Comment by Animats | Hacker News Reader

Comment by Animats | Hacker News Reader

People are assuming this is about gender, but it may well be about COVID. Wu refused to go along with China's huge policy shift, from trying hard to contain COVID to giving up. She still takes precautions and has been plugging for UV sterilizers and HEPA filters. The government of China has been hassling people who still want to control COVID spread. It's like "return to office" enforced by the cops.

She had a previous visit from "the authorities", and wrote on Twitter, back on June 30th,

"I think the "plainclothes cops" who came to visit today and I told to fuck off were fake since they left when I threatened to call the real cops. That said, in the future it would be super helpful if whoever runs things could give me a contact point so if there is a real issue, I don't tell them to fuck off."

"Personally, I think my uncensored rants and the fact that I get away with them makes us look really good, but if there are certain areas where things are delicate, I'm open to toning it down. Just ask." (She repeated all that in Mandarin.)

"For those of you that are curious- Shenzhen isn't some podunk 4th tier hick town, we have laws- and in my experience they are followed, which is why these two clowns were a whole bundle of red flags. (Yes, they need a warrant and would have had one if they were the real deal)"

Meanwhile, her online store is still up.[1]

[1] https://cybernightmarket.com/

I ordered the Nukit CO2 Controller, and it just arrived today! Super excited to use it to automatically refresh air in my basement office :-).

Naomi's tweets taught me that CO2 is a pretty good proxy for human contamination of air, so turning on a fan when CO2 is high is a pretty good mechanism for refreshing air that could contain covid microparticles. Also learned about UVC from her - she's a fantastic educator and I really hope she's OK.

Gonna play with it for a few weeks then might order a second to switch a filter in the living room to reduce the risk from having guests in our home.

> Wu refused to go along with China's huge policy shift

She was also heavily attacked by people in the West as she also refused to go along with the Wests 'masks don't matter policy'

She created Google Docs early on with evidence masks would work contravening the Western governments and the 'trust the science' crowd.

Lets not pretend it's just China here, it maybe offtopic to this incident, but at the time you could see it was wearing her down.

People in the West typically do not have the ability to arrest people in Shenzhen.

The “trust the science” crowd were the ones advocating for masks, no?

There was a pivot. At the beginning of the pandemic there were a number of American institutions saying masks were ineffective and unnecessary[1]

[1] https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/health/2020/02/17/nih-di...

Not at the beginning. There is evidence to suggest that some institutions intentionally lied about the effectiveness of masks at the beginning of the pandemic in an attempt to prevent a mask shortage, and the "trust the science" crowd ate it up. Hilariously/despairingly enough, many of those masking at the beginning of the pandemic when it was "unscientific" to do so would later become anti-maskers. Likewise, those "trust the science" folks were quick to put on masks when "the science" changed.

Throughout the pandemic, political preferences were a far more reliable predictor of human behavior than anything else.

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