Patri Friedman

Metacontrarian take on nCoV: Your panic is the real pandemic. We live in an age of anxiety, where global connected media have driven us to a fever pitch of unhealthy obsession with irrelevant distant events. Our brains are hijacked by amplified signals of primitive threats.

By spreading fear porn, you might as well be a Russian bot account, spreading controversy-stoking political ads. These virulent memes, like political outrage, have no direct physical effect, but directly impede our sense of the Stoic circle of control.

We worry way too much about the wrong things - distant plagues instead of our own personal health. We use toxic shock media to distract ourselves from presence in our own life. We're manipulated by actors, foreign & domestic, who use high-valence bait to sucker our attention.