The border belief described here was incredibly powerful and wormed its way around institutions the world over. The pandemic preparedness index ranked you *less* prepared if you had previously closed borders in the event of disease outbreaks
The WHO had measures to *prevent* border closures in the event of disease outbreaks written into the international health regulations, and even built tools to track outbreak-related border restrictions, so they could lobby to get them removed thelancet.com/journals/lance…
Credit to Lawrence Gostin for acknowledging that this was crazy, but it seems quite bad that an evidence-free political assumption shared by members of one class just became 'science' because nobody checked it?
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There's a good essay in the psychological/social condition (rather than just the direct economic position) of smart upper middle class young adults, and why Altman observed founders disproportionately coming from that background
Obviously by definition there are very few "super successful" people so it could still be that their offspring have an even bigger advantage than the UMC kids and it's obscured by their scarcity, plus thanks to homophily Altman is gonna know more UMC people anyway but
It does seem like UMC kids have some unusual advantages in building new things even beyond what you'd expect given their economic status (can afford to risk a career year on a new biz, likely to have savings, not supporting parents financially, good education to fall back on etc)
We're emerging from a pandemic where we learned that national science teams can make bad calls due to groupthink and cultural baggage, and we've put in place mechanisms (banning "anti-science" people from social media) to make it *harder* to disagree with them in the future
In April 2020 twitter and FB started banning accounts which encouraged people to break virus rules or (more loosely enforced) challenge established virus science. It's been escalating a bit since then with youtube joining in too
Some of the ideas they are penalising now were the established Western consensus early in 2020, like encouraging people to get infected for herd immunity or saying masks don't work- both presented to UK ministers as "the science", now memory-holed thanks to medical sacredness