The Coronavirus thread - Page 20

On October 15 2020 06:17 Baalim wrote: Show nested quote + On October 15 2020 03:00 blackjacki2 wrote: What part of my post doesn't mesh with your understanding of probability? The idea that any country would need to lockdown for 6 months is ludicrous. A 1 month lockdown, 2 at the most, should sufficiently bring down cases. As the WHO said, lockdowns should be used for reorganization and regrouping and essentially as a last resort. They should not be used as a primary method of containment and after 2 months of lockdown the active cases would be sufficiently low enough that to continue them further is just trying to contain the virus which is better done with masks and social distancing. The fact that you mentioned that the avg age of COVID death is higher than the avg lifespan, as if I wen't on a senior killing rampage and if my average is 79yo then what I"m doing is somehow ok or less bad, you are either not quite grasping how meaningless that stats is or you have awful views on the value of the lives of elders. I agree 6 month country-wide lockdown is crazy and its the result of underreacting in many instances of this pandemic, late closing borders, little testing, low and late usage of masks, no contact tracing, no localized lockdowns, soft lockdowns etc, the ironic part is that you bitch about these long lockdowns yet minimize the impact of using a mask, yes the "returns" of wearing a mask diminishes the lest risky your sorrounding is, but there is little to no downside to using it, why does that even bother you?.

Well u can make a case that I'm displaying a "fuck old people" attitude but that has nothing to do with probability.

Also I would say COVID killing mostly people in nursing homes instead of young adults is obviously "less bad." How can that even be argued?

Regarding masks - the only thing I said about masks is they are a better strategy to contain the virus than lockdowns which no reasonable person would interpret as me minimizing mask use so I will just assume you misread my post.

The 'state inefficiency' statement while mentioning korea/taiwan, ect, in the same sentence is an interesting display of compartmentilization. Baal you realize that compared to the west Korea has a very cooperative private/public sector. I.e they don't just dismiss making testing kits because of it's unprofitability, the private sector does actually listen to what the government says in Korea, unlike in the west where the sole human value is profit. Mass survellience was a useful tool in South Korea for the pandemic as well

And yeah, if lockdown's happen they don't need to be longer than a month, NZ crushed it in 3 weeks of lockdown. Although we wern't prepared with things like tracer apps, ect. You can justify a lockdown imo if your society hasn't bothered preparing for a pandemic. Otherwise just do what Korea did. Possibly in the near future mass surviellience will be sophisticated enough to deal with pandemics like this one without having to disrupt the economy in any major way.

I also agree that young people's lives are worth more than old people, unless they are like 2week old newborns. Probably 5-10 years old is peak value. Doesn't really change anything though.

OK I think that helps to understand your point of view. If you feel that every life is truly equally valuable then we can stop wasting time citing stats about who exactly covid kills because it's just not relevant to you.

On October 15 2020 06:59 Stroggoz wrote: Probably 5-10 years old is peak value.

Wait, why?

maybe he's guessing that children 5-10 have the longest life expectancy

No, people who have just been born have the longest life expectancy. Do you like how i am being intentionally obtuse?

10 year olds have the lowest death probability, 0.0001%? It steadily decreases from ages 0-10, then starts increasing again after that. This would a much bigger thing if we were living pre 1850 before the theory of germs was confirmed, plumbing, ect.

https://www.ssa.gov/oact/STATS/table4c6.html

Can come up with some other reasons though. Apparently if your 119 years old you have an 89% chance of dying before your 120, (small sample size). So i'd say a 10 year old's life is roughly 10,000 times more valueable than a 119 year old. Baals dad has something like 2.1% chance of dying this year~, so he's something like halfway between a 10 year old and a 119 year old in terms of value.

LoL.

In all seriousness though, numbers do matter. I don't really know much about bioethics and all that but the medical profession has a lot of numerical utilitarian arguments that they apply routinely when they have to make tough trolley-problem like decisions.

Also trolley problems are the gold standard of moral psychology, they were originally developed to study the structure of people's moral intuitions under an idealized setting. So they are designed specifically to have answers.

That logic sounds reasonable if all other factors are equal

On October 15 2020 11:59 Spitfiree wrote: That logic sounds reasonable if all other factors are equal

wtf, you give in too easily. I was only being half serious with my post. I'm sure there's a lot of holes in my argument. I usually intentionally make half bad arguments these days just to see which criticisms people will come up with

On October 15 2020 12:26 Stroggoz wrote: Show nested quote + On October 15 2020 11:59 Spitfiree wrote: That logic sounds reasonable if all other factors are equal wtf, you give in too easily. I was only being half serious with my post. I'm sure there's a lot of holes in my argument. I usually intentionally make half bad arguments these days just to see which criticisms people will come up with

lol i love that


loving the stats too but leave baal's dad out of this plz

On October 15 2020 12:26 Stroggoz wrote: Show nested quote + On October 15 2020 11:59 Spitfiree wrote: That logic sounds reasonable if all other factors are equal wtf, you give in too easily. I was only being half serious with my post. I'm sure there's a lot of holes in my argument. I usually intentionally make half bad arguments these days just to see which criticisms people will come up with

I mean there are but my logic would also have holes and I don't have enough time for a productive discussion so might as well leave it there. And measuring a person's value based on age is one of the most reasonable measures out there on both social and biological levels. The topic of a person's value is as old as our species so...

On October 15 2020 06:59 Stroggoz wrote: The 'state inefficiency' statement while mentioning korea/taiwan, ect, in the same sentence is an interesting display of compartmentilization. Baal you realize that compared to the west Korea has a very cooperative private/public sector. I.e they don't just dismiss making testing kits because of it's unprofitability, the private sector does actually listen to what the government says in Korea, unlike in the west where the sole human value is profit. Mass survellience was a useful tool in South Korea for the pandemic as well And yeah, if lockdown's happen they don't need to be longer than a month, NZ crushed it in 3 weeks of lockdown. Although we wern't prepared with things like tracer apps, ect. You can justify a lockdown imo if your society hasn't bothered preparing for a pandemic. Otherwise just do what Korea did. Possibly in the near future mass surviellience will be sophisticated enough to deal with pandemics like this one without having to disrupt the economy in any major way. I also agree that young people's lives are worth more than old people, unless they are like 2week old newborns. Probably 5-10 years old is peak value. Doesn't really change anything though.

So your argument is that government were efficient, but it was the private sector lack of cooperation that ruined things, and thats why Korea and Taiwan succeeded? oh boy, I'm going to have a field day on this one, but please clarify so I dont waste my time.

On October 15 2020 20:44 Spitfiree wrote: And measuring a person's value based on age is one of the most reasonable measures out there on both social and biological levels. The topic of a person's value is as old as our species so...

Yeah we all intuitively know that the life of a 100yo is less valuable than the life of a 30yo, but its trolley dilema area, where hard quantifiable human life leads to absurdity, if the life of a young man is worth more than an old one, what about 1 young life vs 2 old lives? what about 3 old lives or 1,000?.


Sure, as Stroggoz mentions sometimes these questions need a quantifiable answer, like recently triage in Italy where they left old ppl to die to save ventilators to young ppl, or when designing driving AI to see if it would serve into a baby stroller or an old man etc, but the point is that quantifying the vlaue of human life is a difficult subject with eugenic undertones, so it often ends up with retarded ugly arguments about how the pandemic wasn't thtat bad because it killed mostly old people since they are less valuable.

Its a bit like the topic of race and IQ... ok sure we can discuss it, but it better be a good point because we all know where this is going.

TBF it didn't sound like that was your point at all, it sounds like you were saying life is of exactly equal value regardless of age and now you dramatically changed your position

You guys are making the mistake of only seeing from a state's perspective (and only one specific type of state), and assuming that this gives you some kind of objective lens through which to see human life and value. It doesn't. You're also making a leap of logic that you can't justify: just because, in a situation of scarcity, some decisions have to be made about who gets saved, it doesn't mean that it says anything about intrinsic value, or what can be universalized about the value of human life based on numbers.

The main problem with thinking of it as a trolley problem is that trolley problems are non-dynamic and the scarcity is unalterable. They are purely exercises of the imagination stripped of complexity that demand that we absolutely choose an option or another. A state is a dynamic entity, which can be influenced by its citizens if it has a functioning democracy. (And when the democracy is failing, people can organize themselves and contributed to solving things independently of the state). So in the situation of a pandemic, the issue of "needing to kill some people so that others live" only arises because of specific socio-economic reasons that are entirely man-made, and what is man-made is changeable. More money and efforts could have been invested in protecting against pandemics, and more money and efforts could have been invested to mitigate it. Of course, we understand the difficulty of this in a neoliberal society because the logic of neoliberalism elevates short-term profits and private accumulation above everything else, which leads to a society ruled by artificial scarcity and greed, and it has also atomized its citizens to a point where political actions pressuring the government successfully seem like wishful thinking. But that's not some unalterable law of nature. If you can't see these things and take them into account in your analysis then you are the perfect subject that can be hijacked by a totalitarian regime that supports eugenics.

The value of life can obviously not be quantified based on age. In a trolley or desert island scenario, you would not always save the youngest person. You would want to know things about the people themselves. If someone is twice your age, but he's extremely altruistic, contributes to his community, is a world-traveler and a great storyteller who has many skills, you'd value his life more than someone who is younger than you and who has spent the last 10 years of his life bumming around, hating life, being addicted to drugs and social media. And if you were on a deserted island, you'd much prefer being with someone you enjoy being with and who can help you rather than someone who is younger. You'd sooner feed the youngest person to the sharks because they spend their time being entitled and complaining that they have no internet and can't go on TikTok because age is just not such a relevant factor. And you wouldn't think "oh damn I feel so guilty because the objectively right thing to do was obviously to save the young person, they had so much more to look forward to!" either.

Uh, i value the life of younger people over older people though. This is not an empirical disagreement, it's a value judgement. You can try to persuade me that i shouldn't but i've already taken most of these criticisms into account. It is also not incongruous with my support of the UN declaration of human rights nor attempts by states to protect the old as much as they can during covid (within reasonable limits).

States are pretty neutral on this-the factor of age, but where i am they care a little more about old people than young people, since old people vote, and make more political contributions to parties. You can see this in youth unemployment rates and pensions. It's not a big difference though, and this is all coincidental. I don't think it differs much between dictatorships and oligarchies. So we are not taking the perspective of the state. Also spitfire said 'all other factors remaining equal', he was clearly factoring out placing value on people for being tiktok users or altruists-and meant that value would change once those dynamics are factored in, althought i'm pretty sure he meant something a bit more serious than being a tiktok user.

Eugenics can be done in a liberal way. You can have the state give a monetary incentive for genetically inferior people not to breed rather than just being genocidal. This is a far quicker method for acheiving better genetics as a species than slowly waiting for women to weed out the weak ones over thousands or millions of years.

I have pretty interesting convo's with young people especially around ages 8-12. It saddens me that a lot of them spend all their free time playing video games though, i generally like kids quite a lot because they are always more interested in learning things. i'd kill dneg's over chomsky for sure, if it was an island i had to spend time on. The scenario you presented is not one that would influence my decision though. Not sure why you gave that example when you can easily come up with better ones. Bratty teenagers almost always grow out of their personal failings.

All things being equal, all human lives have the same objective value, because humans value their own lives similarly, unless suicidal. As soon as you introduce duration or some other thing as a criterion you have to justify it, and it's a mere personal value judgment when you're not taking into account the survival of the society. You have to argue why, for instance, duration would be better than intensity or contribution. People never have the same value to the state, or the same value to you. But here it was basically universalized and taken for granted that duration ought to be central to measuring the actual value of a person rather than his or her use-value (from a personal or state perspective). I wasn't referring to you believing it can be universalized, I was just pointing this out because no one else did, but it was clearly implied by others.

Killing old people in overcrowded hospitals during the pandemic is not done because they have less value in and of themselves; it's done because it's economically/politically logical. It is "seeing like a state" because the state upholds private property and artificial scarcity and tries to reproduce itself above all. Younger people are more suited to reproduce society's structures, even if they vote less. They will produce, consume and procreate more. Secondly, when you use the state's perspective as a centrist or right-winger then it is taken for granted that they would not change the structures of society and they would not take money from the billionaire class in order to help the average person. Respecting the right of the billionaire to his billions and therefore killing the old people is the right thing to do. My point was that this lens with which the centrist/right-winger sees objective value is erroneous, because that should not be granted. It has to be argued for. It's not a trolley problem, because it's not fixed in advance. If the billionaire class had seriously invested in preventing pandemics, or if every dollar they had made since the pandemic began had went to the public in order to mitigate its impacts, we would not even be having this conversation. We can have these abstract moral debates, but we shouldn't depoliticize them.

And it seems to me that all things cannot even be equal between the young and the old. They have accumulated different experiences and can contribute drastically different things based on ability, background, and the different pressures they face(d) generationally.

The kids you like more because they seem more curious will grow old too, they won't remain kids. All things being equal, the system will take that out of them like it did with the older people. So why would that factor in your decision? I think you'd have to think that there is something specific about this generation that will produce better people/people you like more into late adulthood in order to value them more than the actual late adults who are already here. I think your concern about excessive video games and social media usage should hint at being more pessimistic about the future of intellectualism. This is not merely something people "will grow out of," they are a cultural phenomenon, and they don't just structure the lives of kids and teens, it's widespread among adults too, just like excessive drug use.

And yes, my post wasn't implying that only conventional totalitarian regimes can use eugenics.

We always have the option to exchange wealth for saving lives or delaying deaths. We could shut the country down every flu season from December to March in the same manner that we did this spring. Just create a UBI for those months from a tax on the billionaire class. Thousands and thousands of lives would be saved. It's really quite idiotic that we haven't been doing this already. The best part about having a billionaire class is that their wealth is the solution to every problem.

I wasn't even thinking about specifics there, simply because the definition of one's worth is a problematic topic by itself. The fact that tiktokers were brought as an argument is the very reason I don't even want to dive into this, since tiktokers are considered valuable by millions of people due to their entertainment. It's easy to dismiss their "contribution" as useless, but the fact is we need entertainment. (Don't get me wrong I'd shut that shit down if it were up to me, but fortunately, we're not aiming to build a dystopic dictatorship society)

So how do you define one's worth? Are we going with an elitist academic definition of who is smarter and/or will contribute with more knowledge to society or are entertainers also just as valuable? What about musicians - the majority of them are/were heavy drug users or alcoholics and apart of their productions they don't really contribute with anything?

Older people are much more valued in my country by the state as they are used for political purposes, while youth has been protesting for the past 4 months with very solid arguments and nothing happened. I wouldn't say the state values the youth by default, that's simply not true. You could say the same for pretty much every European nation too. Brexit was voted by the older generations for example.

Anyways this topic simply hits a much larger picture, each question leads to a different moral dilemma and they are dependant on each other in many ways

Woops
my country is the worst in the world

On October 18 2020 00:40 Spitfiree wrote: I wasn't even thinking about specifics there, simply because the definition of one's worth is a problematic topic by itself. The fact that tiktokers were brought as an argument is the very reason I don't even want to dive into this, since tiktokers are considered valuable by millions of people due to their entertainment. It's easy to dismiss their "contribution" as useless, but the fact is we need entertainment. (Don't get me wrong I'd shut that shit down if it were up to me, but fortunately, we're not aiming to build a dystopic dictatorship society) So how do you define one's worth? Are we going with an elitist academic definition of who is smarter and/or will contribute with more knowledge to society or are entertainers also just as valuable? What about musicians - the majority of them are/were heavy drug users or alcoholics and apart of their productions they don't really contribute with anything? Older people are much more valued in my country by the state as they are used for political purposes, while youth has been protesting for the past 4 months with very solid arguments and nothing happened. I wouldn't say the state values the youth by default, that's simply not true. You could say the same for pretty much every European nation too. Brexit was voted by the older generations for example. Anyways this topic simply hits a much larger picture, each question leads to a different moral dilemma and they are dependant on each other in many ways

From a humanistic/cosmopolitan perspective, the value of a human life escapes the quantifiable. Once we take the perspective of our individual preferences, or a state working with limited resources, then the value of life changes based on the (perceived) instrumental value of individuals/groups that people have.

It's irksome to me that some would think that just because there exists situations where trade-offs must be made in an environment of scarcity, then it says something about those individuals or groups in themselves. So on this debate on who should live during pandemics, older people shouldn't be seen as less valuable, they should be seen as being made less valuable. It's especially important to highlight the distinction when a crisis is political in nature, and could have been prevented or at least managed much better than it was, and the focus is shifted towards the victims and their involuntary sacrifices to ignore it and not learn from it.

The state values productivity above all, regardless of which party is in power. Is there a threshold after which loyalty to one party becomes favored over more productivity, and parties play on that? Maybe. But if you're superficial to capital, you're not valued, i.e. invested in. That doesn't mean you cannot be manipulated to vote against your interests. Old and/or poor people do it all the time. They'll vote for more austerity that will harm them. Just because they are naive and won't protest as much doesn't mean that the state values them over the economic output and future potential contributions of younger generations, i.e. it doesn't mean that the state will invest more in them than in the younger generations, which is what we mean by valuing more in this context.

You have to keep in mind that younger generations can sustain themselves while older ones can't, they are directly dependent on the younger ones and the state. And in places where fertility rates are below replacement and declining, which is a lot of places, it's not hard for me to see that the equation old = burden is made much easier as a result.