I’d be willing to forgive if there was some expression of repentance on the other side. I don’t think any of these people think their actions were incorrect. That’s the problem. Remorse and recognition of failure are necessary for forgiveness.
I read it skeptically, looking for her reasons to "forgive" the decision makers who made bad decisions, but no such reasons were there. Certainly those not seriously harmed by other non-decision makers who disagreed should try to forgive and agree that there wasn't enough info to be so sure of their own positions.
She fails to discus those who were fired for not getting vaccinated; no data on how many lives were saved by the vaccine vs how many were lost - and how the public insistence that the vaccine death rate was 0 is shown to be false by the data. Even we who believe that millions of lives were saved by the vaccine should be able to accept that thousands of lives were adversely affected by the vaccines, with many deaths.
Most of those who criticize her also fail to note how sloppy and uninformative most public discussion of COVID remains, even after almost 3 years.
What is the death rate / what is the death rate per variant (about 100 variants & subvariants)?
How infectious is it?
What are the effective ways to reduce effectiveness?
In any pandemic, what parameters are needed to be known in order to recommend a lockdown?
To mandate a lockdown?
I'm so tired of hearing "news" and "opinion" with almost nobody addressing these key questions.
We know, now, that mistakes were made. Our civilization needs to know a lot more about what those mistakes were, and what the non-mistake (decision) would look like. All alternative decisions will have good and bad points, but the conversation avoids discussing this reality and almost assumes there was some possible "nobody gets hurt" perfect decisions available.
There weren't. We need an honest discussion of what was possible.
Our politicians also need to fire - fire/ punish - those bureaucrats who were not telling the truth. We get honesty by gov't workers, including honestly "not knowing for sure", when dishonesty results in getting fired. We won't get it without the dishonest folk getting fired.
Oster seems to want to get the honesty without firing the liars; and yes, wanting more mothers to vote Dem (like she did in 2020? disastrously) again. I'm pretty sure the Dems will lose big. Not at all sure the gov't liars will be fired - but she's wrong to want them forgiven instead.
What bewilders me was that in March 2020 it became unquestionable "fact" that any and all corporate, educational and government actions in response to Covid were justified, no matter how logically flawed. No matter how harmful.
How did this happen?
How do we prevent this type of panic from happening again?
We must not sweep the pandemic response into the closet of history until there is a public reckoning of how public officials got the pandemic response so wrong.
In terms of justice, Fauci’s performance during the pandemic is trivial compared to his hand in creating the virus in the first place. There must be a legal reckoning with the national security state and its authority to fund dangerous virus synthesis.
For me the Amnesty argument isn't about forgiveness, or whether I trust Fauci. I want the FDA, CDC, etc to be able to have honest internal discussions about what went wrong, and how to do better next time. That means they have to be able to start with "This was badly wrong, in important ways" and not expect to be fired or jailed for saying so, which means amnesty. Think "blameless root cause analysis". I'm not sure it will work, but I'm sure that holding out for vengeance will prevent the institutions that most need it from learning or reforming at all, and keep their efforts focused on denial and stubborn insistence that they did the right thing.
Kriss is clearly very high IQ, but I also wouldn't be shocked to learn he has bipolar, schizophrenic, or autism spectrum relatives. Even many bright people will tend towards rhyming cyclicality of historicity drawn from nuggets in the information tsunami and this will be mixed with confirmation and hindsight bias and maybe the mirror of narcissus. I don't doubt the death of the current internet in some fashion. Does the internet of now look like 10 years ago, 20 years ago? It will be an evolution not a declining winking out of existence, even if that evolution is sped up to where we can see it before our eyes in real time if we are those blessed with the genetic lottery winnings of a longer memory. And this evolution will be informed by the past and the present and the future in a mix that someone is probably going to see coming, perhaps even someone we have never heard of. Also, Goia seems correct this is just the death of clickbait/internet, a reasserting of everyones story hungry mind, and the winners are those that can satisfy this, ie. youtube and substack.
Arnold, you ought to read the Oster piece yourself. It is short. More importantly, it isn't really what it says on the tin. What exactly it is is a bit interesting to think about.
Burns should say "parties." To partisan politicize or even to think the problem was level (Federal/State/Local) is wrong. CDC did not provide individuals and other public officials with the information they needed to make proper cost benefit analyses of how to respond to the pandemic. FDA failed to approve vaccines as soon as it should and dragged its feet on approving kits that could have been used for self isolation and test to stay opening/closing of venues. Only a radical re-imagining of PH could have gotten better decisions made in a decentralized way.
Re: the Oster piece, I realize that this blog (and Oster's focus) is largely about public policy, but I understood the column to be more about non-policymakers forgiving other non-policymakers for the sides they took in the million asinine online and offline conflicts that took place during the pandemic. I thought there was a lot to take to heart there, honestly.
I know a lot of people who had family, professional, personal relationships strained because of the various positions they took on masking, school attendance, vaccinations, etc. Whatever decisions we make in terms of voting for people who espoused certain policies or heuristics, I believe that declaring an amnesty (as Oster put it) in our personal lives is a good idea.
There's probably also a lot to learn as voting citizens in analyzing the track records of the thought leaders and policymakers we chose to listen to, and I don't think "they did their best" is a good way to judge governments, but you don't have to live with your government the way you have to live with the people in your community.
The response to the Oster piece suggesting peace and de-escalation is the right's corollary to the institutional left's response to that Letter on Ukraine. "How dare you?! We're in this for the long haul. Regime change is a must!"
I haven't been following this blog long enough to know any detail of Kling's view on vaccinations or what he thinks should have been done so I can only agree that many mistakes were made. It would have been great if less mistakes were made and maybe the rate of mistakes could have been realistically lower but I'm not at all confident it is reasonable to think there should have been a lot less mistakes. This was a very unique situation with a lot of uncertainty. Mistakes happen, especially when facing new situations. It's easy to critique from the peanut gallery and a lot harder to deal with something like what Covid presented. And I would wholeheartedly agree that CDC made way too many mistakes that reduced confidence and trust in their capabilities and recommendations. That is likely to continue to do harm, hopefully their won't be a severe issue anytime soon where the harm is large.
Beyond that, I think it is useful to divide the response into before vaccinations and after.
Before Vax - Personally, I was a little scared. And I was glad my wife had retired from medicine a year before it all happened. As a very healthy ~60 yr old, I realize my risk was low. Back then I thought it was a bit higher than I now know it was but still low. Either way, I'm glad I didn't get Covid until after I was vaccinated. We also have to remember that hospitals were overloaded for many months and a less conservative approach would have exponentially increased that problem. People are free to disagree but I think the steps that were taken weren't all that far from optimal despite there being lots of mistakes.
After Vax - I wholeheartedly agree there has been too much hesitancy to return to normal. Schools in some states reopened quickly and they should have in all states. Harm to kids (and their parents) was far greater by not reopening. CDC guidance should have leaned more towards normalcy. And I say this despite knowing many healthy people in their 70s and older who are still very scared of getting covid and not wanting to judge them and their concern of the risks.
Haven't read Michael Greve article (or book) yet, but your excerpt is spot on. But the repeat players aren't the only players, the system (still) allows disruptors to enter the fray without permission and change the rules of the game. This is why democracy needs it's Andrew Jacksons and Donald Trumps. It doesn't even strictly matter if those guys are good are bad, as long as they disrupt the system without destroying it.
Wow, all round outstanding post. The line of reasoning about competence vs. motive not mattering much...spot on. Aint got the time to diligence one's motives. Trying to read someone's mind is for the birds. Life is too short.
Also agree with you about politicians colluding to game the system. An arms race if you will between professional politicians who spend 24/7 trying yo amass more power/influence/money versus the rest of us.
As Tyler Cowen would say, both ideas substantially under rated
I’d be willing to forgive if there was some expression of repentance on the other side. I don’t think any of these people think their actions were incorrect. That’s the problem. Remorse and recognition of failure are necessary for forgiveness.
It reflects poorly on Arnold that he can link to others talking about a short (5 min read?), and not even link to The Atlantic: https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2022/10/covid-response-forgiveness/671879/
I read it skeptically, looking for her reasons to "forgive" the decision makers who made bad decisions, but no such reasons were there. Certainly those not seriously harmed by other non-decision makers who disagreed should try to forgive and agree that there wasn't enough info to be so sure of their own positions.
She fails to discus those who were fired for not getting vaccinated; no data on how many lives were saved by the vaccine vs how many were lost - and how the public insistence that the vaccine death rate was 0 is shown to be false by the data. Even we who believe that millions of lives were saved by the vaccine should be able to accept that thousands of lives were adversely affected by the vaccines, with many deaths.
Most of those who criticize her also fail to note how sloppy and uninformative most public discussion of COVID remains, even after almost 3 years.
What is the death rate / what is the death rate per variant (about 100 variants & subvariants)?
How infectious is it?
What are the effective ways to reduce effectiveness?
In any pandemic, what parameters are needed to be known in order to recommend a lockdown?
To mandate a lockdown?
I'm so tired of hearing "news" and "opinion" with almost nobody addressing these key questions.
We know, now, that mistakes were made. Our civilization needs to know a lot more about what those mistakes were, and what the non-mistake (decision) would look like. All alternative decisions will have good and bad points, but the conversation avoids discussing this reality and almost assumes there was some possible "nobody gets hurt" perfect decisions available.
There weren't. We need an honest discussion of what was possible.
Our politicians also need to fire - fire/ punish - those bureaucrats who were not telling the truth. We get honesty by gov't workers, including honestly "not knowing for sure", when dishonesty results in getting fired. We won't get it without the dishonest folk getting fired.
Oster seems to want to get the honesty without firing the liars; and yes, wanting more mothers to vote Dem (like she did in 2020? disastrously) again. I'm pretty sure the Dems will lose big. Not at all sure the gov't liars will be fired - but she's wrong to want them forgiven instead.
What bewilders me was that in March 2020 it became unquestionable "fact" that any and all corporate, educational and government actions in response to Covid were justified, no matter how logically flawed. No matter how harmful.
How did this happen?
How do we prevent this type of panic from happening again?
We must not sweep the pandemic response into the closet of history until there is a public reckoning of how public officials got the pandemic response so wrong.
In terms of justice, Fauci’s performance during the pandemic is trivial compared to his hand in creating the virus in the first place. There must be a legal reckoning with the national security state and its authority to fund dangerous virus synthesis.
For me the Amnesty argument isn't about forgiveness, or whether I trust Fauci. I want the FDA, CDC, etc to be able to have honest internal discussions about what went wrong, and how to do better next time. That means they have to be able to start with "This was badly wrong, in important ways" and not expect to be fired or jailed for saying so, which means amnesty. Think "blameless root cause analysis". I'm not sure it will work, but I'm sure that holding out for vengeance will prevent the institutions that most need it from learning or reforming at all, and keep their efforts focused on denial and stubborn insistence that they did the right thing.
As I have written in several forums about Oster's pleading for forgetfulness, "Let's not bicker and argue over oo killed oo."
Kriss is clearly very high IQ, but I also wouldn't be shocked to learn he has bipolar, schizophrenic, or autism spectrum relatives. Even many bright people will tend towards rhyming cyclicality of historicity drawn from nuggets in the information tsunami and this will be mixed with confirmation and hindsight bias and maybe the mirror of narcissus. I don't doubt the death of the current internet in some fashion. Does the internet of now look like 10 years ago, 20 years ago? It will be an evolution not a declining winking out of existence, even if that evolution is sped up to where we can see it before our eyes in real time if we are those blessed with the genetic lottery winnings of a longer memory. And this evolution will be informed by the past and the present and the future in a mix that someone is probably going to see coming, perhaps even someone we have never heard of. Also, Goia seems correct this is just the death of clickbait/internet, a reasserting of everyones story hungry mind, and the winners are those that can satisfy this, ie. youtube and substack.
Arnold, you ought to read the Oster piece yourself. It is short. More importantly, it isn't really what it says on the tin. What exactly it is is a bit interesting to think about.
Burns should say "parties." To partisan politicize or even to think the problem was level (Federal/State/Local) is wrong. CDC did not provide individuals and other public officials with the information they needed to make proper cost benefit analyses of how to respond to the pandemic. FDA failed to approve vaccines as soon as it should and dragged its feet on approving kits that could have been used for self isolation and test to stay opening/closing of venues. Only a radical re-imagining of PH could have gotten better decisions made in a decentralized way.
Re: the Oster piece, I realize that this blog (and Oster's focus) is largely about public policy, but I understood the column to be more about non-policymakers forgiving other non-policymakers for the sides they took in the million asinine online and offline conflicts that took place during the pandemic. I thought there was a lot to take to heart there, honestly.
I know a lot of people who had family, professional, personal relationships strained because of the various positions they took on masking, school attendance, vaccinations, etc. Whatever decisions we make in terms of voting for people who espoused certain policies or heuristics, I believe that declaring an amnesty (as Oster put it) in our personal lives is a good idea.
There's probably also a lot to learn as voting citizens in analyzing the track records of the thought leaders and policymakers we chose to listen to, and I don't think "they did their best" is a good way to judge governments, but you don't have to live with your government the way you have to live with the people in your community.
Perhaps what is needed is a Truth and Reconciliation Committee. Good luck with that.
The response to the Oster piece suggesting peace and de-escalation is the right's corollary to the institutional left's response to that Letter on Ukraine. "How dare you?! We're in this for the long haul. Regime change is a must!"
I haven't been following this blog long enough to know any detail of Kling's view on vaccinations or what he thinks should have been done so I can only agree that many mistakes were made. It would have been great if less mistakes were made and maybe the rate of mistakes could have been realistically lower but I'm not at all confident it is reasonable to think there should have been a lot less mistakes. This was a very unique situation with a lot of uncertainty. Mistakes happen, especially when facing new situations. It's easy to critique from the peanut gallery and a lot harder to deal with something like what Covid presented. And I would wholeheartedly agree that CDC made way too many mistakes that reduced confidence and trust in their capabilities and recommendations. That is likely to continue to do harm, hopefully their won't be a severe issue anytime soon where the harm is large.
Beyond that, I think it is useful to divide the response into before vaccinations and after.
Before Vax - Personally, I was a little scared. And I was glad my wife had retired from medicine a year before it all happened. As a very healthy ~60 yr old, I realize my risk was low. Back then I thought it was a bit higher than I now know it was but still low. Either way, I'm glad I didn't get Covid until after I was vaccinated. We also have to remember that hospitals were overloaded for many months and a less conservative approach would have exponentially increased that problem. People are free to disagree but I think the steps that were taken weren't all that far from optimal despite there being lots of mistakes.
After Vax - I wholeheartedly agree there has been too much hesitancy to return to normal. Schools in some states reopened quickly and they should have in all states. Harm to kids (and their parents) was far greater by not reopening. CDC guidance should have leaned more towards normalcy. And I say this despite knowing many healthy people in their 70s and older who are still very scared of getting covid and not wanting to judge them and their concern of the risks.
Haven't read Michael Greve article (or book) yet, but your excerpt is spot on. But the repeat players aren't the only players, the system (still) allows disruptors to enter the fray without permission and change the rules of the game. This is why democracy needs it's Andrew Jacksons and Donald Trumps. It doesn't even strictly matter if those guys are good are bad, as long as they disrupt the system without destroying it.
Wow, all round outstanding post. The line of reasoning about competence vs. motive not mattering much...spot on. Aint got the time to diligence one's motives. Trying to read someone's mind is for the birds. Life is too short.
Also agree with you about politicians colluding to game the system. An arms race if you will between professional politicians who spend 24/7 trying yo amass more power/influence/money versus the rest of us.
As Tyler Cowen would say, both ideas substantially under rated
"That includes people who love Fauci forgiving the rest of us, too."
"Forgive us our sins as we forgive those who sin against us."
This does NOT imply however denying that sins ARE sins.