The semantics of "steal" is very important. And I'll just give you a small example. In many of our experiments, the way they work is the following: We give people a sheet of paper with 20 simple math problems, and we tell people go ahead and solve as many of those as you can, and we will pay you a dollar per question. People work as hard as they can for five minutes. At the end of the five minutes, we say stop, put your pencil down, count how many questions you got correctly. Now take the sheet of paper and go to the back of the room and shred it so there's no evidence remaining. Come to the front of the room and tell us how many questions you got correctly. And people come, and they say they solved six problems, we pay them $6, they go home. What people don't know in the experiment is we played with the shredder. And the shredder only shreds the sides of the page, but the main body of the page remains intact, and we can find out how many questions they really solved correctly. And what we find is that lots of people cheat a little bit. So we've tested about 30,000 people so far, and we found 12 big cheaters, people who cheated kind of all the way, and together they stole $150 from us. And we found 18,000 little cheaters that together stole $36,000 from us. And I think it's - for me, it's kind of this realization, that it's true that there are few big cheaters out there and it's really terrible, but the capacity to cheat a little bit and feel good about ourselves is really much more common than we think it is. And because of that, it's much more dangerous. And because of that, also, we need to think about how we engineered the environment - especially around politics and the business world - not to let that cheating kind of blossom and create tremendous devastation.So, you know, we tend to have an easy time kind of raising a finger and say, oh, it's this banker or it's this particular person, and if anybody else was in the job, they would have acted very differently. The reality is that we all have the capacity to cheat a little bit and feel good about ourselves.
Points well made. Seems like so many of our anti-vaxxers are like the 18,000 little cheaters all stealing our freedom from the larger pool that we are all part of. An anti-vaxxer thinking, "I don't deserve to take any risk by getting the jab, I'll slide by and steal some protection from those saps that are listen to actual scientific reasoning. That choice mulitplied by the thousands now becomes our problem with the Delta Variant.
I've been coming around to the theory that progressive politics is driven by empathy for several years now. COVID has made me hypothesize that conservative politics is also - but that conservatives lack the abstraction necessary to see someone outside of their homogeneous socioeconomic strata as human. I think it's a much easier sell for progressives to go "we're all in this together." I think it's a much easier sell for conservatives to go "it's a matter of personal responsibility." Unfortunately, there's a profound scientific bias to "all in this together" in virulent contagious diseases. I remember when AIDS was GRID - "Gay-Related Immune Deficiency." It wasn't until we'd vilified a hemophiliac kid to death that Hollywood could even think of making Philadelphia. My wife disagrees with me, but I saw a profound sea change in the Los Angeles anti-vaxxer community when Disneyland had a measles outbreak, and California mandated childhood vaccines in response. There were a lot of entitled white women firmly in the "herd immunity is what the little people owe me" camp but as soon as it became "and I'm going to have to home-school them and my friends at Whole Foods don't think I'm cool anymore" all the casuals got their kids poked. There were still anti-vaxers, they were just militant. They were unreachable. Nobody was on the fence anymore. We're seeing that now. We lost a client yesterday because we told her that if she wanted to bring her 5-year-old with her to appointments, her 5-year-old was gonna have to wear a mask. We lost another long-time client because she decided she didn't want any vaxed people "shedding antibodies" around her while she was in labor. I don't know if I have a point. Mother Earth News did a survey about six years ago to find out the political leanings of their readership and were stunned to discover that racist preppers will put up with the hippies if it means they can learn about windmills, and that granola-crunchies will totally stockpile AR-15s if it means they can ride out TEOTWAWKI. I think there used to be at least two axes in politics: "I do/don't care about my fellow human being" and "I do/don't trust my government as far as I can throw it." It kinda feels like COVID is bringing those axes to light again as the CrunchGranolas end up discovering they have more in common with the redhat libertarians than the BLM libtards. I guess my point is the anti-vaxxers ain't the 18,000 little cheaters. They've opted out of our society but since they don't have anywhere else to go, they'll show their contempt for the one they're stuck in. That's why teenaged boys vandalize shit - they have no agency but they have a lot of anger. The lady with the unmasked 5-year-old is an anti-vax protester who made the front page of the San Diego Union Tribune by like beating someone with a sign at a protest or some shit. We weren't sorry to see her go. What about the 5-year-old tho