About once a week (okay, maybe every other week – but goals!) I run with a friend who is a particularly deep thinker. Worry not, some of our runs are superficial and silly, but I am ever grateful for the ones that leave me thinking for the next several days. Last week, she posed a version of this – exact quoting impossible given that it was the crack of dawn and my brain had yet to fully engage itself: When it comes to the pandemic and living life and returning to normal and staying safe and parenting and our kids’ social and emotional development, all of this rolled together in a big ball but also parsed out into individual aliquots of fact versus fiction, what is knowable?
It was barely 6:30am, not exactly dark but the sun hadn’t even hoisted itself up to the horizon. Tackling the question What is knowable? felt too enormous. But it continued to bounce around my mind over the next several days. Then, I just happened to stumble upon an article about the Gell-Mann Amnesia Effect, a phenomenon first described by Jurassic Park author Michael Crichton and named for his friend, physicist Murray Gell-Mann. It goes like this:
Briefly stated, the Gell-Mann Amnesia Effect is as follows. You open the newspaper to an article on some subject you know well. In Murray’s case, physics. In mine, show business. You read the article and see the journalist has absolutely no understanding of either the facts or the issues. Often, the article is so wrong it actually presents the story backward — reversing cause and effect. I call these the “wet streets cause rain” stories. Paper’s full of them. In any case, you read with exasperation or amusement the multiple errors in a story, and then turn the page to national or international affairs and read as if the rest of the newspaper was somehow more accurate about Palestine than the baloney you just read. You turn the page and forget what you know.
The Gell-Mann Effect undoubtedly rules life in a 21st century pandemic. As we ping-pong between articles, posts, anecdotes, and rumors, we can easily write off the ones we know to be patently false; but we’re still quick to believe the next item that scrolls along if it falls anywhere outside of our wheelhouse. This is likely driven by the human impulse to make sense of chaos, which in turn can create cause-and-effect flows where they may not exist. We all want to connect dots, especially in the loneliness and scariness of this pandemic… but when we pull back to a 30,000 foot view, we have often connected contradictory dots. I shouldn’t get the vaccine until there’s more data – wait, I can get a dose of vaccine, so I am grabbing it! We’re safer at home, ensconced from coronavirus – wait, everyone at the party is getting tested so it’s fine to go! Getting COVID hasn’t been a big deal for any of the infected people I know – wait, I just heard about so-and-so who is in the ICU!
Call it short term amnesia or a case of finding data to support what we want to hear, this current Gell-Mann mindset makes everything and nothing knowable. Earlier this week, while Anthony Fauci appeared on one network arguing that new coronavirus variants are spreading and double-masking may be necessary to protect us, Governor Newsom was busy on another lifting California’s statewide stay at home order, pointing to declining COVID case counts as a rationale to green light the opening of restaurants, salons, and a whole host of other indoor venues. Who to believe? Gell-Mann would suggest that unless you are a virologist or epidemiologist, you should believe both, which may very well explain why our brains currently feel so scrambled.
While much feels unknowable at the moment, here’s what COVID nerds are talking about this week:
COVID during pregnancy is a very hot topic for lots of obvious reasons. For those with questions about risks here, Methods Man has some preliminary answers
Vaccines, vaccine, vaccines!
On the topic of Anything But COVID…
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This mom did something completely revolutionary and a complete no-brainer: she encouraged her sons to carry tampons and pads in their backpacks for gal pals who might need them.
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For all of you Bridgerton bingers out there, you can also use it to jump start The Talk with your kids.
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And for parents looking for a great new column about kids’ education, check out this new one from Abby Freireich and Brian Platzer in The Atlantic.
Ending on the ultimate feel-good note this week, because if anything is knowable, this should be!
