Via Darwinian Conservatism on the COVID-19: ‘The CDC Lowers Its Estimate of the COVID-19 Infection Fatality Rate‘:
‘The general lesson from all of this is that when people understand what kind of pandemic they are facing, their behavioral immune system will motivate them to spontaneously change their behavior in adaptive ways to mitigate the health costs of the pandemic through social distancing, while also securing the social benefits of freedom of movement.’
I’m as much concerned about many ideas afoot in the Republic, the people we’ve elected, and the incentives those people are receiving, as I am about the disease. We’ve been rewarding many weak, often incorrect, and sometimes, hysterical voices in our current institutional landscape.
We also have a lot of large, semi-functional bureaucracies out there, full of people who haven’t been elected making decisions.
I try and get information from many sources.
—
Speaking of information, Youtube appears to be mainstreaming and monetizing itself apace, while Twitter still seems to be amplifying LI=Loudest ignorance and selecting for LAB=Loud Activist Bias.
As many readers know, I have full trust and absolute confidence in the Twitter Trust & Safety Council. In an attempt to be as fair as I can, however, I suspect some Twitter problems are all-too-human. This could merely include the sentimental soft spots and biases of a few people scaled-out across the network, now involving lots of money and influence. If you’re building something other people use, perhaps it’s best not to scale-out your own biases and sentimental soft spots and tell users it’s raining.
Dear reader, this is why I write a blog with a few thousand followers.
Enjoy the rain!
As for the tendency in engineering types towards techno-utopianism which I’d argue could do with a good humanities, history or legal education (not necessarily the kinds of education available these days with so much bad institutional stewardship and capture): Today’s well-designed new software platform (if it’s lucky enough to gain traction), could well become tomorrow’s flea-market or center of online blight, with pockets of prostitution, drug-running and the occassional murder.
Do you want the online cops to run another dragnet for wrongthink while they unroll a new murderer-friendly outreach program?
Incentives matter.
It’s always worth a reminder: If you choose play the activist game, don’t be surprised if your partners suddenly flip-over the board, start throwing pieces around and claiming you are the new oppressor. The logic was there all along, after all.
Change, but at what cost?
—
As for my sentimental soft spots, here are a few things a reader points out (I’m into more classical guitar music, blues-based rock, some folk and a little jazz).
I had never thought to put these two together, so thank you. There’s a message in here, but you’ll have to dig it out yourself:
We Real Cool
The Pool Players. Seven At The Golden Shovel.
We real cool. We
left school. We
lurk late. We
strike straight. We
sing sin. We
thin gin. We
Jazz June. We
die soon.