Zeynep Tufekci: evaluation

Transcript context

…For one thing, the sociology of the situation is always very important. For example, one of the reasons that they were saying you don’t need to wear masks early on, where they were saying something like, “You should only wear a mask if you’re sick” — you don’t need a sociology degree to understand stigma. If you have a deadly pandemic with an unknown disease, there’s no way you’re going to go out wearing a mask if only sick people are wearing masks. If they had anybody with any social science background or any common sense in that group, they’d say, “Wait a minute. How are sick people supposed to wear a mask?” That is just not humanly feasible for them to paint a target on themselves like that. That’s one of the ways that it helps. The other way it helps — I used to teach things like groupthink and institutional inertia, and all those things that we’ve seen. One of my friends, who’s an immunologist and a medical doctor at Harvard, Michael Mina, who’s done a lot of work on rapid tests — one of the things he keeps joking about is how basic our virus is. The virus that has caused our pandemic is a coronavirus. It’s SARS-2, essentially, with a minor twist. There’s not much we need to figure out about it. Yes, of course, figuring out things like vaccines is important, but in terms of its basics, it’s not a retrovirus like HIV, which forced us to write the textbook. The virology part of it wasn’t very complicated, in some ways, to a competent virologist or something. Michael jokes first-year students can handle most of it. It’s a very simple, straightforward virus. But the things like the groupthink in parts of the scientific establishment, or the silencing. Right after I wrote about masks in March 2020, honestly, I thought that’s it. I’m going to get canceled. That’s the end of my public writing career. I just contradicted the CDC and the WHO at the beginning of a pandemic. I don’t have a medical degree whatsoever. I just thought, “I have to do it. I’m a tenured academic. If I’m not going to do this now, what is the point of tenure if I’m not going to take this risk?” [laughter] have a medical degree whatsoever. I just thought, “I have to do it. I’m a tenured academic. If I’m not going to do this now, what is the point of tenure if I’m not going to take this risk?” [laughter] I thought, I did my job, now I’m going to get canceled. Instead, what I got was a lot of emails from people in the medical professions thanking me, saying, “Thank you for writing it.” I thought, “You’re welcome.” But part of me was thinking, “Why didn’t you guys write this?” [laughs] Don’t thank me. I would like to have somebody with more credibility to have written this. What I realized was they were just either silent, or parts of them had convinced themselves of really illogical things, like a mask might be harmful. There’s no logic to it. There’s nothing. It’s just groupthink. The sociology of the moment made me realize after that incident — I thought, you know what, sometimes being an outsider and not having my grants or my feelings or my professional career or my friendships be affected by this, gives me freedom to confront things. I know what the scientific underground is speaking about. I don’t have a medical degree, but I can read a good deal of the papers just at a basic level. I know statistics, and I can read some of the basics. And I have a lot of friends, especially junior people. Some of them are aghast but cannot speak up, and because I don’t have as much to lose, I can write things, in a way, that sometimes they can’t. That’s really made me think we need a mechanism for that to be possible for the scientists in the field. Medical fields are very hierarchical, and there’s some positives to that. You don’t want quackery there, but when they need to be challenged, there’s no mechanism to challenge them. So we can have a better sense of how you think, talk us through a mistake you once made in reasoning, and how that happened. What were your bad trades, so to speak?…

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