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Great Barrington Versus John Snow
A competition between intelligence and anti-reason is emerging slowly from the ruins of public discourse
One of the adorable characteristics of the twinkly sparkly young journalists at The Economist news magazine is the interval of time between them merely mouthing generic narratives along with the rest of the mass media and those same eager young things eventually waking up to the realization that the generic narrative they’ve been repeating is in fact specious.
With regards to the rise of populism/nationalism engendered by the 2008 financial meltdown, this interval, which we may perhaps term Economist Thought Lag (ETL) was several years. With the current mindless panic over SARS-CoV2, the ETL interval has been a mere nine months, although it may be several months more before these delightfully self-satisfied journalists truly grasp the magnitude of their early platitudinous error.
We must presumably count ourselves fortunate that the ETL seems to be diminishing, if we can trust a mere two datapoints for the purposes of extrapolation (hint: we should never, ever, trust two datapoints, but let’s pretend anyway).
The topic of SARS-CoV2 is controversial because it has become not a matter of science but a matter of politics and career. The early…
