> I'd posit that "worldwide hysteria" just isn't a thing that happens. Well, we have well-understood cases of more localized hysteria, like https://en.wikipedi

> I'd posit that "worldwide hysteria" just isn't a thing that happens. Well, we have well-understood cases of more localized hysteria, like https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tulip_mania https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tulip_mania. Worldwide mania is just an extension of that. Since I believe that literally social media / the internet / other aspects of modern technology have allowed the propagation of mind-viruses to a degree never seen before, I truly believe that it is simply a state of mass collective delusion. > "it was still really obvious to anyone with the capacity for rational thinking that containment/lockdown was a terrible idea" is just absolutely, patently untrue (if taken at face value and not just as a snipe). Okay, you are right and I let my frustration be visible there, I agree that it is not a fair characterization. More accurately, I feel that people who came down on the pro-lockdown side have the capacity for rational thinking and yet were/are not using that capacity insofar as COVID-19 is concerned. > I am immediately suspicious of "everyone has gone mad except me" arguments You should know that I am too. I spent quite some time trying to figure out what obvious thing I was missing. Well, I think enough evidence is in at this point, if you're willing to look at it. The truth is that otherwise intelligent and knowledgeable people can very easily fall into states of delusion. It's no secret that as humans we are endowed with an incredible set of cognitive distortions, that presumably had adaptive value at one point, but now hamper efforts towards rationality. If you've ever taken the time to synthesize a body of research into a coherent whole - not necessarily writing an actual paper etc, but just trying to iterate and construct a really good mental model - then you know what an enormous amount of careful thought, effort, and intelligence it requires. It's simply not easy to do, thus I think that the majority of doctors really just regurgitate the things they learned in med school, the majority of scientists do their version of that, the majority of software engineers just make whatever hacky change they need to get their feature out without thinking about the whole system (often because the system is crushingly complex, etc). So when I look at what our "leaders" and public health officials have done, I see a total failure to take that mentality, a total failure to see what was really there in front of them. And I don't necessarily blame them; it's well known that an environment of sleep deprivation and stress cripples the capacity for cognitive flexibility. Anyway, to conclude, you are right that my characterization was unfair. I do stand by the notion that they behaved irrationally, but not because of some fundamental lack of ability to be rational, but simply because truly being rational takes an incredible amount of careful attention. (And obviously, none of us, myself included, are truly rational, but what I mean is, are you near that asymptote or are you off in the woods somewhere ranting about how it's too unsafe to open up our schools, etc)