Hey folks, welcome to the Dark Horse Podcast live stream our 18th.

I am sitting with Dr. Heather Hying and we are going to talk to you today about why it is that we are so confused about COVID-19 and what we are supposed to be doing about it.

Are you ready to embark on that discussion?

I am.

All right.

So let's talk about what we are seeing in the world and you know we are all seeing the world through this lens that is social media.

And I have to say one of the lessons of all of this I suspect is that social media has become the ghost in our machine and on the one hand that may sound non-sensical because we can see what social media is but the algorithms themselves obviously haunt our thinking in ways that we can't even test.

Are you suggesting that the pandemic has made social media into more of a ghost machine or that has merely revealed it in more starkly?

Yeah, I think because nobody has a real handle on this because it is emerging in real time.

We are seeing something about the magnitude of its effect and we have talked about phenomena that you cannot detect directly but that you can detect as gravity.

You know, so for example, the existence of a planet that manifests first not as our ability to see a planet but it's effect on other planets in their orbits.

We can estimate how big the effect is and I think we are seeing something here of extraordinary magnitude and it's to be honest with you not very hopeful.

But what exactly it is and why it works the way it does is less clear because it is hidden in a literally private layer.

It's the ultimate black box in a sense.

Yeah, so it's interesting.

Listening to you talk it seems like you could be talking about the algorithms in social media as the ghost machine and not so much the ghost machine but so much of what you just said actually could apply equally to what this virus is and how it's doing what it's doing.

In various layers in society.

Well, I mean, I think these things are and we've said from the beginning that these are two very different things that there's the hazard of the virus and then there's the hazard of its effect on us and at the moment as concerned as I am about the virus.

I'm much more concerned about what we're going to do to each other as we attempt to sort out.

Issues of social distancing and mask wearing and the like.

Yep, I actually start by by reading from.

So this is excellent essay in this month's or the June episode of Harper's Thomas Charter Williams who is a terrific thinker and writer for those of you don't know him.

...