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On a personal level, has anyone else noticed just how much Covid broke people's brains?
I don't mean this in a cruel or offensive way, but the usual way things go is that people simply don't care about the thing that happened a year or two ago. We move on, we change focus, and we find new things to be offended or enraged (or perhaps happy) about.
I know a couple of people who would likely be avid users of r/MasksforAll, and a higher number of people who are perpetually incensed about vaccines and vaccine mandates. Oddly enough lockdowns are a huge thing here (I have never met a single person angry about lockdowns in real life, but here the number of people persistently furious about lockdowns is pretty large), but in my personal life there are still people utterly incensed that other people are no longer taking safety measures - I wear a mask on the train nowadays after A/B testing it in Excel for the better part of a year and finding I was drastically more likely to get a cold when not masking, but not anywhere else.
Ordinarily even the most politically vehement people I know really do shut up about politics, but two of my friends will no longer shut up about Covid. We catch up for a phone call (we live a few thousand kilometres apart each), and it invariably turns back to vaccines or Covid and so on. One of my aunts is frustrated that she can't get people to reliably mask when catching up with her (she's not immunocompromised or anything along those lines, and she's in her late 40s) without asking them beforehand.
I feel like being, well, a normie throughout this has inoculated me to these feelings. I never really got mad at people not wearing masks or taking vaccines (largely because by that point it was pretty clear Covid was far less dangerous than initially thought), except to note that the people who generally didn't mask back when mask mandates were a thing tended to be the sort of people who committed publically antisocial behaviour to begin with (playing loud music on the train, harrassing people for smokes, etc). Likewise, the more worried people seemed similar to me - I was happy to take a RAT test or whatever to see someone if it assuaged their anxiety.
It's not everyone, and the majority of people seem to have returned to normal. I guess this is a culture war issue in general which is why I'm posting here, but I can't help but feel a large number of people will be relitigating Covid for years, whether it's their anger at authoritarian monsters trying to destroy their lives and enforce the injection of experimental biological matter into their veins, or their fury at antisocial plague rats who were unwilling to take even the slightest measure to try and keep people safe.
I'm not trying to judge these people or look down on them, we all have our issues and our pain points. I'm not going to pretend I don't have mine. But it just strikes me as noticeable that there's a substantial chunk of the population now seemingly stuck on Covid issues.
Does this gel with anyone else?
Let me give you a slightly different example.
In higher education, the gossip right now is revolving around perceptions that students are cheating more, less inclined to come to class, more fragile with feedback and being challenged, less prepared for university-level work, etc. I'm not aware of any specific, careful empirical data here, and there is certainly a tendency among professors to complain about their worst cases. But certainly my own experience has aligned with that of the gossip.
I grew up hearing all kinds of stories about how those who grew up during the Great Depression had a tendency toward hoarding, "upcycling," and so forth. "Post traumatic stress disorder" has come to encompass a lot more than shell-shock these days. What's weird, to me, about post-COVID sociological changes is how just wildly unnecessary the whole mess appears to have been. My students aren't skipping class and sloughing assignments because they lost their families to the plague; they're skipping class and sloughing assignments because most of them spent a year or two living under government lockdowns, being assured all the while that this would not impact their life progression. But it already has.
Did you know that six U.S. states just waived the bar exam for law graduates to become lawyers. The bar exam, which is supposed to be the line between "competent" and "incompetent" representation, and state governments just said--eh, just wave everyone through.
Someone will undoubtedly say--well what were they supposed to do? I get it, really. People spent two years or more improvising at every turn. Mistakes were bound to be made. But it is depressing to me that so much of that improvising involved total abandonment of anything approaching ordinary common sense in favor of absolutely maximum panicking. That sort of thing is bound to have long term impacts.
I think in many ways Covid accelerated preexisting trends. One was toward remote work; we would probably have gotten there eventually anyway, the incentives were strong as cost of living and commute lengths skyrocketed in high-income employment hubs, but Covid probably moved us ten years into the future in terms of forcing adoption. Another is probably a secular trend away from meritocracy. IMO the fundamental driver there was the end of the Cold War and generally increasing wealth (slackness is more pleasant, and can be viewed as a luxury good that we are consuming more of now that we have more wealth), but Covid again moved us probably ten years forward in terms of abandoning standardized tests, having sympathy for mental disorders (or laziness that uses the language of mental disorders) and adopting racial and gender quotas in employment and higher education.
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Man, that is wild. I genuinely have a hard time believing that anyone would do something as stupid as that. Do they not stop to think for one second about the consequences of such an action?
And isn’t it normal to have to take multiple times anyways?
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I think what gets me is--maybe there won't be any noticeable consequences. Most, maybe all of these states implemented an "hours of supervised practice" prerequisite. If supervised practice really is enough to accomplish the goals of the bar exam, why in God's name would we continue administering bar exams? That's an expensive, deeply unpleasant process to subject people to for literally no reason at all (queue Meditations on Moloch electroshock discussion).
Conversely, if the exam really does protect consumers in ways that can't be accomplished by supervised practice, what possible justification could there be to shrug your shoulders and say, "well, this year we're just not going to bother?" "Yes, hundreds of lawyers whose legal education was interrupted by COVID, also never had to prove that they learned anything to the state, so... just watch out for lawyers who graduated in 2021 I guess? One in ten should probably not be practicing law?"
But no--we get total doublethink on the matter. The bar exam is absolutely crucial to protecting consumers from incompetent representation, and also a completely optional exercise with no serious relevance to professional competence, somehow.
No, there are reasons for it. Maybe not good reasons for it, but definitely reasons. Just off the top of my head, we have:
(1) the bar filters for people who are either capable of ingesting and processing lots of information, or working like cast-iron bastards for six months to simulate the brainpower. These skills are extremely useful in the legal field.
(2) the bar filters for people who are able to write well (for a certain definition of "well") and with clarity (for a certain definition of "clarity") under high stress, significant time pressure, and over an extended sequence of continuous tasks. This is also a very valuable skill for many lawyers (though not all).
(3) the bar does at least require a certain amount of basic legal knowledge about a number of different legal sub-fields. Most of these fields are quite complex in their own right, and can take whole careers to become an expert in, but the bar means that no attorney is going to be completely clueless when it comes to, e.g., family law, or the remedies available in different kinds of litigation, or the steps necessary to form a contract. As long as we're going to be pretending that all lawyers are members of a sacrosanct professional guild, some degree of basic generality is required so the number of lawyers providing affirmatively wrong information and advice is cut down somewhat.
(4) the bar functions as a literal bar-to-entry to the lawyering guild, increasing compensation in the industry.
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Not really a sophisticated and careful analysis, but Bloomberg had a recent op-ed about SAT/ACT scores. They've plummeted during COVID. If anything, it probably understates the loss, as universities have increasingly dropped test requirements and would-be weak scorers have decided not to take the tests and submit scores.
Obviously scores don't tell everything. But they speak to the trend. And there's a reason for the dearth of other empirical data: American educational researchers are very disinclined to look into this question, and schools don't want to surface self-condemning metrics.
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Listen to all of the smart people who were screaming at the top of their lungs that this sort of thing was exactly what was going to happen, and work to avoid it.
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