Short post today - forgive the language as I start this post with a quotation from Genève Campbell.
You can read the whole thread if you’d like, it did take me a minute to figure out what she meant (I think) about viral surveillance being democratized. I think it could be rephrased as follows: Viruses have always existed. The ability to keep statistics on those viruses and have some idea what they are doing to the population has existed for a decent while. But now everyone can be aware of it. Everyone can be hyperaware of it. You can flip on cable news and be constantly bombarded with concerning-looking data. And, even ignoring the other harms that come from that, a certain segment of the population has found it personally paralyzing - what you could call “data paralysis”.
I write this post because the “problem” of data availability, if it is a problem, is only going to get worse, and obviously shall not be restricted to viral concerns. I was listening to one of Jimmy Akin’s older podcasts recently, where he covered a whole medley of topics, but one of those topics was the fact that birth month of a child correlates with all kinds of outcomes, from the risk of developing certain psychiatric disorders to educational attainment. (One of the explanations is the amount of sunlight the mother receives and hence the amount of Vitamin D she produces while the child is in utero at certain stages of development.) For example one study found that the chance of developing both schizophrenia and bipolar affective disorder was enhanced for people born in the month of January. Shall we therefore start shaming people who conceive in April? “You monster, how dare you put your child at enhanced risk of schizophrenia!” Frankly at this point, if the media made a big enough deal about it, they probably could get a segment of the population to start shaming people for conceiving in April, and another segment to abstain in fear every year until the danger had passed.
But what is the solution here? Of course sometimes you can undertake reasonable efforts to mitigate the risk - more data is never a bad thing if you can handle it. Unfortunately related to the “data paralysis” problem is the “illusion of control” problem where people must psychologically cling to the idea that they have more control than they really do in order to function. Aside from that, let me give you three thoughts, although #2 and #3 are related.
Encourage people to try not to know about data that might paralyze them - you might call this the “smash the television” solution. Now smashing your television is always a good idea, however this is obviously a weak response to the problem. But I have more sympathy for it than you might suppose. We know ourselves. Maybe we know that we have some weakness and so we’d best just not even expose ourselves to X because we know we won’t be able to handle it. It’s respectable to make such a decision. However the people who most need to make that decision are also going to be the people least able to actually make it.
Compare the risk of something to other risks we’ve already accepted. Some people have tried to beat this drum with COVID-19, with limited success. Mitch Daniels had a great letter about Purdue’s response where, among other things, he pointed out that college students were eight times more likely to be murdered than to die from COVID-19, and it’s not as though many college students are murdered either. That can work. However if people are freaking out about current concern, and you point out that they never freaked out about previous concern which was actually more dangerous… they might just conclude that they should have freaked out about previous concern too. Actually from that same thread with Campbell:
Or, the final answer is some sort of conscious moral prioritization, where you can articulate “OK, this risk exists, but it’s worth it, because this other thing is more important, or worth the risk”. One of the problems with our response to COVID was that we acted like it was just a matter of studying the appropriate science and then doing what that science indicated - it wasn’t, and never has been. In fact, much more than that, crafting our response was a matter of ranking various human concerns from more important to less important (a type of decision making very much tied to worldview and even religion), and it turns out leaders were very much not up to that task. A related problem was the fact that decades of secularism have yielded a defective moral reasoning that knows that “continued human existence” is a moral good… but is unable to articulate almost any other moral good that could, and yes at times should compete with the good of just existence. Well that combination is a recipe for data paralysis. And the solution - and a solution that can handle any kind of alarming-looking data the world will throw at you in the coming years - is an awareness of the need to prioritize moral concerns. (Fortunately Christians have two millennia of thinking about what constitutes the good human life to lean upon when answering those questions.)
This sort of horrible realization that safety-ism isn't resolvable by comparative risk assessment, because there are some people who will always accept escalation of fear and call your bluff, is a place I've been for a while as well.
When I was much younger (grad school age), I remember doing some back-of-envelope calculations that my average annual risk of dying in a car accident was on the order of 1 in 100,000 (for my demographic and use rate/pattern), and that therefore it didn't make much sense to ever invest much time worrying about lower risk levels.
But it's been hard for me to follow that rule at times -- and my awareness of it has made it even more obvious that most other human beings have no meaningful risk assessment rules at all, and are doing much worse than I am. Instead, the natural human pattern is to politicize risk awareness -- becoming fearful in ways that your ideological tribe approves, usually because the fear can easily be marshalled at a weapon against an opposing tribe. Of course, this kind of logic can also work very well to rationalize an underlying self-interest: "I won't eat that apple because it might have trace pesticides on it, and I sure want to save the earth from those horrid climate denialists." Whereupon the person wanders off to purchase several pints of Ben and Jerry's and feels very good about eating it all in a single afternoon, to stick it to the Red Tribe.
There is no standard being used. Reminds me of when Iceland bragged about eradicating down's syndrome a few years ago by murdering babies that their data showed at risk.