I want to wish all the moms a happy mother's day. Go moms. We are going to .........wait for it.........hang around the house. Wife is also trying to lose the COVID-19 (weight) so no cooking either. Should be an excellent mom's day.
Let's get our Plato Epistemology studies on and talk about knowledge and chance and the human brain in the time of COVID-19. Who knows about the illusion of knowledge, or remembers
C(p | {Ch(p)=}^E)=x i.e. the principal principle
my guess is most of you are scratching your heads and getting ready to stop reading
let me dumb it down
if we flip a coin and I call it right do you think I have coin calling skill? What if I get it right 10 times in a row? What about if there are 256 people in a room what are the odds of someone in the room calling the coin toss right 10 times in a row?
Wait stop doing math and remember the important thing--assuming a fair coin and fair toss no one has coin flip calling skill----but we humans don't want to believe that. We want to believe that we can figure things out. We are conditioned to ascribe skill to what is chance. Call it the curse of the Protestant work ethic. We want to believe that hard work and brains and effort are rewarded. Smart people can figure out how to beat the market (and yes a bit of solid statistical analysis can make you wonder if Warren Buffet is actually a good investor or a lucky one or maybe a bit of both).
We want to think that if we wash our hands and stay away from groups we won't get COVID.
We also want to think that those people that get COVID must have done something to deserve it.
That will largely be true at the macro level, but isn't true at all at the individual level, and yet we want to judge individuals.
You can have the same argument regarding antibodies and how one's immune system responds to COVID. We want to believe that if we are healthy and take good care of ourselves and therefore deserve good health we will be ok. Those people who get sick and maybe die---well they must have engaged in risky behavior, they must have not worked hard enough to get a job that allows them to work from home, they must have smoked or not exercised or something to damage their immune system.........and on and on and on. Humans hate to think that maybe just maybe chance is going to determine if you live or die.
To put a fine point on it---right now we have to live with a ton of uncertainty and we don't like that. We humans also want to ascribe knowledge and meaning to a the pandemic to help us make sense of what is going on and to know what to do. We don't and the most honest people with the most useful knowledge and suggestions are those who admit the limits of their understanding.
Or as my son's college advisor said regarding the admissions process "its a shit show right now".
More fun as to why Trump is a rational actor regarding some of his seemingly unhinged ideas. If he guesses wrong (re bleach, or sun or hydroxchloroquine) its just Trump being Trump and will be forgotten but if he gets it right.........OMG the rewards for him guessing right would be a second term and all the rewards that go with that. So yea he is the guy who walks up to the roulette table and bets on 17----yes the odds are 1:35 but for him he looses little in terms of credibility but if he gets it right the winnings are huge. A different way to explain it is heads he wins .....tails we lose.
