Zeynep Tufekci: belief

Transcript context

…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? I would say that there are many things for which you do randomize trust, for good reason. What we didn’t get was the flexibility necessary to match the question to the method. With something like masking up, the precautionary principle, plus the mechanistic science, plus the South Asian experience — to me, it was more than clear where things were. With other things, like vaccines, I’m on the side that there would have been problems with — and we can discuss it — with things like human challenge trials for a bunch of complicated reasons. What you needed was flexibility in what’s the right method, given the risk you’re taking. For masks, I think it was clear. Even if you reject human challenge trials — so the vaccine information is presented, and then it’s three weeks to schedule a meeting at the FDA and have a final decision. The offices are all locked in cold over a four-day Thanksgiving weekend. I asked many people who are experts in the area. They all assured me it could be done in less time than three weeks. Yet it took three weeks, because what is it? It just takes that long to schedule the meeting? Or there’s too much status maximization in the bureaucracy? How do we fix that problem, which seemed to recur at many different stages?…

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