My views are never formed a priori. They depend on a position's coherence with three pillars: epistemology, how complex systems work, and statistics supported by large amounts of data. If an idea aligns with all three, I embrace it. Otherwise, I ignore it — regardless of who's behind it.
This preamble is essential. I follow no argument from authority. I don't care who said what. If your idea doesn't stand on those three pillars, I'll listen politely and then move on. And I'm not swayed by mass opinion — partly because I work in marketing, and I know that crowds are irrational and full of cognitive biases.
Why lockdowns were incompatible with science
Science is a constant dialectical process. On one side you have what we know works (the defense), on the other, whoever wants to prove something better exists (the prosecution). The prosecution bears the burden of proof. Lockdowns had never been done in human history. They were the prosecution. They needed to bring evidence before being implemented. That evidence was never delivered.
No paper justified them. Not in February, March, or April. Not even today — except for studies with small samples and non-causal correlations. Lockdowns were a scientific abomination, and I'm embarrassed by the scientists who endorsed them without understanding the fundamentals of their own discipline.
Incompatibility with complex systems
Blocking interactions between the components of a complex system to heal it is simply foolish. This is a universal principle. We don't know exactly what will go wrong, but we know something will. Isolating people while eliminating much of the economy and social interaction means severing communication between the system's components.
The risk spikes from people fleeing Milan, the domestic infections that killed elderly people due to increased viral loads at home — these were all predictable effects. Lockdowns by their nature belong to a class of top-down actions that have been known to generate catastrophic unintended consequences for at least fifty years.
The risk management failure
When 90% of the population faces near-zero risk and 10% faces severe danger, only a naive person would apply a single risk management approach to everyone. No other field operates this way. Tell a trader to apply the same risk management to high-risk stocks and a savings account, and they'd rightly send you packing.
Lockdowns meant applying the same restrictions to young people (minimal risk) and elderly patients with chronic conditions (high risk). The result? The massacres in nursing homes, caused by the naive idea of applying average risk uniformly, rather than obsessively protecting the vulnerable from potentially asymptomatic young carriers.
A cure worse than the disease
We live in a capitalist society. Capitalism is an asset worth protecting if we want to maintain our standard of living. Shutting it down for months means destroying healthy businesses, creating astronomical public debt, and removing the tax revenue that funds healthcare. Health and economy are the same thing — denying this is reckless.
There's an even bigger strategic problem: coronavirus is one of a thousand possible zoonoses. If you wreck a country for a relatively contained threat, what do you do when bigger ones arrive? If you drop a nuclear bomb on a flea, what weapons are left when an elephant shows up?
The data has spoken
The champions of hard lockdown — Italy, Spain, Argentina — suffered catastrophic death tolls and financial ruin. Argentina followed every lockdown rule and ended up economically devastated. Anti-lockdown countries like Japan, Taiwan, and Sweden simply applied sound science: containment without lockdown. Normalize their data by population, and they're exactly where everyone would want to be.
Lockdown countries are now paying for mountains of mental illness, suicides, destroyed relationships, and businesses that fell into criminal hands. Many didn't care because they had unemployment benefits or secure jobs. But money runs out. And when it does, we see the real cost of playing God with the economy.
