I have Schrödinger's COVID. By which I mean, I had a very direct exposure last week and have been monitoring my body, my potential symptoms, and all of my health metrics since then. I'm stuck in a will-I-or-won't-I limbo. It feels unthinkable that I won't have a positive test in the next few days, but on the other hand, it also felt unthinkable that I wouldn't already have a positive test. Bodies are a mystery.

But when you dig down into it—what it means to be sick or well or to test "positive"—all of these things are a function of measurement, ultimately. They aren't and can never encompass the full "reality" of the situation. And the reality is what you make of it anyway. All of these conditions are constructed precisely to be binaries because they're easy to understand, easy to operate from, easy to communicate and develop courses of action around. Binaries aren't about nuance, they're about legibility, expediency, and parsimony.

This isn't about gender, although it could be. It's about the reductive mental frameworks we use for everything, and how questioning those opens you up to questioning yourself in ways that can spur you to deeper understanding and more values-aligned action. The long-promised series about trans participation in athletics (and life, and bodies, etc., the usual) will start later this month, but consider this Post 0. A prerequisite, if you will.

Schrödinger's sickness

If you know me in real life, you know that I take a lot of precautions around respiratory illness because I'm immunosuppressed to manage my autoimmune disorders. I mask diligently and avoid situations where exposure seems likely. But sometimes shit happens. And last week shit happened.

In a way, I'm really lucky, though. I've had COVID twice before despite all my precautions, and had to work through a lot of feelings about being made vulnerable and impacted by others' behavior. But in both of those instances, I also was doing a lot of mental work to try to locate the source of my exposure, learn from it, build systems of resilience around that knowledge, and also pinpoint the trajectory of my illness so I could monitor symptoms for signs of danger. Here, the known exposure means I have so much more information from the outset and my mind can be set somewhat at ease even as I track sensations and outputs.

The black hole between known exposure and testing positive induces a certain kind of vigilance: was that sensation the beginning of the end? did I not sleep well because my immune system is struggling to cope or because my neighbor has dreams of auditioning for Eurovision that he enacts quasi-religiously before 7 am on a daily basis? am I not breathing deeply because of impending viral infection or because we just invaded Venezuela and are threatening territorial expansion that upends half a century of the global world order? do I feel "normal" this morning? what is "normal," anyway? have I ever felt "normal" in my entire life, really?

I've been sick since I was born; that's not new. But the thing about that is, knowing that you're "sick" or that that feeling isn't "normal" when you're that young isn't just a realization that arises from attunement with your own body and nervous system. It's a function of the people around you, how they reflect your sensations or divergence from expectations back to you. This is a sticky part of the illness/difference/disability nexus: you can have differences in functioning that are morally and materially neutral; you can have disabilities that arise primarily from how we structure our society and not how your body does/doesn't function; and/or you can have illness that directly impacts your body and its functioning while also causing clear, observable implications for you, irrespective of the support you do or don't have (e.g., pain, feeling unwell).

There are excellent scholars and writers in the disability studies/disability justice field who have explained these ideas much more deeply than I will here, but suffice it to say that, like everything else, the illness/wellness binary is a fake one. There are ways you can be well while also being ill. There are illnesses or disabilities that we normalize and accept (all your friends who wear glasses) without stigmatizing narratives. There are kinds of pain and sickness that you can be glad you got to go through, or limitations you experience that were important teachers in your life—neither of which means you needed to be or are a Pollyanna.

... ok but back to COVID

I think this liminal space before a positive COVID test precisely illustrates the falseness of this sick/healthy binary, and the falseness of all binaries if you drill down deep enough.

Without exposure, you have 0 chance of contracting COVID spontaneously. Upon exposure, you have the latent capacity to contract COVID. I'm not an immunologist, obviously, so I'm not going to explain this in painfully scientific terms, but to my understanding, your propensity for illness is a function of the combination of the viral load of your exposure (was it direct or indirect? who was masked, if anyone? how infectious was the person you were in contact with? how prolonged was the exposure?) and your immune system's response (are you immune-deficient? have you been vaccinated? are you otherwise healthy or do you have underlying conditions? is your environment supportive of a strong immune response?).

Prior to tests being available, determining whether you were sick was a function of symptoms and how they clustered around our expectations. So, it was up to a medical professional to inform you to diagnose you.^[1] Now, we determine whether you are "sick" with COVID using tests to detect the viral particles that we know cause symptoms. These tests have an error rate, of course, but they are designed with sensitivity to viral loads above a certain threshold. Below that threshold, you may still "have" COVID, but if you're asymptomatic, we'd never know that you're "sick."

For me, this is an interesting philosophical puzzle, but also a meaningful practical problem. If I haven't yet tested positive, how much is the course of my potential illness within my control? If I manage my inflammatory activities (e.g., no super intense workouts, try to limit my psychosocial stress), or make sure to actually eat a vegetable, or suddenly have the sleep hygiene I've always said I should... am I just making a bargain with the universe when the course of illness was predetermined, or is it possible for me to shift the trajectory of my story through my own actions?

If you're feeling like this just reduces to a question of whether we have free will, you're probably right, and that's a very well-hewn road that we don't need to go down: you may not have free will but it behooves you to act as though you do, for reasons of dignity among others. So, watch me take my multivitamin and be the most diligent about nutrition and sleep while I can.

Binaries aren't who you are, but they can shape what you do

But the reason I'm talking about this isn't just to belabor many points you probably already know about COVID or other communicable diseases (although frankly this applies to basically any bodily change, positive or negative). It's because the falseness of that binary conception is impacting how you behave and what you do, whether it's about illness or gender or your political orientation. And it doesn't have to.

Forming identities around our binary attributes (disabled/nondisabled, man/woman, tall/short, fat/thin, white/BIPOC) is one way of reducing the cognitive load we carry about all the nuance we embody. It makes us legible to others and can (seemingly) serve as a basis for connection. It offers simpler, narrower scripts for us to follow so we don't succumb to decision fatigue or need to derive our every move from first principles. Some of these binary labels are chosen, others are foisted upon us. But either way, they're offering a particular kind of structure to our social and political arrangements that's exactly predicated on reducing nuance and ambiguity.

0s and 1s

One of the core problems my dissertation tackled, and a thing I still think about constantly, is latency in measurement. More concretely: the data I used for one major part of my dissertation were about legislative participation. Did this member of parliament speak during the legislative session, or not? 0 if they didn't speak, 1 if they did, 2 if they spoke a second time, etc. Simple.

But not quite: there were a huge number of 0's in the data. People who didn't speak at all the entire legislative session. Typically, the statistical model used for count data like these already accounts for some pathological overdispersion in the counts (these words don't matter, I promise), but there are particular adaptations you have to use if you have too many zeroes—that is, if your model is "zero-inflated." Why?

Because not all zeroes are the same. When we're collecting data counting up behavior, we only get to observe behaviors or actions or countable things for a certain time window. Sometimes we simply didn't arrive at the right time, or our cut-off window meant that we missed seeing some observations that would've eventually materialized. Like the buzzer in a basketball game, we'll never know if you could have scored more points with another 5 minutes on the clock, but you might have been able to. And the players who might have been able to are different from the ones who couldn't hit a 3-pointer if their life depended on it. Those players are "always zeroes." (sorry to those people)

Sometimes, always, never

That latent capacity for change is the same across all kinds of sociological and political phenomena, and it's not only a philosophical construct. A country might have all the building blocks and indicators for regime change, but not quite experience it because of some random chance. You might have all the qualifications for a job and be a stunning interviewer, but the hiring manager is having a random bad day. You can never control random error.

What is under your control, though, at least to some degree, is awareness of your latency conditions. MPs in Myanmar's legislature might have known they wanted to speak and had something to say, or should speak because there was an important point to contribute, but simply didn't get the chance. That private information allows them to strategize how they might otherwise show up in legislative sessions or political arenas.

Conversely, you might want to engage more politically yourself. But if you're aware of your conditions—that you have no political experience, or that you lack information about important issues, or that you aren't connected to any political groups or communities---you have a better sense of whether your latent state is as someone who will never actually act, or someone who could given the right conditions. Getting better informed, getting connected, gaining experience—all of those are under your direct control.

Your latent conditions don't determine your story

At the same time, though, your latent conditions aren't deterministic. But you can make them deterministic if you only embrace them, incorporate them as core components of your identity, treat them like your destiny and your legacy.

Here's what I mean: if I'm someone who hasn't expressed myself politically ever in my life (perhaps I work in a STEM field or a trade, I don't talk with others in my life about politics, I may or may not vote, but it's not part of my core experience), I might not have an intrinsic latent capacity for suddenly becoming extremely politically engaged. But I could change that. I could witness my neighbors being kidnapped by ICE and feel in my gut how wrong that is, and choose to invest time and energy in leveraging my political awakening. Or, conversely, I could tell myself a story about how "I'm just not a political person," and double down on my latent non-political nature.

This isn't a new idea. I'm presenting it in the language of statistics and quantitative models, but disaggregating your sense of self from the healthy components of your ego development exists in all kinds of fields: psychology, sociology, and religion. For example, the Buddhist take on the impermanence of the self precisely warns against rigidly identifying with certain categories or roles, because of how it creates friction and causes suffering. To say "I am ..." versus "I do ..." starts the process of tethering categories and descriptors to our core sense of self, rather than letting ourselves exist in some nuance, exist in some ambiguity, exist in a liminal space of figuring things out and growing and changing.

Fighting the binary

If you dig deep enough, no binary is really binary. Even "simple" ones like life and death, or wake and sleep. Gender is just one front in a battle against reductivism, and part of what's at stake is holding—for ourselves and others—the capacity to be more and do more than the scripts that have been offered up to us. Even if it's a false sense of agency, that sense of agency is a source of dignity and meaning in a life that otherwise can feel overwhelming and empty.

For me right now, I only get to exist in the ambiguity of not presently having COVID but knowing my latent risk and propensity. That knowledge lets me act to support myself (e.g., taking extra good care of my body this week) and also act to protect others (e.g., not going out for anything unnecessary, continuing to wear my N95 everywhere outside my own apartment).

For you, your latent conditions might be different and the questions you're asking might determine the course of action you take. Who are you trying to become? Where do you sense friction in your life between the scripts you've been offered and the person you are or actions you take? What would you need to support a change? What would change if the binaries you organized your life around dissolved?

I wouldn't truly be able to argue, in a post titled "against all binaries," that all binaries are bad, right? Since that's a binary, too? And it's true—as I said at the outset, binaries are useful for reducing cognitive load and social friction. But that doesn't mean you can't and shouldn't question when and where they arise, and resist settling into binaries that don't serve you.

Links 'n' Things

Back in this first week of the new year with a mega link dump since we skipped last week. As always, some stories you may have missed (and some background on the headlines dominating the news), plus some Actually Good Things™ for a change.

Stories you may have missed

• You can read/see all kinds of updates about Venezuela (and coverage thereof) on your own, but if you're digging around to better understand some of the narratives about cartels, I recommend this piece from last fall.
• Betting markets for everything. In all seriousness, there is a segment of social science that really thought/thinks this is a good structure for learning about the world and aggregating the knowledge of the masses, that some people are "superpredictors," that markets are value-neutral. All of those people are wrong. [This is another topic that directly intersects with research I used to do, so if you want a deep-dive on that, just holler.]
• This very cool but very upsetting study from school+county-level vaccination data found that only 28% of counties have herd immunity from measles for kindergarteners. If you're a data nerd, they also share their github repo directly.