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naraburns  nihil supernum  1yr ago (text post)   32260 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of January 2, 2023

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Humans are in control everywhere.

We exaggerate our control, especially our ability to act with predictable effects. I mean, if there's one thing that I hope people take away from covid, it's that nature can still bite us hard. Even if you think that covid was a big deal as a medical problem, it could have been a lot worse, and a fortiori it could have been much much worse if you think that it wasn't such a big deal. See also climate change, where (a) there is a lot of natural variation and (b) even the part that is due to human action is barely modifiable by human design due to political reasons and lagged effects.

We impact ecosystems. Our control of them is limited, unreliable, and extremely unrobust.

You guys are quibbling over differences that exist orders of magnitude past the threshold of her point being true. Your comparing existing under/a part of human dominance to the state of nature that is humanless ecosystems. By this standard my government is litterally perfect; the chances of my living flesh being torn apart by tooth and claw so a carnivore can eat has gone down to straight up zero.

as she seems to treat things like poachers as a limitation on the capacity of humans, instead of a chosen activity of humans

In retrospect, I should have included that as one of the cathedralising signs.

Does covid show that? Whether one takes issue with vaccine side effects, mandates and lockdowns, not locking down or masking enough, or the FDA being too slow - these are all social or institutional failures, not nature giving us something we can't take. Success by any of those measures is within the historical norm. And if sars-cov-2 had the same transmissibility but the death rate of sars-1, the response would've been quicker and harsher - plausibly with more mistakes along the way, but it'd be effective. To say we 'exaggerate our control' understates the power large-scale technology has, and if nature bites us hard, it probably looks more like complex, avoidable errors in use of that power than just climate or disease.

these are all social or institutional failures, not nature giving us something we can't take

I think "can't" is ambiguous here, because social and institutional failures in response to a natural challenge is exactly an example of what I would regard as a failure of control over nature. Subject to the goals and abilities of the human race, as it was in 2020, the response to covid was not one of being able to control the situation, and not one of being able to avoid massive damages of multiple kinds.

I'm just arguing 'nature' isn't an interesting part of the picture here, unless you mean nature in the sense of ''natural law' (which just means 'progressivism is bad', not that i disagree, but that's a different thing) - but if nature means forests, diseases, and climate, we're very good at controlling the former two and navigating around the third.

I would certainly say we have some control over climate and some diseases. On the other hand, if a prion starts decomposing your brain or Yellowstone erupts, the limits of our control become apparent. It's a gross simplification to say that "Humans are in control everywhere".

Does covid show that?

yes because covid came and went at roughly equal regional levels largely irrelevant of the various costly responses at different degrees throughout the world

the institutional predictions were terrible; the institutional predictions of the effects of the various measures taken were horrible

Success by any of those measures is within the historical norm

And if sars-cov-2 had the same transmissibility but the death rate of sars-1

but it wasn't; claiming sarscov2 outcomes aren't as bad as many of the flu epidemics makes a categorical error by equating it to those flus and the ability of those flus to cause damage

but covid19 never was those flus; humans not noticing it at all would have been a far superior outcome to what was done once it was noticed

and if you're comparing it to bad flu years, i.e., the "historical norm," given the costs of responses this would be an argument in favor of overestimation of human ability to control and predict outcomes

but it'd be effective

you would save humanity from covid by killing most people before covid can get them; this would be "effective" at stopping covid deaths, but it would also be far worse than covid

the effects of that would be largely predictable, too

but then again, so what? mass scale slaughter is certainly power, but it's not the sort of "control" being talked about which would be represented by the ability to accurately predict outcomes and costs for inaction or various "large scale technolog[ies]" which was a horrible failure at the institutional level

Whether one takes issue with vaccine side effects, mandates and lockdowns, not locking down or masking enough, or the FDA being too slow - these are all social or institutional failures, not nature giving us something we can't take.

These are the same thing.

Success by any of those measures is within the historical norm.

Indeed, which is to say "none at all".

And if sars-cov-2 had the same transmissibility but the death rate of sars-1, the response would've been quicker and harsher - plausibly with more mistakes along the way, but it'd be effective.

This is completely unproven.

Social failures don't need an external stimulus from 'nature' to manifest - they can be entirely internal, see america's crime problem. And the incorrect intentions, lack of competence, or whatever that leads to internal mistakes is the same kind of thing that causes poor responses to nature's incursions. So I don't think they are the same thing - a poorly coordinated pandemic response due to democracy, media, and government is very different from a 1 in 500 year flood wiping out your citystate. The latter seems a lot more like 'we can't control nature', than the former. I think the technical or social complexity of disease eradication, which has happened, is comparable to that of a successful disease-stopping lockdown, the latter of which is admittedly unproven.

If social or institutional failures mean you can't take control what nature dishes out, you have failed to control what nature dishes out. That social failures can manifest without an external stimulus does not change that.

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