The writer brought up a good point that people's intuitive mental models of the physical world (be it disease or planetary orbits) don't readily align with reality. I think that people want to...
The writer brought up a good point that people's intuitive mental models of the physical world (be it disease or planetary orbits) don't readily align with reality.
I think that people want to exercise their agency against Coronavirus. But they can act only on their mental models. Most people's mental models are naive because they are often intuited using the perceptible, tangible, and concrete aspects of our world — not the imperceptible, intangible, or abstract. What the world outwardly presents to our senses is not necessarily the truth.
I think that another factor that impedes the rapid adoption of factual information is social signaling. It creates information inertia. Much of what we think we know we didn't find out for ourselves: the information was socially transmitted. Some knowledge we can verify from first principles. But other knowledge we accept only because enough people whom we trust also believe in that information. For example, ricin is extremely toxic. I don't really know if it is: I don't know much chemistry and I've never tested it myself to empirically verify it. But enough people whom I trust told me this and that's enough for me to treat this information as fact.
Although conservative use of the term "virtue signaling" to deride liberals in America has somewhat tainted the term, the phenomenon does undergird human activity. Humans constantly read, interpret, judge, and send signals to and from each other. Knowledge has a social function beyond a utilitarian function: people want to show that they're 'in' with the program. Contradicting a collective consensus is difficult. When a collective consensus is firmly entrenched, contradiction is dissension: either the entire collective is wrong or the contradictor is wrong because ze's mistaken or the contradictor is wrong because ze's malevolent.
Similarly, when the Hungarian physician Ignaz Semmelweis realized the importance of washing hands to protect patients, he lost his job and was widely condemned by disbelieving colleagues. He wasn’t always the most tactful communicator, and his colleagues resented his brash implication that they were harming their patients (even though they were).
Throughout the pandemic, the W.H.O. was slow to accept the key role that infectious particles small enough to float could be playing.
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To see this misunderstanding in action, look at what’s still happening throughout the world. In India, where hospitals have run out of supplemental oxygen and people are dying in the streets, money is being spent on fleets of drones to spray anti-coronavirus disinfectant in outdoor spaces. Parks, beaches and outdoor areas keep getting closed around the world. This year and last, organizers canceled outdoor events for the National Cherry Blossom Festival in Washington, D.C. Cambodian customs officials advised spraying disinfectant outside vehicles imported from India. The examples are many.
Meanwhile, many countries allowed their indoor workplaces to open but with inadequate aerosol protections. There was no attention to ventilation, installing air filters as necessary or even opening windows when possible, more to having people just distancing three or six feet, sometimes not requiring masks beyond that distance, or spending money on hard plastic barriers, which may be useless at best. (Just this week, President Biden visited a school where students were sitting behind plastic shields.)
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Dr. Chapin asserted in the early 1900s that respiratory diseases were most likely spread at close range by people touching bodily fluids or ejecting respiratory droplets, and did not allow for the possibility that such close-range infection could occur by inhaling small floating particles others emitted. He was also concerned that belief in airborne transmission, which he associated with miasma theories, would make people feel helpless and drop their guard against contact transmission. This was a mistake that would haunt infection control for the next century and more.
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Linsey Marr, a professor of engineering at Virginia Tech who made important contributions to our understanding of airborne virus transmission before the pandemic, pointed to two key scientific errors — rooted in a lot of history — that explain the resistance, and also opened a fascinating sociological window into how science can get it wrong and why.
First, Dr. Marr said, the upper limit for particles to be able to float is actually 100 microns, not five microns, as generally thought. The incorrect five-micron claim may have come about because earlier scientists conflated the size at which respiratory particles could reach the lower respiratory tract (important for studying tuberculosis) with the size at which they remain suspended in the air.
Dr. Marr said that if you inhale a particle from the air, it’s an aerosol. She agreed that droplet transmission by a larger respiratory particle is possible, if it lands on the eye, for
example, but biomechanically, she said, nasal transmission faces obstacles, since nostrils point downward and the physics of particles that large makes it difficult for them to move up the nose. And in lab measurements, people emit far more of the easier-to-inhale aerosols than the droplets, she said, and even the smallest particles can be virus laden, sometimes more so than the larger ones, seemingly because of how and where they are produced in the respiratory tract.
Second, she said, proximity is conducive to transmission of aerosols as well because aerosols are more concentrated near the person emitting them. In a twist of history, modern scientists have been acting like those who equated stinky air with disease, by equating close contact, a measure of distance, only with the larger droplets, a mechanism of transmission, without examination.
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Another dynamic we’ve seen is something that is not unheard-of in the history of science: setting a higher standard of proof for theories that challenge conventional wisdom than for those that support it.
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So much of what we have done throughout the pandemic — the excessive hygiene theater and the failure to integrate ventilation and filters into our basic advice — has greatly hampered our response. Some of it, like the way we underused or even shut down outdoor space, isn’t that different from the 19th-century Londoners who flushed the source of their foul air into the Thames and made the cholera epidemic worse.
I still see restaurants wiping down tables between patrons, meanwhile they're allowing people to sit inside with all of the windows closed (but maybe a door open, which to be fair is a big help).
I still see restaurants wiping down tables between patrons, meanwhile they're allowing people to sit inside with all of the windows closed (but maybe a door open, which to be fair is a big help).
Haha, good point. But I mean places that have a whole system where the waiter leaves an "UNSANITIZED" card on tables to signal to someone that it needs to be de-corona'd.
Haha, good point. But I mean places that have a whole system where the waiter leaves an "UNSANITIZED" card on tables to signal to someone that it needs to be de-corona'd.
Yeah, that might be a tad bit excessive. But at least it helps them track what needs to be cleaned. One thing we should keep in mind is that they probably know better, and this is just theater to...
Yeah, that might be a tad bit excessive. But at least it helps them track what needs to be cleaned.
One thing we should keep in mind is that they probably know better, and this is just theater to stop complaints from the people who do not yet know the current state of research on the virus.
The writer brought up a good point that people's intuitive mental models of the physical world (be it disease or planetary orbits) don't readily align with reality.
I think that people want to exercise their agency against Coronavirus. But they can act only on their mental models. Most people's mental models are naive because they are often intuited using the perceptible, tangible, and concrete aspects of our world — not the imperceptible, intangible, or abstract. What the world outwardly presents to our senses is not necessarily the truth.
I think that another factor that impedes the rapid adoption of factual information is social signaling. It creates information inertia. Much of what we think we know we didn't find out for ourselves: the information was socially transmitted. Some knowledge we can verify from first principles. But other knowledge we accept only because enough people whom we trust also believe in that information. For example, ricin is extremely toxic. I don't really know if it is: I don't know much chemistry and I've never tested it myself to empirically verify it. But enough people whom I trust told me this and that's enough for me to treat this information as fact.
Although conservative use of the term "virtue signaling" to deride liberals in America has somewhat tainted the term, the phenomenon does undergird human activity. Humans constantly read, interpret, judge, and send signals to and from each other. Knowledge has a social function beyond a utilitarian function: people want to show that they're 'in' with the program. Contradicting a collective consensus is difficult. When a collective consensus is firmly entrenched, contradiction is dissension: either the entire collective is wrong or the contradictor is wrong because ze's mistaken or the contradictor is wrong because ze's malevolent.
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I still see restaurants wiping down tables between patrons, meanwhile they're allowing people to sit inside with all of the windows closed (but maybe a door open, which to be fair is a big help).
I should hope they're wiping down their tables; pandemic or no, I'd prefer to be seated at a clean table.
Haha, good point. But I mean places that have a whole system where the waiter leaves an "UNSANITIZED" card on tables to signal to someone that it needs to be de-corona'd.
Yeah, that might be a tad bit excessive. But at least it helps them track what needs to be cleaned.
One thing we should keep in mind is that they probably know better, and this is just theater to stop complaints from the people who do not yet know the current state of research on the virus.