[Izkata]

> When things go wrong it's important to assign blame to understand why things went wrong and how to prevent them in the future.

Exactly. Things have recently been declassified that makes me very surprised pandemics like this hadn't already happened a few times in just the past few years. For example: https://news.yahoo.com/suspected-sars-virus-and-flu-found-in...

[cjslep]

There are ways to understand why things went wrong and how to prevent them in the future, without assigning blame. Blameless post-mortem.

I'm a reasonable man, I find accountability a positive virtue. I'm also not a foolish one, for I understand trying to assign blame for an act of god is definitely NOT normal. And I understand the "blameless post-mortem" is a tech-industry standard well understood, so I am surprised to find the "blame game" card being played here. Consider:

Every time a hurricane rolls off the coast of west Africa and trashes the Eastern seaboard, you don't see the US blaming west Africa.

You don't see Missouri trying to pin the Joplin tornado onto neighboring Kansas/Oklahoma in order to recoup billions of dollars of damages and loss of human life. You DO get a technical NIST report that is blameless (I have worked with this particular data) [0].

When an earthquake originates in one country but flattens the city in a neighboring country, you don't see one sue the other.

When a typhoon hits SE Asia, they aren't trying to readily assign blame.

What can be assigned blame is a nation's reaction to this force majeure. At that point the people should be holding their own leaders accountable, as the assumption should always be that the neighbors are incompetent, and our own leaders are the best. That is inconvenient for the current President precisely because he politicized the disease. If he had not politicized it, his followers would be more amenable for blameless post-mortems (literal post-mortems, let's remember people are dying). Unfortunately his response was lackluster, and rather than taking accountability (you know, the virtue I agreed w/ y'all on at the beginning), he would rather shift blame. But this implies that he was relying on China to do its part. Which then begs the question: If the US President wants to blame China, why was he sitting back and relying on China on good faith when no other nation was?

To summarize why I don't believe the bullshit that is "assigning blame" for SARS-Cov-2:

- Accountability is a virtue

- Blameless postmortem is a huge cross-industry technical standard, so abandoning that is immediately suspect

- US President politicized the disease; due to this he has political motivations to avoid the virtue of accountability and how he guided the US response (making the act of "blaming" even more suspect as being a political reaction)

- Doublethink of "Did the US President really rely on the Chinese response? Blame them, not him!" (only enabled because of politicization)

There are ways to understand why things went wrong and how to prevent them in the future, without assigning blame. Blameless post-mortem. But that's now been politicized.

[0] https://nvlpubs.nist.gov/nistpubs/NCSTAR/NIST.NCSTAR.3.pdf

[rosywoozlechan]

How do you prevent a hurricane? The coronavirus could have been stopped. The wildlife markets could have been shut down. The spread could have been prevented. The transparency could have been better. I'm not saying China actually does deserve blame, maybe it was way out of control before it was possible to do anything, but this has been a horrible disaster the likes we normally don't see and we need to do what we can to prevent it from ever happening again or if it does to handle it better. Blame is a useful tool, it feels like you're trying to avoid it for unstated reasons when it seems entirely useful in this context.

[cjslep]

> Blame is a useful tool, it feels like you're trying to avoid it for unstated reasons when it seems entirely useful in this context.

I've demonstrated that everything except blame is useful when doing analyses of engineering failures or disaster analysis. I have professional experience in this both in the computer science world and in the traditional engineering world.

Identifying root causes like "lack of testing prevented deployment of limited resources optimally which exacerbated these effects: X, Y, ..." is a useful and actionable way to identify and address problems. And then people can look at these blameless analyses and make their tough decision, and then go beyond and demonstrate accountability for their choice. This can be repeated as many times as necessary all around the world, within nations or across nations in a collaborative response (such as the joint vaccine development initiatives).

Adding "blame" just exacerbates emotions (political or personal or what have you), clouds judgement, and usually results in a worse outcome by whatever measure of the disaster (usually number of deaths). That's my "unstated reason": blaming is an active choice that leads to more deaths as history has shown repeatedly, whether by famine due to supply chain issues plus political rejection of food aid, or a "not invented here syndrome" of rejecting medical supplies, or societal instability resulting in mass protest and political revolution (and more death and starvation), for example.

I don't blame Trump for Covid. Just like I don't blame China for Covid. There are a set of things China could have done differently, just like Trump could have done things differently. "Blame" is really saying "Trump should have never had to do any preparation differently because China should have done things differently," which is the definition of living in an alternate reality. Life says "tough shit" and doesn't treat him like a special snowflake. Plus it does not inspire confidence in the kind of leadership principles the President is following: just how many other things is he relying on others like China to do so that he doesn't have to make any preparations?

If I were inclined to distrust China, instead of blaming them I would be crapping my pants with how emphatic the President repeatedly assures the American people that he relied on them to manage such a disaster for him (and us). That is what he is saying when he tries to blame them.

I think China did as well as they could -- it was a bad outcome because it escaped -- but shutting down their entire society for a few months to bring their new cases down to 0 was effective for them. Sucks it escaped their borders but it's no longer their problem at that point. And it is scary that the whole free world is looking at the authoritarian regieme and going "gee they got down to 0 new cases" and then look at the Leader of Free World USA's high daily new case load and cringing. And then looking in horror at Want-To-Be European Leader Of Free World Germany reopening and watching their daily case rate rise.