Dwarkesh Patel: uncertainty

Transcript context

…Oh man, this is almost a direct quote. You can see the actual direct quote in my previous writing on this. “I will not just prosecute people. I will aggressively try to maximize the reputational impact on your firms and your licenses.” We were pointing metaphorical and, when it came down to it, literal guns at physicians in the middle of a pandemic for doing unauthorized medical care. It’s crazy. When the system corrected, it did not correct all the way. The governor did not go out and say, “hey, that thing I said a month ago was effing insane. I take that back and apologize.” No, it was like, “okay, we're going to quietly pass out the word. That's no longer the policy, but we don't want to own up to the mistake.” People, say in the regulatory departments of pharmacies, make rational decisions based on the signals that you are giving them. The rational decision a pharmacy makes is not, “okay, we've been quietly passed the word that the old policy is persona non grata. But can we really trust the quiet word here? Do we trust that this actor is not going to change their mind in two weeks and consequence us for something we authorize today? Just throw out the shots.” Pharmacies did not cover themselves in glory. Some individual pharmacists did, but pharmacies institutionally did not. Pharmacies were thinking, “we deliver almost all the medications for almost all the diseases routinely in America. We cannot blow up either that position of societal trust or our business results over one drug for one disease.” They decided to throw out the shots and make sure they could still deliver medical care in California tomorrow. I understand how that decision was made. We should not endorse that decision. There were individual acts of heroism by particular pharmacists who essentially said something like this to us when we called them and asked about the procedure for getting the shot. "Okay, an individual like the one you just described cannot formally get the shot right now. I would tell that individual to go to the county website and tell whatever lies are necessary to get an appointment with me. They come in for an appointment and I will inject them rather than verifying the lies that were on the appointment card because basically eff the rules. I swore an oath." Honestly, I don't know where to begin with some of these things. I want to understand a bunch of that. First of all, 25% of the vaccines that were allocated to California were actually delivered in people's arms? Literally the entire world economy was bottlenecked on this, right? Here’s another funny anecdote. I asked some people in positions that might know, "how real do you think that 25% number is?" They said, "the good news is in addition to being incompetent at delivering the vaccine, we're also incompetent at counting.” So it was probably a bit of an undercount. I'm like, "oh so the good news is the true count was like 100 percent or 95 percent or something?" They were like, "no, not nearly close to that, but we got better at counting after the governor yelled at us because he was embarrassed. We were the 40th state in the nation.”…

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