Subnostr

Typhoid Mary.

I don't know the story well enough. I think its probably good to first acknowledge that this is like, the edge case of all edge cases; I think it posses a systemic risk to enact any kind of rule or policy based on edge cases; this one was brought up against the unvaccinated for example, a naked swing at justifying the depersoning of tens of millions of people. There's a values issue here, it looks like she was ostracized by society and health regulators mistreated her, I would hope that today a humanitarian group would do a better job of meeting her needs. I would also hope that today technology has helped us grow past some of the complexities of the human condition; there is little point in having an abortion if a baby could just be safely delivered prematurely and adopted out for instance; today Mary may have found a similarly fulfilling and self sufficient life in cooking for herself and streaming it on the internet, as well as medical advancements in prevention/treatment/cure of dangerous diseases.

No answers to how you fix it, you asked for our thoughts and that's all I've got for today.

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Discussion

Diogenes the Cynic 2y ago

It's always interesting to see what others can extract from a situation. I'm a bare numbers guy, statistics and results. Feelings don't factor for me, because the numbers frequently hurt feelings and I would rather someone's feelings be hurt than adopt a lie. I also readily accept that any and every idea is open to being flipped on it's head by a solid scientific paper at any given moment, barring any reproducibility problems. So for me, feelings are just cruft that get in the way.

Geist 2y ago

I used to be the same way, now, I'm skeptical that those measures can adequately explain what you experience subjectively.

A Keynesian economist for instance believes that economic understanding can only be empiracly derived by strictly looking at the data. Without an a priori concept of economics you wouldn't even know what charts are relavent, so its a non-starter for me that there is no bias at the outset of this theory. Given the unwillingness to examine the a priori concepts and how they match with reality, it is a given that they are operating under bad assumptions. Economics is the study of the allocation of scarce resources, but more foundationally are concepts like subjective value theorem and marginal utility, which clearly are a sociological phenomena. Any serious economic analysis has to have baked in the fact that economics is about the subjective decisions of the individuals making choices, as Rothbard put it "Man must act", humans make choices based on what they see in front of them, not on statistics.