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Originally Posted by jyl
That must be why so many countries, from Korea to Taiwan, New Zealand to Italy, China to Australia, have somehow managed to control their virus epidemics, and now the US is one of the disease pariahs along with Brazil, India, Russia and other places without a fraction of our resources.
Within the US, that must be why Washington, Oregon, and others have managed to hold cases down while Texas, Florida, Arizona are seeing it get out of control like it did in New York.
You don’t have to know everything there is to know about something to take effective actions. We know enough about this virus to know how to more or less control it, sure with crude and costly measures that are way suboptimal, but still work. We just don’t always do what it takes.
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Interesting take, I'll give you that. I'm not sure many will agree that China and Italy managed to "control" their outbreaks, but I guess that is a matter of subjective analysis. Again, like I said earlier - confirmation bias. Everything is so nebulous, so ill defined, that we can ascribe any cause to any result we so desire. There is absolutely no way to say with any certainty that one population would have been more or less "successful" had they taken a different approach. The ultimate opportunity for the "Monday morning quarterbacks" among us.
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Originally Posted by jyl
I find that engineers are particularly prone to analysis paralysis in this sort of situation. I think that they are used to situations that they understand really well, down to decimal places, where the principles and details have been very well figured out, and they have very good insight and tools. So a situation where we are learning as we go along, dealing with conflicting and incomplete data, don’t know many of the fundamentals of how things work, is very frustrating for them.
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Absolutely. Guilty as charged. We are data driven. We make decisions based on observable, quantifiable data. We expect others to do so as well, at least insofar as they wish to make decisions on how others should live their lives. When they are making law, imposing their authority upon the rest of us, we would prefer their decisions to be data driven. If they do not know, if they do not have solid data supporting their decisions that will ultimately affect other's livelihoods, they have no right to impose their decisions on the rest of us.
While they busy are "winging it", others are suffering irreparable financial harm. They do not have the authority, legal nor moral, to act in this manner. It's one thing to go through life making these kinds of baseless decisions for themselves, but when they abuse their authority to impose their scatter gun, willy-nilly approach on the rest of us, they have gone too far.