This is pretty funny…cry me a river. Taleb is virtue signaling about Covid again, like I said he does in my post 2 days ago. The guy is obsessed with pain and suffering.
"…how it would have sounded in 2020 when we had field hospitals in Central Park, bodies were stacked in trailers as funeral homes ran out of space & hospitals ran out of body bags." @zeynep
My sight of a 30 yo woman on O2 outside the ER of @AUB as they ran out of space. pic.twitter.com/9w7qLkx3ag
— Nassim Nicholas Taleb (@nntaleb) September 28, 2022
The only thing missing is the Sarah McLachlan soundtrack from the SPCA commercial.
He signal boosts Zeynep Tufekci, who like Taleb is someone who is constantly promoted by the media despite otherwise being very mediocre. (It’s funny how she parlayed her NYTs and other media connections into a presumably lucrative Substack contract and then stopped writing after 2-3 articles…and people wonder why the gender pay gap exists.) At least she doesn’t pretend to be a mathematician or a statistician, like mister Arab man.
Even the most woke of accounts on Twitter are not talking about Covid as much anymore or at all, which proves how woke Taleb is. Yes, people died, but people die all the time of all sorts of things, like cardiovascular disease, cancer, stroke, infections, falls, dementia, automobile accidents, smoking, or for no apparent reason at all. The greatest risk factor of dying is being alive.
To concede a point to the left, I think the vaccines should have released sooner. Even if they do not stop the spread of Covid, they may attenuate symptoms and mortality to some degree. But the lockdowns, closures, and mask mandates (the entire ‘flatten the curve’ mantra, which no one talks about anymore and relegated to the dustbin of failed ideas) was possibly the greatest policy blunder ever, more so than even the Iraq War or the ‘Great Society’ programs in terms of economic damage and indirect societal cost (such as crime, which spiked in 2020).
Covid has proven impossible to contain, making lockdowns, masks, and other measures wholly infective. Instead of flattening the curve, it’s more like delaying the spike. For example, China had the most extreme lockdowns and restrictions and highest rates of mask compliance, yet despite almost 3 years of economic self-sabotage, there was still a massive spike in cases in April 2022, prompting yet again more shutdowns:
Countries that seemed to contain the virus early on had massive spikes later, like Germany and Italy, which were praised by the liberal media early on during the pandemic for having strict lockdowns, which proved useless:
New Zealand and Israel saw huge surges despite very high vaccine compliance rates:
There is the same recurring pattern of countries which seemed successful early on during the pandemic having huge spikes later, such as Hong Kong, Singapore, and Japan. Japan is just recovering from a surge now. Daily cases peaked at 250,000, which is 5x more than even Brazil in 2020. (New variants are more contagious, which also proves my point that the propensity of Covid to mutate and spread, which makes lockdowns useless.) The assumption by some was that because Japan is high-trust, high-IQ, and not as gregarious that somehow it would spared from Covid, but not so:
The lesson from Covid is to not blindly believe health experts or health authorities. Those who in 2020 who opposed the lockdowns were dismissed as kooks or uninformed, but turned out to be right. Living in a perpetual state of fear and having antipathy for those who do not share such fears seems like a terrible way to live.