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.
Conversation
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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It’s like hurricanes or earthquakes or forest fires vs built environment, but drastically more asymmetric. The biggest, rarest quakes we expect, like Cascadian big one, still only threaten a region. Here we have a decadal threat that can casually threaten us much more broadly.
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It might be the great filter kicking in
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Replying to
An interesting point you've already alluded to is the limits of disinformation. It turns out populists do need experts and bureaucracy when it comes to public health.
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I was re-reading Carlo Cipolla's (of stupidity Law fame) "the seafarer and the bureaucrat" (amazon.com/burocrate-mari - don't think it's been translated, sadly)...
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... It looks at the frustrations of British merchants as they dealt with the strict sanitation controls of the Italian port authorities re. the black death.
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What's striking is that the quarantines worked because they also kept rats, mice and fleas (the carriers of the disease) off the mainland - but at the time they didn't know
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Know we know much better (though not perfectly) what spreads the disease. We are better placed. But we need to yield to the power of the bureaucrats, who will eventually abuse it in the future. Taleb Ian paradox.
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(talebian paradox really more of a contradiction, tbh - his current pusition would, in effect, simultaneously advocate and banish the role of the bureaucrats on charge of public health)
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I think we’re seeing a great natural experiment unfolding, a dozen different systemic responses that people will be studying for years. Simplistic broad generalizations of the sort Taleb favors will be tempting but of limited value. Bureaucratism as 1 variable in a dozen.
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Yes, agreed. The optimist in me hopes this might lead to a definitive ditching of particularly sub-optimal systems (eg US healthcare, of which I am no expert admittedly, but seems completely perverse to us outsiders)
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