For people arguing that not being part of a risk group is a reason not to protect yourself, please take a lesson from brazil. Being part of a 'high risk group' does not saves you from infecting other people who are part of such groups.
That's basically what happened in brazil: people who were not part of risk groups crowded, encouraged by the president himself[0][1][2]. The number of infected poeple soared and variants that affect younger people appeared[3][4]. The health system has now collapsed because there is not enough ICU for such a high number of ill people[5][6].
Legend says Steve Jobs told his two cofounders, who were scratching their heads over an innovative name, that if they didn’t find a name within 24hrs he would incorporate as Apple.
Which is good enough and no reason to hold up the whole process for a decent name.
I recommend the World of Warcraft diary. It's 300 pages, has some awesome stories and pictures, and just as a good job of telling how blizzard made WoW have in 2001-2004.
The author did an actual diary and interviewed people back while the game was being produced and immediately after it shipped. He wrote most of his book back in 2006 but didn't publish it until this year.
> US infrastructure is woefully behind compared to other nations
Reconcile your claim with Akamai's State of the Internet, which shows the U.S. ranked #10 globally, at 10 mbps average connection speed: http://www.akamai.com/dl/akamai/akamai-soti-q413.pdf?WT.mc_i... (page 23). That number would put at about at #6 in Europe (see page 29), ahead of the U.K., Germany, and France, and not far behind Sweden and Ireland.
The ISP's never got "$200 billion" in the 1990's. That's a total made up number, based on taking what ISP profits would have been had they been regulated as a utility, and calling everything over that "money given to ISPs."
The premise of deregulation was that it would lead to increased infrastructure spending. And it has: the late 1990's and the 2000's saw massive investment into cable and wireless. People assumed at the time the money would go into fiber, but demand exploded in wireless so investment went there instead.
> Men seem very unwilling to recognise that the memo and the discussion itself is harmful.
...you realize where this goes, right?
Like -- suppose you're right; and suppose you're given the power to suppress all such harmful discussions. You apply it. No more such discussion. Great.
Now suppose this occurs but in fact you're wrong. We must then ask: How would you find out that you're wrong?
Well, in such a case, you probably wouldn't. I guess you might find out when the chickens, whatever they are, finally came home to roost. But ideally one wants to find out before then. Better hope the chickens are merely bad rather than catastrophic, seeing as you've been doing absolutely no planning for this case. And hopefully they come sooner rather than later.
(And that's assuming you're a reasonable person who would actually admit error at that point; see below.)
I mean, really... illiberalism, it always goes the same way. You think it's discussion that's harmful? Have you seen the alternative? Because, I mean, examples abound, and how it goes is pretty clear. You're talking about going down a path dominated by humanity's worst tribal instincts. I should hope that's not what you want -- but that's where that path leads. By the time the far-off disaster occurs, do you think it'll be people like you, who are capable of thinking clearly but just think certain discussions should be suppressed, who are going to be running the show? No, it'll the people who are the least reflective, the most tribal, the most doublethinky.
Liberalism, free speech, when working properly, is supposed to work as a negative feedback loop. If you're wrong, you find out. Someone contradicts you, supplies arguments, and then you can consider them and see whether they might be right. As a lot of people have noted, it... doesn't exactly always succeed at this. But suppression of speech... hoo boy, that fails so much harder. That's how you get positive feedback loops. As the professed beliefs of the group get further and further from reality, simultaneously the requirements that you agree, the punishments for disagreeing, get stricter and harsher. You sure as hell don't find the truth that way.
Truth, now... I notice that's something you didn't even mention at all. Because some of the points made in that memo, are, as best as people can currently tell, true. You haven't made any claims about to truth or falsity, only about harmfulness. But do you think the harmfulness of the claims in that memo exceed the harmfulness of shitty civilizational epistemic practices? (Nature can't be fooled, as they say!)
Like, OK, bad epistemic practices might not seem that bad, might seem like a worthwhile tradeoff, if you imagine suppression of specific facts or claims or discussions as an isolated thing. Maybe we don't need to know literally everything. But that's not how it goes. Free speech, liberalism, these are ideas that are unnatural to people, they had to be learned, and they are constantly seeking ways to slip them off or and go back to full-on tribalism (or pervert them in service of it). You may want suppression of particular claims... you will get the bad old days. The positive-feedback loop of doom.
Claims don't exist in isolation, after all; claims have relations between them. You can't just suppress one claim, because people will rederive it from other claims. And if the claim you suppress happens to be correct? Then people will definitely rederive it. So either surrounding claims have to go, or the process of inference itself has to go. Likely both. In fact definitely the latter; you can peel off surrounding claims all you want but eventually you'll have to attack inference itself. And hey, it happens already that people are constantly eager to do that anyway! They only need a little push... and then oops, there's your positive feedback loop. Once you encourage people to use bad methods, they'll use them to reach all sorts of bad conclusions... I expect many of them will surprise you!
(And what is the scope of this suppression? Shall the hidden truth be kept alive in the academy, say, with a strict cordon, so that the facts may be known by the chosen few but never applied outside where it might be necessary? Shall those who wish to learn a subject have to first learn only the public parts, and then apply to join, to learn the hidden secrets? Or shall it extend even to them? Is the pursuit of truth itself something that must simply be forbidden?)
It's a dark road you're suggesting here -- and not a new one; an old one, an ancient one, one whose failures we know very well. I'll take whatever harmfulness the truth might pose over that any day. I don't think it can really hold a candle to that.
That's basically what happened in brazil: people who were not part of risk groups crowded, encouraged by the president himself[0][1][2]. The number of infected poeple soared and variants that affect younger people appeared[3][4]. The health system has now collapsed because there is not enough ICU for such a high number of ill people[5][6].
[0] https://www.em.com.br/app/noticia/politica/2021/02/26/intern...
[1] https://noticias.uol.com.br/politica/ultimas-noticias/2021/0...
[2] https://cultura.uol.com.br/noticias/15258_bolsonaro-mergulha...
[3] https://www.cartacapital.com.br/saude/segunda-onda-de-covid-...
[4] https://www.brasildefato.com.br/2021/03/19/tres-novas-cepas-...
[5] https://www.cnnbrasil.com.br/saude/2021/03/19/17-estados-e-o...
[6] https://www.cnnbrasil.com.br/saude/2021/03/19/em-meio-ao-col...