Thread by @patio11

Part of me feels that during a crisis is not a time to litigate claims for social status.

Part of me feels like the current crisis is so sui generis that there actually is social purpose in saying “Your priors from January predict X > Y based on formal expertise or authority.”

“However, we have material updates for you which have happened in the last weeks/days and which you have not incorporated into your view of the world yet. The decisions you make today impact the curve in weeks. Accordingly, yes, need to radically tinker with status weightings.”

And atop this will be a lot of people being petty, or writing clickbait to surf the dopamine wave, or just bored while stuck at home and eager to engage in twitter beefing.

And that isn’t great.

But it is pretty apparent by this point that some processes/institutions/indicia of authority which were quite trusted in December have not performed up to their rep and that some organizations who one would not expect to display cutting edge epidemic management factually do.

And on the third hand, for the purpose of achieving the unprecedented amount of coordination required to agree to cooperate against the only real enemy and to be able to live with each other in the aftermath, we might want to let some things slide.

And so we’re in this weird superposition of states where the game that actually matters is cooperative PVE but there’s a tiny bit of productive and close to zero sum social PVP in a sea of unproductive PVP.

“A WoW metaphor?”

If a WoW guild was distributing masks in February and your local health department was not then put their clerics in charge of DPSing the coronavirus.

I am much more serious about this than the observation sounds.