Yes, but Richard Epstein's crime isn't "stupidity" but "heresy". Nobody is debunking his many errors, but are instead pillorying him for challenging orthodoxy. Nobody will criticize you for Dunning-Kruegering it up as long as you do so in support of orthodoxy.
I've looked and can find no support for this claim that somehow the virus will quickly evolve to become less "virulent".
hoover.org/research/coron…
hoover.org/research/coron…
He projected only 500 deaths when the death toll was around 10.
He then revised his numbers upward to 5,000 when his previous projection was surpassed.
Today it's past 2,000 and clearly on trend to surpass 5,000 by the end of the week.
He then revised his numbers upward to 5,000 when his previous projection was surpassed.
Today it's past 2,000 and clearly on trend to surpass 5,000 by the end of the week.
It's like a psychic whose predictions of the End of the World keep getting pushed back as they continue to not be proven true. Even if his numbers were right, they are still wrong, because he provides no basis for them. They are simply his gut instinct rather than from a model.
But I'm not attacking him here, I'm defending him. Whether he's right or wrong shouldn't be so emotional. It should be no more a crime to be wrong here than predicting next week's weather. Yet it is somehow a crime that threatens his job.
We criticize countries like China, Russia, Iran, and North Korea for the way that they repress any dissent. China famously arrested people in the early part of the pandemic for saying it was a "pandemic" contrary to the official position.
But we do the same thing here. We don't have vigorous and transparent debate on the issue so much as people attacking each other based on political agendas. We make people afraid to speak out because it threatens their livelyhood.
I stocked up preparing for a multi-month siege back in February when your consensus was that such preparation was overly paranoid. But I also go walking around the neighborhood every evening when the rest of you think I should now be staying indoors.
Who should we trust? The WHO? They are clearly defending China's interests here. The CDC? Their claims that "masks don't work" is clearly a deception designed to redirect supply to health care workers who need it more than the average person.
I mean, the CDC has a point: health care workers have a dramatically greater need than the average person, and the effectiveness for the average person is less than believed, but still, their statement is one that people should feel free to challenge. It's not heretical to do so.
How about we trust the "science" instead? The problem here is that people don't know science. Instead, they cherry pick whichever results agree with them and ignore the rest of the science. The hydroxychloroquine thing is a good example of people misunderstanding science.
What "science" tells us about this is that there is huge amounts of uncertainty. Anybody with a nice graph that doesn't contain error bars is violating scientific principles as much as Richard Epstein.
