[FRIAM] Covid question

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I know you were probably just ranting. But I think these are interesting psychosocial questions along the same lines as mind-reading (including cross-species mind-reading), the intelligence of GPT-3, why some people really want others to turn on their camera for Zoom meetings, and emotion/meme contagion across media like Facebook.

We hear over and over that people are social. Some even go so far as to claim we're eusocial: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3279739/. But some of us are and some aren't ... or at least, there's a spectrum of sociality. It doesn't surprise me, really, that if you isolate some very social person (either in the Facebook cage, like my aunt and uncle, who've become hard-core right wingers over the past 10 years or so OR in solitary confinement), they'll go crazy ... start thinking seriously batshit things about not only strangers, but even the people they *used to* love.

Given that, when we ask why people insist on getting out, visiting other places, interacting with people *other* than their immediate pod, seems to fall into place. Those people might be very far on one end of the sociality spectrum. They *need* to be out and about, otherwise their mental and physical health degrades.

The mask question may be a little more complicated, I guess. But there's still a core sociality question, there. Just as one example, it's not all that difficult for us to detect *fake* smiles, where the mouth is smiling but the eyes are not. But a fake smile is a gesture of politeness, not heartfelt feelings ... like saying "Thank You" to people out of politeness when you don't really feel grateful for them doing some tiny thing like holding a door open or whatever. If we can't see or express those fake smiles, we've lost a bit of that politeness.

I don't know. If I look at the anti-maskers as an alien species, it frees me to think a little more clearly, I guess.

On 7/25/20 4:18 PM, Gillian Densmore wrote:
> Questions;what happens when or if Covid stays? 
> And why doesn't the governor close the borders for ptr's.mean is there any f****** reason to be visiting?none that I can think of!
> 
> I am loving loving loving loving loving is the warm weather as  much as the next guy.  But I think I for one can f****** BBQ at home.  Need to see friends?Weal we have Zoom.
> 
> So what in the hell are these people from out of town doing here?And why the fuk can't be where they're f****** mask?


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