Tag: SARS

  • SARS Taught Us 1 Thing: Panic, because We Know Nothing

    SARS Taught Us 1 Thing: Panic, because We Know Nothing

    The reasons why we in Hong Kong hoard face masks and hand sanitisers (and what I wish the foreigners in Hong Kong would choose to understand) “Individual precaution does not scale to collective precaution…. Hence one must panic individually in order to avoid systemic problems.” Nassim Taleb When SARS happened, we had a very limited…

  • Year 2004 (Bonus Track: 2003 in Retrospect)

    A friend asked me this morning, “So what things did you check off in 2003 from your “101 Things to do in Life” list? “If it has an item called “Stay alive”, then that would be the only one that would have been checked off.” I answered apathetically. Reflections suck. They are trivial, energy wasting,…