Science & nature

Superb read from @billbowtell, one of the very few in this pandemic who understood and kept bringing us back to the basic fact. Nature makes viruses, but people and politics make pandemics. (My own two cents - the cause of this pandemic?…

@EricIdle 'virtual particles' mentioned here. Back to the chat about Being and nothingness. 'Real' particles are just excitations of quantum fields. The fields are eternal. Virtual (more transient) particles assist 'real' particles to…

#auspol #covid19 It's not actually that difficult to guess the political views of nearly every pandemic expert. That's not them abandoning science and facts, that's the basic reality that every fact is only true within a wider framework of…

#auspol about time we started talking about risk and undue haste with vaccination. As Science points out, a sound strategy for a country with low or zero Covid (like Oz) is to extend the vaccine rollout to allow different vaccines to be…

@CrabbBrendan @billbowtell good piece from Science, suggesting vaccination haste may not be the optimal public health strategy for countries with very low Covid rates? Use highest efficacy vaccines, take your time etc.…

#covid19 #auspol We've heard lots of wonderful medical and scientific expertise in this pandemic. Often, sadly, ignored. What we haven't heard as much are voices from the public policy community. The thinking that ties it all together. A…

#auspol it's not 'hesitancy', it's those 50+ being plain fucking angry at the expediency of the Oz vaccination strategy. Not them being simple and resisting the science. NZ did so much better by putting safety first, and not rushing. Oz…

#auspol the government's man, out there arguing the politics, as usual, dressed up as science. https://t.co/dXkw9IEwP2

#auspol #covid19 first rich countries provide breeding grounds for aggressive variants. Then they spread them through vaccinated travel, and provide fertile ground for further variant evolution by not controlling transmission.…

#covid19 #auspol the narrative about vaccination to prevent outbreaks. Is it dangerous? US, UK, Israel, the fast vaccinators. 5-6 months in, still only 40-60% of populations vaccinated. Vaccination isn't a speed tool to prevent and control…

#auspol #covid19 Oz has reached a point where journalists understanding the politics and not the science, and experts understanding the science and not the politics, has stalled our thinking. 'Hesitancy' is the public sensing this.

@profmiketoole @CrabbBrendan @DrZoeHyde one of the biggies in this interview I think is Drosten's belief that herd immunity is never possible with humans and their mobile societies. That it's a concept inappropriately transferred from…

Climate change. The volume of combustion gases humanity has released into the atmosphere in the past two-and-a-half centuries; I think it hasn't really registered with many the scale of what's occurred. Take the 2019 mega-fires in…

@normanswan @teegstar is there any research on how long a person can delay a second dose? For example, if somebody has had AZ now, but wanted to wait until there's mRNA vaccine supply later in the year, for dose 2? So several months,…

#auspol I've had first dose AZ, just as context. This isn't a pro-vax/anti-vax question for me, or even pro-AZ/anti-AZ. Twitter turns everything into debating binaries. It's about public health strategy. 1/7 https://t.co/vj7QfwoECO This…

#auspol #covid19australia I wonder if this will create a situation where an assessment will need to be made about just how long a person with 1st dose AZ can actually leave their 2nd dose, if they wait for an mRNA shot?…

#auspol #COVID19 the longer a pandemic goes on, the less it becomes about science. In fact it's never really about science. A pandemic is a social phenomenon, driven by patterns of interaction between people. 1/ Science can help understand…

#covid19 #auspol extraordinary paper in Nature highlighting that we should be listening to a much wider range of expertise in a pandemic. A study of patterns of movement in Colombian cities during the pandemic, triangulated against…

#auspol #covid19 a pandemic is a socio-political event rather than a biological event. For a given pathogen, the spread of infection is entirely determined by the social and political arrangements it encounters. /1 For this reason, all of…

Note how this hawk's head is absolutely still, its attention unwavering even while its body undertakes the most extreme movements. A short thread about how bodies work, potentially life-changing. /1 https://t.co/qofYhonw0g We tend to…

#covid19 The elephant in the vaccine-soaked room. Rampantly mobile cultures still trading on old imperial DNA needed slowing down. They're not liking it. https://t.co/kxF2eK06aS

#auspol #covid19 if you feel that conservative politicians will continue to 'follow medical advice', remember they've happily ignored climate science for several decades. Their only use of expert advice is to keep hospital numbers…

#covid19 it's not news or surprising that putting animals in crowded conditions breeds infectious disease. Antibiotic use in modern feedlot farming is astronomical, to both fatten, and treat infection. But are we seeing the link to our…

#covid19aus unfortunately Greg blocked me some time ago on this very topic. But a leading public health professional challenging the very measured reasoning of ATAGI? The risk assessment ATAGI did is very sound. https://t.co/bFxxLEhDNA

#auspol #COVID19nsw after stalling the country on airborne spread for 18 months, Peter Collignon now wades into another area in which he has no expertise. Several prominent experts stopped doing science and started doing politics, some…

#auspol #covid19 for all modelling and government reports, people get lost in the details, and ignore the framing. This report just operationalises National Cabinet’s 4-stage strategy for pandemic exit. It’s not advice on how to best exit…

#auspol #covid19 much of this pandemic is playing out as Camus would have predicted. Only a novel comes close to capturing the full complexity of social life. Some excerpts in Tweets, today about illness and life in an ‘Economy’. /1…

#covid19 #auspol The ignorance of how political strategy works, the pandemic is about politics, not science. How did so many not see that the same libertarians who tried to 'live with the virus' by infecting millions, would use the…

#auspol #covid19aus one of the curious things in this pandemic is just how immune to some basic empirical evidence so many seem to be. For example it doesn’t take a lot of time to watch international news and see just how many countries go…

#auspol #nswpol #covid19aus NSW 2021 is probably best compared with England 2020-21, when it comes to Covid strategy. Bugger the models, they're nearly all hopeless, let's go back to some basic empiricism. Real-world outcomes there for our…

Wonderful article shared by @NobodyImpawtant. Twitter users will see themselves here, defending the last relatively tiny island of public conversation we have left. But I think this goes further and deeper. /1 https://t.co/btC6O3ou45 I…

If you were asked ‘what is society made of?’, what would you answer? Many might say ‘people’. But you can have people, without having a society. A thread about ideas, and one particular idea that is destroying our socieities. /1 A society…

#auspol bit of a sleeper in this week’s news, great article about the fracturing of communities, ostensibly by social media. Given the fractious nature of Twitter too, there’s something important here, being missed I suspect. /1…

Speaking to an American friend, I wasn’t aware that community sport is pretty much non-existent in any widespread way, in the US. Most sport there is organised through schools. And there’s something really important here that it made me…

#auspol ZeroCovid bad. Net-zero emissions bad. I’m seeing a connection. A War on Zero. Maybe it’s what a lot of them got on science tests, and the memory stings. https://t.co/VAiPsu4ftn

Debates about the transition to endemicity show how science is not a homogeneous enterprise. This paper from an immunological perspective is quite upbeat. Evolutionary virologists seem less so. Etc. What to do when the science is…

Another day, another looking on in helplessness at modern societies, who approach existential threats with the maturity of adolescents. No adult sense of responsibility or sacrifice. The Korean War actually helps explain why, I think.…

Not boosters, AZ + mRNA as second dose (Pfizer and Moderna). Some interesting reading, courtesy of @NobodyImpawtant . @RichardfromSyd1 @Bertrandization @OrinCordus https://t.co/nNwX7mohXT

COP26 and Covid show again that facts and science don't unite societies. They only do that within a framework of wider beliefs, a worldview. The libertarians are winning because they sell a worldview. Worldviews are impervious to facts,…

Why do we stick with our ideas about democracy as being rule by the public, when we keep voting for people who kill the public? Elected leaders are the tiniest tip of the democratic iceberg. A thread about our current madness. #auspol…

This from Yves Smith is worth pondering. Be interested to hear if the science checks out (seems OK, to me, but not my field.) #auspol #covid19aus @Bertrandization @djf0001 https://t.co/sph4v1LuBJ

All medicine is political. All science is political. Not 'influenced by' politics. Intrinsically political. 'Facts' never speak for themselves, and all facts are value-laden. #auspol #covid19aus @laurelleoz https://t.co/vgWNC7na9D

Covid reminds me of asbestos. Hardly anybody showed ill effects from asbestos, when it was introduced as a wonder material. (My father was one, he died years later of the effects.) Airborne = maximum precaution. /1 #auspol #COVID19Aus…

Will there be a reckoning one day for those in prominent medical science positions who call to 'live with' a novel pathogen while it's still uncontrolled? You can understand the average punter doing that, but so many who are paid shedloads…

I like news from the front-line of Covid, if I can put it that way. How our National Plan is playing out in everyday life. A short thread about a meeting. /1 #auspol #covid19aus I was in a meeting with the senior managers of a large…

If we deal with Covid as a medical science problem, we’re always going to ‘need more data’. More data = more people infected. If we deal with Covid as a wider public policy issue, we prioritise all the basic mitigations to prevent people…

That the last sentence is even included is a sign the politics of Covid is still winning over the science. Most Covid cases don't end up in hospital, for all variants. #auspol #covid19aus https://t.co/qelCW3IMT9

Regulatory theatre. Yet another regulatory decision that matches in almost every detail approvals given overseas by other major regulators, weeks or even months ago. Science is international, is this just delaying pandemic action? #auspol…

One of my favourite Beatles stories also shows I think the fantasy at the heart of modern libertarian politics. And Covid. McCartney was the prodigiously talented Beatle - the best bassist, guitarist, drummer and singer in the band. Also…

Not great, but glad I chose Moderna 3rd dose. 2 x AZ + Moderna = 3 x Pfizer. 2 x Pfizer + Moderna best of all. No data on 3 x Moderna. Latest UKHSA report. #covid19aus ⁦@RichardfromSyd1⁩ ⁦@Bertrandization⁩ ⁦@djf0001⁩ ⁦@polioandme⁩…

Infection is disease. That thought has been continuing to emerge in my mind as I watch the attempts by the smart few to stop mass infections. We need to understand that infection is bad, because the way the mass infection crowd get away…

There’s an (often implied) assumption that if Covid gets bad enough, the deniers will eventually come to their senses. I think that’s as dangerous as assuming Covid will become more mild. We have the evidence that this is unlikely -…

A short thread on the magnitude of public maladministration in Australia in the past 50 years, driven by libertarian populists in more recent times and more general neoliberal ideas prior to that. And how Covid throws this disaster into…

Bought an air purifier for my wife to use in her classroom. School won’t buy them. I reckon if you asked parents to chip in $10-$20 each to have one in each classroom many would be delighted. None of this is rocket science.

Science is framed by values. For example, here. Whether we prioritise widespread infection of people to try to end a pandemic. Or whether we prioritise fixing some basics, like clean air in buildings and hyper-obsessive travel.…

Brilliant thread on the historical origins of the term 'endemic'. The science hasn't clarified that for me, but the history has. https://t.co/Tfoa01JJ03

We don’t understand time. We’re born old, and get younger every day. A baby carries the biological and evolutionary history of its species, going back millions of years. Old. As it grows, it learns the customs, language, knowledge and…

More social science and the humanities, please, to beat this pandemic. Who remembers the 1920 variant of the Spanish Flu? Nobody. A pattern repeated throughout the 20th century. https://t.co/9mZfocEylx

People in Oz mostly follow government health orders. They may have no interest in the science, but people will assume it's safe to not wear a mask, for example, if the government says you don't have to. So much for 'wanting government out…

I’m already rehearsing my response at work when the NSW Government removes all masking mandates. “I take my scientific advice from scientists, thanks, not politicians.” https://t.co/CxGMlEbiJm

Waning in VE against hospitalisation and ED admission for Omicron, for 3-dosed mRNA, after 4 months, in the US. 2 months: ED 87%, hospitalisation 91% 4 months: ED 66%, hospitalisation 78% https://t.co/aCrrWemqWs

I'm preparing for civil disobedience by circulating manuals for the revolution. https://t.co/vFWPkDfyS9

10 reasons I give people for why I still wear a mask (in case of interest). It's good to have comebacks ready. 1) I'm focused on the vulnerable in our community, not myself. 2) I get my science from scientists, not politicians. /1 #auspol…

The inversion of majority and minority in modern politics, as a focus for how we understand both politics and society. A thread. /1 https://t.co/bx410Fao0T The worshipping of the majority in modern democracies paradoxically stems from the…

Something that changed my life, an understanding. Ideas have an agency independent of us. They’re eternal, some have existed throughout all of human history. Plato said a similar thing. It has huge implications, not least for Twitter.…

The past 2 years have been 98% politics, and 2% health science. The ‘public’, in ‘public health’. What does it mean? I reckon many would follow our idiot leaders and say it means a majority of the population. Nope. This is the real…

Yes this is the UK copying Australia, to the letter. Same language, ‘illegal’ arrivals, evil people smugglers. And all the same ultimately ineffective criticism, about it being immoral etc. But this is nothing much to do with refugees at…

So much of this pandemic has been an old battle, between public health and medicine. Medicine has the power, and thus the loudest voice. I doubt the distinction between these 2 fields is even widely understood. Much of the tension between…

Remembering HIV in the late 20th century, how we made at least some attempt to control the spread of an immune system-smashing pathogen. Now we’re happy to let the entire globe get infected with SARS2. It’s hard to over-egg the…

No matter who you vote for, the beautiful thing about Australia is how many of us treat an election day as a national event, like a grand final. We need to not lose sight of the basic community nature of what makes us who we are. Most of…

In pandemics microbes invade the ecological niches or ‘homes’ of other living things. Destruction of habitat. Our hyper-mobility is petrol on a pandemic fire. We are never ‘home’, never grounded. Our imperial DNA still lays waste to the…

Why don’t governments protect us from Covid? Because market economies replaced societies, and they don’t have a public. Only individual consumers. No geographical or ethnic or any other identifier for people, except as customers of a…

Too much wasted time arguing science in this pandemic. We had public health systems and procedures tested over 2 centuries that knew exactly how to beat Covid. The reason they didn’t isn’t scientific, it’s political. It’s the same politics…

Events like Vivid sit uneasily with me. It’s pretty and all, but also it represents a new more corporate style of community life. Where your life and work has very little community focus, so we have to organise ‘events’ to get the…

The marvel of heat pumps also can teach us something about social media, I think. Because social media is an emotion pump, with hate the most prominent. Social media is a hate pump. Short thread. /1 https://t.co/zAzjeDwxTY The principle of…

Are we at the ‘send them back down the mines’ point yet, in our evolution of care for children? I can’t believe I live in a society that wilfully infects children with dangerous diseases, and then reinfects them, repeatedly. Egged on by…

It’s not rocket science to understand that ‘small business’ is small, because it’s unsuccessful. Nobody says a band is great because it can’t sell any albums. #qanda

I saw other studies that said similar things about reductions in heart disease risk. Supports the theories of scientists like Paul Ewald, that many if not most of our chronic diseases may have an infectious origin. https://t.co/qhfAJT4WLg

The pandemic is a war about the public. A ‘public’ is not just everybody in a society. It’s not a counting thing. The ‘public’ is about interdependency, about how all of the different characteristics of people and groups are required for a…

Longish quote about Marek's Diseases in chickens in next few Tweets, and then I wanted to ask those who understand vaccines if the Covid vaccines are 'leaky' in this same way, with the same possible consequences? (Thanks to @iko_iko11 and…

I’ve Tweeted about how the apparent disregard for the health of populations shown now by governments is entirely consistent with working people being treated as we treat livestock. This isn’t an animal rights thing (though it is that too),…

Climate change deniers concocted a deliberate Steve Bannon-type strategy to ‘flood the zone with shit’. Overwhelm and disorient the public discussion with junk science. This is exactly what Covid minimisers are doing now. Arguing ‘the…

'Business community' is not quite right. 'Business cabal' might be closer. Utterly devoid of any sense of community responsibility or of the collective nature of all wealth. Rent-seekers. https://t.co/0mRcLLRkcY

We need to talk about freedom I think. It's the lead weight in the Covid saddlebags. A🧵on why Daniel Defoe may be the weapon we need to fight those who won't fight Covid. /1 #auspol #covid19aus https://t.co/DqGnv4Ep6y Watching the UK…

These protesters demand freedom from public health action, which they see as a type of tyranny. But humans are social animals, nobody really wants freedom. All humans form hierarchies, even scientists, shaped by what the group in question…

Southend is deserted, going broke. Combination of Covid and Brexit. Part of the global libertarian movement of unwinding centuries of human progress, to pretend all of civilisation is the consuming individual. Human evolution ends as a…

We’re losing against Covid, because Covid is a symptom, not a cause. We’re fighting the wrong things. I think Twitter is an excellent empirical example of what I mean, it demonstrates the same behaviours and beliefs that are really in play…

How does an infinitesimally tiny group in our society, the top 1%, attract mass support for policies that clearly benefit nobody except this tiny group? And how does it keep doing it, generation after generation? Graphic from ‘The Gilded…

We all went through school watching the ‘geeks’ being bullied, and now scratch our heads wondering why nobody listens to the science. Nobody has ever listened to the science. The science got wedgies.

We all went to school. Groups never self-organise, those who say ‘this is what the people want’ are telling the people what to want. If you think science and facts will beat this, remember how much help they were at school if you were…

The Covid minimisers used the climate change denial script almost to the letter. And we still get bogged down seeing it as a health/science issue, as we also debate climate science. That was the strategy, to distract us from the true…

If we devolve some responsibility for risk to individuals, they need information. Bushfires kill hardly anybody. Covid kills hundreds per week. We’re shutting down information we provide, for Covid. It’s not devolution of risk, it’s…

Most Covid minimisers believe in Covid, it’s just that they want to privatise it. Like they have education, energy, childcare, water and other non-pandemic health care. The Covid debacle is just the latest privatisation debacle. The…

For over 70 years there's been a research program to eliminate the common cold. The Covid minimisers like to say we need to live with Covid, because that's what we do for other infectious diseases. Horseshit, we fight them. /1 #covid19aus…

Climate scientists are a long way further down the road than Covid scientists. They know what decades of being ignored feels like. ‘The science’ has no political power of its own. What to do? Change politics. The fastest way? Mass joining…

It’s common to see monarchy as a relic of a superseded age. But look at the complete train wreck of the popularity politics that has replaced it. Monarchy at least retains historical continuity in its core DNA. Populism reinvents the world…

“So if you've had four … you would have had the most recent one within the last few months, and that would protect you until at least Christmas…so it might be something you do in March or April, at the same time you get your flu jab."…

Royal spectacle was a unifying gaze. It was the mainstream media of its day, a shared social platform to give broader meaning to society. Watching these mourners and their phones we see what’s replaced it. A fracturing. Short thread. /1…

We can come here every day and wail into the abyss about the Covid debacle. The people who can change it aren’t listening. Gotta understand that to change it. It’s not so much the death of democracy I think as revealing it never existed.…

All societies have a constitution. Older societies we don’t understand did something that was pure genius. They included non-humans in their constitutions. Animals, plants, the landscape more generally. We think they’re being ‘spiritual’.…

Looking at those beached whales in Tasmania, and thinking, what sort of idiot species knowingly kills itself en masse? https://t.co/nkSAggUp6P

h/t to all of those who fought so hard to infect the kids. You must be feeling nothing like the bottom-feeding arseholes people with a brain and a conscience think you are. https://t.co/KZUScLBLW5 h/t @MixtUpMixy

This is an important argument to continue. Technology is meaningless without a context. The US, with its extreme libertarian beliefs, mostly invented social media. Think about how it taps into all that idealistic tosh about ‘the people’…

I’ll use ‘Tories’ to describe all of the political bastards of the wider Anglo world right now, who stalled climate action for more than 3 decades, probably condemning us to extinction, and now won’t let us end a pandemic. How Nicholas…

The plea by NC for ‘consistency’ with Covid rules is the same group peer pressure to wear the same sneakers we experienced in school. Why Morrison invented National Cabinet, to create that normalising pressure on State leaders in that…

Missed this in The Australian back in August. No need to build nuclear reactors, there’s a huge one up in the sky sending us energy for free. Science, hey. https://t.co/V5S52tqlw3

Watching the government tie itself in knots over Stage 3 tax cuts shows two critical things. 1) How issues are framed determines political outcomes, across elections. Conservatives have spent decades creating a frame that says tax is a…

Dramatic waning of effectiveness of vaccines, in a public health strategy that is vaccination only. The herd of elephants in the room for our Covid ‘strategy’. UKHSA data (see link at end). Symptomatic disease first. (Experts welcome to…

There’s something so important about this photo, a window into most Western countries and why they’re failing badly to do the most fundamental thing - end a pandemic. A thread that’s an update to my pinned thread about how societies are…

The Imperial Examination ‘cells’ (these at Jiangnan) used to select workers in the Chinese Imperial civil service. A practice more than 1500 years old. A thread on this window into the hidden secret sauce that runs our own societies, and…

I’m a big fan of what the Teal independents are doing. But wary we’re not understanding what’s going on here. As we’re seeing in the UK right now, when popularity-based politics inevitably fails, it’s usual attempt to keep going is to just…

“The reality is that this virus is simply behaving like every other known human virus in adapting to the host and becoming more transmissible and less virulent, so it can coexist and propagate itself better.” I’m sure I’ve read multiple…

The authoritarian city-state now so beloved of Covid ‘freedom’ minimisers. Playing all the authoritarian greatest hits - hybrid immunity, deaths only a problem if hospital capacity exceeded, natural evolution to mildness with mass…

The reason I get bored with all the talk about capitalism and socialism and authoritarianism, and Western democracy vs China, or even Left vs Right, is that none of these ideologies really reflect what actually happens in the world. Why…

On evolutionary or moral or any other terms, what is the ultimate point or purpose of all life if it isn't to protect the next generation? Eating out and travelling and cash-flow are our new Gods? https://t.co/boeZgybSfu

How many years did politics deny climate change? It’s surprising that we’ve been so amazed that the same politicians decided to ignore Covid. And that we didn’t notice them encouraging debates over ‘the science’, in the same way. To stall…

Truly extraordinary piece from @doctorow about how the post-war shift of wealth towards working people ended in the late-1970s. I’ve Tweeted about how wars and plagues are the only two things that ever disrupt social hierarchies in a…

Most human progress we attribute to democracy is really the work of engineers. It’s engineers who scale knowledge to the material wellbeing of people. That includes pandemics, where engineers have saved more lives than any medical science.…

Living with the virus is a lie. We never opened up to the virus. We removed protection measures at scale (government), and outsourced them to private businesses and individuals. We privatised the pandemic. Just as we did education, health,…

Politicians who say they 'follow the science' frame the terms of reference well before any work is done. That way they only hear what they've already decided they want to hear. National Cabinet has been doing this for the entire pandemic.…

We need to learn from decades of strategic stalling on climate change, by arguing ‘the science’. I don’t even argue the science of Covid, it’s so patently obvious that infecting everybody repeatedly with a pathogenic virus is idiotic.…

You can see the emotion in Oppenheimer, the science he led and what it created. About 200,000 have died through the use of nukes. Somewhere between 5 and 20 million have died of Covid. The science that promoted that shows no sign of…

The evolution of SARS-Cov2, and of Covid minimiser spin. Facing off against each other, with minimiser spin so far proving the more virulent. The world cup of social collapse. https://t.co/S5ItAl6GCE

Fact-checking with somebody who actually knows something about viral evolution. @TRyanGregory think you saw this clip, have we painted Covid into a mutation corner? https://t.co/JAeL6uAqx4

To clarify my interest in Christian Drosten’s musings about hybrid immunity, that’s not a theory I agree with. What interests me is his simultaneous belief that we shouldn’t be getting infected. The two don’t go together, but that (to me)…

There are more stringent controls against head lice in schools than there are against Covid. But don’t expect ‘the people’ to rise up. Social conformity runs society. Only regulation can give them permission to rise above it. Not science.…

The politicians who dumped Covid regulations to give you ‘freedom’, at the same time fight election campaigns on the ‘rule of law’, and wars on a ‘rules-based order’. The answer to Covid is regulation, not medicine or science. Covid exists…

We’re at the troughs full of antibiotics for feedlot animals phase of the pandemic. https://t.co/ge4T8QA9i8

We know reasoned debate about pandemic science is getting no cut-through at all. It's time for prominent Australians to get angry, and to express that anger daily. That might actually shift narratives and agendas.

Covid minimisers trotted out false balance early in the pandemic ('balancing' public health action against the economy). It's what they'd already been doing with climate change for decades. It's the same people. We've spent 3 years trapped…

The major ‘authoritarian’ regimes, against which we define our own democracies. Both created by democratic revolutions modelled on Western political ideas, in reaction to imperial rule. In the West those same ideas are crumbling, leading…

The ‘like any other virus’ line from National Cabinet requires the endorsement of the CMO. I’d like him to explain how Covid is just like ordinary seasonal viruses. And also to share the science on using mass infection to control a…

If you’re an expert who understands the disaster of Covid, arguing the facts is a dead-end. Societies run using social rules, not facts. You have to interrupt the social conformity process. Your current fact-based resistance only…

(This explains the Covid debacle.) We’ve lived a delusion of prosperity. Only a very tiny number are. The rest use personal debt to create faux-prosperity. Now that interest rates have ended that, the feudal nature of society has been…

While misinformation is obviously an important issue, it’s also a symptom of our broken societies that people need information at all. Public health used to be like sewage and electricity supply, taken care of. Mostly, nobody needed to…

Living in a scientific and technological age hasn’t changed that every part of our lives is still run using the same basic social dynamics. That includes science. Society doesn’t run on information, it runs on status and conformity. We are…

That mountain of personal debt is what’s created the illusion we live in democratic countries. That and welfare (which conservatives strip away) disguise what’s really a feudal society going back centuries, relatively unchanged. Including…

What is described as ‘factually incorrect’ here is me saying there’s no indication that infection with SARS-Cov-2 creates lasting immunity, to SARS-Cov-2. I’m not a medical scientist, but everything being said about immunity here to me…

The same people who think public health measures are ‘lockdowns’ happily deny people the right to work from home, to have clean air in their workplaces, and to move to more flexible work arrangements. They’re happy to lock you into these…

The basic social dynamics of the schoolyard now discovered in science. (Planck discovered it a century ago.) Our politics is the same. All of society is social groups jostling for status. It’s all school, it doesn’t end. Only plagues and…

Science-led denialism was already well underway when Covid arrived. This is people within the scientific establishment. Some of the most vicious Covid denialism is from within established fields too. Universities and disciplines have some…

Workers compensation is a ‘no-fault’ system. The principle behind it is to compensate workers injured at work, without liability having to be attributed to either employer or employee, except in cases of gross negligence. Where this gets…

We’re in Covidgate right now. Climategate was the model. Flood the public spaces with bothsideism BS, to distract. Get people arguing the science every day, not to find a truth, but to delay any action and make the public mistrust…

The structure of a platform like Twitter makes a lie of just about everything said about it, by all sides. Tweets are ruthlessly hierarchical. Those with many followers get much more attention and visibility than others. This probably…

Just out of interest, does the world have over 936,000 public health scientists and infectious disease epidemiologists? https://t.co/ljLXFVXlrA

Why is nothing being done to stop a pandemic? Because the mechanism for doing that, public health, was only forced upon societies by previous destructive epidemics. It wasn’t a creation of rational thought, it was panic. The ‘great stench’…

Kohler notes that voters are not trending conservative now as they age. It could also mean that progressive parties now conserve, and conservatives have been hijacked by economic pirates, who do revolutionary damage to societies.…

Want to use this graph again to show the birth and possible death of the unique invention of the past 150 years of human history. The public. The word is used a lot - public health, public service, public education etc. But it’s rarely…

Anthony Albanese seems to model himself on Bob Hawke, but to me he seems more like Tony Blair. For both though, longevity was key to their thinking and success. But at what price? Here’s Blair’s 2021 piece outlining his ongoing political…

The ‘wall of immunity’ seems to divide even sane expert communities. Some say it’s a fantasy, others (including our most senior health advisers) say they’re confident it’s happening and is our way out of the pandemic. Two things about…

This is what N=1 populism has done. Public administration has never been you and me having hypotheses, then ‘following the science’. It’s been you and me having no idea how any of this works, going about our own busy lives, and letting…

2 parallel movements in our societies. One, the invention of an ‘economy’ as a political weapon to strip away democratic reform of the past 150-200 years. That’s often a depressing story. But the other parallel movement isn’t. Hans (RIP)…

Whenever you get exhausted with the political stupidity of doing nothing about Covid, study traffic engineering (I say). Roads are the front line of modern politics, in multiple ways. They’re the real-time proof that the politics we live…

To revisit the Doherty modelling National Cabinet commissioned before letting Covid rip in Australia, in late 2021. That time is still critically relevant to today, to decide accountability for the deliberate launch of our worst ever…

If the economy was what people say it is, we would have figured out how to run it by now. But it always - always - just creates booms and busts. Because it isn’t what people say it is. It’s spin for ‘unregulated social life’. That’s all it…

Hive mind question. I can get a Moderna bivalent 5th dose this week. But the pharmacist rang to say the Pfizer update bivalent (B.4/B.5?) will be arriving second week of March. Risk - I could catch in the 3 weeks (wife and kids in…

When the 737-Max crashes happened, we didn’t keep them flying until we figured out the truth. We used risk management. Public administration is not science. It uses science, to act, through a risk assessment. Not knowing for sure is a…

Something that Covid shows so well is that modern societies who thought they had a base of certainty from which to act, science, have nothing of the sort. Like everything else in life, all truth is contextual. Bertrand Russell’s parable is…

Our vaccination strategy with vaccines that don’t stop anything much except severe disease must at least possibly be turning us all into perpetual reservoirs for viral evolution. Keeping the hosts healthy enough to allow the virus to…

Time is on the ‘let’s just define our problems away’ bandwagon. If an ‘agnostic evaluation’ of the science suggests living with a pandemic, it supports what I’ve said, that it isn’t a scientific problem to solve. Scientists can’t fix…

I have less trouble seeing sentience in computer code and animals than I do finding it in modern economic politics. https://t.co/5DHkwHmWs0

Reading the most recent seroprevalence data for Australia shows huge antibody levels in the population, near 100% for spike protein antibodies. When does herd immunity start?

Jazz is a bit of an enigma in some ways, it escapes easy definition. Which suggests there’s maybe something being missed. And maybe that something extends to a lot of the problems we have around identity and politics. Bit of a 🧵. /1…

Quotes that trace a shift. “the unconditional surrender of microbes”. Dwight D. Eisenhower “Children born in the next decade would no longer face the ancient scourge of pestilence”. JFK “The future of infectious diseases will be very…

Maybe the greatest enabler of social breakdown we’re now living is the IT industry. Not much is said about it. As social systems have been degraded through decades of individually-focused politics, rushing to fill the void left by that…

I don’t spend much time now appealing to elected leaders to do anything at all. They won’t, the jobs they take on are little more than following a few economic indicators on a spreadsheet. Go against ‘the economy’ and they’re toast. So…

Americans, like the rest of the world and despite all the libertarian rhetoric, follow their leaders. Politicians said the pandemic was over. Most scientists didn’t. The public followed their leaders. https://t.co/xB06AQ2wyl

⁦@EdConwaySky⁩ makes the excellent point that climate action isn’t just adding renewables to our lives. It’s an entirely new Industrial Revolution. That’s the best way to sell it to the existing status quo, as a new opportunity to make big…

Life in a sloganocracy. Hit me again this week, reading debates about infection-driven immunity, or ‘exposure’ immunity, hybrid immunity etc. In a sloganocracy, what guides community life is no longer government and its associated…

The atomic unity of society is not the individual. It’s the household. Economy politics replaces society with a market, made up of independent, mobile workers, decoupled from place. But that’s not how most people live. The economy wants…

The ‘lockdowns broke our economies’ folk never mention that it was mostly because the supply of cheap slave labour from other countries dried up. It took a pandemic to make fully visible the true nature of ‘the economy’. Feudalism,…

More politics with words. ‘Hybrid immunity’. Most meanings of the word immunity mean to be resistant to infection. But the politics of Covid has again subtly revolved around words, and transformed it into ‘having less severe disease’. I’m…

Both Covid and climate change are not political problems to solve. They’re engineering problems. But it’s also much bigger than that sounds, and the last Industrial Revolution explains why, and shows the irrelevance of anybody who utters…

Adrian Esterman was on PM yesterday, giving a Covid state of play. Spoke of a shift in his own thinking towards less concern about Long Covid now, and about infection of younger Australians. It reminded me again about Paul Ewald’s mission.…

The great hidden infection hypothesis. I love AIHW’s work, the charts are all from them. The common theory says that mortality shifted from predominantly infectious disease, towards chronic disease, in the 20th century. Due to advances in…

When ‘live with the virus’ became the guiding idiocy of this pandemic, conceptually we should probably have shifted from immunity as the guiding principle, towards symbiotic classification. Ecological relationships. How you live with…

If you follow urban design, ‘place making’ is a hot thing. The deliberate design and making of ‘place’. This is Roppongi Hills, an urban development in Tokyo. Why this matters, a lot, for Covid too. As children of empire, we have a very…

Local major retailer selling firewood for $20/kg. That's $20,000 per tonne. We need people to do maths and science again.

Australia has no shortage of housing. No ‘supply’ problem. Just as it has no shortage of gas. It has a market problem. Essential social goods like energy and housing were turned into an economic market. Leading to hoarding of the resource,…

The true nature of the economy is only revealed when it tanks. The illusion that society has survived its substitution by an economy is only ever maintained when there’s cheap debt for ordinary people. The old public has to borrow its…

The bling. It tells a story we don’t want to understand, which response to the coronation today highlights for me. I don’t think we recognise that the knee-jerk rejection of constitutional monarchy is another disguised infection by the…

Time series charts of results show the true nature of elections. This one from the UK, for local government. Red and blue, Labour and Tory. Mirror images of each other, one is in fashion, the other out, and that position swapped regularly…

"So focusing reform on the places where the real problem is occurring as opposed to making fanciful proposals that ask us to do what none of us is really able to do." Political science is slowly getting there. https://t.co/g3yt4p3nkS via…

The key to understanding Australian democracy, and how it’s fundamentally different to the European and US models some try to impose here, is not where you might expect to look. It joins dots with another Australian passion. Sport. /1…

Have tweeted before about the possible links between the 20th century epidemic of heart disease and infection. Another 20th century epidemic was obesity. Is there a possible link to infection for this chronic condition? You betcha. /1…

Ha! Was one of the mistakes with climate science to use temperature rather than heat as the measure? The temperature rises people equate with a minor shift on any day, a degree or two. The amount of HEAT it takes to shift global…

Had some fun talking about the positives of constitutional monarchies when Charles was crowned. But never said who my preferred Head of State would be. My vote is - Australia. The land under our feet. It might seem absurd to suggest a…

Revisiting the heart of the ‘economy’ for Covid Tweets, because the whole pandemic is really an economic phenomenon, not health. We can see the uptick in government spending, during the pandemic. What it MEANS is much more interesting. /1…

Ventilation science seems to suggest that the closer you can get to being outside, the better. And that includes light and humidity, as well as air. I wonder if the old school opening windows, with upper opening clerestory windows and/or…

The greatest leaps in science are always conceptual. I see so much science today that is obsessed with methodology. Research methods. As if the data will reveal its meaning with enough layers of rigorous methodology. I think that’s a trap.…

Bruno Latour once told me that materials science and engineering was the cutting edge of modern societies. These examples back him up. A material that blocks sound, but not air or light. https://t.co/1ofrA1bSsq

Boils aren’t a popular topic for discussion, but they’re horrible for many people. A long conversation with an afflicted friend made me think much wider things, about Covid and infection more generally. About microbes as an ecology. We…

Victoria’s Covid protests. There’s a critical lesson here we’re not heeding, political sleight of hand. The noise and drama of these protests is almost single-handedly responsible for the narrative that ‘people would not tolerate more…

In science, theories are tested in empirical ways. We've now all seen the empirical test of modern libertarian politics, with a pandemic. An unmitigated, ongoing disaster. But nothing will change. As Planck said, only funerals shift…

A story about gravity. A little bit of pure science, but with profound implications for everyday life I think. And joy, which true knowledge brings. Nothing restricts a person’s life more, in my view, than a misunderstanding of gravity.…

We must challenge the idea that action for the public good needs to be ‘balanced’ against the economy. History will tell you that’s a total misunderstanding. Too many years of dreary sociological and political theory has miscast that…

The huge push for public health in the 19th century came before the germ theory of disease. It wasn’t about microbes, it was about sanitation. About crowded and filthy urban environments. This critical report from 1842 was 50 years before…

If you’re old enough, think back to life before social media. If somebody didn’t know something, what did they do? Often it never came up, they didn’t know what they didn’t know. If it did they could use a library, or Google search etc.…

Shameless plug here for @EdConwaySky’s book. Out this week. Part of a big shift we need in our thinking about the world’s problems, away from schoolyard debate and towards material realities. A new industrial revolution, to fix our biggest…

History shows that people mostly don’t change their minds. Belief systems and the social groupings that rally around them will continue to the point of catastrophe. Only the deaths of the holders of the beliefs brings change. Only one…

It's not hard to trace the team each person sees themselves as part of, on Twitter. Their followers, likes and replies to their threads will identify them. And sometimes they even set up groups, which makes it even easier. /1 Once you do…

One of the weirdest and deepest misunderstandings in all human thought is the distinction between big and small. Scale. The prejudice that says big things are complex, small things simple. Covid thinking is like this. The bacterium MO-1 is…

I have no interest in most debates in public life. Most are adolescent identity politics, conservatives and progressives all the same. They reflect cultures who no longer build things, with the calm adult effort and persistence that…

There’s only one way knowledge and expertise has ever had political power. By the invention of a public or civil service. Ask Archimedes. The reason our greatest scientists on Covid and climate are ignored by politicians is that…

I believe we're not supposed to draw the comparison. But the science increasingly does. You won't find chronic infection if you're not looking for it. Many infectious disease physicians seem to be not much interested. From:…

Silicon Valley is now misnamed, as very little silicon-based hardware is made there. It’s the crucible of modern libertarian politics, in ways that aren’t discussed. A marriage of European science and US ‘fake it ‘til you make it’…

Reality is always smarter and stranger than fiction. The tragic loss of the Titan echoes with another populist project from the 1980s. Another ultra-rich-funded mission to the Titanic. /1 https://t.co/xijwuj9phl Jack Grimm was a Texan…

We will quite likely get to this point, where the number of deaths falls away to negligible levels. That’s how all chronic infection-based disease starts, when we relax, thinking the threat is gone. Meantime the pathogens get to work…

Using technology like Google and Apple Maps, you can now see any place on Earth from the comfort of your lounge, at any scale from ground level up to the view from orbit. But at the same time, these same sights are collapsing under the…

Finished this on my trip. I think everybody should read it to help understand the fundamentally material basis of our culture, being ignored by our obsessions with the daily team sports of politics. I plug it because it’s a theme I Tweet…

Just as we can’t vote our problems away, nor can we discuss or debate them away. Society has two orthogonal movements, one social (our overwhelming focus), the other is knowledge. The social dimension of society will never provide you with…

We’re a promiscuous culture. Not sexually. We’re promiscuous with place. This is a common sight in the ‘outback’. If we’re not flying overseas to promiscuously consume the places there, we’re doing the ‘big lap’ of our own country. What…

The evolutionary biology I’ve seen applied to Covid here in the past 3+ years seems firmly in the modern synthesis paradigm i.e. evolution = natural selection of random genetic mutations. Besides being wrong, I think it’s created dangerous…

If you want to have your ‘economic’ cake and eat it too, here’s how to understand this data. Yes emissions are crazily out of control. But that’s the wrong focus. They’re out of control because we’re still wallowing in the last industrial…

There’s a chasm between what people say, and what they actually do and think. Everybody lies. For example despite the trend for despising politicians, it’s abundantly clear people still look to them to lead. The most fanatical libertarians…

Travel is the most visible manifestation of a much deeper cultural problem. You can trace it even into science and Covid action, where more than a century after quantum mechanics upended the relationship between knower and known, it still…

Insurance is the last remnant of risk management employed by economies. As such, it’s one of the best insights into how issues are tracking, in reality. Social media is no guide, point of view is irrelevant. /1 https://t.co/UycMdeRfxS…

I have training and experience in advanced science, in the history, philosophy, public policy and administration of science, and teaching it as well. That causes a question to keep pestering me in this pandemic. Why is science not doing…

This story is perfect to highlight what travel cultures don’t understand. We don’t know how to occupy our own landscapes. We live on them, not in them. We travel through them. We have no idea how to live with the platypus, for example. /1…

We’re obsessed with ‘being there’. Travel is just one aspect of this wider cultural framework. Our relationship to place carries with it an assumption of what place means, and for us it means ‘being there’. But it’s not actually clear what…

I want to use Covid to reframe how we see social media. And human social life too, at the same time. I want to argue that despite all the talk about ‘division’ in the world, social media is the greatest engine of ‘furious agreement’.…

Alan Kohler notes here that climate change isn’t in the RBA mandate. We’ll fix climate change when we recognise it for what it is, a brand new industrial revolution, that will drive down carbon pollution and supercharge the economy.…

‘Fascism’ is one of those words sprayed around with abandon on social media. The 20th century’s two most famous fascists here. In reality fascism is just populism, in its endgame. Both hugely popular leaders, and came to power using…

The headline is accurate, it has nothing to do with science or climate change. It’s electoral differentiation. The survival of civilisation is at the whim of these ridiculous popularity contests. All that matters is beating the other team.…

How our relationship to place explains everything. Covid, climate, the lot. My grandparents’ house was demolished this week, to make way for townhouses. (The family sold the house years ago.) A century+ of memories on that land. This…

Both Covid and climate change are symptoms of a stalled industrial revolution. The last industrial revolution was a response to desperate social need, it was a social movement. We misunderstand it as ‘economic’. Massive social problems are…

If we're discussing the science of Covid and climate change, we've already lost. It's never been the role of the public to digest the technicalities of major social issues. They have representative bodies to do that for them. The science…

My Tweeting for a couple of years now. All societies are exclusively social, and run through conformity or imitation. What we call politics is the same mechanism. It starts at birth, is refined and magnified through schooling. It runs…

I was pleased to find this body of committed scientists calling for a dramatic reduction in the ridiculous amount of flying and travel. https://t.co/aMiLlEMo3Q

In my experience the public knows as much about the justice system as it does about quantum mechanics. https://t.co/8Q5yMMEgc4

These are the 4 stages the Doherty Institute were asked to model when we opened up in late-2021. Two important things to note here I think (we need to revisit that stage of the pandemic, as the promised Royal Commission that will probably…

Populism will destroy every democracy and other system of government, wherever it takes hold. Popularity is the DNA of human society, nothing is more powerful. This talks about the 'sensible centre'. That's a myth. Populists are not Left…

Paul Ewald’s application of evolutionary theory to public health is an incredible new way to look at it. And his views on chronic infection causing most chronic disease are even more fascinating. https://t.co/rhoDZbGHBd

From the Australian government’s information sites. We need to continue to fight the spin that replaces our focus on infections, with hospitalisations, severe illness and death. There’s wisdom and bitter experience in defining epidemics…

From an evolutionary biology perspective, where are we at with vaccines that mostly just suppress severe disease? Do they create the conditions for evolution of variants, and facilitate viral reservoirs?

Watching the national hysteria over The Matildas, including from many who never watch soccer, rams home that our deepest passion is the rivalry of team sports. We convert our politics, our science, our business, our everything, into it.…

Society is social, it’s not a deficit of facts we’re suffering from. It’s a deficit of trust, of respect. We can’t do basic things like public health because millions get in the way with their opinions, people who have no background or…

Here's a lens to view the Albanese government through. And to be clear, it's infinitely better to have a government trying to govern, rather than trying to dismantle government. But a pattern is appearing, and it's not a good one. /1…

And this is the exact question that makes Covid public policy a risk management question, not a science question. We're applying exactly zero risk management to it. https://t.co/3bdQZkHoS3

Every time I hear the phrase ‘closing the gap’ I chuckle. The arrogance of the idea, that original Australians need to somehow catch up with we advanced other Australians. The gap is in the other direction. The continent is broken, and we…

We don’t have: - social surgery - social jet pilots - social physiotherapy - social quantum computing - social policing - social road construction -etc. And yet we have social ‘media’. It needs to be shut down, or heavily regulated.

Always look for the untold stories. Like why are we vulnerable to catastrophic bushfires? Yes climate change. But the much bigger reason is that we don’t live in our own landscape, we don’t manage it, we barely interact with it. /1…

The immune system for Covid is the exact equivalent of insurance for climate damage. Both individual risk mitigations for what are actually collective problems. Both are ‘small government’ politics, not science.

One of the powerful things Hans Rosling did in his life was to get people to take their focus off the daily team sports of politics, and back onto reality. Rosling could show how so much was actually going much more right than we believe…

What’s happening in the US is a new industrial revolution. Which is EXACTLY what we need to fix climate change and Covid. No ‘balance’ required, what we call economies have always boomed when we fixed major social problems. Those…

This would make us fabulously rich. Economies boom when they address actual social problems. That's what the first Industrial Revolution did. For a fraction of the cost of a handful of submarines and ridiculous tax cuts.…

Having seen firsthand multiple times how much the obstruction to renewable rollout is laughable ‘local’ objections from people drenched in social media bullshit, I increasingly recognise very little of the Australia I grew up in. /1 Social…

I zoned out of both the Yes and No stuff from Day 1. No progress will be made through a popularity contest, though I’ll vote Yes because what harm can an advisory committee do. Here’s an excerpt from the national agreement on ‘Closing the…

While we keep seeing individuals and groups as two separate things, the libertarians will win. They’re one thing. Groups are made of individuals, individuals exist only because of groups. Groups are one ‘phase’ of individual life. Like…

Even if you adopt the economic view of the world, if you see societies as economies, all major problems like climate change and Covid are really just rent-seeking old technologies protecting a nearly 300-year-old industrial revolution,…

Only a week until Daylight Stealing starts again in NSW. A very early example of us defining reality as what we want it to be, rather than what it actually is. It does great harm, and is rarely questioned. I despise it. @DavidJoffe64 this…

If you think widespread ignorance of basic science and maths is bad now, talk to your local school about the impossibility of finding maths and science teachers. Societies are in a STEM death spiral, a self-reinforcing implosion. /1…

Daylight Saving is on my list of anti-science harmful BS to be eradicated. https://t.co/wJEm15UCkl

Another example of how ‘the economy’ is our most lethal hidden infection. On the face of it, the fact we have politicians paying attention to employment rather than leaving it to a fictitious market is a good thing. But…there’s a big but…

Clean air should be the thing that supercharges a new industrial revolution. All industrial revolutions arise from social problems. The 'economy' booms in industrial revolutions, there's no binary here. https://t.co/h8g80lCyvG

A true revolution in thinking would be to unpack the ‘job’ as the centre of social life. Because it’s a social creation, vesting ultimate authority in society to an employment relationship. How many people have jobs is a banal, secondary…

What ‘lockdowns’ showed was the incredible and SOCIAL inter-dependency of modern economies. The economy never was a free market of individual consumers. Every economic initiative weaves new, more complex and international social ties. /1…

We’ve spent 30+ years talking about the science of climate change. Almost none of that talk changed our politics. Politics is about creating the stories that make the global individual. That’s what the opponents of climate change action…

“This is an expected part of the ongoing evolution of COVID in the community, as our immunity wanes with time.” Our Covid strategy is to let Covid evolve. We can drive every other species on the continent to extinction. But Covid gets the…

Antibiotics and vaccinations made us complacent about infectious disease. We’ve wasted antibiotics raising animals, and on human infections that were easily preventable with basic sanitation. Here’s a counterfactual, how the last century…

We're sadly relatively close to a time when there will be no living Beatles, Paul and Ringo now both into their 80s. Why I think there's a lot more meaning to this socially and culturally than is often said. /1 https://t.co/yshh7YOhfn Yes…

While nearly everything we hear about China is drawn from tired ideology-driven geopolitical team sports, the industrial revolution there in past decades, where they became an entitled Western world’s factory, is surely one of the greatest…

ICEs have been rubbish technology since the day they were first created. Under 30% efficient in most cars even today. EVs were winning even in the late 19th century, until Rockefeller flooded the world with cheap oil. The EV revolution is…

Ever noticed that 'the economy' is completely party-agnostic, in political terms? That no matter who is elected and their belief systems, they will all end up following the dictates of a handful of entirely arbitrary statistical…

@DrCameronMurray showing how functioning societies involve governments intervening. The small government politics of the past 70 years has reversed social evolution to entrench adolescent high school life as adult life. A ‘market’ is a…

You have to look at human social behaviour to understand Covid, climate change and everything else. People act socially to defend their social groupings. The science or other facts make no difference. It’s not about Covid. /1…

A very good exploration of institutions, and trust. Societies are 100% social, and operate by the imitation and emulation of those we trust. Our institutions are the outcome, allowing us to live by trusting others with expertise in other…

Societies operate on trust, not information (or mis- or disinformation). Don’t challenge with facts, say ‘so, this (climate science, or whatever) isn’t your job, why don’t you respect the people whose job it is? Are they coming into your…

Pandemics are the on/off button for societies. All major catastrophes are. We talk of the health impacts, but there’s a much deeper social, cultural and psychological impact that I think goes unnoticed. The breaking apart of illusions of…

Once you see that all human life is social, and that the root of that social life is imitation, you can't unsee it. But the reason all social life (and thus pretty much all of life) is about people copying other people is…

The engineering Tesla is doing is extraordinary. A longer video here from Jay Leno investigating the Tesla semi. Worth watching to hear all of the thought and features that have gone into this thing, it could revolutionise heavy transport.…

There is no deeper form of violation to the human body than infection. It can even mess with your DNA.

All social evolution: 1) Catastrophe (natural or human made) 2) Institution invented to manage if it ever happens again 3) Institution governs human behaviour, sometimes for generations 4) Absence of further catastrophe makes institution…

Nowhere is the fundamentally social nature of all human behaviour more visible than in fashions. An area we at the same time say is our own ‘subjective taste’ at work, ‘each to their own’. Nothing could be further from the truth. /1…

Paul Ewald talks about the need to live with pathogens by engineering their evolution towards mildness. (Something that won’t happen by itself.) Rather than doing nothing or trying to eliminate the pathogen, you *domesticate* it. /1…

The Industrial Revolution is considered a watershed moment in human social evolution. We’re living another one right now, of even greater scope. Hidden from view by the septic drivel of social media. Energy is a social thing, not just…

We’re living through the greatest revolution in all human history. Get out of the social media fray and you might even notice it, stop listening to the great collective Wormtongue. Come over to reality politics. https://t.co/eafEXLfQYg

Here’s a way to shift from despair to hope. How we understand groups and nations and how they work determines how we think and act. Paul O’Neill, CEO of Alcoa at the turn of the century, offered us a priceless lesson we’re not heeding. /1…

People won’t wear masks now for the same reason they wanted coloured and patterned masks when they would wear them. Human behaviour is social, always. Fashions, fads. Now the fashion is to not wear them at all. It was never about science.…

For those interested in how churches became major strategic assets in the conservative political revolution from the late-1970s, there’s lots out there. The story not told as often is that this is a reactivation of Church v State battles…

A calming suggestion for anybody's life is to stop thinking the ideas people argue about have any relevance to why they're arguing with you. People use ideas purely as ammunition to promote their own social group, and to oppose rival…

My Tweets are often social and cultural lenses for viewing modern life that peel away the economic and political framings we tend to use instead. Christmas is a perfect time for this sort of thing, scrolling through social media. Some…

I have huge respect for the law, it’s the last institution standing against the populist tidal waves of dumb destruction. Not because laws are rules, the libertarian obsession. But because law is a way of thinking. A story about Judge Judy…

Air travel is another perfect example of widespread regulatory capture by fossil fuel-based industries. Look at airports. Massive, ongoing expansion, despite the known challenges of climate change. But to really see the capture, have a…

International air travel is a leading driver of both anti-climate and anti-Covid action. We need to understand that it isn’t some mass, democratised activity. It’s a highly elite activity, both internationally and even within countries. /1…

This to me is how our lives increasingly look. Lives focused on recreation, on ‘having a good time’. Trips, concerts, restaurant meals, sights etc. Like an eternal episode of The Love Boat. Lives of bullshit jobs, made tolerable by the…

A belief central to our culture is that we need to ‘experience’ places. It’s an empty concept, never unpacked. As if simply being somewhere allows you absorb some culture, osmotically. Or some sight. The idea of ‘being there’. Climate…

It was Lynn Margulis I think who said all life is really bacterial. That the huge variety of flora and fauna on Earth is all the product of microbial activity, mostly bacteria. This matters fundamentally in a pandemic. The example of…

In conversation with a very learned professor friend over the past few days, about Covid. And it highlighted for me the magnitude of the damage to public heath that's been done in the past 4 years. Because he's firmly in the cooker camp,…

What can netball teach us about pandemics? If you follow it, as I do (my favourite sport), you'll have noticed that the rest of the world is getting closer to Australia. Why that's happening I think is a powerful lesson about pandemics…

This is where we need to reframe. All massive boosts to what's called 'the economy' come from addressing urgent social need. The original Industrial Revolution was about social need. Both climate change and Covid are HUGE opportunities to…

The push to ignore a pandemic and get back to ‘normal life’. What is that normal life? What great visionary projects are we engaged in, as a human species? What’s our moonshot that makes ignoring a pandemic worthwhile? Sadly it mostly…

The day we understand the bizarre idea of being a tourist in our own land is the day we may start to understand how little we’ve changed, culturally, since the days of Empire. Why this matters for climate and Covid, and everything else. /1…

We need to completely re-frame the challenges we're currently facing. They're not 'Covid and climate change threatening the economy'. Let's keep it all in-house, in the economy itself. Covid and climate change are the economy being held…

It's this pretty basic science by somebody with expertise in the area that seems remarkably absent in just about every official public spokesperson about Covid. https://t.co/ndYccw5tLV

Again, basic science. Not reflected in our Covid strategy, where few even qualify for vaccines now within the workable immunity period of 2-6 months, and shots aren't compulsory. Infection is the main tool being used, and it can't achieve…

I know many people who despair at the challenges we all face as societies, and that little is being done about them. There is comfort I think in understanding what’s going on, putting it in context. None of this is really new. About why…

If you want to understand why democracy isn’t working, we have centuries of empirical trials to draw upon. The Romans. Their civilisation flip-flopped between more democratic forms, and ‘authoritarian’ Great Leader rule (kingdoms and…

Ask your local council if tax cuts will fix this road. It’s not rocket science to do a basic accounting of gaps in public infrastructure and services, and to make that the baseline for all government budgeting. https://t.co/XWxeDrm76n

Most public debates would be transformed by shifting the focus away from the information being exchanged, and towards the question of who we trust. And why. In reality most of us don’t know much about anything, except those things that are…

Populism needs to be understood to be beaten. It brings to the surface the true mechanisms of human belief and knowledge. A mechanism of trust, not of understanding. We trust others, in all areas of life, to know things. And they trust us…

The idea that governments couldn’t continue with aggressive Covid action had nothing to do with public health, but more importantly also nothing to do with economics. Let’s add some history to the spin. Government spending as % of GDP. /1…

How political narratives infect science. The hygiene hypothesis in my understanding isn’t about missing necessary infections, it’s about lack of exposure to microbes that help develop immune function, but not by infection.…

Even vaccine brands are team sports now. I’ve watched the Nova vs mRNA debates from the sidelines. I’ve had a mix of both. Ultimately only the anti-vaxers win with this nonsense. https://t.co/DwjIbEuZgi

The bizarre thing about the pushback on building ventilation, is that it’s been heavily regulated for decades already. Adding additional air quality requirements is not revolution, it’s tweaking. https://t.co/kUi674uas3

I spent a bit of time over the weekend reading research literature on hybrid immunity. Specifically for Covid, but also any other reference to it. A very contentious topic, and reading the literature you could come away being convinced…

We need a graphic designer to capture the dog chasing its own tail nature of hybrid immunity. Where you infect everybody, to try to create population immunity, and the act of infecting them facilitates evolution of new variants.

The common wondering we do about why nothing is being done against existential threats. Have Tweeted about how this is due to the removal of the administrative construct of 'the public', invented in the late-19th to mid-20th century. But…

In the past 20 years, Australian students' performance on science was a year behind the international benchmark. Maths was 2 years. Literacy 1.5 years. Covid exposed the pre-existing problems in the system. https://t.co/TuLBqvfJAw

No living thing has ever taken on evolution, and won. https://t.co/cW1LhL5Qki

Power is power. As in energy is also political power. Today’s power hierarchies are mostly fossil fuel hierarchies. Adding solar to your home is easily the most revolutionary political act you can take. On all issues, including Covid.…

Three have been many outrageous slogan-driven violations of public health in this pandemic. But to me the most fundamental violation is one that is still not spoken about enough. That we’re simply ignoring what a pandemic actually IS. We…

Lots of data analyses focusing dutifully on the political framings of this pandemic, around severe disease, hospitalisation and death. I refuse that framing. The data tells a different story, for infections. All charts from:…

Everywhere that politics inserts itself you end up with false binaries. Like the one between hybrid immunity and ‘Zero Covid’. In reality hybrid immunity *requires* control of spread as well, to prevent pathogen evolution and immune system…

Why aren’t we fighting climate catastrophe and a pandemic? Politics is a hopeless framing for understanding our adult lives. The same social mechanisms apply across all life stages. The same social problems kids have are a window into the…

I keep coming back to immunity in my thinking around Covid, because we’re continually forced into a dumb binary between immunity and prevention of infection. Social media does that, it turns every issue into a binary, with a team at each…

Progressive politicians don’t even notice how completely captured they are by conservative framings. Like the obsession with surpluses, derived from years of conservative slogans about them. Their measure of good government now IS the…

If you reframe our modern economic life in social ways, it makes a lot more sense. I’ve always loved (and lived) the reality of this Dilbert. It’s not just the reality of economies, it’s all of human life, since humans appeared. It’s our…

A tour de force thread on the science of vaccination, superb reading. https://t.co/eriICewzkm

“Despite enormous advances, we still lack essential markers and reliable correlates of lasting protection…Suitable vaccine designs and platforms for durable immunity must be found.” Vaccine science needs a conceptual leap.…

It’s difficult to talk about China without getting caught up in Yellow Peril politics, fuelled by old Anglo reactionary societies in the last gasps of their empires. But China’s industrial capacity is surely one of the greatest wonders of…

Many responded to this thread by suggesting we do this for lots of other places too, like hospitals and aged care and public transport. And yes, everywhere should have good ventilation. But the underlying point I was trying to make here…

Lockdowns were the emergency response, while scientists assessed Covid. Yes to what Peter suggests here as the way forward, but add ventilation not just vaccination, as permanent control. Like I say, find the hubs, control the spread…

Look at the date. We knew we had to target hubs (‘epidemic engines’), at least 3 years ago. It’s not public health rocket science. It was transformed by political minimisers into the idea we had to target everywhere, all of the time. To…

When people ask why aren’t ‘we’ doing anything about climate change or Covid, who is ‘we’? Usually it means politicians. Followed by aspersions cast on ordinary ‘dumb’ people. But the driver of grown-up responsibility has never been either…

When the clear evidence of our senses and experience tell us something is terribly wrong, with our climate and with our health in the pandemic, and nothing is done? Not only that, but when many affect joy at doing nothing? This is what…

ABC radio story about DST. Used an example of a woman scared to run after dark, as a justification for keeping it. What if you run in the morning? The science has been in for years. It’s an IDIOT, harmful practice. Get rid of it.

Physicists are so often scientific arseholes. There’s a God complex sort of thing going on in physics. It often sees itself as the most fundamental science, and therefore the root of all human knowledge. It isn’t either of those things.…

I’ve had a discussion over years with a close friend, a university professor. About our modern idea of ‘the market’, and ‘the economy’. /1 Whenever I discuss the idea of a market with anybody, it becomes clear that it’s one of those slogan…

Both of the big news stories of the past 3 days implicate social media in crimes against civil society. This one, and the Higgins/Lehrmann/Channels 7&10 court case. Enough is enough, it’s time action was taken. /1…

Coming back to this because it seems such a critical paper, one of the few to really address hybrid immunity and model how it might be going (if it even exists). Some key extracts. /1 #auspol https://t.co/JEyitkVrY1 https://t.co/83dkNZNoJx…

The GBD said ‘focused protection’ would lead to herd immunity in 3-6 months. It’s now almost 4 YEARS later. Did I miss the herd immunity transition? Imagine having signed this. To be proud of having brought Flat Earth science into public…

Imagine a climate scientist walking into somebody else’s workplace, and telling them how to do their job. They’d be told to fuck off. This is what climate scientists should be saying to climate deniers. It’s about respect for the work…

I’m happy to be in the control group for the ‘if we all keep getting infected with Covid, we’ll stop getting infected with Covid’ experiment. Doing my bit for science. Remember that? Memories.

Is sovereignty the framework of thinking needed to solve Israel-Palestine fighting? The two-State solution proposed is old thinking, as was used in Ireland and India, both fraying. Sovereignty itself may be the problem. /1…

It's that French Revolution vibe. How'd that end again? https://t.co/49WYbIQ8xF

Society is social. The EV debates slug it out over the science and engineering. It’s really just an ageing society, wanting the world to stay as it is. https://t.co/wNZpWz8qXm https://t.co/XTP0mZd6Ik

Surely one of the pillars of modern thought is the idea that whole populations will develop immunity to a virus, that generates immune-escape variants? Is there some Nobel Prize equivalent of The Golden Raspberries, for science?

Not once in my life did a doctor or anybody else tell me it was important that I get infected regularly, for my good health. Until Covid. 1/3 https://t.co/N5KGydc6IF Sure, my immune system may have been defending me my whole life from…

Edmund Burke is often seen as a forefather of modern conservatism. He’d have been appalled at people sailing under that banner today. Some critical points here. /1 Taken from: https://t.co/r0Gf4LC1Ks https://t.co/KVJ1SYiBap The general…

Before social media, there was already significant trade in what are called ‘urban myths’. Factoids that sound amazing, and are repeated widely. That are actually compete bollocks. Social media poured petrol on this fire. It’s now our…

Social media society is factoid society. Facts broken free from their institutional roots, roaming society like escaped zoo animals. https://t.co/q48jvGlqKU

In the 1960s popular music was the vanguard of a supposed social revolution. It was BS. Those same musicians went on to become billionaires. Nothing has changed. Rock stars had the chance to lead a resistance to the pandemic. They did…

Did the French Revolution usher in a new golden age of freedom for the liberated masses? It created an Emperor even more powerful than the royalty and aristocracy it beheaded. Being non-conformist rigidifies conformity further. /1…

Thanks to @GosiaGasperoPhD for this. The problem we’ve had selling this message I think is that Covid minimisers have successfully created an impression that Covid is everywhere, always. So life as we know it has to be shut down to beat…

Herding, whether animal or human, looks like everybody doing the same thing. But it’s not that - it’s everybody following a strict hierarchy. There are always leaders in a herd, and a hierarchy flowing from that leader. We can’t have herd…

A Judas Goat is trained to lead other animals to slaughter. All social animals, including humans, form social hierarchies around leaders. Our National Cabinet are Judas Goats, for Covid slaughter. The numbers don’t lie. (Thanks to…

So many critiques of AI say machines can’t think like humans. But most of what we call human thinking is actually the social process of imitation. Social conformity. Even the process of peer review is largely the enforcing of social…

It’s easy to think you’re escaping political binaries just by picking one side of them. For example the solution to the disaster of most privatisation isn’t to nationalise, to make it public. 1/4 As soon as you pick a team in that debate,…

To escape the team sports that infect our understanding of ‘politics’, you have to look to history. Take the two most famous ‘autocrats’ in the world right now. Putin and Xi. Said to be running ‘systems of government’ opposed to our…

For those persuaded by populism that democracy = elections, 2024 is an orgy of democratic delights. So democracy must be flourishing, hey. Let’s see. /1 https://t.co/sNI98hJP3n https://t.co/Rnzu2pY4Z9 Oops. In steady and quite spectacular…

The problems facing us should mean societies are on a war footing. Climate change and a pandemic are both MUCH bigger problems than those we go to war for. We’re not even close to being on a war footing. About our social status hierarchies…

Covid disrupted our ‘supply chains’, leading to a cost of living/inflation crisis. Most of these supply chains originate in China, where we outsourced most of our manufacturing. China moved mountains to suppress Covid. We mocked them for…

Only disasters shift societies meaningfully. When Hitler was mobilising in the 1930s, the world mobilised at emergency levels to oppose him. Climate change is a much, much bigger problem than Hitler. Why we need the Chinese right now. /1…

Trying to turn it into a cost of living issue. I have almost zero energy costs. I'm not a high income earner. I did it with renewables and EVs. Reminds me of sitting in science class with complete morons. Covid and climate, not an ounce of…

Over time I’ve watched many great public personas and thinkers prosecute great causes here. And then fall away, as they recognise that micro-blogging doesn’t change the world. Or they become entranced by the economy of likes, with surging…

This whole thread should call into question the idea of hybrid immunity. By infecting (we’re barely vaccinating), we’re just driving pathogen evolution. Immunity is an asymptotic light at the end of a tunnel that is never reached. Basic…

Covid minimisers and their followers always use the same argument to say the pandemic is over. ‘Nobody is paying any attention to it.’ This is a very important window into the dynamics of our situation. /1 You can see clearly that their…

The incredible inertia of the status quo is already dampening recent efforts in renewable energy and EVs, as prominent examples. You can’t gradually change a status quo. It needs to be disrupted. Smashed. This is a key fact of social life.…

Ever taught science? Any idea at all just how little most people know about it? Here’s a window into that question. Because we vested ultimate power in popular voting, there’s nothing you can do about it. https://t.co/tWxU5NP9qJ…

That situation where you’re in a group, and somebody offers you a swig out of the same drink. And you don’t really like the idea of getting half a mouthful of their spit, but it would violate the group dynamic not to. Sociality dissolves…

It’s time we started thinking of living things as machines. Machines are what Western cultures see as their vast superiority over all previous or co-existing cultures. How many of our glorious machines rival the complexity of any of these…

You’re now most likely to catch Covid at home. From your kids, who catch it at school. Most of the young can’t even afford a home, and never will. ‘Home’ as an idea is under assault. By ‘the economy’. The economy is a verb, not a noun. /1…

So much of the US right now is Rome. A failing Republic, with a surging imperial Presidency that is more like a King or Emperor. By far the most successful period in Rome’s history was its rule by emperors. Its Republic was endlessly…

The word ‘fascism’ is bandied about freely here. Like fairy tales for grown-up. Nobody implements fascism. Fascism is a product, not a mechanism. It’s the endgame of populism. The stripping away of all hierarchies of authority, in favour…

The astonishing revolution taking place right under our noses. While we're trapped in team sports engineered by the LNP over nuclear. And what's making all of this possible? China, and their 'authoritarian' State. The engine room of global…

Connection is social media’s bait-and-switch. Offer something people can’t resist, some social heroin - connecting with others. ‘Networking’. Then weaponise it by turning that connection into team sports. Then monetise the likes those…

“There is absolutely no inevitability as long as there is a willingness to contemplate what is happening.” (McLuhan) Our sense of inevitable failure to address our problems is due to them being badly understood. 1/4 https://t.co/uF2SqtrBSu…

Still the most beautiful meditation on the brutal tension between sociality and knowledge. Spinoza. Sociality uses knowledge as fodder, to build and unify teams. To fight other teams. The team’s success becomes what is true. /1…

These punctuated equilibria are caused by punctuated equilibria in social life. It’s our social lives that cause viral evolution. (Viruses don’t ever ‘go viral’. We do.) Epidemic ‘waves’ are the equilibrium lives we live, punctuated by…

China is strategy, the West is tactics. China saw the future was renewables, decades ago. Thus their astronomical investment in that area. Western democracy is 3-5 year electoral (popularity) cycles. All tactics, to win those elections.…

At both ends of the lifespan now humans are put into ‘care’. Child care and aged care. Societies are social, what does this mean? This grandmother calls looking after children ‘abject drudgery’. There’s more to see here. /1…

Re-sharing this on the strategic use of ‘tabloid’ messaging. Tabloidism isn’t by its nature necessarily mis- or disinformation, nor even sensational. It’s the collapsing of the fake binary between individual and collective. Court cases do…

I’ve not seen the BiVACOR discussed here, but we’re on the cusp of a possible medical revolution here? Clinical trials now underway. Nothing at the olympics comes within light years of the magnitude of this achievement. Daniel Timms should…

Imagine a political party whose entire focus was fixing known problems. No routing them through ideological frameworks. Just ‘this needs to be fixed, we’ll implement best practice known ways to fix it’. With not one cent to anything else,…

True adult life is the gradual weaning of yourself away from the social ties of friends and even family, and towards pursuing where knowledge says we need to go. The two cannot exist comfortably side-by-side. Knowledge will always betray…

To be social is to conform. To not conform is also social. You can’t avoid conformity, when you act socially, it’s the currency of social life. The more social we are, the more rigidly conformist societies will become. /1…

It irritates populist societies to be told that even their deepest truths are really just popularity contests. That the truth is the social hierarchy that is dominant. Einstein went on to do the same thing to Bohr and quantum mechanics.…

We still have the idea that societies operate using information. They absolutely don’t, they operate using status and conformity. People are ignoring Covid because their friends and family are. That’s it. Our guidance in life has ALWAYS…

I sat watching this, incredulous at the self-serving econo-babble the West dishes up to protect its existing status. We all know the world - all of it - desperately needs solar panels, EVs and EV batteries. /1 https://t.co/xTEsxdujNX…

Like many I enjoy coming here to discover new things, including the science of infectious disease. But if we want things to change, we have to move away from the idea that facts or information run societies. We have to understand how…

We’re still expected to believe that spending a few months at home a few years ago so damaged our acquired immunity that the whole population is now under continuous assault from a range of infectious diseases. I feel the worm is turning.…

Russia and Chinese are seen as leading ‘authoritarian’ cultures in the world today. As if a culture decides ‘hey, let’s be authoritarian’. Older cultures seem that way because they survived by having strong restrictions on much social…

I agree with Paul Ewald that persistent/chronic infection is likely the great causation for much human illness. Why in evolutionary terms would pathogens prefer a ‘quick kill’ over a ‘setting up an ongoing home’ model? Killing your host…

An important topic. David talks about how ‘we’ are playing with fire, with tipping points. This is where, as with Covid, we need insight into how and why humans think and behave. Which is a social question, not a physical science question.…

If you read the history of Victorian England, the birth of the modern world, what stands out is how much the focus of their massive engineering innovation was one thing. The health and well-being of the public. Engineers change the world,…

The unspoken truth is that we CAN’T do it. The magnitude of the revolution needed is unrivalled in human history. No variant of business as usual will get us even close. James Lovelock used to say it. He thought it was already much too…

We're living through the next Industrial Revolution, the successor to Victorian England. The genuine tragedy is that this time so much of the public is neck-deep in putrid politicising bullshit on social media, missing the entire show.…

I still have a hunch diet is mostly a dead-end in health science. Including with inflammation. The root cause will be microbial (which diet can of course influence). https://t.co/T63dAlDter

Every outrageous injustice is a window into a truth we’ve not been seeing. Why can Israel act with impunity in Gaza? Because what we call Western democracies have always been Judaeo-Christian status hierarchies, with new names. AUKUS too.…

This is game over for the hybrid immunity people, really basic science. If societies ran on information, this would be the end of 'living with' Covid. But they run on status. https://t.co/uN87LfkiWC

I talk a lot about China not because I have any interest in Chinese communism, as some infected by team sports culture think. I use China as a key contrast. For example, the enormous pressure in late-2022 for China to ‘live with’ Covid. /1…

This is reality politics. BYD's massive expansion, while here in the West millions are hypnotised by Wormtongues on social media. Imagine missing an entire Industrial Revolution, trapped inside a social media bubble. https://t.co/I5xTeniT54

We’re all complicit (though not responsible) in the collapse of public-focused government. As a culture we support the idea of using popularity as the sole doorway to ultimate power, through elections. That’s game over. /1…

'According to science', hey. I feel we could see some special Twitter science in response, some calm-mongering to keep up an uninterrupted flow of healthy, natural infections. https://t.co/9nUhTNKd6n https://t.co/dXNORhuTid

We’re in the middle of the next Industrial Revolution, and our team sports hides it from us. Tim Cook here explaining that it’s the depth of knowledge and skill in China’s industrial revolution that now attracts Western companies, not low…

Teddy Roosevelt is attributed with ‘if you’ve got them by the balls, their hearts and minds will follow’. What’s happening in the Middle East right now is a repeat of a pattern throughout history. Societies change when they’re forced to…

Tim Winton on the politics of climate, identifying ‘fossil capitalism’ as the enemy. The real enemy is something he also mentions. The status quo. Fossil fuels fuel the status quo, well beyond those specific industries. 1/5…

On a visit to northern NSW, it was difficult to not wallow in the gobsmacking beauty of the Australian countryside. But it also triggered thoughts, about place. /1 https://t.co/9cXVQjGuZa When confronted with a view like this (photo:…

‘Politicians won’t listen to the science’. They never have. Archimedes killed by a Roman sword, in 212 BC. Society progressed anyway. Never via politics or popular vote. https://t.co/rc44QV2yRx

Many of the same people who have argued for over 4 years here about the critical importance of using the science to combat Covid, will fall over themselves with joy when we play idiot games with the clocks again. https://t.co/1Qdh0RTHn0

The Chinese EV industry makes the Industrial Revolution in the UK in the 18th and 19th centuries look like an Amish barn-raising. We’re living inside the next Industrial Revolution. Our partisan team sports blinds us to it.…

Of the 12 men who walked on the moon, these are the only 4 still alive. I still remember the sense of possibility and excitement of those times. ‘Moonshot’ culture, the sense of exciting social progress. And today? 1/4…

There's an idea that we all stopped listening to 'the science'. We never did. Humans act by copying what other humans do. Not because they're stupid, but because nobody has the time to figure out everything for themselves. Wearing a mask…

We stopped normal life for years to fight world wars. That threat was a pimple on the arse of what's coming now. And what are we doing? Nothing. That's the power of 'the economy'. The status quo re-badged. To quote... 1/2…

Genuinely curious if there’s any evolutionary biology or immunology in the intensivist curriculum. https://t.co/NQAjZ8BqoY

A friend currently has Covid. He’s had it multiple times. He says each time the symptoms he found most disturbing were feelings of impending doom, darkness and depression. What’s behind that, do we know @ejustin46, @DavidJoffe64? Probably…

I often talk about the status quo as the controlling force behind every society. It’s very easy to take all the baddies from existing narratives and just make them the status quo. Like it’s a group of people doing the bad things. It’s not…

These are the threads that make this place still worthwhile. Puncturing the ludicrous political slogans masquerading as science and public health. Thank you @arijitchakrav https://t.co/GXiy27A5Mj

When a 'vastly experienced' (in what who knows) 'world traveler' runs lessons in science for actual professors of science. https://t.co/JxvKVwwMB7

You'll find stories every day of the clash of a status quo in collapse in the West, panicking in response to a new Asian-led status quo. The new Industrial Revolution began years ago already, in Asia. https://t.co/bWekW4gHLl

I think Starlink is genuinely revolutionary. People have understandable problems with Elon’s politics. But what SpaceX and Tesla show is the power of unleashing engineers on global problems. Societies that put engineering at the centre…

As somebody with a lifelong challenging relationship with sleep, I’m certain that in evolution, a neat 8-hour sleep wedged between working days is not the norm. Those who can’t do that 8-hour good worker thing are stranded by its…

The Industrial Revolution of the 18th and 19th centuries was largely the introduction of fossil fuel-driven life, by the West. The next Industrial Revolution began some time ago. In Asia. China mostly. All of our toxic slogan-driven life…

We inherited a framing of religious questions from the Enlightenment, in the West anyway. That religion was just one other way to know the world. Like an inferior science, based on ‘belief’ and ‘faith’. That framing is the same idea that…

The third of 5 planned threads. A tour de force of science to counter the political slogans being used instead of public health. https://t.co/QaNZwDgnUg

Revolutionary social action comes not from the provision of information, or disinformation or misinformation. It comes when status is threatened. if you can find a way to make climate change and Covid a threat to people’s status, they will…

Lithium Iron Phosphate (LFP) batteries have revolutionised EVs. They were developed in the US, via government grant. The company went broke through lack of any coordinated EV development there. The Chinese bought the technology for a song.…

There is only one manufacturing superpower in the world. China. It manufactures more than the next 9 countries in the rankings, combined. But let me suggest how this means *way* more than you might first think. /1 https://t.co/16eaD1wFnj…

“In free governments, the rulers are the servants and the people their superiors and sovereigns.” (Benjamin Franklin) This is the American political DNA. It’s also impossible nonsense, that is destroying the world. /1…

We love advocacy, ‘awareness’, ‘education’, as if the problem is other people being stupid. Advocacy is like a crusade, where you get to put together a team, and fight other teams for supremacy. And yet, the actual solution will always be…

Gil Duran coined a phrase to describe something I Tweet about a lot here as well. The capture of democracies by Silicon Valley. Duran calls it 'The Nerd Reich'. This has been going on for a lot longer than Musk, Zuckerberg etc. /1…

Societies don’t run on information. They run on status. It’s very common to think of information or ideas in this way, as connected semantic bubbles. (from: https://t.co/k9sdX5FYtW) But each of those bubbles is a status game. A team,…

Covid minimisation is status-driven insanity. History suggests it has a lot further to run. This is Francis and Dan Keller. Falsely convicted of sexual abuse of children in a daycare facility. They spent almost 22 years in jail. Status did…

One of the most destructive myths is the idea of ‘top-down’ vs ‘bottom-up’. Human groups and societies have no tops or bottoms. Implicit in the belief that they do is also a belief about how groups behave, that is also wrong. /1 The belief…

One of the most important parts of status as the mechanism of all societies, is the scapegoating mechanism that Rene Girard talks about. The relentless battles for status - status games or team sports - lead to chaos. We’re seeing that…

Status runs societies, and historically that status was concentrated in families protecting their ‘line’. We still have dynasties (Murdochs, anyone?), but something in history profoundly weakened them. It’s not what you expect, I will bet.…

Storr is absolutely right that all of society is status games. What I call team sports. There’s no escaping that, but there is shaping those sports so that they focus on more productive things. ‘Games of success’ include modern science and…

I mean who can we believe here, on energy? Australia’s top scientists and engineers, or an ex-Queensland cop? https://t.co/3THVAVIOBI

Why do bad people keep winning our political games? Because they understand people better. They know what drives all people is status. Have a look around the culture you’re living in. Whether it’s homes, cooking, watches, cars - the…

Both sides of politics see the energy revolution as a simple replacement of older fossil fuel generating sources with newer sources. But renewables fundamentally redefine what a grid is. They decentralise power itself, not just…

We had these books as kids, and would sit for hours absorbing strange locales from around the world. Now we increasingly all just travel there. Because we don’t understand place, we have no conception of the violation this is. 1/6…

The 20th century was a century of revolutions. Russia, China. And we had one too, the 1960s ‘counter-cultural’ revolution. Like Burke I think all revolutions are disasters for societies. They can be the catastrophes I often say bring the…

For me the most important story out of the LA fires was the fire hydrants. Because they show the enormous chasm between a politics focused on actual material need, versus the lunatic adolescent team sports we have instead. There’s little…

For life itself there have been 5 known major catastrophes, which drove most evolution. Also how societies work. Most of the time humans play status games, competing for position and identity. While ignoring basic material needs. 1/2…

Human life is a battle for status. Status is also identity, without it, you’re nobody. We join groups (teams) to fight these battles, emulating high-status individuals. Team members imitate one another, ‘peer pressure’, to have membership…

Copying each other is the most fundamental human act. We imitate because that gives us status, in a given group. It makes us recognisable, to the group. That in turn gives us an identity, we ‘belong’. Groups clash, their statuses collide.…

While simpletons use their Left/Right electoral goggles to understand what’s happening, Gil’s ‘Nerd Reich’ begins to implement exactly what they openly promised to do. And there’s even more to see here. /1 https://t.co/r4xdkH6DQW…

I see ‘enshittification’ as the inevitable creation of status hierarchies. Status is the currency of all human life. There’s a very anti-trust thrust to Cory’s proposed solutions, which make status hierarchies in themselves the problem. I…

Mob rule doesn’t discriminate between just and unjust causes. The fact this behaviour is not universally condemned, but ordinary people actually applaud it, is a symptom of how far gone we now are. Let me say it again. Mob rule doesn’t…

I’m not any kind of epidemiologist or medical scientist. But everything I’ve learned in the past few years from people who are suggests to me the blue line (which I added to Bob Hawkins’ graph) here would be an ‘endemic’ disease pattern?…

Both the Russian and Chinese revolutions began as democratic freedom movements, inspired by Western ideas of ‘the people’ uprising. We still love this same idiot idea. The people is not a thing. It’s a justification used by grifters…

The almost universal worshipping of small business reveals how far we’re infected by the terrible American disease of iconoclastic hatred of anything institutional. All sides of politics worship small business. It’s a terrible mistake. /1…

I’m reminded of DH Lawrence’s Letter from Germany, written between the world wars, when observing public life today. The shift to righteousness, to proliferating and pulverising team sports. Even those who previously seemed moderate now…

In the battle between a cult destroying America and a mob destroying America, the cult is still in the lead. But give it time. America and the world have been here before. We never learn. Revolutions just destroy, they don’t fix.…

It’s very difficult for residents of rich countries in particular to understand that human will and rationality has little impact on how life unfolds. Rich nations assume that, and think information runs societies, because they’re rich and…

Rene Girard’s passion was to understand violence. Why are humans violent to one another? People who follow me know what he discovered. It had nothing to do with individual human psychology or emotion. Sociality causes violence. Humans…

I’ll use one of Vera Kober’s wonderful paintings to talk a bit more about imitation, the core of all human life. How do some smears of paint ‘capture’ a flower? How is that ‘likeness’ or imitation achieved? There’s a fundamental magic in…

The narratives around mis- and disinformation are a fundamental misunderstanding of how societies work. They never run on information. They run on status. Or put more simply, the overriding reason people do what they do, is because…

The people who ask ‘why do you still mask?’ ask it in the way they might ask ‘why do you wear Crocs?’, when Crocs weren’t fashionable. There’s no science or public health in the question. It’s entirely about not imitating the group. That’s…

The curious bed-sharing between ‘Left’ and ‘Right’, showing how vacuously empty all team sports rivalry is. Rational-choice theory is the foundation of both market-driven capitalism, and State-driven democracy. Left *and* Right. /1…

The myth of ‘the people’ and its power refuses to die in the US. The data shows it to be a myth. I don’t agree with the rest of this thread from Cory, about ‘groundswell’ politics. Anti-trust. That’s the great American political delusion,…

That feeling of the world going absolutely batshit crazy is us reaching a specific tipping point. The tipping point where reality itself is defined by the fads and fashions of social life. Where what’s real becomes what trends. /1…

“Man is not only ruled by evil passions; but his rational capacity is severely limited as well. Without the warm cloak of custom, tradition, experience, history, religion, and social hierarchy—all of which radical man would rip off—man is…

Just as species don’t evolve and become extinct via their own agency, look again at the human world and re-imagine it as what it is. A world in which we have little to no real control, and where change and progress is mostly imposed via…

For a few years I’ve argued for what I call reality politics. Galileo’s ‘and yet it moves’ is the motto. This is not about plugging some science into what we call politics. It’s something fundamentally different. /1 https://t.co/XHZXCQSke8…

Hospitalisation as the dominant public health metric for Covid is politics, not science. Hospitalisation is acute care. We would never have tackled smoking, or even most infectious disease, if that was the metric of concern.

Edmund Burke, The Evils of Revolution. https://t.co/rFIeh31214

A week from a federal election here in Oz. A reality politics stocktake on the performance of electoral politics (all sides). Find me one area of public life where current systems and processes aren’t catastrophically broken, with no hope…

The euphoria of victory in team sports taps into something that goes well beyond sport. It’s only one manifestation of a deeper cultural framework. Girard said, the root of all society is imitative rivalry. Team sports. In sport, but also…

I can promise you the entire world will appear fundamentally differently, with this one reframing. The battles and debates of our adult lives are not the adult world. They’re us trapped in a permanent childhood. How this happened is…

The two major ‘authoritarian’ powers of our era had their origins in democratic revolutions, popular uprisings. In both cases Western ideas and people were central to the revolutions. It’s not Trump that will usher in fascism. It’s our…

Nichols Gruen’s chat with ChatGPT brings up many of the themes I raise here. For example, the Magna Carta, the underlying framework for modern democracies, never had a thing to do with ‘the people’. It was a truce between Kings and barons.…

As Paul Ewald said years ago, we need a new germ theory. Infection is the Copernican revolution needed for understanding chronic disease. Not physics, chemistry or even genetics. Biology. It’s the infections, stupid. https://t.co/gnsNMBWDfx

The macro lens shows everything going so well. We had an election where the winning party’s policies at least resemble the desperate physical, real needs of the community. But if you put the long lens on, we’re still fucked. /1…

When imitation becomes rampant, like in the art market and now society as a whole through social media, it generates a powerful desire for 'authenticity'. Grok did a summary for me. However, this isn't quite what it seems. 1/5…

Listening to a Tory toff on UK television still championing ‘levelling up’, or ‘growing the pie’. All the BS high status folk invented to try to avoid the inescapable fact that they’re robber barons. Again, none of this will ever resolve…

It’s estimated that 40-50% of humans who have ever lived died from some kind of infection. This doesn’t include chronic and persistent infection. Antibiotics and vaccines drove that closer to 10%. Both require simultaneous control of…

Once you understand that societies run on status and not information, you also see that most problems are much smaller than they seem. The worst things in your life are controlled by a *tiny* number of actors. /1 https://t.co/dzeYRMqVXm…

Most will focus on the anti-science nonsense here. I focus on the fact it’s 3 more stars of social media taking over old institutions. The entire Trump regime is a social media hijacking of institutions. Shut down social media.…

Trumpian populists don’t get that the institutional checks and balances he’s running aground on *are* democracy. Populists want democracy to be just elections; they can game those. But the rest of us forget where the checks and balances…

The obsession with ‘the people’ in politics took off in the counterculture revolution in the mid-20th century. There it is, ‘Power to the People’. At the same time this movement went to war with the ‘establishment’ i.e. institutions.…

The paranoia about any sort of directing central force in a society almost defines American politics. The founding mythology of ‘the people’ ruling themselves, what Graeber and Sahlins called the contradictory notion of popular…

The genius of Australia is invisible to all of the political categories developed mostly in Europe and applied globally. All of the -isms: capitalism, socialism, liberalism, communism etc. Australia is none of those things. And that’s why…

America’s political woes are intrinsic to its culture. The rest of the world should jump off all the comparisons with European fascism, it’s not what’s going on. The Puritan foundations of the US put mistrust of authority right at the root…

The distinction between tailoring and designer clothes in this thread is fundamentally important culturally, going well beyond fashion. Tailoring is expertise-based style. Designer clothes are about status. Our entire modern world is in…

Robert Putnam’s ‘The Upswing’ traces the cycling between “I” and “We” in American life over the past century. You can see here how the 4 great catastrophic disruptions of the first half of the 20th century drove the emergence of a…

I don’t think debate is really a worthwhile thing to be engaged with. Our fantasies about what democracy and free speech mean lead us to believe debating is some sort of winnowing process, to produce optimal outcomes. I call bullshit. /1…

Renewable energy is a needed revolution. The only placeholder I’ll put in the ground in 2025 is that I bet we look back in a few decades and wonder why we privatised almost all of it, from Day 1. I bet that will be a chicken that comes…

Cory is one of the most intelligent and entertaining people on the platform. This thread (thanks @miki_fern) is so important to show a contrast between the view of activist life Cory often shares, and the alternative set of ideas around…

There is no ‘we’ now, just status games. ‘We’ was a creation of the post-WW2 repair, just as communities ‘unite’ around things like bushfires and floods. In good times ‘we’ is an obstacle to status games, or ‘identity politics’ today.…

Trace every part of a culture backwards to its origins - what we like to do (travel, for example), eat, wear, say, how we build and decorate homes, etc. At its origin will be a high-status person or group, who millions of others then…

So often even the most committed to public health have told me they eventually gave up fighting Covid because they didn’t want to deny themselves or their families a proper life. Another window into kidult culture. The assumptions around…

Herd immunity. The Mayo Clinic setting out the basic scientific reasons this should never work, for Covid. And yet it’s the global strategy, copied from the Great Barrington Declaration, a free market economic think tank. Let’s check with…

Trump isn’t bringing fascism to America. We don’t know our own culture, and that’s not unusual. Fish don’t know water exists, until beached. Trump is the apotheosis of the countercultural movement, going back 70-odd years. Down with the…

One of the indicators of entrenched privilege is a really pretty bizarre idea that you can change the world in some immediate way. I’ve spent a few years here detailing the mechanics of social life and change. And how deliberative human…

Culture is mostly invisible to those living it, it’s like water is to fish. I spend a lot of time talking about the countercultural revolution of our era, with friends. Because it’s our culture. And it’s largely invisible to us, I suspect.…

It feels good to have a baddie. Unfortunately capitalism isn’t real, nor are any of the other -isms. Socieities run on status alone, they’re never economies. They’re 100% social. And we all play the same status games. Because status =…

We don’t really understand that as social animals, everything is social. Our deepest, most intimate likes or tastes too. Take interior design. For many years now minimalist greys and whites have dominated in homes. Why is that? Why do we…

Contrast with Planck, one of the great scientists, remarking that science progresses one funeral at a time. Science is 100% social, just like everything else. It trends, it has fads and fashions deep inside its content. It’s why peer…

I’ve watched sport over many years, as a window into a culture we’re still not seeing or understanding. Victory now creates utter euphoria. Defeat has professionals in tears, with crowds either silent or overwhelmed with euphoria…

Kidults aren’t adults. They’re children in an adult world. Thus they’re selfish. All the major powers derive their modern culture from previous revolutions. For the West, it was the counterculture. The taking over of adult life, by teenage…

The reverse proof that all human life is driven by status games, is to look at what happens when all status is stripped away. That experience is humiliation. The most toxic and destructive of all human experiences, far surpassing sadness,…

If you live in a modern democracy, I think the Magna Carta is necessary reading. Only half-a-dozen pages. The foundation agreement that invented the original checks and balances we call democracy. Read it and you’ll get a very clear…

Australia’s main energy companies are buying up big with grid batteries. Unsurprisingly the much lower cost of generating the renewable energy to fill them isn’t being passed on to consumers. You can’t ‘market’ your way to a revolution in…

There were 3 revolutions in the 20th century, in all 3 major powers. Russia, China, the Anglosphere. We only notice the disasters of the Chinese and Russian revolutions. We ignore our own, thinking we’re somehow culture-free. All were in…

‘Living with’ Covid is the privatisation of public health. In cultures that had already privatised transport, education, healthcare, jails, water, energy etc. Privatisation had already largely failed in all of those other critical areas of…

The fossil fuel industry has its tentacles into every aspect of our lives. The most revolutionary politics you can pursue is to drive an EV, and put solar panels on your house. No amount of voting will change anything. But doing those…

This is a much, much bigger story than something like “Hitler invades Poland”. Many find the view that only catastrophe will shift a human status quo pessimistic. Have a look around. How’s it all going, on our big challenges? Nowhere?…

I think it was McCartney who recently called out the nonsense of the lyric and vibe of this sort of song. It’s a window into the massive social/cultural shift that became our culture. The counterculture. When high school took over the…

The more we socialise human life, the more unequal the outcomes will become. This contrasts with our common assumptions about sociality, that it’s a type of leveller. An experiment in the early 2000s demonstrated this in a novel way.…

Headlines yesterday about this meeting of ‘authoritarian’ leaders. Our democracies are dying because of the ludicrous ideas we have about them. That we in the West are led by ‘the people’ while these evil regimes are led by authoritarian…

Anybody dealing with the public is experiencing this more every day now. A continuous assault. The article traces the surge in this sort of behaviour to lockdowns. But why would lockdowns do this to people? I think it’s not hard to figure…

The Nepalese government tried to regulate and restrict social media. ‘The people’ burned down the parliament in response, and took selfies for their feeds. When are we going to give up the idiot Left, Right and -ism stuff? These are…

We assume humans just get on, and when they don’t they’ve become ‘polarised’. Reverse the assumption. The baseline of all human life is violence. Imitative rivalry, for status. Humans are SOCIAL animals. /1 https://t.co/U6MBDB8JvD…

‘Democracy’ is really code for Anglo culture. It’s a social way of life - a culture - developed in the main Anglo countries, shown here in dark blue. And it’s in decline even in these Anglo countries, and globally. It’s not even a century…

The Beatles were right at the centre of the countercultural revolution, often involuntarily. A story from that time reveals the BS of that revolution. (And still our culture.) McCartney was the driving force in The Beatles. The one who…

How is the world going with climate targets? Nowhere. The status quo will never change something that it relies upon for its own existence. Look around. Humans are just fighting each other in imitative teams, for status/identity. 1/3…

‘All You Need is Love’ became a de facto anthem of the countercultural revolution. Still our culture in the West today. The Beatles split up after only 8 years, because they couldn’t work together any more. 60 years later the rest of us…

We can’t ‘reform’ or ‘manage’ our way to Net Zero. Have we forgotten that fossil fuels entered our societies as part of a revolution, the Industrial Revolution? No gradualism there. Only another revolution will get them out. @TimBuckleyCEF…

No amount of social media posturing in our various battling teams about ‘authoritarianism’ and ‘fascism’ makes the slightest difference to the collapse of the US. Lewis and Usmani offer us a glimpse as to why that is. In this one chart. /1…

If you include the linear regression trend line, it’s clear that American democracy is getting worse, the more people come out to vote. I’ve Tweeted about how elections clearly have failed in their stated aims. But historically, if you…

Only rarely do we recognise that an actual revolution introduced fossil fuels to our societies. Not any sort of gradual, managed change with things like targets. It will need a revolution to wean us off them. Only total disruption shifts a…

@gilduran76 quotes Lincoln to fire up Americans against Trump. I get exactly the opposite feeling from what Lincoln said. To me it reveals the cancer at the heart of American society, which is why it’s always at war with itself. /1…

I sometimes get accused of being anti-democracy. But my position is that there are no ‘systems’ of government in the first place. Societies are not systems. They’re humans, acting socially. Then labelling this behaviour in a variety of…

In Dewey and Lippmann’s famous discussions about the nature of a public and democracy, they agreed on one critical thing. That only problems bring a public into being. As I say, only catastrophe creates the ‘we’ that is the public. 1/3…

It’s almost a truism that to have a revolution, you need to mobilise a lot of people. Renewable energy challenges that. Putting solar panels on your roof can to a considerable extent free you from fossil fuel dominant hierarchies. You…

My belief is we’re blinded to the real social things driving our societies by our obsessive focus on the daily team sports of ‘politics’, really just the names of teams in the same social melee. But here’s a rare window into the engine…

A revolution introduced fossil fuels into societies. We think the ‘market’ will drive them out. The true nature of the market as a defensive shield of bullshit to protect the status quo becomes more visible every day. It’s even worse than…

All major powers are defined by founding popular revolutions. We saw the catastrophe that was for France, Russia and China. We refuse to see it for modern Western powers. Revolutions substitute Kings with populist tyrants. Populist tyrants…

I often post about how all meaningful and significant change in societies comes only from catastrophic disruptions. Historically, wars, plagues, natural disasters. Everything else is status games, dressed up in various costumes. But there…

Those who work with knowledge for a living tend to assume that’s how society works too, people thinking and processing facts. Societies run on status. On people imitating those with higher status, in teams, battling other teams for…

Lord of the Flies was a great window into our assumptions about how societies work. The idea that without wider social life, we become savages. In reality this is completely backwards. We know from real life experience:…

Popularity is the currency of populism, which is Western culture today. In populist culture, the only revolutionary is the person who thinks or does unpopular things. Not opposite to what others think or do, that’s populism too, creating a…

It was Edmund Burke who saw human institutions as humanity’s past and future, folded into the present. As humanity’s memory, its capacity to act outside the present moment. We need him again today, in a time where only what trends is real.…

The thing about public health targeting clean air is, we were already doing it. This was a major victory in many countries, including Oz, only 20 years ago. Covid should have been the spur to target respiratory disease too. What happened…

I looked at debates between infectious disease modellers and evolutionary biologists, about endemicity of Covid. ‘Dynamic endemicity’ just looks like endemic epidemicity. A never-ending epidemic disease pattern. The belief (faith) is that…

The greatest enemy of human existence is infection. Worth repeating every day that most people who have ever lived died from some form of infection, the majority before they’d even reached adulthood. Pandemics are defined by the number and…

Russian culture is still the playing out of the Russian Revolution. Chinese culture is the playing out of its revolution. Both populist movements. The West is the same, but refuses to see it. It’s living out the countercultural revolution…

‘Covid will always be with us’ is a political slogan, not science. Most infectious diseases will always be with us, it’s irrelevant to understanding a pandemic. It’s the same as ‘crime will always be with us’. It doesn’t mean ‘so let crime…

Fossil fuels were introduced to the world via a revolution. Only revolutions can puncture a status quo. It’ll take a revolution to get rid of them again. Only the Chinese are really trying. https://t.co/o30q2eA7hg

Paul O’Neill was Secretary of the Treasury under George W. Bush. But it was what he did at Alcoa that was revolutionary, and offers us a way to run our societies that would be far superior to electoral democracy. Put public health at the…

A status quo will never change itself, it has to be forced to change, by catastrophic disruption. The West is the winner of the last revolution, the fossil fuel-led Industrial Revolution. It'll be the last to realise how fucked it is for…

Why aren’t we interested in *why* populism works? And why it’s so toxic to the checks and balances we call democracy? What is popular under populism is the destruction of those same checks and balances. How could ‘the people’ like that?…

Whether it’s weaponising the hygiene hypothesis to suggest all infection is good for you, or using co-evolutionary ‘infection has always been with us’ arguments, infection normalisers are the scientific snake oil attention tarts of the…

Compare and contrast Sir Humprey here with the revolutionary ‘the people’ narratives coming out of the US and elsewhere. Is Sir Humphrey anti-democratic? Absolutely no. We need to understand the fundamental difference between…

@annabelcrabb here using the common belief that democracy is ‘the people’ thinking and acting, in this case to provide checks and balances on power. Why I think that’s a very dangerous misunderstanding. /1 https://t.co/OCFuRrJxZj…

An actual revolution put fossil fuels into our lives. No amount of meetings or agreements or KPIs will get them out. It will need another revolution. The Chinese are building one, maybe it will be enough. Maybe. https://t.co/cCynwDzNaZ

Day after day I watch brilliant people posting brilliant things into the complete void that public life now is. Desperately hoping they can get something to trend for even 10 minutes. None of that will lead to any meaningful, lasting…

Government activity as a proportion of GDP exploded in the 20th century, due to the rebuilding of societies, after two world wars, a pandemic and economic depression. From about 10% at the beginning of the century, to up to 50% by 1975,…

Despite the great charm of this show from the 1970s, it’s also a window into the birth of our own Western post-revolutionary culture. The counterculture. There’s not one child in the show. Just two couples with competing ‘lifestyles’.…

“Powers that liberal-democratic revolutionaries the world over fought to take away from absolute monarchs in the 18th and 19th centuries are being reconstituted under the American executive in the 21st century.” Yes. Kings are back. The…

Status runs all of human society. The idea science and other fields are an exception ignores that peer review is probably the most status-driven of all human processes. Peer review = ‘peer pressure’ anywhere else. https://t.co/qwrOhyG9Do

Using Turchin's work on elite overproduction, it's possible to conceive all societies as status rivalries between elites. What we call 'democracy' is really the degree of co-option of the wider population, to these rivalries. /1…

I think one of the most striking things to observe when here or when looking at public debates anywhere, is the hubris of control. The idea that humans determine their own fate. Societies are like ecosystems in evolution. Evolution tends…

So often in modern history the sane way forward for human progress is sidelined by the metastasising global impact of the latest American billionaire, in this case Rockefeller’s cheap oil at the turn of the 20th century. This is a problem…

Humans imitate, they create trends and follow them. No matter how idiot the trend, like wankpanzer vehicles. Imitative rivalry is the driver of all human thought and action. The fight for status, which is the fight for identity. We're…

I’ll begin 2026 as I ended 2025, by inviting people to admit that our ideas about how societies work aren’t working. Otherwise change might happen. All societies are rivalries between various shifting elites. The majority of people are…

Humans domesticate other species to ensure our own survival. As Paul Ewald says, we need to extend this to pathogens. They must be domesticated, towards lower virulence forms. Meaning adding TIME and evolution to the mix. Chronic, not just…

The Iranian protests have already been shoehorned into our usual ‘people power’ narratives. (Social media loves that narrative, it’s what it deludes itself that it’s doing every day.) Revolutions come from rivalry between existing elites.…

The last time ‘the people’ rose up in Iran. 1978. The West had restored its repressive monarchy, because their democratically-elected government wanted to nationalise the oil industry. ‘The people’ isn’t real. All revolutions replace an…

Most nations don’t build in time, they build in space. This causes them to lurch from one revolutionary crisis to the next, with collective memory wiped between crises. Like geopolitical measles. China builds in time more than in space. We…

This view on the progress of human knowledge owes more to affection for the US Constitution than to actual history. Knowledge is like evolution. It progresses one funeral at a time, to paraphrase Planck. Worldviews compete for status,…

McLuhan tried to teach us that the ‘medium is the message’. That first we make tools, and then our tools make us. The escalating apocalyptic narratives of social media made me remember this. Those narratives are symptomatic of our capture…

Because institutions ran our societies (brilliantly) for much of the last 70 years, most of us in the West have a level of knowledge of basic governance along a continuum from non-existent to childish. Take this latest purge. Both Xi and…

Again this is the huge gap in most people’s knowledge, the social basis for human thought, feeling and behaviour. Human beings aren’t fact-consuming machines, not information processors. They’re social animals. They pursue status, because…

Ben Stiller’s share highlights again how for US culture, everything is conceived as a stand-off between ‘we, the people’, and government. That’s a remnant of the country’s revolutionary origins. It’s trapped in that one mode of being.…

Societies have cultures, which are their true operating systems. Their ‘political’ teams are just subsets of that culture, politics is not culture. It’s a type of team sports within a culture. America is a revolutionary society. It was…

Hierarchy absorbs violence. Equality releases rivalry. Energy delays the reckoning; information accelerates it. Unpacking this key to understanding civilisations… /1 https://t.co/0ERRxaBh2v Hierarchy seems an evil when our belief is that…

We know how this always goes in the US. Fine speeches, people taking to the streets. Then…nothing. It lacks a sensible, calm, pragmatic desire for public administration. Everything is a revolution. https://t.co/1QGd0xXCvy

@doctorow’s concept of enshittification has achieved deserved success. But it’s also limited by an implicit framing, shared by all sides of today’s fake Left/Right team sports. That ‘the people’ is a thing, and must always be sovereign. So…

Teamification. Not as sexy a term as enshittification, but a much more insidious thing. The transformation of human life into perpetual fake debates, imitative rivalry between social teams. Generated by the destruction of status…

No human group of any size will undertake drastic, emergency change without being forced to. Usually via external catastrophic threat, from nature or from other societies. And that threat needs to be literally bringing the roof down on…

This is where Turchin’s work is so important. The two factors that lead to social revolution/collapse? Operation of the ‘wealth pump’ (elites vacuuming money from ordinary people). And a proliferation of rivals amongst the elite, who all…

The basic model of how individuals think, feel and act will determine how we understand societies to work. So today, we tend to believe individuals are reasoning agents, processing information about the world to optimise their individual…

“We can’t easily identify AI-made papers from the genuine ones.” So the genuine ones must be ‘slop’ too? Like all revolutions, change will come when the existing status quo is a smoking ruin. https://t.co/6IO8WW0m3P

Most of modern economics is a political assault upon the State as a functioning entity, not science. Both the ‘Left’ with its ideas about ‘the people’ leading and the ‘Right’ with its free markets share the same conceptual framework. A…

The ‘scientific method’ was actually invented by philosophers of science, and then retrospectively applied as a descriptive framework by scientists themselves. Most progress in science comes from conceptual leaps, not methodological…

Vaccination is failing because we’re misdiagnosing anti-vax as the population being more ‘hesitant’ about vaccines. The same myths we wallow in about democracy, that it’s led by ‘the people’. All change is led. Distrust in vaccination has…

Period drama reminds us of a time when social status was much more visible. Period drama is almost entirely about the negotiation of social status. Status is the central mechanism of all human life. We're social animals. Status is just as…

The critical drivers or currents of Western life right now? Populism, the deliberate destruction of hierarchies that run societies, the destruction of trust built upon experience and expertise. And the severing of the circle of life by the…

The bizarre idea of ‘community consultation’ is a window into our most stupid and destructive beliefs. The idea that human groups, of whatever size, have some sort of collective will, a group mind that you need to survey in various ways,…

I prefer the ancient stories, where humans were more acutely aware of how little of their own fate was theirs to determine. When gods were used to personify the much greater forces to which humans are subject. The Copernican revolution…

Post-revolutionary societies are mostly stuck in that ‘rise up’ mode for the rest of their short (in historical terms) existence. The revolution destroys every other way of doing things. https://t.co/kIv4DAGk88

The 3 great modern superpowers are America, Russia and China. Russia and China were both crippled by populist revolutions, heavily inspired by the West, creating dysfunctional cultural outcomes. China’s long history gave it some cultural…

The UK is famous for a sort of calm pragmatism. That’s due to its relative modern absence of revolutionary movements, meaning custom and tradition continue to play a steadying role in UK life. It was when it substituted its aristocracy…

The Anglosphere is a playground for permanent adolescents, operating on nothing but trending ‘feels’. It never recovered from its countercultural revolution. Its world of slogans and spin is now colliding with actual reality. Even the US…

America is intrinsically violent. Like other societies founded by revolution, it only knows rising up and overthrow as a way to effect social change. Revolutions generate more revolutions, because they destroy the memory, knowledge and…

I read that Google in its early days had a stringent hiring policy, with all (?) hires vetted from the top. The reason? A belief that even one hired idiot would become a nucleus of idiocy, within the organisation. There’s real wisdom about…

Yes, and no. The Western ‘world order’ obviously came out of Europe, and in some ways its its problem to solve too. But…Asia? It ran the world before Europe, and is kinda doing it again now, in meaningful, material, grown up ways. But… 1/2…

Societies don’t run on information. The more we keep yelling the facts into the void every day, the more demoralised we’ll become, wondering why nothing is happening. Societies run on status. Science was never listened to, it just once had…

America has never been a secular democracy. It’s always been a post-revolutionary plutocracy, with lashings of Christian piety. It’s not being overrun by fascists. It’s maturing to its essence, as a culture. https://t.co/4YCjuLaqEE

Turchin notes that mass tertiary education causes a dramatic escalation of elite rivalry, as frustrated graduates excluded from the elite develop ideological war machines. ‘The people’ don’t create revolutions. They’re foot soldiers to the…

I would love to know how much the thrilling acceleration of progress in this and many other areas of medical science right now is thanks to the use of AI. From what I’ve read, it’s very heavily involved in the rapid progress.…

Labor was told to be brave, to go hard on big reforms like capital gains and negative gearing. Humans are not economic animals. They’re status animals. Labor now discovering ‘the poor’ don’t like being seen as poor. They like to be seen as…

It’s these two buttons that more than anything else are destroying Western democracies. The two functions that converted social networking, a healthy and powerful thing, into social media, a toxic, civilisation-ending collective suicide.…

The ICE vs EV fake debate shows all the ways revolutionary change happens. An almost exact mirror of the earlier horse-car transition. The seeds are always already there, and then catastrophic, disruptive events drive tipping point,…

We’ve forgotten Charles Beard, prominent US historian. Beard saw that elites drive all societies. He said the Founders of the US were a cohesive elite of wealthy property owners, slaveholders, and federal bond investors. /1…