Read on Twitter
In an attempt at some introspection, I've gone back through my tweets/RTs from the year and looked at what I was wrong (and right) about. Thread of the most significant mistakes/successes, with links to tweets/RTs from earlier in the year:
The thing I'm most ashamed of being wrong about: "controlled" herd immunity. I thought the strategy made sense, and that the UK government and its advisors were right. https://twitter.com/ShakeelHashim/status/1238167652859813888
This was, obviously, completely wrong — though I take some comfort from the fact that I wasn't alone. https://twitter.com/Birdyword/status/1238374732690382848
I also misjudged the economic cost of locking down, totally missing the point that a stricter, earlier lockdown would have been much, much better for both health and the economy. https://twitter.com/ShakeelHashim/status/1238446828598763520
On the flipside, I thought the economic impact on tech was going to be much worse than it ended up being. https://twitter.com/ShakeelHashim/status/1250405567572725760
I thought the NHS's initial contact tracing method was smart and would work. It wasn't. https://twitter.com/ShakeelHashim/status/1259411675121364993
And on a completely different topic, I thought Game Pass wasn't doing nearly as well as it claimed, but in fact it was probably doing even better. https://twitter.com/ShakeelHashim/status/1255763834746351616
I was right about some things though! I kind of foresaw the Vox-plosion: https://twitter.com/ShakeelHashim/status/1268818218849832963
Thanks to @zeynep, I think I was a proponent of ventilation before most people in the UK: https://twitter.com/ShakeelHashim/status/1307984057037451264
I had a sense that COVID wasn't going away soon, even in April (if anything, I was too pessimistic about vaccine timelines) https://twitter.com/ShakeelHashim/status/1246053538779840513
The post-summer lockdown was totally predictable: https://twitter.com/ShakeelHashim/status/1277558585531289600
As was the current debacle: https://twitter.com/ShakeelHashim/status/1334844914736246789
And I totally nailed Quibi: https://twitter.com/ShakeelHashim/status/1215280785885929473
The biggest lesson for me is probably what @s8mb said the other day: "To not assume that there's a hidden wisdom to every stupid thing people in authority do." Hopefully next year's version of this thread will have fewer wrongs and more rights.
