[ExI] enough time has passed...

[Jason Resch]

On Sat, Jan 22, 2022, 7:53 PM Stathis Papaioannou via extropy-chat <
extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org> wrote:

>
>
> On Sun, 23 Jan 2022 at 11:38, spike jones via extropy-chat <
> extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org> wrote:
>
>>
>>
>>
>>
>> *…*> *On Behalf Of *Stathis Papaioannou via extropy-chat
>>
>> No Stathis, we will cheerfully take whatever measures which might
>> possibly save us.  We will ignore what our government says however.  Two
>> very different things.  This has been amply demonstrated.  Note they are
>> not necessarily oppose, just different.
>>
>> >…But you’re all gonna die if it is required that at least a certain
>> proportion of the population take the measures, and this proportion is
>> larger than those who would do it voluntarily.
>>
>> --
>>
>> Stathis Papaioannou
>>
>>
>>
>>
>>
>> No Stathis, it really doesn’t work that way.  Nothing we did stopped the
>> virus.  But the virus doesn’t kill everyone.  We were told things like
>> “…you’re all gonna die if you don’t…” this or that, but that kind of
>> overblown rhetoric permanently damaged the credibility of those spouting
>> such nonsense.  Most of us knew someone who caught and recovered.  I am
>> one: I caught alpha very early in pandemic, and I do freely admit it kicked
>> my ass bigtime.  But after I came home from a hospital stay (still not
>> knowing what that was) my bride and son both caught it, presumably from
>> me.  My bride experienced a moderate flu.  For my son a very mild illness
>> that caused one day off school and even that was a coin-toss.  It was only
>> after we all three recovered that we heard anything about this new covid
>> disease out of China.
>>
>>
>>
>> As you recall, it was in about March 2020 that I and others posted that
>> this looked like something that might have escaped from a research lab in
>> China (I caught it from a medical worker who had just returned from
>> China.)  It was ridiculed as an absurd theory, which later turned out to be
>> a likely explanation.  This further damaged the credibility of those who
>> did the “fact checking” in the spring of 2020, such as Face Book and
>> Twitter.  Now our trust in those organizations is very low, and may take
>> years to recover, if ever.
>>
>>
>>
>> This we can say: if we are told things like “…you’re all gonna die if you
>> don’t do {x}” that is a quick way to turn the public against {x}.  We
>> didn’t trust that before and we trust that even less now.
>>
>>
>>
>> Summary: We were told to follow the science by the people who were
>> following the science fiction.
>>
> You’re avoiding the point. IF there is some measure which will save you if
> widely implemented enough, you won’t be able to implement it if a large
> enough proportion of the population won’t do it voluntarily. It’s a deficit
> in the system, if indeed that is your system. You seem to think it isn’t a
> problem, or indeed that it is a desirable feature. So all you can do is
> hope for the best.
>

Conversely, if this widely implemented measure X gave everyone cancer in
five years it would be good if it were not adopted by 100% of the
population. I think some degree of robustness is afforded by populations
not all doing X at any one time.

It can be a deficit in some circumstances and a strength in others, but we
can't always know upfront which it is.

Consider that when you turn on the lights, half the cockroaches scatter and
hide and the other half remain in the open to continue eating. The ones
that scatter risk starvation while those that remain out risk getting
squashed. Either strategy can be good or bad for the individual, but the
species as a whole benefits by distributing different response strategies
across members of the population. It's a hallmark of evolution and
necessary for a species's survival.

Jason
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