[keiferski]

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.

[scotty79]

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

[Mirioron]

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?

[scotty79]

> 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]

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.

[scotty79]

I don't brush my teeth because other people word.

I'm doing it for the feeling of freshness and believe it's good for me because of what I believe to know from science and personal expeirience about existence and influence of microorganisms.

I try to avoid putting qtips in my ears even though people are doing it because science says that it has higher probability of doing harm than good.

> Other people can also say the craziest things and pass it off as science.

That doesn't make it science and you should base your decisions on science not things passed as science. You should use your critical faculties and knowledge of scientific process to tell what science is and what is not.

You definitely should verify every single thing that informs your decision proces if the decision you are about to make is an important one.

> ... 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.

Science offers heuristics to guide your decision process. If scientific heuristic exists and you are using your own instead, you are doing wrong (even if by chance it ends up well).

If there's no scientific heuristic for given problem ( you need to check! ) then by all means make up your own. You won't be wrong unless you make "let's ignore what science established" a part of your heuristic.

You'd be amazed how much of the things you consider instincts filling gaps in science was actually researched for very practical fields. A lot. When money is on the line people suddenly get very interested in actual reality and they do the research. Some of those instincts get confirmed, some get thoroughly debunked. There was no knowledge untill science properly investigated it. Just self propagating ideas, right or wrong.

[keiferski]

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.

[scotty79]

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.

[keiferski]

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.

[scotty79]

No ones wants it. And yet if it comes out positive and you visit the doctor to confirm, it is known to an anonymous corporation, sometimes multiple, and government, if it cares. And everybody is perfectly fine with that.

Historical abuses are vast and many in all the fields of human culture. Proportionally to the power of given part of the culture. Abuses don't automatically make given thing completely worthless. Historical abuses are just things that we need to be on the lookout for.