Your question about mental health really resonates with me. I wonder too whether we really are less well now - whether even with all the little luxuries of capitalism, maybe there's something spiritually about us which causes us a lot of pain - or, perhaps we are just better at diagnosis now and these problems have always been around. It's so hard to know - and even more of a challenge given that perhaps diagnoses themselves can be harmful (for example, someone who is wrongly diagnosed with a mental illness might take a medication that exacerbates other problems). Acknowledging these unknowns and uncertainties are important in understanding our relationships with our mental health - yet it's not something I've heard at all when people are actually being treated

Julie, I also found this question of short term behaviour vs. long term consequence in the context of earthquakes particularly fascinating! I was listening to a podcast recently about earthquake prediction in Iceland, and how earthquake risk has come to be integrally woven into the social fabric of living there. On many levels that might square with Meade's point that it is easier to figure out how to recover from an earthquake then to mitigate their damage. It seems, this concept of rebuilding manifests itself in psychological resilience as much as it does in physical structures.

Unequivocally, the passage in this essay on COVID statistics was eye-opening to read for someone "non-quantitatively-inclined" such as me. While the language of low-uncertainty and high-uncertainty experiences was highly interesting and illuminating, I can't imagine organically changing behaviour based on these discoveries. When the statistics are set out in such a way that they are in the essay though; in plain language, and particularly in comparative context; to the average annual death rate, to the death rate of the Spanish flu, etc., I feel like I'm being introduced to a coherent narrative, based in fact, which will tangibly impact my thoughts, opinions, and thus behaviours. The content, then, I think is excellent! It sounds silly, but perhaps a good way to impart it other than in essay format would be through a TikTok. While a short, tiktok format videos starts off mostly being watched by the younger demographic that likes the app, I see the videos being shared now frequently on other platforms, such as Twitter and Facebook, which have a larger reach for broader swathes of the population!

I love the connection here between sci-fi and 'unknown unknowns' - it's not something I thought of before, but maybe the realm of the unknown truly is the way that artists can fit into the pursuit of empirical truth. The question that you raise: 'how do we capitalize on the value of discoveries from unknown unknowns?' becomes thus absolutely crucial. Human's potential for innovation is one of the most expansive resources on the planet - how can we tap into that in every discipline, and in particular, not just allow but facilitate cross-pollination?

Grace, similar questions came to mind for me when I was listening to the Gilbert interview. The issue of the 'confidence interval' is certainly an interesting one, and your point about the language itself of economics vs our intuitive understanding of these concepts that arise in our everyday lives is one that comes up a fair bit with regards to the social sciences in my eyes. I guess on some level this 'non-scientific' understanding of 'social scientific' concepts is the name of the game: in attempting to locate empiricism in social life, the very goal of the social sciences is to name social phenomena and attempt to integrate and utilise this information into intellectual frameworks for the purpose of, among other things, prediction — but the result can also seem jargon-ey, limited, and even alienating. What it would mean to open up that world, then, is a bit of a mental puzzle. First, you narrow down the expansive experience of life into a narrow set of parameters for the purpose of logical knowledge production. How then do you open it back up whilst maintaining those productive parameters? Is it inevitable that something would be lost in that process of opening up?

Gaurang, these are really interesting comments! I like that you bring out the point about language, and I wonder what are the parameters of this 'language' you speak of in the realm of economics and policy, and the extent to which these parameters are fixed vs adaptable...

Your comment on government policy ("worrying about studying calculus when we still have not mastered basic algebra") made me laugh—but I wonder if it is truly the case. It seems that government policy is rarely entirely as it seems on the surface; what appears on the surface to be algebra is, in fact, calculus, and perhaps necessarily so - after all, I myself know very little about calculus... It seems to me the core question is not one of awareness, but of incentive. From the top-down and the bottom-up, there is a lack of incentive to acknowledge fundamental realities about our ecology. We can't wait for fear of suffering to act as the fatal incentive - some part of me wonders if the key is taking environmental policy out of the realm of individual choice, through increased mandatory action. I wonder then what democratic reforms would need to take place for a higher level of top-down dynamicism in environmental policy; a fundamental shift away from finance dominance in American politics would be the crucial first step, linking this question back to your other findings from the Kammen interview.