August 2023 conversation
While putting together a page of presentations and appearances, I realized I never shared this August 2023 conversation Jonathan Engler and I had with Randall Bock about the Lombardy and New York City mass casualty events of spring 2020. Bock, a New York native and author of Zika: The Pandemic That Never Was, had attended my two-part PANDA presentation “Toward a New York City Hypothesis” earlier in the year and invited us to speak with him. He also invited a doctor who had worked in New York City during April and May of 2020, and who disagreed with some of my points. The doctor declined, but we enjoyed a good dialogue with Bock playing “devil’s advocate” along the way.
One fun segment involved a discussion of the human tendency toward (what I would call) perceptual aggrandizement of experience. Clip below, followed by transcript:
Jonathan Engler: In medicine — in life generally, actually — there is a huge potential for observation and confirmation bias. So this thing, ‘I had an unusual disease.’ We’ve got to appreciate how our mode of thinking has changed.
If five years ago, a series of friends had remarked to each other, ‘I’ve had that really weird kind of bug over the weekend. Left me, you know, washed out for a week or two.’ The other friend wouldn’t then say, ‘Well, we’re under a Department of Defense attack by a biological weapon,’ you know? They would just say, ‘Yeah.’ Whereas now apparently such observations are evidence of this.
I like to make an analogy, in some senses, to the difference between climate and weather. You know, if you said, ‘I want everybody who has experienced the most extreme weather that they’ve ever experienced in the last week to put their hands up and post it onto this website,’ then you will get — because there are a lot of people in the world and there’s a lot of variability in the weather — there will be thousands of people who, in the last week, have experienced the most extreme weather that they have ever experienced in their lives.
You just pick out that thousand people and write a news report about it, you could easily convince people that is evidence the climate is changing. But of course it’s not. It’s just biased data harvesting and pattern — and our innate inability to, or I should say, innate ability to pick out patterns where there actually shouldn’t be any patterns.
Randall Bock: Your weather/climate metaphor brought up two things in mind. First of all, I ran a medical practice for almost 30 years in a kind of a blue-collar town near Boston. And one of my nurses kept saying how the world was getting worse and worse and worse. And she was a small town gal. She had grown up, you know, she’d probably now be in her 80s, and she kept saying how there were more and more murders. And I said, ‘Well when you were a kid, what was your news source?’ She was like, ‘I read the very local Town Newspaper.’ And there had been no murders in this little town, and then as she went to high school and college, she wound up reading the Boston Globe, and then it was national news. And it’s interesting, you know, international news, and she would point out all the things are happening: a flood in in Bangladesh, I don’t know, some earthquake in, you name it, Japan whatever. And like one thing after another and it’s like all these people are dying.
It’s like well now you’re looking at billions of people instead of the 10,000 people in your town. And so so there’s kind of like a a mass effect that we see. More and more stuff and more stuff comes, you know, and obviously you can hunt this stuff out if you hashtag it and whatnot.
Then on a private, personal note, actually my worst experience was a tornado/ I was literally in my office uh in 2014 when a tornado — a rare occurrence for Eastern Massachusetts — swept by. The first 131 years. And you could say, ‘Well, that’s climate,’ but there hasn’t been one since.
Anyway so I did survive a tornado. I’m a tornado Survivor.
Jessica Hockett (laughing): Are you suffering from long tornado symptoms??
Randall Bock (laughing): Yeah, I mean, many many things can be chalked up to that. You know, I I lost n ping-pong the other day to my wife and hate doing that.
If the COVID Era doesn’t convince you that people can turn something typical into something atypical, the Seattle Windshield Pitting ‘epidemic’ of 1954 might. In summary, reports of potential vandalism to car windshield in one location ballooned into thousands of people seeing damage in their own cars. Investigations concluded that the ‘pits’ had been there all along, but there had been no reason to look and notice them until prompted to do so. (Seems applicable to illness and to ‘finding viruses’ alike!)
Humans do have a tendency to aggrandize, or make a big deal out of, their experiences and to perceive what they want to perceive.
Most of the conversation with Randall and Jonathan was New York focused.
Full dialogue with serious and light-hearted moments via YouTube.
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