I've been amazed at how eager people have been to stake out and defend firm positions regarding this pandemic. We know this is an unprecedented global crisis wi

I've been amazed at how eager people have been to stake out and defend firm positions regarding this pandemic. We know this is an unprecedented global crisis with no good analogies, and we know that new information comes to light literally every single day. But instead of acknowledging this and taking a patient and flexible approach, we have everyone from the president on down taking hard positions about how this will play out, when it will end, how many people will die, what will happen after it ends and so on. Even under the best possible conditions, humans are famously bad at predicting the future. Why then, when faced with a situation that is riddled with known unknowns, are so many people so eager to declare they know the future? And how do these fabricated declarations help us in any way? They only serve to obscure how truly in the dark we are about our current predicament.