Scott Adams on Twitter: "The #Coronavirus is acting like an unwelcome Olympics for scientists, doctors, engineers, entrepreneurs, techies, leaders, parents, and ordinary heroes of every kind. Setting records in every event." / Twitter

I posted this on my Thinking Objectively blog and am reposting here because I think what he says about the lessons we learn from the Coronavirus pandemic about our systems and civilization can also apply to us on a personal level. 

The link takes you to a Twitter thread he posted; I've also added the text below in case the link doesn't work.

Scott Adams on Twitter: "The #Coronavirus is acting like an unwelcome Olympics for scientists, doctors, engineers, entrepreneurs, techies, leaders, parents, and ordinary heroes of every kind. Setting records in every event." / Twitter

The #Coronavirus is acting like an unwelcome Olympics for scientists, doctors, engineers, entrepreneurs, techies, leaders, parents, and ordinary heroes of every kind. Setting records in every event. You can almost feel humanity getting smarter. The most capable among us are forming lasting connections. Sharing best practices. Learning shortcuts. Building a working trust. Creating tools at blazing speeds. One way to imagine the future is that the economy will lose trillions of dollars and we will never get it back. Another filter on the future is that energy doesn’t disappear, it only relocates and changes form. A huge amount of energy is leaving the economy. We know that for sure. What is less clear is where that energy is going. My filter shows a global “mind” being formed, in real time, to fight our common enemy, the virus. That mind needs a lot of energy, like a newborn. And wow, is it getting it. I had resisted the common pundit prediction that “everything would be different” after this crisis because I expect a speedy recovery. But I revise my opinion. While I still expect a speedy recovery, I also think this experience is rewiring the collective mind of civilization. We probably crammed years of innovation into months. We’ll be coming out of this with a LOT of extra knowledge about our systems and ourselves. And that energy will get channeled back into the economy. The coming weeks will test us all. But when it is over, we will be far smarter, and far tougher, in every way. As Steve Jobs proved, the right thoughts and the right skill stack can turn into trillions of dollars. Civilization’s skill stack is undergoing a major upgrade. Watch how much energy that later pumps into the economy. It will be amazing.

An Idea for Civil Discussion

I posted the entry below in my Thinking Objectively blog but I thought it would be worth posting it here too. The overall topic covers a political discussion I had this week but the lesson I learned can apply to personal development as well.

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Recently I had dinner with a couple friends when our conversation eventually drifted to the 2020 presidential election. One of my friends expressed disappointment that President Trump had done nothing about gun control. I said that I’m happy he hasn’t been pushing for more gun control. Knowing that my friend is liberal I figured it would carry more weight if I cited a study done by Leah Libresco, a statistician, former news writer at FiveThirtyEight, a self-described liberal and an advocate of gun control. Libresco wrote an article on a study in which she describes a study she conducted. (I also wrote a blog entry on her article.)

[M]y colleagues and I at FiveThirtyEight spent three months analyzing all 33,000 lives ended by guns each year in the United States, and I wound up frustrated in a whole new way. We looked at what interventions might have saved those people, and the case for the policies I'd lobbied for crumbled when I examined the evidence. The best ideas left standing were narrowly tailored interventions to protect subtypes of potential victims, not broad attempts to limit the lethality of guns.

Libresco’s study revealed that most gun deaths fall into one of these categories: suicide, gang violence and domestic disputes. She admits that the most commonly touted gun control measures would have no impact on these outcomes. When I cited this study to my friends I also referred to the high murder rate in Chicago which has tough gun control laws.

But here is where I stumbled onto a potentially valuable approach to talking about controversial subjects. Given the findings of this study by a gun control advocate and the results in cities like Chicago I said, “I’m not sure what else we can do.” My friend said maybe longer waiting periods to buy guns and universal background checks would help. She didn’t say “let’s confiscate guns” and didn’t label me as an unrepentant gun nut. I said I’d be willing to consider her ideas. I think by citing these facts from a source on her side of the political spectrum and saying that I didn’t know what else we could do about gun violence left the door open for a civil discussion.

[Note: Libresco concludes her article with: “A reduction in gun deaths is most likely to come from finding smaller chances for victories and expanding those solutions as much as possible. We save lives by focusing on a range of tactics to protect the different kinds of potential victims and reforming potential killers, not from sweeping bans focused on the guns themselves.” Amen!