Quarantine versus Lift Quarantine Discussion

[mahagonny]

 This article explains where we're going to end up. https://www.politico.com/news/magazine/2020/04/30/coronavirus-shutdown-altitude-ethics-223569

"The pandemic highlights a different way of understanding relativism. It is not that values are no more than a matter of taste, in the way that you like pistachio but I like vanilla. It is to acknowledge—in a way our politics usually does not—that any important value is inevitably, at key moments, in competition with other important values. Individual liberties are in tension with public order. Respect for tradition is in tension with tolerance for diversity. And, yes, averting some number of tragic deaths from coronavirus is in tension with the need for a much larger number of people to resume life—sometime after it is no longer reckless to do so but sometime before it is perfectly safe."

For the first time in many decades, there were no homicides in Miami during the month of March. https://wgntv.com/news/miami-reportedly-went-6-weeks-murder-free-for-first-time-since-1957/

I could then argue that we must stay in quarantine forever, even after COVID-19 is eradicated, or we will again have a regular incidence of homicide. But as the governor said 'that's not the world we live in.'

[Hibush]

Bringing a bunch of infectious students into contact with infectable older tenured professors could cause big changes in the structure of the faculty ranks. Is that a net positive or negative?

[clean]

Our 'open forum' discussion with the administration yesterday shed light on some of their thoughts.  Someone in power is thinking that we will be 'hybrid' in the fall... what they are thinking is that classes will meet, but 1/2 the students will come to class on Monday, and then the other half on WEdnesday and then we will be online for the other half of the week's education.  One of our braver faculty piped up that the faculty, who are more likely to have worse outcomes, are still exposed to 100% of the students!  Isnt the administration concerned about the faculty? (probably not). 

[mahagonny]

Bringing a bunch of infectious students into contact with infectable older tenured professors could cause big changes in the structure of the faculty ranks. Is that a net positive or negative?

Would it cause changes primarily because these professors get sick and die, or because they would retire as soon as possible?  Maybe the question would be for them to answer.
I'm in a higher risk group because of age and one other factor.

I wasn't thinking of our workplace specifically, initially. Just society in general.

[pigou]

We're also seeing the kind of categorical thinking that is common in politics ("pro choice" vs. "pro life;" "gun rights" vs "gun control") creeping into a space where it transparently makes no sense. We don't have a choice between "shelter in place" orders and "football games in packed stadiums." There's a wide range of policies available that we need to consider on the merits.

The city of Somerville in Massachusetts, for example, instituted a mandate to wear masks that applies to anyone over the age of 2 and applies even within residential buildings. So if you don't have a washing machine in your unit, it's now a substantial ordeal to take a child down to the basement. It's pretty hard to argue that there's much of a public health benefit to this: the mask would only help if they encountered someone else from the building in the basement and one of them had been infected. Very low probability, pretty high cost.

More ambiguously, restrictions on visiting friends can have very high social and psychological costs... but how risky is it really to have a couple over to grill in the backyard? That's just not a meaningful transmission vector, even though it will lead to some additional infections. That's very different from attending a church service with 600 other people in a tight space: a very obvious public health risk. That's where we have to get serious in thinking about trade-offs.

Draconian policies would still be defensible if they were very limited in duration. Sure, we can all get past not hosting friends for a month. But that's just not the timeline we're operating on. "Flattening the curve" has been achieved: ICUs never got overwhelmed, we didn't run out of ventilators, etc. But we're not going back to normal until there's a vaccine available, which in the very best case would be a year from now. Perhaps two years. Banning dinner with friends for the next two years is neither feasible nor sensible.

The most interesting discussions, I think, will be around a vaccine. The NYTimes has this great series of infographics on a timeline for vaccine development that lets you play with some counterfactuals: https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2020/04/30/opinion/coronavirus-covid-vaccine.html

In theory, it's possible to speed it up even further: Phase 1 trial results for Moderna's vaccine should be in soon. If it worked, we'd normally go to Phase 2 (larger, representative sample; test for generalizability) and Phase 3 (large sample, test for safety). Then we'd do a follow-up after a year or so to look for side effects of the vaccine. That's where a 2 year projection starts to make sense. But we could do Phase 2 & 3 in parallel, and Phase 3 could be very large with tens of thousands of healthcare workers. The trade-off for them is different than for the general population, since they're at higher risk. In fact, we almost surely should vaccinate high risk groups before young and otherwise healthy individuals, until we have a better sense of the vaccine's potential side effects. If someone is in their 80s, the risk of death from a COVID infection is way too high to worry about the potential longer-term consequences of the vaccine.

[Anselm]

In two months we went from 100 infected people to over one million cases in the USA.  Daily new cases have been about constant in the past month.  I fail to see how you bring people together again without also getting another rapid spread of CV19.  If I get sick I sure will not be logging into a computer to run an online class.   From my direct observations, these students will not stay apart from each other.

Also, I wonder if the admin-critters have any plans for hybrid sports?

[evil_physics_witchcraft]

I've been reading about some colleges having hybrid courses for the fall, or only permitting smaller classes (12 or less). I'm not sure what will happen over here.

Unfortunately, we have a lot of ignorant people in our state government who fear (and do not trust) science. These people determine when things 'open.' Does not bode well.

[Parasaurolophus]

A moral relativist, by these lights, is someone who thinks that if it feels good, do it;

No, that's hedonism, a broad category which includes utilitarianism.

who believes that values are no more than personal preference

Sort of. This is the weakest, least plausible form of moral relativism, and most people who subscribe to moral relativism prefer to index it to the convictions, practices, and traditions of groups of persons. Usually it's applied at the level of societies.

who does not believe in fixed notions of right and wrong

Sort of, but this is mostly false. The moral relativist believes in right and wrong, and those beliefs are fixed--but they're indexed to a group of persons. So, e.g., eating horses is morally wrong where Anglophones are concerned, and perfectly fine where Francophones are concerned. But it doesn't shift around; it's always wrong relative to this one group, always OK/right relative to the other. It's just that what does the fixing are contingent properties of groups of people. Different groups, different assessments; likewise, if groups change, the assessments may change. But it's always true relative to this particular group or that one that some action is right/wrong, even as different groups existing at the same time come to different judgements.

This is also pretty misleading, since it gives the impression that we should lump in moral anti-realism and various kinds of moral fictionalism with relativism, which is just wrong. The relativist is not necessarily an anti-realist--in fact, moral relativism is not really a kind of anti-realism at all.


To my mind, the correct sub-header is not "In the pandemic, everyone is a moral relativist". It's clear to me that it should be "in the pandemic, everyone is a utilitarian"--with the caveat that most people are very, very bad at calculating utility, especially in this pandemic. I have seen virtually no evidence of relativism in the discourse surrounding the pandemic. What I have seen an awful lot of is C- -student descriptions of act-utilitarian calculations, and they all make the common mistake of casting the net too narrowly.

[Caracal]

In two months we went from 100 infected people to over one million cases in the USA.  Daily new cases have been about constant in the past month.  I fail to see how you bring people together again without also getting another rapid spread of CV19.  If I get sick I sure will not be logging into a computer to run an online class.   From my direct observations, these students will not stay apart from each other.

It just isn't possible to have everything be shut down till there's a vaccine. That's not just from an economic standpoint, but from a social and emotional one as well. In the short term the trade offs are worth it, but in the long run they couldn't be. The question isn't "should current restrictions last for the indefinite future?" Instead, we are going to have to figure out which things are most important, which things are the most risky and find a way to balance those things. For example, k-12 schools need to be open in the fall. We have to be able to accept some elevated level of risk from that, because the costs of kids just not going to school would be unacceptable. The key is going to be figuring out the level of risk and finding ways to limit that.

It would be hard to argue that colleges being open are as important as grade schools, so it will really depend on how much it is possible to mitigate risks. A lot of that is going to depend on the success of testing and contact tracing.

[dismalist]

Picking up on Pigou, upthread, as one learns more about the virus, policies can be implemented that are selective. E.g., I just read that observations in Wuhan and in a German hotspot more than suggest that ordinary person to person contact, especially outdoors but even indoors, leads to little transmission, but that intense indoor contact, such as at parties, leads to lots. That tells us the kinds of things that can be loosened up and those that shouldn't be.

And the whole thing might be easiser if there were a functioning market for N95 masks, but never mind.

Politicians are afraid of such halfway houses - in little affected states the electorate may not believe it necessary, and in heavily affected states the electorate is possibly scared of its brains and thinks selective measures are too littel.

[spork]

Bringing a bunch of infectious students into contact with infectable older tenured professors could cause big changes in the structure of the faculty ranks. Is that a net positive or negative?

Positive. I'm 54 with a chronic immune system disorder but healthier than the average person my age. We've got plenty of people in their 70s who should have retired long ago. I.e., "no, I'm not going to sit next to you and hold your hand while trying to teach you what a 'submit' button on an LMS webpage does."

[Hibush]

Bringing a bunch of infectious students into contact with infectable older tenured professors could cause big changes in the structure of the faculty ranks. Is that a net positive or negative?

Positive. I'm 54 with a chronic immune system disorder but healthier than the average person my age. We've got plenty of people in their 70s who should have retired long ago. I.e., "no, I'm not going to sit next to you and hold your hand while trying to teach you what a 'submit' button on an LMS webpage does."

Will they be replaced by hotshot young TT profs who will take the department to new prominence, or by a rotating roster of adjuncts?  (Sorry, I had to poke that issue.)

[mahagonny]

A moral relativist, by these lights, is someone who thinks that if it feels good, do it;

No, that's hedonism, a broad category which includes utilitarianism.

who believes that values are no more than personal preference

Sort of. This is the weakest, least plausible form of moral relativism, and most people who subscribe to moral relativism prefer to index it to the convictions, practices, and traditions of groups of persons. Usually it's applied at the level of societies.

who does not believe in fixed notions of right and wrong

Sort of, but this is mostly false. The moral relativist believes in right and wrong, and those beliefs are fixed--but they're indexed to a group of persons. So, e.g., eating horses is morally wrong where Anglophones are concerned, and perfectly fine where Francophones are concerned. But it doesn't shift around; it's always wrong relative to this one group, always OK/right relative to the other. It's just that what does the fixing are contingent properties of groups of people. Different groups, different assessments; likewise, if groups change, the assessments may change. But it's always true relative to this particular group or that one that some action is right/wrong, even as different groups existing at the same time come to different judgements.

This is also pretty misleading, since it gives the impression that we should lump in moral anti-realism and various kinds of moral fictionalism with relativism, which is just wrong. The relativist is not necessarily an anti-realist--in fact, moral relativism is not really a kind of anti-realism at all.


To my mind, the correct sub-header is not "In the pandemic, everyone is a moral relativist". It's clear to me that it should be "in the pandemic, everyone is a utilitarian"--with the caveat that most people are very, very bad at calculating utility, especially in this pandemic. I have seen virtually no evidence of relativism in the discourse surrounding the pandemic. What I have seen an awful lot of is C- -student descriptions of act-utilitarian calculations, and they all make the common mistake of casting the net too narrowly.

Sorry, in a way, to link an article that had a weak grasp of these concepts. I would normally look in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. But I thought the point about competing values (if that's the word) was correct.

[Parasaurolophus]

Will they be replaced by hotshot young TT profs who will take the department to new prominence, or by a rotating roster of adjuncts?  (Sorry, I had to poke that issue.)

A rotating roster of hotshot young adjuncts who will take the department to a new plateau.



We're a department of seven, three of which are over 70 (two over 75), and teaching substantially reduced loads due to a patchwork of leaves and knowledgeable exploitation of the system (one only teaches two two-week intensive courses in the summer, but draws a full salary). Unfortunately, the fact that their loads are so reduced means that even if they fully retire, we two noobies won't be much better off, since it will only free up a few sections, nowhere near enough that we can rest easy with the guarantee of full loads. If enrollment drops significantly, their retirements probably wouldn't affect us at all.

Nominally, however, it would be good news for us, and would hopefully bring us a step closer towards regularization.

[Parasaurolophus]

Sorry, in a way, to link an article that had a weak grasp of these concepts. I would normally look in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. But I thought the point about competing values (if that's the word) was correct.

Shrug. I don't really mind, it's just that the pedant in me can't let these things go.