Ebola has offered a recent nice example of the triad. Mainstream: “be afraid, be very afraid”; contrarian: “don’t be so gullible, why, hardly any more people have died from Ebola than have died from flu/traffic accidents/smoking/etc”; meta-contrarian: “what is to be feared is a super-lethal disease escaping containment & killing many more millions than the normal flu or traffic death toll”.
meta-contrarian: “what is to be feared is a super-lethal disease escaping containment & killing many more millions than the normal flu or traffic death toll”.
Meh. Mankind survived the mad cow, the SARS, the bird flu and the swine flu hardly scathed; why should it be different this time around?
human deaths are not irrelevant; a million deaths != no deaths.
pandemics are existential threats, which can drive species extinct; I trust you understand why ‘mad cow, the SARS, the bird flu and the swine flu’ are not counter-arguments to this point.
In that triad the meta-contrarian is broadening the scope of the discussion. They address what actually matters, but that doesn’t change that the contrarian is correct (well, a better contrarian would point out the number of deaths due to Ebola is far less than any of those examples and Ebola doesn’t seem a likely candidate to evolve into a something causing an epidemic) and that the meta-contrarian has basically changed the subject.
Ebola has offered a recent nice example of the triad. Mainstream: “be afraid, be very afraid”; contrarian: “don’t be so gullible, why, hardly any more people have died from Ebola than have died from flu/traffic accidents/smoking/etc”; meta-contrarian: “what is to be feared is a super-lethal disease escaping containment & killing many more millions than the normal flu or traffic death toll”.
Meh. Mankind survived the mad cow, the SARS, the bird flu and the swine flu hardly scathed; why should it be different this time around?
human deaths are not irrelevant; a million deaths != no deaths.
pandemics are existential threats, which can drive species extinct; I trust you understand why ‘mad cow, the SARS, the bird flu and the swine flu’ are not counter-arguments to this point.
No, I don’t.
EDIT: Anthropics?
In that triad the meta-contrarian is broadening the scope of the discussion. They address what actually matters, but that doesn’t change that the contrarian is correct (well, a better contrarian would point out the number of deaths due to Ebola is far less than any of those examples and Ebola doesn’t seem a likely candidate to evolve into a something causing an epidemic) and that the meta-contrarian has basically changed the subject.