Our COVID intervention was a syndicalistic tyranny of the minority.

A union of academic epidemiologists who could work from home drove our entire country’s response without interfacing with other sectors and groups’ interests

No surprise: this policy hurt other labor groups. https://twitter.com/19_phd/status/1311655145617461250

One group in January defined “the experts” as their own group (infectious-disease epidemiologists), using informal social control to exclude other groups from the discussion. This was (and still is) amplified by willful participation of major media outlets like the @nytimes.

Academic syndicalism has coupled with arguments of authority to define a competition for power by classifying crises as within one’s labeled domain (and then defining one as master of that domain), a poor deliberative process for balancing competing interests in a global crisis.

In addition to being a poor method for balancing interests of competing groups, our academic syndicalistic authoritarianism has at it’s heart a misguided premise that knowledge is something someone has, expertise a label objectively assigned to s/he who has knowledge.

When a crisis arises, proponents of this syndicalistic authoritarian contagion believe we can objectively determine “the experts” by academic titles and ranks, that they have “the knowledge” of a novel crisis, and can therefore be trusted to steer our ship of state.

The problem with this premise is that knowledge is transferable, that people without title and rank are equally capable of knowing (and often do know) relevant things, especially the minimal necessary knowledge for action in a crisis.

Many people without titles of “epidemiologist” at institutions like “Harvard” with rank of “professor” quickly learned the basics of epidemiology, virology, and immunology, enough to make informed decisions and contribute meaningful ideas for how to manage this crisis.

The role of experts, in my opinion and under the premise of transferable knowledge, is not to steer the ship of state but to chime in with transferable ideas that inform and balance our discussion. Unbalanced discussions arise from excessive emphasis on a few titles, ranks, etc.

The benefit of experts deliberately playing the role of consultant and not captain is that people with knowledge and skills become a modular attachment to political institutions designed by the people, businesses and other institutions.

Hence, scientists should view their role not as knowers-of-the-answers, but as mediators of the discussion, people who point to the right books, ask the right questions, and emphasize what we do and don’t know, not what we ought and ought not do.

Otherwise, we risk allowing one group (epidemiologists who work from home) to drive decision-making with potentially catastrophic consequences for unrepresented groups (job losses and human-dignity crises for other sectors and labor groups).

Academic syndicalistic authoritarianism was not a formally defined process we can legislate, but an informal social process derived from our language and attitudes about “experts” and “expertise”.

It manifests in other forms, such as celebritization of a few scientists.

It’s a special case of a broader propensity of humans to recognize a few names and trust a few sources of information. This propensity to assign authority is a natural reaction to the cacophony of the internet, most perfectly embodied in places like Twitter...

When every random person and even malign actors have a voice in this medium (or when there are too many published papers to read), we want to simplify our information feed to a few voices. The process by which we decide what/who to focus on is the social process....

which is at the root of many societal challenges facing democracies today. When people listen to a few sources as knowers-of-truth, the listeners believe not only the speaker’s knowledge but also their falsehoods, like Fox News and climate change.

The only solution I can think of is to imbue people with a mild cynicism that reflexively gets sick of someone when they’ve heard too much from them, a desire for thoughtful diversity and conceptual novelty in our feed. Moderate cynicism is a cancer to authoritarianism.

Recognizing that “value” (title: epidemiologist, rank: professor, team: Harvard) is arbitrarily assigned, people can question the coin* in moderation, promoting a more fair and productive competition for value among diverse disciplines, labor groups, and more.

This is a social and political proposal based on an ecological phenomenon: kill the winner. In ecology, it’s plagues handicapping the most abundant/dominant species. In economics, it manifests in trust-busting policies. In news and information feeds, we need to kill the winner.

I believe that doing so would have avoided the myopic reactions to COVID that lead to such a grossly unequal recession.

Fight academic syndicalistic authoritarianism with mild cynicism, killing the winners of news and information feeds with a sickness of their dominance.