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Comment by eli_gottlieb | Hacker News Reader

Never again should public policy be made subject to uncertainty? I may have some bad news for you about the human condition.

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We already know quite a bit about the world. Unclear why should we reach out into the fog of unknown for some cutting edge unproven state-of-the-art system, when there are quite a bit of well established and widely agreed upon known ones that can get us 90% of the way there, with much lower risks of catastrophic failure.

Case in point: covid19 policies inadvertently triggering the mega-depression of 2020 and beyond, for what appears to be relatively minor medical gains in the big picture. How bad can you botch it if it takes 5 months to come up with 'masks are good, perhaps, more research is needed' from a peer reviewed source, when even a 14 year old could have been told you that's rather a good idea all the way back in January.

https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6...

Uncertainty is always going to be a problem, and (if history is any guide), allowing free peoples to self-organize and make individual/community decisions about how to live has worked out the best.

Having a few elites (or a strident majority) make decisions for everyone else has turned out ... less good.

The worst outcomes tend to arrive when these groups shield themselves from evidence-based reality (usually by forcibly stripping liberty and wealth from their unfortunate subjects and inferiors), to temporarily suspend them experiencing the results of their actions. There's alot of that going around, presently.

Good luck with all that!

Never again should we allow people to pretend that their favorite brand of uncertainty deserves special accommodation.

What an insane statement. This is literally everything that politicians do: advocate for what they think is best based on our collective lack of understanding of science/economics/relations etc

I don’t think you understand. The “people” in my statement are not politicians, they are charlatans, whining whenever their uncertain theories are not used by politicians to dictate how everyone must behave, which according to some mental gymnastics ought to happen because their theories are dressed up in an outdated notion of “science”. It is pernicious fascist bullshit, but thankfully it will fail.

Would you mind reviewing https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and sticking to the rules when posting here? Note these two:

When disagreeing, please reply to the argument instead of calling names. "That is idiotic; 1 + 1 is 2, not 3" can be shortened to "1 + 1 is 2, not 3."

"Please respond to the strongest plausible interpretation of what someone says, not a weaker one that's easier to criticize. Assume good faith."

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

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