Thank you, Schroedinger’s Cat:
We are in the middle of a global pandemic, a cold virus gone viral. The death toll due to Covid-19 is rising everyday. May isn’t even over and we have already crossed 100,000 deaths in the United States alone.
The virus has bought the whole world to it knees. Almost no one alive today has seen an epidemic on this scale. So paranoia is running amok even among people who should know better. The closest parallel is the Spanish Flu that swept the globe almost a hundred years ago. First it was China and then it was Italy and now we are at the eye of this storm. So far our response has been anything but surefooted. States are scrambling to get medical supplies while the federal response has been halting and inadequate to combat the scale of the unfolding disaster. A microscopic virus invisible to the naked eye has brought the behemoth of the global economy to a complete standstill.
But was this inevitable? The federal response to the pandemic has been guided more by wishful thinking and posturing than by hard scientific data. What explains all the missteps and the fits and starts to combat this pandemic? At the heart of this unfolding tragedy is the scientific and numerical illiteracy that plagues our society, from ordinary citizens to the President. Climate change deniers, anti-vaxxers and people who believe that the earth is flat have been proliferating for sometime now. Some of them have ascended to the highest positions of power. Isaac Asimov said it better than I ever could in his 1980 essay.
The strain of anti-intellectualism has been a constant thread winding its way through our political and cultural life, nurtured by the false notion that democracy means that my ignorance is just as good as your knowledge.- Isaac Asimov
This cult of ignorance is proving costly to our health as the death toll keeps rising due to the COVID-19 pandemic. Infectious diseases experts have been warning about a pandemic at the scale of the 1918 flu pandemic for a while now. The President and his team had been warned by experts as far back as January that a catastrophe was looming. They knew yet they did nothing. They disregarded the scientific consensus about the virus just like they have disregarded the scientific consensus about climate change.
One look at the graph of the exponential spread of infection should have scared anyone. Unfortunately for us some one didn’t pay attention in their high school math class or their intelligence briefings for that matter.
People who disregard science forget one thing, you don’t have to believe in science for it to be true. The laws of nature work whether or not you believe in them. The earth’s gravitational acceleration is g =9.8 m/s2 even if you think that the earth is flat. Viruses can infect you even if you are an anti-vaxxer. But ignorance of science and math is not without consequence. People who promote falsehoods that vaccines cause autism are bringing back infectious diseases like measles which were considered eradicated. They also vote into office elected officials who deny climate change and twiddle their thumbs as a virulent virus ravages the nation. They gut budgets that fund our research infrastructure from the CDC to the NIH and NSF. They want to gut CDC funding during a pandemic. The research budgets which were trimmed because of sequestration (across the board funding cuts to the funding of government agencies to enforce fiscal discipline enacted in 2012) never bounced back when the economy did. Gutting research funding while cutting taxes for the wealthy and corporations is like burning seed corn to have a party right now.
Everyone wants a vaccine for COVID-19 in a hurry now but scientific expertise and research excellence don’t happen in a day or even a year. There is no just-in-time research. It has to be funded generously and in a consistent manner so that people are willing to dedicate their lives to careers in science which for the most part is hard lonely work with little glory. And who else but the government can do this when the rewards, if they exist, are distant?
Investment in science and math is essential for our very survival. This includes support for science and math education, K-12 and beyond and robust federal funding for both pure and applied research. I hope that this pandemic has taught us that ignorance of science comes at a steep price, the price tag is 100,000 dead Americans and counting.
bbleh
I hope that this pandemic has taught us that ignorance of science comes at a steep price …
“Us” being the crux of the matter. Some of us didn’t need the lesson. And I’m afraid some of us are beyond teaching.
Science is all sigmoid curves. I just hope this pandemic has taught enough to enough of us.
Mike in NC
This is what 30-40 years of Republican attacks on science and public schools brings you to.
dmsilev
To quote from another post-mortem after a clusterfuck due in large part to a triumph of politics over expertise,
(the triumph of politics over expertise in that case actually goes back a lot further than just the decision to launch on a too-cold day. Back when the Shuttle was being designed, NASA’s chief did a favor for a politically-well-connected company in Utah, giving them the contract to build the boosters despite all of the technical evaluations saying Bad Idea. Being landlocked, they had to build the things in segments so that the pieces were small enough to ship by rail to a coastal site for assembly. Hence the o rings…)
Elizabelle
Excellent essay. Timely topic. Will have to read that Asimov essay linked.
And this:
I think this part could be a bumpersticker.
I have wanted to use that argument with my brother in law, the free roaming Confederate sympathizer. Gravity does not care whether you believe in it or now. Neither do viruses.
But he gets by with way too much. Because there is just no point to engaging with him.
RepubAnon
gbbalto
As Asimov rightly points out, this has been a strand for a long time. We are finally so unlucky as to have a president who understands and believes in nothing (not even capable of being coherently anti-intellectual) but who has figured out how to attract and promote these idiots. They were always there, though.
Jeffro
Where did I read it recently…I think it was a Steven Johnson book, FARSIGHTED…(runs and grabs book off the shelf)…Johnson quotes philosopher Nick Bostrom as saying:
gbbalto
@Jeffro: This!!!!11!!!!
Enhanced Voting Techniques
It’s worth keeping in mind this isn’t just America; it’s also Mexico, Brazil, Sweden and Russia and likely more that are part of the culture of Science denialism. But that’s something to throw in the faces of the MAGA hates “Good to see you are cool with the Mexicans and Swedes then”
Jeffro
@gbbalto: You almost have to wonder how this ‘strand’ has survived in our genes and culture this long…one would think evolution would have weeded it out long ago.
It must be linked to the genes that prompt us to act even before we have all the info, something something something. Run away often enough when spooked (instead of standing there thinking about it) and eventually, sure, you will have avoided being eaten by a saber-toothed tiger while someone else becomes lunch. Grab that last odd-looking fruit from a tree and maybe you save yourself (and your bloodline) from dying from hunger while everyone else is wondering if it’s safe to eat.
I guess the problem is, through science and technology, we have vastly more historical and real-time data than our ancestors used to, if we’d only listen to it.
schrodingers_cat
@Enhanced Voting Techniques: Yes its not just America I have focused on America because we had the resources to do better.
bbleh
@Jeffro: Hmm, off-topic spitballing, but as to Bostrom quote, why should it be otherwise? Isn’t “good enough” kind of a rule of nature? Doesn’t optimization occur only slowly and under continuing evolutionary pressure? Once there is no pressure — things are good enough, no clear advantage to further mutation — why should evolution — optimization — proceed?
@Jeffro: As to act-before-you-think, I’d definitely recommend “Thinking Fast And Slow” by Kahneman. Among other things, and summarizing very roughly, he does indeed propose a two-layered system that’s not incompatible with what you suggest.
trnc
… and during the transition, and by Obama in 2014, and probably 100 times since.
Miss Bianca
Great essay, S-C! I may post a link to some FB groups I am part of.
...now I try to be amused
I would like this pandemic to be a Sputnik moment, but I fear we will have to keep Republicans out of power for a long time to make it stick.
I like the way Philip K. Dick put it: “Reality is that which, when you stop believing in it, does not go away.”
Jeffro
@bbleh: I’ve already read TFAS…probably influenced my thinking among many other good reads!
opiejeanne
@bbleh: The idiots are sassing Inslee for the way the infection rate is being counted. For reopening the infection rate is supposed to be x new infections per 100,000, and they’re complaining that of course our infection rate is rising because TESTING!!!! They are arguing that reopening should be based on numbers of hospitalized cases.
This was on Facebook so I didn’t engage. I couldn’t tell if these were foreign trolls or really denizens of Washington.
Mike in NC
For quite a while I’d been meaning to finally read Richard Hofstater’s “The Paranoid Style in American Politics” (1965). Got it for the iPad for 99 cents.
Jeffro
@bbleh: I guess we agree that further optimization would happen if/when it is rewarded in some way…doesn’t have to be slow, though…like avoiding death by Covid-19, “deaths of despair”, worse and worse health outcomes, etc. There’s no particular bonus for making it *just* over the line, or doing it slowly, and it costs so little (might even cost less) to do so much better as a species.
The Bostrom quote was in Johnson’s chapter about the perils of AI. Those advances will not happen slowly at all.
David ? ☘The Establishment☘? Koch
Hilarious –
EvaMelanoma (“I don’t really care, do you”) is leaking to Vanity Fair to distance herself from Dump. That’s how bad the crisis is.Elizabelle
@David ? ☘The Establishment☘? Koch: You might have a bad link?
Interesting about Melania. I believe that could be true, too.
gbbalto
@Jeffro: Also bbleh: Agreed. Cheerful ignorance works MOST of the time, as demonstrated throughout history.
+5 – Hope I make sense
NotMax
“Nothing in all the world is more dangerous than sincere ignorance and conscientious stupidity.”
– Martin Luther King, Jr.
Raoul Paste
Many years ago, Al Gore wrote a book called “The Assault on Reason”
And so it goes.
bbleh
@Jeffro: But I thought “just over the line” of being able to start such a civilization was the premise. If so, there is indeed a bonus — technological civilization, with all its benefits for survival (among other things — versus not. But I tend to view evolution as all stick and no carrot, so maybe I’m just a pessimist
In any case, agree indeed re timescale of evolution. But I also believe that there is at least some degree of “social” or “behavioral” evolution (vs. physical), which naturally is more evanescent but which can occur much faster
Goku (aka Amerikan Baka)
@Enhanced Voting Techniques:
The funny (sad) thing about Sweden, is that their Public Health Agency is the one that has enacted their “herd immunity” strategy to disastrous results. And they’re still going, “all according to plan”. So the experts in charge there have fucked up, instead of their elected officals.
There are reports on nursing homes in Sweden that talk about willfully allowing old people to die needlessly because nursing homes are seen as the end of life, like putting old people on ice floes to die. That’s a cultural problem in Sweden apparently
schrodingers_cat
@Miss Bianca: Aww thanks! I also have a graph on my blog of the total death count in the United States.
schrodingers_cat
@Elizabelle: Thanks.
wseattle
@Jeffro: Interesting point. I think some have tried to put some science behind this idea — e.g. Gut Feelings: The Intelligence of the Unconscious by Gerd Gigerenzer (haven’t read it though). Makes sense any “gut” mechanisms only have value in the absence of relevant science though.
A personal pet peeve for me is arguments that start with “but you can’t say that” or some similar presumption based on somebody’s instincts. From there a short step to conspiracy theories.
Royston Vasey
New Zealand Update – COVID-19 Stats (Pop. c.5m)
0 new cases today, the total cases remains at 1,504
– that is now 5 days with 0 new cases, and a total of 1 in the past week.
0 new deaths, the total remains at 21
0 people in hospital with COVID-19 anywhere in the country, a first since mid-March
21 people are still recovering in their own quarantine.
1,462 people have recovered.
RV in NZ
Goku (aka Amerikan Baka)
@opiejeanne:
That’s the exact same argument I’ve seen on r/coronavirus on Reddit. I have no idea how valid it is, but the people pushing it are pointing to Texas, Georgia, Florida as evidence that there is no spike in cases because they’ve been open for 3 weeks already. Any spikes/increases in cases are explained away as increased testing
I imagine the majority of people social distancing before the stay at home orders as well as within the last few weeks accounts for why the virus never crippled the healthcare system in most places as well as why no major outbreaks have occured yet
Punchy
Much harder to fill the collection baskets with PhDs and engineers than trailer park mooks and frightened wrinkles.
Goku (aka Amerikan Baka)
@Royston Vasey:
But small country! /s
Kay
Fun little piece if you loathe these people:
Oh, yay. They’re giving it to Jared to run :)
gbbalto
@Goku (aka Amerikan Baka): I saw an article about that too, but was unable to locate it again. Mind you, the % of deaths in nursing homes there is not worse than many other countries. I look at Canada (my other country), with a not (too) bad overall death rate, but 80%+ are in nursing homes. Also just revealed is that one of the largest chains (with nursing homes in several other countries) is owned by a Crown corporation (i.e. the Canadian people). Not sure we can look down on Sweden that much.
ETA: The Crown corporation is so very very sorry! But it seems that all 1st world countries need to comprehensively reform elder care.
David ? ☘The Establishment☘? Koch
@Elizabelle: Thanks. I fixed it.
Miss Bianca
@Kay:
Uh,oh – I’m shaking in my boots now – Jared Kushner, SOOPER JENIUS is on it!
David ? ☘The Establishment☘? Koch
Looks like Rick Wilson’s attack ad worked.
banditqueen
Thank you S-cat.
I worked in vaccine research for a very lo-o-ong time (went to Dr Birx and Dr Fauci lectures and seminars over those years). It isn’t easy to come up with an effective and safe vaccine–if it were easy it would get done rapidly because vaccines work–there is no conspiracy to hold a vaccine back and no conspiracy or coverup in administering them. I’ve seen vaccine delivery mechanisms improve over the course of a couple of decades, as well as the development of a wider range of options to cultivate an effective immune response, & there are easier ways to administer vaccines. And compared to 50 years ago, well, the research really pays for itself in so many ways. Even though we don’t have an HIV vaccine, we also were able to establish how to administer HIV meds in the setting of mutations, etc etc. And as S-cat notes, there isn’t a lot of glory for most of us, and I’m fine with that. But she’s right that the work must be funded–the knowledge base expands and builds on and branches out from continuous new information, even if the original research and validated results were started from a very different stand point.
dmsilev
@Kay:
…they say, calling in Jared Kushner.
Miss Bianca
@David ? ☘The Establishment☘? Koch: Good. If that fucker Wilson does nothing else useful for us, let him continue working his way under Trump’s skin like the nasty little tsetse fly that he is.
gbbalto
@Goku (aka Amerikan Baka): Islands work well. Prince Edward Island in Canada has 3 entry points. No new cases for weeks. New Brunswick (the poor sister of Atlantic Canada) that borders on out of control Quebec impresses me the most. No deaths, no nursing home cases, 120/122 cases recovered so they can really concentrate on tracking new cases. Alas, I visit my sister and BIL there every Christmas. Being from Maryland (out of control too) when can I go back there?
Pete Downunder
In Today’s Guardian:
What borders on stupidity?
Canada and Mexico
NotMax
@dmsilev
Flack of all trades.
Chacal Charles Calthrop
@Jeffro: Here’s an example: Christopher Columbus. Everyone told him you couldn’t sail to Asia by going due west because the distance was too far. While that was absolutely true, it turns out there was something that even the best scientists and cartographers of the era didn’t know about.
(incidentally Christopher Columbus died thinking he’d been to Asia; it was only the discovery of the Pacific Ocean that led Europeans to realize they were on what was, to them, a wholly new continent.)
Kay
@Miss Bianca:
Oh, it gets better. This is the second story that has Jared as the key to reaching moderate suburban voters.
There is just no reason on God’s green earth to believe he would be good at that. He’s a completely unappealing person himself and he has no particular skills or accomplishments or creativity of any kind.
Jeffro
@Kay: You know what this means…
…DEMOCRATS IN DISARRAY time!! Let’s have at it, national snooze media!
LOLOLOL
opiejeanne
@schrodingers_cat: Yes, thank you for this essay.
Jeffro
@David ? ☘The Establishment☘? Koch: Wilson does know how, where, and when to put the knife in, I’ll give him that.
Kay
@Jeffro:
Democrats are excited. They’re starting to think they’re going to win. I had a Zoom meeting tonight with NW Ohio counties and they voted to do 3 month leases of county headquarters rather than the traditional 2 month because they want to start earlier. I think it matters if they believe they can win.
Miss Bianca
@Kay: That was a deliciously nasty little piece – a palate cleanser, as it were, between courses of Trump-induced sheer horror stories.
Mike in NC
@David ? ☘The Establishment☘? Koch: I’d be willing to look upon a shirtless photo of Brad Parscale simply to try to count the swastika tattoos and related shit.
Bill Arnold
@Jeffro:
It’s from Superintelligence: Paths, Dangers, Strategies (Nick Bostrom, 2014)[1]
It is good book; a bit simplified. Most readers will find themselves arguing with many parts of it.
Skeptics are free to believe what they want, but they will be wrong, eventually. :-) Biological(/some cyborging) engineering is the big wildcard, IMO.
[1] some more quotes
Goku (aka Amerikan Baka)
@Kay:
My father is a constant fretter when it comes to the election. I mean, I’m cautiously optimistic, but he told me tonight that every person he sees in public without a mask is a vote for Trump, which is silly imo
rikyrah
@Kay:
They are just in it for the money. Scamming as much as possible.
rikyrah
@Miss Bianca:
They should get someone to organize a SuperPac to pay for Wilson’s ads to be shown in swing states. They are very good and biting ads.
marklar
@wseattle:
Gigerenzer’s work typically deals with the notion that “considering too much information often ends up with faulty decision-making”. While there has been a lot of research on the perils of gut-based thinking, he’s shown that there are times when using simple heuristics produces ‘fast and frugal’ outcomes. This can be seen in some work on the ‘tyranny of too many choices” (Barry Schwartz’s research), optimal medical decision making when inputs are limited to 3 or 4 factors (as opposed to more…research by Ellen Peters), and Daniel Kahneman’s work on optimal hiring decisions (just focus on a few key factors…don’t overanalyze!).
Now, none of this suggests that gut-based thinking is always optimal…just that in an imperfect species like ours that evolved to survive (which requires heuristic/gut-based thinking, as opposed to slower algorithmic/rational thinking), gut-based thinking can often be adaptive. HOWEVER, IT IS NOT ALWAYS THE CASE, WHICH IS WHY WE ALSO EVOLVED RATIONAL/ALGORITHMIC thinking.
Emphasis on just one element of cognition misses the point that it is the blending of both that makes us human. The 18th Century poet William Blake laid this all out in his “Marriage of Heaven and Hell” (although Daniel Kahneman’s “Thinking Fast and Slow” provides empirical support for the benefits and pitfalls of each kind of thinking).
schrodingers_cat
@banditqueen: Thank You for your comment. I think what most non-scientists don’t realize how science is done. If I do a follow up post can I quote you and/or ask you some questions.
You can DM on Twitter or reach me at my bloggy email
[email protected]
https://twitter.com/ManyWorlds1Cat
Thanks!
Kay
@Miss Bianca:
Jared and Ivanka are banal. They’re boring, coddled twits. Does no one ever listen to them? They’ve never had an original idea or thought between them.
Bill Arnold
@David ? ☘The Establishment☘? Koch:
I want them to continue this with other admin figures. e.g. Jared Kushner, Mike Pompeo, Stephen Miller. (In my estimated order of increasing difficulty.)
Miss Bianca
@Pete Downunder: *lolsob
Kay
@Goku (aka Amerikan Baka):
I haven’t seen the intense partisan divide on the masks here as I’ve seen reported. There’s a range of opinions on the severity of the risk but it runs the gamut, with many Republicans here on the more cautious end of the scale, and this county went 70% for Trump. I actually think the masks are something that mostly make sense to people and a prevention that might become widely accepted. It’s fairly easy wear one, the cheap paper masks are everywhere now, and I think the idea behind it is easy to explain.
I wonder if the focus should have been more on masks right from the start. I think it gives people a sense of control, makes them less anxious if they can take an action.
Miss Bianca
@Kay: Jarvanka look and sound like what would happen if Barbie and Ken had been designed by the people who brought us Westworld. Plastic fantastic suburban creepiness weaponized.
catclub
@Goku (aka Amerikan Baka):
Agreed it is silly. Not when only 70% of registered voters vote. and not everyone is even registered.
jc
I was gobsmacked to see how Trump sneered with contempt at a reporter who wanted to keep his mask on today. Mocking him that wearing a mask was “politically correct.” Trump is not just stupid and wrong, he’s arrogantly stupid and wrong.
Citizen Alan
@Jeffro: I have often worried that we’re now in the experimental stage to answer the question: “Is intelligence above a certain level a desirable evolutionary trait or not?” Because looking around at the state of our world, I now think one possible explanation for the Fermi Paradox is just that every species that’s smart enough to develop technology kills itself off.
Goku (aka Amerikan Baka)
@schrodingers_cat:
I think the most annoying and common complaint non-scientists make against expertise/science is the old “they can’t make up their minds” chestnut, especially when it comes to health news
Mallard Filmore
@Kay:
I view this as a good sign: that Parscale does NOT have a direct line to Russia for strategy and tactics help, and Trump is not depending on them for his campaign.
Peale
Even if we get a vaccine that is effective and trustworthy (I wouldn’t put it past this administration to announce a vaccine in August that hid the fact that it was sugar water), we have the issue that I doubt there will be sufficient numbers of people to actually take it to get sufficient herd immunity so that the immuno-compromised can come out again. We aren’t just anti-science. We just fill our heads with any old sciency thing that appeals to us. Like aliens visiting ancient Aztecs. Or Bill Gates planting microchips in vaccines. I mean, 40% of republicans apparently already believe that he’s going to use a vaccine to track people. Already. And that particular conspiracy could only have been around a few weeks. But before Democrats can be smug, 20% of our side believes that. And 24% of independents. So that would be, what, 27% or so who just aren’t going to take any vaccine. And that doesn’t include anti-vaxxers who aren’t necessarily in on the Gates conspiracy “theory.” And a boatload more who won’t get it because no one has actually died of Covid-19 because its all a conspiracy of hospitals to get more medicare dollars. Anyway, I wonder if Gate’s billions will protect him from being called before the Senate to “come clean about his plans”.
Jeffro
@Bill Arnold: thanks! will look it up!
Kay
@Miss Bianca:
People talk all the time about “evangelicals” and Trump but that isn’t the religion of his supporters. The religion of his supporters is “success!”, as in those sad seminars and those ridiculous woo-woo beliefs like The Secret.
They’re the people who sell CBD oil online, or try multi level marketing, or buy distressed real estate and then lose their shirts trying to “flip” it. They’re the people who storm out of my office when I tell them the rental property they bought for 68 was never worth more than 40, and still isn’t.
There’s a lot of overlap with evangelicals, so I see the confusion, but the religion is “success” and there are tens of millions of these people.
Jeffro
@Citizen Alan: Hmm, maybe.
Maybe it’s more, “Is a species smart enough to develop technology and stay humble/realize there’s SO MUCH more to learn?”
I doubt too many of them (us?) manage to thread the needle before killing themselves off. I’m not optimistic.
Jeffro
@Kay: their religion is ‘magic’, the idea that a thing can be made to happen by wishing for it, by swimming against the tide, by getting so riled about the ‘other’ that they miss the bigger evolutionary picture…in this case, that the virus doesn’t care about one’s beliefs or tribe or anything. The virus is just math. Math doesn’t care about magic.
Goku (aka Amerikan Baka)
@gbbalto:
The thing about Sweden, is that their strategy was specifically aimed at building herd immunity in the population, protecting the economy as well as vulnerable populations at the same time. They’ve obviously failed at this when compared to their Scandinavian neighbors. More people have died and only 8% immunity. The economy is going to go in the crapper anyway.
BruceFromOhio
That’s the plan. Was there a question?
Bill Arnold
@Kay:
To me this is the most offensive thing about them. They’re parasites, sucking thoughts, good and bad, from other minds. People-users.
Though Jared treating most problems as PR/sentiment manipulation problems is a close second. SARS-CoV-2 does not have sentiments to be manipulated. It is immune to his tools of choice.
sfinny
I just heard about a pair of 2 year old bonded cats that need a new home. Katonah NY. I live nearby and would be willing to transport. Don’t have pictures or anything, but thought I would put it out there.
Elizabelle
@Kay: Wow. And they fell for fake “success”, yet again. As if the four or six or whatever bankruptcies weren’t already a clue by four.
The sad side of the Horatio Alger myth. The gullible. The clueless.
Bill Arnold
@Kay:
It should have been an early focus. IMO the WHO and early on the CDC have already racked up a very large body count with their anti-masker stances. Protecting supplies for health care workers I can understand, though it should have been front and center rather than disguised,, but the backing for the WHO anti-universal-masking recommendations was/is very weak scientifically, and has been underwater scientifically for roughly two months.
I feel confident and strongly about this because[1] the new case numbers in NY State are clearly (to eyeball analysis at least) lower since 5-10 days after Cuomo’s orderi making masks/face coverings mandatory indoors in public places. Compliance is very near 100 percent, and the week previous the voluntary mask usage was like 50 percent. I almost feel safe in stores now.
[1] I was pushing masks in March but the science was a little more iffy then. Much more since then, and we’re also doing “natural experiments” re pandemic control with various NPI measures including masks, yay Science; happy I’m not in the control arm.
Goku (aka Amerikan Baka)
@Kay:
I’m glad to hear that about your county. Yours is near the Michigan-Ohio state border, right? Detroit had a bad outbreak, so I imagine people would be especially afraid considering the proximity and interstate traffic
@catclub:
That’s a good point
Kay
@Elizabelle:
I was wondering if that’s how Republican operatives like the Lincoln Project could reach wobbly Trump voters, because that’s who they are. They’re the kind of people who buy “this is the secret to success” books and seminars and products. There’s no ethical component to those sales pitches. They don’t mind that Trump and the Trump Administration are not “good people”- that’s not ever part of the pitch. Successful people are by definition good people in those worlds. It’s never considered or evaluated past that. I see them in my office. “I’m the top seller in replacement windows (windows that are sold primarily to lower income people with a mechanism like a mortgage, so they’re often taking advantage of people). I ask “are they good windows, is it a good deal?” (because I see the aftermath of these sales) and they just look at me like that’s a foreign concept.
Elizabelle
@Kay: I hope they try that tack.
Some of these people might prefer to “believe.” But some might wake up.
Kay
@Elizabelle:
Scot Adams is a woo woo “success” person. He thinks he brought his financial success into being by believing it. Literally magic. So is the My Pillow man. The Power of Positive Thinking. That’s what they see in Trump.
Goku (aka Amerikan Baka)
@Kay:
Don’t you just love the obnoxiously obvious silver/gold cross the My Pillow guy wears in his commercials? That right there tells you everything you need to know about that huckster
Mike in NC
@Goku (aka Amerikan Baka): Several weeks ago when the Secretary of the Navy job opened up, I almost expected the My Pillow evangelical asshole to get offered the job. Totally not qualified, but a dependable fluffer of Fat Bastard.
NotMax
@Jeffro
Mr. D. Duck on line one.
:)
wseattle
@marklar: Thanks — useful context. Indeed, ignoring one or the other style of decision-making is to miss the essence of humanity. There’s an interesting interplay between the time scales of evolution and of scientific development.
oatler.
I am reminded of the ending to Asimov’s “Nightfall”.
JR
Penicillin
Discovery (Fleming) 1928
Medical use (Florey and Chain) 1941
Mass production (Merck et al.) 1943-1944
patrick II
@bbleh:
It’s Nature’s Peter Principle — we have risen to the level of our incompetence.
Brachiator
To the ignorant, science, magic and miracles are all the same thing.
Coming late to the thread, but just wanted to note how much I enjoyed this essay.
Jay
Uncle Cosmo
@gbbalto:
Cf. Richard Hofstadter, Anti-Intellectualism in American Life, 1963 (Pulitzer Prize for non-fiction, 1954). Ike Asimov was quite a few years late to the game.
And just FTR –
I lump Ike with Arthur C. Clarke, another “giant of science fiction” whose clay-footed clumsiness with the language could only bear their alleged stature in the rare instances when an idea grabbed them by the scruff of the neck & shook them into eloquence: Clarke in Childhood’s End and The City and the Stars, Asimov in the novelette “Nightfall.”
/rant
schrodingers_cat
@Brachiator: Thanks I am glad you liked it.
Chief Oshkosh
@Bill Arnold: The whole mask fiasco is another missed opportunity. With just a tiny, tiny amount of leadership, we could’ve had home mask making a nationally-unifying activity. But fuck no! The experts decided to lie (and fuck them for that, regardless of motivation) and, of course, we have no national leadership to speak of.
stinger
Excellent post!
schrodingers_cat
@stinger: Thanks!
planetjanet
@Elizabelle: Believe is the wrong word for for is going on when someone says I believe in X. What they are really saying is they “feel” that X is correct. People think and feel. Some make decisions based on thinking, and some based on feeling. Belief implies that one’s emotions have some greater significance outside their own head.