[ExI] UN worried about police brutality against protestors

[Stathis Papaioannou]

On Fri, 24 Dec 2021 at 14:55, Rafal Smigrodzki via extropy-chat <
extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org> wrote:

>
>
> On Wed, Dec 22, 2021 at 6:08 AM John Klos via extropy-chat <
> extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org> wrote:
>
>>
>> People who ignore science and ignore precautions in a pandemic don't just
>> put themselves in peril. They are a potential risk to anyone around them.
>> They are unilaterally making decisions for others.
>>
>
> ### Really? Did you think it over before committing this to the keyboard?
>
> Let me upack the logic here for you. Let's assume that a population of
> well-informed individuals who are at risk of a deadly infection if they
> leave their homes but are safe if they stay in (but can still starve to
> death, suffer a heart attack, get restless and unhappy and prone to
> drinking themselves to death, etc.). Let's assume they are free to choose
> whether to stay at home or venture out.
>
> Obviously, every single individual who ventures out knowingly assumes the
> risk of infection, therefore every single individual they meet is also an
> individual who knowingly assumed the risk of being infected. Not a single
> person who chooses to avoid infection can be infected by them, since the
> avoidants are all, every single one of them, staying at home. This means
> that every single person infected is somebody who knowingly accepted the
> risk of infection before leaving home. In every single dyadic interaction
> that results in a new infection, the infecter and the infectee both made
> the decision for themselves, and are paying the consequences, in a
> bilateral decision. Since we posit well-informed individuals, their
> decisions weigh the individual costs and benefits of staying vs. venturing,
> and are therefore individually and collectively efficient, and therefore
> morally superior to enforced lockdowns, which discard individual opinions
> in favor of political grandstanding and witless moralizing.
>
> Obviously, this situation is not analogous to environmental pollution,
> where the polluter affects the lives of non-polluters. A more apt analogy
> is that of driving on a public road, which involves some risk of killing
> another driver, or being killed by another driver (we try to reduce that
> risk by various means but it remains non-zero). All drivers assume a
> certain risk of dying when they get on the road, a risk they can entirely
> avoid by staying at home. Yet, we normal people don't accuse all drivers of
> "tremendous amount of selfishness and a criminal lack of self reflection".
>

The correct driving analogy is that anyone who wants to can flout the road
rules with impunity. An equilibrium may be reached with fewer people
driving, but then everyone loses because either the risk of accidents
increases or the utility of the road system or fewer people are willing to
drive and the utility of the road system decreases.

> --
Stathis Papaioannou
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