Conversation

Feels like I’m missing an important angle on virus. Sense of a major blindspot. Hmm. Public health, economy, institutional response, secular behavior shifts... what angle are we missing? Working out extra degrees of impact on above angles doesn’t seem to illuminate blindspot.
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Something about this being an important historical long-arc narrative cue. Thinking centuries not decades. Something about this is setting off my longue durée instincts. More Black Death than Spanish flu.
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I think my sense of the uncanny has to do with the extent of miscalibration of the strength of the wilderness/built environment barrier. At the microbial level it barely exists. We are in relation to microbes where we were with lions and tigers a thousand years ago.
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It’s not that the civilizational stack is fragile because of bad design or perverse evolution. Our stack tech is just laughably weak in relation to our microbial environment. A century of parent progress against infectious diseases has created a false sense of security.
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Replying to
did you ever see that thing about how bacteria colonies coordinate to release poison all at once so they can kill their host and consume it?
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Replying to and
Quorum sensing! Certain bacteria will produce peptides that, upon achieving substantial density in the extracellular environment, trigger a molecular cascade that turns on expressive genes — in the case of staph, toxin-producing ones.
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