COVID-19, obedience to someone else’s greater good

In this blog site, I frequently discussion my own fantasy government that I called a dedomenocracy. One key feature of this government is that instead of asking the population to democratically choose policy, it asks the population to demographically define how to measure the greater good. When some future crisis occurs, what does the population prioritizes and what is the population willing to sacrifice. In such a government, I can not imagine that we would agree to sacrifice our younger people (and especially not our young women) for the benefit elderly people (and especially not old men). We do not live in a dedomenocracy.

Dedomenocracy: a government that quits

The government must quit. Certainly there will be new cases, and new deaths. The rate will fluctuate over time, location, and demographic. The important information is whether the population is tolerating this, and whether they are adapting. To get this information, the government needs to stand down and watch.

Dark nothing, dark data’s blind spot

There is a benefit to opening our processes to the possibility that the reality may be changing, where the changing is from an evolving intelligence or even from a plethora of competing intelligences that have transitions of power much like our political systems. Admitting dark data into our algorithms blinds us to this possibility, especially when we allow dark data to have priority over observations.

Urgency is dark data

A government by data could consider the observations of iatrogenic complications and deaths. The public’s fear of a virus could grant this government permission to impose some new authoritarian policy that would do something, but that something would exploit the opportunity to improve the future prospects based on all observations of the current world. Such a government would be free to decide to tackle the problem of iatrogenesis instead of the problem of the virus. Fixing the overextension of medicine may ultimately benefit more people than overreacting to a virus that is not as threatening as the population perceived.

data wars in dedomenocracy

In a democracy, the declaration of an emergency is a declaration to freeze science, particularly in those areas that tend to predict the most pessimistic results if nothing is done. I suspect this is inevitable because a democracy selects specific individuals to be leaders, and human leadership demands steadfast determination to see a policy to completion and the install confidence of the population. Given the recent experience, this particular property of democracy raises doubts about a democracy’s ability to handle a new emergency that is inconsistent with established theories and the operational plans based on those theories.

Use democracy to assess what matters

The failure of the modern democratic governments is that none of these fundamental perspectives of the population were debated democratically. The irony is that the democratic government of elected officials presiding over unelected bureaucrats imposed these answers on the population. Instead of assessing the population’s sentiments on these questions, the democratic government cajoled the population into following the science, and to listen to the doctors. The science may be correct, and the doctors may be wise, but they might be answering the wrong questions.

Dedomenocracy: govern by placebo

The vaccine as a population placebo has to have a similar reaction on a population. The population-placebo vaccine has to have adverse effects normally associated with vaccines. There needs to be people who will suffer from reactions, and even some some people die from the vaccine. This would prove to the public that this is real, and if it is real, it might be effective. The placebo effect is on the entire population in order calm it back to something closer to normal.