James the lesser

Alice laughed. ‘There’s no use trying,’ she said. ‘One can’t believe impossible things.’

I daresay you haven’t had much practice,’ said the Queen. ‘When I was your age, I always did it for half-an-hour a day. Why, sometimes I’ve believed as many as six impossible things before breakfast.’

One fashionable example: “Surgery, or even a simple incantation, can turn a man into a woman.” Presumably this works by sympathetic magic. Tiresias required a miracle from Hera

You can easily find other examples in which we are assured that the evidence of tradition or our eyes is all wrong. And I know a man who assured me that before he dies, technology will have advanced to the point where his mind can be downloaded into a computer.

How did we get here?

You might cite Chesterton’s famous non-quote “The first effect of not believing in God is to believe in anything,” but the former happens a great deal and the shape our belief systems have taken seems unique.

Older fashions–for example, admitting spectral evidence–were shaped by the religious and scientific understandings of their era. A witch can strike at a distance; the murdered man’s body will bleed in the presence of his murderer, etc. (Ironically, earlier church canon law (1140) forbade belief in witchcraft.)

If you know something of the details of the technology and engineering that goes into the “pocket miracle” of having light appear when you flip a switch, you won’t mistake that for a miracle–and I hope we are appropriately grateful for all the invisible effort that goes into it.

But if you get used to “pocket miracles” (everybody has Dick Tracy’s “radio wristwatch” now) and don’t think about them, you risk not understanding their limits.

I think we have a science fiction culture. Or, if you like, a Willy Wonka culture of “pure imagination”. We can imagine anything. So many things have come true, why can’t they all?

SciFi&Fantasy isn’t our religion. But I think it informs the way we look at the world.

If you can dream it, you can have it. And if you can’t, you can blame somebody else’s dream for interfering.

The Guide laughed. “You are falling into their own error,” he said, “the change is not radical, nor will it be permanent. That idea depends on a curious disease which they have all caught–an inability to disbelieve advertisements.

Is an epidemic like a war?

Yes

1. You have an identifiable enemy that is killing you.


2. You have reasonably clear and achievable objectives. To be accurate, the USA has not fought with clear and achievable objectives for several wars now, but that’s because we’ve been idiots.


3. You need collective action to achieve those objectives.


4. Some of your people are going to die, and a lot are going to suffer, and the means you devise for the “fight” will cause some suffering, lots of opportunity costs, and probably some deaths.


5. Reaching your objectives requires money. The more your economy is crippled, the harder it will be to reach your goal—and you will have additional deaths because people rely on that economy. For the USA that can mean crippled transportation systems that don’t provide cities the food/fuel/medicines they need; for a poorer country that can mean that farmers starve because the army has confiscated their crops.


6. ”The enemy gets a vote.” You have to be ready to adjust your plans.


7. You will do unhappy and unjust things: seizing goods, locking people up (“quarantine” comes from a 40-day detention)–and in war killing people.


8. Your means need to be commensurate with the threat. Scorched-earth may be an appropriate tactic when Germans are invading the USSR, but it wouldn’t be appropriate if Mexico were invading the USA.


9. Some people will get rich off the new requirements, whether drug or ammo manufacturers. You may have to intervene to keep this from getting out of hand, but you need them to benefit to keep supplies coming. “Useful profiteers.”


10. Some people will try to use emergency powers to enrich themselves or entrench themselves in control. “Evil profiteers.” The tools and restrictions intended for defeating the enemy can be turned against your own people.


11. Internecine quarrels about means and promotions and whatnot will be ugly, cause a great deal of damage, perhaps lose you your war—and are unavoidable.


12. You need accountability for the results. If marching men out of the trenches into no-mans-land just gets them machine-gunned, somebody needs to be told to stop that.


13. Wars are full of lies trying to nudge the population, cover up screwups, and prevent panic.


14. You have to make decisions without enough information.


15. You are afraid. Too much fear is bad–you lynch Germans during WW-I or fail to press on against the Confederates at Yorktown. Too little and the Barbarossa plan catches you by surprise.


16. You can lose liberties for a time–forever if you aren’t careful.

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No

1. There is nobody who can surrender. You can kill enough human enemies to make them stop whatever they were doing. You can’t kill all the viruses. Smallpox was an exception—it was easy. Ebola is hard.


2. As a consequence of the above, either the infectious agent or the treatment will keep on killing some number of your people forever. If you can reduce the rate to something small, your emergency is over. 0 deaths is not possible with dangerous disease.


3. Everybody dies. You can defeat one foreign enemy, but one of the domestic ones (cancer, heart disease, murder) is going to get you sooner or later. The temptation for mission creep and battling the next disease (“it’s almost as dangerous!”) will probably be overwhelming.


4. In a war, if you didn’t have a dedicated enemy when you started, you do now—you can’t just say “Oopsies” and stop. If you find a pandemic to be less of a problem than you thought, you can “just stop.” The hard problem will be getting the powers-that-be to admit they were wrong.


5. Against an epidemic, your tactics will always partake of “scorched earth,” damaging your economy and future. In wars, that’s only sometimes true.

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Yes and No

1. It depends on the intensity. A mild disease is more like the random Muhammadans going on solo jihads in London. You can let the existing systems (police in one case, medical in the other) take care of the problem. A more dangerous disease is comparable to them being organized and funded, as with 9/11. You need to bring new tools to bear on the problem. Ebola would be like an invasion.

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Extreme cases sometimes help define the boundaries of a problem.
Imagine an airborne virus with a 14-day incubation period, of which the last 4 days are contagious. It produces a hemorrhagic fever, with a 95% fatality rate. Suppose this breaks out in Brazil.

What should our reaction look like?

All travel to/from South America is frozen; not even citizens are allowed in if they’ve been there. Given the “4-day” asymptomatic contagious period, it may already be too late to stop it reaching Europe and the US, though it may take a few days to figure that out.

Divide the nation into small zones–NY metropolitan area, LA, etc–defined by the ease of internal traffic that you probably can’t stop from outside and the ease of blocking outgoing traffic. Lock down transportation between the zones–not even the military move from zone to zone. Shoot border crossers.

Inside a zone the local governments will have to lock down activity, and actively seal off infected areas. Remember the “weld the doors” claim from Wuhan? Plenty of people will die from lack of medicine or medical care, or even food, but 95% fatality is worse.

I wrote “4 days.” But are you sure if will always be exactly 4 days, and not sometimes 2 and sometimes 6? Your quarantine needs to be expansive, just in case.

Once it is spreading, count yourself lucky if only a third of the people die. The economy goes to hell, of course, but laissez faire would be worse. Remember what happened when European diseases hit the AmerIndians.

Carelessness is deadly.

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Try another extreme. A plague, air borne, kills about 0.01% of the very old, though it sickens many.

There’s no emergency. Ordinary voluntary public health measures suffice. No new rules. It would be an overreach to try, since this is well within normal problems, and it turns out there’s no way to keep people from dying. This is more analogous to self-defense or police work than a war. Carelessness is no more than usually harmful.

Like most diseases, COVID’s danger lies between the extremes.

Granted, harmlessness may be in the eye of the beholder. I had a much younger friend die of the flu a few years ago. A disease that afflicts the very old won’t generate the same worry as one that afflicts children or pregnant women. And I would predict grave disagreements about the seriousness of a disease that only struck legislators.

Who gets to decide how serious a problem is, and what kind of information do they need? I have a strong impression that quite a few officials get their sense of danger from CNN and the other panic-mongers.

We have ways of estimating the economic dislocations of a “war on a plague,” though the officials in charge have apparently done some fudging in past years (no inflation??). The social dislocations eat into our social capital, and we have no good ways of measuring that. Loss of liberties tends to ratchet.

If we task a department with watching for dangers, it will have an interest in panicking, both to justify its existence and to avoid the blame it would get if it missed something. On the other hand, having nobody designated as responsible means your nation’s response will be sloppy and, as now, unaccountable.

Unfortunately, I can’t just set a bunch of thresholds and say “At 1% do this, at 4% start doing this too, etc.” What we need to do depends on the vectors–a fly-borne illness would need different methods. It would be useful to agree on some guidelines. Can we?