Venkatesh Rao

The chain of causation from healthy individual decisions far from the crisis (“I’m healthy, our one party can’t hurt”) to icu bed-rationing (“2 dying patients, 1 bed, who to save?”) is invisible except as a mental model. There’s a type of person who can’t believe it is real.

Heard another ambulance as I was writing the last tweet. In some ways, I imagine watching bombs rain down in a war would be more scary but more real. No powers of abstraction or statistical reasoning necessary to “see” what’s going on.

The missing dimension in war comparisons is the link between individual courage and risk to others. If bombs or bullets are raining down, and you wander into the middle of it because you’re “not a pussy” only you get killed. Imagine if bombs or bullets worked like viruses.

You’d get hit by a bomb shock wave or piece of shrapnel or a bullet but not know it for 4-14 days. And in the meantime, everywhere you went you’d be dropping little bombs or shooting bullets at others... and they wouldn’t know.

The word “trace” as in contact tracing is interesting. Bullets have their own form of “contact tracing” ... tracer bullets were invented in 1915 to allow machine gunners to see their line of fire (and the people getting shot at could see it too). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tracer_ammunition …

Phone contact tracing is a cool technology but I wish there was something visceral or visual like tracer bullets. Like if you went to the grocery store, your nose would glow red for 4-14 days.

It’s easy to suspect stupidity, but anecdotally many who under-react seem to be actually pretty smart have some mix of Darwinian-karmic fatalism, and extra distrust of purveyors of abstraction-binding data. Actual difficulty with abstract reasoning seems to be a minor factor.