Over at Ask a Manager a while back, someone wrote in about a question her boss's boss asked her while her immediate superior was away. It boils down to:
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The prestigious scientific journal Nature offers what is at once an inspiring look at how science is holding off an epidemic -- and a damning (albeit incidental) indictment of the regulatory state.
Does any of that sound familiar?A century [after the Spanish flu pandemic], the Icelandic government was better prepared, enacting a national pandemic preparedness plan at the beginning of January, two months before COVID-19 arrived. "We decided from the beginning we would use isolation, quarantine and contact tracing," says Þórólfur Guðnason, chief epidemiologist at the Directorate of Health. As part of that plan, the microbiology laboratory at the university hospital began testing citizens in early February. [bold added]
Iceland is open to tourists. (Image by Nicolas J Leclercq, via Unsplash, license.)
[E]arly in the pandemic, many US labs pivoted to offer coronavirus testing, but were stymied by regulatory and administrative obstacles...And we're not talking about rapid antigen tests, which could still stop the pandemic in its tracks by allowing people to know whether they might be contagious, but the diagnostic ones, which have also been hindered by the FDA.
Replying to someone whose employer is oblivious at best to the pandemic, Alison Green wisely observes (Scroll down to no. 3.) that how a business handles a crisis isn't just an indicator of how they might handle other crises, but of how they operate in general:
I think it's strongly correlated in several ways. First and foremost, it says they're cavalier about public health, and their employees' health in particular. In your company's case, it also says you can't trust what they say; they might tell you something's okay but then penalize you for it.Yes, and that goes for individuals, governments, and political factions as well.
And it says they're either willing to buy into the politicization of a serious public health issue if it suits their own agenda or -- if they'd be doing this even if Covid hadn't become politicized -- that they prioritize their profits way over the safety of their employees (beyond even the typical amount of self-interest you normally see under capitalism). [bold added]This business is being short-sighted, yes. But that is actually the opposite of what an exemplar of selfishness or a consistent capitalist would do.
Applied to business, this emphatically means taking precautions against spreading this illness, something Disney has shown -- where it is free to operate -- is quite possible regarding its workers (whom it needs healthy to be able to function, let alone prosper):Other people's lives contribute immensely to one's own self-interest. A world full of sick and dying people is not to anyone's advantage. Anyone who misses the life we all lost in March is already familiar with this. Whether you've lost a job or are grieving for a loved one, or even just miss being able to go to a restaurant with friends, you know other people matter to your interests. They are the potential employers, producers, innovators, and friends who help each of us live a happy human life. So why would you want to slow the return to normal life with people by getting them sick?
This, but with fewer people, and everyone wearing masks. (Image by Christian Lambert, via Unsplash, license.)
"'We've had very few [cases], and none, as far as we can tell, have been from work-related exposure,' said Eric Clinton, president of UNITE HERE Local 362, which represents roughly 8,000 attraction workers and custodians."It is also self-interested to protect customers -- obviously for the sake of income and reputation. I can speak from experience on this count: Our family went there a couple of weeks ago, and I was amazed at how well-thought-out the precautions were. Most activities were available in some form. (Exceptions seemed mainly related activities that could result in prolonged contact between guests. Hands-on activities after some rides at Epcot were closed, there were no fireworks shows, and parades were very short, reducing both crowding and duration of any exposure.)
This will be my last post for the week as I break for Thanksgiving.
That quote deserves to be published widely, and not just on this holiday.Thanksgiving is a typically American holiday. In spite of its religious form (giving thanks to God for a good harvest), its essential, secular meaning is a celebration of successful production. It is a producers' holiday. The lavish meal is a symbol of the fact that abundant consumption is the result and reward of production. Abundance is (or was and ought to be) America's pride -- just as it is the pride of American parents that their children need never know starvation. ("Cashing in on Hunger," The Ayn Rand Letter (1974) vol. III, no. 23)
Image by Sheri Hooley, via Unsplash, license.
To call American abundance a "grotesque inequality," to brush aside the source and cause of that abundance -- the tremendous effort, the heroic struggle, the unremitting work, the intelligence, the ambition (and the freedom) of millions of men that transformed an empty wilderness into a land of unprecedented abundance -- to ascribe that magnificent achievement to the use of "the world's resources," is to utter a grotesque obscenity. To call it an appeal to justice is the ultimate touch of cynical effrontery. (Ibid.)In fact, I would recommend anyone with access to the full essay read it soon after the festivities are over: It holds up better than one might expect for an answer to a column written so long ago. That is because Rand focused so well on the essentials -- of what was and remains wrong with the dominant culture, and yet right about America.
I never imagined I'd see the subject of ASMR make an appearance on a blog about deep work, but that day has come, in the form of a Cal Newport post titled, "On Technology and Focus: ASMR, VR, and the First Steps Toward Immersive Single Tasking."
Newport describes ASMR -- of which the painter Bob Ross is something of a patron saint -- as follows:
Around 2010, a curious new term arose in obscure but energetic internet chatrooms: autonomous sensory meridian response. ASMR, as it was soon abbreviated, described a peculiar form of paresthesia experienced as a tingling that starts in the scalp and then moves down the back. It's often triggered by specific sounds, like soft whispering or a paintbrush scraping canvas. Not surprisingly, those sensitive to ASMR sometimes found Bob Ross reruns to be a reliable source of the effect.Newport notes that there is now a sub-genre, the ASMR room, in which mostly static shots of rooms with calming sounds are used to "invoke a sense of meditative calm and focus."
What makes ASMR relevant to our interests here is that it happened to emerge as a topic of discussion just as YouTube emerged as a cultural force. Soon a cottage industry arose of AMSR videos featuring meticulously recorded trigger sounds. One such video opens on a straw stirring seltzer water. A little later it zooms in on a knife scraping dried blush on a make-up tray. It's been viewed over four and a half million times.
[S]he plays the video full screen on her computer while positioning a word processor document in front of it. She listens to the stereo sound in high quality noise cancelling headphones. Though she works out of a "small and noisy urban flat," the video and sounds help her fall into a state of concentration when she needs to write.Newport thinks this reader is onto something, and goes on to make interesting speculations as to how to expand on the idea of such "rooms" using virtual reality technology.
Pre-Pandemic, leftists were fond of using "the science" as a rhetorical cudgel, most noticeably in the public policy debate over fossil fuels. To take much of what that side of the debate said at face value, there was a broad consensus among scientists that continued use of fossil fuels at current rates would soon cause irreparable damage to the Earth's climate.
Let's set aside several questions for the moment, such as, (1) whether there really is a consensus, (2) what any such consensus might be about, or (3) whether the left's particular policy prescriptions are a good idea or even follow from what scientists know.
Since then, the left has invoked "the science" for its particular policy prescriptions regarding the pandemic. Exhibit A is California's Gavin Newsom, who should be recalled. Newsom has imposed varying degrees of "lockdown" by decree ever since "two weeks to flatten the curve" in the spring, in the name of following "the science." To wit:
The governor has failed to follow the science.But in case anyone out there might object that Newsom is misinformed or is misapplying what he regards as "the science," the public sector teachers' unions are -- inadvertently -- doing a fine job of teaching us (!) this same lesson on a national scale, by insisting on remote learning anywhere they have enough political clout to do so:
If he were to use what science taught him, in other words, to "follow the science", he would allow children back in school. Instead of the government spending staggering amounts of money to prop up a closed economy, it should spend some on sanitizing the schools, keep them safe from COVID, and let the children go back to class. Children were allowed in classrooms throughout the pandemic but only when used as a daycare. Science tells us the virus does not know the difference when the same classroom is used for education.
President Trump lost his reelection bid in part because he ignored science that would have (a) led him to take the pandemic more seriously, and (b) helped him see what he could have done about it. It is now -- without Donald Trump there to make the Democrats look good solely by contrast -- the left's turn in the limelight.[N]otwithstanding the scientific consensus -- namely, that closing schools does far more harm than good -- teachers' unions in many big cities have simply refused to go back into the classroom, claiming it's too dangerous. Public schools didn't reopen in the fall in Chicago, Los Angeles, Philadelphia and most other large cities. Several teachers' unions have said flatly that they won't come back until a vaccine is available.
Scientists go to where the evidence leads them, not simply to wherever they feel like going at the moment. (Image by The National Cancer Institute, via Unsplash, license.)
And then there's New York City, which tragically shut down its school system on Thursday after having opened schools to hybrid learning in late September. Did Mayor Bill de Blasio make the decision to close them because they were suddenly Covid-19 hotspots? No. Although the citywide positivity rate has risen above 3%, the rate of infection in the schools was astonishingly low: 0.15%. Kids were not infecting teachers, and teachers weren't infecting students -- just as study after study had suggested would be the case.
Rather, it was because to get the United Federation of Teachers to agree to come back to the classroom, de Blasio had to agree that if the city reached a 3% positivity rate threshold, the school system would return to remote learning.
Was there any science behind the 3% threshold? No...
This is the third and final part of a series with three installments.
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