Hacker News Reader

Comment by tuna-piano | Hacker News Reader

At a certain point, the choice between: "Do I want to lose a few days of my life to a disease with a tiny chance of a bad outcome?" vs "Do I want to lose a year+ of my life not doing what I enjoy?" becomes overwhelmingly obvious.

In March/April - I didn't leave my apartment for a month (besides tossing trash across the hall).

I still avoid most any indoor spaces, wear n95 masks and am not planning any plane travel (one of my biggest enjoyments) or visiting friends/family indoors this winter...

But I'm starting to seriously debate licking every door knob I pass just to get it over with already.

View on HN

Getting sick puts not just you at risk, but your family, friends, coworkers, and anyone you come in contact with after and during the fact.

It also could generate unnecessary strain on our health system that is already over capacity.

There's no need. Stay at home, stay protected, and don't take an unnecessary risk because you can't be mildly inconvenienced to save someone else's life.

> you can't be mildly inconvenienced to save someone else's life.

A major disruption for a year isn't a "mild inconvenience." The longer this goes on, expect more and more people to feel like GP.

> "Do I want to lose a year+ of my life not doing what I enjoy?"

Sounds like a mild inconvenience to me. Any other reason wouldn't be.

And of not doing what you want. At a year, you start going through math around the likelihood you'd die from the virus and realizing that even with a 1% mortality rate, for someone with the whole life ahead of them, the time/opportunity EV is negative.

There are people who set a monetary value on human life, and we have good estimates on that. What we don't have a good number for is what's the value of different degrees of freedom. Is a life where traveling is impractical, meeting people is challenging, you can't go to Disneyland, all that stuff, is it worth 75% of a life at 2019 levels? I don't mean this economically, I mean this as living life.

> , you start going through math around the likelihood you'd die from the virus and realizing that even with a 1% mortality rate, for someone with the whole life ahead of them, the time/opportunity EV is negative.

Could you elaborate on this? By EV you mean the expected value?

Yeah. It's not quite the same as EV, but the idea is that living one year of your life 75% "fully" is like reducing your life expectancy by 3 months. If you have another 50 years to live, if the choice is between 75% fully and any less than a 1 in 200 chance of dying or having lasting complications, you take your chances. Where this gets awkward is the elderly because it takes away one of their five good years left, but the alternative is a 15% chance of dying.

Really starting to get sick of this moral posturing. 1 year isn't a "mild inconvenience", the lockdown have been absolutely devastating to many many people, but of course you wouldn't know that because you probably WFH on a comfy salary for a tech company?

Once again, you misread.

I said their specific reasoning is a mild inconvenience.

And no, funnily enough, I'm unemployed (working on an early stage startup) and my savings are in the low triple digits -- total -- thanks to the pandemic. Might want to start limiting the number of assumptions you make.

> "Do I want to lose a few days of my life to a disease with a tiny chance of a bad outcome?"

There's a high chance of a bad outcome, there's a tiny chance of death. The virus affects your lungs and brain, and who knows what other parts of the body we haven't been alerted to yet.

As time goes on we'll be back to "plague doors" for cafes and restaurants. We'll adjust our way of doing business so that we don't rely on having all the key people in a company in one room for irrelevant meetings (I mean we can dream, right?).

Reply on news.ycombinator.com