[Link] Forty Days

The core issue is who has the power, who decides. You are thinking of an impersonal entity above all whose freedom to choose the "optimal" solution is unnecessarily constrained by individual rights. The alternative is devolve the power downwards and let different people come to different views and conclusions.

Sure. And we have technical tools that help us solve this problem, rather than just reasoning from moral principles. We can look at the structure of the problem and determine the optimal level of centralization for a particular variety of intervention, because problems are caused by mismatch of optimizer centralization and information centralization, and this can be both that the optimizer is too far up and that the optimizer is too far down.

[edit]Huge portions of this comment were missing originally; it's been edited but the context for descendent comments may have changed.

eg mass imprisonment of people who've committed no crime

I will point out that the current legal practice is to basically consider 'being suspected of having an infectious pandemic disease' as a 'crime,' in that the CDC can detain people at its discretion. If you subscribe to the 'non-agression principle,' I think this is consistent with that, since carrying an infectious disease is threatening or initiating violence (even if it's unintentional).

Moreover, if you need my consent for your plan, that's a great way of making sure that you really are acting in my interests.

Consider something like fluoridating municipal water supplies, or adding lithium to them, or filtering out arsenic from them. I don't see a serious difference between filtering out arsenic and adding fluoride- they're both adjusting the chemical properties of drinking water to improve health. (There is perhaps a status quo bias which sees removing something already there as safer than adding something not already there, but I don't think that's particularly relevant.) Adding fluoride or lithium to the water supply is something you either do or don't do- a house by house opt-in system would be tremendously more expensive and there's not a way to opt out besides filtering your water.

Suppose a city is voting on whether or not to add lithium to their water supply. A strict consent rule would require that every person vote for adding lithium in order for it to not be violating consent to add lithium. But it seems to me that we're better served by a Hansonian system of voting on values ("I am willing spend up to $X a year to reduce the number of deaths per year by 1 per 100,000 people") and then betting on beliefs ("If we increase the lithium supply from 1 microgram per liter to 40 micrograms per liter, we would expect suicides to decrease by 20 people per 100,000 per year"), so that the people price their various values and then experts evaluate how likely various approaches are to achieve those values, rather than requiring every voter to be an expert on all possible approaches. ("Fluoride? Doesn't that sap my precious bodily fluids?")

An agile approach based on feedback and iteration is an equally good description.

Sure, but we're back to the issue of what "feedback" means in the context of a pandemic. "Hmm, we let too many carriers of the disease out of isolation, and now 3% of the global population is dead. Oops!" This is perhaps a textbook example of a time-sensitive issue where it matters a lot to get it right the first time. (The current xkcd seems relevant.)

The failure of the "half-measure" should make you doubt the project a bit.

Suppose I'm designing a bridge, and calculate that in order to support a load of ten thousand kilograms, we'd need ten pylons. For budgetary reasons, we only use six pylons, and then the bridge breaks when a load of ten thousand kilograms is driven across it. Should we doubt my abilities as an engineer?

Once again, the question is: who should pay the costs of this risk adjustment? It looks to me very much like you want society as a whole (and HIV sufferers in particular) to subsidise your favourite recreational activity. You should pay.

Are you referring to other people being alive as 'my favorite recreational activity'? I don't think I've looked at it that way before, but that actually seems like it might be a fair description.

But to answer the question, I think that it's reasonable for public governments to pay for and enforce public health projects. I think that it is not objectionable for the broader population to subsidize narrower segments of the population- my tax dollars fund research into treatment of genetic conditions that neither I nor my hypothetical children will have, for example- but agree that when costs can be localized, they should. When you look at compulsory testing combined with 'soft quarantines' like tattooing, it seems to me that the cost for the test is born by society as a whole but the costs of having the disease are born (mostly) by those with the disease. (And my impression is that if we decided it was a social priority to be able to test everyone for HIV, then the scaling would allow the costs of testing to drop significantly.)

I think that smaller scale versions of this are feasible- say, a bathhouse that required all members to take a HIV test every n months, and only allowed entry to people with negative results- but as with most things in public health, larger scales have larger benefits.

Of course you would.

As a general comment, I find it more helpful to ask people questions about their positions, rather than making predictions about their positions. I have found that being right about a prediction is rarely helpful, and being wrong typically disastrous when it comes to having a productive conversation. For example, one of the hypothetical models I had of you earlier in this conversation was be that you might be a principled opponent to government coercion of individuals, and that model would object to the imprisonment of Typhoid Mary because it goes against the principle. Other models, though, wouldn't object to the imprisonment of Typhoid Mary, because they used cost/benefit analysis to make their decisions and that particular example passed. To reduce my uncertainty in a relatively costless way, I asked.

just as I do not believe for one second that you'd be in favour of a quarantine if it applied to you

If I suspect myself of being infectious, I wear gloves and a mask to protect other people (and avoid leaving the house if I can help it). If I were suspected of having a pandemic disease, I would submit to a quarantine. This feels to me like basic "being polite and kind to others," and so I'm moderately surprised you don't think I would behave that way.

And why you are no doubt gung-ho for gun control.

Actually, the evidence seems convincing that arming the populace reduces the amount of and damage done by crime; Kennesaw-style laws requiring heads of household to maintain a firearm with ammunition (with exceptions for conscientious objectors) seem better than the opposite.

And why you will no doubt be gung-ho against every civil liberty in turn.

One of the three charities I regularly donate to, along with CFAR and SENS, is the Institute for Justice, which is a public interest law firm that litigates economic liberty cases. It's up to you whether or not you class 'right to own property' or 'right to earn a living without interference from your competitors' as 'civil liberties' or different kinds of liberties, but I care about the project of advancing liberty comparably to how much I care about advancing rationality and defeating aging.

I, like Hayek, base my libertarianism on arguments from information costs: typically this leads to decentralization, but sometimes it leads to centralization- it makes much more sense to have one CDC with coercive powers than it does to decentralize and voluntarize the problem of preventing epidemics.

What grows one part, shrinks the other part and vice versa.

Yes? If we, say, use subsidies to reward coal plants for reducing their emissions, then coal plants will have lower costs relative to nuclear, and we'll see more coal plants and less nuclear plants than we would have otherwise, and this goes against our stated goal of reducing emissions. If we taxed emissions, then we would get the same short-term behavior but in the long run there would be less coal plants and more nuclear plants, which would aid our stated goal of reducing emissions.

Second, this is a general-purpose argument against helping anyone in trouble.

Agreed. I think this is a concern that should be taken into account whenever considering whether or not to help someone in trouble, but think that it will only be decisive in marginal cases (or cases where trouble is easy to cause or fake).

But sometimes its validity is more doubtful: for example, following this logic the SSI system for disability benefits should be dismantled immediately.

It seems obvious to me that a significant amount of 'disability' today actually is fraudulent, and the SSI system exists as it does because we haven't accepted on the social level that a growing percentage of the population is not able to contribute productive work in the modern economy. Given that SSI fulfils an actual social need that is different from its stated social need (as well as filling that need), dismantling it without fixing the problem it's been co-opted to fix seems like a mistake. If we had a guaranteed income (or negative income tax or however you want to call that solution), then it's not obvious to me that we would need SSI.