Perhaps groupthink is downstream of something else. Like credentialled advisors sharing a technocratic obsession with controlling risk and forcing their will onto nature. Groupthink seems an inevitable manifestation of group selection bias, if that half-assed suggestion makes any sense. Merry Christmas - I've been glad of your work here this year.
Yeah, the local council here actually put huge boulders in place to block off car parks at beauty spots to prevent people hiking even though it was probably the safest activity one could do at that time - much safer actually than being at home (even granting that it would be ‘dangerous’ to catch Covid).
Dec 28, 2023·edited Dec 28, 2023Liked by David McGrogan
Thanks for writing this powerful statement David. As a dad and a special needs education-generalist I felt exactly the same in the spring of 2020. (I wrote my first article in june 2020 in our local newspaper (https://pedagoogle.com/2020/06/07/onderwijs-vergeet-kinderen/ ). I was (and still am) stunned: all we know about what children need to flourish - physically, socially, mentally - was thrown out of the window overnight. And even worse: all the experts in the fields of education, developmental psychology, parenting, children's rights quietly went along with this state induced child abuse. For three years I kept track of research regarding children, covid-19 and schools (50 + studies: https://pedagoogle.com/2021/02/28/onderzoeksliteratuur-kinderen-scholen-en-covid-19-een-jaar-later/). As Sweden has shown: there never were good reasons for restrictions in the lives of children. Agree: children should never have had to go through the experience of lockdown. Kind regards from The Netherlands, Hans
Thanks Hans. The fact that almost all of society was complicit in this in some way is the very shocking thing, and it is I think why the truth will never really be acknowledged. It would involve the majority having to admit to doing something truly appalling.
If lessons are to be learned that is what needs to happen. In The Netherlands all of the politicians responsible for these disastrous policies for children have left the stage. Now the door is wide open for a Covid Inquiry (that stil has to be planned) and has raised hopes for a truly critical evaluation. (I wrote an evaluation of Dutch covid policies regarding children in a book: https://pedagoogle.com/2023/04/18/jong-in-coronatijd-kinderen-in-de-vuurlinie-fragment-uit-voorbij-de-pandemische-chaos/)
THANK YOU for doing the work! These "professionals" and their assessments are insufferable and, for me, nearly unbearable. I am radically tired of technocracy and its pedigreed tyrants. I needed no lab coat or advanced social sciences degree to know that the new covid world was incompetence and insanity.
My several thoughts in reaction to your piece (discovered via Brownstone) that I yearn to express/run by you will have to go by wayside (or be delayed) because I have too many backed-up chores (it's your lucky day 🤪).
So for now, good sir, I just want to alert you to 2 edits: 1) it's "for my daughter and me" (not "and I"), and 2) typo at "health of the counry’s population" ("country").
P.S. If you desire further explanation re the proper pronoun usage, let me know (I'm an expert explainer, whoop-de-doo). Quick proof is that every speaker of basic English knows to write/speak "for us," not "for we" – by ear if not by technical understanding.
Yes - they simply told lies, deliberately. Interestingly, the point is brought up in one of the pieces in the journal issue that is the subject of this post. Apparently one of the reasons why this lie was rationalised/justified within government was on the basis that if one scared parents sufficiently about risks to children, this would in turn cause the adults to act more cautiously and thus have less social contact. So, in effect, to try to get adults to meet less it was necessary to trick them into thinking there was a risk to their kids. It is incredible that this is not a Watergate/Profumo-level scandal, if you ask me.
I totally agree the information was hiding in plain sight to demo that the risks to the vast majority of the population were negligible. I can remember having this discussion with a friend of mine back in April 20 and they were adamant that it was 'better to be safe than sorry'. I also use another metric or indicator to help me decide the right course of action that doesn't require much data at all. For about 30 yrs now I've been using an (my) Iron Rule which has never let me down..... If an initiative is top down driven by Govt it will ALWAYS be net negative for Society at large. If the initiative is authoritarian, draconian and can ever be questioned it is almost certainly GROSSLY negative for Society at large. As for the point about society not placing the interests of children before adults again that has been the case for decades. If we truly did care we most definitely would not be racking up almost unimaginable debt for them because WE want something now. Every single middle class Socialist I know is oblivious to this and when pointed out just casually brushes it off. And the Conservatives of the last 13yrs are certainly no better. Passing down intergenerational debt on the scale we are doing is disgraceful and attaches a dead weight to future generations. You are right - our generation of adults simply doesn't care.
The ‘better safe than sorry’ thing was bizarre. ‘Better safe than sorry’ does not meant conducting the biggest social experiment in history. It also requires you to define what ‘safe’ and ‘sorry’ meant. ‘Safe’ for children did not mean being forced to stay inside all day. That was brewing big future risks to social development and mental health (setting aside the risks associated with sexual and physical abuse).
This is an absolutely excellent post and I commend you for it - and for taking your daughter out during lockdown! I sadly watched as others would allow their children to see their neighbours' children through a fence and so on. Heartbreaking. Must have taken an age to make your way through the boring drag, but excellent referencing :-).
Thanks for this piece, David, which strikes soundly at its target. I must ask the unavoidable rhetorical question: if you and I, with zero medical expertise, could so easily establish that our kids were at zero risk from this infection, why could so few academics and nearly zero reporters conduct this frankly trivial item of research...?
I have three boys, and this was rather fortunate as they always had someone to play with even when we were supposed to be imprisoned in our homes. While schools were closed, I was frankly amazed at how swiftly I was able to develop their maths skills under my tutelage - I mauled the curriculum, but I'm not sure I care. I just taught what I knew well because the alternative was to abandon their education entirely. Yet I am mindful many others had no realistic options with the schools closed, and as you warn here, the damage done by this reckless action was unthinkable (and now, it seems, still impossible to think about for far, far too many people).
I feel distinctly lucky since my family avoided much of the harms caused, largely through fortuitous circumstances. Even my wife quitting the hospital and my resigning in disgust from two academic posts felt more like liberation than anything negative, but I am mindful that I had a consultancy business to fall back upon. Others had no recourse.
While like you I aimed to remain lawful throughout the Nonsense, I did in fact indulge in one act of illegal protest. The local park chained up the outdoor basketball court citing limits on assembly that had been invented out of the warped intellectual fumes that drove so much of this disastrous response. It was bad enough that the proposed solution for an infection that was spreading entirely indoors was to keep people indoors(!), but this act of inane officiousness crossed a line of stupidity I could not bear. So I went out early one morning with a pair of bolt cutters and opened the court. This was hardly a Rosa Parks moment, I had simply reached the limit of what idiocy I was prepared to bear.
I have a piece on this topic coming up on Stranger Worlds in February, "Sacrificing Goats", that is my latest in a long line of attempts to talk reasonably to those who even now defend their wild misjudgements as somehow necessary (or worse, 'it would have worked if only we had caused more harm sooner'). But as we discussed before in another miserable context: once a side has been taken, it will be defended with all the sophistry that can be mustered.
May the day come when this catastrophic misjudgement will be recognised for the insane managerial blight upon humanity it ever was.
The rhetorical question you ask is something which plagued me at the time, and still puzzles me. I knew in February 2020 that there was basically no threat from the virus to youngsters. That information was not hard to find - the pattern was clear in every country that had been hit before us (China, South Korea, Italy, Spain, etc.). And in the mainstream press people were openly acknowledging the truth even in March 2020: look at the final sentence in this article by Matt Ridley, for the Spectator: https://www.spectator.co.uk/article/we-are-about-to-find-out-how-robust-civilisation-is/
I know why government suppressed this readily observable phenomenon: in their minds, it was beneficial for people to believe there was a threat to their children, as it would lead them to be more cautious. But I still can't quite understand why purportedly intelligent people in academia and Twitter didn't make more noise about it. The only explanations I can offer are that a lot of these people aren't as clever as they make out, and/or were panicky and hence gullible.
This is one of the great mysteries of the Nonsense, to be sure - but I think your latter interpretation is the one that cleaves closest to the known facts. Public health agencies, led by a purposeful intervention by the US department of defence, threw away one of their most basic tenets (not to evoke panic). Thus terror was intentionally engendered, and this encouraged the misreading that this situation was far worse than any practical assessment would suggest. Once the fear is loose, all reason goes out the window. Of course, this is not incompatible with your other proposal, that smart people weren't as clever as they seemed. As I like to say "we are all equally stupid".
I thank my lucky stars that my daughter was too young for school at the time, so could attend nursery (which was open from July 2020 and all the way thereafter). That made things much easier. I genuinely don't know what I would have done if she had been of school age, or if I had happened to be living in a country in which young children were required to wear masks.
Britain now has what made the USSR horrible
- Lysenkoist social engineering, rather than tolerant pragmatism;
- induced paranoia, rather than rude health and social trust;
- a clerisy of doctrinaire mid-wits, rather than guidance by the wise;
- a legislated new reality, rather than the bleedin' obvious.
Has any work been done to explain why so many advisors to governments everywhere pushed for lock downs?
The most parsimonious explanation is groupthink. They're all in the same WhatsApp groups, talk to each other on Twitter, read the same journals, etc.
Perhaps groupthink is downstream of something else. Like credentialled advisors sharing a technocratic obsession with controlling risk and forcing their will onto nature. Groupthink seems an inevitable manifestation of group selection bias, if that half-assed suggestion makes any sense. Merry Christmas - I've been glad of your work here this year.
Not half-arsed at all. That's more or less how I see it - watch for future posts on this.
I remember getting critised after I posted on Facebook about my 8 hour hike which wasn't even against the guidelines never mind the law.
The effect of flattening the curve is to extend the time taken by an epidemic and reduce acquired immunity. Unlock and you just get another wave.
Yeah, the local council here actually put huge boulders in place to block off car parks at beauty spots to prevent people hiking even though it was probably the safest activity one could do at that time - much safer actually than being at home (even granting that it would be ‘dangerous’ to catch Covid).
Thanks for writing this powerful statement David. As a dad and a special needs education-generalist I felt exactly the same in the spring of 2020. (I wrote my first article in june 2020 in our local newspaper (https://pedagoogle.com/2020/06/07/onderwijs-vergeet-kinderen/ ). I was (and still am) stunned: all we know about what children need to flourish - physically, socially, mentally - was thrown out of the window overnight. And even worse: all the experts in the fields of education, developmental psychology, parenting, children's rights quietly went along with this state induced child abuse. For three years I kept track of research regarding children, covid-19 and schools (50 + studies: https://pedagoogle.com/2021/02/28/onderzoeksliteratuur-kinderen-scholen-en-covid-19-een-jaar-later/). As Sweden has shown: there never were good reasons for restrictions in the lives of children. Agree: children should never have had to go through the experience of lockdown. Kind regards from The Netherlands, Hans
Thanks Hans. The fact that almost all of society was complicit in this in some way is the very shocking thing, and it is I think why the truth will never really be acknowledged. It would involve the majority having to admit to doing something truly appalling.
If lessons are to be learned that is what needs to happen. In The Netherlands all of the politicians responsible for these disastrous policies for children have left the stage. Now the door is wide open for a Covid Inquiry (that stil has to be planned) and has raised hopes for a truly critical evaluation. (I wrote an evaluation of Dutch covid policies regarding children in a book: https://pedagoogle.com/2023/04/18/jong-in-coronatijd-kinderen-in-de-vuurlinie-fragment-uit-voorbij-de-pandemische-chaos/)
THANK YOU for doing the work! These "professionals" and their assessments are insufferable and, for me, nearly unbearable. I am radically tired of technocracy and its pedigreed tyrants. I needed no lab coat or advanced social sciences degree to know that the new covid world was incompetence and insanity.
My several thoughts in reaction to your piece (discovered via Brownstone) that I yearn to express/run by you will have to go by wayside (or be delayed) because I have too many backed-up chores (it's your lucky day 🤪).
So for now, good sir, I just want to alert you to 2 edits: 1) it's "for my daughter and me" (not "and I"), and 2) typo at "health of the counry’s population" ("country").
P.S. If you desire further explanation re the proper pronoun usage, let me know (I'm an expert explainer, whoop-de-doo). Quick proof is that every speaker of basic English knows to write/speak "for us," not "for we" – by ear if not by technical understanding.
The 3 Myths of Management:
1- The illusion of Control
2- The conviction that there is always a right answer, a perfect solution
4- When things go awry, there is always something or someone to blame (scapegoat.)
Thanks for pointing out that anyone with a brain should have known the mortality risk from Covid for children was zero ... by February 2020.
The fact our officials spread the disinformation that Covid was a risk to "everyone" is yet another massive scandal.
BTW, I also spent those first couple of months of the lockdowns exploring our town with our children!
Yes - they simply told lies, deliberately. Interestingly, the point is brought up in one of the pieces in the journal issue that is the subject of this post. Apparently one of the reasons why this lie was rationalised/justified within government was on the basis that if one scared parents sufficiently about risks to children, this would in turn cause the adults to act more cautiously and thus have less social contact. So, in effect, to try to get adults to meet less it was necessary to trick them into thinking there was a risk to their kids. It is incredible that this is not a Watergate/Profumo-level scandal, if you ask me.
I totally agree the information was hiding in plain sight to demo that the risks to the vast majority of the population were negligible. I can remember having this discussion with a friend of mine back in April 20 and they were adamant that it was 'better to be safe than sorry'. I also use another metric or indicator to help me decide the right course of action that doesn't require much data at all. For about 30 yrs now I've been using an (my) Iron Rule which has never let me down..... If an initiative is top down driven by Govt it will ALWAYS be net negative for Society at large. If the initiative is authoritarian, draconian and can ever be questioned it is almost certainly GROSSLY negative for Society at large. As for the point about society not placing the interests of children before adults again that has been the case for decades. If we truly did care we most definitely would not be racking up almost unimaginable debt for them because WE want something now. Every single middle class Socialist I know is oblivious to this and when pointed out just casually brushes it off. And the Conservatives of the last 13yrs are certainly no better. Passing down intergenerational debt on the scale we are doing is disgraceful and attaches a dead weight to future generations. You are right - our generation of adults simply doesn't care.
The ‘better safe than sorry’ thing was bizarre. ‘Better safe than sorry’ does not meant conducting the biggest social experiment in history. It also requires you to define what ‘safe’ and ‘sorry’ meant. ‘Safe’ for children did not mean being forced to stay inside all day. That was brewing big future risks to social development and mental health (setting aside the risks associated with sexual and physical abuse).
This is an absolutely excellent post and I commend you for it - and for taking your daughter out during lockdown! I sadly watched as others would allow their children to see their neighbours' children through a fence and so on. Heartbreaking. Must have taken an age to make your way through the boring drag, but excellent referencing :-).
Thanks for this piece, David, which strikes soundly at its target. I must ask the unavoidable rhetorical question: if you and I, with zero medical expertise, could so easily establish that our kids were at zero risk from this infection, why could so few academics and nearly zero reporters conduct this frankly trivial item of research...?
I have three boys, and this was rather fortunate as they always had someone to play with even when we were supposed to be imprisoned in our homes. While schools were closed, I was frankly amazed at how swiftly I was able to develop their maths skills under my tutelage - I mauled the curriculum, but I'm not sure I care. I just taught what I knew well because the alternative was to abandon their education entirely. Yet I am mindful many others had no realistic options with the schools closed, and as you warn here, the damage done by this reckless action was unthinkable (and now, it seems, still impossible to think about for far, far too many people).
I feel distinctly lucky since my family avoided much of the harms caused, largely through fortuitous circumstances. Even my wife quitting the hospital and my resigning in disgust from two academic posts felt more like liberation than anything negative, but I am mindful that I had a consultancy business to fall back upon. Others had no recourse.
While like you I aimed to remain lawful throughout the Nonsense, I did in fact indulge in one act of illegal protest. The local park chained up the outdoor basketball court citing limits on assembly that had been invented out of the warped intellectual fumes that drove so much of this disastrous response. It was bad enough that the proposed solution for an infection that was spreading entirely indoors was to keep people indoors(!), but this act of inane officiousness crossed a line of stupidity I could not bear. So I went out early one morning with a pair of bolt cutters and opened the court. This was hardly a Rosa Parks moment, I had simply reached the limit of what idiocy I was prepared to bear.
I have a piece on this topic coming up on Stranger Worlds in February, "Sacrificing Goats", that is my latest in a long line of attempts to talk reasonably to those who even now defend their wild misjudgements as somehow necessary (or worse, 'it would have worked if only we had caused more harm sooner'). But as we discussed before in another miserable context: once a side has been taken, it will be defended with all the sophistry that can be mustered.
May the day come when this catastrophic misjudgement will be recognised for the insane managerial blight upon humanity it ever was.
Seasonal blessing upon you and yours,
Chris.
The rhetorical question you ask is something which plagued me at the time, and still puzzles me. I knew in February 2020 that there was basically no threat from the virus to youngsters. That information was not hard to find - the pattern was clear in every country that had been hit before us (China, South Korea, Italy, Spain, etc.). And in the mainstream press people were openly acknowledging the truth even in March 2020: look at the final sentence in this article by Matt Ridley, for the Spectator: https://www.spectator.co.uk/article/we-are-about-to-find-out-how-robust-civilisation-is/
I know why government suppressed this readily observable phenomenon: in their minds, it was beneficial for people to believe there was a threat to their children, as it would lead them to be more cautious. But I still can't quite understand why purportedly intelligent people in academia and Twitter didn't make more noise about it. The only explanations I can offer are that a lot of these people aren't as clever as they make out, and/or were panicky and hence gullible.
This is one of the great mysteries of the Nonsense, to be sure - but I think your latter interpretation is the one that cleaves closest to the known facts. Public health agencies, led by a purposeful intervention by the US department of defence, threw away one of their most basic tenets (not to evoke panic). Thus terror was intentionally engendered, and this encouraged the misreading that this situation was far worse than any practical assessment would suggest. Once the fear is loose, all reason goes out the window. Of course, this is not incompatible with your other proposal, that smart people weren't as clever as they seemed. As I like to say "we are all equally stupid".
Excellent and very helpful thank you. For what it’s worth, you and many others like you have my vote for being parents & grandparents of the decade.
I thank my lucky stars that my daughter was too young for school at the time, so could attend nursery (which was open from July 2020 and all the way thereafter). That made things much easier. I genuinely don't know what I would have done if she had been of school age, or if I had happened to be living in a country in which young children were required to wear masks.
🎯