Thread by @LeonHWolf

Saw so many people savaging this tweet yesterday that I thought, in the spirit of Christmas, that I would offer some reasons to encourage people to at least stop saying mean things about the person who posted it. 1/

https://twitter.com/EpiEllie/status/1473689957956993030

She isn't evil, or crazy. She just suffers from the condition of being a hammer. To a hammer, everything looks like a nail. Some people are just incapable of seeing past their field of expertise and realizing that people have other considerations for how to live their lives 2/

Lawyers can have this same problem. The way they teach you to think in law school, when a client comes to you with a question, you can pretty much always think of a reason why what they want to do might expose them to liability. 3/

So a hammer lawyer just advises their clients against doing anything because of this parade of horribles that might conceivably happen. A good lawyer realizes that the company has to do things to exist and focuses on existential and reasonable dangers. 4/

Which is not to say that the same lawyer shouldn't mention the other possibilities, but should also point out that they are fairly small and unlikely. In any event, you get my point. 5/

This pandemic has exacerbated the problem for hammer epidemiologists. They always started with the erroneous perception that avoiding every conceivable disease is the only priority anyone should have. 6/

Huge portions of the media have spent the last year and a half telling them they're right in that perception. So you can see how a piece of advice that sounds insane like this gets put on Twitter without any sense of shame. It's not her fault. 7/

You don't have to listen. Just let the hammer sit over there and hit things in peace, take into consideration what the hammer says, then balance it with other normal considerations and live your life. Merry Christmas! 8/