One of the things coronavirus has done is change the way I think about my behavior. I've moved from thinking about what consequences my actions have on myself to what consequences they have on others. This move doesn't come naturally to people and I think it helps explain the resistance to things like masks and vaccines.
A lot of the arguments against lockdown are some version of this: "If I want to put myself at risk, that is my decision and the government does not have a right to make it for me," or "The vast majority of COVID deaths are the elderly or immunocompromised. I am neither, so why can't I eat indoors/attend a wedding/go to church/etc."
People easily understand risk of death but not risk of transmission. Risk of death involves thinking of the self; risk of transmission involves thinking of others.
Another common anti-lockdown argument is that the COVID-19 recovery rate is between 97% and 99.75%, meaning only 1-3% of the people who get it die from it. More people die from car crashes than COVID, and we don't ban cars.
But car crashes are not contagious and that mortality rate grows the more the disease spreads. And the disease spreads based on our actions. The question we should ask is "Three percent of what?"
If we throw caution to the wind, it's 3% of the US population, all 328 million people, and nearly 10 million people die. If we limit exposure by wearing masks and practicing social distancing, it might only be one-third of the country that gets exposed, roughly 100 million people, and 7 million fewer people die.
My point is that our individual behavior determines how many people that 3% mortality rate applies to.
Muh Freedoms
The individual vs. society-wide thinking is also evident in discussions about a post-vaccinated world. Biden, Fauci, and the CDC have been saying that even after you are vaccinated, you will still have to wear a mask and practice social distancing.
The individual thinker hears this and thinks "what is the point of getting vaccinated if I can't get my freedom back." The society thinker hears this and thinks "I'm protected but transmission is still possible; I need to keep others safe until we reach herd immunity, so I will continue to wear a mask."
Unintended Signaling
The other thing I've learned from coronavirus is the disastrous consequences of politicizing behaviors. To an antimasker/antivaxxer, you can show all the studies and give all the convincing arguments until you are blue in the face. There is one giant hurdle that no one wants to talk about. Even if unintentional, wearing a mask has the secondary effect of signaling membership in the Blue Tribe.
And every time an antimasker/anti-vaxxer sees their Blue Tribe Facebook co-worker/family member change their profile to a mask-wearing headshot or give the status update "Just got my first dose of the Pfizer vaccine" it unintentionally reinforces the idea that mask wearing and getting a vaccine correlates with Blue Tribe membership.
People often make public displays to normalize behavior they think is good for society. But I think this is one of the examples in which it makes things worse. So what should we do? Be more like Eric Weinstein and less like Patton Oswald.
Got vaccinated yesterday. I will continue to speak about the overselling of vaccines at the same time I talk about the virtues of vaccines.
— Eric Weinstein (@EricRWeinstein) April 6, 2021
I elected to go w/ the somewhat lower efficacy of the virus based J&J because novelty of the mRNA approach had a more opaque risk profile.
When the polio vaccine dropped in 1955 people lined up to get it, & we were 2 years away from artificial satellites. Now in 2021 we carry external world-brains in our pockets & there’s robots on Mars and idiots think the COVID vaccine is full of wizard poison.
— Patton Oswalt (@pattonoswalt) April 6, 2021
Which one do you think got piled on? Surprisingly, not the one that called a whole group of Americans "idiots."
Why did it get piled on? Because of the on-ramp theory. The belief is that Eric has a large platform, including many right-wing followers, and questioning the science of vaccines is going to put people on the path to extremism.
Promoting vaccine suspicion is legitimizing antivaxx conspiracy thinking. He presents himself as bold and scientific, but he just leads people onto a dangerous anti-science highway and soon they are following QAnon.
Patton, on the other hand, has "the right views" and rightfully makes fun of anti-vaxxers. 90K likes and 18K retweets.
For the vaccine-hesitant crowd, which tweet is more likely to move them in the direction of vaccination? Which is more likely to politicize vaccines and push them to vaccine resistance?
Off Ramp to Herd Immunity
The problem with the on-ramp theory is that it ignores the off-ramp theory.
Regarding the New York Times piece on Scott Alexander, Scott Aaronson writes:
"The piece devotes enormous space to the idea of rationalism as an on-ramp to alt-right extremism. The trouble is, it never presents the idea that rationalism also can be an off-ramp from extremism ... precisely because he gives right-wing views more charity than some of us might feel they deserve, [he] actually succeeded in dissuading some of his readers from voting for Trump."
Eric is the antidote to craziness. He provides influence for a certain group of people who, in his absence, would continue on the highway of craziness all the way to Alex Jones.
I recently heard a quote about Joe Manchin, saying that he isn't the Democrat that progressives want, but he's the Democrat that can get elected in West Virginia. Likewise, Eric Weinstein isn't the liberal progressives want, but he's the liberal that can convince vaccine-hesitant citizens to put a needle in their arms.
No comments:
Post a Comment