Firstly, getting this out of my chest: It felt like a really good note, except for the graphs. The author acknowledges that he is pulling the Bell curve out of his ass, but somehow serves to illustrate his point. But for some reason the extra amount of information that would implicitly come from the internet seems uniformly distributed across qualities. I would have expected a taller (or wider) Bell curve if anything. Why even bother with graphs if there is no semblance of meaning to it? Was he aiming for the target audience's math fetish? I do appreciate silly illustrations, but I felt it distractingly pointless.
Having said that, it's nice to see that people acknowledge the ways that information was available, seeding the need to re-evaluate information dynamics.
It's amazing how the whole world can be in turmoil about a presence we barely bothered to actually look at because there's simply no point in doing so.
This is the only reason I chose not to delete some old accounts from different sites, and check on them yearly-ish. I used to think the internet as ephemeral, but I don't have that luxury as long as anyone else doesn't. From relatives to banks the authentication crisis is real. My soul is forever bound to some shitty teenage usernames and some poorly secured hashes distributed around the world.
Related: Samo Burja is a sociologist with a pretty tidy and poignant YouTube channel. He has a lot of stuff on human institutions (from corporations to civilizations), their underlying social mechanics and what makes or breaks them. He emphasizes the importance of patronage and apprenticeship viewed as a "social technology" that allow for the correct passing of knowledge that is essential to maintaining institutional life-cycles.
I found this so baffling that the best I can say is I don't know, and I've found no explanation satisfactory. "Denial" doesn't cut it, it's mass delusion. The first Chinese quarantine was a giant red flag that nearly everyone ignored.
Which brings us back to the matter at hand; devastating plagues have happened many times in Europe. This one is probably not going to be devastating, but we really don't know the effect of this disruption in today's society.
But back to the discussion about the WHO, their bland attitude is greatly to blame for the inaction of the CDC, and the rest of the world.
As a case study, for some days half of all confirmed cases outside of China were in the Diamond Princess, and the proportion held until very recently with 1000+ cases worldwide (sans China). Why? Sampling bias. Even arguing that a cruise is more virus-friendly cannot possibly account for a single ship holding half of the world's cases. And then came about Iran and Italy, with no clear path of spread. It's hurtfully evident that there are so many more cases and there's a huge visibility issue, and the WHO delaying measures aggravates the matter dramatically.
They showed a strong unwillingness to declare the high state of emergency from the start, which dragged the numbers 30 fold through delayed action. They were the one institution with the moral authority to drive prevention (incentivising testing, the closure of air travel, etc). People act as if the only possible responses are complete inaction or panic. This is terribly misguided. Had the WHO declared high alert a month ago, it would have meant a whole month to take it all in, plan, condition your touch-your-face reflexes, rethink your lifestyle, etc. Maybe they didn't want to be the boy who cried wolf after SARS, MERS and H1N1 were declared global outbreaks and ended up not being full-blown pandemics. But now what? Is the watchdog scared to watch? They act as if Chinese numbers are trustworthy, and I can only guess that it's half political reasons, half delusion. The CCP has a history of under/misreporting catastrophe that should be factored in, at the very least as a warning label. With a mostly mild disease that spreads like wildfire there's bound to be huge visibility biases which were not taken into account, and then you end up with things like Italy where they don't even know how it spread.
Instead there's a discourse vacuum where people seem to decide what's going to happen more on the basis of pre-existing narratives than reality. Examples; People mistrust the US believed it's all exaggerated to hurt China, for a while some "journalists" wrote more about racism and stigma than the actual ongoing development, politicians kept ringing the everything's OK alarm, and finally, mindless optimists are the worst.
The Chinese government decided to establish an economy-crippling quarantine on January 23rd with only 1000 confirmed cases. Something was awry. And in the following week all the warning sings have been available (the quick spread, reports of CCP measures and life in Wuhan, research papers about the spread, incubation, etc). But for a month now the WHO refused to read the writing on the wall, only god knows why.
It's way thinner and full of holes. It's not so much about the skin on your cheeks, but your mouth, eyes, nose membranes. And even if you just dirty your cheek, the contamination might spread elsewhere with further touching. Think about this: How do you take drugs? Eye dropplets, oral blotters, snorting.
secret mind control programs. The human brain, being a computer, is expected to be alterable. But the extent of secrecy, shadiness and memory-holing of secret government programs never ceases to amaze.
>Mathematics was never focused on proof until the formalization of math became popular approximately 100 years ago.
We are transitioning surprisingly fast from kinda explaining stuff to automatically and systematically advancing exclusively through rigurously formalized proofs.
Professional lawyers posing as peers psychologically tortuting him to shatter his worldview, while the professor that led the experiment manipulated him to continue.
Given that he secluded himself and wrote about his ideology for years like a comic book villain origin story, it's safe to say they took to too far, whatever it is they did.
Also, afaik MK tested lacing with different doses, and only the big incidents were disclosed. Why wouldn't you suspect drugging here too?
Having said that, it's nice to see that people acknowledge the ways that information was available, seeding the need to re-evaluate information dynamics.