Global Events, Coronavirus, and the Information Age

World War Two lasted six years, from 1939 to 1945, yet coronavirus fatigue has set in after only one year, showing how differently a global event lands in an age of nonstop information.

A smallpox epidemic during the reign of Marcus Aurelius helped drive the decline of the Roman Empire, and China's Warring States period fractured the country for centuries, but true global events are rare and unfold on a century scale, making coronavirus the first to hit squarely within the information age.

The Soviet Union's collapse happened just as the commercial internet was being born, too early for the information age to shape it the way it is now shaping coronavirus.

Lex Fridman's video on the seven levels of the coronavirus attack, biological, psychological, social, economic, political, existential and philosophical, captures how far this crisis reaches beyond medicine.

Nicholas Christakis's book Apollo's Arrow, written during the pandemic, examines coronavirus through a business, economic and public health lens.

The first challenge of any global event is getting good information, and mass media fails at it, pushing constant fear and manufactured scandal wrapped in political ideology.

The information age does not just widen access to information, it multiplies its sheer quantity until ordinary tools for analysis stop working.

Coronavirus pulled more scientists into research than almost anything in recent memory, and their rush to preprints has effectively overwhelmed the academic peer review system with more literature than anyone can rigorously read.

Mass media's curation system still behaves as if the internet does not exist, and has grown biased and driven by a desire to maximize fear, branding anyone who disagrees with its ideology as evil while ignoring inconvenient facts and amplifying convenient ones.

CNN and the New York Times reported Joe Biden's goal of 100 million vaccinations in 100 days as a rebuild from scratch, ignoring the vaccination program already running when he took office.

Before the inauguration, the existing rollout was already vaccinating about a million people a day off two vaccine platforms, with four platforms expected by February, proof that basic facts were already being distorted.

Genuine distrust means never believing CNN or the New York Times without a second or third source, a slow process because information stays siloed rather than liquid.

Trump rallies were labeled coronavirus superspreader events while over a thousand epidemiologists signed a letter endorsing BLM protests to fight systemic racism, treating two forms of political speech inconsistently.

Neither the Trump rallies nor the BLM protests passed any legislation that day, so both were ultimately political speech about the future, yet tracking the data himself showed coronavirus spikes following both, including politician Herman Cain's death after attending a Trump rally, while only one side's spread got covered.

Mass media is not a good tool for curation, and the volume of information now flowing through social media is far beyond what any human can curate alone.

MIT's pandemic lecture series, 14 episodes and counting, brings in world experts to cover coronavirus biology, epidemiology, immunology, vaccines and therapeutics.

Virologist Vincent Racaniello of Columbia University hosts the weekly podcast This Week in Virology with clinical experts, running since before coronavirus began, while Dr. John Campbell posts a daily coronavirus status update.

MedCram, hosted by quadruple board certified doctor Roger Seheult, covers medical topics from RNA vaccines to how the immune system and asthma work.

Even with these daily sources, everyone claims expertise on whether vaccines will beat new variants despite very few people ever having done actual vaccine research themselves.

Immunity against a variant sits on a spectrum from sterilizing immunity, which fully blocks infection, to complete failure, the fate of most attempted HIV vaccines, and a variant itself can turn out more infectious but less lethal, or less infectious but more lethal, scales that take real domain expertise and population level observation to track.

Genetic surveillance is what revealed the South African variant and the UK variant now spreading worldwide, with a possible Israeli variant as well.

Israel, thanks to strong leadership, is running one of the fastest vaccination campaigns ever, already near 40 percent of the population and likely to hit 70 percent by March, a data point that could finally show whether herd immunity is achievable against a novel virus.

The United States missed a similar opportunity by not fully vaccinating and briefly sealing off an isolated population like Hawaii, which would have created a valuable case study on community spread and sterilizing immunity.

Policy decisions on genetic surveillance, testing, contact tracing and reopening all demand asking good questions and getting the right experts into the room, something mass media rarely bothers to do.

A Lex Fridman interview with Harvard physician and epidemiologist Michael Mina lays out a cheap way to test an entire population on a regular basis, turning testing into an engineering problem rather than a medical one, yet nobody in power talks to him.

The people making these decisions do not live in the information age themselves, since the US president is 78 and his predecessor was 74, and even the Foundation for Critical Thinking's phenomenal body of work, built by Richard Paul, was designed for a slow, methodical, expensive process, not an age where information arrives again and again like a fire hose.

Rolf Dobelli's book The Art of Thinking Clearly catalogs a hundred cognitive biases and logical traps, including humanity's inability to reason about exponential growth.

James Randi, the famous magician and skeptic, built a foundation whose critical thinking lectures come closer to what's needed now, since even a book this good would have suited the 19th or 20th century better than today.

Randi famously offered a million dollars to anyone who could prove a paranormal power on shows like Art Bell's and George Noory's, a prize nobody ever collected, and his foundation later produced ten lectures on critical thinking, cognitive bias and fast and slow thinking modeled on Daniel Kahneman's work.

Even the best available critical thinking lectures fall short, because coronavirus reveals that the trusted institutions' thinking tools are simply outdated for how much information is now accessible.

Media and political pressure for censorship and deplatforming under the banner of fighting fake news will not work, since banning someone from a platform does not stop them from communicating unless the internet itself gets switched off.

Deplatforming just pushes people into less curated, more radical spaces, splitting one shared information commons into separate, self confirming feedback loops.

Coronavirus exposed that society's software for thinking is broken, and the same reckoning awaits the rise of artificial intelligence within 20 years and nanotechnology within 20 to 30 years.

CRISPR and genetic engineering will enable gene drives capable of rewriting an entire species' genome, alongside next generation weapons such as nuclear devices without long-term environmental fallout or drone swarms that could depopulate a city in a day or two.

China's social credit system is another such global event, and the rise of cryptocurrencies is of equal importance because it is fundamentally transforming society, though coronavirus shows the people in charge will not solve any of it since short-term wealth and power already matter more to them than the truth.

Left unchecked, this dynamic radicalizes people into tribes that eventually turn violent, but the biggest legacy of coronavirus may be a global awakening, with vaccines set to break the back of the pandemic this year even as the virus keeps mutating in the unvaccinated developing world.

Flu and COVID vaccination programs will merge into an annual booster shot that protects the vulnerable, but the real value of this event is that the whole planet has recognized, together, that a global event is happening.

Taking the Randi Foundation's lectures, reading The Art of Thinking Clearly, and following thinkers like Dan Dennett is a start, but there is still no canonical set of critical thinking tools for today's information flows the way Richard Paul's Foundation for Critical Thinking work, standing on the shoulders of Mortimer Adler and others, was built for the 20th century.

Cognition is no longer just an individual concern but a collective one, and he has personally outsourced his own opinions on coronavirus to trusted sources like Vincent Racaniello, the MedCram team, John Campbell and MIT rather than trying to master the domain himself.

Outsourcing understanding to trusted sources while accepting they could be wrong is why he draws on a multi-model set beyond a US centric view: UK based John Campbell, Bloomberg's vaccination data, Israel's numbers and how the Serum Institute of India is faring.

He still applies a filter drawn from James Randi's lectures and from Richard Paul and Linda Elder's guides on critical thinking, since filtering four trusted voices is far easier than filtering four thousand social media voices.

AI could eventually take on the job of pairing sources and checking bias, the same balance he applies by matching every hour of Ben Shapiro with an hour of Sam Harris so he isn't imprinted by just one viewpoint.

The other missing piece is incentives: mass media makes more money from scandal, from one ideology winning and from fear, so realigning those incentives to reward moving from subjective opinion toward objective reality, separating the two explicitly with AI's help if needed, matters because everyone can agree on a fact like an asteroid hitting Texas even when values about what to do differ.

Objective and subjective claims have blended together to the point that we can no longer agree even on facts: some viewers will insist coronavirus is a hoax, and he still gets messages on Twitter, Reddit and Telegram claiming germ theory itself is a global conspiracy.

The bigger 21st century challenge is building institutions that can curate information collectively so people vet a handful of institutions instead of every single source, and some government reform might help rein in the clear propaganda and monopolistic bias mass media currently runs in one direction.

Everything in life is deeply interdependent, the same way people mature from dependent to independent to interdependent, and information and social structures follow that same complex pattern.

Coronavirus showed our systems were inadequate in different ways: healthcare proved capable of producing vaccines and new therapeutics remarkably fast, and of publishing an enormous volume of research just as quickly.

MRNA vaccine technology born from this crisis is expected to have a huge impact on cancer treatment over the next 10 to 20 years, alongside major advances in mass testing, genetic surveillance, and ICU care that likely moved the field of pulmonology forward by a decade or two.

Society is still not prepared for a global event in the information economy: there is a real gap between individual and collective curation of information, and a huge unmet need for AI enforced cognitive filters and rebuilt incentives that separate objective fact from subjective opinion.

He recommends watching Lex Fridman's coronavirus video and the Randi Foundation's critical thinking lectures as a starting point, and closes with the line he ends lectures like this one on: think for yourself, because every global event requires each of us to form our own opinion on it.

Every such global event follows the same pattern: surveillance capitalism and government curation of thought are creating an entity smarter than us, nanotechnology risks the grey goo problem of self replicating materials nature cannot counter, and genetic engineering could create new species that transcend and endanger our own.

Weapons capable of ending the human race have nearly triggered twice already in the 20th century, and the rise of cryptocurrency is a global event of the same magnitude as the pandemic, revealing that failing to handle coronavirus well means we are not ready for these bigger risks either, the easy fallback always being to hand centralized control to a single master.

Nuclear weapons proliferated because they were recognized as global and existential, yet two moments nearly ended the human race anyway: the Cuban Missile Crisis and a 1983 Soviet early warning system false alarm, both resolved by a single unchecked officer, Stanislav Petrov, choosing not to launch.

Multiply that single master model across every emerging global event and there is real potential to extinct or enslave the human race, which is why thinking for yourself, or thinking together as a species, matters so much for surviving the 21st century intact.