The sleight of hand to replace “Science” with “Scientific Consensus” is the most damaging development of pandemic buffoonery.

Replacing Science with Consensus, and then censoring any unorthodox idea as misinformation — more people should be worried about this.

To repeat what somehow goes over the head of “Believe the Science” crowd — Science isn’t done by consensus.

You know what the scientific consensus was when Galileo proposed Heliocentrism?

Social-media has a real problem — they can’t verify scientific claims so they’ve chosen to defer to “The Authorities”. YouTube will remove any claim that counters the WHO despite WHO being dangerously wrong on many fronts just this year.

It’s a bad solution, but at least it allows the platforms to CYA (cover their anatomy).

“Well we’re just following The Experts”

I’m not sure what’s the way out.

@balajis suggests one solution — verifiability — the ability to just run a Jupyter notebook and verify the claims for yourself.

Long-term, this would be ideal.

In the meantime, let’s just acknowledge the fact that many anointed experts this year have been wrong while polymaths on Twitter/podcasts were three steps ahead.

We no longer need the stamp of Harvard. Change your mental-models of the world accordingly.

Some of my post-pandemic mental models:

1) Smart independent folks like @youyanggu can do better science than hundreds of credentialed experts at the CDC.

2) Institutions of the past increasingly select for conformity and performance than competence.

3) The Administrative State is bigger than ever. From blocking rapid tests to the botched vaccine rollout — cost of red-tape can be measured in lives.

4) Bureaucracies, when faced with the trolley-problem, always chose not to pull the lever even if it will save lives because it will potentially inflict liability.

Bureaucrats hate any hint of liability.

5) The American State is no longer competent. But the American private-sector more than compensates — for now.

Ex: Moderna gave us vaccine in record-time while The State can’t figure out how to get it into people’s arms.

6) Most of politics is fake. No wonder that a class of smooth-talkers used to dealing with only fake problems fail miserably when confronted with a virus. The virus doesn’t go away by political-messaging or shaping narratives.

7) Big Tech + The Fed will enjoy more power than ever — but for an interim period — after which we will figure out how to break free from The Great Centralized algorithms + brrr $$ printer.

8) Social cohesion + levels of trust for institutions will continue declining. This can be disastrous unless we all 1) upload ourselves to the virtual world or 2) figure out alternatives to coherent model-building for the world.

9) The supply of competent people is finite but conserved over time. If the institutions drove away these folks, they must have migrated elsewhere.

Go where they are. On the edges.
Engineering, crypto, startups, energy — take your pick and be there.

10) Forget institutional reform. It’s too late for that now. Find exits and build the next generation of institutions.

Hint: this is where the competent people are anyway.

In Miami for some time. Going to block all SF related discourse on Twitter. Really feeling this energy from @balajis today! https://twitter.com/balajis/status/1359240333146529796?s=20

Last thing I wanna burn brain cells on today is SF tech discourse...