Most media outlets are like bioweapon labs that release viruses into the population.
News, like viruses, are parasites that add no value to their host (or even destroy it) but are great at spreading.
How can you vaccinate yourself from them?🧵
There are mechanisms for good entities to interact in a body. Viruses hijack those mechanisms to multiply and spread. For example, the coronavirus’ spike protein opens some cell up for invasion. Once in, the virus reproduces and then leaves to infect other cells.
The same thing happens with news. They hijack mental biases to spread.
For example, the chronicle of events, full of homicides, is mostly worthless. They are just remote anecdotes. A much better data point would be tracking the curve of homicides in your community.
But we don’t do that. When we see a homicide, we pay attention.
Because as we evolved over hundreds of thousands of years, living in small communities of up to 150ppl, paying attention to homicides was extremely important.
Now that we live with millions, it isn’t, but our brain is the same, so we can’t avoid but pay attention.
Media outlets know perfectly well it’s worthless. But they don’t care. They still manufacture these memes, these news, to hijack this bias and spread.
So they’re like bio weapon labs: both design things that spread for their own benefit, regardless of the cost to the hosts.
What can you do about it?
Only one thing: realize what’s happening. Ask yourself: is this meme valuable, or just hijacking my brain? That’s how you can vaccinate yourself against wasting your time.
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The new virus strain is ~60% more infectious. We haven’t processed what that means.🧵
1. Western countries that didn’t stop the previous variant won’t be able to stop this one. It’s already in UK, US, FR, NL... that we know. Probably many more places. cmmid.github.io/topics/covid19…
The time to close borders was this summer. Or a month ago. It’s too late now for most countries.
2. If countries had a hard time stopping it before, they will have a much much harder time now. If it’s 60% more infectious, R0 has gone from 2.7 to ~4.3 on average.
Countries that stopped the virus from spreading got R from 2.7 to 1, a reduction of ~60%. Now, they need to reduce R by ~75%.
But remember: all the low-hanging fruit is already used (masks, social distancing...). The next measures are all more expensive.
What was the impact of the article Coronavirus: Why You Must Act Now?
Now that 2020 is ending (finally), and that Medium has published it was its most read article of 2020, I wanted to look back to those few days in March.
Apparently, its origin is unclear, and its usage polemic. So this is a thread about its origin, why, how it’s used, and a lesson about processes vs. goals.
Back in March, ppl had no idea what was happening. They took cases at face value. One of the big goals of the article “Coronavirus: Why You Must Act Now” was to highlight how official cases was meaningless.
Then, ppl realized cases were not the entire picture. Testing was crucial too. No tests, no cases — but lots of hidden infections. So they started reporting cases and tests.
But these are meaningless numbers in a vacuum, so they sought a ratio.