It was never about science, much less The Science

Don't play on their utilitarian field

Three years in, and only a negligible fraction of the population are likely to ever understand that the Covid interventions didn’t work and had devastating harms.

It’s time to focus on the main issue: That our civil liberties don’t depend upon the data.

In response to a tweet to this effect, Jay Bhattacharya asked me, “Why not both?”

That is, why can't we fight on both the civil liberties and the utilitarian fronts?

I suspect we ultimately must do both, but here are a couple reasons why I’m skeptical of the benefits.

(1) Social narratives are a lot like the blockchain, and this is more than analogy, as I discuss in the Twitter link below. Social narratives are consequently practically impossible to displace. I think a sea change in appreciating civil liberties is more viable than budging the narrative that society pulled up their britches and saved themselves with lots of sacrifice.

(2) The more we entertain the utilitarian arguments for the interventions, the more we appear to implicitly accept that, had the utilitarian measures actually been a net positive, they would have been acceptable. But they wouldn't have been. Civil liberties don't depend on data. Our response to civil liberties violating proposals should simply be GFY.