![]() “The grand challenge now is, how can we adjust our thinking to match the problem before us?” says Lori Peek, a sociologist at the University of Colorado at Boulder who studies disasters. The country is now trapped in an intuition nightmare: Like the spiraling ants, Americans are walled in by their own unhelpful instincts, which lead them round and round in self-destructive circles. And instead of overriding misleading intuitions with calm and considered communication, those leaders intensified them. They prevented citizens from grasping the scope of the crisis and pushed leaders toward bad policies. They manifested again and again, distorting the debate around whether to stay at home, wear masks, or open colleges. These conceptual errors were not egregious lies or conspiracy theories, but they were still dangerous. Following these impulses was simpler than navigating a web of solutions, staring down broken systems, and accepting that the pandemic would rage for at least a year. They lapsed into magical thinking, and believed that the world would return to normal within months. They saw the actions that individual people were taking, and blamed and shamed their neighbors. They grabbed onto whatever solution was most prominent in the moment, and bounced from one (often false) hope to the next. Many Americans trusted intuition to help guide them through this disaster. But the toll continues to be enormous-every day, the case count rises by around 40,000 and the death toll by around 800-because the country has consistently thought about the pandemic in the same unproductive ways. The toll has been enormous because the country presented the SARS-CoV-2 coronavirus with a smorgasbord of vulnerabilities to exploit. enters the ninth month of the pandemic with more than 6.3 million confirmed cases and more than 189,000 confirmed deaths. I can think of no better metaphor for the United States of America’s response to the COVID-19 pandemic. This phenomenon is called the death spiral. They are imprisoned by a wall of their own instincts. They have no coordinating force to guide them to safety. The ants can sense no picture bigger than what’s immediately ahead. They march endlessly until they’re felled by exhaustion or dehydration. They become a thick, swirling vortex of bodies that resembles a hurricane as viewed from space. If these trails accidentally loop back on themselves, the ants are trapped. The workers navigate by smelling the pheromone trails of workers in front of them, while laying down pheromones for others to follow. ET on September 13, 2020.Īrmy ants will sometimes walk in circles until they die. If you're interested, there's another video of ant death spirals in Brazil here.Updated at 5:28 p.m. For nearly two whole days these blind creatures, so dependent on the contact-odor sense of their antennae, kept palpating their uniformly smooth, odoriferous trail and the advancing bodies of the ants immediately preceding them, without perceiving that they were making no progress but only wasting their energies, till the spell was finally broken by some more venturesome members of the colony. ![]() ![]() I have never seen a more astonishing exhibition of the limitations of instinct. The phenomenon was first observed in in insects in 1910 by the scientist W.M. The mill persisted for two days, "with ever increasing numbers of dead bodies littering the route as exhaustion took its toll, but eventually a few workers straggled from the trail thus breaking the cycle, and the raid marched off into the forest." It measured 1200 feet in circumference and had a 2.5 hour circuit time per ant. The death-spiral is an example of what happens when the swarm as a whole gets misdirected - and a convenient metaphor illustrating the perils of follow-the-leader behavior in any society.īeebe (1921) described a circular mill he witnessed in Guyana. Typically they follow the scent-trails of the ants before them in the swarm. There are over 200 varieties of army ants, and apparently the type featured in this video are blind, and depend on smells to navigate. The "ant death spiral" is a phenomenon noted seemingly only in army ants, which unlike other kinds of ants do not make permanent nests and are always on the move while they're alive. This video has been making the rounds lately, but I haven't seen a lot of accurate descriptions of what exactly is going on in it.
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