Legible expertise via credentials versus functionally useful expertise

From Our Conversation with Zvi Mowshowitz by Arnold Kling.  A very interesting observation.  Zvi Mowshowitz is one of the legion of data analysts who are gleaning much more useful knowledge from Covid data than are most the national health authorities and getting pretty far out in front of them in terms of what public Covid health policy should look like versus the crumbling framework which was adopted without evidence back two years ago.

We covered where he went to high school and college, his participation in the rationalist community, how he uses Twitter, how he came to be a go-to analyst of COVID, why he found advanced economics courses boring but he finds some economist bloggers interesting, and how he determines what sources to trust. It turns out that in a previous life he was a professional sports bettor and also a securities trader, so I was quite curious about that.

During the question period, one participant asked him about the problem that his knowledge is not “legible” to many people. This is a really fundamental issue. Dr. Fauci has “legible” expertise (his credentials), but he is actually not very reliable by my standards. Zvi is more reliable, but you have to be able to follow his thought process and appreciate it in order to know that.

 

As Omicron overturns the assumptions underpinning most of the flawed public health policies related to Covid-19, we are seeing a dramatic collapse in the establishment narrative.  But much of the knowledge is originating at the margin from people like Mowshowitz whose evidence and conclusions are making the credentialed experts look very bad in terms of their functional utility.  For practical decision-making, one  Mowshowitz is worth dozens of Fauci clones in terms of making useful decisions.