Dr Fauci as Machiavellian Boddhisattva

I am pretty sure what is going on with those advertisements and others' responses to your criticism of them is:

• The other people don't see the ads as having the subtext you do
  • ... and find your reasons for seeing them as having that subtext sufficiently alien that they don't take seriously the possibility that you really truly think the ads have that subtext.
• So they don't think you are "complaining about anti-mask propaganda"
  • ... and even if you explicitly say "I am complaining about anti-mask propaganda" they think you're framing things that way for rhetorical reasons, not that you seriously think the ads are anti-mask propaganda.
• So what they are construing as an anti-mask position is not in their view a complaint about anti-mask propaganda.

I have not seen the advertisements in question (your tweet has a picture of the other one but not of these), but my guess from your description of them here is that (1) I would not, seeing them in isolation from your comments, take them to be anti-mask propaganda, and that (2) even given your comments, I would not think it likely that they were intended as, or that they function in practice as, anti-mask propaganda.

(I am in fact having trouble believing that you seriously think the ads are anti-mask propaganda, rather than claiming that for rhetorical purposes. I may of course be wrong; I mention this just because it seems like evidence that other people might feel the same way, especially if unlike me they haven't explicitly sat and thought for a minute about what it is likely that you mean, and had the context of this post as well as your tweet.)

It seems to me that your reasoning here resembles a common (and in my opinion very wrong) pattern of thought: "These people say X; also, Y; X and Y imply Z; therefore these people think Z". The reason it's wrong, of course, is that these people may well not believe Y. There is maybe an implicit "no one with half a brain reasoning in good faith could fail to believe Y", and I think such propositions are usually false.

Another instance of approximately the same error: "They are not trying to live. They are not trying to save their friends' lives. If they were, they would have picked up my message about high-dose Vitamin D". You are firmly convinced that high-dose vitamin D is plainly very helpful, but they may not be, and the reason need not be stupidity or dishonesty. E.g., Scott Alexander, at least as of December 2021, doesn't think it likely that vitamin D is useful against Covid-19; he may be right or wrong, but to me this is already conclusive evidence that it isn't obvious to any smart person who's paying attention that vitamin D is useful against Covid-19. Which means that "if these people were really trying to save their own and their friends' lives, they would agree with me about vitamin D" is just plain wrong.

Here's a kind of ignorant and offensive question that I nonetheless have re this bit:

I have to assume that prisoners and migrant farm workers and the psychiatrically incarcerated are on my side since my enemies are engaged in war crimes against them.

How can I work with them in this fight? I don't tend to think of them as very intelligent groups that can help me with any specific plans. 

But this is likely my own ignorance given that I know basically no people in this population. (Which is something I could straightforwardly fix if I chose to.)

The first answer that comes to my mind is "If I were running for some election, I could figure out a way to communicate with these groups in order to coordinate their support and help them against their oppressors". But other than straightforwardly having them vote people into power who want to fight against the broadly authoritarian political powers in many countries, I'd find it helpful to hear a suggestion or two of other things that I might do.

There is no plausible public health rationale for the new ads I saw a couple of days ago. The first one reads, "Masks are like opinions / Everyone should have one." The first few Google search results for "are like opinions" link to the well-known witticism "Opinions are like assholes / Everyone has one." The obvious transitive implication that masks are like assholes does not promote the idea of mask-wearing. It does not describe a benefit of wearing a mask. The thinly veiled message behind this advertisement is, "Wear a mask and eat shit."

The second ad reads, "Masks speak louder than words." This neither describes a benefit of masks nor instructs people to wear one, but - while alluding to "actions speak louder than words" and therefore implying that a mask is a costly signal - but of what? - its explicit content is that masks are a form of silencing. And they do in fact impede speech and make it harder to understand and be understood by strangers.

It seems to me like these observations are best explained by ad companies coming up with all kinds of ideas, many of which don't make literal sense but evoke some associations, and some of which can be read into. I'm not convinced that you're not projecting a signal that doesn't exist onto some noise.

What are you positing instead? That the designers who created these ads had had a conscious desire to send a straussian / esoteric subtext? That they were consciously making an add, but unconsciously expressing their true attitudes about masks? That the designers and the decision makers who picked the designs are all motivated to show their conformity by signaling that they think that people who conform should be denigrated?

I don't get it.

And since believing a narrative in good faith makes someone an unreliable coalition partner, coalition members want to send credible signals to each other that they don't take their own arguments literally.

I think you're saying something like...

There are a bunch of people who are operating on an (conscious? unconscious?) model that what actually matters is not improving public health, but instead getting other people (and themselves?) to take on costs to show their deference. So they craft narratives and literally create ads that try to encourage people to take on costs in deference to the authorities. But believing that narrative means that you can't be expected to shift when the narrative shifts, so they have to show that they know (consciously? unconsciously?) that they're operating on a model whereby "more costs are better" by sending esoteric signals to each other that hint at that?

Is that right at all?

Concretely... 

but - while alluding to "actions speak louder than words" and therefore implying that a mask is a costly signal - but of what?" 

I don't think the implication is that wearing a mask is a costly signal. I naturally read it as "stop culture warring about covid, and wear a mask, because that actually helps a lot more." (Which notably, I think is true!) 

But overall, I think these ads are mostly random. They're not making arguments, or even communicating subtext, they're intended to be catchy slogans.

The side effects from the vaccines are minimal. COVID can be very harmful to your health. The risk of death cannot be compared with time lost due to vaccine side effects.* You cannot draw inferences about your risk level from local data because there is no peeing section of the pool.** I live in the real world, where cost benefit analyses are inapplicable. I'll get a booster shot if The Science tells me to, no matter how bad the side effects are.

I would be quite surprised if anyone who argued against me this way actually followed Zvi's advice and doubled up on vaccines (unless specifically ordered to by the authorities), while I might if case rates get high enough. They weren't arguing for an opinion, they were just arguing against me.

For most people in the privileged classes, good-faith argument about the vaccines, even if it explicitly endorses the official recommendations, reads as an antivax position - only bad faith counts as provax. The point isn't to argue for some particular proposition, but to undermine the idea that propositions are credited or discredited by argument.

This, however, sounds right to me. People are feel threatened by cost benefit analysis, because it opens the door to the anti-vax position, which is shunned in many circles. 

It feels a little like if someone was like "let's all be reasonable here, I want to discuss the pros and cons of going back to a system in which only men can vote." Some people will be predictably outraged by that; it's a proposal well outside the overton window, to be rejected out of hand as abhorrent, not "discussed rationally". The act of entertaining it moves this policy from "known to be 'unthinkable'" to "something that is at least worth considering." Even having the discussion is loosing the political battle. 

Furthermore, if a Bob claims that he's not personally in favor of restricting the vote to men, he just wants to consider that option, most people would rightly suspect that Bob is feigning more indifference than he in fact has as a rhetorical trick: probably he's bringing this up at all because he does think that women shouldn't vote.

The same applies in this case. Even considering the question pushes the overton window, and onlookers guess that the overton window pushing is you actual objective.

Plus in the vaccination case, people have math trauma, and anticipate being bamboozled by someone citing numbers and studies, that they can't follow.

So they feel threatened, and produce a somewhat nonsensical "shutting you down" response.

This coalition is implicitly threatening me with collective violence for reasoning publicly at all, so I have to regard myself as in a military conflict with it.

This inference, that you're being implicitly threatened with physical violence, and threatened in such a way that the best response is to regard yourself in a military conflict, seems wildly unjustified. Do you think that the arguments in this post should be sufficiently compelling for your reader to agree with you on this point? Or are there additional pieces of the argument?

A more charitable interpretation of the same evidence would be that as a public health professional Dr Fauci has a lot of experience with the difficulties of communicating complex and messages and the political tradeoffs that are necessary for effective action. And has judged based on that experience what is most effective to say. Do you have data he doesn't? Or a reason to think his experience in his speciality is inapplicable?

Great post.

It seems to me that Dr Fauci takes the corruption of the existing system for granted, and has adopted a Machiavellian strategy to save lives by infiltrating the existing system, and sending out messages that are distorted in ways that will effectively command the sorts of people who mindlessly follow orders to act as prosocially as they can be made to act during a pandemic, while esoterically informing the intelligent few about what's actually going on.

I think the naive cynic inside of me is somewhat positively surprised by this. It's a marginally better state of affairs to have a prominent figure operating on simulacra level 2 rather than solely levels 3/4.

This is more of a general question, but I have to ask - where do all the nice things come from? Why is everything so nice? Every take you have on every conceivable institution you've written about is unrepentantly cynical, to a point where I'm not sure how people manage to do things like make tacos and air conditioning units in your model of the economy. Someone managed to make Portal 2 and I enjoyed that video game. How did they do it?