Carl Zimmer’s Air-Borne is framed as an ironic tragedy about the prewar theory of airborne infection being accepted in biological war, but not in public health, the worst of both worlds. Is this so surprising? Perhaps it is just incentives. Perhaps both sides just made the assumption that would make their task easier, with no connection to reality. Less cynically, the people designing biological weapons don’t need to care what is common in nature, just what is possible. These ideas came to me reading Nicholson Baker’s Baseless, a cynical book uninterested in whether biological weapons actually work. He is so angry about people attempting biological weapons that he is willing to print documents about how they don’t work. Anyhow, there was some value in cross-referencing different books, maybe because of different perspectives, maybe because of different emotions.
As usual, my main takeaway is that there is a lot of low-hanging fruit in science in the form of vague consensus smoothing over substantial disagreement. (I wrote this originally meaning about the consensus against airborne transmission, my takeaway from Zimmer’s book. But I guess most of my words could have been about a consensus smoothing over the difference between the two books. But I’m not sure there was such a consensus.)
Added: I can’t remember why I described Baker as cynical. I remember thinking about writing this yesterday and wondering whether to include the word and deciding to, but I can’t remember why. The whole point is that he didn’t prejudge the efficacy.
Carl Zimmer’s Air-Borne is framed as an ironic tragedy about the prewar theory of airborne infection being accepted in biological war, but not in public health, the worst of both worlds. Is this so surprising? Perhaps it is just incentives. Perhaps both sides just made the assumption that would make their task easier, with no connection to reality. Less cynically, the people designing biological weapons don’t need to care what is common in nature, just what is possible. These ideas came to me reading Nicholson Baker’s Baseless, a cynical book uninterested in whether biological weapons actually work. He is so angry about people attempting biological weapons that he is willing to print documents about how they don’t work. Anyhow, there was some value in cross-referencing different books, maybe because of different perspectives, maybe because of different emotions.
As usual, my main takeaway is that there is a lot of low-hanging fruit in science in the form of vague consensus smoothing over substantial disagreement. (I wrote this originally meaning about the consensus against airborne transmission, my takeaway from Zimmer’s book. But I guess most of my words could have been about a consensus smoothing over the difference between the two books. But I’m not sure there was such a consensus.)
Added: I can’t remember why I described Baker as cynical. I remember thinking about writing this yesterday and wondering whether to include the word and deciding to, but I can’t remember why. The whole point is that he didn’t prejudge the efficacy.