Events like COVID-19 and mass shootings are hugely impactful to our society. Unfortunately, as time passes, we don’t do a great job at recalling events, integrating those events into our lives, or using those experiences to make future decisions/judgments.
OH! And by the way: this is why we depend on reliable governmental institutions and honest officials dedicated to common welfare, civic responsibility, social infrastructure and the greater good.
As a college student history major in the 1970’s I took a class in the History of Disease which focused mostly on social history. There were many interesting things ( how Polio led to the growth of overnight camps in some areas….who knew?) but the most fascinating thing was how people quickly “forgot” about the influenza epidemic in the earlier part of the century. How very little it was discussed after. I thought Downton Abbey did a good job of portraying this. Your home was turned into a hospital??….barely mentioned after. I have always expected COVID to be similar.
We don't forget what we consider urgent. Urgency could be defined as keeping some past event in the forefront of our minds, a constant presentment to that part of our executive function that prioritizes actions. We humans, as all biological organisms are, are not evolved to remain in a constant state of emergency. We cannot sustain it. Flight or fight are short term responses to danger. We can flee a forest fire or a predator but not an ever-encroaching fire, or an ever-pursuing predator, at some point we turn and fight the one or surrender to the other. Recruitment of our inner resources perhaps require perception that the danger is immediate rather than slowly developing, is well defined, rather than fuzzily abstract, is amenable to solution rather than so great as to be beyond our capability to remediate. Humans have a certain stoic fatalism that kicks in. The urgency fades, with it the presentment of memory to the executive function. Everything reverts to some default setting. We all get numbed. To school shootings, climate change...etc.
Thank you - helpful information. Cognitive limitations has been well studied by the decision science community (start with Simon). In organizational settings "decision support tools" (see Peter Keen) are built and used regularly to overcome what Simon refers to as "bounded rationality". This "limitation" isn't just after the COVID "adventure", but was clear at the start. Personal experience, I was sprinting on soccer field by myself on a cold Spring day, when a government official told me I was a risk factor. In NJ they closed outside parks and threatened to arrest people that went there. IF I never hear "we are going to follow the data and the science" again I will die happy. There is a plenty of blame to those who exploited the situation, there is also blame on those who were responsible for guiding us through the challenge by not admitting or recognizing what they didn't know.
As an aside on the overall issue of Dr. Jetelina’s platinum standard for public health communications, here is a video of a WHO official who is also doing a top-notch job explaining what is known and what is being watched on the new XBB.1.16 variant: https://twitter.com/mrigankshail/status/1643029761713643521 More of this, please, and also wish our media would push this kind of thing out instead of obsessing on what DJT had for lunch.
I have an urgent question relating to an earlier post of yours, "Do we need a spring COVID-19 booster?" I posted it in the comments, but I think it got lost in the crowd. After I asked it, a couple other people echoed the question. I hope you will answer it, because it seems to me that the info in the graph you posted is quite scary. Here is a link to the graph itself : https://i.imgur.com/PYUdJ2J.png
And here is my question about it: In the big 4-part figure showing waning protection over time from the booster for various groups, why is it that around month 7 all groups drop below zero? Zero is the amount of protection you'd have if you'd never gotten the booster, right? So does the fact that around 7 months out all groups drop below zero (sometimes a LOT below, like they're at -50%) mean that at that point the boosted people are *worse off* than if they'd never gotten boosted? I'm not a vax skeptic at all -- just perplexed and worried by these graphs. Am I misunderstanding them somehow? If not, wtf?
Do we forget or are we pressured to let go and get back to working and spending? As I was rewatching “The Looming Tower,” I realized there have been 3 transformative, global crises over the past 22 year: 9/11, the Great Recession, and the COVID-19 pandemic. All 3 were followed by a subtle or not-so-subtle push to resume our consumerist behavior (“get down to Disney World in Florida,” “end the lockdowns”).
At a state agency level, the interval between major events (hurricanes, influenza pandemics) is typically just a little longer than staffers' tenure in particular jobs. People get promoted or move to another agency or another state. So the people who could apply what was learned in each episode are no longer in positions to do so.
It seems there are two issues at play here, although I'm sure they affect each other: memory of experience and memory of physical reality.
Anyone who's given birth will tell you they cannot remember the pain. They remember that they were IN pain, and maybe that it was the worst pain they'd ever felt; and they probably remember the story of the birth. But they cannot capture/remember/feel the true depth of the pain. As the saying goes, if they did, no one would ever have more than one kid.
But that applies to other things about being a parent, too, which are more experiential--being up all night with a newborn, constantly changing stinky diapers, answering toddlers' endless questions, dealing with tantrums, etc... Again, if people really felt the way they did in those moments, they'd be much less likely to have more kids.
Covid is different in that we are trying NOT to have another experience like it, but I assume the biological/psychological mechanisms around memory are the same.
Nah, we just don’t care. Must protect our Beautiful Minds from reality so we can keep droning along serving immediate selfish needs. Our system massively encourages such delusional sociopathy.
If we were literally incapable of remembering—of being rational—we couldn’t even have this discussion, of course.
We don’t care—whether out of delusion or sociopathy or both, and it’s utterly obvious. Covid, emergent diseases, carbon, plutonium. Just barreling on ahead.
I just got around to reading this one, and it confirmed my own observations that the horrible atrocities of yesterday are simply out of awareness two days from now. Who talks about the Valdez or even the BP Gulf spill, and I've never seen whether either company paid its fine. Guns stay in the news some because of their repeated occurrences, so that it seems like one long mass murder...yet the inactivity of government suggests despair. Your analysis makes great sense. As always.
I am grateful to people like you, Dr Osterholm, Dr Topol, Dr Hotez, Laurie Garrett, Ed Yong, Angela Rasmussen and on and on, who help us not only remember, but learn more.
Most catastrophes involve the government (correctly!) asking people to give things up for their fellow human beings, and it's almost impossible to do that equitably. Both Covid and active shooter situations involve this, to a certain extent. With Covid people were asked early on to forego high quality masks; stay home but not "hoard" supples; asked to "wait their turn" for vaccines even as "vaccine passports" were already being floated (next time, let's not do those two messages simultaneously). With active shooter situations, people are called on to fight back and help other people get out "if possible", as if it's not *always* safer to get the heck out. In severe droughts, people are asked to conserve water - in some cases even *drinking* water. In heat waves, people may be asked to turn off their air conditioners.
It's not that being asked to ration is bad; it's absolutely the government's role to ask people to conserve resources in catastrophes - or better yet enforce rationing. The latter is seldom possible in the context of late stage global capitalism that we're in. Instead we just get a signal from the government (or workplace, or utility company, or grocery store) that a given resource is scarce, and you just end up with an ugly every-man-for-himself situation.
People who dodge serious catastrophes don't become versions of themselves they care to remember.
OH! And by the way: this is why we depend on reliable governmental institutions and honest officials dedicated to common welfare, civic responsibility, social infrastructure and the greater good.
As a college student history major in the 1970’s I took a class in the History of Disease which focused mostly on social history. There were many interesting things ( how Polio led to the growth of overnight camps in some areas….who knew?) but the most fascinating thing was how people quickly “forgot” about the influenza epidemic in the earlier part of the century. How very little it was discussed after. I thought Downton Abbey did a good job of portraying this. Your home was turned into a hospital??….barely mentioned after. I have always expected COVID to be similar.
We don't forget what we consider urgent. Urgency could be defined as keeping some past event in the forefront of our minds, a constant presentment to that part of our executive function that prioritizes actions. We humans, as all biological organisms are, are not evolved to remain in a constant state of emergency. We cannot sustain it. Flight or fight are short term responses to danger. We can flee a forest fire or a predator but not an ever-encroaching fire, or an ever-pursuing predator, at some point we turn and fight the one or surrender to the other. Recruitment of our inner resources perhaps require perception that the danger is immediate rather than slowly developing, is well defined, rather than fuzzily abstract, is amenable to solution rather than so great as to be beyond our capability to remediate. Humans have a certain stoic fatalism that kicks in. The urgency fades, with it the presentment of memory to the executive function. Everything reverts to some default setting. We all get numbed. To school shootings, climate change...etc.
Thank you - helpful information. Cognitive limitations has been well studied by the decision science community (start with Simon). In organizational settings "decision support tools" (see Peter Keen) are built and used regularly to overcome what Simon refers to as "bounded rationality". This "limitation" isn't just after the COVID "adventure", but was clear at the start. Personal experience, I was sprinting on soccer field by myself on a cold Spring day, when a government official told me I was a risk factor. In NJ they closed outside parks and threatened to arrest people that went there. IF I never hear "we are going to follow the data and the science" again I will die happy. There is a plenty of blame to those who exploited the situation, there is also blame on those who were responsible for guiding us through the challenge by not admitting or recognizing what they didn't know.
As an aside on the overall issue of Dr. Jetelina’s platinum standard for public health communications, here is a video of a WHO official who is also doing a top-notch job explaining what is known and what is being watched on the new XBB.1.16 variant: https://twitter.com/mrigankshail/status/1643029761713643521 More of this, please, and also wish our media would push this kind of thing out instead of obsessing on what DJT had for lunch.
I have an urgent question relating to an earlier post of yours, "Do we need a spring COVID-19 booster?" I posted it in the comments, but I think it got lost in the crowd. After I asked it, a couple other people echoed the question. I hope you will answer it, because it seems to me that the info in the graph you posted is quite scary. Here is a link to the graph itself : https://i.imgur.com/PYUdJ2J.png
And here is my question about it: In the big 4-part figure showing waning protection over time from the booster for various groups, why is it that around month 7 all groups drop below zero? Zero is the amount of protection you'd have if you'd never gotten the booster, right? So does the fact that around 7 months out all groups drop below zero (sometimes a LOT below, like they're at -50%) mean that at that point the boosted people are *worse off* than if they'd never gotten boosted? I'm not a vax skeptic at all -- just perplexed and worried by these graphs. Am I misunderstanding them somehow? If not, wtf?
Do we forget or are we pressured to let go and get back to working and spending? As I was rewatching “The Looming Tower,” I realized there have been 3 transformative, global crises over the past 22 year: 9/11, the Great Recession, and the COVID-19 pandemic. All 3 were followed by a subtle or not-so-subtle push to resume our consumerist behavior (“get down to Disney World in Florida,” “end the lockdowns”).
At a state agency level, the interval between major events (hurricanes, influenza pandemics) is typically just a little longer than staffers' tenure in particular jobs. People get promoted or move to another agency or another state. So the people who could apply what was learned in each episode are no longer in positions to do so.
History repeats itself applies once again.
Excellent topic and well presented as usual!
It seems there are two issues at play here, although I'm sure they affect each other: memory of experience and memory of physical reality.
Anyone who's given birth will tell you they cannot remember the pain. They remember that they were IN pain, and maybe that it was the worst pain they'd ever felt; and they probably remember the story of the birth. But they cannot capture/remember/feel the true depth of the pain. As the saying goes, if they did, no one would ever have more than one kid.
But that applies to other things about being a parent, too, which are more experiential--being up all night with a newborn, constantly changing stinky diapers, answering toddlers' endless questions, dealing with tantrums, etc... Again, if people really felt the way they did in those moments, they'd be much less likely to have more kids.
Covid is different in that we are trying NOT to have another experience like it, but I assume the biological/psychological mechanisms around memory are the same.
Nah, we just don’t care. Must protect our Beautiful Minds from reality so we can keep droning along serving immediate selfish needs. Our system massively encourages such delusional sociopathy.
If we were literally incapable of remembering—of being rational—we couldn’t even have this discussion, of course.
We don’t care—whether out of delusion or sociopathy or both, and it’s utterly obvious. Covid, emergent diseases, carbon, plutonium. Just barreling on ahead.
I just got around to reading this one, and it confirmed my own observations that the horrible atrocities of yesterday are simply out of awareness two days from now. Who talks about the Valdez or even the BP Gulf spill, and I've never seen whether either company paid its fine. Guns stay in the news some because of their repeated occurrences, so that it seems like one long mass murder...yet the inactivity of government suggests despair. Your analysis makes great sense. As always.
I am grateful to people like you, Dr Osterholm, Dr Topol, Dr Hotez, Laurie Garrett, Ed Yong, Angela Rasmussen and on and on, who help us not only remember, but learn more.
Most catastrophes involve the government (correctly!) asking people to give things up for their fellow human beings, and it's almost impossible to do that equitably. Both Covid and active shooter situations involve this, to a certain extent. With Covid people were asked early on to forego high quality masks; stay home but not "hoard" supples; asked to "wait their turn" for vaccines even as "vaccine passports" were already being floated (next time, let's not do those two messages simultaneously). With active shooter situations, people are called on to fight back and help other people get out "if possible", as if it's not *always* safer to get the heck out. In severe droughts, people are asked to conserve water - in some cases even *drinking* water. In heat waves, people may be asked to turn off their air conditioners.
It's not that being asked to ration is bad; it's absolutely the government's role to ask people to conserve resources in catastrophes - or better yet enforce rationing. The latter is seldom possible in the context of late stage global capitalism that we're in. Instead we just get a signal from the government (or workplace, or utility company, or grocery store) that a given resource is scarce, and you just end up with an ugly every-man-for-himself situation.
People who dodge serious catastrophes don't become versions of themselves they care to remember.