‘Intellectual yet idiot’, no ‘skin in the game’: Dozens of university professors call for harsher lockdown
By Samuel Rz, founding editor at Westphalian Times. Make sure to subscribe to my substack below to get live breaking news and analyses in your mailbox. Follow Westphalian Times for honest journalism.
An open letter published in the Quebec outlet La Presse called for the Quebec government to fully lock down the province.
Quebec already has some of the most stringent lockdown measures. Gyms have been closed since October 8 and are not set to reopen until mid-January. The same goes for dine-in restaurants which closed on October 8th and will remain closed until at least January 11th and likely beyond.
Gatherings of any size are banned and Christmas has already been cancelled. Despite all of these measures, cases have been rising. Deaths and hospitalizations remain low and are nowhere near what they were during the first wave.
A group of 77 university professors are now calling for Quebec to put in place additional measures of lockdown.
Their open letter does not suggest specific actions but instead asks the government to do more. The letter mentions curfews adopted in France and suggests that schools should be suspended and retail should be closed or severely limited.
What is staggering is that none of these professors will experience any hardship if the province goes into lockdown again.
They will keep working from home as they have since March and they will touch their full salary in the comfort of their cozy apartments. They’ll order whatever they need online and life will go smoothly for them.
Such individuals have no ‘skin in the game’. As Nassim Taleb wrote:
“If you give an opinion, and someone follows it, you are morally obligated to be, yourself, exposed to its consequences.”
Professors will experience no hardship from their poor advice of locking down the country.
Society’s most vulnerable will fully experience the repercussions of new lockdown measures. Retail workers, restaurant owners, cooks and chefs, fitness center employees, how many hard-working taxpayers will be cut off from their source of income? How many will have to take on new debt?
What will be the effects of further lockdowns on mental health?
To understand these 77 professors, we resort once again to what Nassim Taleb calls ‘Intellectual yet idiot, or IYI”.
“The IYI pathologizes others for doing things he doesn’t understand without ever realizing it is his understanding that may be limited. He thinks people should act according to their best interests and he knows their interests [...]
Typically, the IYI get the first order logic right, but not second-order (or higher) effects making him totally incompetent in complex domains.[...]
IYIs fail to distinguish between the letter and the spirit of things. They are so blinded by verbalistic notions such as science, education, democracy, racism, equality, evidence, rationality and similar buzzwords that they can be easily taken for a ride. They can thus cause monstrous iatrogenics [a treatment causes more harm than benefit] without even feeling a shade of a guilt, because they are convinced that they mean well and that they can be thus justified to ignore the deep effect on reality.”
Nevermind that scientists around the world have condemned lockdowns, or that the World Health Organization has come forward advising against lockdowns.
Nevermind that the data shows transmission in the retail environment is below 1% or that a recent study found lockdowns are not linked with lower COVID death rates.
What matters here is not science. Yes, the Quebec and Canadian healthcare system is weak and crumbling. Socialized medicine has failed the People once again.
The idea of a public health system is that it serves the people. But the COVID-19 pandemic has confirmed a reversion of historical proportions: it is now the people that are serving the crumbling social healthcare system.