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Sanity Amidst the Chaos
I have seen enough graphs, data, and statistics on Ricochet to last me a lifetime. Some of the information is helpful, some of it is 
confusing, some of it is biased. I had decided to just watch and listen to the discussions and come from a place of “not knowing,” to allow myself to take it all in and eventually draw my own conclusions. Well, eventually has arrived, in the form of my complaints and that ol’ go-to method, common sense.
First, I’m getting upset at the number of personal attacks in the conversations. People are assuming the worst of intentions, becoming defensive and aggressive. My advice (for what it’s worth):
Knock it off.
Even when people get the information wrong, please just disagree and re-state your point. Sarcasm and ad hominem attacks are not only unhelpful, but they are destructive to everyone: to those arguing and those of us who are seeking good information.
Second, I think we are all yielding to the stress of anxiety about the situation. Please take responsibility for your reactions, to the information and to others’ comments, and act like mature human beings. I’m anxious, too, but we should be supporting each other, not trying to take others down.
Third, I’ve decided to take a position on what the government is doing and I’m not going to offer graphs and charts. (I’ll look to others to provide that information.) Here’s what I’ve decided:
- My husband and I are seniors. I’m healthy, he’s compromised. But we are perfectly capable of taking care of ourselves. We will stay home, except when we need groceries, and we will shop for groceries without your help. It is risky, but so is crossing the street.
- We are all going to die someday. Nobody knows when his or her date to exit the planet will arrive. You can avoid recognizing that truth, but it will do you no good.
- As Holman Jenkins said in the WSJ today regarding the focus of our attention: “Wouldn’t it make more sense to pour resources into isolating the vulnerable rather than isolating everyone?” Then we can focus on getting the economy back on-line.
I welcome other common-sense suggestions. You can throw out more data, but I’m not very interested. I’m interested in supporting each other. For those of you who know millennials or have millennial family members who are acting like teenagers, tell them to grow up.
Let’s all grow up.
Published in General
I second.
Our world is still turning down here. I was going to have a friend from Raleigh come down and watch the Masters with me. Although the Masters is cancelled, he may come anyway with another friend. We might even go to my favorite Chinese restaurant and order Coronas with our meals. Take that, virus!
I would like people to stop posting their doomsday scenarios. It seems to have become some kind contest who see who can imagine the worst of worst-case scenarios.
For those of us who don’t handle anxiety very well, it’s making me want to just cancel my Ricochet account right now, because it’s popping up in nearly every thread.
Post something positive. Stop trying to frighten people. What’s the matter with you? Do you enjoy seeing how much panic you can create? Last night I had a call from a client (my only client at this point, to make sure I understood that we have no work until September at the earliest — thanks I knew that) and she just started telling me all sorts of bad news, and I just wanted to hang up the phone. Of course, I didn’t. I have to be nice to her. But I was pretty much on the ledge for the rest of the evening after that.
And I’m not back to myself today yet. I don’t know if I’ll be back to myself for months. The daily doses of crappy news is not helping. If Ricochet is going to be a place where everyone is trying impress each other by coming up with the scariest scenarios, it’s best for my mental health to not be here.
Americans out there and on Ricochet would calm down if they knew exactly when the national quarantine would end. It should be two weeks from the day it started. Then let each state do what it needs to do. Spring will kill this thing. It is burning out in China as the weather there warms and becomes more humid.
People can handle anything if they know there is an end in sight.
This historical event reminds me of the years that airlines were holding people on departing or landing airplanes on the airport tarmacs for hours at a time–just because they could. People became acutely frustrated. Of course they did.
We’ve got to do a better job of managing the psychology of this event as well as the physiology.
I’ve stopped reading the WSJ for that reason. I can’t take the pressure. I’m praying for my family and friends and country and world instead.
And I’m leaning on the Serenity Prayer:
God, grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change,
courage to change the things I can,
and wisdom to know the difference.
Oh Drew, I’m so sorry! Please don’t go. Check out my post on the Sabbath on the Main Feed. I agree with the contest on doomsday scenarios. The fact is, we don’t know how this will go, and it’s amazing how prepared we are to assume the worst. I do appreciate your sharing, and I expect that you speak for a lot of people. Thanks.
I think the government has tried, but very poorly. I don’t know about a two-week limit. I don’t know much of anything. But I do know that intentionally traumatizing people isn’t helpful. Thanks, @marcin
Ricochet and Facebook. Although I guess it is better than the constant re-hashing of Trump’s character?
I agree with Susan. Let’s all just be cool, be nice to each other.
I have read many (most?) of the comments on the virus topic in any number of threads because there is a lot of very good information to be had for those of us who disdain the panic-mongering in broadcast news. In fact, I just finished about sixty comments in two of the longer threads.
I will openly admit that I may not be as bothered by “mixing it up” as the average member, but I see very little requiring admonishment. Very little. It’s true that I’ve seen a few comments that could be characterized as highly argumentative, or even ad hominem, but the other comments are generally characterized by two camps having a rather intense discussion about the future of the virus and the worth of the measures taken to date. I’ve learned a lot, and with perhaps a few exceptions, see no reason for moderating the tone.
That is an important point. I’ve been reading before any of this virus was in the news, that we already had a large number of peple on anti-depressants, and a high suicide rate, and wonder if it is easier to make already fragile people panic.
I have a couple of doctor appointments this afternoon and then we’re going out to our favorite Mexican restaurant. Most restaurants in our little senior town are still open. I refuse to be anxious.
I will admit that this morning my mental state is flirting with despair. The first thing I saw was Fox News’s wonderful headline “WORLD IN PERIL.” Then I came across a story making the rounds that does a bunch of extrapolation and concludes that the only way we can avoid catastrophe is to continue the current severe restrictions for 18 months (which would not only be miserable but would pretty much destroy the economy).
The world is a complex place, and on many technical subjects we all must depend on experts to give us information and help us understand it. Sadly, that mechanism seems to have failed in the current situation. Which experts should we be listening to? The doomsday scenarios are the loudest and most attention-grabbing. I have no idea how valid any of them are, but at the moment it’s hard to find anything else.
That’s how I see it, too, @bartholomewxerxesogilviejr. A lot of people’s reactions might be temperament, having a different tolerance level for expressed differences, although I tend to be pretty optimistic overall. But after a while, I just get worn out. There doesn’t have to be many instances of nastiness for those to set the tone, too. I wish I had @hoyacon‘s tolerance level!
No, it would not make more sense. Jenkins displays the same ignorance of epidemiology I’ve seen here and pretty much everywhere people gather online. He also shows the same willingness to advance the first thing that comes into his mind.
This is not the time for reinventing a well understood public health discipline. Quarantine works, and has worked since people have lived in groups.
If anyone reading this thinks they understand epidemiology well enough to interpret the events around us, that is a sign of ignorance. For instance, I understand the math as well as any non-specialist and I’ve read a little of the models. That’s more than most commenters can say, but I have a very low opinion of my own knowledge. I know that I’m ignorant. Dunning and Kruger documented the tendency of people who don’t know enough to know they don’t know to think they have something important to say.
Bad arguments made from ignorance are not as dangerous as Chairman Xi, but they spread faster than nCov.
Everyone would be a lot calmer if they turned off the TV.
You’re probably right, @barfly. And one fact is that you don’t know if Jenkins is spouting “the first thing that comes to his mind.” You don’t know how much he knows about epidemiology. So you don’t know what you don’t know regarding Jenkins.
I suspect we don’t have many epidemiologists on Ricochet. So everyone essentially can evaluate the data in their own way and draw their own conclusions, and the rest of us can read what they’ve written and draw our own conclusions (which you’ve done). If you think that most of the posts are ignorant, you certainly don’t have to read them.
I, too, have a very low opinion of my own knowledge. But I know a lot about human nature. And I know that treating each others poorly (I’m not talking about you) in the comments when people disagree is just not helpful.
Yes, I do. He made a suggestion that could be countered by a first-semester medical student.
It really is ok to measure people’s minds from their speech.
Me too.
I second this. We are in the midst of a national crisis that has the potential to damage our nation forever. We are watching as Americans relinquish their civil liberties at an unimaginable rate. The lock down of people and businesses, once used, will likely be used again. Power, once obtained, won’t be relinquished voluntarily.
We are witnessing the destruction of small and medium businesses and an unimaginable human toll of lost jobs, lost opportunities, destruction to families that may be permanent.
We can look forward to massive bailouts, pay-outs, etc. which will explode our deficits to level never seen in human history. Along with this, we’re in for years of bitter political in-fighting (nothing new) but remember Hurricane Sandy? The storm will seem like a children’s game after all this is said and done.
We’re also witnessing yet another attempt to destroy Trump’s presidency which makes his re-election much less certain than it seemed a month ago. I can’t even fathom what this nation will look like if the Democrats take over the reigns of power.
Most of the emotion and anger seem to arise between those that are more concerned with the above and those that are focused on the human physical toll arising from the disease, both on patients and our nation’s medical system. If we assume both are valid concerns, let’s try to understand and respect each other’s perspectives but if we weren’t very alarmed at what’s going on and happening so rapidly, we’d be amiss.
There’s a wide gray area between tolerating the willful spread of misinformation and medieval thinking on the far left hand, and responding to well-meaning ignorance with scorn and abuse on the other. It is at least as important to keep the logosphere clean as to keep it safe and welcoming.
Avoid catastrophe?
It sounds like we have a choice between two catastrophes. Either way, our civilization is done.
< devil’s advocate mode = on >
The public health experts employed by governments have an incentive to err on the side of overreacting, since accusations that they “didn’t take the situation seriously enough” can cost them their jobs.
There are plenty of medical experts out there who are not employed by governments who are arguing that total shutdown of the economy is a questionable strategy.
The fact that it’s an election year for many (most?) of the politicians who have the final say on these measures is also not completely irrelevant. I think it’s erroneous when people claim that these measures are being instituted solely on the basis of scientific data and expertise.
< devil’s advocate mode = off >
I really can’t give this enough “likes.” Literally, I really can’t, since we only get one. This is SO spot on.
I am an epidemiologist. Of infectious disease. PhD level training. I do bacterial ID research. And I hesitate to address complex issues of immunology and virology, because, despite the coursework in grad school, they’re not my area of expertise (ask me about tuberculosis, pneumococcal disease, antibiotic susceptibility, or even bacterial contamination of blood products). Meanwhile, art majors opine on measles vaccine and everyone seems to have an opinion–tailor made to suit their temperament or bias–on whether this current situation is serious or not and what the epidemic curve will look like.
As you say, quarantine–including social distancing–works in bringing down the number of new cases. That bends the curve down and keeps the serious cases from overwhelming the health care system. That saves lives. Fortunately the disease is mostly not serious–not much worse than a very bad flu. But that doesn’t mean it shouldn’t be taken seriously, because it is contagious before symptoms manifest. The short term pain of businesses being shut down will be short term and recoverable if the epidemic curve can be bent down and panic allayed. That includes denuding grocery store shelves. My gosh, it isn’t even a diarrheal disease. What are people doing hoarding toilet paper??
Anti-depressant use is an epidemic too. SSRIs are sociopath drugs – they make people not care. I wonder just how much of today’s dysfunction can be attributed to weaklings habituated to diazepam.
I apologize that my comment above didn’t state outright that it represented my view of the situation. It’s more than apparent where I stand so I laid out my arguments but I didn’t contrast these with the others’ perceptions. I didn’t mean to dismiss arguments from the other points of view, I should have made my bias clear from the start. Others can (and have) present their positions that counter mine, otherwise there can’t be any balance, any discussion.
And the Internet. Except for this one post on Ricochet.
I know. I hate to think what it says about our values. I just gave away one of my cases of TP to make room for canned bacon.
Amen to that!
Fair enough, @jeannebodine. Especially the sentence I bolded. Thanks.