Re:Coronavirus is most deadly if you are older and male – ne...
by jjcon on Saturday August 29, 2020 @02:29PM
(#24318308)
> Just because something causes fear doesn’t mean that it tells us anything about its truthiness.
Not inherently but the problem is throwing out unscientific speculation without any evidence. This is often done with Covid because fear speculation attracts attention and get clicks/views.
People are hardwired to look for fear - so this sort of irresponsible speculation is dangerous because it spreads like wildfire.
When faced with something novel, the right approach is to be cautious, for some optimal values of novel and cautious. If we were in a timeline where cigarettes or uranium toothpastes were as novel as sars-cov-2, we wouldn’t have established their long term effects yet either.