{"id":3676,"date":"2020-06-24T21:15:30","date_gmt":"2020-06-25T04:15:30","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.sheer.us\/weblogs\/?p=3676"},"modified":"2020-06-24T21:15:30","modified_gmt":"2020-06-25T04:15:30","slug":"individual-freedom-vs-group-safety","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.sheer.us\/weblogs\/covid-19\/individual-freedom-vs-group-safety","title":{"rendered":"Individual freedom vs. Group safety"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>So, I&#8217;ve seen a lot of epicly dumb posts surrounding COVID. There&#8217;s obviously some people who don&#8217;t understand the ideal gas law or gas diffusion, there&#8217;s obviously some people who are paranoid schizophrenic to levels that make me look totally sane (I especially love the people who are convinced God will protect them. Evolution in action, I tell you)<\/p>\n<p>One of the interesting questions is to what extent the group has the right to restrict freedoms of the individual for the best interests of the group. This is a slippery slope, and it&#8217;s very difficult to figure out how down it you should go. Common sense says that given how much wearing a simple mask reduces transmission, that requiring wearing masks is a reasonable thing. After all, we put up with being required to wear clothing (although I do think that there should not be laws requiring wearing clothing &#8211; I actually think this is more restrictive and less reasonable than requiring people to wear masks *where there is a demonstratable large safety advantage to the group*)<\/p>\n<p>Anyway, I&#8217;m sure it&#8217;s a subject that people will be debating for centuries, and I don&#8217;t know what the right utopic answer is &#8211; I suspect the answer is different people will want different things. I also suspect it&#8217;s one of those things where the winning answer might be to have people inside a virtualized world where they have unlimited freedom even though their &#8220;real&#8221; body is subject to restrictions for the good of everyone.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>So, I&#8217;ve seen a lot of epicly dumb posts surrounding COVID. There&#8217;s obviously some people who don&#8217;t understand the ideal gas law or gas diffusion, there&#8217;s obviously some people who are paranoid schizophrenic to levels that make me look totally sane (I especially love the people who are convinced God will protect them. Evolution in [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[26],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.sheer.us\/weblogs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3676"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.sheer.us\/weblogs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.sheer.us\/weblogs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.sheer.us\/weblogs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.sheer.us\/weblogs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3676"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.sheer.us\/weblogs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3676\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3677,"href":"https:\/\/www.sheer.us\/weblogs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3676\/revisions\/3677"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.sheer.us\/weblogs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3676"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.sheer.us\/weblogs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3676"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.sheer.us\/weblogs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3676"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}