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Comment by rosywoozlechan | Hacker News Reader

I also find it extraordinary that unelected health officials have been allowed to dictate the freedoms of millions of people. These bureaucrats are experts in health and not economics, politics, and law and we're all beholden to them. They're qualified in a specific and narrow field but their decisions are impacting so much more. There's more to our lives and well being than an r0 number.

What we are experiencing right now is a considerable loss of freedom, this is what government intervention looks like, but into the most cherished aspects of our personal lives. How much of this control are governments going to try and hang on to after this is all over?

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Where I live politicians do make the decisions. They are only given advice from the health area. Epidemologists are usually way more educated than your average politician. I would even go as far as saying, that those highly educated people might have a better grasp of philosophical issues than politicians, who are mostly all talk. If I look at politicians at high level here in general, I have to doubt their ethics in general. At least epidemologists did not yet prove to be a lobby tool.

As far as I know, they are not allowed to dictate the freedoms of millions. They simply report and provide guidance from their angle of expertise, and it is up to elected officials to aggregate the advice of all their consulted experts and their own judgement and hopefully with a bit of listening to their populace as well, to make the decisions.

You are correct. However, some elected officials have (for incompetence, or just wanting to deflect responsibility) completely abdicated from their functions, and they act (or say they act) like whatever the experts tell them.

"We'll reopen when the scientists say so" was a common mantra the past two months in my country. That's an admission of giving up responsibility, IMO.

On top of that, experts not always agree, which makes things even more confusing. Some say (again, my country) that masks and social distancing are "worthless" (in favor of indefinitely long lockdowns), others say that they might work, others say that they definitely work.

What would be a better course of action to take in this crisis? Would you have preferred for your elected leaders to not have taken the consensus expert view?

Or do you think the consensus view of experts is not agreed upon currently?

The latter. I believe there's no real consensus at this point, save for a few points, of which the minutiae require more investigation. A lot on this virus is being learned "on the go" as the situation develops.

Also, some choices made at the time were made in haste, now, like the Science blog warned about "pandemic research exceptionalism", we need to make sure that public policy is subject to the same rigorous line of thinking (an extreme example of not doing so is the bleaching of a beach in Spain), IOW no decisions simply "because it's a crisis".

Public policy and elected officials need to be aware of these unknowns when taking decisions, especially since many of these, in one way or the other, carry negative externalities.

Interesting.

My take has been that they have taken a conservative action with regards to the virus, I've seen locking down as a way for the government to slow down time to try and work out what is going on before then taking a more considered point of view.

There was so much confusion in mid March about what would happen and lockdowns seem to have slowed things down a bit to get a clear head about what the path through is going to be like and I hope they don't rush their next decisions as there are so many things that are still not known.

In the future these current decisions could be wrong and will be wrong, I'm hoping that they aren't badly wrong but who knows... It seems to be considered on what mainstream scientific consensus but that's been wrong before but I feel it's the best we have given the situation.

The primary statement aside, I find it laughable when people parrot the talking points about "unelected" officials being an issue.

As if they were duly elected and making the same decision, the commenter would suddenly be appeased. Or when a judge makes a legal decision that's disagreed with, it's an "unelected official", but when it's to their liking, that concern disappears. Have some intellectual backbone, man.

By the way, if elected officials did their jobs properly and we were all free of the ridiculous political/social climate we find ourselves in, maybe unelected officials wouldn't have to step in to fill the void.

All the three parts of a functioning government (executive, legislative, judicial) have their own duties and responsibilities towards each other and the citizens.

The so-called "unelected officials" (bad term, I'd say, because it's too broad) do not have such responsibilities. They can be either used as scapegoats, as a way to remove responsibility from those who carry it, or use their current influence to push policy in one direction or the other.

All of this might happen, or might not happen at all. "if xxx did their jobs properly" is not an excuse not to remain vigilant.

Health officers are officers of the executive branch in nearly every typical jurisdiction I can think of. They are an extension of the governor/mayor/county executive, who can usually overrule/fire/replace/choose different decisions. And the elected officials are perfectly free to be accountable for the decisions of the executive.

I think the deeper issue here is the much-commented popular distrust or 2nd guessing of "experts". I guess a disease that has a long incubation time and highly variable susceptibility just brings out the worst in people's judgement capabilities.

> I think the deeper issue here is the much-commented popular distrust or 2nd guessing of "experts"

Experts are human, and so they make mistakes like everyone else. See the German study on the autopsies and thrombosis, for example. A similar finding was reported in my country and immediately slammed by some high profile experts (same with convalescent plasma therapy). Some experts are saying that social distancing is useless against this disease. Others let out contradictory statements to the general public.

For those who aren't equipped to understand that at least part of it (some of it is narcissism, but that's another story) is part of the general scientific discourse, it is absolutely understandable to not trust them fully. And even more when the same experts (speaking of my country) said in February that it wasn't a big deal (but few if any admitted they made a mistake).

A bureaucrat is specifically someone who is an elected official dealing with governance and policy. A bureaucrat who is an expert in health is exactly who you would want advising on an issue that is primarily driven by the management of a pandemic.

But the reality of it is none of these people are making the decisions, they're advising, your governors are making the final calls. So your governors should have information from economists, health officials and other areas and should be making decisions based on their best judgement of all that information.

I have a question in order to compare the USA situation to our own: what kind of statements do the expert panels make, when interviewed by the media or in official communication?

I don't follow US media all that closely, so I don't know enough to comment sorry. I think maybe you are leading to the thought that they still influence public actions through the media, and I'm sure that's true.

I say this because in my country the communication is very un-empathic and some prominent experts truly lack the skill, causing either denial or terror depending on who gets their message.

I'm being told that other countries carry their communication in a much more rational way, but I haven't been able to confirm this (hence the question).

I can only really speak for Australia, where communication has been fairly consistent and level-headed across the official channels at both a federal and state level of government. Most communication stresses caution, but maintains hope and lays out logical, fact based plans for restrictions that people can understand.

At least in April, almost twice as many people had trust in our expert (71%) than our President (45%) or Legislators (41/40%).

https://morningconsult.com/2020/04/08/dr-fauci-is-voters-pre...

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