Covid-19 and Human Irrationality

&gt;While I’m not particularly interested in pandemics, I do find it an interesting and unique opportunity to observe human behavior.<p>I too am also a robot who&#x27;s so logical that I&#x27;m above any form of human bias or irrationality. I observe these covid-19 events around the world and find it interesting because I&#x27;m too analytical. That&#x27;s my main problem, I&#x27;m so analytical that I like to pretend I&#x27;m better than humans and pretend I find human behavior &quot;interesting&quot; when really I&#x27;m just being a dumb human myself in pretending.

Who is the author and what are their credentials? Imho, this article bases a lot of it&#x27;s logic on if so facto statements about human behavior which could be argued. I got a strong: &quot;The world is either black or white&quot; vibe from it.

This is a very weird evaluation: It describes a post mortem on all of humanity from a site that, from what I can see, is mostly an entrepreneurship op-ed e-zine?<p>Certain points are also reflect a strange dissociation or at least misunderstandings of the very thing the essay appears to be describing as interesting to evaluate. For an essay describing human behavioral analysis, the writer appears to look down on emergent human behavior like elbow-bumping. Its analysis of individual rationality vs irrationality is incredibly silly- it is far more rational to evaluate the circumstance to understand that a systemic risk exists and to encourage systemic action as well as individual action than it is to hoard-buy toilet paper.

One thing that is fascinating me is where to draw the line between forgiving an understandable delay, and really blaming leadership for an unforgivable delay. Like, I am seeing blame for the us administration not preparing or responding more quickly to public knowledge in mid-february, but... what percentage of us had the forethought to divest our retirement accounts at that time? (I&#x27;m not looking for bragging anecdotes here, my point is that most people didn&#x27;t.) There&#x27;s a point at which anyone is <i>somewhat</i> certain that <i>something</i> bad is happening or about to happen, without having any sense of intensity or speed, where there&#x27;s a certain level of human reaction delay. So is there a good standard for when it is no longer forgivable human&#x2F;societal behavior, and becomes truly egregious cruelty, willful ignorance, and blame-worthy incompetence?

I did an HN post this morning about Disney having the best day in company history yesterday...there is no rationality or reason for this, and sorry to every HNer I already mentioned the Keynes quote about the market remaining irrational longer than investors remaining liquid.<p>But seriously we have so much in the way of resources, but instead the millionaires and billionaires are investing in a cartoon mouse and company that runs theme parks, hotels and cruise ships that will not only remain closed for the foreseeable future, but when they do open people will not risk going.<p>Its not just the public companies either, look at the university systems. Between just the top 10 schools with the largest endowments and they have collectively over $250B stashed away. 10 non-profits have $250B, they have labs and they have researchers at the ready...but how much of that money are they spending to combat this? How many of these brilliant minds are at work in the labs?<p>I won&#x27;t even get into the government response...all you need to do it look at the President of the US who accepts and promotes medication based on his feelings and hopes and shuts down actual medical experts. It is all so ridiculous believing this is a manufactured conspiracy would almost be easier to accept than what is actually happening right now. But when you are dead, you will be glad you bought that Disney stock for under $100&#x2F;share, it is after all a once in a lifetime opportunity.