Sibylla Bostoniensis

Yeah. And, to my knowledge, every other known connective tissue disorder, too: some years ago, a doctor of mine finally gave up in the face of my clearly connective-tissue-related conditions' refractoriness to diagnosis and generated what I gather is a comprehensive list of known connective tissue disorders, handed it to me and suggested I brute force it looking for matches to my symptoms. I didn't find any hits, but I now have a weirdly well-informed acquaintance with the space.

Every time I see a new ortho/physio/rheum I have to patiently wait through the "But what about hEDS... Oh." screening.

Meanwhile, I have three or maybe four different ostensibly unrelated medical conditions that are well described but poorly understood by medical science, all of which are independently hypothesized to be caused by an as-of-yet undescribed connective tissue disorder.

From the inside, it seems to me that the problem is not that other people need to be taught the skill, it's that they have a hang-up that inhibits their using it.

One of the most interesting things I learned going to an engineering school was that biology seems to be the place logic goes to die.

I observed that in casual conversation, when the topic turned to anything that had to do with living organisms – psychology, medical science, animal ethology, social sciences –my peers would start using all sorts of logical fallacies and make all sorts of (to me quite shocking) reasoning errors. Excluded middles out the wazoo, unidirectional causality, naturalistic fallacy by the truckload, so much FAE you'd think we were in the Summerland, argumenti ad hominem et verecundiam etc. And the thing was, these were all people who were precocious in reasoning and wickid smaht – in the sciences. But when the topic changes from that which they think of a "hard science", their brains fall out.

At the time, I thought it was specific to discussions of minds and society/ies. But over the last three decades, especially since I became a medical professional, my nose has absolutely been ground in the fact: holy shit they think about bodies and biological processes like this too.

And this all culminated in the events of the first half of 2020.

I don't think anybody needs to be taught how to do the reasoning that goes, "SARS-COV-2 is a coronavirus. All previously known coronaviruses have been spread through the air, and to be contagious pre-symptomatically. Therefore, in the absence of more specific information it is reasonable to assume this coronavirus, too, will be spread through the air, and will spread during the pre-symptomatic stage of infection. Therefore it will not be possible to tell which people are infectious by whether or not they have symptoms. Therefore the only way to get masks on the faces of people who are contagious is to put masks on the faces of all people." This is not difficult logic. But people – including, shockingly, medical authorities who were not trying to downplay the pandemic – did not engage in it, and, famously, actively resisted it. To the point the aerosol physicists went WTF?! and revolted.

Step one in debugging one's body is starting with the assumption that it is possible and not letting one's brain fall out. That seems to be an emotional project as much as anything to do with cognition as usually conceptualized.