> I've read far too much casual acceptance of the deaths of older people on HN, as if this ~15% of the population [in the US at least] are freely expendable.
I don't think most people on HN implying such things mean to say old people are freely expendable, but rather that they should not be saved at _all cost_. Our non-pharmaceutical interventions have a cost associated with them too, so we have to strike a balance that's acceptable. The debate to me is ultimately over where the line is. It's not helped that the true costs of lockdowns etc. (or indeed the true cost of not locking down) are not actually all that clear. One consequence is that debates over policies such as these have happened without reliable figures on both sides, and have therefore descended into unconstructive emotional arguments.
I agree, most people aren’t saying that (my wording was “too much”). I also suspect that the majority of people on all sides are not arguing whether or not to save lives at “all cost” —- this seems to be a partisan distortion of the actual debate that is occurring among serious people (much like the similarly egregious “granny killer” reference elsewhere in these comments).
There are real arguments and a real, valid debate here on the limits of a government’s influence upon its citizens, while also fulfilling its tacit obligation to maintain a reasonably stable society in a chaotic world, and in a form where its citizens are free to assemble other organizations with their own forms of governance and capacity to encourage actions among their own members. But the debate seems to be projected onto a shape increasing in magnitude, but decreasing in dimension, flatting nuanced arguments into more extreme, tangential versions of themselves. People end up speaking different languages, where all words contain other tacit assumptions which are unstated but differ greatly depending on the speaker/listener.
Well said. As for a good place to discuss this stuff, my view is that, to misappropriate the Churchill quote, HN is the worst place I've found for debating COVID matters except for all the other places I've found. At least most people here, being predominantly from scientific and engineering backgrounds, are capable of and willing to remove emotion from debate and assess the biases inherent in arguments on both sides.
I don't think most people on HN implying such things mean to say old people are freely expendable, but rather that they should not be saved at _all cost_. Our non-pharmaceutical interventions have a cost associated with them too, so we have to strike a balance that's acceptable. The debate to me is ultimately over where the line is. It's not helped that the true costs of lockdowns etc. (or indeed the true cost of not locking down) are not actually all that clear. One consequence is that debates over policies such as these have happened without reliable figures on both sides, and have therefore descended into unconstructive emotional arguments.