We are developing the social individualist meta-context for the future. From the very serious to the extremely frivolous... lets see what is on the mind of the Samizdata people.
Samizdata, derived from Samizdat /n. - a system of clandestine publication of banned literature in the USSR [Russ.,= self-publishing house]
|
Kieren McCarthy criticises the proposed coronavirus contact-tracing app Here is a link to yesterday’s article by Kieren McCarthy in the Register:
UK finds itself almost alone with centralized virus contact-tracing app that probably won’t work well, asks for your location, may be illegal
Is he right?
Update: Guido Fawkes is also on the case. He is engaged in a vigorous and very public debate with the government, specifically the Department of Health. Earlier he sent this missive their way: 10 Problems With the NHS’s New Coronavirus App. Fair play to them, they did respond, and he has now issued this: NHS App: Rebuttal and Response. (Hat tip to Niall Kilmartin, who independently mentioned this link in the comments.)
|
Who Are We? The Samizdata people are a bunch of sinister and heavily armed globalist illuminati who seek to infect the entire world with the values of personal liberty and several property. Amongst our many crimes is a sense of humour and the intermittent use of British spelling.
We are also a varied group made up of social individualists, classical liberals, whigs, libertarians, extropians, futurists, ‘Porcupines’, Karl Popper fetishists, recovering neo-conservatives, crazed Ayn Rand worshipers, over-caffeinated Virginia Postrel devotees, witty Frédéric Bastiat wannabes, cypherpunks, minarchists, kritarchists and wild-eyed anarcho-capitalists from Britain, North America, Australia and Europe.
|
Who cares? I’m not having it anyway and don’t have and won’t buy or accept a “smart” phone.
Bloj can stuff his Stasi crap. And if he thinks the economy can wait while his mob fart about with such gimmicks –he is extremely deluded and making the eventual economic wrath he must face all the worse.
As best as I can tell, and I’ve read several different reports on it over the last day so, he’s absolutely right.
The privacy implications are large – you can be identified, reasonably easily. He talks about Facebook later in the article, and how seemingly innocuous “unconnected” pieces of data can be connected – this is probably the easiest way to get your head round it for people who aren’t techie, as prima facie it “looks” like it’s private to most people.
On top of that, the data is held centrally, might be retained afterwards by the NHS, requires entry of a postcode, and lots things to raise eyebrows.
There’s also the point that it might not even bloody work, due to how Android and Iphone operating systems work. I’m not particularly knowledgeable about that, so I’m having to take other people’s word for it, but it seems that particularly on iPhone, it needs extra steps – having to manually turn it on, there’s a possibiliity that iPhones can only communicate with iPhones and other bits that I’m not certain on, but are enough to concern me.
Especially given that there is a choice which we could have taken, which (I think) would work, and without any of the privacy implications.
I wonder why we didn’t take that choice?
So an infected person coughs on a surface, or.just touches it, and moves on. A minute or so later another person touches the surface and gets infected.
How does the app. help since the two parties never came close to each other?
And if that is not one means of transmission, what’s the point of handwashing?
Second scenario. Person is discovered to be infected. We trace everyone that he came within 2m of over the previous, say week. Could easily be a hundred people. Then we trace all their contacts. Etc. That is an astronomic number of people to track and trace!
Pat, it doesn’t solve the first point, but isn’t designed to. Handwashing and gloves are meant to cover that.
To your second point, no-one should have come within 2m of 100 people in a week.
Contact-tracing isn’t the silver bullet (I wrote “killer app” and deleted it *wince*) that solves all aspects – it’s just one thing in a suite of measures designed to get this thing to manageable enough level to get things moving again.
In it’s privacy-based form, it would, I think, work “well enough” albeit not perfectly, if we remember to sing Happy Birthday twice over and largely remain at 2m distant, to give us room to manoeuvre.
As it stands, there’s “a lot” of people saying that they won’t download it.
Now, “A lot” doesn’t mean “80% of the country”, it might just be that I/we pay particular attention to more privacy-minded folks, and we’re creating an echo-chamber of sorts. It might be that 80% of the general public are okay with the above problems, and download it anyway, because they’re not bothered.
But if trust in the app is undermined, and not enough people use it, then it’s really dangerous.
It won’t work as intended if only 20% of people are using it, and just maybe those 20% will have a false sense security and start taking more risks. And even if 80% of people download it, but the technical problems that have been hinted at are true, and it just genuinely doesn’t work, then we still have a problem.
…we shall see, of course, but this all makes me very nervous.
neonsnake
That assumes lockdown continues. Which it can’t, if only because without a working economy nobody can afford a smartphone.
neonsnake
It might be that 80% of the general public are okay with the above problems, and download it anyway, because they’re not bothered.
I think in the current climate of covid panic, it’ll only take a few hysterical stories in the press about how unsafe the app is to put a good percentage of the population off.
The time it will take for the PII that isn’t captured, stored or transmitted by these apps to be used for 163 different purposes entirely-unconnected to the current problem, can be measured with an egg-timer. A vast Leviathan like the NHS simply can’t help itself from doing this, it’s in their DNA. Somehow, the apps will keep collecting, storing and transmitting data long-after this crisis is over, even when users believe that they are no longer installed or no longer functioning.
And the app itself will become a tool of health-care choices. He tried to un-install the location app from his phone – Why would he do that? And, as it didn’t really uninstall, let’s place him on Heightened Awareness. Oh, that’s where he was. Funnily enough, Holmes has that location flagged as a possible location for drug sales. Hmm. Madame Trixie’s House of Relaxation, you say? Well, let’s put that in his file, as well . . . . The urge for the state to mosaic data like this is endless and unchangeable. And, pretty soon, an algorithm somewhere that you can’t see and can’t question turns your phone screen either red or green and an armed officer of the state will say “Citizen, you can’t go there – you may not purchase that – you must report to quarantine camp 23 – you may not leave – you must answer my questions”.
This sort of Panopticon control is the wet dream of the epidemiologists and bureaucrats who are driving the response to this virus. F**k ’em, say I. The liberty traded away for the ephemeral and empty promises of security, will never be returned.
llater,
llamas
When The Decline and Fall of the West is wtitten up, the lockdown will have it’s own chapter.
While there are many techical aspects that will sink this:
– it only works in foreground, so as soon as the phone goes idle, it’s turned off
– the centralised database won’t scale, so will just collapse under load
– it’s a government IT project, so will take 10 years and £10bn before failure is quietly admitted
– only the bubble, and kids, are obsessed with smartphones. Out beyond the M25…
Focus instead on the potential upside. Much more promising (said the black-hatted character in XKCD).
I forecast a new sport, a variation on SWATing.
– How many people can you establish a connection with, in the two weeks before announcing a positive test?
100,150? Pah! You’re not trying. Any serious player will be in the 10,000 or more range. What fun when they all get compulsory isolated. Take out an entire business, or school, with one stroke 🙂
– And who can you capture in your hit list? Bonus points for members of the cabinet, talking heads from TV, (no need to meet them, just connect through the wall of their home/office)
Treble points for shaggerfergusson.
Oh, this could be so much fun.
Ahem.
Since when did saying “that’s bad” stop bad things happening.
And for any hard-of-thinking plods reading this, no, I am not advocating this type of action. Just pointing out the bleedin’ obvious.
The first part of educating the British public to be more sensible about the NHS is getting them to distinguish between its doctors and nurses – many of whom have been working hard and facing risk – and its decision-makers and budget-allocators. The app will show the latters’ ‘skills’ to a wider public than usual, which may help.
I think many Tory MPs read Guido. Apparently, NHS decision-makers do too, even if grinding their teeth the while.
Niall, I swear, I had just posted the update in which I recommended that very same link to Guido Fawkes before I read your comment. Great minds think alike.
Let’s have a peek into the ol’ crystal ball, shall we?
‘Dear Mr Smith, your application for urgent NHS treatment dated 12th September 2047 has been refused. Examination of your debit card records and cross-referencing with archived menu data from Burger King and KFC have shown that you opted to ‘go large’ at least twice a month between the ages of 30 and 45. Furthermore, your supermarket loyalty-card records for the same period show insufficient purchases of vegetables and fruits to meet the then-recommended five-a-day minimum dietary requirement. Due to your non-compliance with official advice you are deemed ineligible to receive NHS treatment. In order to conserve limited public funds I regret to remind you that appeals against our decisions are no longer permitted under the NHS Resources (Restriction of Access) Act of 2039.’
Meanwhile, the drumbeats grow ever louder for allowing stores to refuse supposedly ‘virus-laden’ cash payments and accept only those means of payment which – purely coincidentally, I’m sure – create a permanent, traceable digital record of your purchases linked to your verified identity.
Is this the same govt IT as managed to lose the 25 million child benefit records?
That was another secure centralised database wasn’t it?
Mmm- I wonder if a few people remember getting the cold sweats over that one and think never again.
On the off-chance that you may have friends or family who think that opposition to the app is only coming from those with a bias to the “right”, and therefore be dismissive of any criticism, here’s The Guardian’s take on the matter.
That’s already happened. A number of stores have moved to card-only already, as an official company-wide policy. B&Q is one example of a “large” company that has done so (just to offer an example on a scale larger than the local corner shop), it’s perfectly legal to do so.
Tbh, I’m fine with that – their store, their rules. If memory serves, the only law with respect to payment type is that you can’t charge a different amount for differing payment methods, and I’d not want or accept someone ordering me to tell staff to accept cash if they weren’t comfortable with it with handling it.
A large part of getting things moving again is to get people feeling safe and comfortable in environments that they’ve been told so far are unsafe. Like it or not, that’s going to involve unusual measures, and maybe even a bit of “coddling”, for want of a better word.
Tim the coder
What do you mean “the db won’t scale”, it’s the easiest thing in the world these days to scale-up for billions of transactions.
Having said that this app is an enormous mistake, it will not work as designed and they should go with Google/apple which has virtually no privacy implications as no data is ever transferred
Not been to B&Q yet since LD began–and if card only crap is true then they just lost my business for good. I’m sure they can survive losing me–but I suspect I wont be the only one.
@Stephen Lindsay
The update rate will be proportional to the number of smart phones reporting, and the number of contacts they detect (either in update count or update size).
Hence the load will increase as the square of the take-up.
Small scale trial in IoW may appear to work (all other objections being ignored).
Nationwide rollout will hit a scaling challenge. As you say, in the real world, this can be handled (I do know a thing or two about national databases handling 100k transactions/second 24×7). But this is public sector IT we are talking about.
But I was primarily focussing on the vulnerability of such a concept to fake entries, mischief and other attacks.
I’ll be interested to see how the spokescreatures manage to keep “totally anonymous” claims compatible with “we will punish those making false entries”.
Futile anyway, the false entries can simply be “well I had all the symptoms, so the declaration of infection was justified!” Prove otherwise.
A few people being hauled before the courts for making such infection declarations should stop anyone else doing so, even the genuine ones.
Basic engineering: “How can this be broken? If so, how do I stop that….”
“only the bubble, and kids, are obsessed with smartphones. Out beyond the M25…”
It requires Android 8. As I said at Guido’s yesterday, I can’t find recent figures for version share, but I think it’s a fair estimate that almost half of the people out there who do have an Android phone still can’t run the thing.
Here’s a column from the ever-excellent Bruce Schneier on the general futility of contact-tracing apps:
https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2020/05/me_on_covad-19_.html
including a link to a deeper dive from the Brookings Institute.
Tim the Coder is correct, but the basic challenge to be considered should not be the relatively-benign ‘How can this be broken?’ but the more-malign ‘How can this be exploited‘?
As with many other public-sector efforts, if implemented, this app will rapidly become an end in itself, with many people whose efforts and paychecks are tied to its operation and success, and it will quickly become just another act in the ongoing coronavirus theatre – lots of activity, lots of publicity, lots of resources, but very little thought about whether it’s actually helping.
llater,
llamas
Indeed, I was keeping it short, in this business we never assume incompetence when we fear malice. There are always people trying to exploit systems for their gain – of one form or another – and making the systems robust and safe, is, well as they say, left as an exercise for the student.
The danger of this tracing system gaining a head of steam and becoming a ‘something’, without necessarily the purpose intended, is very real. It’s awfully hard to stop a public sector empire, once they are given a hunting licence (or indeed, the same applies in larger private sector bureaucracies…)
And Public Health, by the NHS (PBUI) becoming so dependent upon mobile phones, means that it will become essential, a matter of national security, to have robust identity checks on phone sales, phone usage,….the script writes itself. PHE must be wetting themselves in anticipation.
“The danger of this tracing system gaining a head of steam and becoming a ‘something’, without necessarily the purpose intended, is very real.”
If so, you’re already too late. Mobile phone locations can all be traced, anyway. The mobile phone system itself needs to know which cell you’re in to route the call to you. And they can usually tell fairly accurately where you are in the cell by measuring propagation time to the nearest three towers. There’s nothing stopping the government setting up their own receivers, either, if the mobile phone companies were uncooperative when the Men in Black turned up (yeah, right…). A mobile phone signal can be picked up 45 miles away. They can put receivers in aircraft flying far overhead. They can break the encryption, and listen in. They can hack the phone to turn on the microphone, or anything else. They can use voice-to-text to make a transcript, and apply keyword searches. They’ve been able to do that for years. Haven’t you ever listened to Ed Snowden?
The surveillance state is already here. So there’s no point in even arguing about it in the case of this app. If you’ve got a mobile phone, you can be tracked. End of.
I suspect their worry is that their staff won’t survive keeping you…
Only warehouse staff when it goes online with delivery or click n collect…..
What do you mean? They’ve re-opened now (not sure about all stores, but I think most have) from their previous online/click & collect model.
I suspect I’m misunderstanding.
An “app” on a mobile telephone will not treat COVID 19 – or any other disease.
This whole campaign is very odd – it is either literally insane (i.e. a lot of time, effort and resources being devoted to something, for no reason at all), or it is a 1984 style move – for which the virus is being used as a excuse.
More than 30 thousand people have now been killed by the virus in the United Kingdom – and many other people have been killed by the effects of the “lockdown” and from being discouraged from seeking medical help for other severe medical problems.
But rather the treat the disease (it is possible that there have always been medicines that can help – if used early enough) and end the vicious and harmful “lockdown” (which has smashed the economy – the economic collapse will eventually lead to many deaths), our rulers are talking about an “app” on mobile telephones. I do not know whether to laugh or cry – but if I weep they would be tears of rage.
“An “app” on a mobile telephone will not treat COVID 19 – or any other disease.”
Nobody said it would. The idea is that instead of locking down the entire country, you only lock down the few thousand people who have been in recent contact with someone known to have been infected. That reduces the infection rate without the same level of economic impact. You target the lockdown to just those few places where it’s really needed. It gives you more freedom to lift restrictions elsewhere.
NiV wrote
“The idea is that instead of locking down the entire country, you only lock down the few thousand people who have been in recent contact with someone known to have been infected.’
“A few thousand people . . . .” – Who gave you this number? On what basis?
” . . . . Have been in recent contact with . . . . ” – Assumes facts not in evidence. The fact that mobile phone linking events occurred tells you nothing about whether anybody has been “in contact” with anybody.
“. . . . Someone known to have been infected . . . ” – Known – How? When?
This is a typical example of a misplaced belief in technology. It cannot work as desired (see Schneier et al), it will consume vast resources while not working, it will assume a life and a credibility which it does not deserve (which will in itself also consume vast resources to no benefit), and the potential for mis-use and re-purposing is high.
Mind you, knowing the kind of people promoting it, none of those factors will make it any-the-less appealing, and some will be seen as positives.
It’s hard for me to understand the mindset of people who will happily agree to allow citizens to be placed under house arrest based upon even the partial input of a cell-phone app. How easily you will trade away other people’s freedoms. Let’s see how you feel when the gavvers knock on your door and serve you with a 14-day house arrest, based upon your cell-phone tracking history. This is insanity.
llater,
llamas
““A few thousand people . . . .” – Who gave you this number?”
Take the number of spare tests available, divide by the average number of contacts per infected, and it’s got to be around that sort of level. Infection levels in the UK are around 10k-15k per day, and they’re saying it needs to be lower for app-based methods to work. That strongly indicates they think the capacity is ‘thousands’.
“It cannot work as desired (see Schneier et al)”
I read Schneier’s comment, and I also read the several people in the comments who said exactly what I first thought on reading it. It’s not expected to be perfect at identifying every person; if it can just reduce the numbers of subsequent infections that helps considerably. And all it’s doing is generating a shortlist for testing, not conducting a definitive test.
I tend to agree that it’s a bad design choice, and the more decentralised option would be better. But I don’t have any more problem with such an app than I do with things like FaceBook, which is also a huge privacy-violating big-data surveillance tool of the marketroids, that people voluntarily accept because of the benefits that gets them. ‘Informed consent’ are the magic words.
“It’s hard for me to understand the mindset of people who will happily agree to allow citizens to be placed under house arrest based upon even the partial input of a cell-phone app.”
It’s the same mentality as people who would ask you not to shit in the public swimming pool. You’re not expected to have to be *forced* into civilised/considerate behaviour – it’s about taking sensible measures to avoid spreading a potentially lethal disease and killing other people. Most people would want to.
As with the lockdown, this is not something they can enforce on more than a tiny tiny minority if lots of people decided to flout it. It depends on public support for its continuation. If you don’t intend to respond to alerts, don’t download the app. Ignore it when you get an alert. It’s entirely voluntary. But the more people do, the lower Rt will be, and the more other restraints on life and the economy they can safely lift.
It’s up to you. If you don’t want to be tracked, don’t carry a mobile phone. If you don’t want to use the app, don’t. But the alternative is the lockdown. Which would you prefer?
The Hapoy Slaves have burst into praise bashing pots for the Mid-Staffs NHS round my way, unaware that in Chile this was what they did before Pinochet seized his moment.
The road to freedom is stony and long.
NiV wrote:
“Take the number of spare tests available, divide by the average number of contacts per infected, and it’s got to be around that sort of level.”
So, in other words – a total guess? Let’s not lose sight of the fact that the supposed ‘experts hjave been wrong about the rates of this disease by orders of magnitude, not once but repeatedly.
“It’s the same mentality as people who would ask you not to shit in the public swimming pool.”
What a fatuous, meaningless comparison – between a voluntary act that everyone knows is a danger to public health with absolutely no upside vs an unknown (and unknowable) risk (of infection) that carries a huge downside in terms of economic, social and health costs. This one comes close to pegging the dumb-ass meter.
“As with the lockdown, this is not something they can enforce on more than a tiny tiny minority if lots of people decided to flout it.”
“They” have already shown themselves quite willing to enforce the “lockdown” on lots and lots of people. Why do you suppose “they” would suddenly stop doing so?
“It’s up to you. If you don’t want to be tracked, don’t carry a mobile phone. If you don’t want to use the app, don’t. But the alternative is the lockdown. Which would you prefer?”
An entirely-fabricated choice between two self-selected options. I prefer neither. Instead, we should demand what the science now shows – an end to “lockdowns”, which are self-evidently not having the desired effect, no resort to these ludicrous and ineffective tracking app approaches, and instead we simply let people make their own decisions, based on sensible advice and accepting that there is some level of risk. Quarantine only based on positive, specific tests – not the computer-modelled results of something so ridiculous as cell-phone data. Infection rates are high – much higher than any reasonable tracking approach could possibly address, much higher than any official “estimates”, but death rates and rates of serious illness are very low, much lower than most of the previous dire predictions. Time for this insanity to end.
People are dying for want of normal medical care, while the perennial bansturbators and the legions of newly minted epidemiologic tyrants tie us all up in knots with their fever dreams of tracking every single case of this disease and locking millions of people in their homes. Enough, I say.
llater,
llamas
“So, in other words – a total guess?”
A statistical estimate.
“Let’s not lose sight of the fact that the supposed ‘experts hjave been wrong about the rates of this disease by orders of magnitude, not once but repeatedly.”
I’ve seen plenty of people make that claim wrongly, too. It’s like any survey – there’s a margin of error.
“What a fatuous, meaningless comparison – between a voluntary act that everyone knows is a danger to public health with absolutely no upside vs an unknown (and unknowable) risk (of infection) that carries a huge downside in terms of economic, social and health costs.”
The upside is that you get to go swimming. “Nobody is going to take away my freedom to swim!” he says, as he leaves a brown contrail down the length of the pool. “Even in the middle of a dysentery epidemic, that’s no reason for people to demand that I get out of the pool!”
There are people who are just as firmly convinced that shitting in the pool has no downside, and claims that it is a public health hazard are overblown, exaggerated, a tyrannical seizure of our liberties, “total guesses” by “experts”. They read that in a political discussion group on the internet, so it must be true. Should they have a right to carry on, then? If they believe it as sincerely as you do, I mean?
So if I had a ‘phone I would keep it in a foil bag, I presume it will block any signal. My two contactless cards sitting in a foil envelope in my wallet do not cause any problems for my other contactless card to open ticket gates.
You can always take the battery out, if you really don’t want to be traced.
Ah, but what we could do, is institute a policy along the lines of “This is the shitting in the pool end, and the other end is the no shitting in the pool end”.
That way, the scaredy-cats who don’t want people with dysentery shitting the pool next to them are totally safe and protected, whilst the brave souls who are prepared to risk dysentery get to retain their liberties.
No?
😉
Nullius in Verba (May 7, 2020 at 7:52 pm), an alternative to neonsnake’s proposal for “what we could do” about Nullius asserted analogy is to discriminate between the various downsides and upsides of very different behaviours. It is well known that there is no safe speed limit – that if you want to minimise car fatalities at any cost then the speed limit is zero. But in the real world, we set speed limits and very occasionally (Germany, of all places, IIRC) have none. Setting an equivalent risk and convenience assessment that gets the hypothetical guy out of the pool while not locking us all in our houses would not seem beyond the wit of man. It’s an empirical question whose mere starting gate this far-fetched analogy hardly reaches.
I suggest there is more use pondering the question of whether an assessment that effortlessly turns the guy out of the pool yet lets you enjoy all but only whatever crumbs you get from Boris’s table on Sunday (you in England, not me in Scotland – the Celtic fringe must assert its relevance by being different and Sturgeon has preemptively informed us we won’t be included) is over-risky or over-cautious.
“It is well known that there is no safe speed limit – that if you want to minimise car fatalities at any cost then the speed limit is zero. But in the real world, we set speed limits”
Agreed. There is a trade-off between the cost of too much restriction and too little. There is disagreement between different groups in society over the risk, the cost, and the appropriate compromise to make. Some people vehemently think we should do X, other people are just as vehement we should do Y. We can’t do both. So we design systems for collectively deciding questions of policy on those issues that affect all of us. Political debate. Representative Democracy. All that stuff. And as a result, different societies come to different decisions.
I’m not saying there’s no debate to be had, or no argument to be made. I’m not saying there aren’t any better ways. I’m trying to explain to people who seem incomprehending that there even *could* be a different point of view to their own why 90%+ of the UK population think as they do. “It’s hard for me to understand the mindset of people who will happily agree to allow citizens to be placed under house arrest based upon even the partial input of a cell-phone app.” I’m explaining the mindset. They don’t think of it as “house arrest”. They think of it in the same terms as politely and considerately staying out of the public swimming pool when you suspect you might have caught dysentery. They in turn find it incomprehensible that anyone would think their personal right to go swimming (or go to the pub, go sunbathing, etc.) overrode everyone else’s right to safety from disease. They find it incomprehensible that anyone would think an epidemic killing on the scale of the death toll of another 9/11 every few days (and which threatens much more) was trivial or negligible. Or that these are often the same people who make such a fuss about Islamic terrorism, when in the UK we’ve had about 100 deaths from terrorism in total since 2001. About 5 deaths per year on average. Over-risky? Over-cautious?
Activists for a political cause only ever see one side of the argument. One side only sees the deaths from speeding. The other side only sees the annoyance of the restrictions slowing them down, slowing commerce down, the cost of the speeding tickets, and the cost to their own liberty. Both sides consider their side to be unarguably right, the other side to be obviously wrong, and think that society should be led by an elite (i.e. themselves) who know how to run things rather than being forced into messy compromises with idiots.
“Setting an equivalent risk and convenience assessment that gets the hypothetical guy out of the pool while not locking us all in our houses would not seem beyond the wit of man.”
Quite so. That’s what the app is trying to provide. The aim is to keep out only those few who need to keep out, and let the majority keep swimming, rather than to have to shut the pool entirely to everyone as they’re doing now.
You need to understand the thinking of the other side to be able to argue effectively with them. You need to understand yourself to know when it’s appropriate to argue. γνῶθι σεαυτόν.
“We are going to test hydroxychlorquine”
Are you going to use it early and in combination with zinc and the other things that practicing and qualified medical doctors have used (used with some success) with it?
“Of course not – we do NOT want it to work, we are the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. the World Health Organisation and the rest of the establishment – this virus gives us the excuse to do what we have long desired to do, we will not give up the excuse. Long live the People’s Republic of China Social Credit System! Death to Freedom!”
So how are you going to treat COVID 19?
“We are going to have an “app” on your mobile telephone – as a step towards getting the population to accept the implantation of location and identification chips, and a CASHLESS SOCIETY”.
How will this help in treating the virus?
“It will not – it has nothing to do with treating the virus. We were pushing all this long BEFORE the accidental release of the virus (the natural virus that had been improved) from the lab near Wuhan that the Canadian and American taxpayers were illegally forced to help fund”.
“You need to understand the thinking of the other side to be able to argue effectively with them”.
You are the “other side” Nullius – and we do not wish to “argue” with you. We wish to defeat you – defeat your effort to destroy liberty, defeat it by any means necessary.
“You need to understand yourself to know when it is appropriate to argue”.
On the contrary – it is only necessary to understand the “other side” to know if it is “appropriate” to “argue” with them.
If the “other side” are open to discussion then one can indeed discuss (“argue”) things with them.
But if the “other side” are fanatical enemies of liberty who still support the “lockdown” and now support “apps” on mobile telephones and other means of Social Control then it is not “appropriate” to discuss things with them – it is appropriate to fight them.
“Understand yourself” – the priests of Apollo.
I do understand myself – I am a mortal being. You can only kill me once Nullius – and I am going to die anyway (as I am a mortal being)
So there is no reason NOT to oppose you and to oppose people like you. What can you and other enemies of liberty do to me and people like me, that we can not also do to you and people like you?
For you are also a mortal being Nullius.
“Are you going to use it early and in combination with zinc and the other things that practicing and qualified medical doctors have used (used with some success) with it?
“Of course not – we do NOT want it to work, we are the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. the World Health Organisation and the rest of the establishment”
[sigh]
When are you going to take your own advice, and start CHECKING some of the things you assert?
Less than a minute’s Googling found this:
From here.
Of course, you need to understand that the more different combinations you have to try, the smaller the sample sizes available for each, and the harder it therefore is to get the evidence. Especially as it hugely increases the risk of false positives.
The story sounds like this. Hydroxychloroquine cures it. Tests: no it doesn’t. Oh, you have to try it with azithromycin. Tests: no it doesn’t. And zinc. Tests: no it doesn’t. Oh you have to do it early in the treatment. Tests: no it doesn’t. No, I mean you have to start taking it before you’ve caught the bug. Tests: … and so on. You can keep on playing this game forever. Maybe it only works when administered in a silver spoon by a left-handed cat-owning nurse under the light of the full moon? Have you tested it?
“We wish to defeat you – defeat your effort to destroy liberty, defeat it by any means necessary.”
Then I’ll be happy to help. What’s *nececessary* is that you assemble hard evidence that can stand up to cross-examination, do your best to check your own work, pay attention when other people check yours and find holes in your own arguments and evidence, and make the effort fill those holes, do the hard work to understand the maths and all the different nuances of the science, to build the models, to have looked at the data, and to understand your opponents’ maths and models well enough to be able to spot the flaws, and most of all put finding the truth ahead of winning the argument.
That’s what’s *necessary*. But you’re not willing to do what’s *necessary* because it’s too hard and too uncomfortable. You want to do what’s easy. You want to ‘win’ without having to make the effort.
“But if the “other side” are fanatical enemies of liberty who still support the “lockdown” and now support “apps” on mobile telephones and other means of Social Control then it is not “appropriate” to discuss things with them – it is appropriate to fight them.”
Here, the argument is not about whether I ‘support’ it. It’s about whether you understand the reasons why society has made the choice it has. Society understands it is faced with a choice of either millions of deaths or having to take severe measures to stop it being spread. You have to first understand what they’re saying and why, and then construct your counter-argument on that basis.
Are you arguing that it is better for millions of people to die and be piled up in mass graves than to have a temporary restriction for a few months on the economy and the liberty to go to the pub? If so, say so. It’s partly a question of moral and ethical values, but you can certainly make an argument for why you think so. I don’t have a problem with that. People will judge you and your argument accordingly, in moral and ethical terms.
Are you arguing that they’ve got the (conditional) predictions of millions of deaths wrong? Then this is a matter of understanding how those estimates were arrived at, and arguing data and statistics to produce a more accurate answer. This is a science question – so use the scientific method, and expect scientists to challenge it.
Are you arguing that there’s a better way of reducing transmission? If so, what is it, how and why does it work, what’s your evidence, and what are the issues with implementing it? This is part science, part policy, part management. You can expect politics to be involved in such a debate, too.
Or are you arguing that a shadowy conspiracy of politicians and elites have made it all up, without you providing a shred of evidence that this is so, because that’s the sort of thing they like to do? They’re not going to test HCQ with Zinc, because that fits in with what you think their motives are. Except they *are* testing it with Zinc, as anyone reading can check in less than a minute. So what does that do to your theories? Do you care? Does it matter? If the evidence disagrees with theory, so much the worse for the evidence. All that’s important is defeating the enemy by any means necessary. Even dishonest ones.
So what is your position? None of the above?
I’m not trying to have a go at you. I’m trying to guide you towards producing an argument that stands a chance of working.
“For you are also a mortal being Nullius.”
We are all mortal. We are all fallible. We are all inclined to deceive ourselves, and it always takes a huge amount of hard work, persistence, determination, humility, and principle to avoid doing so, and we never ever entirely succeed. To err is human.
While I can understand the temptation to ignore anyone offering arguments for lockdown – see my latest post – I have more than once mentioned that I have found value in engaging with NiV’s comments, even on those occasions when it is not just a question of disagreeing with an argument. Take for example NiV’s second (that I recall recently) airing, in (May 8, 2020 at 1:12) above, of the “compare Islamic terrorism to virus” idea (which is far from the strangest ever offered).
On the one hand, my reaction to that idea is to think it deeply silly. It is the same absurdity that gave us the ‘war on poverty’ and many another idiocy though failing to distinguish intentional enemies from the perils of life.
On the other hand:
– Firstly, I and/or you and/or many another may meet this argument, not in the coherent civil-English sentences of NiV but garnished with shouts of ‘murderer’, ‘racist’ and ‘you can’t say that’, backed with the sly arguments of some intellectual whose lack of intellect won’t spare you some vicious debating tricks. Practise in this civil environment may help any of us who find ourselves in that one.
– Secondly, while I have past philosophical and historical thought underpinning my attitude to this comparing of war to things that are not war (this ‘War is Epidemiology’, to paraphrase 1984), it will do me no harm to meditate on the exact degree of relevance to this case and (which is harder) how, if that were established, I could convey it in a pithy coherent way. I have not yet replied – if you like, because Nullius has (unwittingly?) informed me that I am not yet fully prepared to reply. On Samizata, one has lots of time (and it matters but little, sadly). In any debate where it matters, time will be short and having thought about it beforehand will be valuable.
Any critique of Nullius that I offered would begin by looking at speed of reply.
Nullius once had a reply up on Samizdata before I had finished using my comment’s 5-minute edit-window to complete the text to which it replied. On another occasion, Nullius block-quoted a sentence of mine in a replying comment (adding ‘[sic]’ against a typo in it 🙂 ) while I was using the edit window of my comment to drop that entire sentence (including typo) as I recast my argument for clarity (so it was not in my comment that any later reader of the thread saw, followed by Nullius’ reply). Etc, etc. Not unusually, NiV replies at a speed that suggests no great thought goes into meditating on what others say before Nullius comments a long rebuttal that (therefore?) engages but poorly (if at all) with what is being rebutted. We all do it – who among us reads and reflects on others’ comments with the attention we think our own deserve – but this behaviour sits ill with that duty to know others’ arguments that Nullius’ keeps pressing on us.
(Of course, sometimes I don’t disagree, let alone think there’s a much more fundamental problem than mere error. This reply of Nullius to neonsnake seems most unexceptionable, as well as nicely complementing my own reply above it.)
Burke said that while an actual uprising (against the French revolutionary government in his case) should not be done if sure to fail, as it would discourage future attempts, reason could always be used in argument, no matter how unlikely to persuade, since nothing was lost thereby.
Just my 0.02p FWIW.