The real problems are the Academics
And instead of putting generals in positions of power, we’ve deferred to academics by and large. And I actually think this is a major mistake because academics are not trained to make decisions with the best knowledge available at the time. They’re trained to make decisions based on Nature papers they read ten years ago. They’re not trained to adapt to the environment, to the ecosystem. They want academic precision, they want p-values and statistical significance. And that’s really different from a general in an army. They have to get comfortable like a surgeon does with working on imperfect information, and academics don’t do that. The fact that we’re still squabbling over antigen tests and trying to figure out, well, what if it doesn’t catch somebody with a CT value of, of 32, but it does somebody with 30 — we are completely missing the point in all of this! If a general was making decisions, they would say, “Is this the test that catches the most infectious people? Yes. Okay. Well then we’re doing it, we’re using it.” That’s the mind-set we should have had; instead we have this academic precision and it’s really screwing us up in terms of being able to act swiftly and with the sort of urgency that we need.
Comments
Post a Comment