Re:Almost one in five Americans may have been infected with ...
by yourapostasy on Friday December 11, 2020 @06:33PM
(#25393158)
> To say this difference shapes our perspectives is an understatement.
We should be expecting to experience this as members of a large, functionally diverse population (and within HN, a technically literate sub group) in a civilization that is blindly groping its way towards post-scarcity but the future is still Gibsonian unevenly distributed. In a less-powerful civilization, this would have been a much more disruptive pandemic. Many people are still navigating with sentience ("monkey brains") that are conditioned to expect physical calamity before taking significant action, instead of navigating with intelligence which takes abundantly more energy to engage.
This is a real-time, mass experiment in operating trust and science at scale.
See Peter Watts' Blindsight for more on this sentience/intelligence divide [1].
We should be expecting to experience this as members of a large, functionally diverse population (and within HN, a technically literate sub group) in a civilization that is blindly groping its way towards post-scarcity but the future is still Gibsonian unevenly distributed. In a less-powerful civilization, this would have been a much more disruptive pandemic. Many people are still navigating with sentience ("monkey brains") that are conditioned to expect physical calamity before taking significant action, instead of navigating with intelligence which takes abundantly more energy to engage.
This is a real-time, mass experiment in operating trust and science at scale.
See Peter Watts' Blindsight for more on this sentience/intelligence divide [1].
[1] https://www.rifters.com/real/Blindsight.htm#Notes