[gregmac]

> COVID mostly (not entirely, but mostly) advances the Grim Reaper for the old and sick who likely only had a few years anyway

What a disgusting attitude.

How is this different from "Why bother treating cancer patients? Most are going to die early anyway"? Do you think old and sick people simply provide no value to society?

I think you're trying to argue that it's worse if a young, otherwise healthy person dies, but it's really not necessary to rank lives against each other in this way.

This attitude seems to be what's largely made this pandemic so bad: it was viewed as "just the flu" and "only affects people with pre-existing conditions" and so rather than fast, decisive action (reducing burden on healthcare system, preventing deaths, reducing the need for lockdowns and shortening the time they take), many countries instead delayed and did half-measures, causing an exponential increase in cases, which causes everything to be worse. The completely obvious outcome of willing to let old and sick people die to "save the economy" was an economy that's in turmoil as well as a massive death toll.

[Mediterraneo10]

At some point the exuberance of the young and their ability to determine their own lives has to take priority over the comfort of the old. I am nearing middle age myself and I might be in a risk group, but I want restrictions lifted. People in their teens and twenties need to have their big social coming-of-age and courtship rituals. I see restrictions as an approach to COVID, as the greatest betrayal of young people since May ’68.

> rather than fast, decisive action

It is worth noting that even if there had been the "fast, decisive action" that epidemologist advisers wanted, that would have still imposed border closures in perpetuity. Life might have gone on "like normal" within a country, but people could not interact with their neighbors.

We see already some Australians advocating for hotel quarantine to be obligatory even after COVID, because a year of closed borders has made them regard outsiders as dirty. How long before border closures awaken old nationalist conflicts that freedom of movement and actually getting to know the other side had largely put to rest?

[rcpt]

But that's real far off from how the US does things. 30% of Medicare is spent on people who die within a year for example.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Healthcare_rationing_in_the_Un...

And global warming might as well not exist as far as lawmakers are concerned. The comfort of the old is our nation's top priority.

[kelnos]

Treating elderly cancer patients does not negatively affect the lives of other people.

Locking down the near-entirety of life has long-term physical and mental health implications that we probably don't fully understand. There have already been suicides directly attributable to COVID-imposed isolation.

It's possible -- and even likely -- that the lockdowns are the right move overall, but the lockdowns themselves have destroyed lives too. Taking measures to protect against something that overwhelmingly affects one segment of the population has a big negative effect on everyone else as well.

[jdminhbg]

> How is this different from "Why bother treating cancer patients? Most are going to die early anyway"?

You do realize that every day we decline to treat cancer patients because they are close to dying anyway, right?

[derefr]

> I think you're trying to argue that it's worse if a young, otherwise healthy person dies, but it's really not necessary to rank lives against each other in this way.

No, the GP is pointing out the well-established social-psychology theory that people already implicitly rank things this way, and that this is why the death toll doesn’t have more of a mental impact on people in changing their decisions, even when they hear about it.

It’s the same reason that news like “baby of suburban WASP nuclear family gets kidnapped” turns into a whole-community man-hunt with special ribbons that gets remembered for years, while news like “baby of urban black single mother gets kidnapped” never even gets acknowledged by the community.

When people who are high-status to society go away, the whole of society mourns. When people who are low-status to society go away, only those directly affected mourn.

Any death-toll number, in the mind of most human beings (or rather, of any human being who’s only engaging with the problem using System 1 thinking), isn’t interpreted as “raw numbers” of lives lost, or even QALYs lost — instead, it’s felt as an aggregate of social-status lost, subjective to the listener’s personal social-status ranking function.

For the same reason that people don’t tend to worry much about disasters half-way across the world (the aggregate social-status weight computed through their status ranking function still sums low), people won’t tend to worry much about the impact of a local disaster if it’s only directly hurting local low-status people. Even if it’s indirectly impacting high-status people by taking away people they care directly about, that still doesn’t generate the sort of performative shame for not having acted that comes when high-status individuals are taken†.

And since that very performative shame is what policy-makers rely on as a group impetus to for getting changes pushed through on a society-wide level, a lack of it means that nothing can really change, even when there are clear rational reasons to implement change.

——————

† Evo-psych just-so hypothesis (i.e. take this with 50 grains of salt): people are expected to sacrifice to protect high-status people; people who do so are rewarded by the high-status people; and so, over generations, it became a eusocial instinct to feel an urge toward performative shame when you “fail to protect” a high-status person in your community—even one you never personally knew.

But people aren’t expected to sacrifice for low-status affiliations of high-status people (since it’d “only” be the high-status person, and not the rest of the community, enforcing the norm on you), so a similar eusocial instinct toward performative shame for failing to protect those people never arose.