It would have been so much worse . . .
A very popular analogy that has been used quite a few times to justify all sorts of covid lunacy is the seatbelt. I don’t know why it became a thing. I think the reasoning goes something like this: seatbelts keep us safe, lockdowns keep us safe, and if we accept one rule (seatbelts) we should accept the other (nonsense covid rule).
It has been used to justify vaccine mandates too. I can’t speak for anyone else, but I consider myself fortunate that my employers have never mandated the injection of a seat belt as a condition of employment.
I’m not really sure where I stand on the seatbelt issue. On the one hand I think they’re a really good idea. A really good idea. I speak from some personal experience. I know there are situations where, potentially, you’d have been better off not wearing one (seatbelt gets stuck and you’re in a burning vehicle, for example) but, in my view, they are a net positive by quite a way (but see below).
The benefits, or otherwise, of seatbelts isn’t really the issue, however. The issue, the other hand, is whether it is our government’s job to save us from ourselves. It’s not an easy issue. In a free society one should be free to be a dick. However, if your dickishness leads to harmful consequences for others then it’s probably right for the government to put in some legislation around that.
I suppose making everyone wear a seat belt does bring costs down. It is probably more expensive to clean all that goo off the road after a crash involving non-seatbelt wearers.
But the basic idea behind a seatbelt is that if you’re in a crash, and you hadn’t worn a seatbelt, the consequences would have been so much worse.
This is an idea that can be tested. We can look at before and after data. Did the introduction of seatbelts bring down the rate of serious consequences after road traffic accidents? I actually don’t know the answer to that one, but I suspect it made a significant difference.
The “science”, the data, can tell us what seatbelts achieve in terms of analysis of outcomes. The science can’t tell us whether it is right for a government to make it a legal requirement for everyone to wear one when in a car.
I should probably try to DuckDuckGo it, but the actual efficacy of a seatbelt isn’t the point here - the point is in the style of thinking that says “it would have been so much worse”. This is an example of counterfactual thinking. A counterfactual isn’t something that runs “counter” to the facts - it’s a consideration of what would have happened had we only done something differently.
It turns out that this is important in physics. In what is termed “classical” physics - that’s physics without quantum mechanics - we can imagine a golf ball flying through the air and we might do an experiment to determine its precise location at a given time. In classical physics it is an entirely legitimate thing to say “OK, we didn’t actually measure the momentum of the golf ball, but had we done so it would have been this”. Classical physics is predicated on counterfactuals.
In quantum mechanics this kind of thinking means that we run into serious problems. It is not legitimate in QM to make the same kind of statement. If we measure something (like the position) we bugger up our ability to know anything about something else (like the momentum). It’s worse than this though.
John Bell showed that if we construct a theory of nature based on counterfactual thinking there will be experimental predictions based on that theory that are incorrect. Just assuming that something has definite properties (in the absence of experiment) leads to the construction of a theory of the physical world that doesn’t work. It is much more than just mere ignorance of those properties - it is the assumption that something actually has certain properties before a measurement is made that is the problem.
Now I’m not suggesting that counterfactual thinking is always wrong - I just wanted to highlight that it is an implicit component of the standard way we view the world, and that fundamentally, at a deeper level, it is actually wrong. But we don’t experience quantum ‘reality’ directly - what we experience is a kind of emergent reality from a seething mess of quantum gloopiness. This higher level world, where the gloopiness has been smoothed out, allows us to legitimately use counterfactual arguments.
The whole sorry saga of covid has been awash with counterfactuals.
If we hadn’t locked down it would have been so much worse
If we hadn’t worn masks infections would have spiralled out of control
If you hadn’t taken the vax your covid symptoms would have been much worse
I remember (at least) one quote in the legacy media where grieving relatives of a person who died of covid expressed thanks for the Glorious Goo: My dad died, but it would have been so much worse had he not taken the vaccine.
If he’d been unvaccinated he’d probably have died several times over.
Counterfactual thinking is a kind of prediction about an alternate reality that didn’t happen. It has been mercilessly used by governments and their propagandists everywhere to drive fear to insane levels. And, although not strictly an example of a counterfactual, we’ve even seen the Chairman of SAGE’s modelling group in the UK admit that, under instruction, the only scenarios they considered were ones that had bad outcomes.
Just because something is a counterfactual it does not make it wrong - except in the rarefied world of QM. But whenever we hear a counterfactual we need to ask “where’s the evidence?”
I wear an amulet around my neck that has protected me from being trampled by a rhino. It’s very effective. If I hadn’t worn it I would have gone on an instant rhino-diet and become impossibly thin.
Where’s your evidence?
I haven’t been trampled by a rhino
This is pretty much the level of “evidence” we’ve often been treated to over covid. We imposed lockdowns and cases came down, goes many an argument. Putting it in counterfactual terms : if we hadn’t locked down cases would not have come down (or would have come down more slowly - or whatever).
You can’t use the fact that cases did not continue to rise as “evidence” that your lockdown amulet worked - just as me not being trampled by rhinos cannot be used as evidence that my rhino amulet works.
Be prepared for an awful lot of counterfactual thinking over the vaccines. The relative mildness of Omicron will subtly be ascribed to the booster. See, we boosted lots of people, and the death rate wasn’t as bad. It would have been so much worse if we hadn’t boosted so many.
Counterfactual statements are literally all I've ever received when I've argued about any covid policy (usually accompanied by a hyperbolic dig about "I suppose we should just do nothing and 'let people die'."
They're impossible to respond to. They cannot be argued. This doesn't make them correct. Just incompatible with debate, like arguing the existence of God.
Thanks for writing this. It's what my geeky, science-y, data-driven mathematician husband uses when we debate about lockdowns and vaccines. My geeky Stanford-grad older brother also uses this argument. "It would have been a lot worse if we didn't..."
I'm not geeky, or science-y like that, plus I was never on the debate team (I suck at confrontation and arguments), so I don't really know what to say when this statement comes up. I think it's important to discuss this whole counterfactual issue because it's what so many people (on the other team) say. And without evidence for either, it's difficult to debate, and I can't just go with what I 'feel'. Geeks (especially my husband) don't talk about FEELINGS.