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.

I’m glad that China is now acting strongly. I'm glad the tiny number of actually-exposed people in the US (PUIs) are tracked, quarantined, tested, and monitored. That’s sensible, practical, and worthwhile. That’s our circle of control.

I’m glad the CDC & WHO obsess, worry, debate, and study things like nCoV. That’s their job, and I thank God they exist & are funded. There's clear black swan risk & it’s critical that professionals be tracking, crafting countermeasures, and de-risking for the humanity.

But you don’t work for the WHO. You've never been to Wuhan. Probably you don’t even know anyone who has. You aren’t part of the mismatched team of stubborn weirdos working on the real problem. You’re just a free billboard for any news that pattern-matches “exciting movie plot”.

Ever laughed at preppers? Congrats, you’re one of them now. Sneer at anti-vaxxers? Congrats, you now share their category - you’ve let your mind be hijacked by overblown concerns about small but real fears to your own personal detriment.