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This whole mess has been a repudiation of business-as-usual politics, but it has not been a repudiation of scientific experts. Scientific experts across the wo

by knzhou 7y ago

This whole mess has been a repudiation of business-as-usual politics, but it has not been a repudiation of scientific experts. Scientific experts across the world have been alarmed for months now. The only problem is that, as with any new and uncertainty situation, the error bars started absolutely enormous, so the range of expert opinion has been wide. This is the case in any crisis. With the benefit of hindsight, you can always find an expert who was wrong, but that doesn't mean anything. It's important to say this because later, you're going to start to hear bloviating from politicians who failed to act for months. "Nobody knew this was coming." "Everything that went wrong was solely the fault of $enemy_country or $rival_party."

professorgerm 7y ago
It has been a repudiation of the communication layers between experts and average people, as well, which I think might be more of Aaronson's ire than experts qua experts (it's certainly more of my ire, but I don't have his platform). A standard of "scientists dabbling in journalism to improve communication" instead of "journalists dabbling in communicating science" would likely have gone a long way to improving the civilian response and trust in experts. There's also the factor of the "Noble Lie" dishonesty around wearing masks. I suspect intellectual-ish contrarians (like Aaronson et al) are more angered by this than the average person, but we ended up with shortages and sellouts anyways: a significant number of non-experts didn't buy into that noble lie so the experts/organizations that pushed it (not to be confused with ALL experts) burned a lot of good will to basically no effect. ETA: I considered replying to your comment about the Harvard epidemiologists but would rather edit it in here to avoid two replies to one person: I think that's a great example of my point. The story wasn't broken by bloggers, but bloggers were more likely to be amplifying the concerned experts than our "traditional media powerhouses."

by knzhou 7y ago

professorgerm 7y ago

It has been a repudiation of the communication layers between experts and average people, as well, which I think might be more of Aaronson's ire than experts qua experts (it's certainly more of my ire, but I don't have his platform). A standard of "scientists dabbling in journalism to improve communication" instead of "journalists dabbling in communicating science" would likely have gone a long way to improving the civilian response and trust in experts. There's also the factor of the "Noble Lie" dishonesty around wearing masks. I suspect intellectual-ish contrarians (like Aaronson et al) are more angered by this than the average person, but we ended up with shortages and sellouts anyways: a significant number of non-experts didn't buy into that noble lie so the experts/organizations that pushed it (not to be confused with ALL experts) burned a lot of good will to basically no effect. ETA: I considered replying to your comment about the Harvard epidemiologists but would rather edit it in here to avoid two replies to one person: I think that's a great example of my point. The story wasn't broken by bloggers, but bloggers were more likely to be amplifying the concerned experts than our "traditional media powerhouses."