Ansuz

Notes on the plague year

I don't remember exactly when I made a specific decision to start serious anti-COVID precautions, but it was very close to one year ago today. I work from home and I don't take all that many trips elsewhere anyway, so it's hard to say that a given day is exactly when I started "staying home" if I normally wouldn't have gone out the day before or after it anyway. I started keeping a near-daily journal on March 10. Here are some notes, going month by month.

Pandemic: the reckoning

The word "reckoning" came up a lot in discussions of the COVID-19 pandemic, especially early on as the world just started to realize the scale of the problem. I've seen a lot of people grimly commenting that "there will be a reckoning for this" in response to things like media dismissal of early warnings, followed by later media endorsement of exactly the positions they had earlier mocked. I've made such comments myself. It's human nature to hope for a reckoning, but at this point I don't think it's rational to expect one.

The imagination gap, part 3

This is the final part of a three-part series on the cognitive deficit in hypothetical thinking: some people seem unable to handle thinking about a difference between what is real and what is imagined.

The imagination gap, part 2

This is the second part of a three-part series on the cognitive deficit in hypothetical thinking: some people seem unable to handle thinking about a difference between what is real and what is imagined. In the first part, I discussed this deficit as an abstraction. In this second part, I'll look at some legal and political examples.

The imagination gap, part 1

A deficit in hypothetical cognition

In The World As If, Sarah Perry gives "an account of how magical thinking made us modern." She discusses how to define "magical thinking" and suggests that the diverse things to which people apply that label form "a collection of stigmatized examples of a more general, and generally useful, cognitive capacity." Namely, the capacity to entertain false, "not expected to be proven," or otherwise not exactly true propositions as if they were true.

Although magical thinking may often be called a behaviour of children or of those in primitive cultures, what Perry calls the "as if" mode of thought (I want to also include "what if") is in no way primitive. The view that magical thinking is for children and the uneducated can and should be inverted: mastery of hypothetical "as if" cognition is necessary for functioning as an adult in a literate technological society, and characteristic of the most sophisticated thinking human beings ever do.

Ad stramineum hominem

Sometimes I find myself on the receiving end of false accusations of "straw man" argumentation, and it feels like this happens abnormally often to me in particular. It's baffling because when it happens, it doesn't make any sense.

How Wikipedia could save itself

I don't think Wikipedia wants to save itself. But if they really wanted to, I know how they could do it.