While finding it difficult to admit error is undoubtedly a part of being human, I suspect that it has become even more difficult in the current climate as norms of what is acceptable have changed. On the one hand, it seems as if statements and actions of politicians which would have demanded retraction, apology or accountability 20 years ago now can be ignored or ridden through without consequence. Sometimes, the breaking of old norms becomes a value to be exalted. On the other hand, the smallest mis-statement or use of an inappropriate word seems to allow for the world to dump on someone incessantly and aggressively. Moreover, while one person may take pride in correcting their past conclusion as facts or their analysis changes, I suspect there is added fear in doing so now as their ‘team’ on that issue will come down on them like a ton of bricks for leaving or betraying the fold.
One of those "synergy" days when it seems as if everything I'm reading is multiple views of the same topic. I just finished finally reading the book version of Burke's "The Day the Universe Changed", where universe-changing depended on *many* proud people admitting previous error, so it was always a long fight for a new truth to be established.
Same day, I read it was 4 years since Anthony Fauci demonization started, and it was much earlier than I remembered, right after he corrected Trump even once on something. Later, he was beat up for changing his mind about masks - admitting they'd been wrong to not recommend them, doing a 180. But the demonization started months earlier. The entire Tony Fauci "controversy" was just beating up expertise itself, fighting against the very notion of a solid truth. NB: Fauci's admission of error was taken as a huge strike AGAINST him by the GOP.
Thing was, my jaw dropped at the 2nd-last paragraph in Burke's book, the big sum-up about the negotiations and fights between science vs myth, which always *compete* to provide humans with a sense of understanding and control. Having noted that we have structures that *try* to open up our prejudices and look at new facts on equal footing with old - academia, journalism - toward a "relativist" approach where no absolute truth is claimed... he suddenly says, in 1985:
"A relativist approach might well use the new electronic data systems to provide a structure unlike any that which has gone before."
And here were are, now arguing what's myth and what's truth in endless online discussions that drive, -and push around- academia, journalism, and politics alike!
It was never the need to pivot on changing science that was the main issue on Fauci for most people, the issue that turned most I know was the way Jay Bhattacharya and Martin Kukdorff were utterly demonized for a scientifically sound approach that was rejected out of hand. The coordinated viciousness of this approach and the ensuing emails he shared with Collins et al. was telling indeed. It just got worse from there.
I'd heard "Barrington" before, but not their names, despite running a pandemic blog, ( http://brander.ca/c19#merchants ) so they were pretty suppressed from the news, indeed.
I see now that I was just reading the overall coverage of the Barrington group, the bogus signatures on the declaration, the libertarian funding. None of which helped their case. Bhattacharya's wikipedia entry on his COVID-19 work clarifies his issues for me, at least.
I saw nothing about Bhattacharya being demonized by Dr. Fauci; if you've got a link to such statements by Dr. F, that would be interesting.
The amount of information that exists is vast but if you are relying on Wikipedia as a bonafide source I’m pretty sure the sources I would site would be unacceptable to you. The case before the Supreme Court Murthy v Missouri would be a great overarching theme to become acquainted with and work back from there. I consume media from hundreds of sources- spanning left to right and also new media. When people ask for sources on substack I hesitate to comply, not because it’s not a justifiable request but the inevitable back and forth of what is considered credible. The Expert Class performed abysmally during the pandemic. I’m not the least bit sympathetic to arguments around fear, chaos, changing science anymore. This was not but a fast moving event except for the first few months. It was dynamic but took place over three years and had ample opportunity to admit mistakes, pivot, listen and course correct. The path taken was none of these.
I was last denigrated for looking at Wikipedia (to get a quick neutral take that survived a lot of peer-review)... by global-warming deniers, so, no probably not.
The old "herd immunity" debate does bring us back to topic! My blog notes that there were early hopes for 70% infection-or-vaccination getting us to "herd immunity", but official authorities were equivocal about it - and quickly updated their claims to 90% when Delta hit, before 70% could even be reached, because Delta was so much more infectious. Now, of course, we know that there was no herd immunity ever going to happen because of the rapid mutation of variants. Nothing protected you from Omicron, only from severity.
I don't recall any of the Barrington folks, or the Swedish official (2680 dead/million; Norway next door, 1204), coming out to say "that herd immunity plan of ours wouldn't have worked, Delta would have hit anyway".
Is it denigration or lazy? I’d chastise my tenth grader for citing Wiki in a science paper. The fact that you didn’t know that the three authors were expert epidemiologists from Harvard, Stanford, and Oxford says everything to me. They could very well have been wrong but there was never a discussion held and the inability of our institutions to demonstrate their policy prescriptions were sound never occurred. Public health is a complex matter that involves multitudes of considerations that go beyond myopic focus on one pathogen. Very early in the pandemic, experts knew that Covid had spread to such a large degree (Italy & Iran) that lockdowns would be a dubious NPI to control the pandemic. The most vulnerable populations (elderly and co-morbidities) had a thousand fold risk compared to young and healthy and had to be the focus from a pragmatic and moral standpoint. We didn’t succeed in that. The irony is not lost on me here that the original post was about admitting you’re wrong. You don’t seem the least be interested in entertaining the idea that aspects of our response the Covid could and should have been much better. Unless our expert class is humble on the face of failure, we will get more of the same.
"Lazy" would imply I'm under some obligation to do a lot of work debunking, or write your high-school report.
For most topics, I'm happy with the encyclopedia viewpoint because it's already been argued to death and the areas of minimum factual agreement settled.
Here, for instance, I did some more research, Dr. Bhattacharya's own resume'
...and counted his participation in 106 peer-reviewed research papers, which entirely confirmed the wikipedia description of him as focused on the "economics of health care". Nearly all of them related to treatment options and costs for a huge variety of issues, from colorectal cancer to smoking, nephrology, childhood obesity.
Just three of 106 related to infectious diseases: one on (avian) influenza, one on seasonal patterns in H5N1 (one of 8 authors on that one), one on vaccination campaign effectiveness for the elderly. I guess two on HIV count as "infectious"...
He's a Director, and gets to be named on a lot of papers, because 106 is a lot. Under 4% of that even touching upon infection-related medicine makes it wholly improper, indeed disinformation, to refer to this man as a "expert epidemiologist", and this conversation is over.
You did manage to irritate me into wasting my time, counting my way through 106 long scientific paper titles, while counting "infection related" on my fingers, all to confirm something I already was sure of, because I trusted those basic sources you don't - and if I don't mute you, you might just do it again.
Having grown up in a Germanic environment I learned early to be right while proving others to be wrong. As a consequence there were enormous efforts to find reasons for being right in the face of having made mistakes - being wrong. I took me many years to change course, and still today (80) I catch myself to relapse.
A discussion to keep inside academia, really...asking *me* to click there and spend one minute of my life policing that level of intellectual dishonesty, when my other news reads are about the NYT helping lie America into war with Iraq, or lies about a pandemic costing literally millions of lives...not happening.
Such a good article. There seems to be no—at least very little—space for admitting an error in a previous held point of view. At the same time there are 180 degree turnabouts all the time that not accompanied by any admission of earlier fault. Trump on TickTok, Trump on Christianity, the Bible and personal morality in general. His genius, however, seems to be the way he has convinced so many that self-interest drives all politics and he is the only one that is honest in that regard. That Trump is an exemplar of this ‘way of being’ is not the biggest threat to US democracy. The bigger threat is that this instrumentalist, means-justify-ends, and all ends are really just self-interest world view absolutely dominates the oligarchs that control tech and finance. Some are a lot more controlled and ‘politic’ than an Elon Musk. Warren Buffett will say “our class is winning” and sound like he regrets it. Jamie Dimon can say things that seem to come from a place beyond the interests of the bank, Sam Altman says he is interested in humanity…but the organizations they lead are driven by the inexorable calculus of heedless, often ‘headless’ self interest.
People need better hobbies than social media. Blocking annoying people is healthy. Read the good stuff once or twice a week and turn it off and keep your phone away from you most of the time.
While finding it difficult to admit error is undoubtedly a part of being human, I suspect that it has become even more difficult in the current climate as norms of what is acceptable have changed. On the one hand, it seems as if statements and actions of politicians which would have demanded retraction, apology or accountability 20 years ago now can be ignored or ridden through without consequence. Sometimes, the breaking of old norms becomes a value to be exalted. On the other hand, the smallest mis-statement or use of an inappropriate word seems to allow for the world to dump on someone incessantly and aggressively. Moreover, while one person may take pride in correcting their past conclusion as facts or their analysis changes, I suspect there is added fear in doing so now as their ‘team’ on that issue will come down on them like a ton of bricks for leaving or betraying the fold.
One of those "synergy" days when it seems as if everything I'm reading is multiple views of the same topic. I just finished finally reading the book version of Burke's "The Day the Universe Changed", where universe-changing depended on *many* proud people admitting previous error, so it was always a long fight for a new truth to be established.
Same day, I read it was 4 years since Anthony Fauci demonization started, and it was much earlier than I remembered, right after he corrected Trump even once on something. Later, he was beat up for changing his mind about masks - admitting they'd been wrong to not recommend them, doing a 180. But the demonization started months earlier. The entire Tony Fauci "controversy" was just beating up expertise itself, fighting against the very notion of a solid truth. NB: Fauci's admission of error was taken as a huge strike AGAINST him by the GOP.
Thing was, my jaw dropped at the 2nd-last paragraph in Burke's book, the big sum-up about the negotiations and fights between science vs myth, which always *compete* to provide humans with a sense of understanding and control. Having noted that we have structures that *try* to open up our prejudices and look at new facts on equal footing with old - academia, journalism - toward a "relativist" approach where no absolute truth is claimed... he suddenly says, in 1985:
"A relativist approach might well use the new electronic data systems to provide a structure unlike any that which has gone before."
And here were are, now arguing what's myth and what's truth in endless online discussions that drive, -and push around- academia, journalism, and politics alike!
Smart boy, that James Burke. Forty years ago.
It was never the need to pivot on changing science that was the main issue on Fauci for most people, the issue that turned most I know was the way Jay Bhattacharya and Martin Kukdorff were utterly demonized for a scientifically sound approach that was rejected out of hand. The coordinated viciousness of this approach and the ensuing emails he shared with Collins et al. was telling indeed. It just got worse from there.
I'd heard "Barrington" before, but not their names, despite running a pandemic blog, ( http://brander.ca/c19#merchants ) so they were pretty suppressed from the news, indeed.
I see now that I was just reading the overall coverage of the Barrington group, the bogus signatures on the declaration, the libertarian funding. None of which helped their case. Bhattacharya's wikipedia entry on his COVID-19 work clarifies his issues for me, at least.
I saw nothing about Bhattacharya being demonized by Dr. Fauci; if you've got a link to such statements by Dr. F, that would be interesting.
The amount of information that exists is vast but if you are relying on Wikipedia as a bonafide source I’m pretty sure the sources I would site would be unacceptable to you. The case before the Supreme Court Murthy v Missouri would be a great overarching theme to become acquainted with and work back from there. I consume media from hundreds of sources- spanning left to right and also new media. When people ask for sources on substack I hesitate to comply, not because it’s not a justifiable request but the inevitable back and forth of what is considered credible. The Expert Class performed abysmally during the pandemic. I’m not the least bit sympathetic to arguments around fear, chaos, changing science anymore. This was not but a fast moving event except for the first few months. It was dynamic but took place over three years and had ample opportunity to admit mistakes, pivot, listen and course correct. The path taken was none of these.
I was last denigrated for looking at Wikipedia (to get a quick neutral take that survived a lot of peer-review)... by global-warming deniers, so, no probably not.
The old "herd immunity" debate does bring us back to topic! My blog notes that there were early hopes for 70% infection-or-vaccination getting us to "herd immunity", but official authorities were equivocal about it - and quickly updated their claims to 90% when Delta hit, before 70% could even be reached, because Delta was so much more infectious. Now, of course, we know that there was no herd immunity ever going to happen because of the rapid mutation of variants. Nothing protected you from Omicron, only from severity.
I don't recall any of the Barrington folks, or the Swedish official (2680 dead/million; Norway next door, 1204), coming out to say "that herd immunity plan of ours wouldn't have worked, Delta would have hit anyway".
Is it denigration or lazy? I’d chastise my tenth grader for citing Wiki in a science paper. The fact that you didn’t know that the three authors were expert epidemiologists from Harvard, Stanford, and Oxford says everything to me. They could very well have been wrong but there was never a discussion held and the inability of our institutions to demonstrate their policy prescriptions were sound never occurred. Public health is a complex matter that involves multitudes of considerations that go beyond myopic focus on one pathogen. Very early in the pandemic, experts knew that Covid had spread to such a large degree (Italy & Iran) that lockdowns would be a dubious NPI to control the pandemic. The most vulnerable populations (elderly and co-morbidities) had a thousand fold risk compared to young and healthy and had to be the focus from a pragmatic and moral standpoint. We didn’t succeed in that. The irony is not lost on me here that the original post was about admitting you’re wrong. You don’t seem the least be interested in entertaining the idea that aspects of our response the Covid could and should have been much better. Unless our expert class is humble on the face of failure, we will get more of the same.
"Lazy" would imply I'm under some obligation to do a lot of work debunking, or write your high-school report.
For most topics, I'm happy with the encyclopedia viewpoint because it's already been argued to death and the areas of minimum factual agreement settled.
Here, for instance, I did some more research, Dr. Bhattacharya's own resume'
https://cap.stanford.edu/profiles/frdActionServlet?choiceId=printerprofile&profileversion=full&profileId=4000
...and counted his participation in 106 peer-reviewed research papers, which entirely confirmed the wikipedia description of him as focused on the "economics of health care". Nearly all of them related to treatment options and costs for a huge variety of issues, from colorectal cancer to smoking, nephrology, childhood obesity.
Just three of 106 related to infectious diseases: one on (avian) influenza, one on seasonal patterns in H5N1 (one of 8 authors on that one), one on vaccination campaign effectiveness for the elderly. I guess two on HIV count as "infectious"...
He's a Director, and gets to be named on a lot of papers, because 106 is a lot. Under 4% of that even touching upon infection-related medicine makes it wholly improper, indeed disinformation, to refer to this man as a "expert epidemiologist", and this conversation is over.
You did manage to irritate me into wasting my time, counting my way through 106 long scientific paper titles, while counting "infection related" on my fingers, all to confirm something I already was sure of, because I trusted those basic sources you don't - and if I don't mute you, you might just do it again.
Having grown up in a Germanic environment I learned early to be right while proving others to be wrong. As a consequence there were enormous efforts to find reasons for being right in the face of having made mistakes - being wrong. I took me many years to change course, and still today (80) I catch myself to relapse.
I like the overall message of your article, well put. At the same time, Claudine Gay’s copy-pasting (sorry, unreferenced citation) was way more serious than originally assumed. See in detail: https://freebeacon.com/campus/this-is-definitely-plagiarism-harvard-university-president-claudine-gay-copied-entire-paragraphs-from-others-academic-work-and-claimed-them-as-her-own/
A discussion to keep inside academia, really...asking *me* to click there and spend one minute of my life policing that level of intellectual dishonesty, when my other news reads are about the NYT helping lie America into war with Iraq, or lies about a pandemic costing literally millions of lives...not happening.
Well , that was refreshing, long winded comments notwithstanding. Thanks for doing what you do.
My grandpa said, "Never mud-wrestle with a pig. You both get filthy but the pig loves it."
Dan, your article reminds me of some of the things that Michael Jorden says about failing, admitting to and learning from your mistakes.
Such a good article. There seems to be no—at least very little—space for admitting an error in a previous held point of view. At the same time there are 180 degree turnabouts all the time that not accompanied by any admission of earlier fault. Trump on TickTok, Trump on Christianity, the Bible and personal morality in general. His genius, however, seems to be the way he has convinced so many that self-interest drives all politics and he is the only one that is honest in that regard. That Trump is an exemplar of this ‘way of being’ is not the biggest threat to US democracy. The bigger threat is that this instrumentalist, means-justify-ends, and all ends are really just self-interest world view absolutely dominates the oligarchs that control tech and finance. Some are a lot more controlled and ‘politic’ than an Elon Musk. Warren Buffett will say “our class is winning” and sound like he regrets it. Jamie Dimon can say things that seem to come from a place beyond the interests of the bank, Sam Altman says he is interested in humanity…but the organizations they lead are driven by the inexorable calculus of heedless, often ‘headless’ self interest.
Behold! This was well-written. Thank you for sharing
People need better hobbies than social media. Blocking annoying people is healthy. Read the good stuff once or twice a week and turn it off and keep your phone away from you most of the time.