Cal Newport

It's got to be pick your mitigation, whether you like it or not.

It was very focused on.

What should we be doing or who is it that's getting in the way of a plan that maybe would get us out of this?

Which is where I think you're very right is that you did not see a lot of COVID pieces that were just, well, I'm just going to kind of walk through like all the different ways, you know, you might die and the morgues are going to fill up and, you know, that's COVID.

That's just how life goes.

But I also think the other thing we saw in a lot of COVID coverage is something that we are seeing in the AI coverage.

That's where I saw a lot of the directionally true.

Not factually, but directionally true.

There was definitely a period early on in COVID because I was following that coverage quite carefully where the papers were thinking, okay, this is the right behavior.

They were probably right about a lot of these things, but I just would notice this.

There would be a lot of like, okay, we need people to buy into, for example, the lockdowns or whatever.

And there'd be a lot of directionally true reporting where maybe they would like put on a photo of a mass grave that was sort of unrelated to COVID.

Or you would see a lot of – there'd be pushback from like conservatives about schools.

And then they put a lot of articles in the paper about teachers dying of COVID even though it was – they weren't in school.

They got COVID elsewhere.

And if you really pushed on it, it was because –

It's directionally true.

Like the general or more general truth here is like we need to be worried about this or these mitigations work.

It doesn't matter if this photo is actually right or if this teacher who died in Orlando, the fact that they hadn't yet been back in a school building yet.

It's serving the directional truth.