5 ms·

A friend of mine recently pointed out that until this point, we didn’t generally or commonly understand pandemic as a real possibility (even if we did historica

by tammer 6y ago

A friend of mine recently pointed out that until this point, we didn’t generally or commonly understand pandemic as a real possibility (even if we did historically & scientifically). The same is true for nuclear weapons.

IAmGraydon 6y ago
The same can be said for any black swan event. It doesn’t make it any more or less likely.
- atlasunshrugged 6y ago
  Was a pandemic really a black swan event? I'm pretty sure researchers had been warning about the possibility of one for a long while, plus we had SARS, H1N1, Ebola, etc. Of course, they're not exactly the same as COVID-19 but it's not like we didn't know pandemics could happen
  - josephcsible 6y ago
    This one is. None of those other diseases have such a long time period where people are presymptomatic and contagious, and that's the only reason that COVID-19 is out of control.
    - mattigames 6y ago
      I'm not so sure, If people in command have had lived through the Spanish flu the situation would have been handled extremely different, such as immediately closing airports in almost every country which would have keep a lot of places like New Zealand is now, with 0 new daily cases.
      - adventured 6y ago
        > such as immediately closing airports in almost every country which would have keep a lot of places like New Zealand is now, with 0 new daily cases. That's not what would have happened. New Zealand has zero new daily cases only because it's an island. The same reason Hawaii has done so well relatively. It has almost been a month since Hawaii has had a Covid death. It's not because their lockdown measures have been magic, it's because they're an island, they got a massive artificial booster to their isolation efforts. Well before it was understood to lock down all transportation, the virus was already spreading across the US and Europe, it was already too late. Direct experience with the Spanish Flu pandemic would have made zero difference to that. Practically nobody outside of China knew the virus was spreading in Wuhan or how serious it was for the first two months of the outbreak, starting in late October. By the time China stopped aggressively trying to conceal the nature of the virus outbreak (mid January), it had already spread to the US and Europe (in December). All transportation globally would have had to have been locked down in mid November at the latest to have had a shot at stopping the spread. That's a fantasy scenario.
        082349872349872 6y ago
        We only locked down mid-March, but we're back down to less than 2% of our peak and have been unlocking since end-April. Stopping the spread is easy, but it apparently requires a population that understands and is committed to hygienic measures.
      - ddeck 6y ago
        I'm not so sure it would have been. Many officials likely lived through the Hong Kong flu in 1968, which killed an estimated 1 to 4 million people. Far fewer than the Spanish Flu, but a much more recent reminder.
      - ekianjo 6y ago
        Not at all. Even in the era of the Spanish flu there were no drastic restrictions like we have now while it killed a lot more people. Different times and different adversity to loss of human life.
    - atoav 6y ago
      While your characterization is valid I wouldn't call it a black swan, just because some of the characteristics are surprising/unknown. All the top virologists I heard say pretty much the same on that front: it is a special thing, but the idea that something like this could happen sooner or later was clear as day.
- baron_harkonnen 6y ago
  Pandemic is not a “black swan” event. A black swan is by definition something you cannot know exists until you discover it. We’ve known pandemic was a real threat for a long time. pandemic was largely considered a certainty by anyone who was knowledgeable in the subject. Pretending something isn’t a threat is a far cry from it not existing and the fact that you’re conflating the two says a lot about why we’re in the situation we are. Pandemic was a certainty we refused to prepare for. Many consider nuclear war a certainty we refuse to prevent.
  - fbelzile 6y ago
    I agree with your premise, but let's just not forget that we're humans with a limited life-span and our brains aren't used to dealing with events that happen this rarely. It's understandable why we may all have been caught off-guard. It's a "black swan" relative to our understanding of life.
    - 082349872349872 6y ago
      MERS-CoV, Ebola, and SARS were all this century.
      - HarryHirsch 6y ago
        Last century was the Spanish Flu. The century before that was the Russian Flu. Viral pandemics seem to be a 100-year event, and meanwhile your bank has no trouble insisting that you carry flood insurance if you are building in the 100-year floodplain.
LiquidSky 6y ago
It's not true at all. The entire Cold War was spent by all sides thinking and preparing for nuclear war. This sort of attitude is a very post-Cold War one. I also share it too, because the Cold War ended when I was a child so the threat of nuclear weapons always felt like something from the past to me. But if you read about people who were older during that period, you'll see that many people genuinely did live in fear that the bombs could start falling any day. For instance, I remember an Alan Moore interview from right before Watchmen came out where he said he felt there would be a nuclear war within the next few years. It's hard to imagine what living your life in that environment was like.
- 082349872349872 6y ago
  I must've been a bit older when the Cold War ended, because I still keep an eye on where permanent security council members* have their sub pens. On USENET, people used to give their "icbmto:" coordinates in signatures. Ha ha. As far as "Who's Next" goes https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oRLON3ddZIw https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oRLON3ddZIw reality imitates art: Alabama (SSBN-731) does indeed have the bomb. * might we explain much US right-wing two-minute hate against France by the simple existence of Brest?
- jbay808 6y ago
  This quote stuck with me: "I returned to civilization shortly after that and went to Cornell to teach, and my first impression was a very strange one. I can't understand it any more, but I felt very strongly then. I sat in a restaurant in New York, for example, and I looked out at the buildings and I began to think, you know, about how much the radius of the Hiroshima bomb damage was and so forth... How far from here was 34th street?... All those buildings, all smashed — and so on. And I would go along and I would see people building a bridge, or they'd be making a new road, and I thought, they're crazy, they just don't understand, they don't understand. Why are they making new things? It's so useless. "But, fortunately, it's been useless for almost forty years now, hasn't it? So I've been wrong about it being useless making bridges and I'm glad those other people had the sense to go ahead." Richard P. Feynman
- fit2rule 6y ago
  There are generations of people alive today who don't remember the Cold War at all, and don't understand the fuss that was made about that era. These people don't know what it was like to live with the terror that life on Earth could end, any day, within 45 minutes. That was hanging over our heads for decades before the wall fell and the Soviet's 'lost' the Cold War - and before 'terrorists' became the #1 scare factor for modern society. I often have to remind 20-something year old folks in my circles that the 80's were absolutely terrifying for the potential for nuclear armageddon, not to mention the HIV waves that decimated certain aspects of youth society, as well. There is an ignorance for these things which I think is quite dangerous - kids these days are complacent and un-caring about the rise of the military industrial complex. In the 70's and 80's, we were all concerned not with terrorits, but with totalitarian military leaders, who might end it all ..
jbay808 6y ago
What philosophy do you think drove the production of these videos, if people didn't think nuclear war affecting them and their children was a real possibility? https://youtu.be/IKqXu-5jw60 https://youtu.be/IKqXu-5jw60
- 411111111111111 6y ago
  there is a difference between the government understanding it and creating videos to teach the population and the population actually understanding it at large. take his example of a pandemic for example. a lot of people thought that we'd be able to handle a global pandemic easily. they watch movies in which everything went to shit and think "no way it would be that bad if it actually happened". and to be honest, i think this pandemic actually enforced this mistaken believe. corona isn't that dangerous. if it killed with a 10+% chance, we still wouldn't have been handling it properly. the death toll wouldve just been higher.
- londons_explore 6y ago
  Another possibility for the creation of films like this is to make it seem the government is doing something about a problem. In this case, there was no evidence that 'duck and cover' saved any lives, even though some people who saw that media experienced bombs and explosions for other reasons. Doing something ineffective is frequently better than doing nothing in the political world. The population won't accept a president saying 'We're really worried about the Soviets bombs, but we've decided the best action is to do nothing'. Saying "we're training everyone what to do if a nuke explodes" is part of a strategy to make the public think you have control of the situation.
- Dahoon 6y ago
  Propaganda.
willis936 6y ago
Commonly, no, but generally we did understand pandemics. Just watch Contagion (2011). If a Hollywood movie would get it that right, then a lot of people had to be pretty sure of the details. It’s no accident that the only changes from reality can be explained by “trying to make a better movie” and “trying to be allowed to air in China”.

by tammer 6y ago

IAmGraydon 6y ago

The same can be said for any black swan event. It doesn’t make it any more or less likely.

atlasunshrugged 6y ago
Was a pandemic really a black swan event? I'm pretty sure researchers had been warning about the possibility of one for a long while, plus we had SARS, H1N1, Ebola, etc. Of course, they're not exactly the same as COVID-19 but it's not like we didn't know pandemics could happen
- josephcsible 6y ago
  This one is. None of those other diseases have such a long time period where people are presymptomatic and contagious, and that's the only reason that COVID-19 is out of control.
  - mattigames 6y ago
    I'm not so sure, If people in command have had lived through the Spanish flu the situation would have been handled extremely different, such as immediately closing airports in almost every country which would have keep a lot of places like New Zealand is now, with 0 new daily cases.
    - adventured 6y ago
      > such as immediately closing airports in almost every country which would have keep a lot of places like New Zealand is now, with 0 new daily cases. That's not what would have happened. New Zealand has zero new daily cases only because it's an island. The same reason Hawaii has done so well relatively. It has almost been a month since Hawaii has had a Covid death. It's not because their lockdown measures have been magic, it's because they're an island, they got a massive artificial booster to their isolation efforts. Well before it was understood to lock down all transportation, the virus was already spreading across the US and Europe, it was already too late. Direct experience with the Spanish Flu pandemic would have made zero difference to that. Practically nobody outside of China knew the virus was spreading in Wuhan or how serious it was for the first two months of the outbreak, starting in late October. By the time China stopped aggressively trying to conceal the nature of the virus outbreak (mid January), it had already spread to the US and Europe (in December). All transportation globally would have had to have been locked down in mid November at the latest to have had a shot at stopping the spread. That's a fantasy scenario.
      - 082349872349872 6y ago
        We only locked down mid-March, but we're back down to less than 2% of our peak and have been unlocking since end-April. Stopping the spread is easy, but it apparently requires a population that understands and is committed to hygienic measures.
    - ddeck 6y ago
      I'm not so sure it would have been. Many officials likely lived through the Hong Kong flu in 1968, which killed an estimated 1 to 4 million people. Far fewer than the Spanish Flu, but a much more recent reminder.
    - ekianjo 6y ago
      Not at all. Even in the era of the Spanish flu there were no drastic restrictions like we have now while it killed a lot more people. Different times and different adversity to loss of human life.
  - atoav 6y ago
    While your characterization is valid I wouldn't call it a black swan, just because some of the characteristics are surprising/unknown. All the top virologists I heard say pretty much the same on that front: it is a special thing, but the idea that something like this could happen sooner or later was clear as day.
baron_harkonnen 6y ago
Pandemic is not a “black swan” event. A black swan is by definition something you cannot know exists until you discover it. We’ve known pandemic was a real threat for a long time. pandemic was largely considered a certainty by anyone who was knowledgeable in the subject. Pretending something isn’t a threat is a far cry from it not existing and the fact that you’re conflating the two says a lot about why we’re in the situation we are. Pandemic was a certainty we refused to prepare for. Many consider nuclear war a certainty we refuse to prevent.
- fbelzile 6y ago
  I agree with your premise, but let's just not forget that we're humans with a limited life-span and our brains aren't used to dealing with events that happen this rarely. It's understandable why we may all have been caught off-guard. It's a "black swan" relative to our understanding of life.
  - 082349872349872 6y ago
    MERS-CoV, Ebola, and SARS were all this century.
    - HarryHirsch 6y ago
      Last century was the Spanish Flu. The century before that was the Russian Flu. Viral pandemics seem to be a 100-year event, and meanwhile your bank has no trouble insisting that you carry flood insurance if you are building in the 100-year floodplain.

LiquidSky 6y ago

It's not true at all. The entire Cold War was spent by all sides thinking and preparing for nuclear war. This sort of attitude is a very post-Cold War one. I also share it too, because the Cold War ended when I was a child so the threat of nuclear weapons always felt like something from the past to me. But if you read about people who were older during that period, you'll see that many people genuinely did live in fear that the bombs could start falling any day. For instance, I remember an Alan Moore interview from right before Watchmen came out where he said he felt there would be a nuclear war within the next few years. It's hard to imagine what living your life in that environment was like.

082349872349872 6y ago
I must've been a bit older when the Cold War ended, because I still keep an eye on where permanent security council members* have their sub pens. On USENET, people used to give their "icbmto:" coordinates in signatures. Ha ha. As far as "Who's Next" goes https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oRLON3ddZIw https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oRLON3ddZIw reality imitates art: Alabama (SSBN-731) does indeed have the bomb. * might we explain much US right-wing two-minute hate against France by the simple existence of Brest?
jbay808 6y ago
This quote stuck with me: "I returned to civilization shortly after that and went to Cornell to teach, and my first impression was a very strange one. I can't understand it any more, but I felt very strongly then. I sat in a restaurant in New York, for example, and I looked out at the buildings and I began to think, you know, about how much the radius of the Hiroshima bomb damage was and so forth... How far from here was 34th street?... All those buildings, all smashed — and so on. And I would go along and I would see people building a bridge, or they'd be making a new road, and I thought, they're crazy, they just don't understand, they don't understand. Why are they making new things? It's so useless. "But, fortunately, it's been useless for almost forty years now, hasn't it? So I've been wrong about it being useless making bridges and I'm glad those other people had the sense to go ahead." Richard P. Feynman
fit2rule 6y ago
There are generations of people alive today who don't remember the Cold War at all, and don't understand the fuss that was made about that era. These people don't know what it was like to live with the terror that life on Earth could end, any day, within 45 minutes. That was hanging over our heads for decades before the wall fell and the Soviet's 'lost' the Cold War - and before 'terrorists' became the #1 scare factor for modern society. I often have to remind 20-something year old folks in my circles that the 80's were absolutely terrifying for the potential for nuclear armageddon, not to mention the HIV waves that decimated certain aspects of youth society, as well. There is an ignorance for these things which I think is quite dangerous - kids these days are complacent and un-caring about the rise of the military industrial complex. In the 70's and 80's, we were all concerned not with terrorits, but with totalitarian military leaders, who might end it all ..

jbay808 6y ago

What philosophy do you think drove the production of these videos, if people didn't think nuclear war affecting them and their children was a real possibility? https://youtu.be/IKqXu-5jw60 https://youtu.be/IKqXu-5jw60

411111111111111 6y ago
there is a difference between the government understanding it and creating videos to teach the population and the population actually understanding it at large. take his example of a pandemic for example. a lot of people thought that we'd be able to handle a global pandemic easily. they watch movies in which everything went to shit and think "no way it would be that bad if it actually happened". and to be honest, i think this pandemic actually enforced this mistaken believe. corona isn't that dangerous. if it killed with a 10+% chance, we still wouldn't have been handling it properly. the death toll wouldve just been higher.
londons_explore 6y ago
Another possibility for the creation of films like this is to make it seem the government is doing something about a problem. In this case, there was no evidence that 'duck and cover' saved any lives, even though some people who saw that media experienced bombs and explosions for other reasons. Doing something ineffective is frequently better than doing nothing in the political world. The population won't accept a president saying 'We're really worried about the Soviets bombs, but we've decided the best action is to do nothing'. Saying "we're training everyone what to do if a nuke explodes" is part of a strategy to make the public think you have control of the situation.
Dahoon 6y ago
Propaganda.

willis936 6y ago

Commonly, no, but generally we did understand pandemics. Just watch Contagion (2011). If a Hollywood movie would get it that right, then a lot of people had to be pretty sure of the details. It’s no accident that the only changes from reality can be explained by “trying to make a better movie” and “trying to be allowed to air in China”.