Don’t fear failure. Fear ignorance.

👋 Welcome back to the Medium Newsletter
Issue #224: your thoughts on the Great Barrington Declaration, and a useful quote

Here are three pieces of practical wisdom to take with you this week:

1. Your biggest fear should not be failure; it should be ignorance. In the words of Meta CTO Andrew Bosworth, the downfall of most organizations is “widespread acceptance of the wrong idea” — misinformed, overconfident assumptions that become so familiar they go unquestioned. This applies on a personal level, too. One way to combat it: seek out, encourage, and reward dissent.
2. A singleminded passion might sustain you briefly, but when it flames out, as novelist and marketer Felicia C. Sullivan recommends, think of your life as a series of rooms you can dip in and out of. Build a “house of fulfillment” that can sustain you over time, bigger than any individual pursuit.
3. The top 10 movies of 2024 are all sequels, if you count Wicked as a sequel. Reasons for this are cultural and economic: The rise of streaming makes studios more risk-averse because they can no longer earn long-tail revenue on VHS and DVD sales. More data = more obsession with data, and a preoccupation with replicating hits. Rebranding existing IP is cheap and nostalgia sells. Ask yourself: How often are you watching/reading/listening to stories that feel new and challenging v. stories that feel familiar? (Ted Gioia)

— Harris Sockel

Also today: Your thoughts on the Great Barrington Declaration

Last week, we sent a newsletter about the Great Barrington Declaration, a 2020 open letter by three epidemiologists arguing blanket Covid lockdowns would do more harm than good. Many of you responded thoughtfully, disagreeing or adding nuance to the conversation. We love nothing more than reasoned disagreement. Here are a few responses that stood out to us:

In retrospect, some of the premises laid down in the GDB actually hold true. There was an impact on mental health, and it was difficult to get access to general medical procedures due to the lockdown.

The term ‘herd immunity’ is usually misunderstood. As defined in the GBD, it implies a steady rate of infection (and cure), similar to what we see with influenza. But the general public took it to mean that we’ll become immune to the corona virus, which can never happen as the virus always mutates.
— S Chakraborty

I get the point you make in this article, and generally agree with it — except that the pushback on the GBD wasn’t overblown. The GBD made some claims that have been proven false, and the anti-vax, anti-shutdown, anti-public health political right immediately adopted a black-and-white approach, acting as if they knew what was right and wrong, and ignoring the fact that public health authorities were making the best decisions they could under circumstances of uncertainty. They dishonestly framed the issue in terms of good vs. evil, and that is what the pushback was against.
— Robert Kantner

Frankly, I can’t see why you would want to elevate people with a track record of being wrong over those who have a track record of being right. Or how you would think you could justify doing so by saying ‘well, there was a lot of fear and uncertainty at the time’. Surely that’s all the more reason to back those who made good decisions despite the challenging circumstances?
— Mark S

You strike the right tone of intellectual curiosity, neutrality, and just practical common sense. Something that has eroded in the last eight years. Nice to see an effort to stimulate healthy, informative dialogue rather than continue the campaign of painting those with a differing opinion as evil.
— Gpanah in an email to tips@medium.com

🎁 One more story: on giving

Six years ago, Kristine Levine published a Medium essay reflecting on the poverty and hunger she experienced as a child. Levine’s mom was unemployed, and they rarely ate dinner. One night, they wandered the neighborhood, knocking on doors until a neighbor answered. She immediately packed up her entire dinner table and handed it to them. Levine has been thinking about that moment her entire life — not just because of what it meant to her and her mother, but because it contains a lesson that applies to so much in life. “When you give the best you have to someone in need,” Levine writes, “it translates into something much deeper to the receiver. It means that they are worthy.”

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Edited and produced by Scott Lamb & Carly Rose Gillis

Questions, feedback, or story suggestions? Email us: tips@medium.com

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