Invaluable

For all that people speak of value as if it were a birthright, there is no right to be useful or to be considered valuable. Value is a measure of preference, and preferences by their very nature, are not subject to considerations of objectivity. There is value someone in seeking out and finding those people who have a preference for them, but it is pernicious to consider one's own preference to be valued as reflecting some deeper reality.

The problem with Diversity, Equity and Inclusion in a social setting that values efficiency (and thus, keeping employment as low as possible) is that the best way for the work environment to be diverse, equitable and inclusive is for it to need people. The tech boom of the late 1990s and very early 2000s is an example of this; when companies are desperate for workers, they can't afford the selectivity that gives rise to variances in representation in the corporate space. True, everyone who wants a job having one won't necessarily fix disparities in executive ranks or in certain industries and subsectors, but it's better than attempting to make the ranks of the unemployed line up withe demographics of the nation. And to the degree that people earn skills that they can then use to keep themselves productive, a high overall level of employment helps with some of the structural problems in the labor force (even if it doesn't come close to solving all of them).

But in the present, value will continue to live in the eye of the person with a need to be fulfilled. And once their needs are fulfilled, they need not value anything beyond that.

Cashing Out

I found an article this morning titled: "Cash will soon be obsolete. Will America be ready?" It started out as fairly bog-standard cheerleading for the Federal Reserve establishing a Central Bank Digital Currency; basically, a version of Bitcoin (or any other cryptocurrency, really), just this time, it's backed by the United States government, and so people could use it to pay their taxes. It's not a new idea... I want to say that I first encountered it a year or two ago. And a Federal Reserve version of Bitcoin is a bad idea on its face. It would come with a decent set of benefits, which, one suspects, is why the concept was floated in the first place. But this particular benefit articulated by the article's author, Eswar Prasad, struck me as perhaps ill-advised.

A central-bank digital currency can also be a useful policy tool. Typically, if the Federal Reserve wants to stimulate consumption and investment, it can cut interest rates and make cheap credit available. But if the economy is cratering and the Fed has already cut the short-term interest rate it controls to near zero, its options are limited. If cash were replaced with a digital dollar, however, the Fed could impose a negative interest rate by gradually shrinking the electronic balances in everyone’s digital currency accounts, creating an incentive for consumers to spend and for companies to invest.

Begging the expert's pardon, but if one of the expected benefits of a Central Bank Digital Currency is that said Central Banks can combat the Paradox of Thrift by adding a "use it or lose it" clause to people's money in order to force, either though spending or taking, a lowering of the aggregate Savings Rate, cash will most certainly not become obsolete, let alone "soon."

There is already a certain segment of the public that understands inflation targets as an unwarranted tax on the value of their cash savings. The steady march of inflation forces people to take risks with their money simply to have it retain its purchasing power, given that standard bank accounts pay less than the rate of inflation in interest. And the idea that the Federal Reserve could simply remove money from one's digital currency account is likely to spark also sorts of conspiratorial thinking. I can almost hear people railing against "the mark of the Beast" already. Of course, that it will set of religious zealots is not a reason to avoid doing something, but how the public will see something might be. And a public that understands that their bank balances can be directly manipulated by the Federal Reserve is likely to trigger a flight to commodities, or some other assets that can't have their value eroded whenever the Federal Reserve concludes that people need to be levered into buying things that they'd rather not. And that doesn't even touch on financially straited people; imagine someone having to go to a landlord or a utility and plead for forbearance because the Federal Reserve has gradually shrunk their electronic balance below what they need to pay their rent, mortgage or electricity bill. In short, the idea that the Central Bank could literally erase people's savings for policy reasons isn't going to be seen as a plus to many people.

But even without that, I suspect that it's too soon to predict the end of cash. Mr. Prasad rightly notes that the ability to trace and audit transactions, removing both anonymity and privacy from transfers of wealth is both a blessing and a curse. On the one hand, underground economies go away. On the other, the government can now see everyone that everyone does business with. One doesn't need to have a conspiratorial mindset to understand how the ability of government to see each and every transaction one makes could result in anxiety. Governments already have a high degree of confidence that no matter what may have been done in the past, the honest have nothing to hide from them. The honest, however, often feel differently. The perception that Big Brother is watching every penny they spend will certainly drive a fairly substantial constituency to maintain some form of anonymous means of purchasing goods and services. And the first leak of information that results in a someone being embarrassed, injured or killed will only accelerate that.

Whether Central Bank Digital Currencies are the wave of the future or not (and I suspect they are), physical currencies will never really go away. They're too useful and governments are not trustworthy enough.

Weak Links

This one's something of a head-scratcher. I found it on LinkedIn today. I have to admit that I'm curious about why one would lose a lot of friends just from being serious about life goals, unless applying oneself to one's goals means not having the time or the energy to maintain relationships with others. Outside of that, it just seems like a bit of car porn with some dubious "wisdom" attached to it.

But it seems to be a fit for what LinkedIn is these days. People are chasing your bog-standard social-media "engagement" by posting things that appear designed to resonate with and validate readers; in other words "like farming." Better this, I guess, than posting random pictures with the promise that a like and comment will make something happen.

Seriously... who thinks something will actually happen?

Part of the reason why the more business-minded LinkedIn users have lost the war to "Keep LinkedIn Professional" is that there are no consequences for posting whatever one might decide to. As has been pointed out, in the alternate universe that is LinkedIn, "cancel culture" has yet to gain a foothold.

Fortunately, LinkedIn had finally implemented a "mute" function (one that I've been giving quite a workout) so that it's now possible to keep one's contacts from flooding one's stream with irrelevant junk without needing to unfollow or unconnect from them. But even with that, the idea of LinkedIn as a place for people to go to further their non-influence careers seems to be petering out. But if you're looking for wonky life advice or people excitedly extolling their spirituality, it's got you covered.

In Common

Under these bitter circumstances, it may seem frivolous to think about what the pandemic means for political theory. Despite that risk, I want to consider an intellectual casualty of COVID-19: the idea of "the common good," a shared framework for determining what members of a political community owe each other. The experiences of the last 18 months show how little help the concept offers in resolving our disputes.
Samuel Goldman "The pandemic killed the common good"

The last eighteen months? Has Mr. Goldman spent the past decade or so living on Mars?

While there seems to be some journalistic currency in lamenting the recent death of "the common good," I suspect that the concept, like anything that requires high levels of social trust, passed away some time ago.

Invocations of the common good are often a pretext for personal or group demands that they're supposed to transcend.

This concession on the part of Mr. Goldman could have been a lead-in to a more detailed discussion of social trust, and I'm somewhat disappointed that it wasn't, because I think that the perception that pretext is at work is what drives a lot of the selfishness that people perceive. And, if anything has killed off the idea of the common good in the United States, it's the idea that it's simply being used as a pretext.

If people are going to think about what they owe each other, then the obligations work both ways. If people feel that invocations of the common good are simply ways for people to justify making demands of them, while offering nothing in return, they're going to opt out. I think that the focus on privilege that's become trendy over the past several years feeds into this, as "the privileged" are presumed to have enough already, thank you very much, and it's about time that they started "giving back." Which I understand, but it breaks the idea of the common good as a mutual aid society writ large.

The common good is, to be cliché about it, one for all and all for one. And that second part is just as important as the first. The United States is better at leaving people out to dry then is often admitted, and an understanding that one can be abandoned tends to trigger as increased focus on looking out for oneself. If we want people to look out for others, they have to trust that others are just as invested in looking out for them.

Cost Sharing

I get the frustration, I really do. But punishing the unvaccinated by saddling them with potentially crippling medical debt is not right, no matter how you feel about their decision.

[...]

 Everyone deserves health care regardless of the decisions they've made in their life; it's why we admit people to hospitals when they're sick or hurt, rather than allow them to die in the streets.
Jeva Lange "Nobody should go bankrupt for COVID-19 treatment. Even anti-vaxxers."

Perverse incentives 101: Allowing people to retain the benefits of opportunities they find, while spreading the costs of the risks they take among the populace at large is a recipe for increased risk-taking. It's one thing to conclude that compassion demands that people be cared for, regardless of whatever choices they've made. But telling people that any cost they feel should be extracted from people who make poor choices is a sin is asking for resentment. And in a society that already behaves as if resentment is a virtue, I don't know how helpful that is.

One of the characteristics of societies in general is that they bring together larger groups of people than might normally decide to be a part of the same collective. And the assignment of privileges and responsibilities across large collectives is always tricky. This is part of the reason why coupling those two concepts together tends to be a good idea, even when it's a given that it's not realistic to always do this.

It's worth keeping in mind that what Ms. Lange refers to as "punishing the unvaccinated" is little more than "Most private insurers are no longer waiving cost-sharing for COVID-19 treatment." In other words, treating a SARS-CoV-2 infection pretty much like any other reason that a person may be hospitalized. There is a legitimate point to be made that health care in the United States is broken in any number of different ways, and that one of those ways is that it's not completely socially subsidized (although, I would point out that the experience of nations with socialized medicine would argue against it being a cost-free panacea). But arguing that a specific disease or disorder should receive special treatment, just because, seems weak.

And if the point here is that medical care should be universally affordable (a nebulous term that seems to lack any real definition) regardless of what a person may or may not have done to require such care, then looking to place the responsibility on other parties is a poor justification.

Doesn't the Biden administration also hold some responsibility for not effectively reaching vaccine skeptics?

This makes a pretty big assumption, namely that it's always possible to convince someone to make the "correct" choice; all that one needs to do is "effectively reach" them. This is the sort of statement that people make because nothing is impossible to the person who doesn't have to do it themselves. The thought that "There has to be a way," is not the same as being able to articulate a way. And if responsibility for payment is going to be assigned according to responsibility for the actions taken, this simply sets up a dynamic of passing the buck (as is being done above). While it's a common Liberal viewpoint that the average person on the street is more or less helpless to care for themselves without some sort of professional intervention, that viewpoint can be used to argue for compulsory vaccinations. That certainly makes more financial sense than footing the bill for people who have decided that the arguments in favor of voluntary action are not credible.

What's worse, like those who abuse the emotional support animal system, the people who take a "rules don't apply to me" approach to the COVID-19 vaccine are actively endangering the members of the community they purport to be a part of.
Jeva Lange "COVID-19 vaccine 'medical exemptions' are the new emotional support animals"

Here is where I pick on Ms. Lange a bit, in shifting to another one of her columns on the topic of the vaccines, and people's refusals to avail themselves of them. I'm going to point out that in most societies, there tends to be little in the way of sympathy for people who are portrayed as actively placing other people in danger due to their actions. Making the point that people who are engaged in actively harmful activities should have the blowback to themselves social subsidized is something of a hard sell. In nations where medical care is exclusively tax-funded, it may be par for the course, but even then, other consequences are certainly going to be exacted, and this is not commonly considered a failure of compassion.

You never know another person's medical situation, and a lack of compassion for others isn't productive. But anti-vaxxers need to take accountability for their stances and not hide behind the language of others' real medical conditions.

Isn't expecting people sharing the costs of the medical expenses brought about by such stances, in the way that others are expected to as matter of course, a measure of accountability?

In the end, this is likely one of the pitfalls of being a columnist. Not all of the things one writes will be condense into a neat, coherent, whole. I know that I try to maintain a certain level of consistency, but my views on the world have changed over time (this is part of the reason why the "Rampant Idiocy" tag has been retired). Still, I think that it's often helpful to take a broader view than the one that ideology first presents.

Change the World

No "good morning" for me then, apparently...

I am, I will admit, not one of those people who "remains optimistic about the basic goodness of humanity." Mainly because I'm fairly confident of the basic neutrality of humanity. Few people are intentionally deviant enough to qualify as evil, while only a small number are consistently compassionate enough to manage being good.

And yes, I place myself in the neutral category.

But I'm also one of those people who wonders how the world becomes a "trainwreck clusterfuck dumpsterfire hellscape." Something tells me the author of this hasn't actually read very many reductive and simplistic science-fiction screenplays. Because in the grand scheme of things, life, especially in the United States, Europe and other first/second world nations, is pretty good. In most science-fiction dystopias (and more than a few real-world nation states) complaining about things publicly like this would earn one a visit from the authorities.

I've never really been one for "attitude of gratitude" thinking. It strikes me as, well, a platitude, and one based on maintaining an unrealistically pessimistic view of the world. But, like a lot of other things, there is wisdom there. Mainly, don't let one's expectations have free rein, because they'll make one miserable. There is use in taking the world as it is, rather than constantly comparing it to something that one might want it to be. And if the world must fall short, there is value in seeing at as fixable, and by the self as an individual.

Viewing the world as a fundamentally broken place, populated by generally well-meaning, but basically hapless people absolves individuals of responsibility and robs them of agency. "This world" didn't get into the state that it's in because some wicked cabal somewhere steamrollered what is right and good. Rather, the world is in the state that it's in because it was seen as better than the alternatives. It was the path of least resistance. But it doesn't have to be.

What's This "We" Business?

But as comforting as it would be to blame Obama and Trump, we must look inward and admit that we told our elected leaders—of both parties—that they were facing a no-win political test. If they chose to leave, they would be cowards who abandoned Afghanistan. If they chose to stay, they were warmongers intent on pursuing “forever war.” And so here we are, in the place we were destined to be: resting on 20 years of safety from another 9/11, but with Afghanistan again in the hands of the Taliban.
Tom Nichols "Afghanistan Is Your Fault"

This analysis is fair enough, I suppose, but I do have one problem with it: there is no "we." And that's been the problem all along. The American public is not a single, unified body with common aims, interests and understanding of the world around it. In a group of appreciable size, there will be a multiplicity of interests, some (if not many) operating directly at cross purposes to one another, even in the absence of zero-sum games. In an intensely partisan environment, and one driven by negative partisanship, at that, there will always be someone looking to criticize. And since partisan criticisms will typically find a receptive audience among co-partisans, regardless of what the criticism is or it's overall coherency. These facts, taken together, call into question the idea that "we" can directly tell anyone anything.

President George W. Bush had this problem. This perfectly reasonable assessment: "I don't think you can win [the War on Terror]. But I think you can create conditions so that the — those who use terror as a tool are less acceptable in parts of the world," was seized upon by Democratic politicians like Senator John Edwards and even now-President Joe Biden as a declaration of defeat and "unacceptable." The debate over whether President Bush's analysis was partisan then, and the debate over leaving Afghanistan is partisan now. Now that it's President Biden presiding, rather than Senator Biden criticizing, it will be Republicans leveling charges of unacceptable defeatism. Because it will work. It will elevate their stature in the eyes of people for whom President Biden can do nothing worthwhile and become a demonstration of right thinking that's independent of the argument itself; in much the same way that Senators Edwards and Biden found a receptive audience in Democrats aggrieved with the Bush Administration.

(As an aside, I wonder if things in Iraq and Afghanistan would have gone better if creating the conditions that made using terror as a tool less acceptable had been the goal from the outset.)

But even if it weren't the case, all that someone's critics need have in common is an understanding that the person being criticized isn't doing it right. Everything else is just detail. And so critics need not agree with one another, even if they are being consistent over time. And in a society where disagreeing with "them" is how people prove both worth and loyalty to their social reference groups, the idea that a national debate could have lead to anything approaching a national consensus is a pipe dream. (And even then, the pipe needs to have something pretty strong in it.) And while the specific form that negative partisanship has taken may be different, this fracturing of the polity is nothing new. As I understand it, the United States has never been a unified population, outside of a few very short-lived instances. The immediate aftermath of, for instance, the al-Qaeda attacks on New York and Washington DC, resulted in people being united in grief and anger at a common enemy, but partisan divisions quickly made themselves known, and many Americans demonstrated an inability to distinguish a different-looking citizen from an Islamist fifth columnist or infiltrator (presuming those making the mistake cared about the difference in the first place).

In order to say that "we" are delivering a message, there first has to be an understanding that there can be a broadly shared consensus. Previously, that consensus was somewhat falsified, created by simply ignoring those people who disagreed, or whose interests were harmed. As more and more people obtained access to the public discourse and the franchise, a single social voice based on one group's understanding of their own interests became less and less tenable as an ongoing practice. And in such situations, it's more common, at least in the United States, for those groups to deliver their own messages, rather than to hammer out some form of compromise message. That cacophony of different constituencies results in a situation where there is no one message ever being delivered, even if one set of voices is momentarily significantly louder than the rest.

Unmotivated

Earlier today, I encountered the fascinating subject of "amoralism." It doesn't mean what common intuition, based on the common understanding of "amoral," would suggest that it means. Rather than a glib indifference to whether an action comports to some or another theory of moral justification, it simply regards all such theories as irrelevant. I encountered the viewpoint in reading this article on why moral philosophy is a waste of time and effort, and in a desire to understand the viewpoint (and how it might differ, if at all, from Nihilism), I found myself reading an article on moral motivation.

Personally, I do not consider myself to be moral. I am of the option that supposed moral statements are little more than preference statements. So "murder is wrong" (which is a tautology, as I see it) is better stated as "killing without proper justification meets with disapproval," and that disapproval is a thing unto itself. It neither has nor needs, any other foundation or justification. As long as someone is ready, willing and able to enforce their approval or disapproval via some sort of imposed consequence, they may define something as "wrong," and to the degree that they are able to get enough other people to either internalize their viewpoint, it will be promulgated by the society at large as a moral stricture. In other words, might, when it backs preferences, makes those preferences right. I'm okay with this; the world appears to work this well well enough that I can make workable predictions by following this, and without some sort of objective "correct state" to compare things to, it is, as they say, what it is. There is no "ought" to contravene it.

In place of morality, I have interests and preferences of my own. Now, according to the article on moral motivation: "Morality is widely believed to conflict, frequently and sometimes severely, with what an agent most values or most prefers to do." And I understand this; it's a very common viewpoint. But there is no particular reason why it should be so. Sure, there is the common Abrahamic idea that everyone is a sinner; that people are simply incapable, basically by design, of fitting their behavior into the divine commands that they are expected to follow. But crediting that first requires that one believe in the Abrahamic deity, or one very like it; and this is a matter of faith more than anything else. Generally speaking, people with the ability to reliably free themselves from accountability to others are free to act on interests and preferences that violate established moral norms, but people genuinely in this position are very few and far between; forbearance and lack of coordination among the public at large are more of a factor than personal independence. And this is what allows for the differences between common norms morality and an agent's values or preferences.

And so while I can conceive of having a set of interests that would put me at odds with the people around me, that's different than saying that I currently have many such interests. And to the degree that amoralists see the world in similar terms, their understanding that moral thought carries no value is more trivial than people would make it out to be. In his article, Professor de Sousa, sees a "right to blame" as a primary casualty of adopting amoralism. I think I see it more as an external justification for blame, but that's likely only a semantic difference. Either way, in a amoralist system, one has to own one's judgements. Sounds like a good idea to me.

Do I Know You?

Tom Hanks and Rita Wilson's son doubles down on anti-vaccine stance.

If Chester Hanks is well-known enough to have headlines written about him, one would think that he would be well-known enough that his name could be used in those headlines. But such is the way of things; Mr. Hanks and Mrs. Wilson are enough of a draw to entice people to click in the hopes of some juicy family drama; where the Chester Hanks is not.

It's often said that the news media acts to distract the public away from the pressing things that require their attention. But while it's possible to make the case that providing news should be a public service, I don't know if the case can me made that providing news should be an act of charity. Journalists have to eat, just like everyone else, and principles are inedible. And so headlines about the celebrity-adjacent trade in the names that are well-known, as people are more likely to click through and see the advertising that comes with the story.

And to be sure, it's likely a trivial story. (No, I didn't bother to actually read it. Why do you ask?) Chester Hanks is an actor, musician and son of a famous person. He's not a policymaker, executive or an advisor to same. He's just a guy who has decided that he doesn't care for vaccination. So what else is new?

Stakeholders

"Vaccination is not a personal choice."

Well then, whose choice is it? The column ends with: "The vaccinated may be protected from COVID-19, but we can't protect ourselves from the consequences of our neighbors' bad choices." But this has always been the risk of having neighbors; only the completely isolated and unconnected have nothing to worry about from the undesirable choices of others. I'm pretty sure that once upon a time, Thag Simmons was greatly annoyed by the habit of the Neanderthals next door to lead stegosaurs back to the cave complex.

It's a sometimes disappointing fact of life that having a direct interest in what other people do often fails to make those other people accountable to us for the outcomes of their choices. And the reasons for this are many and varied. Sometimes, it's because there isn't an authority that's positioned to enforce some sort of accountability, and sometimes it's because people have been granted the freedom to make their own choices. Attempting to define "personal choice" as those things that only impact the one person who makes the decision is unworkable in a connected world. When people write sincerely about "desirability politics" and state that "attraction and dating is political" or seek to explain "Why your food choices are a political act," the space for purely individual, personal choices that no-one feels they have a stake in becomes vanishingly small.

And so, to a certain degree, people have learned to simply push those other self-appointed stakeholders aside. And I don't hold that against them. In my own understanding, other people don't owe me anything. The fact that the choices they make in their lives will have impacts on me may be unfortunate, but it's the way of the world. And for that reason, I try to avoid hanging anything of importance on other people behaving in a certain way; to do so would be to create a recipe for disappointment.

One of the problems with the shift from containing or managing the SARS-CoV-2 outbreak to eradicating the virus is that the latter goal leaves little to no room for defection from the group plan. But when it's unrealistic to expect that one can get 8 people to agree on what to order for dinner in the evening, it's orders of magnitude less rational to expect that tens or hundred of millions of people are going to act in unison. And that doesn't even bring partisan identities into the picture. In general, any plan that relies on masses of people all going along with the plan is likely not going to work out as hoped. That fact of life should always be an incentive to have other plans in place, ones that don't rely on as much coordination.

Enter the Ninja

The next lesson is how to disappear in a puff of smoke...

The Renaissance Faire started up on Saturday, and since the weather was cool, I took the opportunity to go. Stopped in for my annual lesson in European Longsword, and while I was waiting, I noted that these two were having a go at it. While I know that Feudal Japan is a bit out-of-scope for the European Renaissance, I still think the Faire missed a bet by not going with a Ninja theme for at least one of the weekends this year.

Personally, I didn't really see the point in so many people wearing masks for an outdoor event, but that's likely just me.
 

So Scary

The good professor is at it again.

It’s obvious what an unvaccinated person should do: get vaccinated ASAP, and stay super-safe until fully vaxxed (remember, shot #1 doesn't protect against Delta the way it used to). Particularly in a high case prevalence region, your chance of catching the virus has never been higher, and – while treatments have improved – there’s still a decent chance of a stormy course, including Long Covid, hospitalization, and (depending on your risk factors) death. I’d be afraid. Yes, I'd be very afraid.
Professor Robert M. Wachter, Chair of the Department of Medicine at UCSF.

Now, if you've read this blog for any period of time, especially since the beginning of the SARS-CoV-2 outbreak, you may recall that fearmongering gets on my nerves, and I've dunned Professor Wachter for this previously. While I understand the reasons why one might seek to use fear as a motivator, it's not always the best way to go about things. In a situation in which people trust one to advise them, there's no real need to use fear. As I've stated before, the intuition that only fear breeds an understanding of the usefulness of precautions is misplaced; people are perfectly capable of taking action to prevent outcomes that they aren't necessarily afraid of. Understanding an outcome to be undesirable is not the same as being afraid of that outcome. And for people who don't trust the person seeking to advise them, fear comes across as an attempt to manipulate.

This is not a rapidly-emerging situation where an immediate fear response is needed. While it may be conventional wisdom in some sections of society that it is literally impossible to be too careful where SARS-CoV-2 is concerned. not everyone is ready, willing or able to hand over a blank check in that fashion. And there's no need to. There isn't anything that one can do with a threat that one can't do by understanding what motivates someone and appealing to that.

But I don't think that's the point. I don't know if Professor Wachter is really attempting to spark fear in those people who haven't taken a vaccine or justify the fear (and perhaps loathing) of those who have. Because honestly, how many people is the Professor going to reach with his tweets who don't already agree with him? It more likely that his words have become a cause for the vaccine-supportive to fear for their children than the vaccine-opposed to fear for themselves. And for those who have already been vaccinated to nod along in agreement as to how stupid their "fellow Americans" are.

I am of the opinion that the United States is not, and has never been, a unified polity. The United States is too large and populous, and not wealthy enough, for people to not have interests that are direct cross purposes with someone else's interests. And that clash of interests eventually lead to people seeing one another as The Enemy. The SARS-CoV-2 outbreak is just another in a long line of things that people have used to sort themselves into Good and Bad, while their backers cheered them on. Sometimes, the media finds the cheerleading to be newsworthy.

Stained Glass

A new understanding of "street art," perhaps. One admires the work that went into this.
 

Just Say It

Still, I'm not going to lose my running mask just yet. Not because I'm "addicted" to the pandemic, or distrust the science or advice of the CDC — on the contrary, I'll be the first to explain all the ways we know running outside without a mask is safe. But I first started wearing my mask outdoors as a courtesy, a signal to my neighbors that I cared about their health and was taking precautions to keep them protected. As we begin rolling back pandemic restrictions and resuming "normal life," I'm not quite ready yet to stop sending that message.
Jeva Lange "Why I'll keep running with my mask on"

While I certainly understood Ms. Lange's motivations, I do feel that her take on this contributed to the overall "public health theater" aspect of the way that the SARS-CoV-2 pandemic has been handled. The expectation that everyday people can't understand the nuances of the situation that they live in, and thus symbolic reassurances that don't actually improve the situation are helpful, leads to a state in which signalling takes on an outsized importance.

But that signalling also sends a message. For Ms. Lange, it's that she cares about her neighbors. However, just as with any other message, once it's out there in the world, the sender has no control over what it actually communicates. And a culture of wearing masks communicates that people should see themselves as a hidden danger to others and others as hidden danger to them. While it's true that covering one's mouth and nose can decrease the chance of direct person-to-person transmission of the virus, the reason why ubiquitous mask-wearing was mandated was that it's possible to not have any symptoms of the disease, yet still be contagious. The risk of miscommunication isn't necessarily a reason to change one's behavior, but understanding the potential for it is helpful, as it reduces the temptation to confidently state other people's understanding of the world around them.

It might also bring a certain openness to other possible messages. Running without a mask on is unlikely to communicate to everyone who sees Ms. Lang that she's uncaring and incautious. There will likely be some who would see that as a sign that the messaging on the current public health understanding was getting through to people or that being outside doesn't carry the same level of risk as other activities.

In the end, message by signalling is imprecise. Granted, imprecision is a fact of life. One can walk up to someone and speak one's mind and the other person might still not be 100% clear on the meaning of one's words. But part of public health theater is the understanding that simply giving people information is ineffective. But I don't know how accurate that understanding is. When there's no reason to treat a person jogging on the sidewalk as a significant risk of infection, then perhaps it's best to be up front about that, and start making it clear that this is a situation in which an abundance of caution, and certain precautions, are not warranted.