Quote:
Originally Posted by Tyrone Slothrop
Is it any surprise to you that when there's a pandemic of a brand new diseases, maybe the experts don't have all the answers right away? Adults soberly assessing the situation are going to have a hard time -- it was literally a brand new disease. The idea that an ordinary person is going to "research" (research what?) and make a better decision is silly in those circumstances.
You have a separate set of complaints about how the government lost trust in the first months of the pandemic. Noted. It would be all too easy for me to point to the clowns running the federal government back then, so I won't. The point you make about the media & social media giving people terrible information is exactly right -- but that's where you want people doing their "research" instead of letting public-health officials set policy.
There have always been anti-vaccer kooks, and we did pretty well in spite of them. What's changed in this pandemic, as I was saying the other day, is that conservatives have decided to oppose reasonable public-health measures, not only of any deep principle, but out of oppositional behavior. (Not everyone who doesn't want to get vaccinated is reflecting this, but some of them are surely deciding that the vaccine isn't to be trusted at least in part because there is an organized campaign to push those views.)
The choices are pretty simple: We either let government experts decide, or the government abdicates that role and lets everyone decide on their own what to do based on what their lunatic cousin says on Facebook.
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There has to be a willingness to adjust, however, and giving the experts total control often precludes this. They lock in a view that’s based on their expertise, and then they’re trapped with it. They can’t pivot or adjust substantially because of a mix of bias and fear of loss of face/authority. At that point, science and policy are polluted with PR and politics. (All of this is written about much more colorfully in that Martin Gurri book I recommended, btw.)
Our govt, our leaders, almost all of our institutions suffer from this tendency to lock in to methods, policies, aims, etc. we talk too much about them, oversell them, and become wedded to seeing them succeed. Our institutions outside tech suffer from an astonishing lack of nimbleness.
If we’d talked less, argued with conspiracy theorists less, and just pushed forward policies, we’d have had room room to change course as we learned more. It would have vaccinated us a bit against tribalism.
