Important tweet from @jaketapper. One amendment: mainstream media will try to change the subject too. It's not a new criticism, the deferential spirit among the political press corps has been noted since Didion wrote about it in the 1990s.

Eight years ago, Spencer Cox died of #AIDS. He had access to #antiretroviral therapy, but in his own struggles with #depression and substance use, he stopped taking them. 1/

Spencer left college, dropped out like me in the 80s, and we both found ourselves in @actupny where we joined the Treatment and Data Committee, doing battle with drug companies, the @US_FDA, the @NIH on a quest to save ourselves and our friends from near-certain death. 2/

Now everyone knows what those dark days before the advent of antiretroviral therapy were like. Waves upon waves of dying friends. A government who couldn't care less for the sick and dying. 3/

All this has happened before, and all this will happen again. AIDS. #COVID19. The next pandemic. The fire next time. 4/

And it changes you. Seeing so much death so young. Seeing those in power turn away from the catastrophe, even joke about it (find, listen to the tape of Larry Speakes in Oval Office w Reagan laughing about AIDS). 5/

One thing I will never understand. In 2020, we let ~340,000 Americans die, sometimes in the thousands per day. And we watched. There were no protests, no daily banner headlines befitting a national tragedy on this scale. It's as if we watched 9/11 in a loop for 300+ days. 1/

It was the non-chalance of all of it, the sangfroid. Yes, of course, there were stories in the media, some great ones, but we were shoving bodies into makeshift morgues in America in 2020, and it all became background noise. 2/

And no one rose up. Punctuated outrage from some. But no one on the streets in any substantial numbers asking for, demanding answers, action. 3/

If it weren't for the #BlackLivesMatter protests you'd think most of America was already dead. 4/

You don't have to ask what would I have done if I was present at one of history's great tragedies where people made choices to let barbarism flourish. We've done it now. 5/

Here @playbookplus goes again: ‘HOW MUCH IS BIPARTISANSHIP WORTH?’ I don't know @politico, how many more months would you like the pandemic to drag on for? How many more dead? How many more people, businesses ruined economically? I'm sorry but this is garbage framing in a crisis.

Oh but this is what powerful people are talking about in DC! Might that point itself be examined with more seriousness than taking this BS at face value? Don't you understand, we just reflect back what people are saying? We are mirrors on the world, we offer no commentary.

If "very serious people" are talking about what "nice number" would be $1.3T, 1.2T and not what we need to get out of this mess, might it be worth saying, perhaps, this conversation w/o reference to epidemiologic or economic reality is just a failure of leadership, governance?

OK. I may get slaughtered here, but there is a kind of pundit who doesn't know what he doesn't know. I'm not talking about ordinary people on @Twitter who shoot the shit on a variety of topics, but people with millions of followers, readers. 1/

These are usually men, who will assume expertise because they've always been told they were the smartest in the room, were given a platform because of who they are, and feel no sense of humility when they decide to ramble off and take down others. 2/

Here I am talking about @NateSilver538 @mattyglesias and @DouthatNYT who have decided they are the arbiters of truth in science and public health. 3/

It started with the #ACIP recommendations on the next phase of #COVID19 vaccination (which as far as I know is still pending). All three of them are suggesting that #ACIP doesn't know what it's doing because there are discussions happening about how to manage trade-offs. 3/

All three believe age-based allocation is the only way to triage vaccine delivery and they've been scornful of the deliberation of #ACIP for talking about things like equity, essential workers, etc. 4/

I'll not leave Riddlersworld. But I'll redefine the notion of riddler. A riddler is a person who doesn't know about specific dates and even about dates in general such as the year things will happen. He only knows, in general, some of the events that will take place,... 1/*

a kind of general history, a plot. In this sense continuing in Riddlersworld goes through an approach of minimums, taking riddlers as what gives an outline of some of the events that could happen at an always unknown date. 2/*

Sure, riddlers intend to convey the idea that they do know the dates, or at least the year, but they don’t know them. 3/*

Take 2020 as an example. At this point of the year you can make so many ad hoc statements as you like, but guys, 2020 clearly meant year 2020. 2020 was the year of the visible "outcomes". 4/*

On November 4, 2019 Mr Pool suggested that outcome of action Plan B is what you have been waiting = price increase. It should have happened in November and December 2020, as Plan B ended on November 7, so the outcome should be those months. 5/*

So, here's my contrarian take on Why Trunk-Based Development Is Great But Probably Won't Work For You. Buckle up, it's a long one.

From time to time I talk about, or boost someone else's discussion of, "classical" continuous integration/trunk-based development/push-to-master/whatever. I do this because I've personally worked like this and I genuinely think it's a marvelous way to write software.

I've also, at this point in my career, failed—a bunch of times!—to bring this technique into practical use on the teams and organizations I've worked with. As a result, while I still do it myself, I don't focus as much on encouraging it in others.

The technoculture that's presently in vogue is what I think of as async/individual—optimize for the individual, performance-manage the individual, decouple the individual from others so they can be their best, most productive, most heroic selves.

This is in contrast to what I think of as sync/team—a culture that leans into interdependence and collaboration. If you've never worked on a team that collaborates very closely every day for months or years on end (and likes it) you've likely not experienced a team like this.

It's a slow, snowy afternoon. How about a 🧵 on "rationalists" & "rationalism"? I want to talk about what real rationalism might look like & what people devoted to rationalism might actually behave like--and how that differs from what you often see from self-styled rationalists.

Caveat up front: this is not about Slate Star Codex, which I haven't read regularly enough to have an opinion on, or about the recent controversy between SSC & the NYT. I'm more interested in the *idea* of rationalism (vs. the practice).

The core premise of rationalism, as I understand it, is simply that humans' cognitive machinery was not designed by evolution to find truth, but rather to advance the interests & welfare of the collective -- a Venn overlap, but not the same thing. Therefore ...

... reasoning well, both individually & as groups, requires special effort. It requires consciously trying to set aside the parochialism, biases, & other distortions that typically characterize our thinking -- resisting, to some extent, the dynamics of group membership/welfare.

That's all fine. I agree entirely that we should make special effort to reason well & to guard against the typical failures of reasoning to which we humans are prone. I believe it's the best (maybe only) way forward as a species. So far so good.

@jeffreyatucker In the end, it is all a natural consequence of a very human foible, namely that we all do everything we can to blame anybody or anything else for our problems, if we can get away with it. It's the reason why rulers start wars to squelch domestic dissent - macro and micro the same

The very notion of the germ theory of disease revolves around this and while it is good for selling medical interventions, treatments and pharmaceuticals, it is no good for either personal health, or public health in any way. We need to start looking at health on a holistic level

More of a systems approach to health would get us to see that the whole instinct to stamp out viruses, like the very counter-factual notion of "zero Covid," and other nonsense, are driven by this need to blame somebody or something else for our problems, so we can have our cake

and eat it too, i.e. we can pass the blame to others and go and kill them, be they bugs or other people (lockdowns???). The results are disastrous for health on both a personal and a public level, and we continue on a path of assured self-destruction. But times are changing, now.

Lifestyle Medicine @aclifemed provides the new paradigm, more of a systems approach to health, in which personal responsibility for our habits comes first, starting with nutrition. Immune systems become depressed by fatigue, stress, inner conflict, malnutrition and so on. Change