death of time

History offers so many examples of epic underestimations. These run from Goliath’s dismissal of David as “little more than a boy” to NATO’s misjudgement of the fighting prowess of the scrappy, dishevelled Taliban. We also find this pattern in today’s miscalculations about COVID-19.

We are subject to what Israeli psychologist Tali Sharot calls an “optimism bias”. In tough times, optimism enables us to carry on. But sometimes our need for good news woefully misleads, even as it coaxes us on. We not only underestimate what we’re up against, but we’re also overly impressed by our own prowess — especially when it comes to technology.

The Philistines saw the little boy David and their champion Goliath. Goliath was certainly big, but he also boasted impressive tech — “a bronze helmet on his head … a coat of scale armour of bronze weighing five thousand shekels”, and a spear with an iron point weighing “six hundred shekels.” Our disbelief about the swift victory of the Taliban in Afghanistan is partly about the amazing tech — armoured vehicles, helicopters, jet planes, and the rest — that the Afghan National Defence Security Forces had been bequeathed by NATO.

This pattern of underestimating our adversary and being overly impressed by what we can do carries over to COVID-19. The pandemic has taken pretty much everyone by surprise. But there’s an attitude toward the virus and what we pit against it that explains our susceptibility to the same “over before Christmas” predictions about the pandemic that characterised the opening months of the First World War.

Our contempt for SARS-CoV-2 is well captured by an incredulous June 2020 statement to the United States’ House Committee on Energy and Commerce by the director of the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, Robert Redfield: “We have all done the best that we can do to tackle this virus and the reality is that it’s brought this nation to its knees. We are probably going to spend $7 trillion because of one little virus.”

Redfield’s “one little virus” (SARS-CoV-2) measures 0.1 to 0.3 microns — between one tenth to three tenths of a millionth of a meter and has a genome of around 30,000 base pairs. This sounds like quite a lot until you compare it to the elephantine 3.2 billion base pairs of the human genome. Our recent history of COVID variants of concern has shown that the virus has some capacity to respond to humanity’s countermeasures. But surely, we think, there’s got to be a limit to the amount of novelty that can be squeezed out of the small number of protein-coding genes in those 30,000 base pairs.

Pretty soon the medicines made by our exponentially improving technologies must exceed the limit of what even the feistiest 0.3 micron virus can muster.

The tech that today shoulders much of our optimism is mRNA, the basis for the Pfizer and Moderna COVID-19 vaccines. According to representatives of Moderna — a pioneer in mRNA technology — the company was built “on the guiding premise that if using mRNA as a medicine works for one disease, it should work for many diseases.” Moderna’s mRNA platform promises to fix many of modernity’s ills. If you type “mRNA” and “cancer” into a search engine, you shouldn’t be surprised to learn that Moderna’s mRNA platform is the basis of the latest big hopes for breakthroughs against cancer.

History is the best remedy for our tendency to overestimate the power of our technologies and to underestimate our adversaries. We need to look, not only at history as a sequence of facts, but also inside to recall the dashed hopes when yet another confident statement that “this time will be different” fails to come to pass.

Siddhartha Mukherjee’s biography of cancer, The Emperor of All Maladies, reveals a pattern of dashed hope for cures for cancer. The years since President Richard Nixon declared war on cancer in 1971 have seen so many promises of imminent cures. When in 1998 the Nobel laureate James Watson told the New York Times that cancer would be cured within two years, there was a great deal of excitement. Yet cancer remained defiantly uncured. There’s a good chance that shrewd marketing of Moderna’s mRNA platform will soon have us hoping that cure for cancer could come from mRNA. A focus on the history told by Mukherjee should dampen those hopes.

Now, we have rueful reflections on how invading Afghanistan went for the British and the Soviets. The facts of Afghan history were not forgotten, but we tended to think that now must be different because neither the British of the 1840s nor the Soviets of the 1980s had the Boeing AH-64 Apache twin-turboshaft attack helicopter.

We shouldn’t be quite so surprised that a 0.3 micron virus is able to evolve to responses to our amazing mRNA vaccines.

In philosophy this focus on history is called inductive reasoning. It’s worth tamping down our optimism bias to reflect that, our exciting tech notwithstanding, this time might not be different.

Professor Nicholas Agar is a philosopher and ethicist who teaches at Flinders University. He is the author of Humanity’s End: Why We Should Reject Radical Enhancement, Truly Human Enhancement: A Philosophical Defense of Limits, and How to Be Human in the Digital Economy.

Read more:

https://www.abc.net.au/religion/underestimating-our-adversaries-taliban-and-covid/13515998

Note: the story of "David and Goliath" is a legend that has ZERO historical value, but is designed to make us accept that a mouse has as much weight as an elephant...

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