My gut is always to mash reply, then I remember I pay and can have my silly ideas read by others!
This is wonderful -- though a bit unsettling read. One of the ways that I often work to distill or reduce technology into graspable pieces is to think of the offline (un-tech!) ways that folks used to do what the "high-tech" thing does. For your coronavirus research, it seems to me like you're putting too much stock in silly people. For one, there are no responsible voices on Twitter (I will not work to defend this claim right now) -- if they were responsible, they wouldn't waste their time there. So to originate proper research on Twitter, Facebook, Reddit, or even aggregated news sites seems like an effort in self-delusion. Why not stick to trusted sources like the CDC, WHO, or countless others that provide pretty boring but true information? Granted, I am lucky that I am married to a brilliant scientist who knows everything there is to about epidemiology.
Hopefully I'm tugging at some of your own apprehensions in the writing as opposed to dunking on you. I very much see the media landscape as a wasteland -- a place of little to no intrinsic value. I have no respect for it and have since vacated it.
Should a tornado head my way, I would rather die a saint's death than humor one more damned joke on the internet. You can quote that!
And I should add, that part of the point of my comments was to suggest just how easy it is to get lost in the rabbit hole under these conditions, so a kind of cautionary tale.
Indeed! My guess is if thrown into the 1600's, we would leave our small, stove-adorned home, to venture out into the town or village and ask around the local watering hole what was to become of the German countryside if the pox really did arrive? And we would probably get eerily similar answers -- yet be completely out of grasp of any possible right answers.
I'll tuck that last line away, hoping, of course, the tornado does not come. Also, while my wife is brilliant, she is not a scientist, so I am out of luck there. That said, points well taken. My journey basically took the shape you describe, although I am continuing to glean information from a select set of voices online including epidemiologists, virologists, etc. Part of the problem, very early on, involved the scarcity of information combined with my own desire to know more than could be reliably known. That, and some wobbly first efforts from the more credible organizations. That said, the epistemic waters seem to be settling, mostly.
My gut is always to mash reply, then I remember I pay and can have my silly ideas read by others!
This is wonderful -- though a bit unsettling read. One of the ways that I often work to distill or reduce technology into graspable pieces is to think of the offline (un-tech!) ways that folks used to do what the "high-tech" thing does. For your coronavirus research, it seems to me like you're putting too much stock in silly people. For one, there are no responsible voices on Twitter (I will not work to defend this claim right now) -- if they were responsible, they wouldn't waste their time there. So to originate proper research on Twitter, Facebook, Reddit, or even aggregated news sites seems like an effort in self-delusion. Why not stick to trusted sources like the CDC, WHO, or countless others that provide pretty boring but true information? Granted, I am lucky that I am married to a brilliant scientist who knows everything there is to about epidemiology.
Hopefully I'm tugging at some of your own apprehensions in the writing as opposed to dunking on you. I very much see the media landscape as a wasteland -- a place of little to no intrinsic value. I have no respect for it and have since vacated it.
Should a tornado head my way, I would rather die a saint's death than humor one more damned joke on the internet. You can quote that!
MM
And I should add, that part of the point of my comments was to suggest just how easy it is to get lost in the rabbit hole under these conditions, so a kind of cautionary tale.
Indeed! My guess is if thrown into the 1600's, we would leave our small, stove-adorned home, to venture out into the town or village and ask around the local watering hole what was to become of the German countryside if the pox really did arrive? And we would probably get eerily similar answers -- yet be completely out of grasp of any possible right answers.
The pox was the 14/500's...
I'll tuck that last line away, hoping, of course, the tornado does not come. Also, while my wife is brilliant, she is not a scientist, so I am out of luck there. That said, points well taken. My journey basically took the shape you describe, although I am continuing to glean information from a select set of voices online including epidemiologists, virologists, etc. Part of the problem, very early on, involved the scarcity of information combined with my own desire to know more than could be reliably known. That, and some wobbly first efforts from the more credible organizations. That said, the epistemic waters seem to be settling, mostly.