@skinnylatte

"What do [minority] people think, [minority talking head]?" is one of the most liberal phrases in the English language.

@clarinette

I don't know, friend. I'm an opera singer.

@lmk

If you want to teach folks about prevention vs reaction, you've got to do something about key cultural values like "harm reduction" (which assumes that harm will occur...), individualism (we don't need to worry about that because it won't affect *me*), and systemic precarity (if I make a million dollars today because we didn't solve that problem that will cost someone else a trillion tomorrow, it was worth it)

You also have to break everyone's acculturated futility bias.

@lmk

Also -

It's dispositively true that if you address problems early they end up being cheaper to fix and less destructive. But does it make rich people richer?

In retrospect, I think the neofascist's' total control of our economy and society, and funneling of money to the worst people in the world, will be seen as obvious. "How could those people not see these corrupt criminals for what they were and throw them out windows?" they will ask in 50 years.

The 75 year olds will be like ‍️

@lmk

Could it be a combination of history "ending", our political class turning away from people and towards their owner/operators, and a "number goes up this quarter" mentality that drives almost all business in this day and age?

The ruling class doesn't believe they will be subject to disasters, no matter what they are, because they believe their own propaganda about the absolute power of wealth. That's why they build bunkers instead of lower carbon pollution.

Joke's on them, of course.

@jeffjarvis

They want to be able to pivot to "the US government is right to attack Europe now that they've repelled our military advances in Greenland" quickly, so they have to leave open the idea that conquering Greenland is an idea with merit.

It's all cynicism and opportunism and ideology and ethical wastrelcy coming together in a perfect storm.

They're also losing viewers by the bucketful every week. Hopefully they'll all go out of business and cease to exist, sooner rather than later.

@pjakobs @unchartedworlds @syllopsium

This sounds like an excellent way to absolve people who were fatally wrong and help them keep their positions of power and influence.

Which, don't get me wrong, is *very* "collapsing Western Empire" coded! There's nothing like being wrong and killing people to get you a promotion and a bonus in our society.

The reality is that science in the early 21st century is more of an ideology than a method, just like it was in the late 18th century.

@pjakobs @unchartedworlds @syllopsium

I mean, *basic decency* dictates that when you have a plague with a reported 1% CFR and strong potential for global spread you go hard with rhetoric.

Instead we got waffling and delays driven by politics and business.

It was politics and business that won the day, which is why Long COVID is the most common childhood chronic illness in the US.

I'm sure that'll work out fine, though. After all, I don't have a study in front of me that says "we're fucked".

@pjakobs @unchartedworlds @syllopsium

The answer, of course, is "ask an engineer" or "yes", because ostensibly you'd know that answering outside of your knowledge level was, not to put too fine a point on it, foolish.

The entire purpose of the "precautionary principle" is to assume the worst and be proven wrong, because to assume otherwise and be proven wrong results in... 300+ million deaths and the worst mass disability and persistent chronic illness crisis in human history.

@pjakobs @syllopsium

But this category error - confusing execution failures with engineering specs - happened all the time during the pandemic

Yes, if a doctor is careless and "wearing" a masks incorrectly that they take off frequently, the mask will not be "effective", because the doctor is a fool misusing a tool.

To the same point, if a surgeon takes a scalpel and slashes around inside someone's body like they're pretending to be Zoro, it's not the scalpel's failure when the patient dies.

@pjakobs @syllopsium

As I said, both hospital studies and RCTs are batshit dumb ways to "study the efficacy of masks", because masks are *engineered* and *thoroughly tested* for efficacy in absolute terms.

The way respirators protect from particles is well known and undisputed.

"Will people wear masks wrong" and "are masks effective" are categorically different questions.

One is a failure of training and execution. The other is an answered question of physics and engineering.

@pjakobs @syllopsium

When I hear you describe scientists, I hear someone describing an ideology, not a group of practitioners who have a body of knowledge and a mastery of a method designed to guide them in uncovering progressively more true aspects of our reality.

"Not making political decisions" is making a political decision, and especially in this era of "data is God" scientists are, whether they want to be or not, political.

That they are not taught this is a failure of their education

@bencourtice

A fraction of what it would have caused had we not shut everything down, even for the (too short, inadequate, unenforced) 4-6 week period that things actually changed.

China and Italy had pandemics that were a *fraction* per capita of the US', which by far was the worst pandemic in the modern world. I'm not familiar with Iran's, so I can't comment.

We take the 1st place trophy in terms of devaluing life and putting the interests of capital ahead of those of people.

@pjakobs @syllopsium

Look up AJ Leonardi, mask denialism, the "airborne" controversy, Long COVID denialism, "hybrid immunity", Great Barrington Declaration, and "immunity debt" if you doubt me.

These are all classic examples of how a community of experts, cut off from their comfort zones, made incredibly bad decisions based on out-of-date information or just full-stop made up notions. But still couched it in the language of expertise, which led to devastating policy errors.

@pjakobs @syllopsium

As I said: expertise is useful insofar as it can guide decisionmaking by providing a necessary perspective, but we've built a rigid and calcified scientific community in the West that spends most of its time protecting its own ideas, and less time dismantling them, especially in medicine.

In 2020, when circumstances demanded flexibility, dynamism and inference, the vast majority of the scientific and expert community failed to deliver.

Indeed, sometimes aggressively.

@pjakobs @syllopsium

The problem is when "facts" that are in evidence are wrong, but dogmatic insistence that they are, in fact, correct creates transparently bad outcomes in real time.

My mom was a research scientist (in the biological sciences) and professor, and when I pointed out that insistence on getting rock-solid evidence before we took precautionary measures was literally killing tens of thousands, she simply couldn't accept that action should be taken despite the lack of knowledge.

@pjakobs @syllopsium

We also learned that experts and scientists are *not* the people you want to set the pace of responding to an emergency or catastrophe.

Had experts and scientists accepted (or assumed, to limit harm) that COVID was airborne in March 2020, the pandemic could have gone a much different way.

Notoriously, many credentialed scientists also were like "we don't know if respirators work without RCTs!" which is, bluntly, batshit stupid.

@doug @pjakobs

When news is a profit center, it can't be difficult to watch. ‍️

@pjakobs

A not-insignificant number of major problems in our society are driven by the attitude that "_____ is impossible, therefore I will never try ______, which proves that ______ is impossible."

@pjakobs

The idea that people cannot be taught complexity, or even communicated with at all, is silly and particularly modern.

This refusal to communicate is both fascist (re: the political class) and fatalistic, as well as self-fulfilling: I won't tell you, then I'll decide you cannot learn because you do not know what I didn't tell you, so next time I won't tell you, again, because I was right!

It's like "I won't try to pass this policy because it will not pass, proving it couldn't pass."