The idea of being concrete is abstract

— Devon (@devonzuegel) April 30, 2020

Further, the idea of being anything is abstract, because it requires conceptualizing one’s self as an entity separate from the world. Thus, the idea of “idea” is also abstract because a cat for instance does not have any ideas — it has observations, responses and actions. The same with a snail. In other words, being able to think of ideas as a phenomenon in the world at all means one has abstractions essentially from the bottom up. All of the mirrors are turned on one another, and where reality truly dwells and emerges from cannot ever be clarified.

However, a cat has a different predicament. It has no infinity mirrors, no ideas, no abstractions, thus no ability to reflect on and from anything other than brute reality. It’ll never get lost in a maze of abstractions, but it will also never escape a labyrinth that it doesn’t even realize it’s in.

Instead of ‘there’s so much to do here on Earth’ we should flip it around: no movies and video games and sports for anyone until we’ve conquered the galaxy.

— scientism (@mr_scientism) April 29, 2020

And I know just the guy to be your galactic overlord.

Hint: it’s me.

‘“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.”’ https://t.co/01nK2BFLpw

— David Wallace-Wells (@dwallacewells) April 29, 2020

As much as I like Zeynep Tufekci, this is clearly wrong and I disagree with her strongly. There were all sorts of actual experts 2-3 months ago dispensing all manner of incorrect information about Covid-19, the possible path of the pandemic, and responses. For instance, most of WHO, many epidemiologists in the US who were saying what was happening in Wuhan was nothing to worry about, and we should be far more concerned with the seasonal flu.

These were all experts proffering this nonsense.

Her point that “if you follow the right people” is completely useless when you have competing experts, some of whom are correct and some of whom are peddlers of utter flapdoodle. How is the average or even the above average person, ever supposed to operate in that environment? It’s just not possible. I can do it to some extent but I’ve devoted most of my life to being good at such things. There should be no expectation that a normal person be able to do this.

I understand where she’s coming from, but she’s one of the more highly-educated and intelligent people alive. She knows where to turn and who is likely to be correct. That is a skill that she’s severely underestimating because she is good at it (we all do this with things we are good at).

Michael Moore produced a film about climate change that’s a gift to Big Oil. Planet of the Humans deceives viewers about clean energy and climate activists.

Have not seen the film but appears to be full of false claims, wildly inaccurate statistics and bad, easily-disproven statements about science.

Moore has always played a bit fast and loose with the truth, but this is a whole new level of mendacity and deceit for him.

A year ago, if you read about government funding being used to measure the velocity of a sneeze, it would have been tempting to call it “wasteful spending.” But, much of this seemingly wasteful research is now saving lives. Why do we need government funding for science? A thread.

— Jen Heemstra (@jenheemstra) April 26, 2020

There’s hardly any “wasteful” research, considering that the future is unknown and that 99% of the time the people declaring research to be wasteful don’t even understand what is being investigated.