gains in taxation, even if it were to achieve its goal of saving us from a coming apocalypse. — NOS4A2

    So you would actually prefer an apocalypse if it meant lowering taxes and regulations?
  • The Road to 2020 - American Elections
    In my book, getting a voice is not worth the risk of a 2nd term for Trump. — Relativist

    Though I like
    ↪Benkei
    reasoning with:

    That means there's a (100-x)% chance the status quo will change in the opposite direction.

    A risk-based approach means Bernie is the only viable candidate.     — Benkei

    -- and hope that conversation continues; I think it is adjacent to the main issue most people have (and I'm sure you would agree with, but perhaps have not given a thorough look).

    The main issue in "Bernie or 'moderate'", whatever is meant by moderate, is the DNC and friends in the media unfairly managing, if not out-right trying to fix, the primaries against Bernie, as well as the sort of "structural election fixing" that is the super delegates. Keeping in mind that since the DNC is a "private organization" it has no obligation to run a fair primary.

    If the vote was fair, everyone has a different opinion sure, Bernie wins or not, the issue of backing the winner would be less contentious. The argument can be made a moderate is better position to defeat Trump or Bernie or Bloomberg or whoever, and the opposite arguments, and the best candidate wins and that's that.

    However, if the vote's not fair two large issues arise.

    The first, with regards of your priority of defeating Trump, an unfair process is very demotivating for the side that sees their candidate being shafted, as well as for independents, and in addition provides great ammunition for the right-wing spin machine (who would love nothing more than to counter balance the obvious and prodigious corruption of Trump with obvious corruption of the DNC primary process). So strategically, even if Bernie is less likely to win than a moderate, it is extremely dangerous to run a unfair primary process to attempt to determine the result.

    It takes a certain "passion" to actually go out and vote, so the continuous hammering of "DNC corruption" in picking the candidate will lower that passion for many, perhaps leading to just "tuning things out" and not voting.

    The second issue, is that it puts Bernie supporters in the position of enabling an unfair process if they support a winner of a corrupt process. By "punishing" the DNC by not voting, or even voting for Trump, is the only way to make them think twice next time; risking 4 years of Trump in exchange for pushing the DNC in a less corrupt direction maybe seen as the right calculation long term to some. Regardless of whether this is "true" or not (and who knows), it's a major theme in the "progressives" as it is clearly a critical question. Of course, this is exactly what happened with the "Bernie or bust" in the last primary with Hillary; again, maybe Hillary would have won anyway, maybe not, but the collusion with the mainstream media and anomalous coin-flipping and so on, obviously provides fuel to the Bernie or best argument. This is of course simply a subset of "demotivated" people, but a particularly vocal one.

    Whether you disagree or not, these groups need to be taken into account in your strategic calculation; obviously, the best way to get as many participants as motivated as possible is a fair primary. Hillary's idea was "republicans will vote for me"; history proved that wasn't a good enough to win.
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