Man in the sky versus wet paint. Strategic authority gives way to individual curiosity.

A very worthwhile essay.  From Welcome to Wikipedia World by Leslie Bienen.  The subheading is The only way out is through.  From the author description "Leslie Bienen is a veterinarian and is on the faculty of the OHSU-Portland State University School of Public Health in Portland, Oregon."

Way back two or three decades ago, we had a similar experience with that which we have recently had with Covid.  Not a public health experience but an epistemic experience.  The experts were saying one thing and the history and data seemed to be saying something entirely different. 

Back then the argument was a bit clearer.  The IPCC position was that our emissions of CO2 were causing the globe to warm up.  Anthropogenic Global Warming.  That turned out to not be an easily defended argument so they gradually evolved it, moat-and-bailey style, into the assertion that we were at risk of global climate change from human activities (CO2 being one of the human activities.)

This is a much more defensible position as climate is always changing, sometimes in cycles, sometimes erratically, sometimes episodically.  Sometimes quickly and sometimes slowly.  In addition, it has always been the case that human activities affect local climate including forest clearances for agriculture, constructing cities, emissions of all sorts.  

But the moat, AGW, is as indefensible as ever.  In part because we simply don't have sufficient data, in part because we still do not understand the chaotic complexity of climate change, but largely because this was always an argument about computer models rather than climate.  Do our models reliably tell us anything useful about the weather and climate?  If the answer is yes, we should pay attention.  If no, then the whole debate is largely cognitive pollution.

In the early years, there was clearly problems with the models (see East Anglia University data and model leak).  In later years, lack of transparency became a problem.

I know that climate changes.  I know that different human activities affect at least local climate changes.  I suspect that land use might be a bigger causal element than emissions.  I see little evidence that CO2 emissions are the delicate dial they have been described as though I remain concerned about the sheer volume (and our lack of causal understanding.)  I am reasonably confident that the contribution of human activity of any sort is relatively modest in the context of solar output, astronomical factors, geological event, meteorological oscillations and cloud activity.  Even if only a small contribution, it theoretically might be significant in effect.  I have no confidence in the integrity of the existing models or their forecasts.  

Probably ten years after the first IPCC panics, already steeped in concerns about the disconnect between the IPCC arguments and the actual data, I took solace in the fact that meteorologists had a much more jaundiced interpretation of the models and forecasts than did the AGW advocates.  

Stuart Kauffman has the concept of the adjacent possible.  I sometimes think in epistemic terms of the near adjacent.  Meteorologists are near adjacent with climatologists.  Veterinarians with medical doctors.  Statisticians with mathematicians.  Civil engineers with hydrologists.  

None of them are substitutes for one another but there are clear overlaps or similarities in their knowledge domains.  If I, as a generalist, look at the climatologists models and their claims and see a disconnect, then I have the operating assumption that they are wrong but with a healthy degree of self-skepticism.  I don't know what I don't know.  Even if they are ineffective at clarifying their position, I must acknowledge that it is possible that they are right.

If, however, I see near adjacent experts to climatologists who also have grave doubts about their argument and claims, then my confidence in my own assessment rises.  

Bienen's piece is of that nature.  I am very confident at this point in my interpretation of the serial public health failures over the past three years but it certainly reinforces that confidence when a near adjacent expert such as Bienen has a similar interpretation.  

Independent of a shared, but not necessarily fully aligned interpretation of what happened, Bienen has an additional argument which I find intriguing and worth thinking about.

For the first time in history during a pandemic, everyone with access to the internet could access masses of data. Even when SARS hit, the last time there were major travel restrictions and business closures (though not domestically in the USA), and widespread infection panic, most people had limited access to public health data and little concept of where such data might be found. It was 2003; there were very few smartphones and about 50% of Americans did not have access to internet at home. I don’t recall whether state health departments had public-facing websites twenty years ago, but they certainly did not have millions of data points readily accessible to the public and people were much less sophisticated about how to find information on the internet.

These data posed a major counterfactual to the narratives that many public officials, including the CDC, were putting out. The most generous interpretation of these narratives is that they were spun because policy makers were afraid that if people did not fear a Covid-19 infection adequately they would behave recklessly. Recently leaked Whatsapp chats by UK leaders, for example, demonstrate this phenomenon explicitly.

But problems quickly arose with this rationale, because anyone could go look at data. Pres. Biden said the unvaccinated were facing “a winter of severe illness and death” in December of 2021, long after anyone who wanted to could be vaccinated. Hospitalizations were not surging and did not, throughout Omicron, though incidental hospitalizations ‘with’ Covid rose due to Omicron’s high infectivity. The Oregon Health Authority (OHA), for example, continued to push boosters for young children as a life saving measure, despite the fact that anyone could see on their website that few, if any, children were at risk of a severe Covid infection. 16 children under 19 in Oregon died of Covid during the last three years, and this figure does not account for incidental deaths which, according to the CDC, is likely at least half of total deaths. So, some number likely less than eight, most of whom—if not all—had major underlying health issues. At the same time, in 2021 alone 73 young people (under 24 years old) in Oregon died of fentanyl poisoning/overdoses. In 2021, 92 Oregon youth died from firearms. Yet the overwhelming barrage of information (email, Facebook posts, etcetera) about children’s health the OHA put out in 2020, 2021, and 2022 was about the importance of boosting children for Covid. The mismatch between the truth of what was—and still is-- killing children and the narrative was in plain sight, and anyone could find it with a one-minute Google search.

George Carlin once said “Tell people there’s an invisible man in the sky who created the universe, and the vast majority will believe you. Tell them the paint is wet, and they have to touch it to be sure.” Public health, and to a large extent mainstream media, does not seem to realize that somewhere between 2000 and 2022, they went from being the people saying there is an invisible man in the sky, and being believed regardless of verifiability, to being the people saying the paint is wet. Even worse, they said the paint was wet and it wasn’t, and anyone and everyone could reach out and touch it for themselves in a matter of seconds spent at the computer. Of course, the paint was wet in some places (e.g.,very old people are still at risk of Covid hospitalization, and should get boosted and vaccines were very important for immune naïve people over fifty or with risk factors) but it wasn’t wet everywhere (children are incredibly low risk and do not need boosters or possibly even to be vaccinated at all) and it never was.

I want to believe this is an articulation of a major insight.  Between 2000 and 2022, we jolted from a position where the public was effectively excluded from the epistemic details of any particular issue to the position where virtually anyone could make an informed argument.  Granted, not all arguments were well made or well-informed.  But that is not the point.  Expert arguments are also often not well made or well-informed.

Experts can assert their guild privileges only so long as their assertions have credibility and as long as no one else has access to the models or data which underpin the assertions.  When everyone has access, the guild privileges evaporate (exhibit A - Fauci.)  

And the sources of extensive detailed data are proliferating, for example Our World in Data, FRED, and GapMinder.  There is more and more, high value data for bright people to access.

The number of experts in any particular field are usually small in number.  Let's say there are 3,000 expert level climatologists/forecasters.  If they can restrict the data and restrict the models, then almost tautologically, but not necessarily accurately, they are the experts.

But if the data is accessible and the modeling capability is available, then everyone in a near adjacent expert field can weigh in.  What are some near adjacent fields of knowledge to climatologists?  Certainly meteorologists, but also financial modelers, economic modelers, statisticians, historians, paleobotanists, dendrologists, geologists, etc.  

Similarly with public health.  What are some of the near adjacent knowledge domains to public health?  Lawyers, doctors, medical researchers, historians, statisticians, economic modelers, financial modelers, network theorists, social contagion specialists, medical examiners, veterinarians, animal husbandry experts, etc.  

Say there are 3,000 experts in each of 15 near adjacent fields to the 3,000 experts in public health policy.  Suddenly you have 45,000 experts with the capacity and the access to the data and models.  If all 3,000 public health experts take firm positions on whatever the issue might be then that is all we can know.  But if only 1/3 of the near adjacent actually exercise an interest in the issue, we go from 3,000 arguments to 18,000 arguments.

Further, not only do we have a much larger number of informed arguments, there are two other benefits to this extra-connected, hyper-accessible condition.  First, the risk of group think, very real among small numbers of homogenous experts, is significantly reduced.  Second, the likelihood of the discovery of relevant additional knowledge increases dramatically.

Building on Bienen's insight, I would argue that three things happened differently during the Covid-19 Pandemic.

Global Experts, not just local - Because of the internet and ubiquitous computing, we had access to global institutional knowledge.  We could compare ourselves to the UK, Israel, Netherlands, Sweden, Japan, etc. and see possible benefits from variant policies as well as variant data sets.

Greater and better leveraged expertise was brought to bare - Full connectivity and access has meant that the powerful effect of near adjacent knowledge expertise was demonstrated for the first time.

The probability of more robust and accurate arguments is materially enlarged - For any particular issue, the population of Guild experts is much smaller than the population of possible relevant experts from near adjacent knowledge domains.  With greater numbers from overlapping knowledge domains, the greater the probability that all knowledge will be incorporated.

I had been thinking in terms of loss of trust in institutions and my own incomprehension of how badly the CDC, NIH, etc. performed.

Bienen is pointing at a different way of interpreting what happened.  Because of computing power and connectivity and because this was a global incident with possibly dire consequences, we got our first view of collapsing knowledge guilds.  The emergent order, knowledge and insight from connected, informed, and motivated near adjacent experts (as well as merely interested cognitively competent general public) outpaced the Guild Experts (WHO, CDC, NIH, NHS, etc.) at every step.

The near adjacent experts came to more accurate conclusions, sooner, and with better empirical and rational arguments than did the Guild Experts of WHO, CDC, NIH, NHS, etc.  The Guild Experts are still not clearly aligned with the reality that has hit them.

I ascribed some of the bad decision making and more reprehensible public policies to institutional defensiveness.  CDC kept trying to hide their bad policies by doubling down.  There was perhaps some group think and epistemic isolation as well.  

I still think those aspects remain true but I wonder if Bienen is not on to something even more fundamental.  Perhaps the bad decisions were driven in part not just out of institutional defensiveness.  Perhaps it was also driven by an effort to protect the perks and benefits of the Guild Experts.