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.
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.
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.