One question to ask when you advocate for a particular position is "what would happen if everyone did as you suggest?" If everyone stopped using vaccines, we'd lose billions of lives. Polio would return. Children would die routinely of diphtheria. Tetanus would be a thing again.
I think this test alone more or less says everything you need to know about the idea. Something is desperately wrong if your idea, widely adopted, would kill a large fraction of our species.
Unfortunately, many people have no memory for history, and some cannot even remember how the world has changed in their own lifetime. They watch a nice BBC drama about life in 1820 and think it looks cool. They forget that in the real 1820 no one had indoor plumbing.
They certainly don't remember that even in the mid-20th century panics would cross the US as polio waves struck, killing and maiming children in vast numbers. Swimming pools and playgrounds would shut down for weeks or months at a time.
"Do you expect us to live in fear of diseases forever?" the people with no historical memory cry. No, not forever. Only until you stop trying to do your best to keep the diseases around.
No, it wasn't nice living in 1820. It sucked, and part of why it sucked was there was a very good chance you were disfigured for life by smallpox scars and that your best friend in childhood died of cholera.
I'm often very critical of the medical profession because I would like it to be better than it is, but there's a difference between wanting medicine to be better and thinking we'd be better off with more disease.

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More from @perrymetzger

Nov 26, 2021
In March of 2020, I was asked, when requesting a COVID test, if I had traveled recently to China, at a point where the disease was spreading locally throughout Europe and the US. The quality of the bureaucratic response has not improved in the interim.
Governments have had 22 months to figure out how to reason about the disease. At this point, the safe bet is that they’re never going to. Their responses are mostly theatrical, and rarely effective. Worse, though, most of the population hasn’t figured this out.
The anti-vaxxers (for example) believe in a supercompetent conspiracy government capable of perfectly organizing itself to execute some sort of nefarious plan, when for the most part the bureaucracy can’t find its hindquarters even given photographs and a map.
Read 6 tweets
Jul 6, 2021
The most important lesson I ever learned as a manager, and the hardest to internalize, is this: you can't actually ever make someone who works for you do *anything*. You can fire them, of course, but that doesn't actually get the thing done, either. 1/
Under normal circumstances, you can convince someone they want to do something, or you can fire them, and that's your available spectrum of options. (If you are a totalitarian dictator, you can of course have them killed, but that still doesn't get the thing done.) 2/
This might seem like a stupid or trivial observation, but it isn't. Getting people to do what you think needs to be done requires their cooperation and good will. In the long run, if you lose that good will, if their morale turns sour, you've lost. 3/
Read 13 tweets
Jun 5, 2021
Here is my best advice for keeping your organization safe from online attacks. I've given similar advice in the past, and I suspect this advice is nearly the same that almost every security professional will give you. None of it is very deep or complicated. 1/
First, patch all vulnerabilities on all your machines as soon as possible, and never run an operating system or software version that is out of support. 2/
(Some people will tell you that your company can reasonably evaluate how important particular patches are, or that they are better able to determine if a patch is safe than Microsoft or Apple. I recommend ignoring such advice.) 3/
Read 14 tweets
Jun 4, 2021
Apparently the government is urging businesses to take measures to stop ransomware attacks. My assumption, based on decades of observation, is that the probability of success of this campaign pretty much zero.
The issue isn't that most companies don't want secure infrastructure. The issue is also not a lack of regulation. The issue is most of them don't have the capacity to implement it.
It's not that it's impossible to do, mind you. Running up to date software, patching regularly, taking backups, using 2FA etc., are not particularly complicated. But solving an arbitrary quadratic equation is also straightforward and I bet most people can't manage that, either.
Read 5 tweets
Jan 9, 2021
There is a distinction between what is something you ought to do and what is legal. It is legal to drink yourself to death. It is probably not a good idea. The distinction is not a small one. Let's apply it to the social norms many people suggest we adopt on silencing others.
I hear quite frequently arguments to the effect that private platforms are legally _allowed_ to silence people. And yes, they are, and yes, they should be. Is this a good idea, though? Let's have a quick look for a moment.
It's possible to imagine a society where every restaurant refuses service to people of the wrong political background, every supermarket checks to see if people arriving match a particular political affiliation before selling them groceries.
Read 17 tweets
Sep 17, 2020
Hypothesis: Outlook and GMail are so terrible at handling complicated conversations (they encourage top posting and make it impossible to reply point by point) that they have caused meetings to multiply when many topics could instead have been disposed of in email threads.
One symptom of this that many people have noticed is "send many questions, get an answer to one of them" syndrome. You can't see the list of the counterparty's questions, so you have to remember what they were, and many people forget while replying.
The people who created the Outlook and Gmail style of email had no experience with the tools that came before; they did not understand the power of quoted replies, and ideas like automatic sorting of email were things they reinvented thinking they were new.
Read 5 tweets

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