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I mean look, Nate Silver did himself no favors with the tone of his tweets, but
1) In basically all other policy areas, e.g. economics and foreign policy, we have no problem with non-experts opining. In fact experts in those areas are distrusted as coming from a certain viewpoint
1) In basically all other policy areas, e.g. economics and foreign policy, we have no problem with non-experts opining. In fact experts in those areas are distrusted as coming from a certain viewpoint
So it's odd to me that the public health community, which recently (Feb/March) very consequentially failed in its decisions about what to tell the public about masks while non-experts got it right, is exempt. (They could've said make a cloth mask at home!! Not over this!)
2) The ACIP defenders readily admit that they're considering a huge range of disciplines: death-and-disease modeling, equity, public comms, etc. They are virologists, immunologists, and public health officials—notably *not* ethicists, economists, or public opinion experts.
So the idea that a non-virologist/etc should "stay in his lane" but the ACIP team is free to aggregate across these disciplines, and explicitly base its rubric on really questionable claims about equity in particular...again, strikes me as odd
3) I would certainly be interested in seeing somebody explain why Nate (and @mattyglesias etc) are wrong that the massive, orders-of-magnitude-scale age disparities in death clearly trump the other considerations, but so far I've missed that—just "stay in your lane" credentialism
And since I imagine a large amount of the public would be convinced by that (as I am), it's very problematic *if* the response is "how dare you question the experts, we're doing it our way" rather than "this is why that's wrong." Again maybe it's not, but I haven't seen it
And the ACIP defenders are really not reassuring me that they're thinking about it very hard when their responses are "oh you think the principles ACIP is using to decide how to distribute the vaccine makes no sense? Guess you hate clean water" https://twitter.com/gregggonsalves/status/1340610188324298753?s=20
And since ACIP itself is now moving towards Silver's suggestion, it seems like his content wasn't that bad, so people are really just responding to the audacity of (at least plausibly *correctly*) criticizing the vaunted experts. Seems bad https://twitter.com/Yair_Rosenberg/status/1340700662271754241?s=20
If I wanted to go truly galaxy-brain, I might say that while libs were obviously right about the sexism and ludicrousness of Dr. Jill-gate, the length and intensity of the reaction has resulted from this same credentialist fixation...but I don't want to go galaxy-brain
Lol like the actual logical conclusion of this tweet would be "but I don't criticize the CIA" https://twitter.com/rgay/status/1340552339279626242?s=20
Also this is a terrible comparison—the reason this is such a bad idea in finance is that your competitors have massive incentives to get it right. If we mis-prioritize vaccination and 10,000 more people die, what exactly happens to individual ACIP members? https://twitter.com/mikeandallie/status/1340474677081366528
Just saw that @daniel_eth already made this point https://twitter.com/daniel_eth/status/1340544477061111810?s=20
On pins and needles for when this thread is going to get QT'd into less friendly territory lol
Some good critical responses to this have noted a few things. 1) that Nate did get several things wrong about ACIP's work, 2) that much of the focus was on his bombast and arrogance. My only response is: those are both good things to criticize him for. But:
Much of the criticism *was* in fact naked credentialism. I quote a couple examples above, and that's what inspired the thread in the first place. I don't want to defend everything Nate said; I just want to push back on the idea that non-PhDs need to shut up about public policy
