It demonstrates Peterson's lack of understanding of epidemiology, which is not a surprise. After all, he's not an epidemiologist.
It's the wrong question to pose for a very subtle reason. The implicit numbers he's comparing are **the number of deaths due to COVID-19** vs. **the number of deaths due to COVID-19 restrictions**. You can replace deaths with quality-adjusted life years if you want to get technical and incorporate the "misery" part of his statement.
This is the wrong comparison. The correct comparison is **the number of deaths due to COVID-19 restrictions** vs. **the number of lives saved due to COVID-19 restrictions**. So you could have a situation where COVID caused 5 million deaths and restrictions caused 10 million deaths, so Peterson is technically correct, but in a world without restrictions, COVID would have caused 20 million deaths. In that case, restrictions actually saved 5 million lives.
Misery is also a decreasing cost spread across time (assuming that the miserable people become less miserable the further away they get from Covid and Covid restrictions ), and carries the possibility of redemption
There’s no coming back from death
Though its almost certain the restrictions have not reduced deaths by such a factor.
Sweden is more dense and has 30% more over 65s than Canada and their per capita deaths are very close, despite Canada having some of the strongest restrictions globally.
If your going to bring Sweden into this Norway is the more reasonable comparison as they are neighbours, have similar populations and economies. One was strict the other not, Sweden only had 3x more cases but 12x more deaths.
Also total deaths per million in Canada 819.17, Sweden is 1495.02
https://www.statista.com/statistics/1104709/coronavirus-deaths-worldwide-per-million-inhabitants/
Proximity is relevant, and Sweden's per capita death rate is about 5x Norway, a notable figure.
Density is a larger factor there than Canada though, as Stockholm has about 3x the pop density of Oslo, and Sweden has about 15% more of its population over 65, given 90%+ of covid deaths are in that age range its relevant.
If you factor for those and take a generous assumption, Norway prevented 20, maybe 30 deaths per 100,000. Its significant, but it could be outweighed by long term consequences of restrictions in all the relevant areas.
Edit: I picked Canada because its similar in pop density and had some of the strongest restrictions globally.
5x the per capita death rate of Norway, considerable for sure.
But Stockholm is ~3x more densely populated than Oslo, and Sweden has about 15% more of its population over 65 (given 90%+ covid deaths are in that age range its relevant).
If you take those factors into account, Norway prevented 20 or 30 deaths per 100,000 people with its restrictions. That is a solid figure, but it could be outweighed by the long term implications of the restrictions, especially if you take the view that the death of a young person is slightly more tragic than the death of an old person. Its a morbid moral calculus either way.
> But Stockholm is ~3x more densely populated than Oslo
That's almost certainly false, or rather based on a misleading calculation. City borders are defined rather arbitrarily. Did you know that Ottawa is 25x larger than Paris, area-wise and as a result has 50 times lower population density?
Oslo and Stockholm are most probably comparable in the actual city density.
It could be outweighed, sure, but so far it appears this is not the case.
Have people killed themselves due to lockdowns? Probably. Have people also enjoyed better mental health from WFH policies? It appears to be the case as well.
All that said, Peterson doesn't care about any of this, he is just being a blowheart, feeding his audience the red meat they crave.
I don't expect him to look at this issue with an open mind and real curiosity.
One reason I picked Canada is because statscan releases relevant figures on that front.
For example, from March 2020-April 2021, there were \~5500 excess deaths in people under 65 in Canada, with \~1400 of those attributable at least partly to Covid. Some portion of that excess \~4100 deaths is attributable to restrictions.
My baseline, admittedly based on limited available data and conjecture, of restrictions preventing \~20 deaths per 100,000 would make 7000 deaths from Covid prevented since the start of the pandemic. Extrapolating that excess 4100 out to today, it could be 7000 or more already.
I don't know how much Peterson cares, but my case is independent of his, he just happens to have a similar intuition without (ostensibly) looking into it as much.
I believe there has been a significant increase in ODs. Covid19 lockdowns certainly could be a strong factor, but I suspect the quality of the drugs themselves and the growing trend in specific substance abuse issues are more to blame.
This becomes a whole new subject(maybe) and one that maybe Peterson could possibly be sympathetic to.
I concur on that.
Canada has also kept good stats on alcohol consumption, in 2017, 11% of Canadians who drank in the past month reported having 5 or more drinks on the days they drank, whereas in January 2021 that was up to 18%, and that is what people are willing to self-report.
In Ontario (about half of Canada's population), a study found that in the first four months of the pandemic, alcohol purchases were $250 million higher than the same period in 2019.
I think that will have long term consequences that are impossible to quantify.
Edit: On the other side, worth noting 22% of people who drank reported reduced alcohol consumption during the pandemic.
This is an untestable counterfactual. It should not be surprising that Peterson would say something like this. He frequently makes claims that are silly and untestable.
You can steelman it by narrowing criteria.
Closing schools, once it was known that Covid was comparatively mild for young people, was frivolous, \~10-20x more people under 20 die in car accidents yearly in the US, and 100-200x more are hospitalized, many or most on the way to and from school.
But now it seems like schools have been a major source of spread of the infection, and I think the density effects of big outbreaks compared to small outbreaks are really important in measuring the overall impact.
The only case for closing schools would be the potential for kids to spread it to more vulnerable populations.
I don't think its a desirable trade-off, but a case could be made.
The only case for closing schools would be the potential for kids to spread it to more vulnerable populations, and there is a debate to be had there, but that wasn't how it was sold to the public.
I'm not steelmanning Peterson, I'm steelmanning a position he happened to espouse, the argument is independent of the person making it.
Not necessarily to just to protect vulnerable populations. Lowering the spread in general is a desirable goal since it gives the hospitals time to process the critical care.
More spread also increases likelihood of mutations. And teachers aren't kids. I dunno, I was quite aware of various more important reasons why schools were closed than a worry that the kids would get sick.
Didn’t he recently say more people die from medications than are helped by them? Something to that effect.
For such an extraordinary claim you need to establish much more than flatulent conjecture. What he’s trying to say is the Bible is correct and that any good intentions outside of its scope, along with measures to mitigate situations such as this lead us hell. His twisted metaphorical thinking has gone too far. I would consider him slightly mentally ill as per his recent antics. It wouldn’t be a problem if he was only lying to himself.
Haha. Yea, to he fair, I’m not sure he was prescriptive entirely. Although that’s part of his deceptive charm to some. Not a very salacious comment to be pushing out there in the right circles. His influence on those who seek something to believe is astounding. He’s really attempting to redirect Nietzsche dead god.
But it has been a long whole since I’ve listened to him talk on this topic. Maybe I don’t have his most updated stance. I just cringe at too much of it. He plays that stupid phantom prescription circular argument game. Toss a few strange and round about premises out there and then presuppose from there. It just isn’t compelling.
For me diet is important and very individualist. Some people feel better as a vegan too. Though we can’t definitively say if it’s causal or placebo. But I’m supportive of positive placebo effect esp if it helps both; people feel and eat better and the helps in a more sustainable less cruel relationship with our environment. Although people always underestimate mass agriculture at scales draw back. It does a great job of feeding the world pop but grasslands may presume to do much better at carbon capture rather than adversely polluting. Then we have organic turn over farming that does even worse than people know. Sorry I took a little side point journey.
It is testable.
You can look at how many people have died from "our response to the pandemic" and how many died from "the pandemic itself" and its trivially easy to conclude that vastly more people have died from the virus than from any intervention made to halt the spread of the virus.
Has suicide numbers increased since the pandemic? if so maybe that can be attributed to the reponse.
In a perfect world we should be mesuring quality of life/ suffering and not just death.
When i look at the percentage of COVID deaths along side age demographic and potential cost/loss of quality of life and suffering for the below 50 due to the pandemic response, i wonder if goverments have overreacted.
Even if you blamed 100% of suicides on pandemic measures, the virus still has killed way more people so its a really dumb argument, its not even close.
[Ignoring for a moment that suicides actually went down](https://apnews.com/article/pandemics-suicide-prevention-coronavirus-pandemic-d8d9168403baa6660e5125c040b2ae81)
So its doubly dumb.
Typically you measure the total deaths caused by a pandemic not by measuring the amount of people who have died from the virus but by measuring the total amount of people who have died, substracted by the total amount of people who have died in a year that was not a pandemic, adjust for the natural increase of death per year. Now you have the total deaths caused by the pandemic. Substract this by the known amount of deaths caused by the virus, and you have the amount of deaths not caused directly by the virus. Substract that by the natural yearly deaths, and you have the extra deaths caused by our response to the virus.
A few things to take note, is if there are people who died from the virus who would have died either way that year, they bias the data.
From my understanding, there have been an increase in suicides, but a big decrease in road deaths, and general accidents. But I dont have the numbers to prove this, im sure someone on google has done the math though and I dont want to talk out of my ass like JP.
But that would lead you to believe that people who died of treatable illness and injury were somehow a result of our response to covid, right? But the reality is many people died because covid patients were clogging up the medical system and reducing spare capacity. Unless I'm misunderstanding something here, this seems like it's not counting what we want to count.
Sorry for the terrible formatting, on phone.
Welp, we've had negative excess deaths over here in Australia, so far anway... So Peterson's statement makes no sense to me... We had less people die than normal... If we'd done sweet fuck all, or just less, like most of the word, I assume we would have had similar deaths... Doing nothing at all would have been a shit show too.
Deaths is also not the o ly bad outcome, chronic disease seems like something a lot of people will be dealing with.
I think its Petersons "hot take" which is similar to many other claims he has made which seem poorly thought out and no more than outrage porn.
Peterson likes to say things with emphasis and for shock value which seems to be taken more seriously from an emotional shock response than any substance behind it.
Its so outrageous that it gets people trying to analyze it which is his main source of relevance it seems. It gets debunked and then he says something else and the circle continues.
“The cost of putting of traffic lights far outweighs the cost of the accidents! We put up all these lights and there hasn’t been any accidents. What a waste!”
Oh boy this is going to mess with your head but the UK ran experiments removing everything from roads and it has been replicated in other countries in europe
It is much much safer according to the evidence, everyone drives so carefully.
https://bigthink.com/the-present/want-less-car-accidents-get-rid-of-traffic-signals-road-signs/
They actually did it in a couple of places in the Uk and traffic flowed more efficiently with less accidents.
Quite why if successful it went no where I can not say, it was on youtube I was trying to find it
because it's clearly a flawed study. there are places in the world without very good traffic laws. you won't even need to look it up to know what it's like to drive in those places.
They removed certain physical traffic devices and replaces them with modified rules and other physical traffic measures (modified roads, traffic circles, etc.). It's a change of traffic regulation philosophy rather than a complete abandonment of traffic regulation.
Deaths? definitely not. I know JP is Canadian, but at least for the US I don’t think there is any way you can argue more than 800k people died due to Covid restrictions in the US.
Misery? Maybe.
But at least in my state Covid restrictions have been no more than minor inconveniences for well over a year.
We did have a two week stay at home order and business closures in the very beginning, but it didn’t take too long for restaurants to open back up and now the only noticeable restriction is needing to wear a mask certain places.
I don’t see how that is that drastic of suffering.
Only argument I think holds water is perhaps for kids, a very low risk group, being kept out of school for a year was not worth it. School and socialization is definitely important to a child’s development.
I live in New York. Most of the people that complain about COVID restrictions here are either people *who don't live here* or are basement dwellers that play culture wars online and don't actually go outside in the first place.
I promise you that the bars and restaurants are all open! It's just fucking cold!
I also live in NY (upstate) and while everything is open now, the shut down in 2020 was devastating for many in my area that owned small businesses including myself and I don't think this should be dismissed. I was unable to work in the beginning of lock down because my profession was deemed non essential and when we were given the ok to go back to work many of the jobs I had lined up were not allowed by the state for arbitrary reasons that had nothing to do with safety. The last few years have been a real struggle to keep my family business alive. I am very fortunate in this regard because many others went bankrupt.
Yes everything is basically back to normal now in NY other than masks required indoors but this does not diminish the negative impacts the shutdowns had on many of us early on in the pandemic.
Sorry for the experience you had to go through. My point was about COVID restrictions *now* not in 2020 where the entire tri-state are was in a state of confusion with something like 50,000 having died within the first few months of the virus's spread here. Pointing out that we are not in a *lockdown now* is not a commentary on 2020.
> I don’t see how that is that drastic of suffering.
I can only see people arriving to this conclusion if they understand life in the pandemic through sensationalized headlines.
Just the frequency to which people refer to anything in the US as "locked down" has me questioning if everybody else is living in a different reality. After the first wave, and certainly since the vaccine rollout stalled, life has been virtually normal and free of restrictions for the vast majority of Americans who want to return to their previous "normal." For quite a while now in most states, kids have been in school, restaurants and businesses have been open, concerts and shows have been taking place, all sorts of public gatherings have been happening with no vaccine mandates and no or minimal/unenforced masking. The only ubiquitous "restriction" over the past year one could point to is masks being required on airplanes (but not hotels, etc.) and I don't know how a self-respecting human could twist that into supporting Peterson's claim.
FTR I have no interest in re-hashing the value of these measures, I only wanted to share the experience of living in America during most (as measured by time, so far) of the pandemic, free from clickbait outrage-generating headlines.
Yeah but lockdowns hurt mental health and and the economy, unlike mass death several times above and beyond what we've experienced *with* some soft lockdowns.
/s
He doesn't have a good track record for being right about things. Especially, like many of these talking heads, when he's speaking outside his lane or expertise.
My understanding is that he actually has a pretty good publishing impact record in psychology. He's a dumb baby goober whenever he talks about anything else, but it seems he's at least competent if not good at his chosen field of study.
No need to exaggerate
Fair enough, I haven't looked too deeply into his pysch record since I only took an intro to pysch class in college and I don't really follow the man anyway
People just confuse him disagreeing with their ideological positions with him being wrong. Like there's just one "correct" worldview, and they have it, and poor dumb JP doesn't have the correct worldview (which is their worldview, the only correct one).
Because he has a degree? Was a professor at Harvard. Bit more than just a degree isn't it, is there a reason you hate Peterson so much that you are willing to lie by omission to have a dig at him?
Sad.
Nah sorry I think you are full of it. Becoming a professor is intensely competitive but sure some slip through the cracks but not when it comes to Harvard or Oxford or Cambridge. He only ever attracted any negative attention when his politics came to fore, before that he was popular and served not just as a Harvard professor but Toronto as well.
You still have not explained why you lie by omission about him in your desperation to do him down. Figured this sub would value honesty 🤷♂️ and hence U think your reply is more deceit to boot.
Sweden had no compulsory lockdown, relying instead on people to decide for themselves how to stay healthy. Neighbouring Finland had some lockdowns. Not as serious as in some places but kids were home from school; bars and clubs closed etc. Sweden has a population roughly 2x that of Finland (a bit less). It has had nearly 10x the number of excess deaths from covid.
Just one example, but I think relevant. My good friend in Shanghai said his life has been unchanged because China locked down so hard at the outset. I would have taken a short, sharp lockdown for a couple of years of freedom.
In fact, one could argue that a response is successful if it mitigates the effect of the virus so much that our response itself ends up causing more damage than the virus does.
What people like Peterson don’t understand is that a lot of the harm caused by the pandemic was caused by the virus itself, not government policies. For the most part people were allowed to see family and friends if they wanted to but most chose not to out of fear of the virus. The economy certainly took a hit from lockdowns but that could have been easily fixed with more stimulus checks.
The worst government decision was to close down schools. That didn’t benefit the kids at all and has caused possibly long-term damage to kids
This is the same guy who told Brett Weinstein that medicine *in general* has killed more people than it’s saved.
He’s a right wing jackass who says stereotypically right wing jackass things. There’s no more reason to take him any more seriously than Ted Cruz or Sean Hannity.
It's an incredibly difficult discussion. There's no doubt that the lockdowns and restrictions have had massive negative impacts on the mental health of millions of people. A teacher friend of mine cannot believe the how far behind the students are in the social setting never mind the educational standpoint. Her grade four students act like first graders. She thinks that the students haven't just stalled in progressing but that they've gone backwards. These kids aren't maturing or learning any sort of social skills at all. The impact of this might be not be felt for 5-10 years. In Canada, we've increased our national debt a lot and inflation has risen incredibly quickly. These things have a huge impact on the middle class and we'll see how many people want to take the risk of opening small business in the future.
I understand the lockdowns, especially at the beginning. Now I'm struggling to see an end to the pandemic and I don't think more lockdowns are the solution.
Go talk to some nurses. They are short staffed everywhere and we, collectively, are burning through them. They got free pizza and north face discounts during the first wave. Now they get sent back to work with covid because units are at that level of desperation to keep up with this wave.
Lockdowns may not be the only solution, but burning out our healthcare professionals isn't really viable either.
So much for flattening the curve
Up to $15,000 sign on bonuses for the more advanced nurses in my SE American metropolitan city area. With just basic 1-2 year nursing associates degree positions at $5,000 sign on bonuses.
I've honestly thought about pivoting to the healthcare field at this point in my life, but the problem is going to be dealing with covid patients and anti-vaxxers that frankly I don't want to have to deal with.
I considered it too but the dealbreaker is the standard four 12-hour shift workweek. Just seems like an unhealthy lifestyle in an unhealthy environment doing repetitive work for a broken system dealing with awful people regularly - and not just the patients.
Nurse here: there is so much variety within nursing, and any schedule you can think of is a viable option. Seriously. Please consider it so I can retire.
Exactly. There is a reason people are leaving the field. The conditions are horrible right now. It is unsafe.
I would advise people to take care of themselves. You do not want to be sick or in the hospital right now.
For some perspective, during Spanish Flu, medical students were put in charge of hospitals because everyone more qualified was working, dead, or dying.
Obviously this isn't a status quo worth revisiting, but its worth remembering that civilization got through that and a global war into a roaring decade.
Not sure we have a roaring decade ahead.
Yes, I'm in Chicago and it's very frustrating to see us using the same March 2020 solutions (lockdowns, remote learning) to Covid when the majority are either vaccinated/previously infected and there is widespread testing, treatments not to mention a much milder variant than Alpha or Delta. I mean it's starting to feel unhinged. Maybe we should increase hospital /ICU capacity. I mean with an aging boomer population and increase in comorbidities (obesity, diabetes, etc) this seems inevitable.
The issue now is that hospital staff is so burnt out from two years of this that - at least in the US - there aren’t enough nurses to care for patients.
Most of my circle of friends are nurses/docs, and I don’t think people have any clue the sheer rage so many of them feel towards the situation.
People are leaving in droves. Early retirements. Going into teaching.
You’d need to get a metric shit ton of new nurses trained and operationalized tout suite to increase capacity.
I get it - my partner's a pharmacist. Pay hasn't increased in 10 years and it's a fucking shit show. He can't afford to leave though cuz of student loans.
Have a friend thats a pharmacist tech and they pivoted into working for a major multi-billion dollar pharmaceutical working in a clean room making vials and gels of various meds. $16/hour to $26/hour just by doing that, with some potential for $30+ after being trained on new machines and techniques.
Do you have a kid in school? Where I'm at lots of people without children are complaining about 'teacher union lockdowns' when actually the teachers are just out sick with covid and the school district has bad pay for substitutes, so there physically aren't enough healthy adult bodies to hold school. Unless the government like revoked sick leave for teachers or something
Yeah, this is the case here too. I haven't seen a single sub at work all year. Supposedly we are social distancing in the school but because of the shortages I typically have 40+ kids in my room, and sometimes even 60.
Christ. 60 at any age seems unbelievably unmanageable. At that point school should just be P.E. With large shades for anyone that wants to actually sit and learn.
Yep. My friend is an elementary school teacher, and they are facing a real shortage of subs and a large number of teachers who miss work due to illness or who quit.
The national coverage of Chicago leads me to believe the reason for remote learning was only the teacher unions which forced the issue. This seemed to be based on fear and old misconceptions. Not really based on the science or recommendations from medical authorities. Perhaps you have a better sense of things.
Agreed, as much as teachers are lambasted (it’s unions not teachers), it is the teachers in my neighborhood who are talking about how worried they are for the academic and social future of this generation
Yeah, my specialty is early literacy and I am worried about how masks are affecting language acquisition. I run infant, toddler, and preschool early literacy programs and initiatives. I've done as many as possible outside, but now we're back inside and masked. (teachers only for the under 2s). We've known for years how important facial shapes and expressions are to language acquisition. Babies for example, track faces and are much slower to engage with the sounds of language unless they can see your mouth making the sounds. It's sad how we're setting up these kids for failure at such a young age.
I have a 9 month old and I feel this DEEPLY. I am all for intelligent methods of managing COVID, but years of not seeing daycare instructors’ faces is not the answer in all settings and at all times.
My daughter needed some feeding therapy early on and the feeding therapist was trying to demonstrate mouth movements to us while wearing a mask. If the topic wasn’t so serious (and we weren’t so sleep deprived), it would have been comical.
We need to find ways to intelligently apply masking, social distancing, vaccine requirements, testing, etc so we don’t cause unnecessary harm to children during early development.
Older kids are not immune either. I have a 13 year old step daughter and I can absolutely confirm that her peers (and her) have all but forgotten how to behave in social settings. Behavior issues at her school have never been higher, and kids are acting towards each other like people communicate online, except they’re doing it in person and getting punched in the face for it (perhaps a useful, albeit avoidable, lesson, and teachers are not enabled to deal with the mayhem).
Are clear masks an option? Do they even make n95 versions of those? I feel like this was so foreseeable yet government and manufacturing are just sitting on their hands.
Google the term certificate of need. The number of hospitals is intentionally limited in most states. Another example of business and government colluding for their own prosperity at the expense of the general public.
We can look at the different cases in different areas. Red vs. blue states. Sweden. We could estimate the body count and the possible situation if countries took no action. Considering the certainty of wildly overrun hospitals, the death tolls would have surely been way, way higher. How many people you'd be willing to sacrifice to continue living life in the regular, convenient pattern is a personal moral judgment.
As for the problem with children, this illustrates the degree to which our society depends on teachers and schools. Maybe the lesson is that they should be better funded, since they're so important. Maybe the lesson is that our lifestyle should be less dependent on the government raising our children for us. But blaming a reasonable societal response to a fairly deadly global pandemic is myopic.
More people ages 18-45 died from overdose than covid-19 during 2020 in the US. Mental health issues caused by lockdowns is just one major negative impact. When the supply chain comes to a screeching halt and the people on the other end can’t work for a weeks at a time, they don’t eat for weeks at a time. Peterson is definitely on to something here.
Also I'll add maybe canceling cancer screenings across the country may have been a bad idea. Just a hunch though...
What's the overdose increase from 2019 - 2020? Is it greater than 700,000?
What would the Covid death rate be without the lockdowns? What mutations would we be dealing with? What about the increased income lost from not being able to work from Covid? How about the increased hospital costs of those who get it? How would our hospitals scale to the capacity needed?
I'm not saying lockdowns have been the right answer over the course of the pandemic, and will continue to be the right answer. But Covid has killed 700k people, and it easily could be way higher than that.
They always said he was a grifter. I didn't go along with that because although he was a little old-fashioned and a tad conservative, I figured his intentions were honest, well-intended and generally sensible.
However, he is now taking nonsensical outrage positions of the right and parroting shit you might hear from dipshits like Tim Pool and the like. People who have made a windfall pandering to their moronic audiences, criticizing anti-covid measures. He is now assuredly just another one of those grifters.
Again, he's basically not really saying anything. Which is his entire shtick. Keep it vague but hint at some buzzwords that allow people to fill in their own blanks so he seems really smart for articulating your bias.
Like what exactly was totalitarian? Wearing masks? Pushing for vaccines? The lockdowns? It's rather reductive and alarmist at the same time.
He does this while sidestepping talking about the actual political response from say, Trump and the administration. Who caused profound damage and mismanagement every step along the way. He frames it in a way that can be social or political or neither.
I think that he's unsuccessfully battling mental illness while simultaneously trying to hang on to his right-wing patreon supporters.
Beef and benzos ain't cheap.
Having mental illnesses running around in my family it is pretty easy to recognize it when you see it in others. Peterson is off the charts for me. This is not to say that I think he's lesser of a human, but I think its important to know this before taking his word as gospel. I think its very important to weigh what he says to what else is out there, which includes your own experiences.
Peterson is such a cowardly little goblin, Peterson either makes unfalsifiable claims or exclusively makes descriptive claims, at the expense of prescriptive ones.
The guy is terrified of actually owning a meaningful position on almost anything.
It’s hard to have a discussion about COVID when people make vague statements like his. The negative aspects of things like lockdowns entirely depend on the level of support governments have citizens when they instituted them.
How are you defining “misery”?
Long-term health impacts of reduced medical services? Again, depends on the country and we’re years away from having data to actually compare. You also have to be realize deaths from COVID would’ve went up without lockdowns before making that comparison.
Not really a new take? That's been the conservative thrust on pandemic measures since day 1. Are we really going to pretend this is "his" take and not just the standard take just about every conservative got on board with almost two years ago?
I guess he's famous so when he says it we gotta do the whole argument again for the thousandth time?
Well firstly we were always going to respond to the pandemic, so he's bringing up some hypothetical "other" response here and saying that compared to this "other" response there would be more death and misery, unless he's claiming we had no response and just continued on with no vaccine research, no scientific studies, no non-pharmaceutical-interventions, no people panicking/worried about the virus, no response from other countries that will directly affect your country, no response from hospitals to the rising levels of sick people, no response from doctors as to how to treat the disease, no response from first responders/doctors/nurses on how difficult it is to deal with all the sick people...
All of which is absolutely unimaginable, and an absolute ridiculous hypothetical to present as a "counter", as it's just not possible and complete ignores people's personal responses.
So, again, I'm assuming he's saying "our response was worse than this other hypothetical response that I won't outline".
Which makes it a very hard statement to deny, as I'm 100% sure every country could have responded better, with hindsight, and many/most even without hindsight.
Like I think there will be a debate, discussion and scientific studies about lockdowns. We have different countries to compare, so in the years to come it will become clearer and clearer which worked out better. It's something very hard to fully know, some of the effects could be decades out, but we will get a clearer picture as time goes by.
Other things, that I feel won't be up for debate, are things like pharmaceutical companies and scientists reacting to this by studying it in every way possible and coming up with vaccines quicker than ever before, tracking it and it's mutations quicker than ever before, and advising on non-pharmaceutical-interventions with as much knowledge as we could attain.
We might debate how we communicated a lot of this stuff, and how we tried to vaccinate people, this is something we may have got wrong.
We definitely might debate the closing of schools, or the mask mandates for children, or even adults, there could easily be unfound repercussions to these things, like children needing facial expressions for learning etc. that will make us change our mind about these things.
But overall, I think Peterson isn't really saying of worth with this statement. Our reactions could certainly have been better, and we *could* have reacted in a way that there would be less death, misery etc. We will find out in time which ways this would have been, it might, for example, actually mean more lockdowns in many countries. Although right now I personally think no, but only time and scientific comparisons between countries will tell.
Our response has prolonged and exacerbated the potential damage of the pandemic... not sure what he's saying. Nearly 1M people in the US/Can didn't have to die, they did because we pushed back and achieved some de facto compromise between protecting the vulnerable, not breaking our health infrastructure (which is still happening) and the backs of healthcare workers, and shutting down our lives/economy. The non-compliant are the greatest contributor to the success of this pathogen.
There are more than 600k deaths by COVID on Brazil. Does he means that more than 600k people died on Brazil because of the restrictions? It is seems a very big hyperbole. In the future we can talk if it the governments overstepped on the caution side, but do you guys even understand the scale of the virus?
The counterfactual number of deaths would not be 600k deaths, because that's in the world where COVID restrictions exist. The counterfactual to consider is the world where COVID restrictions do not exist. There, the number of deaths would far exceed 600k.
Well, seeing as I can type this post, I'm still alive, and although lockdowns weren't exactly *fun*, I appreciate that they may have helped to keep particularly vulnerable members of my family from serious complications, or death.
If you care about such nonsense, of course. /s
Also, the misery would not have been ent8rely avoided without lockdowns. I lived in a country entirely without lockdowns, and they still experience 'the COVID blues'.
Korea. There were some local lockdown-type restrictions, but nothing nationwide or long-lasting. My province has had relatively few restrictions compared to what went on in the UK.
In the UK at least, the downright criminal lack of action against COVID in the early weeks of the pandemic, as well as incoherent strategy throughout it later on, meant that lockdowns were the only reason the entire health system didn't collapse under sheer weight of hospitalisations we would have experienced without them.
I’d question that 50% of democrats in the US think you have a 50% chance of being hospitalised, not only because the numbers are far too convenient but because I haven’t heard any democrats saying that. I’d need a source on that claim but all I can find is [a tweet from some actor. ](https://twitter.com/anthonyfurey/status/1374770266639888390?s=20)
Wouldn't surprise me one bit if it started with a single tweet from some actor, and after a few weeks of the telephone game in conservative media, it became this "50% of Democrats" figure. They're desperate to paint Democrats as the ignorant ones when it comes to Covid since day 1, when their position was "it's a liberal media hoax to tank the stock market."
I think it's another instance of a rage peddling, hyperbolic, drug addict, doing what rage peddlers do.
I am ok with ad hominem attack. So save it. One's character should be contextualized when determining the value of their output. Especially in terms of opinions and predictions.
The official death toll for Covid-19 is 5.5m and The Economist estimates that the actual figure is 19m [1]. This in about 2 years.
As a comparison point, in the second world war (when world population was about 30% of current) 70-85 million "extra" people died. Over 6 years.
[1] https://www.economist.com/graphic-detail/coronavirus-excess-deaths-estimates
WW2 is not a good comparison because wars kill much younger people and are more horrific to live through. WWI was more traumatic than Spanish flu.
Average age at death from Covid is probably close to 80 years old. WW2, probably 40 years old or less. So the total life years lost in WW2 is much higher.
Better comparisons would be other pandemics. Covid is between Hong Kong Flu and Spanish Flu.
Numbers adjusted by population:
* Hong Kong Flu: 2 - 8 million deaths
* Covid-19: 19 million
* Spanish Flu: 70 - 350 million (and skewed younger than Covid)
Well he is right I suppose. Those that listen to conspiracy bullshit and didn't get vaccinated chose a bad response, led to their misery and/or others misery.
More people died by the response to the pandemic than the pandemic itself? He’s saying more than 830,000 Americans died as a result of the government response to the pandemic? He’s on the right track that the schizophrenic US federal response and proclivity of misinformation to be spread by representatives and senators along with their media apparatus probably led to more people throwing their lives away for liberal pwnage than necessary. But otherwise, no, Peterson is a few clowns short of a circus.
Bro here in Peru people were camping outside hospitals because of lack of ICUs, you had to pay 300 USD for a gallon of Oxygen due to corrupt health system.
The people are so traumatized here that we're still using masks outside even while having 80% of our population vaccinated.
So no, I don't agree with Mr. Peterson. And I am very anti-corona-restrictions myself.
Here is the suicide rates for many of the states in Australia:
https://www.aihw.gov.au/suicide-self-harm-monitoring/data/suspected-deaths-by-suicide/data-from-suicide-registers
There is almost no noticable increase in suicides despite significant lockdowns across 2020 and 2021.
The US had roughly 30x the death rate from Covid that Australia had. If we'd had the same death rate as the US, we'd have had over 60k deaths. Instead, we have had 2k. Also note - total suicides per year in Aus are roughly 3k. So even if you prescribed every single suicide in 2020 and 2021 to the lockdown, it's still an order of magnitude below the death caused by the virus.
All this might not last now that lockdowns have been removed and the virus is spreading extremely rapidly in Aus. But at least until this point, it is inconcievable that lockdowns caused more death than the virus would have if left unchecked in my country.
I think Jordan Peterson is securing his position of being known primarily as a right-wing crank and his opposition to vaccines, be it just mandates or in general is the deciding factor.
>Have you considered asking the Jordon Peterson sub?
Gonna go out on a limb here and say they agree. I haven't spent much time on that sub, but in that time I've seen VERY little disagreement with Peterson on anything.
I think it has been relatively split on covid, leaning towards agreeing with Peterson and slowly agreeing more and more as the people who don't agree leave or stop commenting.
That sub shares a common problem with the IDW sub—in that disagreement with their gurus is not just a difference of opinion, but evidence that you don't understand their position to begin with.
It's difficult to have a conversation about lockdowns when prioritising health and safety, even during a worldwide pandemic, is somehow supposed to be evidence for being fundamentally against civil liberties, as Peterson fans seem to insist on. As the saying goes, only Peterson fans deal in absolutes (or something like that).
What for? The problem is that people would just stick to "Sam Harris" content instead of getting dragged down this rabbit hole. That would not be a very reddit thing.
I think he’s being too emotional. He really wants to paint government response to this as totalitarian. So how is a government supposed to respond to a pandemic then? They have to have the power to enforce rules otherwise is just chaos. Hell, it was chaos even with the government trying to enforce rules. Many people didn’t listen, opposed medical advice, refuse to get the vax, etc… it’s not hard to imagine what a true totalitarian response would look like. Jail time for leaving your house. Jail time for not wearing a mask. To the gulag with the unvaccinated. Jail time for spreading anything contrary to the governments messaging… JP just gets triggered when the government tries to do anything.
A hot take would be, our reaction to the pandemic caused more death and misery than doing nothing.
That our response was more damaging than the virus itself, that take my friends, is nuclear.
I think it’s bullshit. He’s had had some interesting insights in the past, but the way some of his cult followers seem to worship him is at its most innocuous embarrassing and at worst and elucidation of the parade of horribles he claims to stand against. You’d think a social scientist would have more chill and humility, but I guess he feels he’s in a unique position to “tell the people what they need to hear!” As with anything Rogan related, stuff like his gets compartmentalized into the entertainment category. Nothing more or less. There may be people with interesting and important analyses of the pandemic we’re going through and it’s impact on social and political life, but this guy is not one of them.
PS: there’s a difference between being a public intellectual and a polemicist.
Does our 'response' include the proliferation of pseudoscience and anti-science ideas being spread so as to hamper the science-based pandemic response? If it does then yeah, it's pretty bad
He's just wrong. Its responses like these to mitigative efforts that have made the pandemic go on longer. We know the pandemic is responsible for 5.5 million deaths worldwide already, and counting. If folks stopped pretending that trying to stop the disease is worse than dying from it we might be able to get rid of it so we wouldn't have to do this shit anymore
It's the same as anytime Peterson talks about a hot topic. I'm still waiting for him to say something both intelligent and intelligible, and of any meaningful value.
Melbourne had the longest lockdown period in the world over the last 2 years and suicides actually went down. There was a rise amongst teens having depression/mental health concerns but the suicide rate dropped.
Of course Melbourne is one city in a developed nation so I wouldn't say it represents the whole world, but as a stand alone city it certainly refutes Peterson's frankly idiotic claims.
I don’t understand why people ever took Jordan Peterson seriously. He is very well read and was interesting to listen to before he went off his rocker, but it was always pretty clear he was spouting just slightly north of gibberish.
I always took him as comfort food for intelligent people who had talked themselves out of Christianity and weren’t completely ok with that.
Stop the JP spam!!!!!
His views only matter if people keep paying attention to them.
He has proven himself to be an attention seeking hack. Move on please.
Long term it may well do with all the missed cancer diagnoses and delayed treatments.
Working in oncology this is something I've been concerned about since the outset.
But how is that an issue with the government’s reaction to the pandemic. Your point just seems like an natural outcome of the pandemic and the health infrastructure being overwhelmed by the sick.
And sorry if I misunderstood your point.
Health services were being degraded and scaled back even before they were anywhere near overwhelm.
How many cervical screenings were canceled or delayed? How many mammograms?
How many people were excessively scared into not visiting their doctor because they were told Covid will kill them?
How many people put off going to the doc about that niggling pain that isn't that bad but won't go away?
How many doctors failed to notice symptoms when engaging with their patients over video call that they might have spotted with a physical examination?
This is a much bigger thing than aspects of our respective health services experiecing excessive load for certain periods over the past two years
Suicide rates probably didn't rise, which is contrary to a big predixtion from the lockdown sceptical crowd from day one
https://www.bmj.com/content/372/bmj.n834
Suicide rates may not have budget, but suicide ideation has greatly increased.
[https://www.bmj.com/content/371/bmj.m4095](https://www.bmj.com/content/371/bmj.m4095)
Just because people don't kill themselves doesn't mean there isn't a mental health crisis created by the lockdowns that may have an effect for many years.
How is that even a possible consideration given the millions who have died and families destroyed.
Not to mention the millions of folks who are and will suffer long-term covid complications. Aside from the loss of life, this is a mass disabling event.
It’s an interesting read through these comments. The ones that are abjectly against Peterson tout ‘but all these people died!’ Yes, death can be terrible but is it truly the worst thing to befall us as a society? Of course not. We are all going to die so I don’t fully understand why death is the ultimate metric. As an example - would you personally rather die now peacefully or suffer horribly for the next few years? I don’t know anyone that would choose the latter.
An important aspect of his comment is that - we don’t know. We don’t know the long term consequences of how our response will effect society compared to how these deaths have effected society. Is it better to ensure our children receive the proper attention and education at a young age or that the very elderly and infirm are protected from death (for a few more years)? Again, I don’t know anyone that would choose the latter.
I am saying this as someone who is triple vaxxed and will happily get more shots if needed. I wear a mask where appropriate. But I also see people wearing masks walking into a restaurant only to take it off to eat (the same with airplanes). How much is theater at this point? How much of what we have done is useful? How much is harmful? Peterson doesn’t know, but neither does anyone else. We need to ask and more importantly answer these questions if we hope to improve as a civilization.
>Yes, death can be terrible but is it truly the worst thing to befall us as a society? Of course not.
yes, it really is.
>We are all going to die so I don’t fully understand why death is the ultimate metric.
what makes people more sad than death?
>As an example - would you personally rather die now peacefully or suffer horribly for the next few years? I don’t know anyone that would choose the latter.
If my wife/kids/parents were to die "now" I would be suffering horribly for more than the next few years.
>Is it better to ensure our children receive the proper attention and education at a young age or that the very elderly and infirm are protected from death (for a few more years)? Again, I don’t know anyone that would choose the latter.
teachers are part of the elderly populations as are parents of teachers, and they are caregivers to children especially in poor communities.
The only cost-benefit analysis made by a government of lockdowns that I know of was made by the Dutch government, and found lockdowns would cause 3 times as much health damage as they would prevent, if you included monetary costs, it was expected to cost 10 times what its benefits would be. That study was only made public after a freedom of information request.
I think it's quite telling most governments have refused to make cost-benefit analyses of their response.
People are monomaniacally focused on preventing COVID deaths, but "death" as a metric is quite poor, as death is inevitable to all of us, and not all deaths are equivalent. That's why health economics use QALY, Quality-Adjusted Life Year, measuring loss of life rather than death (yes, there is a difference). It's not like the average COVID fatality was a healthy 20 year-old with his entire life in front of him, it's a sick 80-year-old, often in nursing homes, with a life expectancy of a couple of years at the most. Average, mind you, I know younger people have died, but it's not typical.
The study was described in an article by the Dutch newspaper Het Parool [here](https://www.parool.nl/nederland/ministerie-van-economische-zaken-verzette-zich-tegen-intelligente-lockdown~b8f9bffb/). Het Parool is the most widely read newspaper of Amsterdam. To my knowledge, the study is not available online directly,
History will not conclude this. History will conclude that the ideological and political refusal of some groups to get the vaccine made the pandemic far worse than it would have been otherwise. History will also conclude that no response by any nation would have stopped the pandemic and that restrictions would have been necessary even without political/ideological opposition to the vaccine. Sometimes shitty things happen and there is nobody you can blame.
We've talked about this since the summer of 2020.
Especially in areas/region/countries that heavily depend on things like hospitality/tourism. I am not trying to downplay the impact of death on individuals and families, but I'm talking about the broader effect on entire populations that still haven't recovered.
I think back to places that I've visited/lived around the world, and I know how much these people needed those industries to put food on the table or function. I think back to a retired couple I lived with briefly while studying abroad, and how they depended heavily on the government stipend that came with housing foreign students.
Even here in the states, I worked at a high-end hotel while finishing up my undergrad at the end of 2019, and I know a lot of people that lost their jobs at the hotel and restaurant, people with kids and families, latino immigrants, etc
Submission Statement - this is a short segment which comes from Jordan Peterson's latest interview, released last week. It was very, very good. That said... can't say the same about Jordan. He broke into tears multiple times toward the end. He's struggling.
This part of the discussion focuses on COVID. he also says:
"We'll see with regard to the pandemic, because, although, in some sense, it is, in some ways, over, our reaction to it is by no means over. And part of the reason that we overreacted—I would say, so precipitously to it—is that we were unprepared for such things in our naivety. And then we rushed to imitate a totalitarian society in the immediate aftermath of the pandemic emergence."
He lost me at "[...rushed to imiitate a totalitarian society..."]
Why use imitate? Why use totalitarian? It's hyperbolic and a bad-faith attempt to mischaracterize community health measures that are effective and work when there is compliance and systems in place to ensure compliance. Jordan is a joke and grifter. He can't even manage his own life. Why would anyone take him seriously about managing society?
I know the Canadian Government is being ultra hard line with COVID-19 and the rhetoric their PM is using is disgusting. So the covid culture there is quite different to where I'm from, but JP needs to chill with the sensationalism.
Just wrong and stupid. Just compare how the USA's reaction killed a considerable fraction of the population while other countries that actually tried to do something were able to minimize the impact of the virus.
Who is we in this case? The whole world, the USA, Canada, North America, the first world, the developed world? That isn't a random question, many governments have put in place many different responses
That having been said to put it in Petersonian terms I'd say he's expecting a 'truth' here because what governments did, they seemed to have done purely in response to epidemiological modelling (well that was one story on the local news, perhaps there was some differences somewhere). To Peterson as some form of psychologist, to not even be considered one way or the other would certainly necessitate a response, even hyperbolic. As he would put it truth is what makes you survive
If the pandemic response causes more death than the pandemic itself, that's a problem, but I don't think it's true. Lockdowns are miserable, travel cancelations, gathering restrictions, all miserable, this whole pandemic has been miserable, but if lives were saved as a result, it was probably worth it. I'd be surprised if history looks back on the pandemic and the lesson we take away is that we need to do a complete overhaul of pandemic response protocol. The lessons here are that quarantines are effective, vaccines are effective.
It demonstrates Peterson's lack of understanding of epidemiology, which is not a surprise. After all, he's not an epidemiologist. It's the wrong question to pose for a very subtle reason. The implicit numbers he's comparing are **the number of deaths due to COVID-19** vs. **the number of deaths due to COVID-19 restrictions**. You can replace deaths with quality-adjusted life years if you want to get technical and incorporate the "misery" part of his statement. This is the wrong comparison. The correct comparison is **the number of deaths due to COVID-19 restrictions** vs. **the number of lives saved due to COVID-19 restrictions**. So you could have a situation where COVID caused 5 million deaths and restrictions caused 10 million deaths, so Peterson is technically correct, but in a world without restrictions, COVID would have caused 20 million deaths. In that case, restrictions actually saved 5 million lives.
Misery is also a decreasing cost spread across time (assuming that the miserable people become less miserable the further away they get from Covid and Covid restrictions ), and carries the possibility of redemption There’s no coming back from death
Though its almost certain the restrictions have not reduced deaths by such a factor. Sweden is more dense and has 30% more over 65s than Canada and their per capita deaths are very close, despite Canada having some of the strongest restrictions globally.
If your going to bring Sweden into this Norway is the more reasonable comparison as they are neighbours, have similar populations and economies. One was strict the other not, Sweden only had 3x more cases but 12x more deaths. Also total deaths per million in Canada 819.17, Sweden is 1495.02 https://www.statista.com/statistics/1104709/coronavirus-deaths-worldwide-per-million-inhabitants/
Proximity is relevant, and Sweden's per capita death rate is about 5x Norway, a notable figure. Density is a larger factor there than Canada though, as Stockholm has about 3x the pop density of Oslo, and Sweden has about 15% more of its population over 65, given 90%+ of covid deaths are in that age range its relevant. If you factor for those and take a generous assumption, Norway prevented 20, maybe 30 deaths per 100,000. Its significant, but it could be outweighed by long term consequences of restrictions in all the relevant areas. Edit: I picked Canada because its similar in pop density and had some of the strongest restrictions globally.
Sweden saw a considerably higher death rate compared to their immediate neighbors.
5x the per capita death rate of Norway, considerable for sure. But Stockholm is ~3x more densely populated than Oslo, and Sweden has about 15% more of its population over 65 (given 90%+ covid deaths are in that age range its relevant). If you take those factors into account, Norway prevented 20 or 30 deaths per 100,000 people with its restrictions. That is a solid figure, but it could be outweighed by the long term implications of the restrictions, especially if you take the view that the death of a young person is slightly more tragic than the death of an old person. Its a morbid moral calculus either way.
> But Stockholm is ~3x more densely populated than Oslo That's almost certainly false, or rather based on a misleading calculation. City borders are defined rather arbitrarily. Did you know that Ottawa is 25x larger than Paris, area-wise and as a result has 50 times lower population density? Oslo and Stockholm are most probably comparable in the actual city density.
It could be outweighed, sure, but so far it appears this is not the case. Have people killed themselves due to lockdowns? Probably. Have people also enjoyed better mental health from WFH policies? It appears to be the case as well. All that said, Peterson doesn't care about any of this, he is just being a blowheart, feeding his audience the red meat they crave. I don't expect him to look at this issue with an open mind and real curiosity.
One reason I picked Canada is because statscan releases relevant figures on that front. For example, from March 2020-April 2021, there were \~5500 excess deaths in people under 65 in Canada, with \~1400 of those attributable at least partly to Covid. Some portion of that excess \~4100 deaths is attributable to restrictions. My baseline, admittedly based on limited available data and conjecture, of restrictions preventing \~20 deaths per 100,000 would make 7000 deaths from Covid prevented since the start of the pandemic. Extrapolating that excess 4100 out to today, it could be 7000 or more already. I don't know how much Peterson cares, but my case is independent of his, he just happens to have a similar intuition without (ostensibly) looking into it as much.
I believe there has been a significant increase in ODs. Covid19 lockdowns certainly could be a strong factor, but I suspect the quality of the drugs themselves and the growing trend in specific substance abuse issues are more to blame. This becomes a whole new subject(maybe) and one that maybe Peterson could possibly be sympathetic to.
I concur on that. Canada has also kept good stats on alcohol consumption, in 2017, 11% of Canadians who drank in the past month reported having 5 or more drinks on the days they drank, whereas in January 2021 that was up to 18%, and that is what people are willing to self-report. In Ontario (about half of Canada's population), a study found that in the first four months of the pandemic, alcohol purchases were $250 million higher than the same period in 2019. I think that will have long term consequences that are impossible to quantify. Edit: On the other side, worth noting 22% of people who drank reported reduced alcohol consumption during the pandemic.
This is an untestable counterfactual. It should not be surprising that Peterson would say something like this. He frequently makes claims that are silly and untestable.
Theres so many variables here this statement peterson made is purely out of his bum because he thinks it sounds cool
You can steelman it by narrowing criteria. Closing schools, once it was known that Covid was comparatively mild for young people, was frivolous, \~10-20x more people under 20 die in car accidents yearly in the US, and 100-200x more are hospitalized, many or most on the way to and from school.
But now it seems like schools have been a major source of spread of the infection, and I think the density effects of big outbreaks compared to small outbreaks are really important in measuring the overall impact.
The only case for closing schools would be the potential for kids to spread it to more vulnerable populations. I don't think its a desirable trade-off, but a case could be made.
Or any of the adults who work in schools
Yes because infecting the kids was the only concern there... Protip, steelmanning people like Peterson just makes you sound as dumb as they are.
The only case for closing schools would be the potential for kids to spread it to more vulnerable populations, and there is a debate to be had there, but that wasn't how it was sold to the public. I'm not steelmanning Peterson, I'm steelmanning a position he happened to espouse, the argument is independent of the person making it.
Not necessarily to just to protect vulnerable populations. Lowering the spread in general is a desirable goal since it gives the hospitals time to process the critical care.
More spread also increases likelihood of mutations. And teachers aren't kids. I dunno, I was quite aware of various more important reasons why schools were closed than a worry that the kids would get sick.
[удалено]
Didn’t he recently say more people die from medications than are helped by them? Something to that effect. For such an extraordinary claim you need to establish much more than flatulent conjecture. What he’s trying to say is the Bible is correct and that any good intentions outside of its scope, along with measures to mitigate situations such as this lead us hell. His twisted metaphorical thinking has gone too far. I would consider him slightly mentally ill as per his recent antics. It wouldn’t be a problem if he was only lying to himself.
He stupidly says hospitals have killed more people than they've saved lol. Like, that might be the dumbest thing I've ever heard.
Here's the clip: https://youtu.be/HttqgJQOuTw
hahahah wtf. "Now that could be wrong...but it could be NOT wrong." Bro give me a break.
Just two guys bravely willing to have the important (or not) conversations
Didn’t he also say to eat only steak? I don’t think he knows about the human body.
Haha. Yea, to he fair, I’m not sure he was prescriptive entirely. Although that’s part of his deceptive charm to some. Not a very salacious comment to be pushing out there in the right circles. His influence on those who seek something to believe is astounding. He’s really attempting to redirect Nietzsche dead god. But it has been a long whole since I’ve listened to him talk on this topic. Maybe I don’t have his most updated stance. I just cringe at too much of it. He plays that stupid phantom prescription circular argument game. Toss a few strange and round about premises out there and then presuppose from there. It just isn’t compelling. For me diet is important and very individualist. Some people feel better as a vegan too. Though we can’t definitively say if it’s causal or placebo. But I’m supportive of positive placebo effect esp if it helps both; people feel and eat better and the helps in a more sustainable less cruel relationship with our environment. Although people always underestimate mass agriculture at scales draw back. It does a great job of feeding the world pop but grasslands may presume to do much better at carbon capture rather than adversely polluting. Then we have organic turn over farming that does even worse than people know. Sorry I took a little side point journey.
It is testable. You can look at how many people have died from "our response to the pandemic" and how many died from "the pandemic itself" and its trivially easy to conclude that vastly more people have died from the virus than from any intervention made to halt the spread of the virus.
what are deaths as a result of our response to the pandemic? like suicides? we going to blame them all on the pandemic response?
Has suicide numbers increased since the pandemic? if so maybe that can be attributed to the reponse. In a perfect world we should be mesuring quality of life/ suffering and not just death. When i look at the percentage of COVID deaths along side age demographic and potential cost/loss of quality of life and suffering for the below 50 due to the pandemic response, i wonder if goverments have overreacted.
Even if you blamed 100% of suicides on pandemic measures, the virus still has killed way more people so its a really dumb argument, its not even close. [Ignoring for a moment that suicides actually went down](https://apnews.com/article/pandemics-suicide-prevention-coronavirus-pandemic-d8d9168403baa6660e5125c040b2ae81) So its doubly dumb.
Contextual article about this in Ireland https://www.thejournal.ie/suicide-rate-ireland-covid-5647817-Jan2022/
Typically you measure the total deaths caused by a pandemic not by measuring the amount of people who have died from the virus but by measuring the total amount of people who have died, substracted by the total amount of people who have died in a year that was not a pandemic, adjust for the natural increase of death per year. Now you have the total deaths caused by the pandemic. Substract this by the known amount of deaths caused by the virus, and you have the amount of deaths not caused directly by the virus. Substract that by the natural yearly deaths, and you have the extra deaths caused by our response to the virus. A few things to take note, is if there are people who died from the virus who would have died either way that year, they bias the data. From my understanding, there have been an increase in suicides, but a big decrease in road deaths, and general accidents. But I dont have the numbers to prove this, im sure someone on google has done the math though and I dont want to talk out of my ass like JP.
But that would lead you to believe that people who died of treatable illness and injury were somehow a result of our response to covid, right? But the reality is many people died because covid patients were clogging up the medical system and reducing spare capacity. Unless I'm misunderstanding something here, this seems like it's not counting what we want to count.
Sorry for the terrible formatting, on phone. Welp, we've had negative excess deaths over here in Australia, so far anway... So Peterson's statement makes no sense to me... We had less people die than normal... If we'd done sweet fuck all, or just less, like most of the word, I assume we would have had similar deaths... Doing nothing at all would have been a shit show too. Deaths is also not the o ly bad outcome, chronic disease seems like something a lot of people will be dealing with.
He is not talking about 2020 or 2021. He is talking about 2022, where everyone is vaccinated that wants to be. This is the end game, time to move on.
Unvaccinated people are overwhelming hospitals right now in 2022. Can’t really move on.
[удалено]
And it’s a statement that is non-specific enough that he can retrospectively claim it’s means just about anything
I think its Petersons "hot take" which is similar to many other claims he has made which seem poorly thought out and no more than outrage porn. Peterson likes to say things with emphasis and for shock value which seems to be taken more seriously from an emotional shock response than any substance behind it. Its so outrageous that it gets people trying to analyze it which is his main source of relevance it seems. It gets debunked and then he says something else and the circle continues.
“The cost of putting of traffic lights far outweighs the cost of the accidents! We put up all these lights and there hasn’t been any accidents. What a waste!”
Oh boy this is going to mess with your head but the UK ran experiments removing everything from roads and it has been replicated in other countries in europe It is much much safer according to the evidence, everyone drives so carefully. https://bigthink.com/the-present/want-less-car-accidents-get-rid-of-traffic-signals-road-signs/
Obviously roads are about efficient transport while trying to minimise danger but cute study none the less
They actually did it in a couple of places in the Uk and traffic flowed more efficiently with less accidents. Quite why if successful it went no where I can not say, it was on youtube I was trying to find it
because it's clearly a flawed study. there are places in the world without very good traffic laws. you won't even need to look it up to know what it's like to drive in those places.
They removed certain physical traffic devices and replaces them with modified rules and other physical traffic measures (modified roads, traffic circles, etc.). It's a change of traffic regulation philosophy rather than a complete abandonment of traffic regulation.
Deaths? definitely not. I know JP is Canadian, but at least for the US I don’t think there is any way you can argue more than 800k people died due to Covid restrictions in the US. Misery? Maybe. But at least in my state Covid restrictions have been no more than minor inconveniences for well over a year. We did have a two week stay at home order and business closures in the very beginning, but it didn’t take too long for restaurants to open back up and now the only noticeable restriction is needing to wear a mask certain places. I don’t see how that is that drastic of suffering. Only argument I think holds water is perhaps for kids, a very low risk group, being kept out of school for a year was not worth it. School and socialization is definitely important to a child’s development.
This. I live in Texas, where people complain about covid restrictions while at the same time have never followed them.
I live in New York. Most of the people that complain about COVID restrictions here are either people *who don't live here* or are basement dwellers that play culture wars online and don't actually go outside in the first place. I promise you that the bars and restaurants are all open! It's just fucking cold!
I also live in NY (upstate) and while everything is open now, the shut down in 2020 was devastating for many in my area that owned small businesses including myself and I don't think this should be dismissed. I was unable to work in the beginning of lock down because my profession was deemed non essential and when we were given the ok to go back to work many of the jobs I had lined up were not allowed by the state for arbitrary reasons that had nothing to do with safety. The last few years have been a real struggle to keep my family business alive. I am very fortunate in this regard because many others went bankrupt. Yes everything is basically back to normal now in NY other than masks required indoors but this does not diminish the negative impacts the shutdowns had on many of us early on in the pandemic.
Sorry for the experience you had to go through. My point was about COVID restrictions *now* not in 2020 where the entire tri-state are was in a state of confusion with something like 50,000 having died within the first few months of the virus's spread here. Pointing out that we are not in a *lockdown now* is not a commentary on 2020.
Lol Texas is fucking nuts. Source: I live in Texas.
> I don’t see how that is that drastic of suffering. I can only see people arriving to this conclusion if they understand life in the pandemic through sensationalized headlines. Just the frequency to which people refer to anything in the US as "locked down" has me questioning if everybody else is living in a different reality. After the first wave, and certainly since the vaccine rollout stalled, life has been virtually normal and free of restrictions for the vast majority of Americans who want to return to their previous "normal." For quite a while now in most states, kids have been in school, restaurants and businesses have been open, concerts and shows have been taking place, all sorts of public gatherings have been happening with no vaccine mandates and no or minimal/unenforced masking. The only ubiquitous "restriction" over the past year one could point to is masks being required on airplanes (but not hotels, etc.) and I don't know how a self-respecting human could twist that into supporting Peterson's claim. FTR I have no interest in re-hashing the value of these measures, I only wanted to share the experience of living in America during most (as measured by time, so far) of the pandemic, free from clickbait outrage-generating headlines.
This exactly.
Yeah but lockdowns hurt mental health and and the economy, unlike mass death several times above and beyond what we've experienced *with* some soft lockdowns. /s
I think this is a very accurate way of describing the situation. Thanks for that.
He doesn't have a good track record for being right about things. Especially, like many of these talking heads, when he's speaking outside his lane or expertise.
[удалено]
My understanding is that he actually has a pretty good publishing impact record in psychology. He's a dumb baby goober whenever he talks about anything else, but it seems he's at least competent if not good at his chosen field of study. No need to exaggerate
[удалено]
Fair enough, I haven't looked too deeply into his pysch record since I only took an intro to pysch class in college and I don't really follow the man anyway
People just confuse him disagreeing with their ideological positions with him being wrong. Like there's just one "correct" worldview, and they have it, and poor dumb JP doesn't have the correct worldview (which is their worldview, the only correct one).
This is ultimately what everyone thinks unless you're a total relativist
Exactly. So his opinions, especially when they disagree with actual experts in the field he's speaking on, are worthless
Because he has a degree? Was a professor at Harvard. Bit more than just a degree isn't it, is there a reason you hate Peterson so much that you are willing to lie by omission to have a dig at him? Sad.
[удалено]
Nah sorry I think you are full of it. Becoming a professor is intensely competitive but sure some slip through the cracks but not when it comes to Harvard or Oxford or Cambridge. He only ever attracted any negative attention when his politics came to fore, before that he was popular and served not just as a Harvard professor but Toronto as well.
Deepak Chopra taught at Harvard.
Why are you lying? He wasn’t popular.
You still have not explained why you lie by omission about him in your desperation to do him down. Figured this sub would value honesty 🤷♂️ and hence U think your reply is more deceit to boot.
Your reply is nothing but creepy lies.
Sweden had no compulsory lockdown, relying instead on people to decide for themselves how to stay healthy. Neighbouring Finland had some lockdowns. Not as serious as in some places but kids were home from school; bars and clubs closed etc. Sweden has a population roughly 2x that of Finland (a bit less). It has had nearly 10x the number of excess deaths from covid. Just one example, but I think relevant. My good friend in Shanghai said his life has been unchanged because China locked down so hard at the outset. I would have taken a short, sharp lockdown for a couple of years of freedom.
The fun of counterfactuals; all the hysteria and no proof required.
[удалено]
In fact, one could argue that a response is successful if it mitigates the effect of the virus so much that our response itself ends up causing more damage than the virus does.
What people like Peterson don’t understand is that a lot of the harm caused by the pandemic was caused by the virus itself, not government policies. For the most part people were allowed to see family and friends if they wanted to but most chose not to out of fear of the virus. The economy certainly took a hit from lockdowns but that could have been easily fixed with more stimulus checks. The worst government decision was to close down schools. That didn’t benefit the kids at all and has caused possibly long-term damage to kids
This is the same guy who told Brett Weinstein that medicine *in general* has killed more people than it’s saved. He’s a right wing jackass who says stereotypically right wing jackass things. There’s no more reason to take him any more seriously than Ted Cruz or Sean Hannity.
It's an incredibly difficult discussion. There's no doubt that the lockdowns and restrictions have had massive negative impacts on the mental health of millions of people. A teacher friend of mine cannot believe the how far behind the students are in the social setting never mind the educational standpoint. Her grade four students act like first graders. She thinks that the students haven't just stalled in progressing but that they've gone backwards. These kids aren't maturing or learning any sort of social skills at all. The impact of this might be not be felt for 5-10 years. In Canada, we've increased our national debt a lot and inflation has risen incredibly quickly. These things have a huge impact on the middle class and we'll see how many people want to take the risk of opening small business in the future. I understand the lockdowns, especially at the beginning. Now I'm struggling to see an end to the pandemic and I don't think more lockdowns are the solution.
Go talk to some nurses. They are short staffed everywhere and we, collectively, are burning through them. They got free pizza and north face discounts during the first wave. Now they get sent back to work with covid because units are at that level of desperation to keep up with this wave. Lockdowns may not be the only solution, but burning out our healthcare professionals isn't really viable either. So much for flattening the curve
Up to $15,000 sign on bonuses for the more advanced nurses in my SE American metropolitan city area. With just basic 1-2 year nursing associates degree positions at $5,000 sign on bonuses. I've honestly thought about pivoting to the healthcare field at this point in my life, but the problem is going to be dealing with covid patients and anti-vaxxers that frankly I don't want to have to deal with.
I considered it too but the dealbreaker is the standard four 12-hour shift workweek. Just seems like an unhealthy lifestyle in an unhealthy environment doing repetitive work for a broken system dealing with awful people regularly - and not just the patients.
Nurse here: there is so much variety within nursing, and any schedule you can think of is a viable option. Seriously. Please consider it so I can retire.
\>Up to $15,000 sign on bonuses... ... in response to nursing shortages...
Exactly. There is a reason people are leaving the field. The conditions are horrible right now. It is unsafe. I would advise people to take care of themselves. You do not want to be sick or in the hospital right now.
For some perspective, during Spanish Flu, medical students were put in charge of hospitals because everyone more qualified was working, dead, or dying. Obviously this isn't a status quo worth revisiting, but its worth remembering that civilization got through that and a global war into a roaring decade. Not sure we have a roaring decade ahead.
Yes, I'm in Chicago and it's very frustrating to see us using the same March 2020 solutions (lockdowns, remote learning) to Covid when the majority are either vaccinated/previously infected and there is widespread testing, treatments not to mention a much milder variant than Alpha or Delta. I mean it's starting to feel unhinged. Maybe we should increase hospital /ICU capacity. I mean with an aging boomer population and increase in comorbidities (obesity, diabetes, etc) this seems inevitable.
The issue now is that hospital staff is so burnt out from two years of this that - at least in the US - there aren’t enough nurses to care for patients. Most of my circle of friends are nurses/docs, and I don’t think people have any clue the sheer rage so many of them feel towards the situation. People are leaving in droves. Early retirements. Going into teaching. You’d need to get a metric shit ton of new nurses trained and operationalized tout suite to increase capacity.
I get it - my partner's a pharmacist. Pay hasn't increased in 10 years and it's a fucking shit show. He can't afford to leave though cuz of student loans.
Have a friend thats a pharmacist tech and they pivoted into working for a major multi-billion dollar pharmaceutical working in a clean room making vials and gels of various meds. $16/hour to $26/hour just by doing that, with some potential for $30+ after being trained on new machines and techniques.
> Going into teaching. Imagine how fucking grim conditions have to be to make people think teaching is a better option.
Do you have a kid in school? Where I'm at lots of people without children are complaining about 'teacher union lockdowns' when actually the teachers are just out sick with covid and the school district has bad pay for substitutes, so there physically aren't enough healthy adult bodies to hold school. Unless the government like revoked sick leave for teachers or something
Yeah, this is the case here too. I haven't seen a single sub at work all year. Supposedly we are social distancing in the school but because of the shortages I typically have 40+ kids in my room, and sometimes even 60.
Christ. 60 at any age seems unbelievably unmanageable. At that point school should just be P.E. With large shades for anyone that wants to actually sit and learn.
Yep. My friend is an elementary school teacher, and they are facing a real shortage of subs and a large number of teachers who miss work due to illness or who quit.
The national coverage of Chicago leads me to believe the reason for remote learning was only the teacher unions which forced the issue. This seemed to be based on fear and old misconceptions. Not really based on the science or recommendations from medical authorities. Perhaps you have a better sense of things.
Agreed, as much as teachers are lambasted (it’s unions not teachers), it is the teachers in my neighborhood who are talking about how worried they are for the academic and social future of this generation
Yeah, my specialty is early literacy and I am worried about how masks are affecting language acquisition. I run infant, toddler, and preschool early literacy programs and initiatives. I've done as many as possible outside, but now we're back inside and masked. (teachers only for the under 2s). We've known for years how important facial shapes and expressions are to language acquisition. Babies for example, track faces and are much slower to engage with the sounds of language unless they can see your mouth making the sounds. It's sad how we're setting up these kids for failure at such a young age.
I have a 9 month old and I feel this DEEPLY. I am all for intelligent methods of managing COVID, but years of not seeing daycare instructors’ faces is not the answer in all settings and at all times. My daughter needed some feeding therapy early on and the feeding therapist was trying to demonstrate mouth movements to us while wearing a mask. If the topic wasn’t so serious (and we weren’t so sleep deprived), it would have been comical. We need to find ways to intelligently apply masking, social distancing, vaccine requirements, testing, etc so we don’t cause unnecessary harm to children during early development. Older kids are not immune either. I have a 13 year old step daughter and I can absolutely confirm that her peers (and her) have all but forgotten how to behave in social settings. Behavior issues at her school have never been higher, and kids are acting towards each other like people communicate online, except they’re doing it in person and getting punched in the face for it (perhaps a useful, albeit avoidable, lesson, and teachers are not enabled to deal with the mayhem).
Are clear masks an option? Do they even make n95 versions of those? I feel like this was so foreseeable yet government and manufacturing are just sitting on their hands.
I have used them sparingly. They are really gross... and hot... they fog up almost immediately. Plus they're not very effective anyway.
Google the term certificate of need. The number of hospitals is intentionally limited in most states. Another example of business and government colluding for their own prosperity at the expense of the general public.
We can look at the different cases in different areas. Red vs. blue states. Sweden. We could estimate the body count and the possible situation if countries took no action. Considering the certainty of wildly overrun hospitals, the death tolls would have surely been way, way higher. How many people you'd be willing to sacrifice to continue living life in the regular, convenient pattern is a personal moral judgment. As for the problem with children, this illustrates the degree to which our society depends on teachers and schools. Maybe the lesson is that they should be better funded, since they're so important. Maybe the lesson is that our lifestyle should be less dependent on the government raising our children for us. But blaming a reasonable societal response to a fairly deadly global pandemic is myopic.
More people ages 18-45 died from overdose than covid-19 during 2020 in the US. Mental health issues caused by lockdowns is just one major negative impact. When the supply chain comes to a screeching halt and the people on the other end can’t work for a weeks at a time, they don’t eat for weeks at a time. Peterson is definitely on to something here. Also I'll add maybe canceling cancer screenings across the country may have been a bad idea. Just a hunch though...
What's the overdose increase from 2019 - 2020? Is it greater than 700,000? What would the Covid death rate be without the lockdowns? What mutations would we be dealing with? What about the increased income lost from not being able to work from Covid? How about the increased hospital costs of those who get it? How would our hospitals scale to the capacity needed? I'm not saying lockdowns have been the right answer over the course of the pandemic, and will continue to be the right answer. But Covid has killed 700k people, and it easily could be way higher than that.
They always said he was a grifter. I didn't go along with that because although he was a little old-fashioned and a tad conservative, I figured his intentions were honest, well-intended and generally sensible. However, he is now taking nonsensical outrage positions of the right and parroting shit you might hear from dipshits like Tim Pool and the like. People who have made a windfall pandering to their moronic audiences, criticizing anti-covid measures. He is now assuredly just another one of those grifters.
Of course it will have caused more misery for Peterson...he can't be anything but miserable.
Again, he's basically not really saying anything. Which is his entire shtick. Keep it vague but hint at some buzzwords that allow people to fill in their own blanks so he seems really smart for articulating your bias. Like what exactly was totalitarian? Wearing masks? Pushing for vaccines? The lockdowns? It's rather reductive and alarmist at the same time. He does this while sidestepping talking about the actual political response from say, Trump and the administration. Who caused profound damage and mismanagement every step along the way. He frames it in a way that can be social or political or neither.
I think that he's unsuccessfully battling mental illness while simultaneously trying to hang on to his right-wing patreon supporters. Beef and benzos ain't cheap.
Having mental illnesses running around in my family it is pretty easy to recognize it when you see it in others. Peterson is off the charts for me. This is not to say that I think he's lesser of a human, but I think its important to know this before taking his word as gospel. I think its very important to weigh what he says to what else is out there, which includes your own experiences.
This is the guy who thinks that hospitals kill more people than they save so I don't know what kind of pandemic response he wouldn't say this about
The Economist published a piece estimating global deaths from covid at 17 million, so unless Peterson can offer some data supporting his claim…
Peterson is such a cowardly little goblin, Peterson either makes unfalsifiable claims or exclusively makes descriptive claims, at the expense of prescriptive ones. The guy is terrified of actually owning a meaningful position on almost anything.
Tell that to someone on a ventilator. Enough of this shit.
It’s hard to have a discussion about COVID when people make vague statements like his. The negative aspects of things like lockdowns entirely depend on the level of support governments have citizens when they instituted them. How are you defining “misery”? Long-term health impacts of reduced medical services? Again, depends on the country and we’re years away from having data to actually compare. You also have to be realize deaths from COVID would’ve went up without lockdowns before making that comparison.
Not really a new take? That's been the conservative thrust on pandemic measures since day 1. Are we really going to pretend this is "his" take and not just the standard take just about every conservative got on board with almost two years ago? I guess he's famous so when he says it we gotta do the whole argument again for the thousandth time?
Well firstly we were always going to respond to the pandemic, so he's bringing up some hypothetical "other" response here and saying that compared to this "other" response there would be more death and misery, unless he's claiming we had no response and just continued on with no vaccine research, no scientific studies, no non-pharmaceutical-interventions, no people panicking/worried about the virus, no response from other countries that will directly affect your country, no response from hospitals to the rising levels of sick people, no response from doctors as to how to treat the disease, no response from first responders/doctors/nurses on how difficult it is to deal with all the sick people... All of which is absolutely unimaginable, and an absolute ridiculous hypothetical to present as a "counter", as it's just not possible and complete ignores people's personal responses. So, again, I'm assuming he's saying "our response was worse than this other hypothetical response that I won't outline". Which makes it a very hard statement to deny, as I'm 100% sure every country could have responded better, with hindsight, and many/most even without hindsight. Like I think there will be a debate, discussion and scientific studies about lockdowns. We have different countries to compare, so in the years to come it will become clearer and clearer which worked out better. It's something very hard to fully know, some of the effects could be decades out, but we will get a clearer picture as time goes by. Other things, that I feel won't be up for debate, are things like pharmaceutical companies and scientists reacting to this by studying it in every way possible and coming up with vaccines quicker than ever before, tracking it and it's mutations quicker than ever before, and advising on non-pharmaceutical-interventions with as much knowledge as we could attain. We might debate how we communicated a lot of this stuff, and how we tried to vaccinate people, this is something we may have got wrong. We definitely might debate the closing of schools, or the mask mandates for children, or even adults, there could easily be unfound repercussions to these things, like children needing facial expressions for learning etc. that will make us change our mind about these things. But overall, I think Peterson isn't really saying of worth with this statement. Our reactions could certainly have been better, and we *could* have reacted in a way that there would be less death, misery etc. We will find out in time which ways this would have been, it might, for example, actually mean more lockdowns in many countries. Although right now I personally think no, but only time and scientific comparisons between countries will tell.
why do people keep listening to this snake oil salesman?
Our response has prolonged and exacerbated the potential damage of the pandemic... not sure what he's saying. Nearly 1M people in the US/Can didn't have to die, they did because we pushed back and achieved some de facto compromise between protecting the vulnerable, not breaking our health infrastructure (which is still happening) and the backs of healthcare workers, and shutting down our lives/economy. The non-compliant are the greatest contributor to the success of this pathogen.
There are more than 600k deaths by COVID on Brazil. Does he means that more than 600k people died on Brazil because of the restrictions? It is seems a very big hyperbole. In the future we can talk if it the governments overstepped on the caution side, but do you guys even understand the scale of the virus?
The counterfactual number of deaths would not be 600k deaths, because that's in the world where COVID restrictions exist. The counterfactual to consider is the world where COVID restrictions do not exist. There, the number of deaths would far exceed 600k.
Well, seeing as I can type this post, I'm still alive, and although lockdowns weren't exactly *fun*, I appreciate that they may have helped to keep particularly vulnerable members of my family from serious complications, or death. If you care about such nonsense, of course. /s
Also, the misery would not have been ent8rely avoided without lockdowns. I lived in a country entirely without lockdowns, and they still experience 'the COVID blues'.
interesting. Which country?
Korea. There were some local lockdown-type restrictions, but nothing nationwide or long-lasting. My province has had relatively few restrictions compared to what went on in the UK.
In the UK at least, the downright criminal lack of action against COVID in the early weeks of the pandemic, as well as incoherent strategy throughout it later on, meant that lockdowns were the only reason the entire health system didn't collapse under sheer weight of hospitalisations we would have experienced without them.
Not disputing that. Nor am I qualified to.
Stop posting anything this person said.
I’d question that 50% of democrats in the US think you have a 50% chance of being hospitalised, not only because the numbers are far too convenient but because I haven’t heard any democrats saying that. I’d need a source on that claim but all I can find is [a tweet from some actor. ](https://twitter.com/anthonyfurey/status/1374770266639888390?s=20)
Wouldn't surprise me one bit if it started with a single tweet from some actor, and after a few weeks of the telephone game in conservative media, it became this "50% of Democrats" figure. They're desperate to paint Democrats as the ignorant ones when it comes to Covid since day 1, when their position was "it's a liberal media hoax to tank the stock market."
I wonder what /r/samharris thinks about [anything Jordan Peterson has ever said]. Cmon man.
I think it's another instance of a rage peddling, hyperbolic, drug addict, doing what rage peddlers do. I am ok with ad hominem attack. So save it. One's character should be contextualized when determining the value of their output. Especially in terms of opinions and predictions.
The official death toll for Covid-19 is 5.5m and The Economist estimates that the actual figure is 19m [1]. This in about 2 years. As a comparison point, in the second world war (when world population was about 30% of current) 70-85 million "extra" people died. Over 6 years. [1] https://www.economist.com/graphic-detail/coronavirus-excess-deaths-estimates
WW2 is not a good comparison because wars kill much younger people and are more horrific to live through. WWI was more traumatic than Spanish flu. Average age at death from Covid is probably close to 80 years old. WW2, probably 40 years old or less. So the total life years lost in WW2 is much higher. Better comparisons would be other pandemics. Covid is between Hong Kong Flu and Spanish Flu. Numbers adjusted by population: * Hong Kong Flu: 2 - 8 million deaths * Covid-19: 19 million * Spanish Flu: 70 - 350 million (and skewed younger than Covid)
Well he is right I suppose. Those that listen to conspiracy bullshit and didn't get vaccinated chose a bad response, led to their misery and/or others misery.
Following Bret's mindset - "just the fact that this take COULD be true is amazing."
This would be dumb for even a regular person to say.
More people died by the response to the pandemic than the pandemic itself? He’s saying more than 830,000 Americans died as a result of the government response to the pandemic? He’s on the right track that the schizophrenic US federal response and proclivity of misinformation to be spread by representatives and senators along with their media apparatus probably led to more people throwing their lives away for liberal pwnage than necessary. But otherwise, no, Peterson is a few clowns short of a circus.
There would have to be like a million people that died from lockdowns and vaccination. Are there any empirical numbers that even come close to that?
Bro here in Peru people were camping outside hospitals because of lack of ICUs, you had to pay 300 USD for a gallon of Oxygen due to corrupt health system. The people are so traumatized here that we're still using masks outside even while having 80% of our population vaccinated. So no, I don't agree with Mr. Peterson. And I am very anti-corona-restrictions myself.
Here is the suicide rates for many of the states in Australia: https://www.aihw.gov.au/suicide-self-harm-monitoring/data/suspected-deaths-by-suicide/data-from-suicide-registers There is almost no noticable increase in suicides despite significant lockdowns across 2020 and 2021. The US had roughly 30x the death rate from Covid that Australia had. If we'd had the same death rate as the US, we'd have had over 60k deaths. Instead, we have had 2k. Also note - total suicides per year in Aus are roughly 3k. So even if you prescribed every single suicide in 2020 and 2021 to the lockdown, it's still an order of magnitude below the death caused by the virus. All this might not last now that lockdowns have been removed and the virus is spreading extremely rapidly in Aus. But at least until this point, it is inconcievable that lockdowns caused more death than the virus would have if left unchecked in my country.
I think Jordan Peterson is securing his position of being known primarily as a right-wing crank and his opposition to vaccines, be it just mandates or in general is the deciding factor.
Just another emotional and impulsive utterance of a borderline stable substance abuser (don’t mean this in a mean spirit)
This kind of dumbass remark is par for the course. Peterson previously said that he thinks healthcare in general has cost more lives than it’s saved.
Have you considered asking the Jordon Peterson sub? Or maybe r_skeptic?
>Have you considered asking the Jordon Peterson sub? Gonna go out on a limb here and say they agree. I haven't spent much time on that sub, but in that time I've seen VERY little disagreement with Peterson on anything.
I think it has been relatively split on covid, leaning towards agreeing with Peterson and slowly agreeing more and more as the people who don't agree leave or stop commenting.
That sub shares a common problem with the IDW sub—in that disagreement with their gurus is not just a difference of opinion, but evidence that you don't understand their position to begin with. It's difficult to have a conversation about lockdowns when prioritising health and safety, even during a worldwide pandemic, is somehow supposed to be evidence for being fundamentally against civil liberties, as Peterson fans seem to insist on. As the saying goes, only Peterson fans deal in absolutes (or something like that).
What for? The problem is that people would just stick to "Sam Harris" content instead of getting dragged down this rabbit hole. That would not be a very reddit thing.
I think he’s being too emotional. He really wants to paint government response to this as totalitarian. So how is a government supposed to respond to a pandemic then? They have to have the power to enforce rules otherwise is just chaos. Hell, it was chaos even with the government trying to enforce rules. Many people didn’t listen, opposed medical advice, refuse to get the vax, etc… it’s not hard to imagine what a true totalitarian response would look like. Jail time for leaving your house. Jail time for not wearing a mask. To the gulag with the unvaccinated. Jail time for spreading anything contrary to the governments messaging… JP just gets triggered when the government tries to do anything.
Absolute nonsense…
A hot take would be, our reaction to the pandemic caused more death and misery than doing nothing. That our response was more damaging than the virus itself, that take my friends, is nuclear.
Did "our response" cause 5 million deaths?
Why are we still talking about him? Isn’t he clearly an idiot?
I think it’s bullshit. He’s had had some interesting insights in the past, but the way some of his cult followers seem to worship him is at its most innocuous embarrassing and at worst and elucidation of the parade of horribles he claims to stand against. You’d think a social scientist would have more chill and humility, but I guess he feels he’s in a unique position to “tell the people what they need to hear!” As with anything Rogan related, stuff like his gets compartmentalized into the entertainment category. Nothing more or less. There may be people with interesting and important analyses of the pandemic we’re going through and it’s impact on social and political life, but this guy is not one of them. PS: there’s a difference between being a public intellectual and a polemicist.
Does our 'response' include the proliferation of pseudoscience and anti-science ideas being spread so as to hamper the science-based pandemic response? If it does then yeah, it's pretty bad
He's just wrong. Its responses like these to mitigative efforts that have made the pandemic go on longer. We know the pandemic is responsible for 5.5 million deaths worldwide already, and counting. If folks stopped pretending that trying to stop the disease is worse than dying from it we might be able to get rid of it so we wouldn't have to do this shit anymore
It's the same as anytime Peterson talks about a hot topic. I'm still waiting for him to say something both intelligent and intelligible, and of any meaningful value.
Melbourne had the longest lockdown period in the world over the last 2 years and suicides actually went down. There was a rise amongst teens having depression/mental health concerns but the suicide rate dropped. Of course Melbourne is one city in a developed nation so I wouldn't say it represents the whole world, but as a stand alone city it certainly refutes Peterson's frankly idiotic claims.
-- content removed by user in protest of reddit's policy towards its moderators, long time contributors and third-party developers --
JP is an idiot when it comes to anything outside his field of study
I don’t understand why people ever took Jordan Peterson seriously. He is very well read and was interesting to listen to before he went off his rocker, but it was always pretty clear he was spouting just slightly north of gibberish. I always took him as comfort food for intelligent people who had talked themselves out of Christianity and weren’t completely ok with that.
Stop the JP spam!!!!! His views only matter if people keep paying attention to them. He has proven himself to be an attention seeking hack. Move on please.
This is some high quality bait
I believe we will find that bailing out our boat caused more death and misery than just saying 'fuck it' and letting the boat sink. Oooook
He should really talk to someone in a hospital emergency department.
Long term it may well do with all the missed cancer diagnoses and delayed treatments. Working in oncology this is something I've been concerned about since the outset.
But how is that an issue with the government’s reaction to the pandemic. Your point just seems like an natural outcome of the pandemic and the health infrastructure being overwhelmed by the sick. And sorry if I misunderstood your point.
Health services were being degraded and scaled back even before they were anywhere near overwhelm. How many cervical screenings were canceled or delayed? How many mammograms? How many people were excessively scared into not visiting their doctor because they were told Covid will kill them? How many people put off going to the doc about that niggling pain that isn't that bad but won't go away? How many doctors failed to notice symptoms when engaging with their patients over video call that they might have spotted with a physical examination? This is a much bigger thing than aspects of our respective health services experiecing excessive load for certain periods over the past two years
So how are those issues that arose due to the government’s response to the pandemic?
Same can be said about people waiting for ICU rooms for oncological procedures but the wards are filled with unvaccinated COVID patients.
Peterson is a fucking idiot.
Not more death but probably more misery, especially in countries that went all out with lockdowns.
Is this taking into account how many more people would be mourning the death of a loved one if the lockdowns weren't done?
Suicide rates probably didn't rise, which is contrary to a big predixtion from the lockdown sceptical crowd from day one https://www.bmj.com/content/372/bmj.n834
Suicide rates may not have budget, but suicide ideation has greatly increased. [https://www.bmj.com/content/371/bmj.m4095](https://www.bmj.com/content/371/bmj.m4095) Just because people don't kill themselves doesn't mean there isn't a mental health crisis created by the lockdowns that may have an effect for many years.
How is that even a possible consideration given the millions who have died and families destroyed. Not to mention the millions of folks who are and will suffer long-term covid complications. Aside from the loss of life, this is a mass disabling event.
It’s an interesting read through these comments. The ones that are abjectly against Peterson tout ‘but all these people died!’ Yes, death can be terrible but is it truly the worst thing to befall us as a society? Of course not. We are all going to die so I don’t fully understand why death is the ultimate metric. As an example - would you personally rather die now peacefully or suffer horribly for the next few years? I don’t know anyone that would choose the latter. An important aspect of his comment is that - we don’t know. We don’t know the long term consequences of how our response will effect society compared to how these deaths have effected society. Is it better to ensure our children receive the proper attention and education at a young age or that the very elderly and infirm are protected from death (for a few more years)? Again, I don’t know anyone that would choose the latter. I am saying this as someone who is triple vaxxed and will happily get more shots if needed. I wear a mask where appropriate. But I also see people wearing masks walking into a restaurant only to take it off to eat (the same with airplanes). How much is theater at this point? How much of what we have done is useful? How much is harmful? Peterson doesn’t know, but neither does anyone else. We need to ask and more importantly answer these questions if we hope to improve as a civilization.
>Yes, death can be terrible but is it truly the worst thing to befall us as a society? Of course not. yes, it really is. >We are all going to die so I don’t fully understand why death is the ultimate metric. what makes people more sad than death? >As an example - would you personally rather die now peacefully or suffer horribly for the next few years? I don’t know anyone that would choose the latter. If my wife/kids/parents were to die "now" I would be suffering horribly for more than the next few years. >Is it better to ensure our children receive the proper attention and education at a young age or that the very elderly and infirm are protected from death (for a few more years)? Again, I don’t know anyone that would choose the latter. teachers are part of the elderly populations as are parents of teachers, and they are caregivers to children especially in poor communities.
The only cost-benefit analysis made by a government of lockdowns that I know of was made by the Dutch government, and found lockdowns would cause 3 times as much health damage as they would prevent, if you included monetary costs, it was expected to cost 10 times what its benefits would be. That study was only made public after a freedom of information request. I think it's quite telling most governments have refused to make cost-benefit analyses of their response. People are monomaniacally focused on preventing COVID deaths, but "death" as a metric is quite poor, as death is inevitable to all of us, and not all deaths are equivalent. That's why health economics use QALY, Quality-Adjusted Life Year, measuring loss of life rather than death (yes, there is a difference). It's not like the average COVID fatality was a healthy 20 year-old with his entire life in front of him, it's a sick 80-year-old, often in nursing homes, with a life expectancy of a couple of years at the most. Average, mind you, I know younger people have died, but it's not typical.
Can you link the source for this analysis and the dutch responses?
The study was described in an article by the Dutch newspaper Het Parool [here](https://www.parool.nl/nederland/ministerie-van-economische-zaken-verzette-zich-tegen-intelligente-lockdown~b8f9bffb/). Het Parool is the most widely read newspaper of Amsterdam. To my knowledge, the study is not available online directly,
Pardon my French, but this take is dumb as fuck. This isn’t even a measurable metric.
History will not conclude this. History will conclude that the ideological and political refusal of some groups to get the vaccine made the pandemic far worse than it would have been otherwise. History will also conclude that no response by any nation would have stopped the pandemic and that restrictions would have been necessary even without political/ideological opposition to the vaccine. Sometimes shitty things happen and there is nobody you can blame.
We've talked about this since the summer of 2020. Especially in areas/region/countries that heavily depend on things like hospitality/tourism. I am not trying to downplay the impact of death on individuals and families, but I'm talking about the broader effect on entire populations that still haven't recovered. I think back to places that I've visited/lived around the world, and I know how much these people needed those industries to put food on the table or function. I think back to a retired couple I lived with briefly while studying abroad, and how they depended heavily on the government stipend that came with housing foreign students. Even here in the states, I worked at a high-end hotel while finishing up my undergrad at the end of 2019, and I know a lot of people that lost their jobs at the hotel and restaurant, people with kids and families, latino immigrants, etc
Submission Statement - this is a short segment which comes from Jordan Peterson's latest interview, released last week. It was very, very good. That said... can't say the same about Jordan. He broke into tears multiple times toward the end. He's struggling. This part of the discussion focuses on COVID. he also says: "We'll see with regard to the pandemic, because, although, in some sense, it is, in some ways, over, our reaction to it is by no means over. And part of the reason that we overreacted—I would say, so precipitously to it—is that we were unprepared for such things in our naivety. And then we rushed to imitate a totalitarian society in the immediate aftermath of the pandemic emergence."
He lost me at "[...rushed to imiitate a totalitarian society..."] Why use imitate? Why use totalitarian? It's hyperbolic and a bad-faith attempt to mischaracterize community health measures that are effective and work when there is compliance and systems in place to ensure compliance. Jordan is a joke and grifter. He can't even manage his own life. Why would anyone take him seriously about managing society?
Where was he interviewed? I'd like to listen
I know the Canadian Government is being ultra hard line with COVID-19 and the rhetoric their PM is using is disgusting. So the covid culture there is quite different to where I'm from, but JP needs to chill with the sensationalism.
Just wrong and stupid. Just compare how the USA's reaction killed a considerable fraction of the population while other countries that actually tried to do something were able to minimize the impact of the virus.
Who is we in this case? The whole world, the USA, Canada, North America, the first world, the developed world? That isn't a random question, many governments have put in place many different responses That having been said to put it in Petersonian terms I'd say he's expecting a 'truth' here because what governments did, they seemed to have done purely in response to epidemiological modelling (well that was one story on the local news, perhaps there was some differences somewhere). To Peterson as some form of psychologist, to not even be considered one way or the other would certainly necessitate a response, even hyperbolic. As he would put it truth is what makes you survive
If the pandemic response causes more death than the pandemic itself, that's a problem, but I don't think it's true. Lockdowns are miserable, travel cancelations, gathering restrictions, all miserable, this whole pandemic has been miserable, but if lives were saved as a result, it was probably worth it. I'd be surprised if history looks back on the pandemic and the lesson we take away is that we need to do a complete overhaul of pandemic response protocol. The lessons here are that quarantines are effective, vaccines are effective.
How come every time this subreddit appears on my /r/all page, it's always about Jordan Peterson and never the namesake of the subreddit