>It’s such a basic concept that a child would have the solution, and you need to do mental gymnastics to convince yourself otherwise.
Mental gymnastics are precisely what's happening. When confronted with an uncontrollable horror, people generally have one of two possible reactions. The first is to accept it, and do what you can logically to minimize the risk, but to then live in perpetual fear and anxiety. The second is to begin rationalizing the problem itself away, as a defense mechanism to the anxiety and fear, and flocking to others who have made the same choice to mutually affirm each other and make themselves feel better.
I don't really think there's a correlation between general intelligence and which one of those two people gravitate towards. It's an emotional response that has a lot more to do with personality types. You see it in everything, not just with COVID. It's the same divide that exists between religious/non-religious.
The public health authorities in the United States spent 6 weeks pretending the coronavirus didn't exist, then another 6 weeks publicly saying masks didn't work, before saying that you must wear them and if you don't you're stupid and dumb (without really bothering to explain why or ever admitting they had changed their opinion), and then 4 weeks later said that it was OK to shout and march in the streets by the tens of thousands but only for particular reasons. It's a trust issue. Usually when a place is out of order, it isn't an employee problem but a management problem. Isn't it the job of the authorities to understand their population and know how to communicate important things to them? Or maybe millions of people are just stupid and deserve to die.
Also, nonsensical restrictions mixed in with reasonable restrictions in a seemingly ad hoc way have eroded trust in local leadership.
Around here, government construction projects were allowed to continue while private ones were halted. Outdoor walks encouraged, but fishing disallowed. And plenty more.
Now, indoor dining and gyms are closed again even though they are not contributing to the recent spike.
Also, don't forget the well publicized disregard of restrictions by some politicians who enacted or advocate for those same restrictions.
The giant funeral for John Lewis was a special case too. Back then funerals for little people had severe restrictions.
The number of deaths in my 2.5million pop. urban county has been 1 per day since mid-June. The number of cases has gone up and down since then till now with no variance in deaths.
At a certain point people get tired of the bullshit.
I don’t know which country is being talked about here but if I had to guess why fishing is proscribed, I’d hyphothesize that fishing had alwasy been classified by the state as being a “sport” (allowing fishing bodies to apply for grants, licences, etc.). Then, when Covid-19 mitigation measures were being drafted, all sporting activities were proscribed (possibly because many sports involve risk of transmission between participants and/or spectators. This is what happened in my country (Ireland) with hunting clubs. Despite being an activity that is pursued by individuals or very small groups, they were caught under a similarly wide umbrella.
I don’t envy legislators the task of having to drill down into every aspect of human behaviour and make ongoing risk assessments for it. For Level 5 restrictions in Ireland, a huge amount of effort went into determining what goods should be considered as “essential” so that shops selling them could stay open. Needless to say, they didn’t get it right and there are inconisistencies. However, legislators have to react quickly to changing circumstances while maintaining the requirement that their work be legally sound. Under such circumstances, I don’t expect the new (and temporary) rules to be perfect in every way. The best we can hope for is that they get the big picture right.
It was in Washington State in the US. The shutdown order came from the Governor and was enforced by the state department of fishing and wildlife.
Now, guided fishing and fishing tours still have some reasonable restrictions but non-guided fishing and non-guided hunting are pretty much back to normal.
Strict lockdown rules were announced this past Sunday, I am not sure if they impact fishing or hunting -- it doesn't sound like it.
Recreational fishing was closed state-wide in Washington State for about a month as part of the initial lock-down. Granted it wasn't closed that long but the damage to 'follow the science' credibility was done. There were protests and public ridicule which probably led to the quick turn-around.
Can we call it education though or is it an anti-intellectual spirit or a disdain for elitism and the idea of experts? Or perhaps mistrust of authority and experts?
It would seem like perhaps an uneducated but highly communal/cooperative/respectful-of-authority society would have better outcomes than one with well educated individuals who have a culture of disregard for institutional science or the idea of technocrats and bureaucrats that might know more than Joe Sixpack. You could argue that education is what creates the values we're hoping for here, but that is kind of what I'm questioning. Perhaps the culture itself is the problem not the test scores.
> Can we call it education though or is it an anti-intellectual spirit or a disdain for elitism and the idea of experts? Or perhaps mistrust of authority and experts?
I'm sure poor education accounts for a lot of it, but it can't be the only factor - even here on HN (where I'd assume most posters are well educated) there are people claiming COVID is a non issue and/or claiming masks are dangerous.
Another example are countries other than the US, such as the UK. In the beginning there were plenty doubters (hardly surprising when you've got arguably the most powerful idiot in the world claiming it's a hoax), but I see/hear very little of that these days.
It could be a mistrust of authority, but a lot of people in the US seem quite happy to trust authority - as long as it's the "right" authority.
For example, in the USA, you have Trump telling the most outrageous lies on a near-hourly basis, and millions believe him. On a similar vein you have ludicrous conspiracy theories like qanon, and even just plain conspiracies (without the "theory"!) about the Clinton's eating babies! As I European, I might suppose that a lot of people in the US are batshit-insane, but there has to be a reason for all that lunacy.
>I might suppose that a lot of people in the US are batshit-insane, but there has to be a reason for all that lunacy.
Peter Medawar addressed this[0] quite some time ago:
"The USA is so enormous, and so numerous are its schools, colleges and religious seminaries, many devoted to special religious beliefs ranging from the unorthodox to the dotty, that we can hardly wonder at its yielding a more bounteous harvest of gobbledygook than the rest of the world put together."
That sort of stuff just breeds magical thinking, conspiracy theories and all manner of other sorts of malarkey, hogwash, balderdash and hooey.
In a lot of the same states that can't figure out how a respiratory virus comes in and out of your face, the general population and especially the elected officials and religious leaders are unsure of the circumstances under which a human female becomes pregnant. Not surprisingly, these states are also the national capitals of teenage pregnancy. Basic knowledge of biology would maybe clean these places up a bit.
> I hate to be so blunt, but 50% of the population has IQ below 100. Nothing to me has demonstrated this more than the reaction to the pandemic. When you are so uneducated that you think a mask won’t help prevent a disease that is spread via respiratory droplets, that is a big problem and unfortunately those people are all sitting ducks. Of course many won’t believe the doctors when they don’t have the capacity to understand even the basic concept?
Maybe the problem is they spent too much time listening to the apparently sub-100 IQ public health establishment in March?
Lots of people have IQs of 100. If you have a moment, I'd like to understand why you think half of the population has an IQ below 100, and why that might be significant. Does an IQ of 98 or 99 deem a person a moron?
I agree that the US has an issue with how education is viewed in the popular culture. I would bet, without any acutal supporting data, that compliance with mask orders is highly correlated with the degree of education of a region.
