One thing this year has forced me to confront is the quality of my judgement & sometimes it hasn’t been great. My first instincts were wrong on a few things, masks being the obvious one, but I hope I demonstrate a willingness to learn & change my mind.

I suffer from a desire to hope for the best & a willingness to trust authority when I don’t have the time read all the necessary info. I think/hope I’d be different as a leader but who knows? When I do have the time to read more I trust my own judgement much more.

Problem comes from not knowing who to trust when there are a lot of people touting themselves as experts. Researching credentials is time consuming. But there’s a real problem with self styled experts not admitting to errors. This really corrodes how we view what’s going on.

Because lots of people invest a lot of credibility trusting experts who make errors & pride prevents us from admitting these guides have been wrong. I hope I don’t do that. I wanted to believe Gupta on herd immunity but ultimately had to admit to myself it was wishful thinking.

I think I’ve been pretty good on vaccines but that’s because I’ve read a lot & evaluated source data for myself rather than relying on others to do that for me. But I could be wrong on my belief the vaccination programme will be better organised than testing was.

Being right at first instinct is great but so IMO is admitting to being wrong & being prepared to act on that realisation. I think we should value that in politics much much more because everyone makes mistakes. No-one’s judgement is infallible.