Thanks for actually stating your arguments. It makes your reasoning much more clear. It encourages rational dialog.

What I fail to understand is what in the world leads you to believe that people routinely make wise decisions using facts and intelligence. A cursory glance at any newspaper should convince you otherwise.

Yes, people start smoking as young people — but they continue smoking as adults. People start all sorts of drugs as adults. Very few teenagers are cocaine addicts. People develop all sorts of bad habits as adults, like “not getting exercise”. If you’re in terrible physical condition, “not getting exercise” is a decision you make every day, and one that leads you to a shorter and more miserable life. It’s in every way irrational and yet tens of millions of Americans choose to do this their whole lives.

People make terrible decisions all the time. Many people don’t get an education, skills or training when they could, and end up in dead-end jobs they hate. That’s probably fifty million Americans right there.

I mean, look at your example above! I can’t imagine a state of mind less conducive to rational thinking than hungry kids. Most parents would take irrational risks at that point.

And most people simply don’t have the learning to understand statistical reasoning at all — which is completely essential to make an educated choice about epidemiology. As a sometime educator in mathematics myself, I believe that America has let their schoolchildren down by leaving most of them innumerate and even hostile to numbers.

If you offered your average American two otherwise identical jobs, one of which had a 1% chance per month of killing them, and the other had a 0.001% mortality, and the first option paid $500 a month more, it is my belief that even if you showed them these two probabilities that most of them would take the more dangerous for the extra $6K a year — even though they’d have about one chance in nine in dying that first year. I think the majority of people really see both 1% and 0.001% as “small” and therefore basically the same.

Heck, 40% of Americans believe that God created the Earth within the last ten thousand years. These aren’t people who value critical thinking or rationality — why would someone who believed such madness have the skills for good decision-making?

Your whole argument relies on people being good at making decisions, but there’s no evidence that this is true, and a ton of evidence that this is not.

But there’s an even worse flaw in your reasoning: the Prisoner’s Dilemma, where “two individuals acting in their own self-interests do not produce the optimal outcome.” The Prisoner’s Dilemma isn’t some weird edge case — it occurs in almost every non-trivial competition, and hugely so here.

For example, if you and I run the only two hairdressers in town, if the economy re-opens each of us might be forced to go back to work rather than permanently lose our business to the other — even though overall both of us would be better off staying at home, and might even want to stay home.

Thanks for reading, and stay well!