Counterpoint: most people who will read your post are already better than average at vetting-memes-before-spreading. If you succeed at making these folks even more cautious, everyone else in the world will still keep spreading unvetted memes, so worse memes will win.
The problem isn’t spreading memes in and of itself. “Flatten the curve” is the same kind of statement as “we stay here for you, you stay home for us” or “we will defeat this invisible enemy”; it’s a motivational poster, a compact way for people to remind themselves what’s happening and why their efforts are important. The problem is when people start trying to interpret the memes as *policies*, and argue about whether the curve can indeed be flattened or declare that we’ll be in lockdown for N months because otherwise the curve won’t be flat.
It seems to me like the role of LessWrong should be to produce new ideas and be at the cutting edge. It’s not a place that’s valuable as a venue for hearing the same ideas from elsewhere repeated without much filtering.
But we already filter more than the reference class of smart Internet people, that’s the point. cousin_it argues, and I agree, that this community may already be on the extreme of “filters too carefully in the face of the need for urgent updates”. We did well by taking COVID-19 seriously before it was proven, and we could have done still better on that front.
Counterpoint: most people who will read your post are already better than average at vetting-memes-before-spreading. If you succeed at making these folks even more cautious, everyone else in the world will still keep spreading unvetted memes, so worse memes will win.
The problem isn’t spreading memes in and of itself. “Flatten the curve” is the same kind of statement as “we stay here for you, you stay home for us” or “we will defeat this invisible enemy”; it’s a motivational poster, a compact way for people to remind themselves what’s happening and why their efforts are important. The problem is when people start trying to interpret the memes as *policies*, and argue about whether the curve can indeed be flattened or declare that we’ll be in lockdown for N months because otherwise the curve won’t be flat.
It seems to me like the role of LessWrong should be to produce new ideas and be at the cutting edge. It’s not a place that’s valuable as a venue for hearing the same ideas from elsewhere repeated without much filtering.
But we already filter more than the reference class of smart Internet people, that’s the point. cousin_it argues, and I agree, that this community may already be on the extreme of “filters too carefully in the face of the need for urgent updates”. We did well by taking COVID-19 seriously before it was proven, and we could have done still better on that front.