We need scientific dissidents
I really don&#x27;t see how anyone can look at how covid proceeded and come to the conclusion that we need <i>less</i> trust in experts. &quot;Thinking for yourself&quot; was an excellent way to die of covid and to produce much longer, much higher peaks in your region of residence than you would otherwise have had.<p>Places with populations that shut up and listened suppressed covid nearly entirely until the rise of the much-more-contagious Delta and Omicron, neither of which would have realistically arisen at all if the whole world had applied suppression of that magnitude. New Zealand, Australia, Japan, Korea, and China remained open for business throughout most of the pandemic precisely because they had strong institutions and because they successfully enforced expert consensus.<p>Even within the US, the map of covid deaths is practically an electoral map, which is itself practically a map of trust in institutions. San Francisco had a death rate of 134 per 100k. King County (Seattle), 158. And less you think it&#x27;s an urban&#x2F;rural thing, rural Vermont sits in the 150s. Meanwhile, almost nowhere in the South or Great Plains is below 400 per 100k, and almost everywhere that is is a blue island amidst a sea of red. Raleigh-Durham, Atlanta, Austin, Dallas, Houston, Chicago, and St. Louis are all visible clear as day on a map of death rates.<p>Even if we assume that expert consensus got covid&#x27;s origins wrong - a fact that is far from demonstrated - I will happily take a temporary error in a relatively unimportant fact about the virus&#x27; origins over hundreds of thousands of unnecessary deaths and years of shutdowns that could have been avoided with better coordination any day. Experts are sometimes wrong, but from an outside-view, probabilistic standpoint, a person betting against expert consensus is almost always going to lose, especially if they are not themselves an expert.