Month: March 2020

Economy freezer

Denmark is putting the economy into the freezer for 3 months. the government is paying companies for employees who are going home and not working. These workers are being paid a wage to do nothing. The government is saying: Lots of people are suddenly in danger of being fired. But if we have firing rounds, it will be very difficult to adapt later.

Titrating Quarantine

Last week I predicted that this might look like titrating quarantine levels – locking everything down, then trying to unlock it just enough to use available medical capacity, then locking things down more again if it looked like the number of cases was starting to get out of hand. This would eventually develop herd immunity without overwhelming the medical system. A paper argued for alternating periods of higher and lower quarantine levels based on how the medical system was doing:

A seesaw pattern of quarantine might work

Censorship History

At the same time, the Inquisition was allowing the circulation of Lucretius, which says there’s no such thing as immortality of the soul, and prayer doesn’t work, and the gods didn’t create the cosmos…there’s this confusing apparent paradox of: “Inquisition, why are you spending so much effort and yet allowing these things that we think should be your number 1 target to circulate with your permission and even recommendation on the title page?”

And so I’m fascinated with trying to figure out what the Inquisition was doing when it wasn’t going after who we think it should’ve been. If you had a time machine, you’d go back and tell the Inquisition “You know, you’re fighting the wrong battles —if you want to really want to ferociously control the world, you should be going after Voltaire and not these bizarre Jansenist theologians no one in the future will have heard of.”

And so I became fascinated with the question of what the Inquisition’s actual goal was … and then that became a larger interest on a global scale, which is what my current project is: taking the patterns I’ve observed in European censorship and comparing them to China, the USSR, the Indian subcontinent both before and after British rule, to try to figure out what big global patterns there are in censorship that operate differently from what our expectations are.

how censorship worked historically. very interesting.

Taiwan & COVID-19

Most important was Taiwan’s experience battling the SARS outbreak in 2003, followed by the swine flu in 2009. In the middle of the worst of the outbreak in 2003, the current vice president, Chen Chien-jen, was appointed minister of health and won widespread praise for taking quick and decisive action. The threat of SARS put Taiwan on high alert for future outbreaks, while the past record of success at meeting such challenges seems to have encouraged the public to accept socially intrusive technological interventions. The government’s special powers to integrate data and track people were only allowed during a crisis.