[hamaluik]

I can get onboard with most of this.. until the end. COVID deaths don’t just mean everyone losing 15 days of life. To me it meant multiple family members dying. It means my respiratory system has been absolutely wrecked, hopefully not forever but for at least several months now. It means my infant son is gasping for breath on my lap as I write this and there’s nothing we can do for him. Statistics in white towers are so decoupled from humanity they are worse than useless; these selfish attitudes cause real harm.

[geiser]

That's exactly what I thought. We have to learn to live in a community, and that means sacrificing personal liberty for the benefit of others.

[btilly]

And if we fail to be able to cope, what then?

As https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamapediatrics/fullarticle/... and many other sources will attest, COVID and COVID lockdowns was TERRIBLE for mental health among teenagers. And yes, poor mental health is a communicable disease within a family.

This is personal. 3/4 of my teenage children are receiving psychiatric care. Including a daughter who was temporarily institutionalized for being suicidal.

Do you REALLY wish to repeat your position and explain why my children need to sacrifice their personal liberty, no matter the cost to their mental health, for the benefit of others? Or is it POSSIBLE that there is a tradeoff where my children's mental health is one of the benefits that society needs to consider in deciding what policies to follow?

I've spent a lot of hours of my daughter explaining very calmly why we should stop caring about her so she can die in peace. I see this as a result of denying liberty. And so I put a very different value my family's liberty than you do.

(This post revised for various reasons, such as avoiding swearing.)

[ZeroGravitas]

This though is another example of "people/society should do X because it has a potential negative impact on other people".

Which I generally agree with. And it appears the person you replied to thinks like that as well.

The article on the other hand is arguing that we shouldn't do things differently to avoid impacts on people, because that reduces 'freedom', and he'd rather be free to go out during a pandemic than prevent people dying.

So he's only coincidentally on your side of this, because he opposes lockdowns and you feel the lockdown policies had an impact on your family that was negative.

But if you asked him if he'd do some minor thing to avoid physical or mental harm like that to other people in future, then he's already clearly stated his position on that. No, even widespread death of other people is not a reason for people to collectively avoid potential harm to others.

It just so happens that him not caring about other people's deaths coincides in this particular case with what you feel would have helped your family, but he's not arguing for what does the least harm overall. He's saying there's a principle at stake, and he's willing to let others die to uphold it.

[btilly]

You misrepresent his argument.

Just as we have to consider the price of people dying across the whole population, we also have to consider the price of lost liberty across the same population. If the average person in the population shares his preferences, that they would prefer liberty even at the risk of death, then the sum across that population of those values results in the same conclusion. The population as a whole will suffer more from loss of liberty than from excess deaths. And therefore the greatest good would follow from doing as they prefer rather than as you think that they should.

But that isn't what it actually looks like. What we actually have is about half the country who prefers liberty, and half who prefers life to be as long as possible. And this division corresponds fairly well to the existing political divide between Republicans and Democrats. Who are really good at not hearing each other already and so misrepresent each other's points. As you just did.

Now of course his argument is missing other harms that people have suffered. Such as the impact of long COVID. There are plenty volunteering to make that argument. I'm pointing out that the reverse is true as well. The cost of lockdowns includes widespread mental health problems, lost education, weight gain, increased alcohol consumption and so on. See https://www.apa.org/news/press/releases/2021/03/one-year-pan... for an idea of how common and how extreme these impacts are.

When you add up everything on both sides, it isn't obvious which side is better. I know my preference. Which is, of course, biased by my extreme experience. But in 20 years we will still be suffering from long COVID. We will also suffer from poor mental health, alcoholism, excess diabetes, and so on. It isn't clear which set of harms will be worse. But if you refuse to look at the harms that don't support your chosen position, then you literally are unable to even think about this.

[ZeroGravitas]

I thought he was very clear that he wasn't making a "least harm" case. And I think you are misrepresenting the side that decided on lockdowns. The tradeoffs and risks were a constant topic of discussion.

Economic, schooling, mental health, excercise, business, these factored into every decision. The bend the curve thing was literally saying "we will let some people get this disease and only apply the brakes when we fear that the sheer number of people getting it will overwhelm the hospitals and cause even more deaths." Some jobs were considered "essential" some werent. Did that impact some people more than others? Kids were seen as being at low risk of dying which factored into things like school being open. Just constant, non-stop discussion about trade-offs and risks across multiple domains.

Lockdown vs no lockdown isn't a real division, each lockdown strategy was different for incedental reasons alone.

[btilly]

As soon as he talked about what he would vote for, and what people should be able to vote for, he was implicitly talking about the greatest good across the population (as measured by voting).

If he had been talking about unilaterally violating lockdowns, then your characterization that he was putting his interests above the life of others becomes fair. But he didn't do that.

As for strategies, he was arguing that he wouldn't want strict borders and strong lockdowns, with full vaccination before opening up. Australia and New Zealand did this. The complex tradeoffs discussion that you remember from the USA was not involved.

In the USA, a weak federal response at the start meant we began behind with endemic COVID. The most we could do was "flatten the curve" - we couldn't stop lots of people getting it. Then with vaccinations we could choose which lives to save. And so the discussions you remember. But that is entirely irrelevant to what he says he wouldn't have wanted.

Related, the fact we talked about lots of stuff didn't mean we were actually thinking very well. For example internal memos about prioritizing "essential workers" was to create some "racial justice" in early vaccinations - they didn't want to only be vaccinating old and mostly white people. And so we prioritized healthy young people blacks and hispanics over people who needed it more. And probably wound up with more dead blacks and hispanics than the "unjust" method. But hey, we got early vaccinations into a politically correct mix of arms!

(In case you didn't guess, I'm not a fan of stupid things done to be politically correct.)

That said, I believe most Democrats would have preferred "doing it right" if that was possible.

[moistly]

> I've spent a lot of hours of my daughter explaining very calmly why we should stop caring about her so she can die in peace.

Surely this is worded very poorly, and is not intended to say that you have been telling your daughter that you don’t care if she suicides. Because that would be monstrously cruel and quite possibly warrants prosecution per the Michelle Carter/Conrad Roy III case.

[btilly]

It is indeed worded poorly.

She was the one explaining to me why she wished that the people she loved could let go of their desire to hold on her. That way she could die as she wished, guilt-free. But instead she was stuck with a life of misery which she had a variety of reasons to believe would never improve.

It would be easy to dismiss were it but a childish tantrum. But it was not. She was very intelligent, mature and persuasive. And spent months improving her talking points into the best arguments that she could manage.

You find it easy to condemn someone who was in this position and was persuaded by despair. I can no more condemn them than I would a torture victim who broke. But I hope that you never are unfortunate enough to have an experience that shakes the arrogant naiveté that maintains your ignorance.

[moistly]

> You find it easy to condemn someone who was in this position and was persuaded by despair

I do? That’s news to me. Pray tell, where did I state this condemnation?

[btilly]

Look above to where you say, "Because that would be monstrously cruel..." If that is not condemnation, then what is it?

It sure doesn't sound like any kind of empathy.

[geiser]

So sorry about your family. I also started personally getting psychiatric care after all this happened, and continuing now. The situation is so complex, but definitely it should have been managed better overall. I'm no expert so can't comment.

[mijoharas]

This was my thinking. From the way the author writes, they seem to say, "I would skip lockdowns, in exchange for giving up my 15 extra days of life". If that were the thing on offer, I think a lot of people would say "forget the extra 15 days, I'll not have a lockdown".

That's not what it is though. The question is, would you go into lockdown to give everyone in the country 15 extra days of life. That's what you're trading. Personal inconvenience for strong positive externalities, you can't just think about the part of it that comes back to you. It's a general societal good that you're doing.

[josephcsible]

It's not fair to frame this as just you not having lockdown vs. everyone living 15 more days. Frame it instead as everyone not having lockdown vs. everyone living 15 more days.

[azinman2]

As the GP points out, long Covid isn’t factored into this, let alone the cruelty of averaging lifespans with death when we know it’s an inaccurate way to understand the effects.