Not sure if this is the right place for general questions/discussion of Red Heart but I'm curious who you talked to and what research you did on the China side of it

What was your experience of getting novels published?

I agree with everything you've said. If anything, I think the effect is underrated because it's socially taboo to admit we've been majorly influenced by fiction. We all want to convey that we are Very Serious People who make decisions by reading serious scientific papers, not that we got into environmentalism because we watched Fern Gully as a kid, or whatever.

Part of the challenge with using fiction to persuade people is that fiction is often most effective for conveying views when it's not being explicitly didactic, e.g., compare Soviet and Chinese propaganda films, which are universally terrible, or at best cheesy, with how America in the 20th century gained a huge amount of soft power through media that implicitly conveyed its worldview. Many people have that complaint about HPMOR.

To some extent this just comes down to the quality of the underlying work, people only call something didactic when it's too obvious. But it adds additional constraints to the problem, writing a fun adventure is hard, writing a fun adventure that also teaches people about endocrinology is much harder.

I also think fiction is generally harder than nonfiction. Most educated people can write a comprehensible essay fairly easily (arguably they do so several times a day with emails, tweets, etc.), but would struggle to write a good short story, especially if it was also trying to convey the same information. The floor on bad factual writing is that it's basically readable, the floor on bad fiction writing is that it's excruciating.

What are you basing the claim that the vaccine is responsible for increased deaths in 2021 on? The NZ statistical agency's 2021 report says that its due to an aging population and rebound from 2020 when isolation measures decreased rates of non-COVID winter diseases. Basically 2020 was an unusual year for the obvious reasons while 2021 was closer to normal, but still lower than 2019. 

In 2021, the crude death rate was 6.8 deaths per 1,000 people. This was up from 6.4 per 1,000 in 2020, but down from 6.9 per 1,000 in 2019. The crude death rate has been below 7 deaths per 1,000 people since 2003.

Median age of death seems to have also continued to rise, which you woudln't expect if there was a significant surge in vaccine deaths among young people. NZ's official vaccine safety reporting attributes 2 deaths to myocarditis following vaccination. 

There's no good history books even trying to untangle the hyperobject that was the COVID-19 pandemic^[5], almost nobody trying to figure out where our sense-making failed to, ah, make sense, almost nobody trying to steer the ship^[6].

A slight counter to this, several countries have done, or are doing, major enquiries into their response. A good first step would be to give praise and attention to these and lobby for their recommendations to be implemented.

UK Module 1 on preparedness failures has been published and seems particularly relevant to your points. Excerpt from the executive summary:

• The UK prepared for the wrong pandemic. The significant risk of an influenza pandemic had long been considered, written about and planned for. However, that preparedness was inadequate for a global pandemic of the kind that struck.
• The institutions and structures responsible for emergency planning were labyrinthine in their complexity.
• There were fatal strategic flaws underpinning the assessment of the risks faced by the UK, [...]
• The UK government’s sole pandemic strategy, from 2011, was outdated and lacked adaptability. [...]
• Emergency planning generally failed to account sufficiently for the pre-existing health and societal inequalities and deprivation in society. [...]
• There was a failure to learn sufficiently from past civil emergency exercises and outbreaks of disease.
• There was a damaging absence of focus on the measures, interventions and infrastructure required in the event of a pandemic – in particular, a system that could be scaled up to test, trace and isolate in the event of a pandemic. [...]
• In the years leading up to the pandemic, there was a lack of adequate leadership, coordination and oversight. [...]
• The provision of advice itself could be improved. Advisers and advisory groups did not have sufficient freedom and autonomy to express dissenting views and suffered from a lack of significant external oversight and challenge. The advice was often undermined by ‘groupthink’.

Quick list of links to other countries reports that I haven't looked into in as much detail but may be relevant: Sweden, Norway, Australia, New Zealand, Netherlands, France, Germany, Ireland, European Union (European Parliament COVI)

Yeah, that's right. They were starved of funding, neglected, or mostly forgotten. So far, HERA has received 1.28 bio. €+1.27 bio. €+0.73 bio. €+0.358 bio. €=3.28 bio. € of the promised 4.5 bio[...]

What would you consider to be the correct amount? And how would you calculate that figure? I assume something like, if we take the 5 trillion US cost figure, and a 1% chance of something comparable happening per year, then up to $10 bn yearly would be reasonable for the USA to spend?

I think a more concrete idea of what we are not doing that we should be doing would help with the call for action part of this. 

It comes back to the wider problem that there is little demand and interest from voters in preventative measures, vs. things that have a more immediate visible impact. This is so sticky its remained even in the aftermath of a very visible pandemic. 

So the natural selection effect of politics is always going to push against it. You need a way to change public opinion, or at least elite discussion, on the topic to make it more politically viable, otherwise you are relying on politicians and political parties to act against their self interest. 

A related takeaway is that good government matters a lot for a response. And if you live in a democratic country that should influence your decision on how to vote and what other political activity you engage in. 

Partly you can just look at their stated policies on pandemics, or if they don't have any it can normally be reasonably inferred from other things. You should probably also prioritize general competence and ability to react well to new information more highly, relative to ideological alignment with you, than you would have otherwise. 

I'm confused by what is meant by "flirting" as an activity if its separated from the romantic context? How is that distinguished from friendly conversation?

There's a sense in which a lot of rules are attempts to solve coordination problems across time. A rule may work most of the time, but not in specific edge cases. But it may be the case that even in those edge cases its best to continue to follow the rule, because the benefit you get from consistency is higher than the harms of enforcing it in the edge cases, or the costs of building in more discretion.  

E.g. if you allow for this reasonable excuse you then have to allow for all equally reasonable excuses, removing the benefit of the rule. Or if you allow the lowest level decision maker more discretion you risk them using that discretion corruptly or incompetently. And either accept those costs or build in additional oversight structures which are costly. 

Often what seems like blind rule following from the outside is someone who has correctly made a utilitarian tradeoff, you are just on the wrong side of it.