Something we’re seeing a lot of during the coronavirus crisis is the rise of the armchair epidemiologist: the men (it’s mainly men) presenting themselves as authoritative voices about things they have no expertise in.

Sarah Weinman, for InsideHook.com:

They are lawyers, former reporters and thriller writers, Silicon Valley technologists, newspaper columnists, economists and doctors who specialize in different parts of medicine. Their utter belief in their own cognitive abilities gives them the false sense that their speculation, and predictive powers, are more informed than the rest of ours.

They’ve been with us for a long time, of course – the blogging world is full of them – but coronavirus has given some of them a much bigger audience, and that has made some of them dangerous. The UK press and social media is full of grifters speaking with great certainty about things they know nothing about, and those things currently include how to deal with a lethal global pandemic.

There is a name for this, and it is the Dunning-Kreuger effect. The effect is often explained as “stupid people are too stupid to know they are stupid”, but it’s more nuanced than that. It’s not that people are stupid. Many of the people who clearly have DK are very clever. It’s that they are blinkered: they lack the knowledge to understand what knowledge they are lacking.

For example, let’s say you’re an economist. If you turn your attention to the likely outcome of the coronavirus, you may come up with different answers than the virologists and epidemiologists do. That doesn’t necessarily mean the virologists and epidemiologists are wrong; it’s much more likely that you’re making ignorant assumptions and rookie mistakes that people in the field don’t make. You don’t know that you’re making them, because this isn’t your area of expertise.

Where the Dunning-Kreuger effect comes into play is when you decide that if the experts disagree with you, it means it is the experts who are wrong.

Who better to speak to about the Dunning-Krueger effect than David Dunning, one of the two professors who coined the term? That’s who Sarah Weinman interviewed.

The problem is that some people can take things they know and misapply it to this new situation. A lot of people think, “Oh, this is a flu,” so they use what is common knowledge of the flu to guide them. But this virus is not the flu. Knowledge is a good thing, but they don’t realize it’s a misapplication.

I used the example of an economist because that’s a field Dunning specifically mentioned.

Confidence comes from knowing something, but not realizing you don’t know everything you need to know. If you’ve been rewarded as a successful economist, you deal with formal models in math, and you have confidence in what you do. This can be true of all of us in our area of expertise.

That confidence may be perfectly justified in economics, but that doesn’t necessarily mean that you have anything valuable to say in other fields.

Elon Musk is a great example of this. The Tesla boss has an electric car company and launches rockets into space. And when a bunch of kids got stuck in a cave in Thailand, Musk rode to the rescue with a special high-tech submarine to save them.

The submarine was useless, because it wasn’t able to navigate the caves. When criticised, Musk called an expert diver – the diver who actually helped rescue the trapped kids – a “pedo”.

Musk has since moved into providing ventilators for coronavirus patients. The machines he supplied are not ventilators. It’s surely just a matter of time before he calls the doctors “pedos” too.

Here’s one example of why these overconfident men are dangerous: Richard Epstein. Epstein has arguably contributed to the US death toll: his prediction that the coronavirus would only kill 500 Americans was widely shared in US conservative circles and helped inform US government policy on how to respond to the potential loss of life.

As NY Mag reports:

A week later, Epstein conceded that he had committed a math error, and the real number would be 5,000 deaths, though “it, too, could prove somewhat optimistic.”

At the time of writing, the US toll is about to pass 50,000 deaths.

…Somehow this experience has not shaken Epstein’s confidence in his own ability to outthink the entire field of epidemiology.

There’s an astonishing interview with Epstein in The New Yorker where he throws a tantrum.

O.K. I’m going to tell you. I think the fact that I am not a great scholar on this and I’m able to find these flaws or these holes in what you wrote is a sign that maybe you should’ve thought harder before writing it.

What it shows is that you are a complete intellectual amateur. Period.

O.K. Can I ask you one more question?

You just don’t know anything about anything. You’re a journalist. Would you like to compare your résumé to mine?

Part of the reason grifters have achieved such prominence is because the people in authority often have the Dunning-Krueger effect too.

The UK government is a stellar example, but you can also see it in things such as authorities urging us not to wear masks because they don’t really prevent you from getting the virus (even though proper ones do, which is why health workers use them, and though they do have a proven effect of reducing the danger of you spreading the virus to others if you don’t realise you have it). When official sources are often wrong, it creates a vacuum that grifters are all too ready to fill with bullshit.

In the MetaFilter discussion of the article, one commenter posted:

Science and these various “experts in stuff” both operate in uncertain environments, but treat uncertainty in totally opposite ways.

…Experts in stuff… use uncertainty as a means to an end, so they generally try to increase it. Since science shows its cards with regards to uncertainty, they can always argue a reasonable level of skepticism of science. Then they can turn around and present some alternative facts and arguments about their own position on the matter. The idea isn’t about the next researcher, or a process to eliminate uncertainty, it’s simply to be convincing. They don’t care if they are right – only if they are perceived as right.

This is why these “experts” can be so troubling to deal with. They’ll stake a claim against anything, as long as it gets them to their goal. Sometimes it’s just to be respected, but sometimes it can be much darker.

There’s a cartoon I love by Stephen Collins about Michael Gove. It riffs on the film Independence Day, and features the MP volunteering to fly a plane to defeat an alien invasion.

When quizzed about his unsuitability – “you’ve never flown a fighter plane in your life!” – Gove is adamant that he’s the right man for the job.

“I used to be a journalist,” the fictional Gove says. “for The Times. I wrote two articles about planes [and] I’ve got strong opinions about aliens.”

The cartoon’s ending is one of my very favourite things.

Unfortunately it’s not so funny when the threat isn’t fictional and the strong opinions are about ventilators for coronavirus patients.

Earlier today, Financial Times public policy editor Peter Foster wrote about the “Ventilator Challenge”, where the UK government decided to specify a whole bunch of ventilators that aren’t suitable for coronavirus patients. His Twitter thread tells the story. It isn’t a happy one.

The short version, as Foster puts it:

What this speaks to is the deeply worrying tendency of this crop of politicians to think they know best.

The ‘cut-the-crap’ ‘how-hard-can-it-be?’ attitudes that leads to headless decision making. It’s embarrassing.

…Expert people TEARING their hair out at the willful numbskullery of the people at the top.

If it weren’t for a combination of medical skill and sheer good luck, this fiasco would have killed people.

I fear that this extraordinary photo will become a tragedy in hindsight. It’s of protesters in Michigan, many of them armed, demanding the government lifts lockdown because “we’re tired of not being able to buy the things that we need, go to the hairdressers.” Some protesters’ cars blocked the entrances to a hospital, preventing ambulances from getting through.

This potentially lethal idiocy is being inflamed by – of course – Fox News. Earlier this week, Fox’s Bill Bennet told Americans once again that the coronavirus isn’t a pandemic and that social distancing isn’t necessary. Protesters’ claims that the virus was less dangerous than the flu are just echoing what Fox has been telling them, and their president, for the last five weeks.

The Conservatives are working on their exit strategy. Not how we’ll exit the lockdown; how they’ll shift the blame for their failures onto others, such as the NHS. For example:

Care homes are not run by the NHS.

Care homes used to be run by councils, but years of funding cuts have seen that provision almost disappear. Today, care homes are primarily for-profit private businesses.

84% of English care home beds are owned and operated by private companies, 13% are run by voluntary organisations and 3% are run by councils. As the authors of a recent report into the sector put it:

The state has abdicated its responsibility for providing care over recent decades. The private sector may have filled this gap but it consistently puts profits before people.

…The fact that private equity-backed firms have taken over a significant share of the UK’s care provision, fuelled by debt and driven by the prospect of rising property prices and ever-lower care costs, puts our vital social care system at ever-increasing risk.

One of my best friends is a care home worker. Like many in the sector they are on a zero hours contract and paid a pittance by a private and very profitable company; they have not been given PPE because the company doesn’t want to pay for PPE. Care homes can do, or in this case not do, whatever they want. Which is why so many people are dying in them.

The government doesn’t want to be on the hook for those deaths, or for the growing death toll among front-line NHS staff. Hence the emerging narrative that it’s all the NHS’s fault. But it isn’t. The lack of PPE for front-line workers and other key equipment is the result of government decisions and indecision going back to January.

The dread hand of news management has already kicked in: the allegation is now that key workers aren’t getting PPE because the lumbering, inefficient NHS isn’t allocating resources properly, not that the resources weren’t there in the first place. There are a lot of carefully worded claims doing the rounds, so for example the government is keen to talk about the overall number of items of PPE that have been distributed rather than the details of which items have gone where and in what quantities: there’s a big difference between a gown (which is inappropriate for aerosol-generating procedures) and an FFP2 surgical mask. If there were enough PPE, everyone in the country with a 3D printer wouldn’t be making making visors for NHS staff and nurses wouldn’t be making their own PPE from bin bags.

Still, we can count on our fearless, non-partisan press ensuring they don’t get away with it. Can’t we?