Helen De Cruz
@Helenreflects
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Philosopher writing on science, religion, SFF, @SFWA , Codex, lute videos, Wonderstruck forthc. w @PrincetonUP Any pronouns
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Joined January 2014
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Princeton University Press sent me an advance author copy of Wonderstruck! (The non-advance copies will come out next month)
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My 9-y-old finds quantum mechanics, for whatever reason, very disturbing. He particularly dislikes superposition, the double-slit experiment, and Schrödinger's cat. Today, he asked me to explain quantum entanglement, "But only a little. If I say, "stop" then you have to stop".
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Today I learned about this elaborate eulogy carved into stone of a 1st c Roman husband for his wife (identity uncertain, traditionally referred to as "Turia")
It's the longest personal document of this kind. He loved her a lot, they were married for 40 years.
Highlights: 1/
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Who among you does *not* have a reference manager (e.g., Endnote, Bibtex, Zotero etc) but just compiles your references manually for each thing you write?
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Some loose thoughts on masking (my second day in Seoul). I had no idea the norm against masking in the US is so *strong*. Basically, if you mask at all you'd better be immunocompromised or have someone in your household who is, otherwise you are weird/not living your life/etc 1/
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Some EU citizen friends I know are leaving, the headlines are saying that they're "going back home". If you've lived here for over 20 years, have a British spouse, British kids, a British mortgage, British friends, a British job, you're not going home. You're leaving home.
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I don't know who came up with the analogy that covid is like smoking, but it's brilliant. Covid is like smoking in policy, in that all the peer-reviewed lit says reinfections are bad and cause: strokes, brain inflammation, premature death, diabetes, etc 1/
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This laudation is such a beautiful and timeless declaration of love. Wow. I cried a bit when I read the full text. You can read it here + new analysis of who "Turia" could have been, the social context of women in Rome, etc /end
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We learn divorce was super-common "Rare are marriages as long as ours—marriages ended by death, not cut short by divorce. It was granted to us that ours lasted into its forty- first year" -- husband then is sad it's bc she died, not he, even though he is significantly older 😭7/
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It begins already like this "You were orphaned suddenly before the day of our wedding when both of your parents were killed together in the solitude of the countryside. It was mainly through your efforts that the death of your parents did not go unavenged:" 3/
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This elaborate carved eulogy challenges our expectations about Roman women. Far from these meek, defenseless creatures the husband keeps on going on about how his wife saved him (and doesn't seem to feel threatened in his masculinity for this), how she avenged her family, etc. 2/
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He then goes on to lavish praise on her: she's great at managing stuff, she is virtuous, she is religious without being superstitious, devoted to her family... he then says "I must skip over quite a number of your other kindnesses" 8/
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Well, who knew a virtuous Roman woman's duties would include avenging her parents? He continues "You insistently demanded punishment and you got it, so strenuously performing your familial duty that even if we had been present, we could not have done anything more." 4/
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He expresses gratitude for her help, and says unabashedly she saved his life (no toxic Roman masculinity?) "In recognition of the greatness of all the good deeds you did on my behalf, I shall display to the eyes of all an inscription that tells how you saved my life." 10/
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An interesting incident (I put the full quote below) is where she goes and pleads her husband's case to reinstate him (as a senator?) and she gets beaten but she does it nonetheless, pleading his case 9/
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She then successfully litigated a dispute over her father's will, ensuring her sister and she got fair equal shares of the inheritance, "you completed the defense that you had undertaken, all on your own, of respect for your father, devotion to your sister, and loyalty to us"6/
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But all at the end "A natural sorrow jerks away my power of self-control. I am overwhelmed by sadness and cannot stand firm either against the grief or the fear that anguish me. Going back over my earlier troubles and fearing what the future may bring, I break down."😭😭 14/
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Seeing people get covid again and consoling themselves with "It's inevitable now" and "WAYGD, mask forever?" -- even if you don't like masking, this defeatist attitude is socially engineered and lets governments get away with not implementing simple interventions 1/
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You have to imagine this teenager (Roman women married v young) avenging her parents, and then waiting for her fiancé (writer of the laudatio): "After you did obtain punishment of the guilty, you immediately went to the house of my mother, where you awaited my homecoming." 5/
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Things we said we would fix back in 2020, but didn't bother to when we went back to normal:
1/ essential workers seem pretty essential for the well functioning of our society. They need better pay, better working conditions, paid leave and things like that.
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He concludes as follows "Thee fruits of your life will remain available to me. With the thought of your glory presenting itself, I shall strengthen my resolve; in- structed by your deeds, I shall stand up to Fortune, who has not snatched everything away from me." 13/
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But husband refuses. "I must say that I became so enraged that I lost my mind; I was so horrified at your designs that it was very hard to regain my composure...; I could never have assented to your proposal without bringing great shame upon me and unhappiness on both of us." 12/
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This paper from 2021 aged well.
"a return to pre-pandemic social and economic conditions without fully suppressing SARS-CoV-2 will lead to extensive viral spread, resulting in a high disease burden even in the presence of vaccines"
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Okay (you see, a very long inscription in stone). Peace is restored, these two happy Roman citizens are thinking: kids. But unfortunately, it's not happening. After a while it becomes clear the wife is not conceiving, "on that account, you mentioned the word “divorce."" 11/
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Whenever I see things like this, I'm reminded of this awesome thread on how to deal with unbearable heat:
I grew up in Pakistan, which gets really, really unbearably hot in the summer.
Here are some tips on how to manage the heat. 🧵
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I saw someone today whom I had not seen since September. We were at a memorial service. It was packed. I was one of two people wearing a mask then. She then asked me "What's wrong, are you not feeling well?"
I said, "No, I just protect myself against covid."
So now we spoke 1/
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"people used to live life to the fullest when the plague and smallpox were going around," is a minimizing argument that's used against people who, in spite of public health and governments having given up, continue to protect themselves. Here's why it doesn't work: 1/
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It is very strange, reflecting on this. I am continuing to mask, but only one of my colleagues is. I feel I keep on apologizing for masking (including to my students etc) and I am wondering: why am I apologizing? The answer is: social norms. Social norms strongly influence us 2/
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I don't understand academics. Our brain = our bread and butter. Without it properly functioning, we cannot work.
We read peer reviewed lit and trust it. That lit says: covid = bad for brain.Really bad!
Yet no mitigation in our conferences or classrooms.
Our workplaces are unsafe.
'The growing body of research now confirms that COVID-19 should be considered a virus with a significant impact on the brain. The implications are far-reaching, from individuals experiencing cognitive struggles to the potential impact on populations and the economy'.
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Sad philosopher fact: Leibniz died age 70, and his funeral was only attended by his personal secretary.
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I think the best explanation for why the US became anti-mask is that it was politically expedient to do so. It allowed Biden, for instance, to claim a win against the pandemic (hence the talk of being in a "better place" it being "over" as ppl continue to die and be disabled 20/
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Short intermezzo part 2: Getting covid is no joke. It affects all parts of your body including your brain, your blood (clots), your immune system. Receipts here:
So I am assuming that it is rational even for pure self-interest to wear a good mask 9/
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Short intermezzo to say: Masks do work. Whether mask *mandates* work in the US is apparently continued up for debate, but if you wear an N95 or N94 consistently then you do lower your risk of getting covid 8/
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Surgery went well. Damn tumor is out. We have not won war yet but this is beginning hopefully of path to health. Pain manageable. Will post more soon. Thank you all for concern, wishes and prayers
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Social norms explain, for instance, why so many of us are fine eating animal products although the agro meat, milk and egg industry is horrible and atrocious and produces a lot of suffering. Because it is socially acceptable (and in fact being vegan or veg isn't) 3/
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Okay, so masks work. Covid is a *bad* disease. It's a public health disaster. This is why Koreans, even after the mandates have dropped (now only in healthcare to my knowledge) continue to mask, both in and outdoors. 10/
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This is strange because there was, a while ago, a polarized split between conservatives (anti-mask) and liberals (pro-mask). The anti-maskers had truck convoys and protests etc. but then something weird happened: all of a sudden, the liberals were on board w the anti-maskers! 6/
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Whereas, in Seoul it is totally normal to even wear a mask outside (I'd say about 50% does), and certainly inside and nobody's going to accost you about how you're not living your best life or living in fear. So the social norm is very mask-normalized/friendly 15/
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Now, which norm seems most repressive and freedom-suppressing to you: the Korean norm or the US norm? Personally, I have felt so liberated the past few days bc I don't feel like I need to apologize or that I'm being ridiculous or a coward for masking 26/
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We would love to think that in our everyday moral deliberations we weigh and make decisions based on our own moral insights, but unfortunately, a lot of our day-to-day moral decisions are influenced and guided by social norms. They make things acceptable or not 4/
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The tourism argument for the British monarchy falls apart if you realize that Versailles has more visitors than Buckingham palace. You can have royalist aesthetics without upholding an unjust, antiquated institution
#AbolishTheMonarchy
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She thought it was fine if you were vaccinated and that the disease was now mild. But how mild is mild if you are ill for weeks and then are tired for months more? This was her first (known) infection. This is an educated woman. Many people genuinely do not know 3/
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I think paradoxically a mask-friendly culture bc it lowers transmission makes it easier for you to make individualized decisions about risk to exposing yourself to the virus. Do you want to go clubbing in Seoul's nightclubs? You could (and mask next day in classroom) 17/
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Whereas the social norm in S Korea seems to be something like this: Covid is going to stay around, so we need to exercise caution in many situations "for personal health" (masking indoors and even outdoors). However, we balance this with other needs (e.g., restaurants) 25/
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Now, what I am puzzling over is why did liberals decide to become anti-mask? Why did we en masse adopt the position of the freedom convoy truckers in Canada and other anti-maskers? It's not the vaxx (cf omicron) it came later... 19/
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Indeed, the social norm in the US says something like this: Covid is never going to go away. If you continue to stay cautious in an attempt to save your heart, brain, immune system etc you are a coward who lives in fear, and someone who is not really living their life, really 24/
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Masks are, unfortunately, a very visible sign of the pandemic not being over. So it helps to have a strong norm against wearing masks. You'll note how suddenly the group of people who need to protect themselves became very small from initially a large group 21/
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and although covid is worse for people already vulnerable no-one is invulnerable to its ill effects. So, the literature (as with smoking) is very very clear. However if you look around as a layperson you might wonder: is it really so bad? Everyone's going about their lives 2/
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So, the person who wished to protect herself from harmful second-hand smoke is like the person now trying to not catch covid over and over. Without public policies of clean air, next-gen vaxxes etc in place it's going to be a struggle and you either have to withdraw 7/
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@laurentoget
Strangely mine is totally fine with relativity, we watched special and general relativity videos and he’s totally cool with it, so i expected he would also enjoy quantum mechanics, but unfortunately…
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The way people mask here in Seoul would describe as consistent but imperfect. In the sense that you cannot mask when you eat so they go off then, and there are other occasions too. But in general people mask a lot indoors and even outdoors. They do it when asked "for health" 13/
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So, I have a very difficult, dangerous health situation. I’ve beaten bad odds before and fully intend to do so here, but I’m frightened —prayers and good vibes appreciated, and never forget: our lives are fragile and precious
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Just like when I was a kid when I went to family gatherings, these etc were in a permanent blue haze of smoke. There was smoke in trains, offices, restaurants... Restaurants were particularly bad. It was not fun to go if you weren't a smoker 3/
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Whereas, in the US, the anti-mask social norm makes any decision to socialize etc so weighty. You'll be the weird one again or you cave to social pressure and take off the mask. I am talking about things like attending a public lecture, where masking doesn't make a difference 18/
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She told me how she got covid shortly after then and was so, so tired for many months. How she had difficulties concentrating and getting anything done.
She said "I think you are wise to still protect yourself against covid, I didn't know it would be this bad." 2/
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I'd say Koreans are not "living in fear", neither are they "not living their best life" etc. This is in part bc their masking is imperfect (though consistent), e.g., they go to restaurants, they go clubbing, karaoke singing etc. Still they reduce risk in many situations 16/
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By focusing on these disparities, covid is no longer something that affects us all (which it does!) but something that happens to "them" (i.e., not me). Hence, I think white liberals have basically said "not my problem" and moved on from masking 28/
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Compare this to the US. If you think of masking outside you are just *ridiculous* and apparently invite negative commentary. There is a lot of supposition about "last holdouts", "living in fear", "not living your best life" etc if you wear a mask 14/
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So I feel slowly ever so slowly the penny is dropping that this is not something you can wish away, or that bad outcomes are so rare you can afford not to care about it. I very much wish that I (and a large stack of peer reviewed lit) is wrong and this has become harmless 5/
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Also good to remember, doing the right thing if it's not the societal norm rarely *feels* good. It's often unglamorous and a slog. But it's still good to keep on going. Another thing as I'm rambling late into the night, I do sometimes see ppl write things on here 7/
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I'm really very heartened by the love and support from people. I'm as many of you know gravely ill, and a surgery is planned very soon. It's unchartered terrain, and I'm frightened. Any prayers, thoughts very much appreciated.
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I am thinking that academia globally has problems (e.g., adjunctification, outpacing of doctorates to academic job market), but in addition different countries seem to have specific unique bad features to them. From own experience and hearsay:
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And people who smoke the whole time [are reinfected the whole time] *seem* fine, and you think am I panicking? It all seems OK! Cue grandpa who is 90 smoking a pack a day. It's hard for individuals to discern the population-level effects of smoking policies 4/
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But (see receipts in the thread) it's not. There are still hundreds of people dying of covid every day in the US. There are still many more dying of stroke, heart attacks etc. They all went out maskless and didn't update their boosters bc the social norm says "it's fine" 23/
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We look in our social milieu what's acceptable and how we should behave. Hence, a lot of the "masking is altruistic/caring" is moot unfortunately because the overall social norm in the US is: unless you have a serious health condition, do not mask 5/
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@GregTrayling
I think I gave that info too early (we sometimes watch physics and math videos, which he generally enjoys, but this was a video on the double slit experiment--I don't recall which--and it filled him with dread about the quantum world)
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In sum: the US anti-mask norm is harmful, makes people falsely believe covid is not their problem and also makes them throw disabled people under the bus. It's possible to have a different norm (cf South Korea) but that would not have been politically expedient 34/
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Remember Cambridge Analytica? Not long ago right?
So I wonder why my friends are enthusiastically sharing aged/gender swapped pictures of themselves on an app called
#FaceApp
The creator is a Russian tech firm we don't know much about, Wireless Lab. 1/
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But more and more people, I get the impression, do get the sense something is wrong. My sister-in-law has a grandchild who is 8 yrs old or so and who got covid + flu and had to be hospitalized w pneumonia just last month, she wondered "Is it normal for kids to get pneumonia?" 4/
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The people with long covid realize that it is not something that only affects people who had poor health to begin with. I realize, there is something very callous about the anti-mask norm because it explicitly throws people who are disabled and immunocompromised under the bus 31/
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"People in the past died of infectious diseases all the time and so we should likewise do that today" is weird ahistorical erasure of all the public health advances we've made, all the infrastructure we've created to improve health and to remove sources of infection 6/
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It wasn't the introduction of the vaccine that affected this change. You will remember omicron which caused a huge wave of death and disability in 2022. Vaxx was already available. During omicron wave, liberals were still pro-mask 7/
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I asked local people and they say the mask-wearing outdoors has increased since 2020. There was mask-wearing before 2020 due to the bad air in Seoul. But it has now increased, and there is little reason to assume it will suddenly drop even without mandates 12/
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If anyone is so inclined, any prayers, thoughts, well wishes appreciated for my second surgery which is tomorrow (April 9). This should hopefully set me on a path of complete healing. I believe it, I want to fight for it. I'm a bit scared, but hopeful.
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But crucially, the public sphere is now more dismantled than it was in the 2000s when anti-smoking legislation finally took effect and I could go to bars and restaurants in peace without having to breathe in that harmful air. So it's unclear to me how it will go with covid /end
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"Scientists used to be much more playful in their academic writing: they used italics and exclamation marks, they wrote ‘charming descriptions’, and they didn’t hesitate to tell their own research in the form of a story" Why are papers dull now?
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But it isn't. So best we can do is inform, model sensible behavior, pressure orgs and workplaces and schools to be safe work environments, and hope eventually there's enough critical mass for the tide to turn, and we finally can get a *real* exit ramp, not the pretend one now 6/
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Now imagine you say: I don't want to be reinfected the whole time. I read the lit, I am playing Russian roulette with my health and I don't want it [or: I don't want to smoke and risk all these bad effects]. Well, bad news if you want to be part of public life you'll be exposed 5
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Or accept being exposed. Now I hope that as with smoking, the penny will finally drop. And there was a tobacco lobby delaying legislation but there's no pro-virus lobby (you'd think...it certainly seems like the virus has representatives/lobbyists everywhere) 8/
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First, it was old people. Now it's totally fine for an 80-year-old to get his 3rd infection. Then, it was unvaccinated people. Now, only severely immunocompromised people need to watch out. If you can believe the social norm, it's fine for everyone else to get it 22/
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You might like Descartes, but do you love him as much as Malebranche did? Upon reading Descartes, age 26, he "had such violent palpitations of the heart that he was obliged to leave his book at frequent intervals and to interrupt his reading of it in order to breathe more easily”
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When you think of yourself as potentially vulnerable, then it makes sense to protect yourself. The American public otoh, is massaged into thinking covid is someone else's problem. Hence the main advocates for masking are ppl with long covid, disabled people etc 30/
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Also, sorry but I thought we could do better? We have tools. We know how disease transmission works. How weird to plunge yourself in ignorance. Imagine if ppl did this when we made major public works to clean our drinking water: too much effort! Let's just die of cholera 5/
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I made a bug report to
@duolingo
I am also posting it here because they are also on X/Twitter.
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The prof who taught me intro to philosophy loved to go clubbing and drinking when he was younger, but he also valued his rationality. So, having drunk a few glasses he would ask himself: Can I still formulate to myself Anselm's ontological argument? If he could not, he went home.
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I read a lot of 17th-century letters for a new project and it's kinda disconcerting to see how people are really sad and devastated by how their kids, spouse, loved ones, keep on getting killed by diseases. They were not cavalier about it! They were very sad!! 2/
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There may also be other sinister reasons for why the social norm in the US shifted so quickly. A lot of news coverage focused on racial disparities (more Black ppl and Indigenous ppl dying) and on the adverse outcomes for the immunocompromised and disabled people 27/
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Second-hand smoke hangs everywhere. When I was pregnant of my first child in 2003 I shared a large office space with a chain smoker. In fairness co-workers asked her to stop, but she simply said no. There was no escaping it (less of a working from home culture). 6/
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S Korea, on the other hand is much more homogenous. The greatest disparities are gender and class. Overall population health is better. So, it is easier to see covid as something that could affect "me", hence masking becomes for personal health 29/
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2/ School inequality: Some schools struggle to provide any form of education because kids have no stable internet connection, are in a car close to a place that has WiFi trying to log into google classroom. Let's address that inequality and invest in schools and teachers!
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PS: another symptom of the US anti-mask norm is the weird uptick in social media accounts that will try to shame people who are cautious in spite of the norm as "being in a cult," "being mentally ill", "being effeminate" (for men) etc. I block and move on
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An 1896 caricaturist predicted Zoom Christmas celebrations in 2020! Translation (roughly): My wife visits her aunt in Budapest, my oldest daughter is studying to be a dentist in Melbourne, ... this does not prevent us from celebrating Christmas with the telephonoscope.
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Except, there is no tension. You can live your best life as a society through the imperfect but consistent masking that e.g., Koreans do. I will note that fatalism ("it's going to be around forever") is also a denialist recipe (cf climate change, similar dynamic) 33/
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A lot of Nietzsche discourse and it's weird how people read him so differently. Nietzsche tells you to embrace your fate, the difficult things in your life too, to be joyful in defiance of customary morality, to chart your own path. That's not nihilistic at all!
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Hence, there is an added element, because we have (hopefully) not all become callous eugenicists who wish to kill people around us by not mitigating a virus. That added element is the YOLO: covid is going around forever, and we must not live in fear but live our best lives 32/
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I'm back (thanks for letting me know!!) But i'm still nonplussed and my already declining confidence in this platform got another hit. It makes me wonder how can we as users exert *any* kind of control on what the platform does? Voting w feet is fine as it goes, but otherwise??
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Mainz Carnival, Germany. Photo shared with permission from someone who was there.
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About how if you get covid it's a moral failing on your part, and how you can totally make your life so that you can't get it, but w this amount of virus around it's not guaranteed. Also ppl live with others who can bring it in, etc. But that's no reason to throw in the towel 8/
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The origins of Dark Academia lie in the 16th century hermetic philosophical tradition of magic and neoplatonism, which drew a connection between a melancholy disposition and having access to secret, divine knowledge.
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