COVID vaccines and masks aren't "woke" LOL
I was skimming through an exceedingly long critique of "woke" culture and I found myself agreeing with most of its comprehensive analysis even though personally I hate the word "woke" but don't consider myself "anti-woke" either because there's no generally accepted definition for "woke".
I would retire the word from the English language LOL.
But I felt one area of disagreement -- the author viewed public health advice to get vaccinated and wear masks to reduce the spread of COVID as another type of "woke" behavior. I studied statistics in graduate school and worked as a statistician during my 20s. I also live with a scientist who chaired the federal government's interdisciplinary committee on COVID response during the worst of the pandemic. This combination of statistical expertise & COVID expertise in my household leads me to feel confident that the mRNA COVID vaccines work and that wearing masks also works -- although neither works perfectly. You can get all your shots and wear a mask everywhere and still catch COVID.
In the part of her essay calling the vaccines and masks "woke", she cited to articles posted by noted anti-vaxx cranks. When I read these articles I usually feel like throwing my laptop or phone across the room because they always use statistics improperly or simply make shit up.
I don't claim to be infallible, but it is one thing to criticize the excesses of identity politics and trigger warnings and labels like "cultural appropriation" -- it is entirely a different thing to claim that public health experts are making shit up as they go along and that there was a dark conspiracy to censor and hoodwink the public.
During the pandemic I read a lot of original scientific studies and could tell which ones used statistics correctly and which ones didn't. Although there was not always a consensus among public health officials, and sometimes recommendations changed as the facts on the ground changed & as we learned more about COVID, and as new treatments were developed, generally the scientific community and public health officials did a great job in saving lives. We can't go back in time and rerun the history of the pandemic under different variables to be certain of what worked and what didn't, but I think we have good estimates that around 5 million Americans would've died from COVID under "business as usual" whereas only 1 million Americans actually died.
We can debate whether the disruptions of the public health response were worth 4 million lives. Or whether we should've "locked down" even harder to save some of the 1 million lives we lost. But COVID was and still is real, the vaccines do help, masking does help, social distancing does help. This isn't "woke", it is science.
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Perhaps a problem that lots of people have with science is that they never learned growing up that science is and has always been messy. In school people are taught the settled principles of science, rather than the history of how these settled principles were arrived at -- a history involving much debate and uncertainty and interpersonal drama. New discoveries are often resisted by other scientists who adopt a skeptical and condescending inertia.
The history of COVID science was no different. There were plenty of disease experts who at first refused to believe that COVID could be spread via airborne droplets, not until we had solid scientifically designed studies showing airborne contagion. So at first a lot of experts pooh-poohed the idea of wearing masks. This expert disagreement occurred in full view of the public during the spring of 2020, and so led a lot of the public to disbelieve subsequent public health advice to wear masks. Anthony Fauci was one of those early skeptics about wearing masks, so when he flipped it hurt his credibility -- fatally destroying his credibility among much of the public.
But the scientific community has both liberals and conservatives, like any other group of humans. Conservatives resist change, whereas liberals are quick to adopt change, and both groups make mistakes because of their biases.
Nowadays Einstein's formula E=mc2 is widely accepted. But when Einstein first published his theories they were met with wide skepticism, until enough experimental evidence supported them. In turn, Einstein himself was skeptical of certain quantum mechanics formulas ("God does not play dice," he famously said), which were later supported by more experimental evidence.
In my opinion, science is the least "woke" stuff we humans do. Science involves making hypotheses about how the world works, and then designing experiments to find out whether these hypotheses are correct, and then running those experiments over and over to make sure the results are consistently replicable. But the process of science is governed by fallible humans who often disagree with each other along the way. Unfortunately, the speed with which we had to address the COVID emergency lifted the veil of history and showed how messy scientific progress can be.
But it ain't fuckin' woke!
I would retire the word from the English language LOL.
But I felt one area of disagreement -- the author viewed public health advice to get vaccinated and wear masks to reduce the spread of COVID as another type of "woke" behavior. I studied statistics in graduate school and worked as a statistician during my 20s. I also live with a scientist who chaired the federal government's interdisciplinary committee on COVID response during the worst of the pandemic. This combination of statistical expertise & COVID expertise in my household leads me to feel confident that the mRNA COVID vaccines work and that wearing masks also works -- although neither works perfectly. You can get all your shots and wear a mask everywhere and still catch COVID.
In the part of her essay calling the vaccines and masks "woke", she cited to articles posted by noted anti-vaxx cranks. When I read these articles I usually feel like throwing my laptop or phone across the room because they always use statistics improperly or simply make shit up.
I don't claim to be infallible, but it is one thing to criticize the excesses of identity politics and trigger warnings and labels like "cultural appropriation" -- it is entirely a different thing to claim that public health experts are making shit up as they go along and that there was a dark conspiracy to censor and hoodwink the public.
During the pandemic I read a lot of original scientific studies and could tell which ones used statistics correctly and which ones didn't. Although there was not always a consensus among public health officials, and sometimes recommendations changed as the facts on the ground changed & as we learned more about COVID, and as new treatments were developed, generally the scientific community and public health officials did a great job in saving lives. We can't go back in time and rerun the history of the pandemic under different variables to be certain of what worked and what didn't, but I think we have good estimates that around 5 million Americans would've died from COVID under "business as usual" whereas only 1 million Americans actually died.
We can debate whether the disruptions of the public health response were worth 4 million lives. Or whether we should've "locked down" even harder to save some of the 1 million lives we lost. But COVID was and still is real, the vaccines do help, masking does help, social distancing does help. This isn't "woke", it is science.
-----
Perhaps a problem that lots of people have with science is that they never learned growing up that science is and has always been messy. In school people are taught the settled principles of science, rather than the history of how these settled principles were arrived at -- a history involving much debate and uncertainty and interpersonal drama. New discoveries are often resisted by other scientists who adopt a skeptical and condescending inertia.
The history of COVID science was no different. There were plenty of disease experts who at first refused to believe that COVID could be spread via airborne droplets, not until we had solid scientifically designed studies showing airborne contagion. So at first a lot of experts pooh-poohed the idea of wearing masks. This expert disagreement occurred in full view of the public during the spring of 2020, and so led a lot of the public to disbelieve subsequent public health advice to wear masks. Anthony Fauci was one of those early skeptics about wearing masks, so when he flipped it hurt his credibility -- fatally destroying his credibility among much of the public.
But the scientific community has both liberals and conservatives, like any other group of humans. Conservatives resist change, whereas liberals are quick to adopt change, and both groups make mistakes because of their biases.
Nowadays Einstein's formula E=mc2 is widely accepted. But when Einstein first published his theories they were met with wide skepticism, until enough experimental evidence supported them. In turn, Einstein himself was skeptical of certain quantum mechanics formulas ("God does not play dice," he famously said), which were later supported by more experimental evidence.
In my opinion, science is the least "woke" stuff we humans do. Science involves making hypotheses about how the world works, and then designing experiments to find out whether these hypotheses are correct, and then running those experiments over and over to make sure the results are consistently replicable. But the process of science is governed by fallible humans who often disagree with each other along the way. Unfortunately, the speed with which we had to address the COVID emergency lifted the veil of history and showed how messy scientific progress can be.
But it ain't fuckin' woke!