This study was released in June, so this may be a repost, but I just found out that one of my friends is a fan of Emily Oster and this is the void I must scream into.
This study was released in June, so this may be a repost, but I just found out that one of my friends is a fan of Emily Oster and this is the void I must scream into.
[he/him] Study makes a lot of sense, not here to comment on that… Been reading what some people have said here on Emily Oster, and I cannot agree, although I can understand how you may have reached that conclusion. I sincerely feel from she is making an earnest attempt to bring people the best facts we have on an issue, and help them make their own decision. Sorry for wasting your time. She has changed the way I try to frame my decision making so I couldn’t not look into what everyone was saying, and I couldn’t not say what I found cus this was stressful.
People I know who have been pregnant, and especially those who have had difficult pregnancies, have found Oster’s book Expecting Better to be a breath of fresh air. But the individualistic approach to personal risk assessment completely falls apart when it comes to contagion, and Oster’s work on Covid has gotten people killed. From a critique published not long after the vaccine rollout:
I agree with you, every individual making individual choices that are best for them breaks down in the context of a global pandemic, 100%. I do think you miss something though. We all can, do, and should apply a scaled up version of the same framework.
How many additional covid deaths we are willing to tolerate in exchange for something else will vary by person. We vote/act politically to attempt to move towards our preferred outcome. Chosing 0 deaths is likely too costly in other ways to be acceptable for most, and choose to have no restriction with no available protections would likely cause too many deaths to be acceptable to most people. We make similar choices as a society in other contexts. We, for example, have not banned cars dispite the benefits this might bring. Too many people enjoy the benefits of cars too much to accept this trade off.
I cannot blame her for being focused on individual impacts when she had specialized in this from her books. She did call out other individual risks in making this decision. I do think it could be considered a fair criticism to at least not call out the sociatal risk when talking about individual choices in that article… Just not one where it’s fair to say it makes her so evil Satan would be uncomfortable with her in hell. I think it can be hard for us to remember what we knew and where we were back in March 2021.
She seems pretty suspicious just off of her covid “work.” She’s written most her books about children, actually has children too, and we’re expected to believe she actually believed that schools wouldn’t be covid hotspots? How’d she change the way you frame decision making anyways?
From what I’ve read on what people have linked here, she attempted to determine how bad it would be for children spcifficly in aggregate, which is a different question with a potentially different answer.
For decion making, I usused to assume that I could just gather enough facts, and then a single right decision would emerge. And if others made different decisions, they were wrong. We should all try to gather accurate information, but we could still make different decisions or conclusions, and knowing this has helped me to not get decision paralesis at times, and has helped me understand and accept people making other choices than I did at times. One example would be sleep training your child. I will plan to do this, others will not. They are not bad parents for making that choice.
She’s earnestly attempting to spread the bountiful gifts of her lord Nurgle, Grandfather of plagues. Ia! Ia!
Jesus fucking christ you’re taking advice from people Satan wouldn’t let in to Hell.