Do not mistake empirical arguments for the real argument - Who controls the power?

Part of the Great Revealing in 2020 has been how little value can be tied to large numbers of "experts". We have known this for more than a couple of decades, originating out of work by Philip E. Tetlock of the University of Pennsylvania who originally demonstrated that "expert" forecasts tended to have less validity than forecasts by informed observers.

The models on Covid-19 have been especially inaccurate in their forecasts, as has been the ever-changing recommendations of the "experts." A situation not yet ameliorated because we still do not have good, hard, consistent data. Everyone is still using a grab-bag of heterogenous data to see what they want to see.

But another part of the Great Revealing is the arrogance, hypocrisy and blind self-regard of the chattering Mandarin class.

An example is from Are Protests Unsafe? What Experts Say May Depend on Who’s Protesting What by Michael Powell.

As the pandemic took hold, most epidemiologists have had clear proscriptions in fighting it: No students in classrooms, no in-person religious services, no visits to sick relatives in hospitals, no large public gatherings.

So when conservative anti-lockdown protesters gathered on state capitol steps in places like Columbus, Ohio and Lansing, Mich., in April and May, epidemiologists scolded them and forecast surging infections. When Gov. Brian Kemp of Georgia relaxed restrictions on businesses in late April as testing lagged and infections rose, the talk in public health circles was of that state’s embrace of human sacrifice.

And then the brutal killing of George Floyd by police in Minneapolis on May 25 changed everything.

Soon the streets nationwide were full of tens of thousands of people in a mass protest movement that continues to this day, with demonstrations and the toppling of statues. And rather than decrying mass gatherings, more than 1,300 public health officials signed a May 30 letter of support, and many joined the protests.

That reaction, and the contrast with the epidemiologists’ earlier fervent support for the lockdown, gave rise to an uncomfortable question: Was public health advice in a pandemic dependent on whether people approved of the mass gathering in question? To many, the answer seemed to be “yes.”

Of course the answer was yes. There was no other answer possible.

Catherine Troisi, an infectious disease epidemiologist at The University of Texas Health Science Center at Houston, studies Covid-19. When, wearing a mask and standing at the edge of a great swell of people, she attended a recent protest in Houston supporting Mr. Floyd, a sense of contradiction tugged at her.

“I certainly condemned the anti-lockdown protests at the time, and I’m not condemning the protests now, and I struggle with that,” she said. “I have a hard time articulating why that is OK.”

Mark Lurie, a professor of epidemiology at Brown University, described a similar struggle.

“Instinctively, many of us in public health feel a strong desire to act against accumulated generations of racial injustice,” Professor Lurie said. “But we have to be honest: A few weeks before, we were criticizing protesters for arguing to open up the economy and saying that was dangerous behavior.

“I am still grappling with that.”

[snip]

The pandemic has also brought an increase in deaths from heart attacks and diabetes during this period.

“Have people died because of the closed economy? No doubt,” said Professor Lurie, the Brown University epidemiologist. “And that pain is real, and should not be dismissed. But you won’t have a healthy economy until you have healthy people.”

There’s another epidemiological reality: No one quite understands the path of this idiosyncratic virus and how and when it strikes. The public health risks presented by the protests are not easily separated from the broader risks taken as governors, in fits and starts, move to reopen state economies. The protesters represent a small stream filled with 500,000 to perhaps 800,000 people, merging with a river of millions of Americans who have begun to re-enter businesses and restaurants.

“To separate out those causes, when we look, will be very difficult,” Professor Lurie noted.

Still, he admitted to some worries. He said he took his daughter to a protest early in June and felt a chaser of regret in its wake.

“We felt afterward that the risk we incurred probably exceeded the entire risk in the previous two months,” he said. “We undid some very hard work, and I don’t see how actions like that can help in battling this epidemic, honestly.”

But Powell and Lurie and Christakis and all the other Mandarin Class pundits miss the point.

There is a health question, a moral question and a Civil Rights question.

The health question relates to the nature of the virus, how it spreads, how infectious it is, how lethal etc. The answers to those questions go into the consideration as to whether people need to be locked down or can mingle freely. Supposedly that is a matter for experts but given their track record of contradictory and not infrequently disastrous recommendations, they "experts" don't have much of a leg to stand on. This is not a call for anti-intellectualism. Indeed, the reverse. It is a proclamation that expertise is demonstrated by performance, that performance has been poor and unreliable. It is an assertion that credentials are no synonym for expertise.

The moral question is whether individual "experts" are permitted to be hypocritical. Is it permissible to assert one thing to be onerously true for everyone else and then relieve themselves of the costs and burdens of that recommendation when it suits their personal desires. To say that Civil Rights campaigners protesting to open up are an unacceptable health risk whereas protests for ideological purposes near and dear to the hearts of the "experts" are permissible.

The mainstream media is obsessed with the second question but gives an occasional head nod to the first.

The first question is an empirical one and the practical reality is that we do not have the hard evidence to give us the clear answers we need. For the time being, we are all guessing. The "experts" might have more elaborate justifications for their guesses but they remain guesses. Eventually we will get to some objective answers to our empirical questions but it is unlikely to be within the time frame we are dealing with.

Powell's piece focuses on the second question - "Are "experts" being hypocritical?" It hardly takes all words he uses to demonstrate that yes, they are being hypocritical. There is no avoiding the answer and any effort trying to dress it up in relative moralism or concern, etc. simply makes it look worse. The "experts" want citizens to do one thing while the experts are permitted to do exactly the opposite.

And the third question? That is the most important of all.

On what basis does any "expert" have the right to override the natural rights of citizens? Particularly in the case where everyone is deciding based on a relatively equal playing field of ignorance?

First Amendment - Freedom of assembly. There are conditions of narrow exemption under very special circumstances and health is one of those circumstances. But it is not an open-ended abolishment of those rights.

The"experts" have essentially done something more than simply committed the sin of hypocrisy. They have, most pertinently, advocated for a stratified society of unequal citizens where those of the "expert" or Mandarin Class are ruled by one set of limited laws whereas everyone else has to be ruled firmly and made in totalitarian fashion, to obey the laws the Mandarin Class reject.

This isn't about whether wearing masks or attending protests will spread the virus. This is a question of whether all citizens will be allowed to equally exercise their freedoms. This is a question of power. Who has the power to force others to obey?

The totalitarian "expert" class and the Mandarin Class have reached the conclusion that everyone but themselves must obey and pay the cost.

Citizens, not surprisingly, especially given the poor performance of the Mandarin Class and the "experts" are insisting on the rule of law and equality before the law. A consideration not part of the Mandarin class thought process.

Regrettably.

And now it is revealed. We see that there is a demand for expert rule and we can simultaneously see that that expert rule has been disastrously and consistently wrong for many months. No wonder there is panic in Mandarin land.

Pursuit of empirical truths by all citizens should almost always trump blind obedience to an incompetent totalitarian state.