Covid is Big Foot

The same reasoning biases leading to "evidence" of Big Foot, UFOs and ghosts underlie the "evidence" for Climate Change and Covid Authoritarianism.

What do Big Foot, ghosts and UFOs (or UAPs) — on the one hand — and climate change and Covid — on the other hand — have in common?

Surely very little, right?

The former, UFO-like stuff, are the illusory observations by fringe observers of questionable reliability.

The latter, such as Climate Change and Covid, are deemed to be serious threats to the world, and the arguments for that are made by some of the smartest and most educated scientists and intellectuals on Earth.

These two classes of beliefs are, however, much more similar than they at first appear.

ALTOGETHER NOVEL

First, they’re all about some completely new thing, heretofore not known to exist. The hypothesis in each case is, “This thing no one used to think exists actually exists!”

They are therefore inherently exciting, mysterious, and mystical, at the border of the known and unknown.

This is obvious for Big Foot, Loch Ness, ghosts and UFOs. That’s what fun about them: If the observations are right, there’s a whole new entity to add to the list of players in the universe!

How about Covid? If you remember, it was “altogether novel.” We heard that a hundred times per hour in February and March of 2020.

Climate change, too, is about the entirely new climate forces fossil fuels are claimed to have brought upon us.

If it’s entirely novel, that might imply we know absolutely nothing about it, and so all bets are off! All information we might possess about other things simply doesn’t help whatsoever in making sense of this new thing. That would mean our prior probability distributions on the many possible properties of the new thing would be flat. And that means that we basically throw out all common sense about the thing, something I talked about early on at Twitter, and here in this LooFWIRED article.

How fear of Covid irrationally transformed our priors

But it’s worse than that, as we’ll see.

BUT KINDA LIKE THIS

At the start of the previous section I said the hypothesis form they all share is, “This thing no one used to think exists actually exists!”

But that’s not quite right. It’s more specific than that. It’s not merely that some unknown thing might exist.

It’s that a very particular kind of unknown thing exists.

Big Foot isn’t just some monster, but an in-between-apes-and-humans creature. Loch Ness is the one dinosaur species that didn’t die out tens of millions of years ago (setting aside the birds, etc.). Ghosts are wispy, semi-transparent, usually humanoid apparitions with the power to go through walls and kinda sorta move things. UFOs can go really fast, don’t seem to have propulsion, can change direction arbitrarily quickly, can dive through oceans, seem utterly smooth and composite, and so on.

The narratives for each have a bit of give. They’re certainly broader than my above brief pointers in their general direction. But they stay within certain rough bounds, and we all kinda know them. If you write a Big Foot story but it’s a humanoid two-headed reptile then, nope, it ain’t Big Foot. A ghost story with hard metallic robots coming out of the toilet isn’t a ghost story.

Now, for Covid, notice that it wasn’t simply altogether novel. Instead, right away the narrative about Covid attributed to it hosts of fairly specific expected properties, including those below (from the LooFWIRED piece I linked to earlier).

(a) its infection fatality rate (IFR) is super high

(b) there are few asymptomatics (and so IFR will be roughly the very high early CFR values)

(c) transmission is unprecedentedly high

(d) asymptomatics can spread it

(e) it’s disproportionately risky for the young

(f) no one is safe, comorbidities or no

(g) it will hit the entire population (and so let’s multiply CFR by total population and see the total expected deaths)

(h) immunity doesn’t apply

(i) herd immunity can’t happen

(j) it leaves you with chronic health issues

(k) seasonality does not apply (i.e., the epidemic doesn’t have a tendency to come, and go, at a typical time of year, like almost all other viruses do)

(l) it goes away only via intervention policies (lockdowns, masks, etc.)

(m) all variation in epidemic severity is due to intervention policy

(n) a vaccine will be easy to build soon, and super effective

…and what sums most of them up fairly nicely is, “Covid is expected to be like the viruses found in the most dystopian horror flicks about pandemics.” (Along of course with “and only our greatest expert minds and the power of the state can possibly save us.”)

And, for Climate Change, it’s usually not merely that the climate will change. No, the narrative is filled with a certain suite of devastating and apocalyptic changes: some places becoming deserts, some forever flooded, some experiencing permanent deathly winter, and a surfeit of natural disasters such as hurricanes, droughts and wildfires. The narrative of climate change is definitely not, say, that the world will be a little warmer and greener.

So, these aren’t mere hypotheses about unknowns. They’re hypotheses about a construct within an existing narrative.

DISPROPORTIONATELY DANGEROUS

And, these ideas aren’t merely fairly specific things we already have long-lived narratives about. Rather, as is clear from running through them above, each of these is really dangerous. They’re monsters or deadly threats. That was part of each of the narratives.

Big Foot and Loch Ness are literal monsters. Ghosts are clearly dangerous — there’s a whole ghost story industry of books and movies scaring the shit out of their audiences. And UFOs are dangerous both personally at the kidnap-and-anal-probing level, and societally because they’re millions of years beyond the power of our military.

Covid, if you recall, wasn’t merely “altogether novel.” That phrase was invariably followed by “and disproportionately dangerous.” The infection fatality rate was originally said to be several percent, and the public actually thought the infection fatality rate was ten times higher than that (38% in one poll of the Australian public, and the average U.S. respondent thought 9% of the population was already dead by Covid by summer 2020). (Note that I’m not suggesting Covid doesn’t exist. The issue is the suite of properties it was claimed to possess.)

And climate change is obviously touted as the ultimate slow-motion apocalyptic disaster, which is why for decades anyone driving a Hummer was obviously somehow involved in genocide.

All these things concern deadly other-worldly chimeras writ large. They’re not at all simply hypotheses about the arrival of some thus far unknown thing. They’re each more akin to a mythical creature, or a mythical cataclysm more akin to the Great Flood or Armageddon.

SINGLEMINDED AND FUZZY

And the similarities don’t stop there.

One of the more salient features on the Big Foot / UFO side of things is that the evidence we have for them always smells the same.

For UFOs, for example, we have photo after photo over the decades that (1) kinda sorta looks like a flying saucer, but (2) has just the right level of fuzziness or ambiguity that you can’t see the level of detail that would be needed to realize that it’s in fact a nothing burger like a frizbee or a dinner plate. Similar story for Big Foot, Loch Ness and ghosts. Just fuzzy photos that don’t really convince anyone except those that want to believe.

And, in fact, let’s pause on that last phrase.

“want to believe.”

What exactly does that mean?

I don’t mean by it that they literally want to believe in it. Rather, what I mean is that they have already somehow gotten into a state of mind where they only give high prior probability to the existence of the entity in the narrative. They view that kind of thing as privileged.

You see, there are loads and loads of other things that as far as we know don’t exist, but just might. But all these other things get basically zero prior probability. That is to say, they’re all treated as so implausible as to not even be worth considering. But not so for the mythical notion in the narrative. That alone is deemed plausible. And this plausible-implausible difference is for all practical purposes infinite.

So, imagine someone finds a really fuzzy photo of what could have been a humanoid two-headed reptilian monster. That is to say, if there really were a humanoid two-headed reptilian monsters, that would easily explain the existence of that poorly shot, out-of-focus photo. But no one would ever take this photo as evidence that gives them any reason to believe in humanoid two-headed reptilian monsters, because they deem the very idea of such a monster as basically impossible.

And the same is true for the infinity of other possible things we don’t yet know exist. They’re all forever discounted, and we never find evidence for them.

But for Big Foot, because it’s part of my narrative and I deem it possible, that mere possibility makes it infinitely more probable than all those infinitely many others I deem absolutely impossible. And so it can actually get more probable with evidence I might find.

Like, if I found a photo of Big Foot.

But, of course, given that Big Foot in fact does not exist, any photo that provides evidence of Big Foot will be really really bad. Sure, the existence of Big Foot would explain that photograph, but any number of other more plausible possibilities would also explain it, like that it was just a person, bad lighting, and a poor-quality camera. Nevertheless, because I gave Big Foot undue prior plausibility, such fuzzy photos do, for me, raise my confidence a little that Big Foot exists.

In summary, for someone with Big Foot in one’s narrative, (1) they’ll tend to accumulate evidence confirming its existence, and never raise their confidence in other possible creatures that might exist, and (2) their evidence for it will be peculiarly weak, albeit positive evidence.

They’ll be single-minded on Big Foot, and their evidence never better than really fuzzy.

This might now be beginning to remind you of Covid and Climate Change.

For Covid, no matter what actual evidence appeared, the only evidence that was treated as such was data that served to support the radical, “mythical,” apocalyptic narrative that Covid is altogether novel and disproportionately dangerous, as well high transmission, equally deadly to all demographics, and all those other superlatives in the long quote earlier. Evidence not supporting that was effectively ignored, despite yours truly and other early anti-lockdowners loudly broadcasting the actual evidence. Those within the mainstream Covid narrative were notoriously single-minded. And, the evidence they did deem as evidence was invariably terrible, such as dozens of terribly poor observational studies claiming that masks work, when whatever effect they actually found could be explained much more plausibly by some other variable. The Covid Cult was single-minded, and their data fuzzy in this “poor” sense.

And the same for Climate Change, where the mainstream narrative deems anything but the apocalyptic hypothesis as completely implausible. And, in this case, because the climate is so complex, practically any data can be spun such that the apocalyptic Climate Change hypothesis explains it. The apocalyptic hypothesis invariably rises in confidence in their mind, and the evidence is uniquely “fuzzy.”

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The suggestion here is that much of what drives sociopolitical movements is myth-style narratives.

It’s also why cults are invariably centered on end-of-the-world themes.

Few have any idea that they / society is still to this day (and will always be) disproportionately prone to cataclysmic narratives, and that it in fact is driving vast funding and societal attention.