Patrick McKenzie: commitment

Transcript context

…There was a particular kind of craziness that we had during 2020 and 2021 about equity and wokeness. How much was that uniquely responsible for the dysfunctions of this tiering system and geolocation/redlining? Basically, if this happened in another year when there wasn't a bunch of cultural craziness, would it have gone significantly better? It's difficult to ask that question. We were clearly in a unique time in 2020 and 2021. Yet, point to me a year in American history in which American society was truly united and had no social issues going on. If people counterfactually point to say, World War II, I will say read more history there. Be that as it may. Was it the case that strong societal feelings in the wake of George Floyd's death in 2020 and the racial reckoning strongly dictated policy? Yes. That's a positive statement rather than a normative statement. That is absolutely the case. There's this thing we often say in the tech industry called bike shedding. If you're building a nuclear power plant, many people cannot sensibly comment on what is the flow rate through the pipes to cool a nuclear reactor. However, if you build a bike shed next to the nuclear power plant, it's very easy to have opinions on the color of the bike shed. So in the meetings about the nuclear power plant, you will have a truly stupid amount of human effort devoted to what colors you should paint the bike shed. It is very difficult for most people in civil society to successfully inject a vaccine into someone's arms, to successfully manage a logistics network, to successfully build a nationwide information gathering system, to centralize this information and pass it out to everyone. We aggressively trained the entire American professional managerial class in decrying systemic racism. To be clear, it is a problem. The American professional managerial class essentially calls all the shots in the U.S. system. Any discussion about what we should do with regards to information distribution will almost invariably get bent to, “I have no particular opinions on server architecture here and nothing useful to comment, but what's our equity strategy?” The equity strategy dominated discussions of the correct way to run the rollout to the exclusion of operationalizing it via medical necessity. People brag about that fact. That fact is enormously frustrating to me. If you say it with exactly those words and emotional valence, people will say, “no, that's not exactly what we meant.” When they're talking to other audiences, they say, “no, this is absolutely what we mean.” Maybe the culprit here is a scarcity mindset. We cared more about proportions rather than just solving the problem.…

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