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the y2k example you opened with was different in one way: the people to act were all part of a group of people that deeply understood both the reason and the possible outcomes of the issue, that could act based on information.
Things that need broad collaboration from society at large work, as far as I can see, different.
@johnzajac
If you read the IPCC report, you can even see how the contributing scientists rate the probability of the verious predictions the models make.
it's all right there, but what do we do?
Do politicians act according to the facts?
Do countries elect politicians that do?
That is my key point: it's not enough to *know* what's coming, you also have to feel it, to *fear* it.
we're discussing after the fact, with next to perfect knowledge of what we did not know six years ago.
My primary point was: Information alone, knowledge, is not enough to overcome the prevention paradox.
If we look at a different domain, climate change, things are slightly different, here, science almost unanimously agrees on "if we stay on this path, we're f'ed", we have high quality information.
Policy decisions must be made for and explained to them as well.
And politicians may themselves be an that camp, too.
To me, politics has failed to act decisively in a situation where they were facing a force that they had no tools for, that was outside of what politics has been dealing with in more than three generations.
But on the flip side, even the relatively mild measures we had created a major societal rift.
I could make my decisions on the base if the facts we knew and the discussion of the uncertainties. But I also have had an Interest in Virologe for 15 or so years by that time and could access sources that were not easily accessible for most (not from an availability level, but due to their complexity)
The bigger problem, and that was my initial argument were people that can‘t or would not be able to grasp the scientific facts.
That's great, that‘s how science should work. Would it have been better to understand this earlier? To self-correct quicker? Yes.
I am by no means saying everything went right, not by a long shot, I‘m saying that, in the situation back then, I understand why people werde unwilling to go out on a limb.
I said it earlier: to me, the situation was easy, I believe I understood the situation as good as I could, I had access to developing information
I had not, thank you.
I don't think it changes things.
We agree that early in, mistakes werde made, heck, even some of the virologists I trust most were initiallly dismissive about mask efficacy (Vincent Racaniello) and had to correct themselves.
Would it have been wetter to know then what we know now? Absolutely!
Did we?
The article is written through the eyes if people who challenged consesnus at the time and it turned out they were right
In January/February 2020, I was in New Zealand, and it was interesting to see that the Asian Population there started to mask upon the first news from Hubei, in fact, I remember first learning about it from a receptionist at a motel in Christchurch who wore a mask. That was in the last week of January, a full two months before any measures were taken back home in Germany.
I guess what I wanted to say is: I am not sure that it is that easy.
The WHO is a different beast, that's a public health commitee, they're job is it to collect the available data and make policy proposals.
I guess that's where the gravity of the situation makes an impact: you see something coming that is large, do you cry "wolf"? How often do we see things that turn out to be nothing burgers? At what point *was* it obvious that mask mandates were the best first course of action?
I will just say: what would have been a better approach.
Scientists are sometimes a weird bunch, only trying to state publicly what they are absolutely sure of, and hopefully only for the field they have expertise in.
So if you ask a virologist "do masks work" they will look for a study of reduced infectivity.
@johnzajac is right, we have good engineering data on masks, but that's engineering data, not scientific, and it would not be a virologist's expertise.
Science can inform, tell us what we know, what may be probable to happen. and what may be less probable.
Mask mandates are a good point to discuss this: early on, all the data we had for masks efficacy was from hospital studies, there were, to my knowledge, no large published studies on the effects of masks in public Areals.
The correct, scientific thing to say is "we have no data".
It's for politicians to gather data and make desicions.
So there are a few things here:
- Scientists deal with reality and our current understanding of it. To speculte beyond that is generally frowned upon as non-scientific, and spoken about in terms of probabilities
- Words have different meanings in the scientific language, best exampified by the word "Theory" which almost has opposite meaning between scientific and every day language.
Given this, the mistake is to expect scientists to make political decisions.
most people, that you needed to reach them at an emotional level. I didn't, at the time, understand what he meant, but where we are today is a result of this.
There are clearly a lot of people who are not rechable with facts, who we need to address differently, so they can accept the conclusions that the facts mandate
Okay, but what do we then base decisions on?
Facts are a pretty good basis if we have them, beyond facts, we might have heuristics, and then?
At the beginning of 2020, I felt well prepared, we had information, science was working at an amazing speed and there was a good choice of factual comuniction. When speaking to a friend who is a social scientist, he mentioned that he felt we did not provide enough emotional communication, that facts are not good enough for
There's another thing we've learned form Covid:
What is considered intellectual honesty is read as intellectual weakness by many:
Someone who deeply understands a topic will
a) be careful with black and white statements
b) change their position if they have new information
@syllopsium @johnzajac I think the underlying question is really interesting:
how can we have a world where
a) people trust experts and
b) people don't listen to charlatans
the core thing is then: how can someone who is not an expert distinguish between those two.
The key learnings for that, in my mind, would be to
- understand and learn to distrust your own confirmation bias
- understand and accept how much you don't know
@johnzajac The people who tried that during CoViD, like Fauci or Drosten here in Germany, faced death threats for just that.
Don't get me wrong: I don't disagree with you, and even less do I want to be a naysayer, I just feel that, given what we've seen the last decades, it's not as easy.
I guess what I'm trying to say is: I'm at a loss.
@johnzajac I know, and sorry for stating the obvious.
I share the frustration.
I just don't think you can teach people compleyity (which is what it is, at the end: predicting the likely behaviour of a complex system and modifying it, if necessary)
For the majority, it will continue to be a black box and an event that didn't happen.
@johnzajac well, we were a few 100000 fixing it and at the time, what, 5 Billion people hearing about it.
Our experience that it was real wasn't their experience. The world always is simpler if you're not an expert