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March 3, 2020 - 11:17am
Cass Sunstein, Harvard Professor and ‘nudge theorist’, has a piece on Bloomberg urging us not to panic:
But hang on, Prof, if “no one can specify the magnitude of the threat” then how can you say that people have an “exaggerated sense of their own personal risk”? Given the highly uncertain, but potentially extreme and multiplicative risks of new infectious diseases, over-reacting to pandemics is entirely rational.
In a series of tweets, the demographer Lyman Stone pushes back against the anti-panickers:
“That worm of a feeling in your head saying, ‘omg we’re gonna die we’re gonna die we’re gonna die’ is a good thing.
We should cultivate and encourage it. “Not to induce panic behaviors, but to motivate compliance.”
I think that’s right. The things we need to do to slow down the rate of infection require a change of deeply ingrained habits across entire population.
A mass behavioural shift like washing our hands more frequently and thoroughly won’t happen because it is the logical thing to do but out of a compelling emotional impulse. Widespread fear is just what we need right now.
Stone also explains why it’s so important that we do minimise the rate of infection. We probably can’t stop the disease in its tracks, but by holding down the number of people with full-blown symptoms at any one time we give the healthcare system a chance of coping. If our hospitals are overwhelmed then people will die that might have been saved.
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