Day 177: Finally the Flu

It must be a slow news day, because a lot of "record" numbers were reported today. Though the world is at a far-from-round 16.4 million cases, Worldometer has declared a cool 10 million persons recovered. Earlier today, when the death toll surpassed 650,000, BNO News noted that we have finally, after more than seven months, exceeded the estimated death count of a severe (though not pandemic) flu year (646,000).

India (#3) had a record of over 50,000 cases today. NPR reports a bit of a flare-up in #9 Spain which "could already be a second wave."

As expected, California took first place in total cases yesterday. In a less-watched number, Louisiana has exceeded New York to take first place in cases per capita. And on the adding-insult-to-injury front, the city of Los Angeles has, without warning, fined a bunch of already-suffering local businesses $356 apiece for hanging up banners saying they're open.

Paul Graham has posted a few times now about what we here in the PlagueBlog newsroom refer to as "the new crazy". His first couple of posts were brief; the first one noted the hubris of some not particularly qualified folks making not particularly reliable predictions back in April about the impact of coronavirus:

But epidemics are rare enough that these people clearly didn't realize [rapid falsification of their predictions] was even a possibility. Instead they just continued to use their ordinary m.o., which, as the epidemic has made clear, is to talk confidently about things they don't understand.

The second one was directed at cancel culture, but correct coronavirus thought is a more pressing example of orthodox privilege:

The more conventional-minded someone is, the more it seems to them that it's safe for everyone to express their opinions.

The third one, on conformism, is longer and more interesting. He concludes with the tragedy of the conformists taking over the universities—institutions formerly devoted to non-conformist thought. (He has implied in the past that there is no such thing as conformist thought; it is a contradiction in terms.)

Enforcers of orthodoxy can't allow a borderline idea to exist, because that gives other enforcers an opportunity to one-up them in the moral purity department, and perhaps even to turn enforcer upon them. So instead of getting the margin for error we need, we get the opposite: a race to the bottom in which any idea that seems at all bannable ends up being banned.
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Having ideas in a world where some ideas are banned is like playing soccer on a pitch that has a minefield in one corner. You don't just play the same game you would have, but on a different shaped pitch. You play a much more subdued game even on the ground that's safe.

In terms of coronavirus, it is conformism in science that is the contradiction in terms. If you are preaching the absolute truth of some result from a paper or papers you haven't even read (never mind having read the other papers that contradicted it), you are a conformist. You are not part of the solution; you're part of the minefield.

Massachusetts cases are up a third of a percentage point today. This may reflect a tiny upward trend.