Zeynep Tufekci: evaluation

Transcript context

…What can we do to make mainstream media less risk-averse? If you think back to last March, Dr. Fauci — he’s criticizing masks, right? He’s even telling people it’s fine to go ahead and take your cruise. You’re editor of the New York Times. Should you just come out and contradict the nation’s leading public health authority when we’re relying on that same person to correct some possibly larger mistakes of President Trump? What’s the right role for the media in this? And how do we align their incentives in a superior way? Because we screwed it up, didn’t we? Yes, this is a really difficult question because I ended up writing an op-ed essentially criticizing CDC and the WHO on masks in March 2020. At the time, people were still saying masks could infect you, make things worse. Never in a million years I thought I’d start my own personal pandemic, criticizing global health authorities or the CDC. That was a really weird situation. I have to say, I did not like it one bit. I knew they were wrong around early March. I have links to Hong Kong. I was researching the field. There’s a lot of infectious disease specialists in Southeast Asia who are way ahead of us, partly because they’ve been through SARS and partly because they really are way ahead of us. I started tweeting out the argument on why they were wrong, just on the science side of the virus, the science side of masks — all of that. I just twiddled my thumbs after tweeting out the whole argument, hoping somebody would write it. Not me because it shouldn’t be. It’s really terrible to undermine, as you say, a nation’s leading health authorities. I hoped it would come from — I don’t know — the ex-director of CDC, somebody like that, somebody with really high stature, so it didn’t look like a random challenger. Because how are you going to distinguish that from an anti-vaxxer or a quack? That is a real problem, but it didn’t happen. I think the real question you’re asking isn’t what should the New York Times have done. In some sense, I think, what should have our scientific establishment have done? Why didn’t they create a consortium? Why didn’t the universities create their own advisory body, even if our own authorities weren’t functioning very well, partly because of Trump’s not great — I mean really negative influence. We didn’t step up as academics to say, “Here’s another consortium of lots of experts.” Not just one person saying, “Oh, by the way . . .” Because that’s really corrosive, at some point, to have individuals be ahead of the health authorities. Isn’t the scientific establishment part of the problem? There’s a kind of religion of purity, the cult of the randomized control trial. You want to maximize status. Everything has to be perfectly safe when, in fact, during a crisis, we want them thinking in terms of expected value and expected number of lives saved. What can we do to reform them, to get them to think more in terms of expected value? Because they failed us most of all, right?…

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