Are you getting tired of officials telling you to keep a six foot separation to avoid getting the Coronavirus? People are still thinking "digital". This blog may sound like a repeat.
I blogged a few back about the fact that most people only think "digital" when the world is "analog". Our officials who have been telling us that sex foot separation is safe are now changing their tune. Here is a example. Did you ever hear anyone tell you that you can not smell a skunk beyond 50 yards? I did not think so. The reason is that down deep we are "analog" people and would not buy that statement in a minute. If you were up wind, you might not be able to smell a skunk beyond 50 yards, but what if you were down wind? You could smell one for a mile! It is the same with this Coronavirus. It is like giving a "yes" and "no" answer to something that does not have a clear "yes" or "no" answer.
I don't know if this would work or just confuse people more, but maybe we need to start adding probabilities to our digital answers. In the case of the six foot answer, why don't they add that this is safe 95% of the time? I know what the next question would be and that would be how far away to I have to be to be "safe"? In this case meaning 100% safe. The fact is no distance is 100% safe, it is just the greater the distance, the greater the safety. Is this getting a little boring?
I have not even gotten into the quality of the tests. If you have a brain, then you know that no test is 100% accurate. All tests have some level of false positives and false negatives. That is a fact. Now the question is how to deal with explaining the test results. If you try to keep it simple for the simple minded public, eventually you will live to regret it. When some exception comes along, you are going to be accused of being dishonest. That is how it works. If the public understood Bayes' Theorem, it would be easy to explain and for them to understand, but that is wishful thinking.
With something like the Coronavirus that starts out very slow, a test that has a modest percentage of false negatives can be almost worthless. Think about it this way. It is like looking for a needle in a hay stack. It is so easy to miss the few needles because of all the hay you have to sort thru. The results are that you only find a "small" percentage of the needles. If there are a lot of needles in the hay stack, with the same method, you will find a much "higher" percentage of them. Do you understand that? This is how it works with stopping the Coronavirus. When the virus starts out it is a low percentage so you need a test that has very few false negatives. It is like you can not miss even one needle in the hay stack!
My bottom line is that we have to start thinking "analog" where there are very very few situations that can be described and either "right" or "wrong". This applies to almost every thing and we ignore this fact at our peril.
