‘I was stupidly overconfident’: a South Korean coronavirus survivor’s tale | Hacker News Reader

‘I was stupidly overconfident’: a South Korean coronavirus survivor’s tale

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21 pointschewz5 comments

Here in America what I’ve observed is that most people are overconfident, or just lazy, with regards to the coronavirus. Even though the epicenter of US outbreaks is here in Seattle, many are going about business as usual - attending dinner parties, going skiing, traveling, or whatever else. It’s even worse when I speak to friends in other parts of the country, where there they are exercising no caution whatsoever except when forced to (by businesses closing responsibly or by local governmental action). The mortality rate and R0, along with asymptomatic qualities for many incubating humans, are causing people to not take it seriously even though we have all the information access to know better. I’ve seen coworkers and friends ridicule others for overreacting only to realize weeks later (when it is probably too late) that this is a very serious situation.

I am not sure what the solution is, or what the problem even is. The easy answer is that most people lack intelligence. Maybe a more generous answer is that most people are bad at evaluating anything beyond the short-term. But my gut tells me this is a cultural and social problem, rather than one cause by a lack of (innate/biological) intellectual capability or access to information. But if complacency can be so ubiquitous then how can a democracy hope to function, knowing the same crowds wield votes? I don’t have the answers, just thinking out loud.

I think the problem is twofold.

1) Our brains are bad at acting on information that contradicts our gut feelings, which are usually based on things we perceive directly. If we don't see direct evidence of a threat, we might take some minimal steps to avoid it, but it's hard to fully commit for intellectual reasons alone.

2) We've adapted to a low signal/noise ratio. Everything is always a near-cataclysmic threat: tech companies, Trump, the Clintons, Sanders, immigrants, global warming, vaccines, carbs, terrorists, and so on. They're all going to kill us or ruin our lives! We could probably mobilize and act on one or two of them, if we could all agree, but all of them? Some of them contradictory? We just pick a handful that resonate, and ignore the rest. And that mostly works, because the threats have few visible short-term effects.

A pandemic is just another one of these filtered threats, right up until the exponential growth shoves it in our faces -- at which point it's too late.

It's not a matter of intelligence or complacency. Humans are just obligate social animals. Most people can't voluntarily shut themselves away from the world, in the same way that a depressed person can't be happy or someone with ADHD can't sit down and focus.

It's not that stupid to feel overconfident (aka normal) when there are no cases reported in your vicinity. After he got the disease he didn't do anything dumb.

There are 26 known cases in my state. I started self-isolating yesterday. Hopefully that wasn't too confident.

In my country of roughly 5.6 million people we now have > 800 cases. Diagnosed, so multiply at least by 10 or 20.

Day before yesterday, colleague handing over company car to me. He gets out, and needing hands for both his bag and the doorhandle he holds the key between his teeth. And is vocally offended when I refuse to accept it dumped into my gloved hand.

30 people use that car. I will not enter it without first rolling down the windows, and I will not touch anything in it without wearing gloves.

Those are the ends of the spectrum.

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