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Are You Calibrated Properly?
Ways to see the world more accurately
There are a lot of doomers around these days. You know, people who post this sort of thing on the internet:
If you look at any doomer-style post, including the one above, you’ll see plenty of optimists who reply that the doomer is hopelessly deluded — how could she not realize that everything’s great?
Many of our biggest cultural and political conversations can lapse into this sort of whiplash-inducing, all-or-nothing dialectic.
Take the pandemic. The doomers would say: We’re in the middle of a horrific pandemic, during which millions have been sacrificed to keep the machinery of capitalism turning, and now we’ve abandoned the vulnerable to severe illness or worse. The pandemic isn’t over, folks, and the “new normal” is a stressful, uncertain mess!
While an optimist would reply: Sure, there was a pandemic, but the real story is the miracle of medical science that produced vaccines in mere months and saved millions of lives. The system worked!
