Editing 2278: Scientific Briefing
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Things are not good, and are going to be bad soon. The only way for things to not be bad is for someone to do something about it. [[Megan]] and [[Cueball]] are presenting these things to [[White Hat]], evidently hoping to encourage him to do something about things, but he instead chooses to wait for things to become bad, to which Megan replies that the conversation itself indicates they have become bad. | Things are not good, and are going to be bad soon. The only way for things to not be bad is for someone to do something about it. [[Megan]] and [[Cueball]] are presenting these things to [[White Hat]], evidently hoping to encourage him to do something about things, but he instead chooses to wait for things to become bad, to which Megan replies that the conversation itself indicates they have become bad. | ||
| β | Megan's final remark — "Based on this conversation, it already has [become bad]" — is an instance of [[:Category:Recursion|recursion]], and suggests that the unnamed subject of the graph may be something whose worsening is demonstrated by the way the discussion of the graph has gone. The subject of the graph could, therefore, be the phenomenon of people not acting on things that are worsening until they actually become bad, as White Hat proposes to do. Alternatively, if the group of people who could stop the Bad Thing is either small, or made up of people who will predictably act like | + | Megan's final remark — "Based on this conversation, it already has [become bad]" — is an instance of [[:Category:Recursion|recursion]], and suggests that the unnamed subject of the graph may be something whose worsening is demonstrated by the way the discussion of the graph has gone. The subject of the graph could, therefore, be the phenomenon of people not acting on things that are worsening until they actually become bad, as White Hat proposes to do. Alternatively, if the group of people who could stop the Bad Thing is either small, or made up of people who will predictably act like Cueball, the fact that Cueball has refused to act itself means that ''will'' become bad, which is bad. |
At the time this comic came out, the outbreak of {{w|COVID-19}} was on the rise and about to be declared a pandemic, with widespread perception the US federal government had failed to act before the outbreak became a crisis. The first of the COVID-19 comics, [[2275: Coronavirus Name]], explicitly showed people not dealing with one problem while they concentrate on another (though in that case they were dealing with COVID-19 while neglecting an invading giant spider). | At the time this comic came out, the outbreak of {{w|COVID-19}} was on the rise and about to be declared a pandemic, with widespread perception the US federal government had failed to act before the outbreak became a crisis. The first of the COVID-19 comics, [[2275: Coronavirus Name]], explicitly showed people not dealing with one problem while they concentrate on another (though in that case they were dealing with COVID-19 while neglecting an invading giant spider). | ||
