Here is some non-basketball content I read or listened to this week that I found interesting:
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- “Even if prevention wasn’t possible, we could have had the supplies we needed. They were for sale. But someone has to decide it is worth keeping massive expensive inventories that are rarely used. A hospital owned by a corporation that wants to stay lean to keep profits high, is unlikely to do this. What corporations call inefficiency, in the short term, is often very important in the long.”
- “It’s governments that historically are well suited to insure societies against uncommon but devastating events, like wars, famines and natural disasters. Without shareholders and profit motive they can prioritize differently. America’s prized $748 billion military mostly stockpiles missiles, guns and aircraft that will never be used for their purpose, but we pay anyway. Why? In case we need it. That’s what a government can do. Why the same logic isn’t used when it’s about the health of citizens is a better line of inquiry than simply pointing out that we didn’t have enough of something. A small percent of that military budget might have been enough.”
- “This was not a building problem. It was a priorities problem. A logistical problem. A leadership problem. You could call it many different kinds of problems but building isn’t high on the list.”
- “I agree with him that these should be solvable problems but part of the answer is having more of our best young technologists choose to work to help society in profoundly important ways instead of being recruited to join one of Andreessen’s startups that’s going to go try, but likely fail, to disrupt something or other that everyone involved admits isn’t really that important but happens to have a bigger “growth opportunity.””
- “How about free internet for all? (A timely problem since underprivileged kids can’t do schoolwork from home right now). How about ensuring basic health care for everyone or even that every family has enough food to eat for the next few months? Those are building problems too, but they don’t sound as cool to the tech-centric as his list does. Historically the truly important things technology can do for us in the long term don’t seem cool, but maybe a silver lining of the pandemic is that will change.”
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It’s time to build - if you have the bucks - “So while the readers truly inspired by “It’s Time to Build” are out there with huge construction cranes, there also needs to be a separate set of people, less noticeable but just as important, holding chisels, to chip away at the systems we’ve built - the legal hurdles, political systems, large swaths of government that are ineffective, and VC-based technologies and startups that don’t do any of the actual building but only get in its way.”
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Why the Coronavirus Is So Confusing
- “This is how science actually works. It’s less the parade of decisive blockbuster discoveries that the press often portrays, and more a slow, erratic stumble toward ever less uncertainty.”
- “A lack of expertise becomes problematic when it’s combined with extreme overconfidence, and with society’s tendency to reward projected confidence over humility. “When scientists offer caveats instead of absolutes,” Gralinski says, “that uncertainty we’re trained to acknowledge makes it sound like no one knows what’s going on, and creates opportunities for people who present as skeptics.””
- “In a pandemic, the strongest attractor of trust shouldn’t be confidence, but the recognition of one’s limits, the tendency to point at expertise beyond one’s own, and the willingness to work as part of a whole.”
- ““I hope the lesson people take from this is not ‘Experts were wrong,’” Tufekci says. “If you followed the right people, they were overwhelmingly right. We just didn’t put them in the right place so we could hear them.””
- “Rosen also argues that the media’s default rhythm of constant piecemeal updates is ill-suited to covering an event as large as the pandemic. “Journalists still think of their job as producing new content, but if your goal is public understanding of COVID-19, one piece of new content after another doesn’t get you there,” he says. “It requires a lot of background knowledge to understand the updates, and the news system is terrible at [providing that knowledge].” Instead, the staccato pulse of reports merely amplifies the wobbliness of the scientific process, turns incremental bits of evidence into game changers, and intensifies the already-palpable sense of uncertainty that drives people toward misinformation.”
- “The mathematical models that have guided the world’s pandemic responses have been often portrayed as crystal balls. That is not their purpose. They instead describe a range of possibilities, and help scientists and policy makers to simulate what might happen pending different courses of action. Models reveal many possible fates, and allow us to choose one.”
- “In the final second of December 31, 1999, clocks ticked into a new millennium, and … not much happened. The infamous Y2K bug, a quirk of computer code that was predicted to cause global chaos, did very little. Twenty years later, Y2K is almost synonymous with overreaction—a funny moment when humanity freaked out over nothing. But it wasn’t nothing. It actually was a serious problem, which never fully materialized because a lot of people worked very hard to prevent it. “There are two lessons one can learn from an averted disaster,” Tufekci says. “One is: That was exaggerated. The other is: That was close.””