America 'vs' coronavirus: an intuition nightmare

Ed Yong calls America's continued coronavirus mistakes "an intuition nightmare." He notes that many things of intuition that can lead to classical informal logical fallacies have done that here, such as follow the herd availability heuristics. Others would fall more under the Kahnemann/Tversky "fast thinking," a keystone of behavioral psychology, which I have blogged about before with the coronavirus and Dan Ariely.

Yong gets ready to introduce key points with this.

Following these impulses was simpler than navigating a web of solutions, staring down broken systems, and accepting that the pandemic would rage for at least a year.

These conceptual errors were not egregious lies or conspiracy theories, but they were still dangerous. They manifested again and again, distorting the debate around whether to stay at home, wear masks, or open colleges. They prevented citizens from grasping the scope of the crisis and pushed leaders toward bad policies. And instead of overriding misleading intuitions with calm and considered communication, those leaders intensified them. The country is now trapped in an intuition nightmare: Like the spiraling ants, Americans are walled in by their own unhelpful instincts, which lead them round and round in self-destructive circles.

Yong goes on to note "serial monogamy" of looking at one part of a multi-part solution at a time and no more, false dichotomies (I the repeated citer of Idries Shah put this under larger "twosiderism) and other issues.

Magical thinking, explored in more detail at point 6? As I told Yong on Twitter:

.@edyong209 Magical thinking goes WELL beyond #coronavirus and is as much a part of the American cultural DNA as is Serb nationalists' mythmaking over Kosovo. https://t.co/4zRaMNt3AE

— Again: Fuck Jesse Ventura & his lying cult 🚩🌻 (@AFCC_Esq) September 10, 2020

There you go. Reactivity vs proactivity and other things round out the list.

Yong next notes the exploding university problem, discussed in my COVID briefs for this week (he wrote the piece before the blowout effects of Sturgis were known, I think) and then moves by citing Thanksgiving and Christmas travel and what that's likely to do.

He wraps up by returning to magical thinking. While being careful not to give antivaxxers fuel, he notes that many Americans have an almost naive faith in the power of vaccines.

Instead of solving social problems, the U.S. uses techno-fixes to bypass them, plastering the wounds instead of removing the source of injury—and that’s if people even accept the solution on offer.

It's part of what I call salvific technologism, or related, and also ties into his single-issue thinking.

Again, read the whole thing, not just this summary.