Thread by @oliverbeige

To summarize a longer private conversation: In the long reckoning, no restrictive public measure will survive any rigorous scrutiny. It was all protection theater. Measures that made a difference were all in the backend, the access-to-care part, that nobody paid any attention to.

That summarizes a claim I made a long time ago. If a country is diligently prepared for a pandemic, most public restrictions are unnecessary. If it's not, they might seem unavoidable, but ultimately pointless. Protection theater for a shell-shocked populace.

So the biggest mistakes were already made ten-plus year ago. The "rationalization" of the healthcare, eldercare, and disaster preparedness systems, euphemism for cost-saving measures that killed valuable operational expertise in favor of spreadsheet wizardry.

The next big mistake was to put the people with the least operational expertise, the least sang-froid, and the least ability to think straight in charge. The first people you should throw out of any crisis control room by their collars are the professors. We put them in charge.

You don't fucking follow the scientists in a fast-changing environment. You follow the science that has been accumulated prior, and distilled into disaster preparedness protocols. But we threw those out and replaced them with vainglorious nutcases making shit up on the fly.

Why do we already know public restrictions didn't make a difference? There are two obvious ways to reject, or fail to reject, the null hypothesis of "treatment effect indistinguishable from random noise": Diff-in-diff and event sequence. We've already done both ad nauseam.

There are thousand of pairs with similar external conditions and all variations of {treatment, no treatment} bundles. The ones you see on twitter, Norway-vs-Sweden, are the special pleading types. Take a random pair, blind it and guess which timeline is which. Most will fail.

The more entertaining tests are the event sequence tests, aka "retroactive miracles", which explain why large parts of the academic community recalcitrantly refused to accept that we observe events with a lag. Bc that would revert effect and cause, and time doesn't flow backward.

The massive social cost of handing the steering wheel to folks with zero operational competence, an experience horizon that doesn't go beyond spreadsheets, a tenuous grasp on the fundamentals of their own field, is that it distracted us from doing the things that made sense.

Which is really fucking put the resources in place to protect the people that are actually dying from Covid rather than appease the well-situated laptop class and put masks on kids. A stunning institutional failure that stems from confusing academic attainment for expertise.

Let's not do this again, and especially stop that endless supercilious drivel coming from the foolish idea that because you have an advanced degree you have some exclusive access to moral superiority. Or maybe start by learning how to properly construct a moving average.