Thread by @asymmetricinfo

This seems like a good time to discuss my most recently printed column,. Because this effect shows up strongly in the responses to it.

washingtonpost.com/opinions/2020/…

https://twitter.com/s8mb/status/1344218228470460417

And also, frankly, in the responses to the column that preceded it, which discussed the CDC's "Let some old people die in the name of equity" vaccination strategy.

washingtonpost.com/opinions/publi…

But we'll leave that for another tweetstorm.

Back to the column at hand, which was about the people I follow who called covid-19 as a big problem AHEAD of the big mid-March shift in the upper-middle-class professional consensus. What sort of people were they?

You can read my taxonomy and analysis in the column. The reaction of those who did, however, surprised me.

HUGE numbers of people who got mad because I pointed out that Peter Navarro had correctly urged the administration to seal the borders (all the borders), while CDC et al said "wait for more data".

Cue the outrage. HOW DARE I SAY PETER NAVARRO WAS RIGHT ABOUT SOMETHING?

Well, er, because he was.

Sadly, a perfectly on point line had been cut for space, a favorite adage of an anonymous science blogger I followed back in 2002: "The universe is not here to please you"

Because understanding this at a gut level--that it was 100% irrelevant whether a pandemic would be extremely economically costly, or hurt Trump's reelection chances, or make it harder to push your policy agenda, or just suck--was necessary but not sufficient to get it right early

But even more interesting was the people who said "If we'd just listened to the real experts ..."

The Real Experts TM were saying "Wait for more data" (which China wouldn't let us have). Navarro instead reasoned from data we did have, to the correct answer.

In the very early days, we would have done much worse to listen to the experts. The experts had a whole lot of professional committments--an outdated script for a different kind of pandemic, a desire not to make the public health community by being alarmist.

And there was a lot of data! China had locked down a whole city, which strongly suggested human-to-human transmission, at a pretty high R!

Now, one can make a decent argument that even if the experts failed in this case, on average you will do better to listen to them over the fringier people who got this right. That would be an interesting argument to have--but it clearly *is* arguable after the debacles of 2020.

I have on average gotten better and clearer guidance from a personally assembled group of advisors outside of public health than from the public health community.

This was especially true in April when my Dad had covid and the people who were supposed to help--nursing home, public health officials--gave me conflicting and often incorrect advice. When I could get them to say anything at all.

But anyway, the point is that it is just inarguable that in January we'd have done better listening to Peter Navarro and Matthew Pottinger over CDC, FDA, etc. They advised doing the things we now wish we'd done: seal the borders, invest heavily in PPE and vaccine capacity, etc

But people were arguing it anyway! They are retconning a past in which public health officials didn't tell us everything was fine (in NYC, memorably urging people to get out there and party), didn't slow-walk the news that Things are Bad, didn't tell us not to wear masks, etc

Part of this is just a deeply ingrained partisan knee-jerk: Trump wars with his public health experts in stupid and unproductive ways, therefore anyone who disagrees with them is stupid and wrong, like Trump.

But the other part, I suspect, is our desperately need to believe in our public health experts, to the point of ignoring glaring evidence that their advice was suboptimal at multiple points.

It's just too frightening to think there is no all-wise sheriff overseeing the town

Now, of course these decisions can be complicated, and to the extent that disease control is an iterated game, experts do have to trade off efficiency in some rounds--"warn as early as possible!" in order to preserve credibility for future rounds that might matter even more.

But you can believe that is true and still believe that there is something to be gained by understanding which people got it right, and how, and trying to use that information to improve the accuracy of their own response, and reduce those ugly tradeoffs.

Anyway, the column is here, thanks for listening:

washingtonpost.com/opinions/2020/…