Epistemic chaos and the Delta variant: Part I
Bad arguments about the dangers of vaccines and the efficacy of snake-oil cures will kill many thousands and prolong the pandemic. Should YouTube censor them?
From Claire—Welcome back to Doom Week. As you surely realize by now, our definition of “a week” at the Cosmopolitan Globalist is elastic. We were completely preoccupied last week by the building of our ravishing new website, which we’ll soon unveil to our adoring readers. You will love it. Subscribe now before we raise the price, because once the world sees this thing, it will be a seller’s market:
We may have some new readers today, owing to a little dust-up I’ve been in on Twitter recently about whether mRNA vaccines are safe and whether ivermectin is a miracle cure for Covid19. If you’re new to the Cosmopolitan Globalist, welcome! This is who we are and what we do. Recently, we’ve been publishing essays on the theme of catastrophic and existential risks to the world, like these:
How should we think about imprecision in climate forecasting?
Nuclear weapons, close calls, and normal accident theory
Will we be wiped out by the next lab mishap?
Risk and cognitive bias: Why do we become irrational when the stakes are high?
Coming up next week: The second part of our essay about the cognitive traps that bedevil our efforts to think about these risks. Vivek is hard at work exploring the risks of artificial intelligence. I’m beavering away on a companion piece to The Threat from Space. It’s called The Threat from Earth. How worried we should be about earthquakes and volcanoes? Also, we’re delighted that Lawrence Krauss, the former chair of the Board of Sponsors of the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, has written an essay for us about the dangers of the new nuclear arms race and its associated technology. Finally, Cosmopolitan Globalist favorite Gareth Lewis writes to suggest it might end not with a bang, but a whimper. What if, like so many great civilizations before, our civilization just ebbs away via the accretion of small but unwise policy choices?
But we’re going to hold these essays in abeyance, because one risk, in particular, is on our minds. The risk is the Internet, and specifically, the epistemic fragmentation to which it has given rise, undermining our ability, as a society, to acquire and act upon knowledge—justified, true, beliefs.
Since 2018, the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists has explicitly included Internet misinformation and disinformation in setting the Doomsday Clock. The Internet is a threat multiplier—it exacerbates every other catastrophic risk. This is surely what our reader David Eggleston meant when he wrote, “The Great Filter is the smartphone.”
The propensity of the Internet to exacerbate catastrophic risk is an exceptionally relevant topic because we have now reached the point, at least in much of the West, where the supply of life-saving vaccines exceeds demand. Yet we’ve vaccinated nowhere near enough of the public to prevent further outbreaks, suffering, and death. In the US, slightly more than half the public has received both doses of an effective vaccine; in Europe, slightly less than half. Meanwhile, we are seeing a global infection surge, powered by the Delta variant, which appears to be twice as transmissible as the original strain.
Yet even as the variant spreads and the danger grows, immunization campaigns have slowed in countries fortunate enough to have enough vaccines for everyone. The primary reason for this is the anti-vaccination movement—a social movement so insane it could not possibly exist in a society with smooth-functioning mechanisms for transferring human knowledge.
The anti-vaccination movement has not yet impeded immunization campaigns in countries that are not as fortunate as Western ones, but only because those countries don’t yet have enough vaccines to protect their citizens. As soon as they do, they’ll face the same problem, and they’ll face it because humanity’s new system for transmitting information—instantaneous, algorithm-driven social media—is globally networked. Even in the absence of vaccines, every species of medical misinformation and quackery has spread, at the speed of light, throughout every country in the world, causing grave harm. Our ability to end the pandemic is in jeopardy because of this.
The combination of a catastrophic risk like a pandemic and a threat multiplier like the internet threatens to give rise to a unique and unprecedented catastrophe: a pandemic we know how to end, but can’t—not because the remedy is too burdensome, like quarantines; not because the remedy is too expensive, involving millions of dollar in healthcare costs; not because we cannot solve the logistical problems involved; and not because the remedy is too dangerous. We face being unable to end the pandemic because a large minority of the human population has been persuaded, by a remarkably small number of people, to believe vaccines in general, and Covid19 vaccines in particular, are more dangerous than the pandemic itself—and to believe this even when it contradicts abundant evidence. For some people, the fantasy of the dangerous vaccine, and the system of fantasies in which it is embedded, have come to seem more real even than the evidence of their five senses. The number of people in the grip of this fantasy is easily large enough to prevent us from triumphing over the pandemic.
Not only is this fantasy suicidal in its consequences, it’s homicidal. A society can afford to have a few unvaccinated people here and there. They’re protected by the immunity of the herd. But if, as now seems likely, 30-40 percent of the public remains unvaccinated, that society will continue to suffer wave after wave of infection until, eventually, it acquires herd immunity the hard way. But it doesn’t end there, because with every wave of infection, the virus acquires another chance to mutate in a manner that allows it to overcome the immunity conferred by vaccination or prior infection. We won’t know this has happened until the immunized start dying in significant numbers. Just as a vastly more infectious variant that arose among unvaccinated populations in India swiftly spread to the United States, any variant that emerges in our unvaccinated population will swiftly spread to the whole world.
The decision to forego vaccination has the potential to be the most terrible mistake any of us could even conceivably make. If your body becomes the unlucky laboratory in which that vaccine-resistant mutant performs a natural gain-of-function experiment, your decision could kill as many people as the original coronavirus. This is of course highly unlikely. Most mutations are useless or harmless. But if a large population declines vaccination, it is not unlikely but certain that one of them will become a refuge for a mutating virus that is more infectious, more lethal, or both. Thousands if not millions of wholly unnecessary deaths will result.
The unlucky Indian citizen whose body became host to the Delta variant had no choice in the matter: India did not have enough vaccines. But Americans have more than enough. Those who decline them are indeed morally responsible for any mutants that escape as the result of this breathtaking irresponsibility.
It is a plain truth that the unvaccinated are a danger to themselves, their families, their communities, their countries, and the world. Yet often they describe their decision in the language of libertarianism: “It is my body and my choice.” This logic should not be persuasive to anyone—the choice they’re making is to become a bioweapon—but modern communication systems, as we’ll discuss below, favor short, familiar slogans like this that on inspection make no sense.
Those who oppose vaccination tend largely to oppose them for the same reasons—a common master narrative is woven through the various strains of anti-vaccination sentiment—and these reasons are so little grounded in observable reality that had you told someone, twenty years ago, that these would become common beliefs, he would have been dumbfounded. The spread of these ideas is only possible in a context of total epistemic breakdown. Societies at large acquire common knowledge through a series of links in a chain of epistemic authority. These links are broken. The Internet is not the sole cause of this, but it is the primary cause.
The anti-vaccination movement is now a global catastrophic risk in its own right—but it could not possibly have become one without the Internet. The interplay—and the gravity—of these risks will be the subject of our next several essays.
This is, you could say, an emergency edition of the Cosmopolitan Globalist.
The Internet as threat multiplier
In the span of roughly a decade, human social behavior has been rewired. An entirely novel system of global communication has emerged. It is nothing like any system of communication our species has experienced before. Massive, complex social networks now transfer information instantaneously, over vast distances, at no cost to the speaker. Through social media, algorithmic searches, and click-based advertising, new mechanisms have emerged to assign monetary value to information.
This entire system was built to sell advertising, and built in complete indifference to the aim of enlarging humanity’s stock of justified, true beliefs. Every feature and function of this system serves one goal alone: keeping users’ eyes on the screen as long as possible. No mechanism or process has been built into the system to encourage the spread of truth, reasoned arguments, or ideas that are complex and subtle. That’s not what they are designed to do. Nor do they promulgate sound mathematical reasoning or deep literacy. They aren’t meant to.
The systems are built to be good at tasks like this: If you’re an upper middle-class woman in San Diego whose friend just remodeled her kitchen countertops, they will serve you ads showing you trendy, upper-middle class San Diego ways to remodel your kitchen. (Quartz? Marble? A handy virtual room designer?) They’re built to be good at grabbing data from your phone, your device ID, your location, and the discount cards you use when you shop. They’re terrific at matching them with your email address and phone number; cross-referencing your interests with your browsing and purchase history and those of your friends; and creating a virtual you—she lives on a server in Prineville, Oregon—who knows what you want to buy even before you. You agreed to all of this when you accepted those Terms of Service.
This is the only thing these platforms were built to do.
The first recognizable social media site debuted in 1997. Today, some 3.6 billion people worldwide are connected to social media platforms. Social media has all but wiped out the traditional news media; the legacy platforms remain as empty shells if they remain at all. Social media—not the legacy media, not books, not even face-to-face conversation—is now the primary way we transmit knowledge, maintain relationships, and establish norms, a trend consolidated by the pandemic. Even in countries with lower rates of social media penetration, the norm-setting elites have access it. With the advent of high-quality machine translation, language barriers have dissolved. Everywhere, as soon as people become wealthy enough to do it, they buy smartphones, and immediately they are in instant contact with 3.6 billion other people, around the world, to whose views they will be exposed as a function of the degree to which they are apt to make them buy an advertised product.
This is extraordinarily new. But our cognitive faculties and physiology have changed but little since the long period during which humans lived in tribes of hunter-gatherers. These groups were small—the very upper boundary, probably, one hundred people—and rarely did members encounter anyone beyond it. Suddenly increasing the size of the group to whose opinions we’re exposed—by eight orders of magnitude—might be expected to cause us cognitive challenges. And behold, it does.
Because of the aim these platforms were built to serve—keeping your eyeballs on the screen for as long as possible—ideas and images that appeal to the triune brain predominate. Sex, of course. Fear. That which is entertaining and sensational. The habits of thought associated with oral culture bubble to the top; those associated with written culture sink.
Assume a neighborhood, a library, and a shared public square: If this is your environment, it’s a fair bet that over time, bad, simple, and primitive arguments will be defeated by true, complex, and difficult ones. The true, complex, and difficult ones will be more useful to the neighborhood, even if they’re harder to understand. The man who has read and understood all three volumes of Fundamentals of Electrostatic Discharge will sooner or later persuade the guy who thinks lightning never strikes twice that abstruse and difficult though his arguments may be, they are more useful. Or at least, he will persuade the witnesses.
This is not true on the Internet. The small-scale process by which knowledge accrues and the purveyors of knowledge become authoritative is not replicated at scale. If I announce on Twitter that vaccinations caused every woman in my village to give birth to two-headed calves, a single retweet from a gullible celebrity or president could transmit this information to millions of people in seconds. None of them live in my village, so none will do what once they would once have done to see if I’m a useful source of information: survey the village, count the heads.
Thus ideas that within living memory would have been the sole purview of the village idiot now flood the Internet, imbued with lunatic vitality, coursing and rushing through our social world from all sides and sources at the speed of light, nourished by algorithms designed to focus human attention on information arousing to the average limbic system. Nothing serves to sift the justified, true beliefs out of this sea of noise.
Obviously, the Internet is not the first innovation in mass communication. Nor the first to be met with alarm. But there are good reasons to worry this is a transformation in kind, not function. There is a logic to thinking this new system of communication will not improve the marketplace of ideas—as the printing press did—but destroy it.
The invention of the printing press, for all the turbulence that ensued, encouraged a transition from oral to written culture. Written culture, by its nature, encourages rigor and reflection; it diminishes our instinct to prize emotion over careful reasoning. When the spread of information was limited, at least, by the speed of the printing press, the cost of paper, and the time and effort it took physically to convey a printed object from one point to another, it discouraged the impulse to print the first thing that popped into mind. People in the chain of distribution had more time to see if the information was false—or useless—and if so, cease spreading it.
The marketplace of ideas
Now let’s consider the problem of censorship on social media, which is much on the mind of many owing to Big Tech’s decision, during the pandemic, to crack down on medical misinformation. This is a decision that rubs many people the wrong way. (Not all of them. Surveys suggest that 65 percent of the public supports deplatforming anti-vax luminaries and peddlers of quack therapies.)
But a good percentage of the public finds this censorship antithetical to the principle upon which liberal societies are built: freedom benefits everyone. Censorship, the person of liberal sensibilities believes, is a grave evil, and not just because everyone possesses a right (self-evident or not) to speak freely, but because it prevents a society from acquiring knowledge—justified, true beliefs—and it is knowledge upon which civilization is built.
In his famous essay on liberty, JS Mill made this case in the form of a proof:
Let x stand for an opinion we might wish to suppress.
x must be true, false, or partly true.
If x is true, we should know the truth, however much we resist it, for truth is always good.
If x is false, its public expression will only enable us better to know the truth, for its falsehood will be exposed by vigorous public contestation.
Therefore no view x should be suppressed.
No one can be secure in the knowledge that x is true, Mill proposes, unless he hears the very best arguments against it. Believing x without knowing why one believes it reduces x to a lifeless doctrine.
This all sounded right when I was an undergraduate. But this idea, itself, should not be a lifeless doctrine: Is it relevant to the new world we’ve built?
What these platforms do not do is provide a robust marketplace of ideas where bad arguments are countered by better ones and through this process, society at large becomes more knowledgeable and wise. It is by design that users can—and do—create an entire social universe comprised only of people who echo and reinforce their views, however insane those views may be. How will good ideas vanquish the bad when the algorithms—having discovered your passionate belief that vaccines cause magnets to stick to your skin—ensure you’re exposed only to people equally persuaded of this? What if there is no longer such a thing as public square, where everyone gathers to see and hear the same debate?
All of these thoughts, and more, have been on my mind in light of a controversy with which Americans, at least, are probably familiar. For those of you who pay no mind to American politics, pay attention to this one, because some version of it is certain to come your way:
Enter the Quacks
Amid a pandemic that has killed four million people, ground the global economy to a halt, and caused more deaths on American soil than any catastrophe since the Civil War, there is a ray, at last, of hope. We have vaccines. We have them sooner than we had dared hope. They are astonishingly effective. And they are remarkably safe. Some of us are fortunate enough to live in countries where we have more of them than we need. From now on, people in the wealthy West no longer need to die of Covid19. Almost every death is preventable.
This is the truth, and the arguments to the contrary are absolute balderdash. They can be dismantled by a bright sixth-grader.
If, in a free society, truth shines brighter than a lie, it should be impossible for a small handful of cranks and quacks to convince vast numbers of Americans to reject these vaccines. Simply out of the question.
Yet they have. And this has taken place around the world, often through the influence of the same handful of quacks.
In France, vaccination clinics are closing. In the United States, doses are going unused. And why? Because people have been persuaded to believe things that should not be persuasive to citizens of an advanced industrial democracy:
Bridget Burke, 22, a college student in Michigan, said she was unsettled by rumors that Covid-19 vaccines could affect her reproductive health. …
Ms. Burke said that her family wanted her to get the shot but that she worried about the vaccines affecting women’s reproductive systems, a concern that came up in multiple interviews with young women.
Where are people getting these ideas? From social media. Always. A survey of UK residents found that heavy users of social media were three times more likely to believe the true purpose of the vaccination program was to track and control the population. Nearly 40 percent of heavy users of YouTube believed the coronavirus vaccine was developed only to make money for pharmaceutical companies. Four in ten such people said they didn’t know whether the vaccine caused autism.
Clearly, our system for transmitting knowledge—justified, true beliefs—is not just suffering from a minor misadjustment: It is broken.
The main vehicle for the spread of these apprehensions is not, generally, the legacy media, friends, or family. It’s social media:
The prevalence of these views is a consequence of the way the 21st century’s information ecosystem functions. And it’s functioning the way it was designed to function.
Panicked by this, the social media giants have taken to simply censoring the quackery. YouTube and Twitter have issued stern policies to stem the tide of pandemic misinformation. The list of content labeled “demonstrably false or misleading” is long, detailed, and explicit; in some cases, it contradicts stern injunctions they issued only weeks or months ago. (You may now, for example, discuss the possibility the virus came from a lab.) YouTube and Twitter, as private entities, are fully within their legal rights to forbid you from saying anything they please on their property; this is not a First Amendment question. But given these platforms have become our de facto public square, are they contravening the spirit of a liberal democracy in doing so?
When they find their accounts suspended, prominent anti-vaccination vuvuzelas inevitably make this case, even if they never make it as well. Inevitably, they attract sympathy, even from people who disagree with them, who are put in mind of Voltaire: “I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it.”1 Depriving a man of his access to YouTube strikes many as a violation of his human rights. And the case for this isn’t actually stupid. If these platforms are now humanity’s primary forum for the exchange of ideas, of what use is the right to speak freely without access to them? And if liberty of expression is, as Mill argued, good for everyone and good for the truth, why should this not be so on YouTube?
Bill Maher speaks for many in expressing outrage that some faceless dweeb in Silicon Valley has taken it upon himself to decide what he should and shouldn’t hear. The objection springs from a natural and instinctive reservoir of liberal sentiment.
But the outrage is misplaced. You should be furious with Big Tech, yes, but not because they’re making a hapless, half-assed, rearguard attempt to separate these quacks from their microphones. You should be furious with them for creating a product that’s incompatible with a flourishing and scientifically advanced liberal democracy in the first place.
The sooner we understand that this is the nature of the problem, the better. When recently I discussed this issue with an old friend, he said roughly what I assume Bill Maher was thinking. “The principle of free speech,” he said, “includes the idea that contrarians should be able to air their views, indeed the unfettered airing of such views is one reason why we should trust scientific consensus. Our republic has had cranks from before the revolution. We’ve survived.”
And that’s true. We’ve survived. He and I. But 618,000 of our fellow citizens haven’t. Should that matter to the way we think about this? A lot of them died because contrarians aired their views—particularly the view that Covid19 is a hoax. Just yesterday I spoke to a man whose 76-year-old father died, in June, of Covid19. His was a fully preventable death. He left behind a son whose emotions are as you’d expect. His father believed the anti-vaccine quacks. If social media is capable of persuading people not to be vaccinated against a disease that has caused more deaths on American soil than any catastrophe since the Civil War, how sure are we, really, that we’ll just keep chugging along and surviving?
The promotion online of claims about the danger of Covid19 vaccines, entwined with conspiracy theories about Big Tech and Big Pharma, is genuinely and immediately dangerous—and no one has the first idea what to do about it. Censoring them is a blunt tool that does nothing to address the larger phenomenon—the crumbling of the epistemic architecture of our society. This has many causes: It isn’t just the Internet. The academy, public health authorities, and a host of other people who should have known better are also to blame. But above all it is this system—one in which the normal methods by which we sort good information from bad has gone haywire.
Given the imminence of the wave of preventable death from the Delta variant, the Cosmopolitan Globalists think this is a rich and fascinating case study of immediate relevance.
Thus in the coming week, we’ll be publishing a multi-part essay treating this question. We will do something few people do: Make a detailed and irrefragable case against the master narrative of the anti-vaccination movement.
Why? Because no one now bothers to do this in a systematic way. Arguments against this movement on Twitter are as fragmentary as the movement itself. The Establishment Organs—The New York Times, the CDC, the dreary fact-checkers—find it beneath their dignity. Again and again, they intone, “Scientists say the vaccines are safe.”
Why do they do this? For one thing, public health authorities have come to believe that giving any attention to the details of these beliefs, even if just to say they’re wrong, is to reinforce them. That’s not silly. A great deal of empirical evidence supports the idea that drawing attention to a false belief tends to reinforce, not correct, the false belief.
But the words “experts say” and “scientists say” not only fail to persuade the target audience, they enrage them, and justly so. It’s an appeal to an authority these experts no longer possess—for reasons good and bad, but if you’re an expert and you’re wondering about this, think long and hard about the way 1,200 healthcare workers—your fellow experts—made a volte-face from denouncing public protesting as the country’s Number One Health Menace to encouraging public protests on the grounds that our racism pandemic was even worse than our Covid pandemic. I know, I know: There are 22 million healthcare workers in America and only 1,200 of you signed that letter. But if you belong to an expert guild, one of your responsibilities is to maintain the credibility and authority of that guild. Allowing quacks to speak in your name means you’re failing in your responsibility. Yes, I get it: Signing that was their First Amendment right and you couldn’t discipline them for that. But come on. There was a lot you could have done. And you didn’t.
That’s the first problem with “experts say.” Another is that its use typically indicates the speaker does not, in fact, know why the experts say it, leaving them unable to make the case for their position in language that isn’t infantilizing. Sure, you’ll find the occasional blog post that explains one or another fragment of the case. But rarely will you find qualified authorities who are willing to speak to the lunatics, in a dignified public forum, as if they had faculties of reason. Instead, they despatch journalists and PR flacks to correct the misinformation. These people don’t, themselve grasp why “scientists and experts” say what they do; they just trust them blindly—as Mill feared. They know anti-vaccination sentiment is a heresy, but they’re damned if they know quite why it’s ludicrous to say, “The spike protein is toxic and it breaks off and goes straight to your ovaries.”
Perhaps the most important reason, however—or so I suspect—is that the authorities don’t feel like explaining it. If, after all, they could explain this simply, in a way anyone might understand, of what value is their expertise? What of their special and revered status as “scientists and experts?” The belief that this stuff is just too difficult for ordinary people, who can’t possibly get their heads around these complex concepts, is immensely flattering to those who believe it. And perhaps they’re right: Perhaps these ideas—which frankly don’t seem all that difficult to me—are completely beyond the intellectual powers of ordinary men and women.
Maybe they’re right. But whatever they’re doing, for whatever reason they’re doing it, it’s not working. The anti-vaccination movement is growing, not shrinking. This constitutes a genuine emergency, a major threat to global health, and we’re already compromising with fundamental liberal principles because of it: When 40 percent of the public thinks the vaccines cause autism and the other 60 percent of the public is sick of this that they favor just shutting these people up, liberal democracy is not working as promised.
Since we can’t walk into the headquarters of YouTube and force them at gunpoint to change their algorithms so that they reward only the true, the beautiful, and the good, this coming week, the Cosmopolitan Globalists will make one last, desperate effort to handle this like liberal democrats under the influence of John Stuart Mill.
First, we’ll consider the content of common anti-vaccination narratives. We’ll look, specifically, at the idea that seems now to be the beating heart of the anti-vaccination movement: to wit, that public health authorities are hiding information about the dangers of vaccines and doing so because pharmaceutical companies stand to earn so much money from them.
We’ll offer a detailed, good-faith rebuttal of these claims, one that explicates the mistakes in statistical reasoning and misunderstandings of the scientific literature upon which they rest. We’ll look at claims that one or another drug—most recently ivermectin, but before it hydroxychloroquine—is a miracle cure for Covid19, or a prophylaxis so effective that it might substitute for vaccination.
Ideas like these exist at the intersection of genuine medical research and absolute public confusion. It is not hard to explain, in plain language, why these ideas are bad. But social media does not lend itself to doing so. To rebut them requires the use of the written word, and more than 180 characters. It requires willingness to spend time understanding the claim—a certain intellectual nostalgie de la boue—as well as the evidence for and against it.
The legacy media, their self-righteous fact-checkers, and the phrase, “experts say,” we suspect, are doing more harm than good. When the public willing is eager to embrace such ideas, it has already lost confidence in experts. This kind of argument from authority, in any event, is pointless, because the vastness of the internet ensures there will always be an endless supply of richly-credentialed experts and authorities willing to endorse batshit crazy ideas.
We hold that anyone of even modest intelligence who wishes to do so can sort out the difference between true and false claims about the efficacy of purported wonder drugs and the safety of vaccines. But it takes time, and this kind of thinking is not what the Internet encourages. The information people need to do this properly tends to be in paywalled scholarly journals, whereas garbage on the Internet is free. Why is the information in the scholarly literature more useful? Because the whole system of scholarly publication, flawed and gamed though it often is, is at least designed with the goal of providing truthful information. Quite often (and often infamously) it falls short of this goal, but at least, that is the goal. Social media was not designed to serve this goal at all.
Having demonstrated that that our vaccinations are extremely safe and superior to any other strategy for avoiding the risks of Covid19, and that it is a bad idea—indeed insane—to forego vaccination in favor of treatment with ivermectin or any other known drug, we will ask whether demonstrably bad arguments and false ideas should be barred from social media platforms on the grounds that they are apt to cause harm.
The case, we think, for forbidding the expression of these ideas on social media platforms is legally irreproachable. Is it morally sound? We believe that in this case, the argument for censorship is more robust than many think at first. We find the justification, in fact, in the first chapter of On Liberty: “[T]he sole end for which mankind are warranted, individually or collectively, in interfering with the liberty of action of any of their number, is self-protection.”
But we would prefer to persuade. We will make the case that everyone has a moral obligation to be vaccinated as quickly as possible, because the unvaccinated are an immediate, catastrophic risk—to themselves, their families, their communities, their countries, and the world.
Given the immediacy of the risk, and the way the design of social media exacerbates this risk, we can see few alternatives to the clumsy system of censorship the social media giants have recently been trying to impose. In the long run, however, these companies must change their structure of incentives. They have created a dangerous product that has disorganized the stock of human knowledge. They are not apt to do this voluntarily, so this entails their regulation. In exploring the anti-vaccine movement’s spread, we hope to show precisely why and how.
We sincerely hope this series of essays will help us begin to reorganize our knowledge, suggest the way the shattered epistemic foundations of our societies might be rebuilt, and persuade those who are worried that they have nothing to fear from being vaccinated against Covid19—which they must do, immediately, because the virus will not wait.
Yes, yes, I know. Evelyn Beatrice Hall.
Claire,
Well written. It supports my instinctive decision long ago to not participate in social media. I've never been on Facebook, I followed a couple people on twitter to see what it was, and rejected it because a conversation of sentence fragments cannot communicate ideas in any meaningful way.
I agree that writing long form is the best way to organize, refine and communicate an argument. (See the length of my past comments. I was trying to keep them succinct.)
When I express a short response to an idea, the feedback I get almost always tells me the recipient has ascribed a meaning to my words I did not intend. This has taught me that if I'm not going to express an idea completely, there is no point to expressing it partially only to be misunderstood. Either go all the way or not at all. (I do forget and have to relearn this every so often)
Keep up the good work. In the past when new technology has changed the world, humanity had more time to react and adapt. Social media my be changing things faster than our ability to absorb and adjust.
I hope y’all address the “it isn’t that bad, they cooked the numbers” crud as well. I’m seeing way too many otherwise well educated folks falling for a lot of this malarkey.