Tag Archives: robinhanson

Gossip resolution courts?

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Robin Hanson writes,

Today social media has amped up the power of gossip. Crowds can now form opinions on more cases, and thus enforce more norms on more people. But this has also revived the ancient problem of gossip rushing to judgement.

Sounds familiar.

Robin proposes this:

I seriously propose that some respectable independent groups create non-government non-profit “Cancel Courts”. When a crowd starts to complain about a target, these courts can quickly announce some mix of a speedy investigation and trial on this complaint. They’d solicit evidence from both sides, study it, and then eventually announce their verdict.

I see this as a proposal for resolving issues of social media gossip using a prestige mechanism. But the people who are using this tool are doing so to make a dominance move. They see prestige as a tool of the white supremacist patriarchy.

Virus update

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1. Timothy Taylor has a useful discussion and links regarding the issue of whether lockdowns have a large effect over and above voluntary changes in behavior.

2. The president told me [Marc Siegel] in a late July interview that he was more excited about therapeutics in the short term even than vaccines. Does that mean he reads my blog?

3. The average daily death rate has trended up recently.

4. Robin Hanson writes,

those virus harm estimates come from assuming a $7M value for each of these lives lost, and that I say does seem crazy.

He refers to estimates by David Cutler and Larry Summers of the direct harm caused by the virus vs. the indirect cost of prevention measures. The thrust of Robin’s post is that the cost of the prevention measures was probably higher than the cost of the virus, and that we are “over-preventing” COVID. I want to question that conclusion.

We should be cautious about employing the notion of “lost GDP.” There are two states of the world, one in which some activities have little or no perceived risk and the other in which those activities have a significant perceived risk. The value of “output” for those activities differs under those two states of the world.

Note that most of the prevention measures were voluntary. Many of us are making decisions to restrict travel, social activities, and in-person shopping. Our revealed preferences indicate that the GDP that we are thus giving up is worth less to us than the value of risk prevention.

Think of it as a relative price shift. Valuing today’s output at yesterday’s relative prices can be misleading.