I'll advance a theory some people may find controversial. I beg you for a moment just assume it can make sense, and then later tell me whether the fundamental controversial hypothesis is really unacceptable, or what else is wrong with this idea.
Where are the most intelligent people in the world? Many people like to think everyone is equally intelligent, or that if there's some variation, it has little correlation to any socio-economic variables you can come up with, including your job or field of work. Let's suppose for a second this may actually not be the case.
Where are these smart people, then? I would say most of them are not politicians, they're not in the government and are not biologists either, for the most part. Most of them are working for Amazon, Google, Facebook etc, maximizing click rates. Everything about the Covid crisis involves not only blunders from government and health/life-sciences professionals, it also brings good business to the cognitive elite (e-commerce, moving all you social interactions to social media and videoconferences, staying at home watching Netfilx and YouTube).
There are many bright people working in biology, of course. Dr. Sunetra Gupta was the first, if not only person I've seen that appears to have a good understanding that measuring the R of coronavirus infections is not that easy, and you should stick to death statistics, for example, because it's much more reliable data.
She's an exception. Everyone else is going around thinking you can actually take a bunch of test results, throw it in an Excel sheet and find out "oh, today the R was 1.2 in Dorset, and it's also going to rain". It's silly. And it happens because many people are just not very good with maths and models and probabilities and fitting models and making predictions... I.e. pattern recognition.
Dr. Ioannidis also seems to have a good grasp of it. In this video he discusses how fitting two models to some data can bring us to very different conclusions, and it's not very easy to say what is the truth. It depends on details that he doesn't even get to discuss. Because it's so complex and difficult to understand.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rXuljpIY-nk&feature=youtu.be
The difficulty in discussing this subject is also clear in the confusion about false positives. Most people out there talking about Covid test statistics apparently don't even begin to suspect it's actually not that easy to draw good conclusions (a random example, Mr. Matthew Hancock). You must take test accuracy into account, you must take into account things like what fraction of the population was tested, etc. Not to mention what the test is even measuring (what's a "case"? What is "infection"? Were you "sick"?...) This is all very difficult. Most people don't have the skill or even the patience to deal with this. Even if you have a lot of very objective data, the analysis may be fuzzy. And figuring it out, dealing with the complexity and frustrations of this work, is not for everyone. Even if you are intelligent, it may still be very difficult. That's why many of the most smartest people in the world go on to study Mathematics and Theoretical Physics instead of Engineering, but I digress...
It should be no shame struggling to understand these things. People are different. Some people just have the "knack" for this stuff, or the will. Like Dr. Gupta and Dr. Ionnidis. And where are these people? Well, there are some who are politicians, some who are epidemiologists, yes some. Tons of them are not on these jobs, though. They are right now working on much more important things like maximizing retweet rates at Twitter, maximizing YouTube likes and maximizing Amazon Prime memberships.
This would explain a lot. Someone draws some lousy graph, that doesn't really mean much, posts some scary tweet, and it gets massively retweeted. Why? Well, the smartest people on the planet are not the ones plotting and reading all these Excel charts. They're the ones behind the retweet button, and selling you the video-conferencing software that you need to do your work nowadays. Just like the richest man in the world used to be someone who sold you the software suite you needed to do your job in your office, when we used to go to office for work.
It's all just hypothetical, though. I hope you are not offended by admitting these hypotheses.
But if it's true, how did we get here? Is it because smart people like to play with computers? Is it because their talent wasn't rewarded with a high enough salary in other occupations, and other places outside of the American west coast? Is it just an effect of economy moving to services, plus digital convergence? It is simply Moore's law? Or do smart people just converged like birds of a feather? Or are they actually attracted to where the money already was going to? Or is it actually the money making people smarter, and then there's also a positive feedback?
If the original hypothesis is acceptable, of course...
Where are these smart people, then?
In a cave meditating, away from worldly distractions and trying to come to terms with this ephemeral life.
I may be biased as one of those "smart people". I have spent a lot of my career working in Silicon Valley, But actually there are lots of not very bright people there too. Working for Dot-Coms mainly..
But I digress.
For as long as I can remember the rule in the sciences was that people very good at mathematics went into physics, pure mathematics, comp sci etc. Those not very good at mathematics when into the soft-sciences. Like biology and bio-sciences. There is now an area called bio-informatics but on the whole the bio-sciences tend to be consumers of mathematics rather than people who real understand how it really works.
The people with no real grasp of mathematics all seem to have become economists.
But a common problem for those of us who come from a hard science background, even those of use very familiar with the "dodginess" of the majority of published papers in their field, is just how sloppy if not outright silly the mathematics and conclusions drawn in most of the relevant literature regarding the epidemiology and clinical characteristics of SARs CoV 2, human corona-viruses and the related public health issues.
The simple fact is there is no large body of rigorous research done on these subjects. On which public policy could actually be based. Then when the crisis started the politicians and government agencies misused what little research there was in a manner for which is was never intended and despite the very clear warning from the researchers that their research was a very unsuitable base for any kind of very intrusive public heath policy
To give just one example. There is a large body of published literature, including multiple survey papers, on why it was such a terrible idea to use the R0 value as a benchmark value on which to base short term public health policy. The literate is emphatic, dont use R0.
So what happened back in March. Governments start using R0 ( in this case a purely made up number with no supporting data) as the fundamental measure of public health policy. And then used the purported ups and down in this purely synthetic number as the measure of "success" or "failure".
So a simple rule of thumb since then is that the moment anyone, politician or supposed "expert", mentioned R0 going up or down you could be 100% certain they were just making it up. Because they do not have any data to make that statement. Just some guy with a computer sticking arbitrary numbers into a program which spat out fancy graphs.
Then there are masks. The published literature is very clear. Some effect with sneezing, wet cough symptoms, not much but it helps. Every other scenario, no statistically measurable effect. So masks would have no statistically measurable effect with a dry cough infection. Like with SARs 2.
But the politicians need to look like the are "doing something" so it mandatory masks.
Social distancing. Well according to all the published research typical stranger personal distance in the West is 1.50 meters plus. Well outside dry cough / repository aerosol range. But is less than 1 meter with family. So if social distance was based on the science it should only apply at home and around immediate family...
But the politicians need to look like the are "doing something" so it's 2 meters in public.
See the pattern? The reason why the political class is such a failure is because so few of them have ever had a real job.
The career path of politicians of previous generations, the real world, business, professions, trade unions, then politics. They almost all had real jobs. Real world experience. Before their political career. This has been replaced with a career path of University (PPE etc), then some political policy organization etc, then a SPAD etc , then professional politics. Or civil service.
When you look at the career background of most of the people in a position of power you will find that almost all of them are either career politicians or career bureaucrats. I include almost all the senior "scientific" people in the latter group. When I look at the CV's of most of the scientific "experts" advising governments I just see the type of people who are very good at playing academic politics, collecting faculty titles along the way. People who are very good at career politics are almost always not very competent in their supposed field of expertise. I speak from long years of experience. The more exalted the academic qualifications the more professional incompetent the person actually will be at producing a practical working end results. The people who actually know what they are talking about are rarely any good at career politics.
Which I think we are now currently seeing played out on an national and international stage. People who never had a real world job being advised by people with academic titles but no actual practical pragmatic domain knowledge.
I think you have hit the nail on the head there, MikeAustin. I've come to see a common denominator in all this, which is our terror both individually and collectively, to contemplate our own mortality. It's this that makes people so unable to even LOOK at numerical data if it includes death statistics. The view that death is such an affront that there MUST be a cure all vaccine. But I also wonder if, paradoxically, this same fear drives many lockdown sceptics. Just to give a couple of examples. I lean towards cockup rather than conspiracy theories partly because conspiracies require so much competence and a convergence of interests which may not be there. More the convergence of opportunisms that Mike Yeadon speaks of. There seems to be a package of views which most conspiracists espouse: some plausible like the machinations of Big Pharma and some quite whacky like the idea that this is all a plot to control population. As if the continual rapid expansion of human numbers could have anything other than catastrophic environmental consequences. Such ideas can only accrue in people whose lives are dislocated from the rhythms of nature, the cycle of birth and death. I've also noticed that some of the more conspiracy inclined have a rather obsessive concern for their own personal safety and data security which may reflect in part an inability to accept their own finitude.
Sorry this is a bit incoherent and off the top of my head but I was pleased to see this elephant in the room given some attention.
