ddrcrono

I would actually say I've seen this go both ways too - I was in Japan in 2020 and there were very much in denial about COVID likely in part because it happened just before the Olympics were supposed to (economically disastrous for a country already struggling).

Conversely, once they started to actually have public policy on it, their restrictions were significantly more moderate than in most places in Canada - in my prefecture aside from an initial month of lockdown I never stopped working, as a teacher, in-person, teaching hundreds of students a week. I could still go eat food with colleagues most times, and our infection numbers rarely exceeded double digits in the whole prefecture. How did we do it?

Our prefecture took more of a laser-focused approach to things - when infections started upticking they would make rules like "no eating at restaurants open after 8pm" and had 5 levels of very oddly specific rules about things you could and couldn't do in public. They often targeted shutting remotely resembling nightlife first because a lot of infections would come from anything that looked like that. Looking at some places in Canada which were being far more draconian (and doing worse) from a public policy end it felt that the Japanese "Don't ask for more than people can do," was more successful. (Of course this was less the case for places like Osaka, Tokyo, etc but even they were on the whole less strict than, say BC).

Would a more Japanese approach have worked in Canada? Hard to say, but I think there is a case to be made that some restrictions were asking for more than a lot of people were willing to give. Essentially, knowing people and good public policy isn't necessary the same as understanding science, because you have to consider what people are willing to comply with, and what is asking too much, whether certain things will backfire, what downsides there are to policy, etc. and it's reasonable for us as citizens to have objections (one way or the other) - I would even go so far as to say that's part of our civic duty.

The way I'd put this in technical terms is "What percentage of your disposable income is going towards helping others?" $50 for someone making minimum wage is probably more than $1 million coming from a billionaire.

I would say as far as my genuine feelings I feel a bit torn about this one. I would say the people you describe definitely are a chunk of the people out there.

But just on principle alone it's more interesting if I argue for a different angle:

Just as much as you get people saying "do your own research" you get people saying "trust the science," usually people who themselves haven't actually looked at the science and are just copy-pasting media headlines. (And as I'm sure you've heard, a lot of what makes it into the public conversation is the media twisting or exaggerating scientific findings beyond the certainty they actually show).

So in this context, "do your own research," actually makes sense - for instance, when Corona started I got way ahea of the game by actually talking to my friend who was at the time doing his PhD in immunology, he recommended some videos on YouTube (which a paltry few thousand views) that were just lecture recordings of a professor talking about and breaking down to a class what had been discovered about Corona already.

From this I actually came to realize that the way the governments and media were portraying Corona in the beginning (we're talking March-May 2020 sort of time period) was actually extremely misleading. Ex: We knew the half-life of Corona in the air was like, 3-4 hours, and that it was reasonably likely transmission was occuring that way, and that transmission by touch was very unlikely, yet we were still hearing a lot of "wash and sanitize" (and we still see sanitizing stations) which very likely do nothing at all.

Anyway for the love of God let's please not have an extended Corona talk - the point that I wanted to get to here is that, compared to the information that was being publicly dessiminated by both governments and the media at the time, by doing my own (actual real) research, I got information I wouldn't have otherwise.

Similarly, if there's a topic that's really contentious, or "the science" I'm seeing seems a little suspicious or incomplete I'll suck it up and start looking at papers (which are linguistically and technically dreadfully inaccessible if you haven't done a lot of research / you don't know that field of science, but with persistence and a bit of extra learning you can get the gist of it). A lot of the time things in reality are at least a bit, if not a lot different than they're being presented. After all, the sources that control public access to science themselves have biases and interests.

This is why, I think that people who say "trust the science" can be just as bad as those saying "do your own research" because usually those "trusting the science" aren't closely taking a look at what they're actually trusting (which often ends up being "trust how the government/media is talking about the science," a far more precarious statement). To me, both groups smack of a lack of critical thinking - one group universally untrusting and the other the opposite.

Ultimately science is contingent on our rationality, and our ability to think critically - all the scientific instruments and research results in the world do no good in the hands of someone with poor reasoning or, for that matter, a lack of imagination (Einstein himself said it to be more important than a mastery of the rational side of the sciences - this is, after all, how we form hypothesis to test). That is to say, essentially, that if the way we reject, or accept science is in itself something resembling faith rather than considered critical thought, then we ourselves are not being scientific.

The last point I want to touch on is that I think, is that you can perfectly good science lead to bad policy. Not to beat it to death, but I think a lot of people feel governments overreacted / overreached with certain laws and policies, ostensibly based on good science, but without the science clearly pointing to that being a good practical way to handle people. (It's essentially the age-old list a bunch of sound premises and then an unrelated conclusion - to many people that will seem like an argment that leads to a conclusion, especially people who are feeling afraid and panicked).

So, in situations like this you can have people who intuitively feel "This isn't right," but can't put their finger on why, and then they get sucked into overtly incorrect conspiracies that confirm their feelings. (So their conclusion "This isn't trustworthy/objective/reasonable," is correct, but the theory they adopt to explain why is wrong). I think a lot of these things are fundamentally a little more complex than they initially seem, anyway, and most people at some level have a reasonable intuition that is correct that they're going on, but where it's leading them is not.

Personally, I have found that at least some "do your own research" people are people who genuinely doubt the public narrative (and with some good reason, ex: intuitively it lines up too conveniently with government/corporate interests) but they just don't know how to look for good quality stuff/where it is. While you're not going to get through to all of them, I think if you know someone who's skeptical but reasonable it's worth the time to sit down with them and show them a bit of what's going on "under the hood" so to speak.

Overall, taking a less combattive approach when possible is something I'd always like to see more of, so even if people are being unreasonable, it's important to extent grace and charity to them if you want to make things better. Be patient and find the people worth your time, and have a conversation about things, and be prepared to also be surprised that you might have not been totally right on some things you felt strongly about.

I like the point about people being too tired - as much as that might have felt like a side point I think there may be something there - one thing I noticed in Japan is that when I did something nice that was not culturally required people would not only be really happy but actually surprised.

Japan is not only overworked to death, but also very strict on manners and social rules, so you're often required to pretend to be nice to someone and to follow your duty to others to the point that people start to lose the concept of doing nice things spontaneously.

As the vice grips tighten around the working and middle class, I think what you're describing has also been happening in the West not only since Corona but gradually over the last several decades. People concerned primarily with survival have less room to be kind. (That said, it means more when they are).

I have mixed feelings on this:

On one hand I've seen stuff where AI makes confident assertions about things in my field of study (philosophy) that are just straight-up incorrect, but sound right enough to "trick" laymen. I'm pretty sure anything that actually requires any depth of reasoning, critical thinking or genuine creativity is still pretty far off. I think that's probably the stuff you have in mind.

On the other hand I think there is a lot of genuinely boring mechanical middle-level job type with that is in genuine danger, where it previously was just a bit too complex and human to automate but is at its core very repetitive and predictable. (One example I heard was someone who wrote descriptions of events or something similar). These are things where have perfect accuracy or high quality isn't vital and generally making associations and giving vague descriptions and a general idea is good enough. I think these jobs are generally in the most danger. (A lot of "low" level with requires physical interaction and wouldn't save much money to replace and high level work requires you to actually have a brain).

On the other hand, I think there will be a certain point where we see a significant breakthrough where we see something that starts to genuinely resemble critical thinking comes out.

Full disclosure I've been following the world's most popular AI streamer since shortly after her debut last year and having seen the leaps and bounds by which her general interactions with people and her environment have improved is pretty impressive. (Not to mention things like voice/singing etc.)

It's also really interesting to see how many real people interacting with her seem to forget that she's not a real person, letting themselves get rattled or thrown off more than you might expect. (Unlike your standard AI she can often be a sassy brat if not at times mildly unhinged). Even her creator gets genuinely exasperated when she decides to roast him.

Weirdly, the appeal for me is that I often find her to be more genuine than excessively scripted streamers who are really putting up a front, staying within a narrow persona and so on - and because she can say more or less whatever she wants she actually brings out a more interesting side in people agree collaborates with.

I would say in the case of this project, there's a lot of hands-on effort on the part of the guy running it and it only works because of how it interacts with people - there's a reason it's never taken off beyond this particular steamer. I'm really interested to see how this develops over time.