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Melissa Chen

@MsMelChen

2 Dec

As someone on the spectrum (with a deficit in contextual information processing) who grew up in a high context East Asian culture, I was really drawn to the low context nature of American culture.

I found it easier to thrive in a place where direct, explicit communication

was the norm. This was very much reflected in how language here is used, which is something that wokeness/the Successor Ideology has begun to change.

Language in our modern discourse now is hyper-contextual. "Abolish the police" doesn't really mean abolish the police.

"Black lives matter" is not just a literal statement of declaring the obvious. It's symbolic language that signals a whole other suite of ideas.

There are countless other examples of this shift. If one values cultural diversity, and not merely pay lip service to it, then one

Read 4 tweets

Melissa Chen

@MsMelChen

3 Nov

It's unnerving just how confident both sides are in emerging victorious in this election. Whatever happens, one side is going to have to reckon with the fact that there's some level of mass delusion going on.

(Thread)

I'm genuinely uncertain how it would go, but I won't actually be surprised at all if Trump wins despite what the polls tell us.

My natural instinct is to heavily favor System 2 (slow, analytical) over System 1 (fast, intuitive, gut-based) mode of thought, which did burn me the

last time in 2016. Despite claims that the polls have been adjusted to capture the missing voters this year, there's a sneaking suspicion in my gut that the data isn't capturing reality.

Something about the zeitgeist doesn't seem to be reflected in that 89% chance that 538

Read 8 tweets

Melissa Chen

@MsMelChen

28 Oct

The media can lie by publishing falsehoods. But mostly, they achieve the same effect of subterfuge by omission.

It’s popular to lament our fragmented media ecosystem & its self-reinforcing information silos. But without the right-wing media, who would interview Tony Bobulinski?

Who would be asking salient questions about a presidential candidate two weeks from the election?

I warned that of all the Dem candidates this year, Joe Biden seemed to have been vetted the least. Everyone else went through the gauntlet with harsh (sometimes unfair) hit pieces.

@NYPost

In the old world of media where everyone was constrained by the same few channels, what chance did the truth have of coming out?

A major story got sidelined and the reasons given were hilariously arbitrary. So the @NYPost & independent journalists pick up the story, and it gets

Read 6 tweets

Melissa Chen

@MsMelChen

18 Aug

This is interesting.

If true, it might explain why there are so few deaths and cases in Cambodia, Thailand, Vietnam, Laos despite many connections to Wuhan.

These countries are next to each other & vary in systems of government, state capacity and

nypost.com/2020/08/15/cov…

@tylercowen

in measures taken to address the pandemic. Cambodia for example, didn't go into full lockdown and mask adoption is not widespread.

@tylercowen touched on this Mekong conundrum here: marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolu…

If that report is true, the reason for these statistics could be that

people in these Asian countries were already protected due to cross-reactivity from being exposed to years of related coronaviruses.

They might be full of antibodies that blocked viral surface proteins and antigen-specific T cells generated when they were exposed to these

Read 15 tweets

Melissa Chen

@MsMelChen

27 Jul

America is allergic to tyranny and for good reason. There's a history of federal overreach that's more than well-documented (Waco comes to mind), and combined with the ethos that was forged in the birth of this nation, a general distrust of government persists.

Sometimes this comes into conflict with the desire to preserve law and order.

It doesn't matter what your politics are. Most people would acknowledge that there exists a line that, if crossed, they would wholeheartedly endorse the deployment of federal agents domestically.

What we're debating here is exactly where that line is, because it cannot be that this line doesn't exist (which only anarchists would argue).

Surely there are conditions under which you would justify federal action.

Read 12 tweets

Melissa Chen

@MsMelChen

24 Jun

One of the problems with "silence = violence" is that we're no longer allowed to be reserved in judgement whenever a story about a heinous hate crime explodes into the national consciousness.

But if anything, it's what we need more than ever. Slow news. Time to gather facts.

Instead, we must rush to condemn, to publicly display rituals of solidarity, to brandish a hashtag here and there, because to not do so is to risk the passing mob's wrath, to be called out as a racist dismissive of injustice, of oppression.

So here we are with yet another Boy Who Cried Noose story, and worse, barely a reckoning from the media that fanned its flames and called it wrong.

Some blue-checked journalists have even insisted on denying the FBI's investigation and doubling down (*cough cough* Jemele Hill).

Read 5 tweets

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