If person W says “I was wrong, you were right”, our immediate reaction is that the right person (R) is better, smarter, and will gloat. W is humiliated, proven ignorant.
That’s why those in the wrong don’t want to acknowledge it, and hence mutter sorry
R hears muttering, and doesn’t think W really means it. So she’s not satisfied either.
But why? R did get an apology.
It’s because the point of the apology is to make sure it won’t happen again.
What R wants to hear is not sorry. It’s: “If in the future the same circumstances happen, I will not react the same way. We will avoid this problem.”
What R wants to hear, in other words, is learning. A half-assed utterance does not convey learning.
W, meanwhile, doesn’t want to appear weak. They don’t want to lower their status. What’s a way to solve that?
R should not gloat or treat it as a personal win. Rather, it should be seen as a mutual win: the same conflict won’t happen again.
So what’s a perfect apology?
W must take the first step. They were wrong. They must say sorry and then explain in detail how they see the problem emerging and what their specific mistake was.
Odds are, R and W won’t, in fact, see eye to eye in what the pbm was. So they’ll engage in a dissection of the event
That dissection is gold. It’s where the leaning comes from. It should be seen as a great joint pbm-solving opportunity.
Once R and W agree on what went poorly, they will both be satisfied: They’ve either both learned, or they’re sure one of them has learned the right lesson
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And now for good news. Another failure of linear thinking: Vaccine rollouts.
Disregard comments such as “With the current level of vaccinations, it will take 3 years to vaccinate everybody!”
We will not have the current level of vaccinations for long.
Over the next few weeks, you will see how daily vaccination rates steadily increase. This is something humans, markets and govs are good at: making one single thing happen when there’s a huge incentive.
Even a linear growth in daily vaccinations would get lots of ppl vaccinated fast (quadratic growth):
Eg, If today the US vaccinates 100k ppl, tomorrow 120k, and 20k more every day, after 1 week you have 1.1M vaccinated, but by the end of next week 3.2M are vaccinated.
2. The evidence of the transmission-virulence tradeoff theory is not that clear. This fantastic paper explains it well. ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/P…
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.
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.
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.