Home: thoughts from an evening

Playing with spreading in networks, it is salient that the spreading of a thing is very dependent on the susceptibility of the ground. Which is the same as saying that you should make something that there is demand for. But perhaps looking around at what kinds of things people and places are susceptible to is a different way to ask. (What am I susceptible to? Off the top of my head right now, I want to say warm delicious things in cups that you can eat for breakfast, simple ways to keep things neat, excuses for knitting, packages that are nice to open, convenient ways to not have to think about coronavirus, phone games that don’t involve words. What do I have demand for? Safe, legal, psychedelic drugs, a comfortable and cozy place to sit and work undistractedly, the heights of experience and understanding… not sure if these are drawn from different distributions.) This reminds me of a bus ride where my friend and I tried to describe everything in terms of natural selection, and came to the view that the reproductive cycle of chairs involved not only chairs themselves and chair-makers, but also a kind of chair-hole or chair-idea that had its own interacting shadow proliferation among a population of hosts. 

Lately social media is mostly about coronavirus, and a lot of it is ideas about what to do. For instance, we should try variolation, or we should infect healthy people to try out vaccines. I never have much idea who ‘we’ are who might do things. Who can decide to try variolation? Someone official somewhere, I suppose. But it seems to matter who, and why they don’t do it now. I don’t just wonder this in coronavirus times; this is a thing I am usually confused about. Do the people discussing interventions generally know who they want to be doing something? Does the implicitly targeted decision-maker know? It’s not clear that anyone should know necessarily—a system that involves everyone saying ‘we should X!’ until it gets loud enough that enough people wonder if maybe they are meant to be doing X or know someone who is, that the relevant person gets the message is maybe the ideal system. I’m just curious whether that is the system. 

I also feel like there must be a more efficient way to evaluate all these proposals, which would involve spreadsheets and people who aren’t mostly tentatively procrastiworrying. (Is someone doing that? Is it meant to be me? I assume not? But does the person whose job it is know? Are intellectuals on Facebook a significant idea generation and selection unit? Again, I’m not sure how one tells if one has an important role in all this..) It is also possible that this is the ideal system, and I just like systematization too much. I am reminded of how much better a giant folder called ‘stuff’ with search is than a carefully organized set of files.