In the end people average out the whole subject to “Wait, you support charities? But didn’t you hear about that one that turned out to be corrupt? Can’t believe you’d be into something like that.”
Short post from Scott Alexander on the most consequential thing about the virus itself being the least talked about thing: it killed a lot of people.
The quote above is memorable because it struck me as one of the real downsides to memetics where you boil down and poison complex things with quick assumptions.
Narrative poison.
It reminds me of growing up in a fundamentalist Christian tradition. I don’t mean that negatively. I’m only saying that often things largely got boiled down to, This is good. The world is against it. And for some reason that never felt true.
But countering it in any meaningful way is next to impossible.
There are a staggering amount of comments on this post too. Interesting.