Thoughts
COVID-19 - Conclusions and actions
This past month I’ve been thinking… a lot. And the conclusions I got (and lots of others got too) are pretty solid. Here’s what I found out: Governments are ill-prepared and can’t handle diseases at scale. (See this) And most of them don’t learn from the errors of others. (See this) Pharmaceutical companies can’t do it either because their whole operational flow is based on selling and distributing well-tested, thoroughly studied drugs and vaccines. Labs (including university Labs) are better as they move at a faster pace - yet most of the machinery they use and how it’s setup is for the development and study of drugs and vaccines on a longer timeframe. Startups are great and there is alot of good people willing to help but the lack of real resources behind them makes it infeasible. each startup will need to get a fully stuffed lab for what we are going to do. Some of these groups can be of great help (like labs) but they are not fit for the speed required in situations like the one we are in.
March 18, 2020
The 1%
Problem of elevating collective intelligence is that the more shared knowledge we have - unless specialised and always on the edge of knowledge - we get a similar distribution of the Pareto principle where 20% of the information is seen, read and accepted the 80% of the time. This makes it very difficult for independent thinking. In this case, I dare to say we are probably closer to 1/99 where 1% of the information gets read 99% of the time and becomes the de facto body of knowledge. By standardising information and using only what is known to work we’re closing ourselves to (yes!) big failures but obviously to better ways too.
September 21, 2019