COVID-19 Outbreak (Update: More than 2.9M cases and 132,313 deaths in US)

And, I share that distrust of government and belief in rugged individualism and it makes me uncomfortable to give out information like that when I know that the government will have easy access to it., but I also recognize that there are times when small "sacrifices" need to be made for the benefit of society as a whole. And, in the case of contact tracing, for my own benefit as well. I mean, if we are going to open up the economy, certain "sacrifices" are going to need to be made to do that. Some people will be sacrificing their lives so I don't think it's unreasonable to ask people to write a name and phone number down when they decide to have a meal with service at a restaurant. In that light, my discomfort with giving private information to a third party that might give it to the government doesn't really seem all that important.

And, it completely complies with the balancing test that SCOTUS has established over hundreds of years of jurisprudence. The fact is that rights will be limited in some ways by almost any government act. The question then becomes how important/fundamental is that right and how narrowly tailored and reasonable is the thing that is being done to violate that right. In this instance, I see the violation as very, very minor and the method to be pretty narrowly tailored for a very important purpose - contact tracing. It's not like they are even checking ID's to get the info. They don't even get it unless their if someone there tests positive. They aren't collecting all of these logs.

We have allowed many other violations of what I think are much more important individual rights to happen for must less compelling reasons.

This is basically where I'm at. I think it's reasonable to be worried about government overreach and worrying about slippery slopes and all that. But it's also reasonable to allow the government to coordinate what must be a community response. The simple way to balance this is to set up a Schelling fence ahead of time to prevent things from going down a path that at this moment seems terrible but might be made possible by incremental changes that make this end result more possible at some future point.

I've been itching to drop in a murder Ghandi reference for some time now, and now's my chance. I'm taking it from here (https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/Kbm6QnJv9dgWsPHQP/schelling-fences-on-slippery-slopes). It's from a blog that I think you'd enjoy, it has some strong libertarian influences (one of the main contributors also runs this blog (https://slatestarcodex.com/)).

Anyway, the legend of murder Ghandi goes like this. Let's say Ghandi is the ultimate non-violent pacifist. As such, if you were to offer him a pill that would turn him into a murdering psychopath, he'd obviously refuse. Even if you offered him a million dollars. But let's say that you could offer him a pill that would make him 1% less likely to be a complete non-violent pacifist for a million dollars. 99% Ghandi is still pretty good and really unlikely to kill anyone, and now he'd have a million dollars to do more good. If you're a utilitarian, it makes sense for Ghandi to take the pill and the million dollars. Now lets say you make the offer again -- you're now dealing with 99% good Ghandi, he's slightly less abhorrent to murder than 100% Ghandi was. He's more likely to take the pill and the million dollars -- after all 98% Ghandi is still really good. And you can do this all the way down until you have Ghandi rampaging through the streets. However, if let's say Ghandi was able to think about this ahead of time and decide that 95% of his peak goodness he's pretty comfortable at his moral fiber. He can set up a Schelling fence at that point and not go beyond it.

We can do this with pretty much any policy we're worried about creating a slippery slope.