What the Omicron wave is revealing about human immunity

Re:What the Omicron wave is revealing about human immunity by ssl232 on Thursday February 03, 2022 @05:24PM (#30199898)

I find peoples' reactions to this to not be a new phenomenon, but I do have the pandemic to thank for making me far better at identifying such personalities and not letting myself judge the person having them. In my experience it's pretty rare to find someone capable of removing emotion from an argument. Perhaps 5% of people I know are capable of this. The other 95%, given enough debate, put you in their idiot or "basically Hitler" box and cease to listen to or respect anything you say. This makes me very sad, because we've got other huge challenges needing faced as a species and I can see the same crazy nonsense we've seen with COVID happening for all of those too. Before we can begin to fix real issues facing civilisation, we're going to have to fix our ability to tolerate and debate arguments we disagree with.

One thought I had recently is how up and downvotes on sites like HN must contribute to tunnel vision in debates. I know I have self-censored in the past knowing that something I would say would get downvoted into oblivion, and I've posted stuff that hasn't been very constructive but that I've known would be a crowd pleaser. This surely creates echo chambres resembling the opinions of the loudest in the community. Old vBulletin-style forums before likes and up/downvotes were a thing, where all you could do was quote-reply (and one-word "+1" and "disagree" replies were brutally deleted by zealous moderators), were perhaps in hindsight the closest to optimal we ever reached in the realm of textual online debates. What a sorry state of affairs.

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:What the Omicron wave is revealing about human immunity by gubikmic on Sunday February 06, 2022 @10:00PM (#30239761)

Thanks for sharing your thoughts and also how it makes you feel. In Jan 2021 I had become “intellectually lonely”. That was my feeling when I realized there’s almost no one left to have a productive conversation about COVID with. Also I realized how lazy most people are in just putting in even 1 hour of research that could change their situation dramatically (e.g. around supplementing vitamin D).

At the same time I started listening to many interviews with Daniel Schmachtenberger. Mindblowing, but also quite abstract. Rebel Wisdom does some work on the meta-level, i.e. how we can become better at sensemaking. Whether it’s around COVID or the next thing. And that for me is really the main takeaway from this pandemic. We suck at collectively making sense of complex threats and enacting good policies. Even simpler issues like statistical deaths due to air pollution most people don’t quite take for what they are.

I’d be happy to get in contact, I’m trying to figure out what ways there are to connect people and create a community that does high efficiency-collective sensemaking. Something that gives a good and balanced picture of status quo truth quickly. But also something that allows to progressively dig deeper into details. If this resonates with you → [email protected]

Oh, and I totally agree about the message board presentation making a big difference. I posted a crucial comment providing the context to the JRE thing yesterday and it didn’t get any attention. But even on Twitter most people missed the context, so it’s no wonder our sensemaking is so inefficient. Imagine talking for an hour only to later realize the point of contention became 90% mute in the presence of a bit of new information. That’s how I saw this, but multiplied by thousands of people. What a waste of smart people’s time.

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:What the Omicron wave is revealing about human immunity by chana_masala on Thursday February 03, 2022 @11:00PM (#30202707)

I'm glad I found this thread and thank you for not self censoring this time. I've very often done the same. And yes, the vBulletin style forums is something I really miss.

[ Parent | on HN ]