What a WoW virtual outbreak taught us about how humans behave in epidemics(2020) | Hacker News Reader

What a WoW virtual outbreak taught us about how humans behave in epidemics(2020)

arstechnica.com

unfortunately the model didn't include Thrall regarding a response to the pandemic as a threat to his power, and going full denialist. Might have been a better storyline than Cata.

This reaction to the pandemic still baffles me, even if you thought the precautions were overly cautious you were fighting an uphill battle against the scientific consensus. Even when you're right that almost never turns out well for you as Semmelweis Gamgee can personally attest.

Magnified by the fact the broader population considered this a crisis where social cohesion is priority number one it cost literally nothing to tow the line; no one was going to be fired for being too cautious with people's health. And you can still get an I told you so at the end. Were prominent right wing politicians really that desperate for another wedge issue to justify their lack of platform they thought it was good idea to just throw some m80s into the public square and run away?

Is there some other deep seeded part of human nature desperate to be contrarian "for the luls" even to your own detriment? Because the high profile people pushing the denial clearly didn't believe their own words, they all got the vaccine. Looking back the only explanation left is they just wanted to be like "u mad?" for the attention.

I think it’s part of humans success. When part or parts of society decide differently this gives us an element of diversity, which overall I think makes us stronger.

If humans blindly followed all authority I don’t think we would be where we are today. We might all be praying to some weird god and offering our first born as sacrifice.

Basically even at a cost, we need people who don’t follow the masses and rebel. Some die, some cause death and others discover the world is not flat, or that earth is not the center of the universe.

> it cost literally nothing to tow the line

BTW, it's "toe" the line, in the sense that someone is concerned about the position of their feet relative to a line carved or painted onto the ground.

>you were fighting an uphill battle against the scientific consensus.

I mean, they don't think they are fighting against scientific consensus explicitly because they don't think science is real, or valid, or reliable.

More to your point, "griefing" has existed long before video games existed. Plenty of human beings have decided, for whatever reason, that "fuck all of you" is entertainment.

You think that straw manning the millions of human beings that came to different conclusions than you, describing them and their beliefs in the worst possible way, without any good faith analysis of what they believe and why, is a good contribution to your society? You believe that you live in a country where literally millions of people, a double digit percentage of the population, "don't believe in science"? In my mind your belief system and the hate you're spreading around is more dangerous to our civilization than the worst-case straw manned people you're describing.

Content yourself with this revisionism all you want, but it wasn't the scientific consensus pushing harsher restrictions, it was anti-scientific political posturing, from both the right and left. There was never scientific justification for mask mandates, or vaccine mandates, and now there is clear evidence that the mRNA vaccines have dubious efficacy and likely lead to greater adverse reactions for certain demographics, especially those that had natural immunity. Should those demographics have gone along to get along, despite unclear at best, or negative at worst, reactions to the vaccines? Obviously not- it is the height of unethical behavior to force a medical intervention that has negative health impact to the recipient. At least, it was universally agreed to be bad ethics, prior to the unbridled panic during COVID. Thankfully, there was a substantial push back from the same contrarian voices you derride, otherwise there's no way of telling how much more authoritarian things might have become.

If you truly want to reach understanding of the opposing view, try steelmanning instead of this obvious and oblivious strawman.

thank you, some sense.

I don't know how you took what I said as not steelmanning, I literally presumed the opposition was fully 100% correct.

The point was that pushing so hard (and the manner it was pushed) against what was really was the scientific consensus at the time and the CDC recommendation only really served to birth a family of conspiracy theories and divide the country than promote a healthy skepticism even after the pandemic. People are still today dying of COVID because they're unvaccinated and in denial. It didn't do one iota of difference politically in terms of policy because at the time there was no evidence whatsoever of any negative effects. It was just all FUD without evidence and it was dismissed as such.

There's the post-hoc opposing view which was revised in the presence of more substantive evidence and the opposing view in the moment which accepted the CDC's position but said the economy and killing the old and immunocompromised was a necessary trade for muh freedom.

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