EZRA KLEIN v MATT YGLESIAS

Oh right, for kids?

thats the one

All I know is before she leaves for school I tell my daughter to put her Anglo socks on

In order to channel the dystopia discussion to the dystopia thread may I present:

The absolute most Covid-cautious people I know are less cautious than like random NYT articles and I’m not really sure how much deeper into the educated/lib bubble you can get than my life.

— Matthew Yglesias (@mattyglesias) December 12, 2021

I think this is an interesting one for many reasons. First among them is the idea, which must be hard to avoid sinking into in MY's line of work, that the real question is not "what should people be doing about COVID" but "what ARE people doing about COVID, especially the people I know, and is the NYT staff appropriately calibrated to it?" Like a music critic who never writes about whether the music is good or bad, only about whether it's over- or underrated by Pitchfork.

But also: what does Yglesias see as the level of caution espoused by "random NYT articles"? I'm finding it hard to imagine he really knows no one who, e.g., is eating inside in restaurants less than they usually do. So the level of caution he sees as NYT-median is.... more cautious than that? Does he think the NYT line is "no eating in restaurants at all?" "Mask on when you're jogging in Central Park?" What?

There’s a lot of people who think they are more Covid cautious than they are in real life. I’m thinking people who won’t let vaccinated family members in their homes but go to the supermarket regularly. Stuff like that.

— Helaine Olen (@helaineolen) December 12, 2021

could it be that one of these is optional and involves long-term direct exposure and the other... is a requirement to survive?

"a lot of people." how old are the family members? what was the person's stated reasoning? very mysterious.

look helaine's got it covered okay

I don't know who Helaine Olen is, is she part of the Extended Yglesias Universe?

WaPo opinion columnist

Centrist dweebs starting to circle toward the May 2020 MAGA argument of "if you're so concerned with COVID why don't you quit your job and stay home forever SO I CAN GO OUT AND LIVE MAH LIFE"

I had to read the Yglesias tweet several times. One of my buddies posted it in our WhatsApp thread a couple hours ago. He offered the following interpretation: even among liberal circles the performative standard of care talked about in outlets like the NYT doesn’t align with the actual behavior of the community. In NY at least even in the most liberal pockets like the West Village less and less people are wearing masks, people are having parties, going to bars, concerts because you can’t do anything without being vaxxed in NY.

Which made the most sense to me. I still don't get the point of posting such a thing, though.

there's a lot of people who think they are more washing-your-hands-after-using-the-bathroom cautious than they are in real life

And I'm not willing to go to their barbecues. If I want poop on my burgers I'll just go to

It seems plausible that Matty’s irl friendship circle is composed of liberal/educated ppl who are giant idiots and narcissists

the performative standard of care talked about in outlets like the NYT doesn’t align with the actual behavior of the community.

But that's what I don't get. I read the New York Times every day. Its coverage takes for granted that people are going to restaurants, having Thanksgiving and Christmas with family, etc, and talks about how to do that in a way that doesn't create unneeded extra risk of accelerating COVID spread. Which seems to me like... exactly in keeping with what the people in Matt's SES/political tranche are doing, to the extent that it's the same as the people in my own etc etc? I feel like he's reading some shadow version of the New York Times that advocates individual commitments to Austria-style lockdown.

Like maybe he's saying he doesn't know anybody who's taken a rapid test? That's a thing people certainly sometimes do in my circles when they have symptoms they're concerned might be COVID, maybe it's unknown in DC, I dunno.

It seems plausible that Matty’s irl friendship circle is composed of liberal/educated ppl who are giant idiots and narcissists

I have vague memories of pictures of him and Megan McArdle hangin' out at the gun range, like people do.

cmon do we really think matt has friends or even knows people

I'm sure he found his profile on OKCUPID and started to date himself.

It seems plausible that Matty’s irl friendship circle is composed of liberal/educated ppl who are giant idiots and narcissists

― bobo honkin' slobo babe (sic), Sunday, December 12, 2021 6:58 PM (yesterday)

lol otm. Also, I've found it pretty easy to hang out with more "educated" people than Matt Y. Not a cheap own, I just know a bunch of academics

I live in Montreal and just visited Chicago and Milwaukee. The level of local variation in Covid caution can't be exaggerated, even just between the two US cities

what are the particularities of that

Montreal: masks everywhere, you can't ride public transit without one, so people are often wearing them outside too, plus it's winter now; official vax proof required to enter bars/restaurants; masks required in stores; pretty high vaccination rate in Quebec; however, cases are super spiking right now anyway

Chicago: lots of masks outside due to an outdoor mask requirement (now lifted I think, but people stuck with it, honestly it was a little weird seeing solo people walking around at night masked); no official vax proof required anywhere I went; rampant dick-nosing in ORD, though that's obvs not "local"; crazy high prices for a quick-ish PCR test

Milwaukee: no vax mentions whatsoever; no mask mandate anywhere; the hotel we stayed at had a sign in front when we checked in asking unvaccinated people to wear a mask, it had been taken down the next day; majority of restaurant staff I saw when getting takeout were unmasked; reasonable prices for a quick-ish PCR test (free); mix of masked/unmasked at the art openings we went too (my partner was installing a show)

pretty subjective of course, and in Chicago I stayed with family, in Milwaukee a downtown hotel, so not an equal comparison probably

interesting thanks

I've been pretty locked down in MTL, so staying in a hotel was something of a culture shock: locals coming to a *hotel bar* to listen to bad music, company holiday parties in the ballroom, sales conferences in interior, windowless rooms, unmasked coworkers packing the elevator, etc.

I was also on edge the whole time because I couldn't reenter Canada if I tested positive. So even if I got a not-bad case of Covid, my life would have been seriously disrupted

just come to vermont well take you over on a quad

I could quarantine in Vermont. When I stayed in White River Junction a few years ago, the elderly hippie woman selling me coffee asked me where I was from and unhesitatingly launched into an anti-trump tirade as soon as I said Canada

lmao

i know the place

It seems plausible that Matty’s irl friendship circle is composed of liberal/educated ppl who are giant idiots and narcissists

― bobo honkin' slobo babe (sic), Sunday, December 12, 2021 6:58 PM (yesterday)

lol otm. Also, I've found it pretty easy to hang out with more "educated" people than Matt Y. Not a cheap own, I just know a bunch of academics

― rob, Monday, December 13, 2021 8:51 AM (forty-nine minutes ago) bookmarkflaglink

I've found it pretty easy to hang out with people who are smarter than Matty Y just because I know literally anyone

xpost - Rob went to Milwaukee twice last summer (gf is from there) and yeah on the whole Wisconsin was pretty much a wild west in terms of Covid.

I'm just gonna include Megan McArdle in the EK/MY discussion because I think this thread is pretty interesting:

There is lots of opprobrium for that! Every time we have this conversation I repeat that I am against your son wearing a mask during speech therapy! I now repeat it again!

Now, are you going to say that it's irresponsible not to get vaccinated?

— Megan McArdle (@asymmetricinfo) December 15, 2021

You really see her struggling to come to terms with the limits of her libertarian philosophy, which demands that people largely left to make free choices will converge on optimal collective behavior because markets/information-sharing, and here she is confronted with the fact that people largely left to make free choices will choose en masse to eschew vaccination despite this not being the right choice for their own self-interest and the self-interest of others, and she just keeps on arguing with this guy -- don't you see that the invisible hand DEMANDS that you and people like you act correctly in this situation? and it's kind of tragic as it dawns on her that nothing short of the heavy-handed governmental freedom-squashing she hates most will get her to the policy outcome she most wants.

she's amazing. to my knowledge she's been right about absolutely nothing ever; the only book she's managed to write is subtitled 'Why Failing Well Is the Key to Success' and her ultimate legacy is supporting the grenfell tower fire as economically sound

people are not and have never been “left to make free choices” tho - this is partic the case with vaccination and public health. would that they were! opinions have been shaped by demagogues and bandits

freedom isn’t free, we just argue about the fee

Get back in your area pic.twitter.com/2YNtCv7I0B

— Nolan🌹 (@VoidOfRoses) January 4, 2022

Suppose you think that school closures were a disastrous, invasion-of-Iraq magnitude (or perhaps greater) policy decision. Shouldn't that merit some further reflection?

— Nate Silver (@NateSilver538) January 6, 2022

You think this was a policy decision (which of course is totally a decentralized one) equivalent to the deaths of 460,000 people and the destabilizing of an entire region?

And...do you think parents and educators have not been reflecting, ffs?

— Clara Jeffery (@ClaraJeffery) January 6, 2022

Yeah, I think depriving tens of millions of school children of an in-person education for a year or longer is absolutely on that magnitude. No question.

— Nate Silver (@NateSilver538) January 6, 2022

stick to telling me who's going to win my state's senate race, Nate, and bow the fuck out

were there any schoolchildren in iraq

considering how many educations were disrupted in iraq and the surrounding region we must conclude that the iraq war was worse than the iraq war

this guy dumb

he has suffered from learning loss

doing asynchronous days with my kid were my personal Afghanistan

Nate's desire to be seen as a Rational Thinker unencumbered by foolish human biases has led him to be overly skeptical of some views that he, in his detachment, can judge as extreme and/or irrational. I think COVID mitigation measures fall into that category for him because it is unfortunately easy to view them through the lens of political and emotional bias (i.e., driven by anxious liberals).

remember when

This is not unique to coronavirus, but it feels like the people who know the *most* about something often express more uncertainty and doubt than people who have some adjacent knowledge but fall short of being subject-matter experts.

— Nate Silver (@NateSilver538) March 13, 2020

I'm in the high-risk zone for having adjacent, sophomoric knowledge myself (know statistics, have written about epidemiology) which is why I'm mostly trying to shut up about coronavirus. But I will say be wary of overconfidence and trust folks who express uncertainty/doubt.

— Nate Silver (@NateSilver538) March 13, 2020

Someone tell Nate a good way to avoid the appearance of being encumbered by foolish human biases would be to not to double down on making grotesque racist equivalencies

Why didn't the morons who called the Steel Dossier worse than the Iraq War get this treatment?

(citation needed)