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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?
I think there's zero chance humanity survives this century. Just think about AI, how diabolical and complex the challenge is, dealing with alignment issues AND the prospect of rogue actors in the tech or military/intelligence sectors.
Then consider that we knew COVID was an airborne virus. We knew that because of the Diamond Princess and other cruise ships, where they sprayed everything down but people got sick. It must've been coming in through the air-filtration systems. Yet people were still spraying down surfaces for about a year! A relative of mine, who intensely trusts the media, was spraying down groceries and her own shoes. Someone spread some totally pointless hysteria (hopefully it was Big Spray looking for customers rather than a genuine case of random error) and nobody managed to correct this. And then there's the whole 'masks don't work but actually we changed our minds and they're compulsory' thing, there's the gain-of-function research that continues up to this day, despite a very high chance that it was to blame for the virus.
We got outwitted by a virus, something that's not even technically alive, let alone sapient, let alone superintelligent! If we can't prevent or at least secure dangerous GoF research, how can we do anything for AI? AI is immensely more important, more profitable, more omni-present, it's a key area of competition between the US and China. We've failed the tutorial-tier technological crisis and we failed badly. There are going to be more technological crises, devious and lethal crises. We are clearly not capable of handling them.
Expanding brain meme goes here
Microbrain: "Yay! We're safe because the smart people are in charge"
Brain: "The "smart people" can't even figure out how to avoid endangering civilization with fumbled virus research"
Megabrain: "So they definitely won't be able to figure out how to avoid endangering humanity with fumbled AI research"
Galaxy brain: "Yay! Wiping out civilization first with viruses will prevent us from wiping out humanity with AI"
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