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naraburns  nihil supernum  2yr ago (text post)   35891 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of October 3, 2022

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Just got a RemindMe message from January and want to follow up on it. On January 3, one of @Highlandclearances's predictions for 2022 was that all mask and vaccine mandates in Western countries would be lifted by September. They said:

90% All mask and vaccine mandates in all Western countries will lift by September. 30% by June.

I said:

If you’re taking bets I’d take this one at even odds. This seems so extremely unlikely to me that it’s hard to believe you mean it.

They said:

I do. I think the median voter in most countries has pivoted from concern about Covid to exhaustion fairly rapidly. Even the most risk-averse people I know personally now want full reopening. Eventually power hungry governments will deliver reopening especially once vaccines are approved for children under 5 and there is no further milestone to justify waiting for before the end state is reached.

That said, I have a charitable view that governments are not using Covid to arrogate permanent powers and restrictions. I think very soon, if not now, their incentives from the public will flip to normalize as fast as possible and away from being biased toward social desirability (being seen to do more rather than less).

It's true that many mandates have ended. But they said all mandates would be lifted, and the US still has a mandate for healthcare workers to be vaccinated against covid. The Pentagon also has a vaccine mandate. Many colleges also mandate covid vaccines. I think I was right. I'd be curious to hear what Highlandclearance thinks they got wrong in this prediction.

(This feels like a mean callout post, but that's not my intention. I greatly respect people who are willing to go out on a limb and make falsifiable predictions. I didn't have a list of a bunch of 2022 predictions, so I recognize that there is some unfair asymmetry here.)

Yeah you’re right: this one’s busted. I also described it poorly. I should have been much more precise. I was imagining government or major institutional mandates for Normies, specifically around travel, universities, hospitals, the civil service and so on. For Canada, i missed my prediction by one day on travel. But of course universities are still requiring vaccines and hospitals masks. I definitely did not appreciate how fast vaccines would be incorporated into the vaccine regimen everyone is expected to get.

I don’t think I’m gutsy enough to re-up. I honestly can’t imagine when hospitals here are going to stop masking. My wife gave birth a month ago and we were asked to mask in the delivery theatre (when the going got real we stopped and no one protested) but there is no natural limit.

My other predictions look decent though haha. I still have some time for Italy to detonate and those put options were juicy.

Not even being Pendantic.

The CDC still requires a full vacination regime ofr covid to enter the US, and every unvaxed Canadian or anyone else risks being turned around for their personal medical decision when they try to enter the US. Has happened to my neighbor trying to drive home to Mexico. No sign this is ending.

Canada's Digital vaccine passport regime only ended start of october, so your sept timeline is accurate as well.

.

A whole lot of people are going to try to downplay the fact they forced vast segments of the population into medical appartheid over the next few years, and it should never be allowed to be forgotten. Who you are at the moment of crisis is who your are always. If you were an Auswitz guard in 45 you never got to stop being that, and we should never let the COVID authoritarians take off the mark of Kane either.

We are likely going to get a new serious narrative fragmentation in the Western discourse between the minority who were on the receiving end of the apartheid and will remember this for a long time, and the majority who did what they were told and did not even notice that the McDonalds they were eating was banning 20% of the population for no good reason.

Almost everyone I know is in the category of "did what they were told without much fuss" and they have already binned the events of the last 2 years almost entirely in distant weird times category.

I do not think "serious" narrative fragmentation will occur, given that:

Almost everyone I know is in the category of "did what they were told without much fuss" and they have already binned the events of the last 2 years almost entirely in distant weird times category.

Those who suffered little from the virus but much from the lockdowns and are aware of such facts have no one fighting their corner and are not large enough to demand serious restitution. Pro lockdown media has already prepared their inevitable rebuttals, expecting you to forget everything that was done to you in the name of public health. Those times have been brushed under the rug, and now all our woes are the fault of Big Vlad or whoever.

There will be no reckoning, no rapture, and that is a pill so black that light cannot escape its surface.

Yes I agree. That’s exactly what I mean by new narrative fracture.

Some people are very upset and will remain so. Majority doesn’t even remember anymore and will consider those people obsessive loser conspiracy theorists. The political actions and rhetoric of this small group will stay incomprehensible to the respectable members of the society which will create all sorts of strange political and societal tensions which is pretty obvious if you have a memory longer than a goldfish but the media will somehow be totally unable to decipher. We have been seeing this dynamic with many contentious issues in the west for decades.

For once I agree with kulak revolt near uncritically; Covid restrictions must be treated as never again territory on par with 9-11 and the holocaust, and those responsible for pushing them treated like 9-11 planners or architects of the holocaust.

The moral of the story is clearly "never generalize." (Hmm...)

When you start including words like "all" in your predictions you're setting yourself up for trouble.

If this prediction was a bet it would be a 100-leg parlay, even one exception invalidates it. That's not the kind of thing you can be 90% confident about.

I think he's closer to correct on cultural vibes, but you win on the specific technical claim.

Another example of a remaining mandate is that my city requires either vaccination or a negative PCR test to be an election worker. For the first time in my life, I have enough time on my hands to participate in an election in that way, I'd like to do so, but I absolutely refuse to play along with Covid charades, so oh well.

But they said all mandates would be lifted, and the US still has a mandate for healthcare workers to be vaccinated against covid.

Isn't that to be expected, though, don't they have the same for the flu?

The Pentagon also has a vaccine mandate

But the military has had vaccine mandates for a variety of vaccines for centuries?

In general, if something mandates a flu vaccine, mandating a covid vaccine too is expected. So that'd also explain colleges.

Anyway, his mistake was taking a bet saying 'all mandates' (what criteria) when he meant 'most mandates', there are many cities / states / countries / institutions, and many of them have very slow bureaucracies or processes, so even if all of them intended in some sense to repeal something, one might stick around for a while.

Healthcare workers, in fact, are not mandated to take influenza vaccine in most states. Neither is military required to get a flu shot, for that matter.

Isn't that to be expected, though

I mean, yeah, that was kind of my point back in January.

As I've said before, if you have good reason to be confident in a proposition, losing a bet made about that proposition will be dominated by the cases where you didn't phrase the bet properly. This is one of the reasons bets are a bad idea.

Hardly anyone is going to phrase the bet properly. It's as if the bet is a computer program, and you are forced to make sure the program runs perfectly the first time you try it.

Sure, but it's a relatively simple computer program. And you can write those to run perfectly the first time if you are very careful, and if the stakes are high enough to incentivize you to double check your work before submitting.

Importantly, the ability to do this is a skill which can be learned, and is important to actually use when making predictions. When I see

90% All mask and vaccine mandates in all Western countries will lift by September.

a red flag goes up in my mind. Because "all" is an extremely ambitious condition, and 90% seems way too high for that. And part of the point of being rational (or rational-adjacent) is to recognize and avoid the exaggeration and hyperbole that everyone else uses in common speech. You might casually say "all of mandates will be gone by September" and, when someone calls you out and questions that as being unrealistic, and asks for a concrete prediction, you should think about it more deeply and walk back the exaggeration. "Well, not literally all, they'll probably keep some for healthcare workers, and maybe one or two nations will keep most of them, but I predict at least 8 out of these 10 specific nations will lift mandates for 90% of the population" or something like that. The fact that this person didn't walk back their bold and unrealistic claim when making a bet is an actual mistake that deserves a loss, not a technicality. The term "all" didn't set off a red flag in their mind, and it should have.

It's a technicality. The proposition it's trying to prove is not "literally all", it's "substantially all". That proposition was proven true by reality,.

The fact that he literally said X doesn't mean that the intent of the bet was to prove X.

"All" means "all". "Substantially all" just invites arguing over "substantially" after the fact. Perhaps you can quibble about rules from subnational entities (since the bet was about "Western countries"), but there are still national mask mandates and national vaccine mandates in place.

"All" means "all".

My whole point is that, no, it doesn't, except literally, and literally is not the intent.

I don't know if vaccine requirements for institutions that have traditionally had vaccine requirements is a good metric to go by. I mean, yeah, a lot of universities are requiring COVID vaccines, but a lot of universities already had other vaccine requirements. I know Pitt requires an MMR vaccine for all students and a meningitis vaccine for students living on-campus. Healthcare workers in a lot of places already required a whole host of vaccines down to a flu shot. For these kinds of places, the COVID vaccine isn't so much an additional burden for the institution but simply another vaccine on the list. The real test is places like concerts and the like that required proof of vaccination and weren't already accustomed to it. These places had additional costs involved in verifying the vaccination status and were only interested in doing so because of the pandemic. I'm sure some of these places still exist, but I haven't come across any (and I was never required to show a card for anything personally despite living a pretty active lifestyle).

There is still a vaccine mandate for entering the US by air for most non-citizens. As of October 1, Germany oddly dropped mask mandates on flights but increased mask mandates on public transit. So this is definitely busted.

I didn't follow it too closely, but there was some minor scandal about government ministers being photographed maskless on planes immediately prior to the flight mask mandate being lifted. Don't know if that really was the cause, but it may be interesting gossip to some.

I think the prediciton is correct becase it was assumed that by 'all' he was referring to the general population, not govt. employees or healthcare workers.

As The_Nybbler pointed out, there is also a vaccine mandate for foreigners entering the US and Germany has mask a mandate on public transit, so there are mandates that apply to the "general population" too.

Then he should have said that instead of "all"

Even so, general population needs to be masked when around healthcare workers. That's still mandated, I think, to be masked in hospitals, doctors offices, etc.

I think the prediciton is correct becase it was assumed that by 'all' he was referring to the general population, not govt. employees or healthcare workers.

By this metric, there never was really a vaccine mandate for "the general population," so the prediction is non-falsifiable.

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