I think people are doing too much of the former and not enough of that latter.
Maybe, but in the context of the earlier thread about when to end mandates, I think they were trusting the advice of experts over the advice of
you. You may argue that they should take more sources that ay lend credence to your observations into account, but I don't think that's what's being argued.
I said I am skeptical when experts use their status as subject matter expertise to give credence to opinions that have nothing to do with their expertise.
I couldn't agree with you more. I think I made some snarky comment about doctors and engineers that expressed a similar idea.
The president has a number of experts at his disposal. Some of them are medical experts, some pharmacological experts, some are economics experts, but some are experts on public health policy. So deciding when to end the mask mandate is
exactly them speaking to their expertise.
when we end mask mandates, is a cost benefit analysis that has to be done by elected officials.
an expert cannot answer that question, they can tell you about the impact of certain policies.
but they cannot tell you when exactly is it worth it to dispense with mask or distancing mandates.
that's made by leaders, who YOU vote for.
Again, agreed. All of those advisors all get distilled into decisions by (hopefully) elected officials. And that's exactly what has happened. And I don't think anyone is advocating that we change that.
However, I think it's reasonable for ME to ask MY elected officials to listen carefully to the advice of the cadre of experts that they have and, maybe on this issue, give a bit of deference on this issue to the public health guys over the economy guys and the politics guys.
That's the crux of what people are saying here. You have not provided sufficient evidence to them that they should start asking their elected officials to shift their decision away from the opinion of public health policy experts.
Maybe the evidence is out there to support a change of attitude, but you haven't made the case to most of the people in this thread.
Before we go to dow the wrong hole, I should note here that I actually agreed with you that we could probably take a bit more risk now with public policy. Given preliminary findings on Omicron, I haven't really changed my mind.