[FRIAM] RedState/BlueState OneState/TwoState

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What troubles me in all this is the (coarse) granularity. Whole state stay-at-home orders deny the reality that many states are diverse, geographically, demographically, etc. But I suppose it's par for the course because our coarse grain misgovernance shows up everywhere, not only in the response to this crisis, but in voting, in-network healthcare, Walmart/Amazon logistics, ... hell even in the remote diagnosis of Trump's mental disorders <https://www.salon.com/2020/04/08/yale-psychiatrist-bandy-lee-trumps-deadly-briefings-display-anti-human-psychology/> by non-experts.

Steve's ideas around clique-specific methods are attractive, but ultimately infeasible because we will *never* have enough fine-grained information to make such methods data-driven. And even if we did, I think 2 fundamental conditions would obtain: 1) celebrity expert-deniers like Alex Jones, Joe Rogan, and Gwyneth Paltrow would be gravity wells for the attention of us lazy normals and/or 2) something like gerrymandering, where the specific methods would be too complicated for us couch potatoes to follow.

Contrast hypothetical proposals for such network-specific methods against the tight, universal, semantic grounding of "don't shake hands" and "stay home". My guess is a full dictatorial clamp down will be effective precisely because it leaves no finagle room for (1) or (2). There's no room for dithering between "experts" or the artificial seizure of expertise by non-experts (like George Conway). And the reason the US will suffer in practice, despite the theoretical and "anti-human" benefits of a diverse response, is because we're a Federal system.

However, a story from the radio or somesuch the other day seems to contradict me. (I was exercising and couldn't pay close enough attention.) I heard someone *assert* that Germany is fairing, practically, so well against the virus *because* it's federated. I can't find a link to that or similar stories. So, I can't tell if they're just post-hoc rationalizing or have some data to show it's the federated decoupling that's causative.

On 4/7/20 10:52 PM, David Eric Smith wrote:
> All that said, the clamp-down was impressive, and probably fairly effective.  Not a gold standard like Taiwan, but better than any of the major countries in the west, and with a much larger population.


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