Thomas Nagel wrote about what it must be like to be a bat. His paper is a welcome reflection for data scientists living in a pandemic world. He presents us with the hypothesis below.

“I assume we all believe that bats have experience. After all, they are mammals, and there is no more doubt that they have experience than that mice or pigeons or whales have experience.”

He continues, “Bats, although more closely related to us than those other species, nevertheless present a range of activity and a sensory apparatus so different from ours that the problem I want to pose is exceptionally vivid (though it certainly could be raised with other species). Even without the benefit of philosophical reflection, anyone who has spent some time in an enclosed space with an excited bat knows what it is to encounter a fundamentally alien form of life.”

Likewise, any data scientist who has spent some time in an enclosed space with an excited client knows what it is to encounter a fundamentally alien form of life.

The pandemic is a new kind of enclosed space that has spawned an alien life form, the Covid Politician, one that is redefining social and economic behavior across the globe. A simple, but novel virus, is arming the Covid Politician with the tools to implement a new caste system in human society.

There are two kinds of workers in the real world; essential and non-essential. Set aside bats and data scientists for a moment. Both types of workers are responding to the virus that is exploiting a deep mythology in modern economics.

All workers are not created equal in a free market economy.

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