Good call! The Power of Myth is super easy access and presents a decent gist.

Carl Jung and Archetypes.

Just curious, do they have something called ‘Capri’ in Argentina? Man with horses head.

If you haven’t read Wittgenstein’s ‘Philosophical Investigations’ already I couldn’t recommend it enough given the thoughts and ideas you’ve expressed.

GL :)

I can answer the ‘when’ but the ‘how’ is beyond my knowledge. Personally I’m just trying to push the narrative here and elsewhere to get people thinking about this.

Individual governments understand their capabilities better than me. They will, and do, respond to public pressure though. That’s our collective job.

Each developed country has most definitely not gone the same way. The reason the virus has had a minimal impact in both China, Singapore, Hong Kong and South Korea is because they’ve had plenty of experience dealing with this kind of thing before - as a few other Asian countries have too. Only Germany listened and prepared testing, hence the low number of cases.

Relaxing too soon is certainly a problem. What they will mean (the experts in the field) is easing off every 2-3 weeks and assessing the situation once they see the effect of the measures taken.

For a more visual understanding of how the models can play out I HIGHLY recommend watching this:

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=gxAaO2rsdIs

It’s not modeling this actual virus but gives a tangible appreciation of both the random nature of this and the effects of different possible measures - although represented in an abstract way.

India is taking drastic steps because they simply can’t do anything when it comes to medical aid for its citizens. There option is basically do nothing OR lockdown before it overwhelms them. Ironically what has happened it Italy may have helped.

I was looking at the original meaning of ‘hedonism’ a year or so ago. Cannot recall exactly what it was, but remember there were subtle differences between the philosophers of the time that made it look similar to the stoics thoughts.

I don't think we will be over the peak anytime soon, in the UK the experts announced yesterday that the lockdown is expected to last for at least 6 months, with only tentative attempts at relaxation of measures towards the end of this period. Personally, I expect it to be for a few more months than that before significant restrictions can be lifted. — Punshhh

That’s not exactly what was said. They said restrictions would hopefully be completely lifted in 6 months, not there will be 6 months of lockdown. At the moment the message in the UK is quite clear, and they are being open about the unpredictable nature of this - if you’ve run any mathematical models yourself you’ll see that the EXACT same figures ran twice through identical models DO NOT show exactly the same results (that is the nature of nature).

The message was they hope to have a better idea about the flattening of the curve in 3 months time, that after that period (if it is falling off) they will VERY slowly lift restrictions.

The key point being they don’t really know and will be able to tell us more in 2-3 weeks once the virus does what it does to those infected.

Think of this akin to predicting the weather. We know summers are hot, but we cannot say exactly how hot they will be and the accuracy of our predictions improves the closer we get to the time and we learn how to predict better due to observing patterns.

Note: I think it is wise to look at this going beyond 6 months. It helps to be pessimistic in these situations. Where I am schools closed as a continuation of the New Year Holiday with plans to open within 2 weeks ... then 2 more weeks, then ... you get the idea. As soon as I heard about this I told myself June, now I’m saying September but I wouldn’t be completely shocked if schooled simply shutdown all year - it depends whether or not cases go up here.

The possible benefit of this whole situation is that less developed countries can now clearly see what happens if you don’t stop the spread early doors. Hopefully Europe and North America’s mistakes can help those much more vulnerable countries act quickly - I really hope so because they just don’t have anything like the kind of healthcare in place that they do.

Long term consequences?

Brief report about how the southern hemisphere is preparing:

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=7Ru8qsQ9wQs

I guess you’re asking me how to deal with allocation of resources? Basically we need to discuss this across as many platforms as possible to remind governments we care about humanity not just national interests.

It incredibly hard to figure out. This has been a major concern for me since a month ago.

The best I can make out suggests the developed world needs to get into severe lockdown in order to gets through this as quickly as possible in order to support the developing world. Remember that ‘economy’ essentially means distribution of resources. Poor allocation of food and medical supplies/equipment could lead to the progress made in the developing world the past few decades being nullified.

No matter what the most important thing is international cooperation as this is a problem for humanity not merely a nationalistic game of favour exchanges. Are we up to the task, who knows. One thing for sure, we’ll make more mistakes before this is over so it’s a matter of how we cope with the mistakes to come I think.

May I suggest that blame games, finger pointing and personal theories may be better suited at a later date.

It would probably be both more interesting/useful to discuss future and present courses of action. Leaving the posturing to the politicians and exchanging information would be more beneficial.

Note: I say this under the assumption that people may visit this site looking for a balanced view of the situation. The disruption globally means we’re now all responsible and our words on this subject do actually count for something.

I WON’T be responding to some counter argument on this point - feel free to discuss that with me on a fresh thread though

Take care

Brief report about how the southern hemisphere is preparing:

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=7Ru8qsQ9wQs

Perhaps posting how many people usually die at this time of year and comparing previous years would shed light on this?

The masses may act dumb from time to time, but the public - person for person - aren’t so easily duped.

If I’m wrong we get what we deserve. If the ‘truth’ is too much for some they can join the ranks of the flatlanders. Tell people what to expect and they won’t generally freak out when it happens. Lie, cheat and deceive, and you’re essentially digging your own grave.

Why do think I’m worried about starvation? The threat of catching a virus isn’t all that terrible on a full stomach. The developed world won’t starve, they’ll just get a brief and dilute version of what billions of others are going to have to cope with in far less comfortable circumstances.

All of the books I initially mentioned are part of his interest in reason and morals. I view it through my own lens which is admittedly interested with how religion has effected cultures through human history. I don’t know about ‘Thus Spake ...’ though, as I got halfway through and quickly realised I had little to no idea how he had arrived at that work or why he viewed it as his pinnacle achievement.

One day I’ll get back to it, but other books are more pressing tbh.

I don’t generally disagree with your take, but I have my thoughts and you have yours. What I believe your about doesn’t even interest me, and what I believe you’re correct about isn’t exactly my direct interest.

Either way there is some overlapping interest here I think. I’ll get to it in a fresh thread next week hopefully.

Thanks

Sharing information is what will save us not destroy us. They’ll be conspiracy theorists as usual but the positives far outweigh the negatives imo.

We’re better off talking to each other. I cannot think of any situation where discussion and information sharing doesn’t have more benefits than deficits.

If by ‘near peak’ you mean ‘rate of infection’ it’s far too early to say that for Italy. In terms of number hospitalised and/or infected, we’re likely 1-2 months away if it’s kept under reasonable control, then a month or two after that before restrictions can ease up.

Remember Wuhan has been in total lockdown for as good as 3 months. In Europe and North America the response has been much slower because we’re not as experienced with this and we’ve dismissed it in the past - I dismissed it too at first and thought it was an overreaction (I’m still concerned about the developing countries though and the economy killing many).

There are positives though, but complacency is in developed countries could lead to us bloodying our hands with the starving from developing countries because we didn’t react in time and would’ve been better off carrying without further breaking the backs of poorer nations.

I think the best thought is ‘Okay, this is shit. But at least I’m not in a slum in Cape Town sharing a toilet with 30 people whilst scraping a living from day to day to feed myself and my family.”

I’m curious what your views are here on ‘lockdowns’ and NY without any emotional baggage attached (if possible?)

Just curious because if you take a brief look across the Atlantic ‘lockdowns’ are not exactly being touted as a terrible idea.

Remember ‘a broken clock is correct twice a day’.

Haha! Got a little distracted :)

Here: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=Xe8fIjxicoo

@Shawn

I meant now we have enough salt, fat and sugar we nevertheless still possess the desire to glut on it. Our cravings for something hard to come by and essential to life makes sense, yet once it becomes easily acquired we need to stem that urge or possibly suffer ill-health.

Sado-masochistic? Not at all. The most important things in life come at a cost. Learning that is a less painful path than not learning it as far as I can tell. We view pain as a lesson sometimes and others as something to avoid and guide us to something ‘better’.

Of course I’m suggesting people chop their arms off or anything. Fear is a great guide. If you fear something, step up to it. Most fear disguises itself as humiliation or guilt, and not learning how to navigate these emotions is immediately less painful. Facing up to yourself and accepting your flaws and shortcomings as a human being is a painful and necessary business in my experience. Ignoring it is MUCH worse in the long run.

Think about something simple like learning algebra. At first it is frustrating and makes you feel stupid and useless (that is painful), but once you bring your urges to ‘give up’ under control and harness yourself you’re met with a literal rush. Learning your limits is essential to living a good life, and learning your limits is painful if you over or under step - which we all do. It’s tough to train yourself and task that never ends (at least not for me!). It’s also a joy too.

Insert several dozen pithy sayings here if you wish. I’m not one for aphorisms myself as they tend to be more interested in surface details rather than plumbing the depths of probable and possible.

There are always exceptions, expect when there are none! :D

I want what I need but I don’t know what I need.

I could go tail chasing over this, but I think that about sums it up?

Take salt, fat and sugar. We crave them because in evolutionary terms they were scarce in nature. Now we practically have them on tap, but we still need them, but the demand doesn’t balance with the availability anymore.

It would be a wonderful thing if we all spent more time trying to train ourselves to ‘educate’ ourselves. The conundrum is ‘learning’ hurts at first so we have a tendency to avoid its initial humiliating punch in the face ... I guess that is what makes life both interesting though, just takes time to suffer enough and appreciate suffering for SOMETHING. The ‘something’ could literally be anything; that’s all our problems :D

Note: I’m still massively worried about the longterm problems posed for developing countries.

My VERY basic understanding of the situation at present is the developed countries better clamp down severely and get sorted in order to help the developing countries and halt second, third, fourth and multiple seasonal waves of this that would certainly lead to as good as 100% infected. That in my mind is the challenge - turning inward and nationalistic rather than viewing a global problem as a global problem that we have to, both morally and practically, pull together for despite the cultural differences and personal agendas.

It could’ve been a LOT worse and it could be a LOT worse too. We’ve got choice on our side though. Such an event may actually help the human race in the long run - silver linings are there :)

When it comes to the math these should help iron out any disagreements :

- https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=k6nLfCbAzgo
- https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=gxAaO2rsdIs

Spreading confusion via trying to ‘win’ an argument doesn’t really help anyone. Just provide people with the resources to look for themselves - generally people are rational enough to know not to drink fish tank cleaner (generally!).

Statistics used by to predict are not the same as stats used to manipulate the public. Scientists and mathematicians lean heavily toward the former whilst politicians and conspiracy theorists lean heavily toward the latter.

My general advice is to generally ignore people/articles/reports that are more concerned with finger pointing than anything else.

It won’t change much once things settle down. It will happen again but the difference is we’ll be prepared. South Korea handled this well because they’ve had to deal with other diseases the past couple of decades.

The warning signs were there, but humans being humans didn’t really take them too seriously as they were ‘somewhere else’.

Found a good talk by Bill Gates. Will post in a minute ...

Lots to address here. I’ll try and cover what I can.

Science relies heavily on removing extraneous circumstantial evidence. All experience, in this light, is evidence. Evidence for what is discovered through investigation.

Science and philosophy rely on logical principles. The ‘evidence’ is what we work with by sorting and ordering (logical principles). In this respect a book like ‘Logical Investigations’ by Husserl could be of some interest to you.

So for me when you say experience isn’t evidence then I can only ask you to ask yourself how you distinguish the two, what they have in common, whether or not they are essentially the same thing and merely separated by a habit of language use, and whether or not you think it is more likely that either ‘evidence’ is a kind of ‘experience’ or ‘experience’ is a kind of ‘evidence’ (take your pick).

Word can often be misleading if they’re not analysed carefully - hence what I believe to be one of, if not THE, importance of ‘philosophy’.

As for what is ‘right’ or ‘wrong’ I believe you meant ‘correct’ or ‘incorrect’? The former are more laden with ethical thought in the lexicon of philosophical jargon. For ‘correct’ or ‘incorrect’ it is merely a matter of sets of rules - Wittgenstein’s ‘Philosophical Investigations’ would probably be of interest to you in this particular area. For example if we’re playing chess and both know the rules of chess there are definitively ‘correct’ and ‘incorrect’ moves. The problem is that if we’re not focused enough on the game it is possible one of us could’ve made an ‘Incorrect’ move unintentionally and neither of us noticed - here in lies the conundrum of whether or not we were ‘playing chess’ or not if we’ve made a mistake. We can argue that we were both under the impression we made no ‘incorrect’ moves therefore we were still ‘playing chess’ yet if someone was to watch a video of the game and pointed out our mistake they could see our error and tell us ... but that doesn’t change our belief that we had a game of chess, only that we made an unnoticed mistake.

In short, this comes down to accuracy of play and error margins. Undoubtedly someone learning to play chess will make some errors, and they are more likely to make errors than a grandmaster whose error rate would be as good as zero. ‘As good as’ in this sense could be equated to mathematical impossibility and basic entropy - it is ‘Possible’ that the wind will blow in such a manner as to for a perfect sandcastle on a beach somewhere on Earth, but the ‘Probability’ of this happening during the span of the Earth’s lifetime is so incredibly minuscule that we say it is ‘Impossible’. Claude Shannon may interest you in this particular area.

Bill Gates - How we must respond to covid pandemic.

Useful talk: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=Xe8fIjxicoo

Yes, there are different scenarios. It is quite possible as good as 100% off the population could be infected over the next couple of years.

The general view is to slow the spread not stop it (that’s fantasy at the moment).

After the economic destruction do you think this event will stop people looking for quick, easy money or help oil the chainsaws and invite the miners in.

The economic plight from this could wreck and ruin far more than people seem to appreciate.

What are the global projections? (Number infected)

Maybe I was being too harsh.

I’m simply not interested in that stuff. I’m fascinated by what he has to say about religion and culture because I’m interested in how Morality relates to reasoning in general and the role of Art in society.

Everyone’s vision of others is ‘idealized’ to some degree. So what? I adore Bjork’s music - that doesn’t wholly define who I am or why I think the way I think.

In terms of aristocrat and plebeian, I read Nietzsche as stating something about intellectualism and superstition in terms of hierarchy. This echoes back to Dionysus and Apollo in ‘The Birth of Tragedy’. You can disagree, no problem. If I’m ‘wrong’ it certainly isn’t because I’m trying to paint him, or anyone else, in a certain light. It is because I take what I can from what I study and develop my own ideas and thoughts rather than faun over some guy who died hundreds or thousands of years ago - that’s for people with less imagination/time/interest.

1) Don’t use commentaries by other philosophers.
2) Read a paragraph and think.
3) when you’ve finished a section write a summary of what you’ve just read - helps to improve retention.
4) Take a break and/or read something by a different author on a related subject.

Once you’ve got your own idea about the text (or failed to understand) then look at other philosophers commentaries on the text.

As you build a broader knowledge you’ll learn to understand better.

Simply put, persist. Reading is a skill that takes a lot of effort and hard work to improve. Reading words isn’t really reading. You can practice by reading a couple of pages of a novel closing the book and then giving a detailed summary in writing.

GL and work hard :)

I highly recommend reading ‘The Sacred and The Profane’ by Mircea Eliade if you haven’t already.

You’re obsessed. I’m not. Bye bye

He was open about his hatred of nationalism and anti-semitism. Anyone and anything he talked about was with derision and bombast.

The heart of his writings are not about Jews? That’s a strange thing to say. He was concerned with morality and it’s cultural development. Europe is Judaeo-Christian. He hangs far more off ancient Greek mythos than anything else.

Like I said above, he hated nationalism.

Talking about race and culture doesn’t make the author ‘racist’. He openly deplores racism and calls the German attitudes of the time something like the ‘lowest’ because they think of groups of people’s as being the same.

What Jewish question? He praises the Jews and takes digs at them, he does the same for ‘Europeans’. His main concern was the evolution of religious attitudes through human culture with particular emphasis on Christianity (which he was less than fond of).

It will take some time to pick out the relevant quotes where he talks about the ‘masses’ and the ‘individual’. You need them?

I was being brief. I thought it was reasonably common knowledge that Nietzsche compares the ‘masses’ and the ‘individual’ in terms of how moral attitudes wax and wane? Maybe I was wrong.

I question it too. My general impression of the situation has me seriously worried for the poorest. If my worries are unfounded it would be nice to see evidence.

The poorest live of the refuse of others. They earn a few dollars a day from menial work. That work has already stopped.

9 million now could increase quite easily to over 100 million when you consider the countries I’ve mentioned. 7% unemployed (70+ million). 9 million global in one year could easily turn into 10+ million in one year in India alone. Then there is next year where lockdowns may well still be in effect in some areas and even if they’re not the economy will have taken such a hit that the death toll due to starvation, although receding, will still exceed 9 million.

I think everyone is responsible. We cannot expect less developed countries to deal with this like other countries (where poverty is a far more serious issue).

Some articles are coming out now addressing this issue.

https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2020/03/indias-homeless-shelters-struggle-meet-demand-200325190150342.html

https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2019/07/820-million-starving-people-number-growing/

https://www.creditdonkey.com/world-hunger-statistics.html

If people don’t have money they can’t grow/buy food. They starve to death or lose their homes/education.

If the lockdown goes on and on then literally millions more are likely to starve to death not to mention those that are simply pushed below the poverty line. Basically I’m worried that all developing countries will be pushed back nullifying the progress of the past few decades and leading to mass starvation and then the inevitable strain poverty puts on the natural environment.

Your not alone in asking this question sadly. It needs addressing more closely I feel.

That wasn’t the thrust of my point, but fair enough.

I was referring to the economic fallout due to lockdowns potentially killing millions more than the virus itself. The better off countries can take the economic hit much better than others. So my point was a worry about prolonging lockdowns to save peoples lives in developed countries being a possible cause of deaths in less developed countries simply due to the economic downturn not the virus itself.

I’ve seen precious little discussion on the combined issues of this in terms of the global effects - maybe because experts in both fields don’t exist.

Possible in developed countries. That is precisely my worry. Just because some countries can afford to hand out funds and suspend taxes doesn’t others can.

Think about the proportion of people in India that live hand to mouth losing what minute income they can scrape together every day. Europe, North America and several Eastern countries can afford to take larger blows with less long term problems than somewhere like Brasil, Indonesia, Philippines or Nigeria where the gap between rich and poor (per person) is a gaping chasm in comparison.

I’d have to say that willfully not looking too far ahead to avoid guilt isn’t something I’d like to aspire to. We’re human though so I cannot pretend we’re limitless and some avoidance is necessary for day-to-day ‘(in)sanity’.

Simply put, if saving 3 people today would with 100% certainty cause 10,000 to die next year my decision would be easy enough if I was making the choice. The reality is MUCH messier though, so I’d probably gamble on the more immediate good if the odds and consequences were deemed ‘reasonable’ by my personal judgement. For me the really ‘moral’ decision is never an ‘easy’ decision. I don’t honestly think many of us take on (by choice or force of circumstance) many - if any - seriously difficult decisions. Self preservation involves ‘mental’ as much as ‘physical’ health.

I want to know more and hear more about the economic implications by experts with a foot in both fields of concern. At least there are discussions going on between experts in both fields so maybe together they can help each other enough to offer balanced advice to governments.

Wouldn't the moral choice be to save as many as you can now and then also save as many as you can later?

This goes right back to the moral hypotheticals I’ve asked before. The issue is do you think it worthy saving one person today causing one million to die tomorrow, or saving one million today so that only one dies tomorrow.

Of course reality is FAR more complicated and unpredictable than that. Morally it is my position not to shirk away from uncomfortable questions and resolve problems based on one particular universal rule.

Where is the line between willful negligence and ‘crossing that bridge when we come to it’? I don’t know. I think it’s worth asking that question for obvious reasons though.