Subjacent Banana on Nostr: For people trying to understand Covid & its behavior, it might be useful to think of ...

For people trying to understand Covid & its behavior, it might be useful to think of a classic Linguistic division:

i) form: the structure and (narrowly-defined) contextual dependencies of a thing

ii) function: what the thing does, what its purpose is, how it is used, to what ends it is used

In the discourse about Covid, Form has been the domain of Virologists and Function has largely been the domain of Immunologists.

Because formalism is always preferred to functionalism, Virology tends to think of itself at the top of the "heap."

Immunology is a messy, hyper-complex business, clearly, and its experts typically have to admit they don't know much. The field has to simultaneously synthesize all kinds of structural and contextual dependencies, etc.

Virology is "pure" and "unadulterated" by these concerns. Hence they talk much more confidently.

(Also, they're largely wrong in all the ways that matter.)