[XTXinverseXTY]

Friedman's thermostat

Analyst visits his lumberjack cousin one Christmas at his cabin. Notices the cousin puts an amount of fire in the fireplace, which is correlated with the outside temperature, while the inside temperature remains constant (uncorrelated with firewood or outdoor temperature). Analyst wonders what his cousin is wasting all his wood for.

http://bactra.org/weblog/1178.html

[roenxi]

The thing is if we quiz Friedman's cousin he can justify his actions, we can test his beliefs and then deduce that he is acting in a reasonable way.

Whereas with COVID we don't have that. Particularly since the controls in place were almost all things that people could have done voluntarily so the compulsory aspects are quite hard to justify. Eg, if a fellow want to live as a hermit they can just do that. The government doesn't need to shut down big chunks of the economy for them to go into seclusion.

And then there were all those vaccine mandates where people were just spreading plain misinformation that they would have an impact on transmission numbers. Turns out they didn't. Without that, the justification for a mandate is flimsy even assuming that there is good medical evidence.

The medical establishment should have been championing against these measures and, charitably assuming they were, they really weren't visible enough in their opposition. I can imagine a lot of voters in the US would be asking "why do we fund these people?".

[jltsiren]

There is a similar justified mechanical model with vaccinations. A toy version is that vaccinated people are X% less likely to get infected and Y% less effective at spreading the disease if they get infected. If compliance with vaccination policies and other mitigation measures is at least Z%, then the outbreak will be contained before most people get infected.

With novel diseases, it's usually impossible to have accurate enough estimates of the numerical parameters in advance to determine if lockdowns and vaccine mandates are going to work. And the compliance rate is fundamentally political. A few key individuals, such as politicians and judges, can have an outsized effect on it. Containment that would have worked otherwise may fail due to the actions of those individuals.

[JumpCrisscross]

> since the controls in place were almost all things that people could have done voluntarily

The useful part of quarantines was to protect hospital capacity. We don’t have a form one can sign that says you get to take risks but are put at the back of the line for healthcare access under certain circumstances. (I think we should. Particularly with vaccines. Modelled off the Arizona stupid motorist law.)

> vaccine mandates where people were just spreading plain misinformation that they would have an impact on transmission numbers

Do you have a medical source that claimed this? It seemed to mostly be right wingers who didn’t understand the polio vaccine was also non-sterilising. (In some forms, negatively so.)