Helping facts and action spread faster than a virus

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“You are always behind where you think you are”

— Dr. Anthony Fauci, National Institute of Health

If there’s only one thing you take away from this website it’s this: Your human mind is not built to understand exponential growth. 

As humans, we always underestimate exponential growth. Even when it’s growing slowly.

If you are going to act to stop COVID-19, and I hope you are, then you must act much more forcefully now than you think is needed. And you must do so without panicking.  This has been hard for me. So I have put my thoughts on steps we can all take together in the Practical Advice page. 

As humans we also need feedback to know that our actions have made a difference. I have put the visualization tools you need to see how your actions make a difference on the Data page. 

If you want to avoid either state security lock down or deaths on the order of 10% of your population then act now. Act more forcefully than you think you need to. And enlist as many others as you can. When you are trying to get others to act, please do so with love and not shame.

“In a free and open society citizens must be provided with facts presented in way that enables them to act.”

— Peter Khoury

This website is currently devoted to the coronavirus. Its aim is to allow everyone to viscerally understand, as best we can, what is going on.  You might find that some of this information might make you anxious. Please know that the right response is not panic. You can affect the course of this pandemic not by doing anything on your own but by acting as a community.  The virus spreads in the community and so the community as a whole needs to act. You are a link in that chain by affecting other people’s behavior. That is the purpose of this website. To help you understand the data, your own biases as a human being so that you have the tools to affect other people’s behavior.  The way that this is not going to end in a shit show is if you can spread this information socially. This website is as eclectic as I am I hope you find a scrap of information here that you feel like sharing with somebody else. Remember that the spreading of high quality information is one of the keys to stopping this pandemic.

> How this crisis relates to climate change. (click to read)

Both COVID-19 and climate change are exponential processes. This pandemic has the advantage of taking place on a human time scale. The human mind is even more poorly equipped to think of and react to exponential processes taking place on a generational timescale. I think of this pandemic being humanity’s fire drill for climate change. This pandemic will have a massive impact on our culture but it is not apocalyptical. Climate change could potentially be apocalyptical and I don’t want to take the risk. At some point in the future when this crisis has passed this website will devote itself to climate change which is arguably a much bigger threat than the current coronavirus scare.