Philosophize This had a good episode recently on the tradeoffs between security and freedom, and I think he made some good, relevant points about our decision making during the pandemic, but I really think there is nuance to the freedom vs security discussion that is specific to public health.
Like, crime might multiply in areas where crime is already high (broken windows theory), but it’s not 1:1. With novel infectious disease, the only way it spreads is that more than one person gets infected per person who gets it. That is wildly higher than how “infectious” crime is, and I’m not sure on the stats but it seems like the early-Covid 2% death rate is much higher than the average for all crime, too.
It just seems qualitatively different when the numbers are so high (Napoleon’s “quantity has a quality all its own”), in the same way that we tolerate some amount of random murders but would not tolerate an army invading and murdering people.
So, I think maybe it’s worth thinking about because it’s familiar, but we should think about it in a different way than how we weigh freedom vs security normally, it’s an exception for an emergency the same way that war powers are, not a normal-state calculation like whether we want the government to be able to subpoena Ring cams and Alexa recordings.
Philosophize This had a good episode recently on the tradeoffs between security and freedom, and I think he made some good, relevant points about our decision making during the pandemic, but I really think there is nuance to the freedom vs security discussion that is specific to public health.
Like, crime might multiply in areas where crime is already high (broken windows theory), but it’s not 1:1. With novel infectious disease, the only way it spreads is that more than one person gets infected per person who gets it. That is wildly higher than how “infectious” crime is, and I’m not sure on the stats but it seems like the early-Covid 2% death rate is much higher than the average for all crime, too.
It just seems qualitatively different when the numbers are so high (Napoleon’s “quantity has a quality all its own”), in the same way that we tolerate some amount of random murders but would not tolerate an army invading and murdering people.
So, I think maybe it’s worth thinking about because it’s familiar, but we should think about it in a different way than how we weigh freedom vs security normally, it’s an exception for an emergency the same way that war powers are, not a normal-state calculation like whether we want the government to be able to subpoena Ring cams and Alexa recordings.