One does, of course, hesitate to say anything at all in the aftermath of a school shooting such as the one that happened in Texas a few days ago. (Well… at least I hesitate to speak. The people who do not hesitate to speak at all are probably not people you want to listen to.) But watching the response, especially on Twitter, I felt like I was watching a sort of repeat of our response to COVID - the situation was very different, but the technology-induced and technocratic psychology was the same. So I thought it was worth typing up a quick post to say, generally, “we have to make an effort not to think this way, not about shootings, not about viruses, not about anything. It causes more and new harm.”
The instinct to "do something" if it "helps at all" is indicative of the difficulty of matching up solutions to problems in a quantitative way. The general public has no way to understand the difference between a policy that reduces a risk by 50% vs a policy that reduces a risk by 5%. Assigning those probabilities is speculative in the first place, and all intermediate probabilities (ones that are not "very low" or "very high") tend to be treated in functionally similar ways.
Anything in this intermediate region ends up getting classified as either "it never works" or "it always works" based on anecdotal proof/disproof, depending on personal biases.
"Common sense" rhetoric is much too popular with politicians. Making laws is not a matter of common sense, and it's hard to predict what impact they will have. That goes to points 1 and 3, 2 as well I suppose.
The instinct to "do something" if it "helps at all" is indicative of the difficulty of matching up solutions to problems in a quantitative way. The general public has no way to understand the difference between a policy that reduces a risk by 50% vs a policy that reduces a risk by 5%. Assigning those probabilities is speculative in the first place, and all intermediate probabilities (ones that are not "very low" or "very high") tend to be treated in functionally similar ways.
Anything in this intermediate region ends up getting classified as either "it never works" or "it always works" based on anecdotal proof/disproof, depending on personal biases.
It's "Christ or chaos." Looking on at the mess that was once the greatest civilization on earth, this binary rings true, it seems to me.
"Mental illness" is a secular world's all-encompassing catchphrase for what used to be called "evil" by our religious ancestors.
"Common sense" rhetoric is much too popular with politicians. Making laws is not a matter of common sense, and it's hard to predict what impact they will have. That goes to points 1 and 3, 2 as well I suppose.