Infection is bad, treatment is even worse.

AI image for presentation (Lexica.art)

His first book expressed the idea turning point into widespread use, sort of proving his thesis that ideas, products, messages and behavior spread like viruses. Hence, he argued that small changes and decisions can make a big positive difference in the world.
Now, 25 years later, in Tipping Point Revenge: Exaggerated Stories, Superspreaders, and Growth Social engineering, authorMalcolm GladwellInstead, the article emphasizes that choices made to change the shape of a contagious phenomenon can also be used against people.
This argument is built on examples that present three lessons about social epidemics. Firstly, they are not unlimited. In many cases, whatever infectious belief unites a community, it has enough discipline to stay within its boundaries. Second, this power of place comes from the stories of local communities, which are infectious and exaggerated. Third, communities may be responsible for the fevers and infections that plague them.
The medical term iatrogenic refers to treating a person with a drug whose side effects are worse than the disease. In the book, this applies to the United States. opioid crisisseen as a fundamentally American problem, complete with its own unique super-story and super-spreaders, by a minority of a minority of doctors who believed that handing out drugs willy-nilly is what doctors do.

Then came a well-intentioned change in wording Oxycontin almost impossible to squash and snort. Addicts turned to heroin, and from there to fentanyl, combining it with veterinary drugs and whatever was at hand. The counterfactual is that if the old OxyContin had stayed in place, the opioid crisis in the US would have eased over time.
Today it is easier to know when and where a tipping point will occur because the people driving it can be identified through new technologies. But the question is whether unscrupulous people will take control of the tools needed to fight the epidemic, or whether the community will have an honest and transparent conversation about its choices.
One can identify a tipping point where a member of a minority no longer perceives the group’s skewed proportions as toxic, say the number of women on a sales team where no one questions the effectiveness of women as a category.
When Indra Nooyi became CEO of PepsiCo, her exoticism as a woman and an Indian immigrant was celebrated in a way that made no sense to her. Since then, a critical mass of people like her have entered the highest levels of American corporations. In 2023, when Starbucks named Laxman Narasimhan as CEO, his WSJ profile made no mention of him being born in India. Something fundamental has changed in the way American culture views Indian Americans.
Gladwell says the point is that it doesn’t always take a revolution to change the perception of a minority group. Even if we can’t eliminate the achievement gap simply by changing class composition, there’s something going on here, right? The idea practically begs us to intervene, to engage in social engineering.
But suppose age and obesity are the two biggest predictors of superspreading of the next pandemic? Technology will give us the opportunity to understand both the Law of the Very, Very, Very Few and who they are. What will we do with this information?