What am I doing here?
This started out two years ago last week as an experiment in form: I began by restricting myself to precisely a thousand words, simply because I could.
I had a few things to say, and have mostly said them. I've talked about quantum reality and god and stuff, convincing no one that god's word is readable in the world by anyone who cares to do so. But it is.
I've spent a great deal of time on covid and the lies the political class has been telling about it.
In the past year I've transitioned from talking mostly about new scientific results to showing how science is actually done, by doing it in public. There's a lot more I could do along those lines.
In the past two years my readership has grown by about a factor of three, from around 20 at the start to exactly 60 today. This unspectacular growth rate is likely because I write about what I feel like writing about, and that is sufficiently broad to not really be generally interesting to any particular person.
While this has increasingly become a place to record "How I do stuff", that "stuff" has been mostly confined to scientific and philosophic topics. There are other areas I've not really touched on. I've mentioned theatre the odd time, but not much about poetry, or film, or various marine activities, or machine design, or...
Thinking about where I might take this faces me with a conundrum. I'm not interested in using it to teach in any practical sense. I may talk about differential equations, say, to give people an idea of what's going on with them, but anyone who wants to learn the subject is going to avail themselves of a wealth of online resources. The most I can do is convince someone who might be thinking about doing so that it's worth a shot.
A lot of substack blogs are aimed at very narrow topics, which is well in keeping with the ethos of specialization that makes the modern world possible, and so far out of step with my own personal way of doing things that it makes me wonder if I'm in the wrong place, or possibly on the wrong planet.
Spring and fall tend to be the times I reflect on things, and this spring I'm finding myself in a more-than-usually-reflective mood. I've always felt out of step with the world, because I am, and never more so than in recent months as governments who barely tried to do anything to stop covid have decided they no longer need to do anything at all, and the vast majority of people have followed suit. Or even led the way.
Most people would rather risk death or disablement than protect themselves or anyone else from the ongoing pandemic.
There have been some good bits of news: Enovid nasal spray as well as Betadine Cold Defense have both been shown to be somewhat effective in protecting against covid, and a new nasal spray being developed in Finland is promising to be even more effective. Those of us who are paying attention are increasingly able to go about our lives without much inconvenience, even as the dead and disabled pile up around us because hardly anyone is bothering to use these advances, and it's clear I'm not going to change that.
Which brings me to the real question: why continue to write when I have a tiny audience and my writing it not going to have any impact on policy or the larger discourse?
The reality is I don't know how to change anyone's mind, and the last six months have shown that in spades.
The world has moved on while people are still dying of covid at a rate of five to (more likely) ten times the rate that automobiles kill people. And that's in a lull.
The OECD average for under-reporting covid deaths is about a factor of two, which is why the covid death rate is more likely a factor of ten over the automotive death rate. In BC under the true-left-wing NDP the government simply lies: deaths caused by covid are only counted as caused by covid if it's a first infection. Really. So accounting for things like that, as well as long covid deaths, a factor of two is a fairly conservative estimate of the under-count.
Maybe there will be a slow decline into automotive equivalence over the next six months. If that's the case, I'll be delighted.
But I'll still wear a mask indoors in public from September to March at least, because we've learned in the past three years that all respiratory diseases are spread primarily by aerosols, and wouldn't it be kind of stupid to not wear a coat in winter when we've just learned that freezing to death can kill you? Even if you've never worn one before? Even if you're not from a "coat wearing culture"?
Canny observers will notice that the historical pneumonia death rate as shown in the graph above is pretty close to official covid death rate right now. The covid death rate among people under 70 is much higher, though, and again: now we know how to prevent many of those pneumonia deaths, which are generally the result of an opportunistic bacterial infection in the wake of a respiratory viral infection, shouldn't we make the effort to actually prevent them?
I think we should.
But most people are quite deeply committed to the idea that we shouldn't.
And I recognize that nothing I say is going to change anyone's mind. All I've got is data, Bayes' theorem, and compassion. Those aren't enough.
So the notion that I'm writing for advocacy or social change is right out.
What am I writing for?
My own understanding and discipline, I think. I've got numerous projects on the go, from more quantum simulation stuff to population models to entirely speculative things. Writing them down commits me to bring them to closure, which I find helpful. Part of what I've been doing here I think of as "clearing out the drawers", a metaphor inspired by an elderly physicist who in searching for a bit of apparatus went over to a back bench and pulled out this enormously long drawer full of strange odds and ends, and explained in his rather precise voice that, "Every laboratory needs a place to put things when you have done enough to ascertain that the experiment will work... and you have lost interest."
I've got a lot of stuff like that, because I do tend to lose interest once I've answered the question I care about. Explaining it to other people? That sounds like work.
But that's what I've been doing here, entirely for my own edification and satisfaction.
I will continue to do that for at least some time to come.
Spring Reflection
Well said, and thanks for saying it, Tom. Certainly, one more twinkling star has been added to the night sky - yours. There is that. 👍👏
I know I appreciate your edification efforts, even if I/we don’t always act on what we’ve learned. Thanks for continuing to do these.