I agree 100%. And I'm sorry if I sound like I'm on some kind of high horse. One of the flaws of digital media is the lack of overtones and context that would otherwise accompany meatspace discussion. I pepper my opinions with self-deprecating commentary, which is always inadequate.
Shubik is not wrong. Our institutions are under attack and it's not merely incompetence, as my point about "active measures" alludes. It's in the headlines every day: FDA, under pressure from Trump, authorizes blood plasma as Covid-19 treatment https://www.statnews.com/2020/08/23/fda-under-pressure-from-trump-expected-to-authorize-blood-plasma-as-covid-19-treatment/ Finding ways to doubt other people is easy. Finding ways to trust them is always difficult. That's the hard work we've been trying to do since this dumpster fire administration took office. On 8/24/20 5:17 AM, David Eric Smith wrote: > Yes, I guess this is fair, and I apologize for popping off at you. > > I think that, after being doused in it for 15 years, I have absorbed some of > Martin Shubik’s view (for which maybe I am even willing to claim some > responsibility from my own understanding by now) that the design and > implementation of institutions is hard, and that they carry enormous weight > in running the society. Getting the rules right, finding people, > acculturating members, building up networks including all the habits of > others in the world whom you need to influence to work with you, etc., take > time and a lot of effort. > > The week after Trump was elected, Shbuk wrote a hair-on-fire open letter to > several of his colleagues in Econ and operations research, with the main > theme “We’ve got to protect the institutions! They will be the first thing > to go under attack!”. Part of that is the response one expected from him, > from a life of worrying about these things as his main specialty, but part of > it was just the kind of long-paid-for expert understanding that I was hoping > to learn from working with him. > > Lawyers can act as pure advocates, if you are in a country with legislators > that make the laws as fair as possible. But scientists shouldn’t do that. > They can’t help have preferences, and even advocate, but they are supposed to > stop short of acting like lawyers, and act partly like judges and legislators > over themselves, because there isn’t really an outside office to do that. > But scientists are not always reliable in that, and scientists in companies, > especially those run by high-profit businessmen, are doubly at hazard. An > aggregator and regulator outside the corporate world can do very hard jobs > that nobody else is set up to do. When they are well run, it is remarkable > how good they can be. Conversely, when they get hijacked, they can be > organized sources of bad pressure. > > Yes of course, if something comes out, I will use what connections I have to > try to learn about it. We are privileged, in that we have shorter lines to > people with more expertise than the vast majority of our 330M fellow > citizens. But from what I can see of the reporting, even understanding the > etiology of this new disease continues to be rather hard. Vaccine safety and > efficacy are hard in general, with lots of opportunities for error or poor > practice. Vaccines for a class we haven’t vaccinated for before (no vaccines > for the cold, as far as I know), give more wild-cards. We don’t even have a > long term yet, in which to have seen effects of disease or vaccine. A don’t > think our informal networks on FRIAM++ can referee that problem comparably to > a well-run institution with the full support of a large national government. > > Still, I would reach into an urn full of cobras before I would take trump’s > word for anything, or the word of any lackey acting on his behalf. That > makes the burden of proof from any of our large institutions in the near term > that much higher. -- ↙↙↙ uǝlƃ - .... . -..-. . -. -.. -..-. .. ... -..-. .... . .-. . FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv Zoom Fridays 9:30a-12p Mtn GMT-6 bit.ly/virtualfriam un/subscribe http://redfish.com/mailman/listinfo/friam_redfish.com archives: http://friam.471366.n2.nabble.com/ FRIAM-COMIC http://friam-comic.blogspot.com/
