Coronavirus, Bias, Etc.

This year has changed my opinions on human nature, but it's hard to really explain how or why.

Mostly because I hadn't actually thought we were all that logical in the first place. I mean, I adore people. We're quirky, and weird, and have the potential for astounding acts of kindness and sinister acts of selfishness... but we're not actually all that good at logic. This is not to say we're terrible, we've got some great advantages in other ways. Pattern recognition, quick decision-making. All things that have allowed us to survive over the years. Logic is important, and worth striving towards, but mostly because we should try to be aware of when we're not being logical.

That's one of the first things Sudoku teaches you. When you're in there trying to figure out what number fits in the square, if you go with your instinct and put in a number that feels right - you're probably wrong. You absolutely have to have some basis for deciding what number fits in the square, if not you'll screw up the game and lose.

Pattern-recognition, giving personal anecdotes more weight than statistical analysis, confirmation bias and using emotions to decide which facts we believe (rather than science) - they're all pretty typical human behavior. Awareness of when we do this makes it easier to recognize and correct for it. And logic is ultimately better than the alternative. (There's a whole discussion I could have on belief systems, and the ways belief systems reinforce themselves when something seems to prove them wrong, and the role science can play as something different and also the same. That is, science has the potential to self-correct and focuses on evidence... but there are also scientists who use it more as a belief system, with all it's flaws, so that commonly accepted science is sometimes wrong. More research and experiments and scientific studies can eventually correct for that, though. Not in the way that evangelical Christians explain away something they assume God isn't behind - like a political loss - as 'the work of the devil', either.)

So anyways. We're not all that logical, and I've known that for a while, so I'm not exactly shocked by the multiple examples of this that 2020 has given us.

And yet...

And yet I had expected better. I don't know, I suppose I'd thought death and dying would be a huge wake up call. That all those biases and anecdotes and whatnot might affect people's thinking for politics in a normal year, but 250,000+ dead would matter.

Stalin said that "the death of one man is a tragedy, the death of millions is a statistic." I have never liked the cynicism, lack of empathy, and sheer evil behind a statement like that.

And yet, as goal posts have moved and the death toll continues to rise, I think there is more truth to that then I want to admit.

I have seen what I had previously thought were somewhat credible news sources publish the worst and stupidest assessments of coronavirus. I mean, I'm not an epidemiologist myself, so take it for what it's worth... but even though illnesses do appear to rise, and spike, and taper off that's generally either because it spread so far and wide that it's hard to find new people to infect, or because of actions taken to stop the spread. So when one of the earliest and most widely publicized predictions for coronavirus decided to use the Chinese experience to model the data, well. Our experience would only mimic the Chinese one if we had taken the same sorts of actions. 

If we weren't quarantining, and testing, and doing what China did to control the virus then why the hell would you think our coronavirus infection rate and death rate would follow the same trajectory?!?

And okay, again. I'm not an epidemiologist and the articles don't go much into the nitty gritty. Maybe the models took that into account? (Though given how wildly wrong the predictions I linked to were, it seems like they either didn't - or assumed the US would lockdown to a degree that hasn't happened.)

As with so much in life, these wildly inaccurate predictions have already been forgotten. And yet they served their purpose. That is, they were published during the height of uncertainty, and gave people looking for a reason not to freak out something to cling to. Gave decision-makers cover for saying 'it won't be that bad, don't worry'...

And here we are, over 250K dead. And it's just a statistic.

I know part of why that is. Part of it is our human tendency to rely more on anecdotes and personal experience. I mean, nobody in my immediate family has been diagnosed with covid yet. Nobody I'm close to. I think I had one facebook friend, a rather loose acquaintance, who tested positive and told everyone.

If all I went by was my own personal experience, I would probably think coronavirus was overblown.

However.

However, statistics matter. However, for as lucky as I have been (so far), there are others who have seen coronavirus sweep through their entire family. 

However, it shouldn't have to affect me personally for me to care, or take it seriously. With the way exponential growth works, by the time its hitting me and mine it'll be far too late. 

However, we all should be able to learn from other people's experiences, so that it doesn't take the loss of someone we care about to make us change our minds.

I don't know how much of our current situation is because of the absolute disaster of our national leadership and how much truly is human nature. I can't help but think it's worse, though. There probably would always be people who think it's overblown, and refuse to wear masks, and all that... I've seen some articles about the Spanish flu that show as much. I just don't think it would have been as widespread if we didn't have the President of the United States refusing to wear a mask and giving out massive amounts of disinformation. 

Which brings us to today, in a sense. Because the issue has become so polarized that there's pretty much no ability to talk to each other. We live in vastly different worlds, with vastly different ideas of what's going on, and it's hard to see how and when we'll ever have a shared reality again.

That's the strange part, to be honest. I had thought that people dying would be an indisputable reality. I had always thought the notion of 'truthiness' and a post-truth world was pretty much bullshit. It works for philosophical things ungrounded in reality, but again - dead bodies are pretty much indisputable. Dead is dead, you can't pretend that they didn't die (though you can apparently say that it was pneumonia, or the regular flu, or a stroke, and pretend that it wasn't actually covid that killed them. And most people aren't comparing the current overall mortality rates to previous years to realize that there's a ton of unaccounted for deaths. And if you do make that point, they then argue that those unaccounted for deaths come from the lockdown.... even though I think we would have noticed thousands more people dying of suicide or whatever it is they think the lockdowns are doing to get people killed.)

Florida, by the way, is one of the worst for fudging their data and pretending everything is fine. I've been monitoring the state because I'm wondering how long that will truly last. Surely people are noticing that a lot of people are dying? Even more than can be accounted for by the number of covid deaths? 

Then again, on an individual basis maybe there's no reason to. They don't know anyone who actually died, or accept that it was for non-covid causes, or something. (Whenever I check for Florida covid on twitter, there's almost always some sort of misinformation push. Most recently it was some Federalist article saying Florida is doing better than Illinois and wondering why mainstream media drags Florida so much... and it's no use telling them how badly Florida is lying with their statistics.)

It's the degree of willful blindness that bothers me, I think. I've long accepted that partisan bias and confirmation bias means that there's always someone extreme on the edges. But I've seen even people I thought were reasonably good at critical thinking buy into some of the worst arguments.

And, like... I sympathize. I really do. I hate sounding all doom and gloom (and considering we've gotten this far, I have considered revising my estimates. Then again, we seem to be facing the worst parts of the epidemic now. As expected, more and more hospitals are nearing capacity... and people have gotten exhausted of social distancing, the holiday season is coming up, the weather is turning colder. The crazy thing is that a vaccine is right around the corner, and if we'd had halfway decent leadership a lot more people would have survived long enough to see that... which is also maddening if you think about it. But there's almost no point dwelling on it right now. If things get bad enough that might change, but for now... well. Not a lot to do about it.)

Anyways. I remember how strange it felt in March, when I'd  investigated enough for my own satisfaction and expected a long period of lockdown to come. My Little had a school dance, and I had a sinking feeling I knew how awful the next few months would be and privately decided to hell with it all. I was going to help her and her friends make some good memories, something that hopefully would give them a bright spot to look back upon in the months to come. So one of her friends couldn't afford to get a manicure? I'll pay for it, why not? And they want to eat out for lunch? Sure... no problem. Kid needs a ride home after the dance? I gotcha. (I do think it worked, though I'm pretty sure none of the girls realized how much thought went into it. They were shrieking and giggling and goofing off and being teenaged girls just like they should be.)

It's sort of the same feeling now, tbh. I expected we'd reach a tipping point earlier. I mean, I knew we'd be in lockdown for months... but I hadn't really expected it would be eight months and counting. I hadn't expected it to take so long to get to the more remote parts of the US, either.

The vaccine is right around the corner, and maybe it won't ever get as bad as I fear. 

On the other hand - as I've said. More and more people are talking about hospitals that are maxed out. Staff members that are exhausted and unable to keep up. People who need treatment and no beds are free - not just for their hospital, but anything in a two hour radius. 

And we just had Thanksgiving, where there's still a large portion of the population that doesn't take coronavirus seriously. That's on top of election day, and people celebrating Biden's win (mostly masked, thankfully) and MAGA folks protesting...

All signs point to a terrible, horrible, and dark winter. 

And nobody wants to hear it.