Inception
The COVID overreaction should be our collective kick in the pants to understand and secure free expression.
Mark Changizi
3 March 2021
3 March 2021
We’re starting something new here at FreeX, and we’re doing it on the first anniversary of what one might call, “The Great Mass Delusion of 2020.” Over the next several communications we’ll explain what we’re up to, but in this first one, let me give you some sense of the acute origins of the need for such an institute.
The beginnings of this Mass Delusion event began in February and March of last year, and in early March I made what I thought was an obvious observation: that some sort of strange hysteria had set in. For example, already at that point it had become “required” that each reference to the virus had to be prefaced by “dangerous” -- and if you pushed back on that you were simply irresponsible.
My first tweets on the topic were on March 10, trying to calm things down by pointing out some of the facts that were being miscommunicated by the media (e.g., conflating case fatality rate and infection fatality rate). On March 17 I noted the following, which has been pinned to the top of my Twitter account for nearly a year...
"The moral of coronavirus19 will be that social contagion via social networks is more dangerous than biological contagion."
That is to say, the emergent crowd effects emanating from a tightly connected world-sized network of people is itself one of the most dangerous threats -- no, the most dangerous threat -- to all of us, far beyond biological threats like that of a pandemic.
The hysteria had at that point only just gotten rolling. By July, polls indicated that people believed that nearly 10% of the population had already died of the virus, orders of magnitude off.
How did such misperceptions occur? Is it because the initial data pointed to that? Not at all. Even in early March, many medical experts -- e.g., Oxford's Center for Evidence Based Medicine -- had calm, reasoned estimates of the likely nature of the disease, which were orders of magnitude lower than what was being bandied about within social media and the news. Whereas the average bloke and journalist thought he had a 3 to 10% chance of dying if infected, the actual estimates from the experts were nearer to 0.2%, and for healthy people a couple orders of magnitude lower still. The average person had no idea of the numbers of seasonal cold and flu deaths each year (which, by the way, is far higher than the number of recorded such deaths), and so numbers of corona deaths were heard without context, without proportion.
By early March a “mass decision” had already been made that Covid-19 was super-obviously super-dangerous and unlike anything we’ve seen before. And that wreaked havoc on the ability for anyone within the mass delusion to move forward rationally. Common sense was gone. It shifted the burden of evidence such that (i) every normal baseline expected thing about a cold virus now had to be proved to an unreasonably high standard, and (ii) every hypothesis about Covid being especially bad in some respect required no support. For example, the following claims were deemed almost unquestionable:
By virtue of this, the utility calculus was all Covid. No economy included. No quality of life either. No other deaths even mattered, so the rest of health care was practically put on pause.
By mid-March not only was everyone’s beliefs all wrong, but there was righteous indignation to anyone showing skepticism about any of it, and severe contempt for anyone violating the rules. For example, a group of friends and I were working out in mid-March, and a lady pulled over and accosted us. And we were outdoors, and distanced from one another! But we were nevertheless putting her and everyone at risk.
When folks are this confident, and this afraid, they're willing to entertain solutions that, under normal conditions, only totalitarian regimes like China might do. Like house arrest for everyone, putting tens of millions (hundreds of millions worldwide) out of work, crashing economies, and putting billions at risk (especially in the developing world). Civil rights -- which normally they'd say they care about -- are not even a twinkle in their eye. And, making this all the more creepy, they do it with a strong sense of moral outrage. Those who speak out are evil, selfish, trying to get them killed, etc.
Soon, not only were regular folk enforcing the cult upon everyone at a grassroots level, but Big Tech began censoring viewpoints at odds with the extreme narrative that had gotten “fixed” into "the truth." YouTube, Google, Twitter, Facebook, etc. all went out of their way to censor skeptical voices. For your safety, of course. The truth was to be given to us from on high by their fact checkers.
When our freedoms were under the greatest threat -- freedom of movement, freedom of dress, freedom to keep our businesses and livelihoods, etc. -- our ability to even speak against the threat was cut from beneath us. Righteous cancellation from our peers loomed at every turn, as did suspension from our social media accounts. When what was needed most of all was a healthy raucous conversation about the truth about the virus and the interventions, that conversation was severely shunted, accelerating our spiral into authoritarianism that we’re still in today, a year later.
That provides just a small hint of the sickness that has afflicted us over the last year. It’s something that has afflicted societies for millenia; it’s exactly these sorts of mass delusions that are behind our worst chapters of human history. But this time it was everywhere by virtue of the nature of a connected world. There was almost nowhere to run.
At FreeX our goal is to research the mechanisms that lead to “social sicknesses” of this kind. In this case, free expression took a wrong turn in March, leading to a mass delusion. What exactly went wrong? Can we do anything to minimize the chance of mass delusions in the future? Are there any effective ways to coax a society out of a mass delusion?
But, FreeX is more broadly aimed at understanding how free expression actually works as a mechanism for aiding societies move in a decentralized manner toward the truth, and away from authoritarianism.
There is, however, a lot more to free speech than most of us realize. Our three pillars at the Free Expression Group are (1) free, (2) expression, and (3) group.
We’ll get to these and many more facets of free expression as we move forward.
My YouTube announcement of FreeX.
NEXT: The Task
The beginnings of this Mass Delusion event began in February and March of last year, and in early March I made what I thought was an obvious observation: that some sort of strange hysteria had set in. For example, already at that point it had become “required” that each reference to the virus had to be prefaced by “dangerous” -- and if you pushed back on that you were simply irresponsible.
My first tweets on the topic were on March 10, trying to calm things down by pointing out some of the facts that were being miscommunicated by the media (e.g., conflating case fatality rate and infection fatality rate). On March 17 I noted the following, which has been pinned to the top of my Twitter account for nearly a year...
"The moral of coronavirus19 will be that social contagion via social networks is more dangerous than biological contagion."
That is to say, the emergent crowd effects emanating from a tightly connected world-sized network of people is itself one of the most dangerous threats -- no, the most dangerous threat -- to all of us, far beyond biological threats like that of a pandemic.
The hysteria had at that point only just gotten rolling. By July, polls indicated that people believed that nearly 10% of the population had already died of the virus, orders of magnitude off.
How did such misperceptions occur? Is it because the initial data pointed to that? Not at all. Even in early March, many medical experts -- e.g., Oxford's Center for Evidence Based Medicine -- had calm, reasoned estimates of the likely nature of the disease, which were orders of magnitude lower than what was being bandied about within social media and the news. Whereas the average bloke and journalist thought he had a 3 to 10% chance of dying if infected, the actual estimates from the experts were nearer to 0.2%, and for healthy people a couple orders of magnitude lower still. The average person had no idea of the numbers of seasonal cold and flu deaths each year (which, by the way, is far higher than the number of recorded such deaths), and so numbers of corona deaths were heard without context, without proportion.
By early March a “mass decision” had already been made that Covid-19 was super-obviously super-dangerous and unlike anything we’ve seen before. And that wreaked havoc on the ability for anyone within the mass delusion to move forward rationally. Common sense was gone. It shifted the burden of evidence such that (i) every normal baseline expected thing about a cold virus now had to be proved to an unreasonably high standard, and (ii) every hypothesis about Covid being especially bad in some respect required no support. For example, the following claims were deemed almost unquestionable:
- its infection fatality rate (IFR) is super high
- there are few asymptomatics (and so IFR will be roughly the very high early CFR values)
- transmission is unprecedentedly high
- asymptomatics often spread it
- it’s disproportionately risky for the young, or at least equal opportunity for them
- no one is safe, comorbidities or no
- it will hit the entire population (and so let’s multiply CFR by total population and see the total expected deaths)
- immunity doesn’t apply
- herd immunity can’t happen
- it leaves you with chronic health issues
- seasonality does not apply (i.e., the epidemic doesn’t have a tendency to come, and go, at a typical time of year, like almost all other viruses do)
- it goes away only via intervention policies (lockdowns, masks, etc.)
- all variation in epidemic severity is due to intervention policy
By virtue of this, the utility calculus was all Covid. No economy included. No quality of life either. No other deaths even mattered, so the rest of health care was practically put on pause.
By mid-March not only was everyone’s beliefs all wrong, but there was righteous indignation to anyone showing skepticism about any of it, and severe contempt for anyone violating the rules. For example, a group of friends and I were working out in mid-March, and a lady pulled over and accosted us. And we were outdoors, and distanced from one another! But we were nevertheless putting her and everyone at risk.
When folks are this confident, and this afraid, they're willing to entertain solutions that, under normal conditions, only totalitarian regimes like China might do. Like house arrest for everyone, putting tens of millions (hundreds of millions worldwide) out of work, crashing economies, and putting billions at risk (especially in the developing world). Civil rights -- which normally they'd say they care about -- are not even a twinkle in their eye. And, making this all the more creepy, they do it with a strong sense of moral outrage. Those who speak out are evil, selfish, trying to get them killed, etc.
Soon, not only were regular folk enforcing the cult upon everyone at a grassroots level, but Big Tech began censoring viewpoints at odds with the extreme narrative that had gotten “fixed” into "the truth." YouTube, Google, Twitter, Facebook, etc. all went out of their way to censor skeptical voices. For your safety, of course. The truth was to be given to us from on high by their fact checkers.
When our freedoms were under the greatest threat -- freedom of movement, freedom of dress, freedom to keep our businesses and livelihoods, etc. -- our ability to even speak against the threat was cut from beneath us. Righteous cancellation from our peers loomed at every turn, as did suspension from our social media accounts. When what was needed most of all was a healthy raucous conversation about the truth about the virus and the interventions, that conversation was severely shunted, accelerating our spiral into authoritarianism that we’re still in today, a year later.
That provides just a small hint of the sickness that has afflicted us over the last year. It’s something that has afflicted societies for millenia; it’s exactly these sorts of mass delusions that are behind our worst chapters of human history. But this time it was everywhere by virtue of the nature of a connected world. There was almost nowhere to run.
At FreeX our goal is to research the mechanisms that lead to “social sicknesses” of this kind. In this case, free expression took a wrong turn in March, leading to a mass delusion. What exactly went wrong? Can we do anything to minimize the chance of mass delusions in the future? Are there any effective ways to coax a society out of a mass delusion?
But, FreeX is more broadly aimed at understanding how free expression actually works as a mechanism for aiding societies move in a decentralized manner toward the truth, and away from authoritarianism.
There is, however, a lot more to free speech than most of us realize. Our three pillars at the Free Expression Group are (1) free, (2) expression, and (3) group.
- Free: Freedom goes far beyond government restrictions. How can we move toward a society that encourages free speech?
- Expression: Key to freedom of speech is emotional expression, not speech per se. How can we augment free speech in this light?
- Group: Free expression is the workhorse for freedom more generally by virtue of how it acts within our social groups.
We’ll get to these and many more facets of free expression as we move forward.
My YouTube announcement of FreeX.
NEXT: The Task