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When it comes to mass shootings or terrorist attacks I'm always happy to be one of the people going "hey this is a statistically tiny fraction of deaths and it doesn't make sense to make policy around it." But I don't think this applies to the coronavirus: vox.com/future-perfect…
Yes, the coronavirus has killed fewer people than the flu. That's not really responsive to peoples' fears, which are that it'll get much worse and kill far more people than it has so far - and if it kills as many as the flu on top of the flu, that'll be an immense global tragedy.
More than that, pandemics have some risk of being really bad. Much worse than the annual flu. As bad as the 1918 flu that killed 50 million - or conceivably worse, b/c we don't have a principled reason to think that's as bad as it can get either.
We should probably worry about them more and do more to make sure we're prepared. Telling the public to calm down and worry less is hypocritical and unhelpful when actually, public health experts are usually telling me they worry about pandemics a lot.
Last note: a lot of the most panicked people I see online are in Hong Kong. People in Hong Kong have *spectacularly* good reasons not to trust that the Chinese government cares about their lives and is giving them good info. China is reaping what they sowed, here.
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More from @KelseyTuoc see all

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Kelsey Piper
@KelseyTuoc
The United States has more confirmed coronavirus cases than anyone in the world. Here's how we got here: vox.com/2020/3/26/2119…
One of the biggest questions I grappled with in this piece: we know how our govt could have done better. more testing, less lying, better preparation, learning from other countries. They failed us.

But how could the rest of us have done better?
It is very obvious in hindsight that the CDC requirements for testing -- which are public and online -- made it impossible to tell whether the virus was spreading in the US. What if they'd been challenged more on that?
Read 12 tweets
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Kelsey Piper
@KelseyTuoc
If you want to understand the political positions held in Silicon Valley I think you need a understanding of how atrociously SF, the Bay and really all of California have been governed, and how viscerally this affects everyone here.
We are a rich region of a rich state and we don't have adequate public schools, or adequate roads, or adequate shelter or public services or law enforcement, and lately we do not even have consistent access to electricity.
I think a lot of the political stances you hear articulated by Silicon Valley and SF elites have, as their bedrock conviction, that the thing SF and more broadly California is doing *does not work* and that proposals to do more of it are *really alarming*.
Read 6 tweets
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Kelsey Piper
@KelseyTuoc
I think values differences and a desire for control both play a role here, but I want to throw in another theory: sometimes this is a variant on an information problem that I see a lot these days and that seems hard to solve.
If someone tells me about an unusually good giving opportunity, I should be a bit skeptical because they might be wrong, but I don't need a heuristic to never even both looking into these things, because it's not like I'm told about them all the time.
And I basically don't need to consider the possibility that someone is just trying to systematically scam me, because I don't give enough to be worth that effort. But billionaires do hear this all the time, from tons of people -- and they do give enough to be worth deceiving.
Read 8 tweets

Related threads

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Nafees Hamid
@NafeesHamid
What power do we have in preventing the next white nationalist #terrorist attack? I draw from our brain scan studies of #jihadist supporters to give some insights in this @nytopinion vid. It means changing the way we talk in the aftermath of an attack. 1/
nytimes.com/2020/03/02/opi…
"Terrorists rely on you and me and the way we speak about their crimes to increase the impact, the virtual blast radius, massively, from a small town to the whole nation... We have a power and responsibility to save lives, but it means changing the way we talk." 2/
"My colleagues and I carried out a bunch of psychological tests, including the first-ever brain scans of radicalized people. We didn’t find any evidence of mental illness, but what we did find were clues to what makes people willing to fight and die for their beliefs." 3/
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Hurricane Watcher
@GodlessNZ
(1) Thread #5 about the #TaosCompound New Mexico case, starting 8/30/18.

Politics, corruption, incompetence & passing the buck. This case has it all.

And it's NOT too late to fix the mess!

Read my series of threads about this case:
… …

#MAGA
(2) Shoot, the first tweet has the wrong date. This thread starts on 8/31/18 not 8/30/18. I hate little mistakes, but continuing on is quicker than fixing it all up.
(3) I realize 5 threads are a lot to read, but if your reply shows you haven't read even some of this unpaid research work I've done, you probably won't get a reply from me. I don't mind being unpaid, I prefer it bc I can say what I want.

I'm j/s, read some facts b4 replying.
Read 47 tweets
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Angus Johnston
@studentactivism
Hey, remember that playground gorilla statue that everyone freaked out about when some folks suggested it was kind of racist?
Well, the town repainted it to look less minstrely and reinstalled it and everything's okay now.
It's a useful reminder that "people object to a thing, other people respond to their objection, situation gets resolved" is a story that happens all day every day all around us.
Read 17 tweets
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Stealth Jeff
@drawandstrike
From conversing with these personality types:

the gov't is super duper unbelievably competent with super James Bond like agents carrying out multiple complex secret atrocities like Parkland, Sandy Hook, 9/11, LV.

I've dealt with gov't all my life. Only morons believe this.
The gov't is NOT super duper comepent with incredibly skilled James Bond-like agents pulling off very complex events to kill targeted American citizens disguised as randam mass shootings or terrorist attacks.

The truth is MUCH MORE FRIGHTENING than this fairy tale.
Let me give you just one example of how incompetent the gov't really is:

the Ft. Hood mass shooting.

An *incredible* number of warning signs and red flags were ignored that allowed an actual terrorist inside our military to kill US soldiers he viewed as his enemies.
Read 21 tweets

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