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> I don't need or want some external authority to tell me if I'm allowed to leave my house.

In a world full of Covid19 mutations, some even more lethal than the current one you actually might need external authority to tell you if you can leave the house because you yourself will lack technology to asses the risks involved and your decision making even if you have the information might be very dangerous to other peoples freedoms.

You still might not want that because people's wants are not necessarily reasonable.

As I said in the original comment:

> Not every solution to a serious problem needs to be some surveillance state dystopian nightmare.

The authoritarian response of shutting everything down, locking people in their homes and instituting all-but-in-name-martial law seems like a massive lack of creativity to me. Plagues are not a new phenomenon. We can come up with better solutions - as Taiwan and Singapore seem to be doing. Throwing away the rights and benefits of a free society should be the last solution.

Authority is not authoritarian if it tries to make you do the most scientifically reasonable thing.

Mirioron 2293 days ago

Yes it is. Science advances one funeral at a time. The most scientifically reasonable thing can still be wrong. If an authority forces everyone to do the same, then everyone would be wrong. And this is all assuming that there is zero corruption at play, which is unlikely.

Everyone should do the scientifically proven swab test every morning. The test has very strict requirements that were created by politicians and industry professionals working together! As it happens, only one company creates a rigorous enough test to fit the criteria. Thus every test is bought from said company. Is the test actually any good? Of course! Who has ever heard about bs being published as science before?

> The most scientifically reasonable thing can still be wrong.

Yes, it can be. But you still should do what science says because relying on science is the only way you could make knowledge base decision, because science is the only way we actually know things.

If you decide to act other way to what science dictates and it leads to better outcome, then you were right by sheer luck and can't really claim that you made the right call. You made the wrong one which by sheer luck turned out well.

Mirioron 2292 days ago

Do you brush your teeth? Have you ever looked into why brushing your teeth is good scientifically? How many people do you think have done that? Yet we all brush our teeth or at least believe it's good for us. We're not basing our decision to brush teeth on science. We're basing it on the word of other people.

Other people can also say the craziest things and pass it off as science. Should we believe them too, because they claim it's science? You can't verify every single thing whether it's "based on science" or not. You need to use heuristics and sometimes those heuristics lead people to do something different that ends up being the better way to do things than what science at the time entails. Taking away people's choice means that this happens a lot less.

As an aside, I would like to contest the idea that science is the only way we know things. Most science that ends up in practical use has a lot of handwaving of details in it. We describe some parts of it, but everything else is filled in by our instincts and knowledge. Few sciences are as pure as mathematics, where you can reason over things on paper without needing an extra assumed context. In most cases when science says we "know" something it is meant in a narrow context. We extrapolate based on that into other contexts and most of the time it works fine, but we often don't know.

Probably the best thing a woman can do upon discovering that she is pregnant is to see a doctor. Under your argument, it would be ‘scientifically reasonable’ for pregnancy tests to automatically track your name, age, and location, and then send your results to your doctor.

Obviously this is a massive violation of privacy...which is exactly the same issue.

Yes. It would. It doesn't not because of sacred privacy, just because technology is not there. Currently tracking is too much of a burden to do at test level and introducing it would harm usage.

But when you go to the doctor to confirm pregnancy you can be sure you'll be tracked, because it's easy and it's reasonable thing to do.

I assure you, no one buying a pregnancy test wants an anonymous corporation or the government to be informed of the results. This has nothing to do with technological feasibility and everything to do with privacy concerns.

Your definition of reasonable seems to be pretty warped. The historical abuses of "this opinion is reasonable and scientific" are too heinous and numerous to even list. Thankfully we have (but still need more) consumer privacy laws.

Sammi 2293 days ago

There are already a bunch of things you are not allowed to do in a free and democratic society if it is unsafe for other people if you do it.

If there exists a home test that can test you for dangerous infectious diseases, and you are forced to take that in the morning before you go out, then this is comparable to not being allowed to drive while under the influence.

pishpash 2293 days ago

Sure, but what do you have against a personal in-home test? The information should be available at least to the individual.

Nothing, as long as it functions more like a pregnancy test and not something that is sending personal data to a corporation/government somewhere.

However, that wasn't the primary idea in the OP, which was specifically about tracking and restricting people based on their test results.