Evan Wondrasek

“Closing borders would be of no benefit either. It would be impossible to shut down trade, prevent citizens from returning to the country, etc. That would shut down the entire economy and enormously magnify supply chain problems by ending imports—including all health-related imports like drugs, syringes, gowns, everything. Even at that, models show that a 90 percent effective border closing would delay the disease by only a few days, at most a week, and a 99 percent effective shutting of borders would delay it at most a month.”
― John M. Barry, The Great Influenza: The Epic Story of the Deadliest Plague in History

“the boundaries between different categories are often arbitrary, but once some arbitrary boundary exists, we forget that it is arbitrary and get way too impressed with its importance. For example, the visual spectrum is a continuum of wavelengths from violet to red, and it is arbitrary where boundaries are put for different color names (for example, where we see a transition from “blue” to “green”); as proof of this, different languages arbitrarily split up the visual spectrum at different points in coming up with the words for different colors. Show someone two roughly similar colors. If the color-name boundary in that person’s language happens to fall between the two colors, the person will overestimate the difference between the two. If the colors fall in the same category, the opposite happens. In other words, when you think categorically, you have trouble seeing how similar or different two things are. If you pay lots of attention to where boundaries are, you pay less attention to complete pictures.”
― Robert M. Sapolsky, Behave: The Biology of Humans at Our Best and Worst

“The army had data on 120 training camps—99 imposed quarantine and 21 did not. But there was no difference in mortality or morbidity between camps implementing quarantine and those that didn’t; there was not even any difference in how long it took influenza to pass through the camp. The story, however, isn’t quite that simple: the epidemiologist who performed the study looked not just at numbers but at actual practice, and found that out of the 99 camps that imposed quarantine, only a half dozen or so rigidly enforced it. Those few did benefit. But if the overwhelming majority of army bases in wartime could not enforce a quarantine rigidly enough to benefit, a civilian community in peacetime certainly could not.”
― John M. Barry, The Great Influenza: The Epic Story of the Deadliest Plague in History

“I was once at a conference of neuroscientists and all-star Buddhist monk meditators, the former studying what the brains of the latter did during meditation. One scientist asked one of the monks whether he ever stops meditating because his knees hurt from all that cross-leggedness. He answered, “Sometimes I’ll stop sooner than I planned, but not because it hurts; it’s not something I notice. It’s as an act of kindness to my knees.”
― Robert M. Sapolsky, Behave: The Biology of Humans at Our Best and Worst