Sean Carroll's Mindscape: Science, Society, Philosophy, Culture, Arts, and Ideas - 141 | Zeynep Tufekci on Information and Attention in a Networked World

Episode Date: April 5, 2021

In a world flooded with information, everybody necessarily makes choices about what we pay attention to. This basic fact can be manipulated in any number of ways, from advertisers micro-targeting specific groups to repressive governments flooding social media with misinformation, or for that matter well-meaning people passing along news from sketchy sources. Zeynep Tufekci is a sociologist who studies the flow of information and its impact on society, especially through social media. She has provided insightful analyses of protest movements, online privacy, and the Covid-19 pandemic. We talk about how technology has been shaping the information space we all inhabit. Support Mindscape on Patreon. Zeynep Tufekci received a Ph.D. in sociology from the University of Texas-Austin. She is currently an Associate Professor in the School of Information and Library Science at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, and will be a Visiting Professor at the Craig Newmark Center for Journalism Ethics and Security at Columbia University. She is the author of Twitter and Tear Gas: The Power and Fragility of Networked Protest. Her writing has appeared in The New York Times, Scientific American, The Atlantic, and elsewhere, and she publishes the Insight newsletter on Substack. Web site UNC web page Insight @ Substack Google Scholar publications New York Times profile Wikipedia Twitter

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for a brighter, more awake look. This do-it-all formula also contours, correct, and highlights, all while staying lightweight, crease-resistant, and smooth. It may be the world's greatest eraser. Find your shade of instant eraser concealer at your local retail. Hello everyone and welcome to the Mindscape Podcast. I'm your host, Sean Carroll. These days there are a lot of people who are worried about filter bubbles, right?

Living in your own little bubble, only getting the sort of information that confirms your views about the world. And we've read about how to break out of our filter bubbles, et cetera. But if you think about it, the amount of information that is out there to be consumed by a typical person with access to a computer and the internet is literally overwhelming. it is far more than any one person can possibly fairly look at. We're all going to choose to pay attention to certain things and not to pay attention to other things. So there's always a kind of bubble in the sense that you can't literally follow everything, right?

It turns out that manipulating these bubbles, manipulating the way in which we choose not just what political side we pay attention to, but the general question of what information we pay attention to overall is critically important for figuring out how people work and believe and act in the modern world. Today's guest is Zaynep Tufetchi, who has become quite celebrated these days

for saying a lot of wise and smart and correct things about the pandemic and about social media and things like that. She calls what she does techno-sociology. And as she points out right here in the podcast, it's really just sociology, but technology is just so overwhelming these days. You have to pay attention to it. Zaynep started thinking about things like protests and revolutions,

the Arab Spring and the use of information technologies like people in Tarrier Square were organizing over Facebook and Twitter. It turns out that the government's response to this is, of course, the first move is to censor, right, to try to shut off the information. But because there is so much information out there, that's just impractical.

It's just too easy to get information. What you can do instead is flood the zone. You can sort of put out so much disinformation that people can't actually find the correct. information. And this kind of analysis also works in other circumstances where you're not necessarily in a revolution. So Zeynep has studied social media like Facebook and Twitter in everyday use as well as in revolutions. And of course, recently we've had this global pandemic you may have heard of. So how do people get the information they need to figure out what the right strategies are, what's going to

happen, and so forth? It's a very fast-moving, modern thing that we all need to be thinking about, right? What is the information we should be getting, how should we evaluate it, how do the technologies of social media affect the choices we make there? So this is an important, as well as a timely conversation. Let me also mention parenthetically that despite me being a scientist and Zenev being a techno-sociologist, we struggled with technology at the very beginning of the interview. So for the first few minutes, the microphone quality is not as good as it could be, but we switched. We got a better microphone, We fixed our technology. Our sociology, I will leave to you to decide whether that's any good.

So let's go. Zaydeb Tupacchi, welcome to the Mindscape Podcast. Thank you for inviting me. So you've described what you do as techno-sociology. We haven't had a lot of sociologists here in the podcast. We've had one recently. But techno-sociology, that sounds interesting. I took sociology courses.

We were reading Marx and Weber and Durkheim. And so are you talking to Android version? versions of those folks? Or what does it mean to do techno-sociology? Actually, it's really funny. I had to add a qualifier to make it clear that I was doing sociology. It would sound really kind of convoluted, but it kind of makes sense. So if you think about sociology, and obviously you've taken some classes because you got the Marx-Weber Durkine, the founders, as we call them, kind of traditionally, they're considered, three of the big founders, it was born of an era of technological transformation, right?

One of the defining things of what sociology is doing is trying to grapple with a world that was changing fairly rapidly from, you know, urbanization, mass manufacturing, just the communication technologies, everything is an upheaval in the 19th century in the middle of a scientific and technological revolution. And it is, of course, altering the way people live. You know, you have the rural to urban migration. You have cities where people don't know each other, which is creating, you know, these sociological concepts we talk about. So all of that, technically speaking, sociologically speaking, scientifically speaking, it is very much about understanding that kind of societal change. But, so here's why I had to add the techno, as it usually happens, um,

Fields tend to kind of start becoming ossified, if you will, a little, because that's what happens to fields. And also, there's a way in which things get divided into the technology and the sociology. So when I started, what I wanted to do was to do the classical sociology, the work of sociology of understanding, how is the world changing as we get these new kinds of communication that alter our sense of space, our sense of time, how we can connect. These are very old sociological questions. But I'd also started as a sort of a technical person. So I had some sense of that side, which is also important, like, to understand the social change.

So as soon as I said, I want to understand, you know, for example, how the public sphere is changing or how our notions of privacy are changing because of Facebook or Twitter. Twitter or phones, people thought I did stuff like user interface study. Like, you know, what color should the pixel be or where should it be? Like people kept thinking it was some sort of technological work. And I was like, no, no, no, it's not technological in the sense that I'm not looking at, you know, what kind of button makes people click on, yes, I'm not looking at user interface. I'm not even looking at human computer interface, like the HCI.

that's not what I do. I'm looking at the sociological side of it. And at the time that I was starting, like especially looking at things like social movements, you could study a social movement and not talk about the way they use technology, the new technologies. You could, like,

but it was changing so many things about, like, how they got attention, how they organized. There were ways in which is the same way, like having moved to cities, which is, some, you know, big technological shift in the way we experienced space and time and each other had altered our social relations, like having phones in our pockets was altering our social relations. And I just couldn't convince people. This was a thing to study. So I made up a name

to try to say, no, I'm not doing HCI. And I couldn't just say sociology because people were like, then why are we talking about Facebook? Why is Facebook relevant to sociology? And I'd be like, it's very relevant to sociology. So in a way, I made a complicated term to say, I'm doing really traditional stuff. It's just the traditionals don't recognize this as the thing it is. And the new people think they're just doing technology. I'm kind of like, no, Facebook is a people business.

It's not a tech company. It's a people company. It's very much focused on people stuff, right? You need that, you know, the sociology side of it or the psychologist side of it, as much as you need the technology side of it. So that's how I ended up with that phrase. So it's always been techno-sociology. You're just sort of recognizing that we have to do different technology today than we used to have. I mean, right now it's mundane.

But when I made that term up, like it's been more than 10 years. The Arab Spring hadn't even happened. Yeah. Right. So when you started, like when I started going around saying, I want to look at how technology, digital technology especially is going to have societal impacts. People were like, say what? It just sounded like a very bizarre thing. So it doesn't sound like a bizarre thing now. So right now I wouldn't need to make up a term. But it's kind of got its little novelty now. And sometimes people will say, how do I be a techno sociologist or all of that? So I'm kind of like, all right. And it was the name of my initial blog. I kind of keep it. But it's, I mean, truth be told, it's not a thing. Right. Okay. That makes perfect sense.

But it's not actually necessarily primarily even technology that you care about. I mean, I get the feeling that in fact this sort of systems approach is what you care about more than anything else. Is that accurate? Yeah, that is very accurate. Like, I don't really care about, I mean, I like the technology side of it. It is kind of cool. I like knowing things about it. There's a lot of geeky things that is fun there.

But what I'm really looking at is like how does this complex thing work, right? And in this particular case, I was looking at how our public sphere and how things like social movements and the way we understand information. But I mean, it's kind of hard to put a single name on it. But I just like these complex systems and thinking about how is this thing working? How does this thing evolve? How do these things kind of interact with each other in these really men? messy ways and just trying to think hard about that. And of course, when the technology itself is a crucial input to the system, it makes sense to focus on that side because that's where

a lot of the dynamics and the change is happening from. But that's kind of why I was also pretty eager and quick to switch to, not to switch, I was always interested in things like pandemics too, because there are a similar interesting dynamic. in, you know, shuffling things around in complicated ways, as we have seen the last year. So that's the kind of stuff that I find interesting. Can someone even say, I mean, is there a skeptical case to be made about the new technological ways we have of talking to people through social media and the internet or whatever are differences of degree but not of kind? You know, we always were talking to each other, but now we're talking to each other faster. Or is there really some kind of shift that is undergone and really changed that?

Right. So it's more different. is I would say, of course, in some ways, yes. So what you have is, I mean, in some ways, it's a break that comes from the invention of writing, right? Before writing, all you have is the ephemeral speaking, right? You do not have a way to separate the speaker and time and space. That is a big shift, yes.

You can only speak in that moment, in that place to someone else. And you have all the sort of the Greek, The Greeks are interesting partly because they're that shift from oral to, you know, written society. And you see them, like they're very obsessed with the arts of the rhetoric and, you know, that kind of oral persuasion and all those things. So you see the big break is writing where for the first time you can separate the sort of the words of the speaker from the speaker. But then, you know, it kind of gets interested in all sorts of different ways. We have the printing press, which kind of automates that process. So you can have texts that are available in mass.

Then you have something like telegraph that is, for our purposes, instantaneous. It's not, you know, instantaneous to a physicist, but for human purposes, it is instantaneous communication, which is another big break, right? before the telegraph, you were still limited to the speed of your messenger. You know, if it was a pony express or a pigeon, I guess you could do things like, you know, flash smoke signals or mirror signals like that, but those are fairly limited to how far you can get like that. So you have the telegraph. And then all of a sudden you have things like the telephone where the voice itself is instant.

And then you have, so you have, I think, in some ways, of course we always spoke to one another, right? You know, we spoke to one another ever since we had any kind of language. In other ways, starting with writing, we have had ways in which how that speaking and time and space and our bodies existed or did not exist are being reshuffled in very interesting ways. And every time we do something like that, it has huge consequences, right? Like all of a sudden, you know, you have the way wars are fought changes. Because if you have a telegraph, you know, before in the U.S. Civil War, you had people fighting because they didn't get the word that it had ended. You have all sorts of different ways in which the whole aspect of, you know, immigration changes because people would just go to another country and never here again, except maybe a letter once a year

and now you're like just what's happening all day. So those are very different, I think, things. So they're not like everything that's in kind is also in degree usually in some way. So this is I think a case of a more is different in that it affects what happens to us and how we live. But it doesn't make us different kinds of people. So let me try to say it this way.

Like you could plop someone from the Pleistocene or the late Pleistocene maybe and they might be able to adjust, you know. So it's not like you're a very different kind of species in terms of how what we like to do. We still like to connect with people. We care about status. We are social, right? So we don't really do, we don't turn into some sort of alien creatures. Yeah. But the game board on which we are doing those things, you know, where we're acquiring status, where we are getting our information, all those things do change.

There's actually a great, I think it's a Danish TV show called Be Foreigners about exactly this. They bring, you know, there's time travel and they bring people up from the Pleistocene. And they had that pretty well, actually, you know, with a few cosmetic changes. I think we would like, they would do pretty well. We're not as different as we think. You know, they'd have to adjust to, you know, a few technological. tricks and new stuff, but it's, yeah, you could live. From the point of view of complex systems, though, is there something about social media

that enables people to sort of broadcast very widely, but at the same time not be part of some giant centralized institution? Is that kind of a new thing? Well, it changes the gatekeeping mechanisms, right? So before, if you were a social movement in the past, you try to get attention from television. If you didn't get on television or newspapers, you kind of could do a huge thing. And like nobody heard about it and didn't have an impact because attention is really important. Like there were cases in the Middle East of sort of even a couple years before the Arab Spring. You had these incidents where there are these mass strikes and little uprisings here and there in little towns.

And they kind of die out because there just wasn't enough saturation of the cell phone that's going to be. recorded, the Facebook network that's going to be able to spread it. And, you know, they're just sort of surrounded town and there'd be censorship and all of that. So right now, you can get attention without approval of the traditional gatekeepers. That doesn't mean there's no new gatekeeping mechanisms. You know, as we found out, even the president of the United States can be deplatformed. So it's not like there's no gatekeeping. There's new kinds of gatekeeping. You can be kicked off these things. They have various algorithmic

methods that amplify certain things. If you're friendly to the algorithm in what you do, if you can kind of... There's all these other things. If you sort of already have a lot of followers that will help you amplify

things. So it's not like the gatekeeping is disappeared, that it's all flat. It's just not the old kind of gatekeeping. And that in turn, changes what, you know, we have as common knowledge, what people think is the norm. Do we even have a common knowledge?

Like, do we have a way in which we construe what's happening? Because if you think about it, you don't really know what's happening around the world. It's somebody tells you, right? You don't see it all. So you have sources you trust, news you follow. So you have a mental model of what's happening. right outside your immediate visceral experience that comes through mediated sources for you. And that's fine.

Like that's true for everyone. So if you look at like mid-20th century, those are very centralized for the United States. Like they come through, you know, big broadcast, big TV, big media. Right now it's really fractured. So you have an epistemic fracture. So these are, I think, very interesting things. Because if you have an epistemic fracture in your society, you know, you can have a very different mental model of what's going on in one portion of the society

and, you know, the other portion has a completely different view of what's going on. And that's a different kind of question than what we had before. So I think those are the ways in which these things are changing, how we live through things, including through pandemics or political crises or anything we go through. One of the great things about learning something new is that not only do you, have new knowledge, but you have a sense of accomplishment for having attained it. And one of the best and most fun ways to do that is with a subscription to the Great Courses Plus. The Great Courses Plus is a streaming service that offers over 13,000 audio and video lectures from a wide variety of topics. And with the

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greatcourses, p-l-us.com slash mindscape. There was something that I read in one of your pieces that crystallized for me, something that I've been thinking about for a long time. The idea that in the modern world, there is no shortage of information, right? There's a lot of information floating around. What there is

a difficulty in is figuring out what to pay attention to. You had a line that attention matters more than information. I'm like, yes, finally. As I've been thinking, I think that the very first intro I did for this podcast series two years ago, I made a similar point to that. And in fact, there's another line about how censorship works by drowning us in too much indifferentiated information rather than keeping information from us. This does sound like something new as far as I can tell. Yeah, so that part is new.

So I'm going to, there's, I think, the first sort of formulation that I really, like about this is Herbert Simon, and it's about like 1973 or something. And he's basically pointing out that in a society where you have a lot of information, the thing that is precious is that which information consumes, which is the attention, right? Like, so you don't, you have, you no longer have a scarcity of information. And the moment you don't have a scarcity of information, you have a scarcity of attention. And so it becomes the filter that's important, not, you know, the information. And in such an environment, like in the, when I was growing up in Turkey, the way they would censor things was very traditional censorship. They would, you know,

they'd have a military coup. And we have them a lot. So it's kind of, we have like well-established best practices, quote-unquote, for military coups. And the traditional best practices would be you surround the radio station, you surround a TV station, you take over the radio station if you're in the 60s, the TV station if you're in the 80s, and then you control the broadcast. This is the very traditional method of controlling information from getting out at all. Now, of course, I lived through another coup in 2016. I just happened to be in the country, and we had another one of them. And there, they did even try to go to a few of the TV stations.

But, like, I was looking at my phone, not the TV. So everything was happening through the, you know, WhatsApp groups and other kinds of information sharing. And they never got an information monopoly over the country. So the sort of that kind of, you know, you can shut down a few TV stations. It doesn't really matter. So in such an environment, if you really want to censor things, you can try to completely shut down the Internet. But that's a very, like, you can't really have a modern economy now. Like you can't really be a world in which you just shut down the whole internet

because there's all this other stuff that's going on, including just the regular socialization, including economic activity. So the way a lot of places have figured out how to do censorship is by information glut. You drown people in information in claims, questioning the credibility of whatever you don't like, claiming things are, you know, fake, hoax, other kind of things. So you base or distracting, creating distractions, you know, just when something important is happening, you know, create some other fall controversy.

So these are managing attention, right? None of them are really blocking the crucial piece of information from being found by somebody who's focused on finding it. But they are making it essentially more difficult to even identify the crucial piece of information amidst all the cacophony. And also, like, for enough people to focus on it and say, because information by itself isn't powerful. It's just enough people take it seriously and decide that this is the crucial information we need and do something about it. You know, that kind of, so you can break those chains. You can break the chain between information and action.

not by removing the information, but just surrounding it in things and an environment that makes it useless to the hearer because you can't tell what's going on. And I think that's the modern form of censorship. And I wrote this in my book that came out before Donald Trump was elected, right? I was kind of like working off from examples around the world of other sort of authoritarian and other. new populist ways of sort of creating obstacles to focused information and attention on what was sort of important and relevant. And then Donald Trump got elected and everybody was saying, oh, these are, you know, this is what he's doing.

And I kind of was like, yes, and that's not really unique to him, right? This is something that we have seen around the world. So I didn't really have some sort of crystal ball to say, you know, this is what he's going to do uniquely before he did it. I was just looking around and, you know, he was one more in a pattern. And if every claim that you can imagine is out there in the media and every counterclaim is also out there, then you can see, I'm not a professional sociologist, but I'm guessing how you can have these little groups of self-sustaining epistemic communities that are sort of, you can see, you're sort of, you know, completely divorced from the mainstream and that might feed into polarization and fracturing more broadly. But so the thing is it's even more than that is that. So if you want to get people's attention, like traditionally sort of, if you just think about

human beings, we'd like to think of ourselves as these wonderful cognitive creatures. And there's no doubt, like, you know, we're fairly smart apes as these things go. but we are still social animals, right? And some of the most motivating things for us are things that pertain to group belonging, right? Which group we belong to are status within that group and which group is the out-group. Right? So that's like the traditional in-group out-group thing. So if you really want to get attention in a media environment where you can kind of play with these things,

tribalization is your best bet for getting attention, right? You know, if you want to get clicks, sort of the culture wars and Dr. Seuss and all those things, are really going to get people's attention because it's a way of delineating us versus them. And us versus them for a social species, like that's a very, very important thing because, you know, we want to find our group and we want to sort of figure out who's the other group. And we have these platforms like Facebook and the others that are Twitter, all of media, basically, that are financed by getting our attention and then selling it to advertisers. So to do that, they must first keep us on the site.

And to keep us on the site, you find their design really encourages this tribal dynamics. Now, it's not just hating other groups. It's also bonding with your own. So you find like the Facebook groups thing. It's like, oh, you find the people that think like you. But that's the flip side of finding people you don't like. Because that demarcation process, that in group out group, like you can't have one or without the other, right?

If you're a fan of one team, there has to be some other team that your team is playing, that you can cheer for, right? This is just very, very basic. And things like, you know, fans of sports team and stuff like that, those are sublimated, usually not dangerous ways of in-group, out-group processes. We just find a team, we cheer for it. You know, we don't normally go and murder the other teams, fans normally, although it does happen occasionally.

But if you kind of think about it, like a lot of things we think about, the nationalism, tribalization within the polarization within the country. All of those things are in-group, out-group processes. So now we have, at a global scale, these major platforms that are using what are very basic social species dynamics to grab your attention to say, here, come find the people that you identify with, and then also sort of polarizing. against the people, that's the outgroup, which is the basic thing. And you see, they feed into the polarization. What they will say in response is that we don't create these dynamics.

These are human dynamics, which is true. But they also have a business model that very much amplifies these dynamics. I kind of see them like, you know, like an ice cream company that's serving ice cream for breakfast, lunch, and dinner and saying we didn't invent the human appetit. The human appetite for sugar fat, you know, because that comes from your evolution, right? Where our appetite for calories and sugar and fat or salt comes from the scarcity in the past. So it totally makes sense that we have an appetite for it. But they have a business model in which they keep giving more of it to you for breakfast, lunch, and dinner.

So it's like they're symbiotically merging with what are human social dynamics to keep us on their site. Well, this makes me think that number one, I like ice cream. And number two, I think it's great when tiny groups of people who otherwise would never have found each other can find each other online. So is that tradeoff inevitable or is there some way programmatically to allow, people define themselves and be part of the in-group without demonizing the outdoors? I think part of some of the issues are like how large are you going to make to out-group, right? Or how large are you going to do the scale? So if, for example, Facebook groups was limited to 250 people or 150 people, right?

Something like that. And if you wanted to go larger, there were these other requirements of moderation and this and that or I'm just making up something. But if it was limited in scale, it wouldn't have the same. effect because you would probably find a different dynamic or if like, but I'm not saying this is something to be done. I'm just kind of saying that once you allow these big groups to come together in this kind of format, unless you have something pushing in the other direction, it's going to

polarize. Now, traditionally, because of history and because of the way advertising work, traditional media would try to be in the center because they wanted the scale and they wanted a broad sort of range readers so that Sears could advertise with them, right? Like Sears didn't want to be on the left or the right or something. Sears wanted to reach a majority of people because you didn't really have the kind of scale you could have without bringing people together. Whereas right now you can bring people together in a platform like Facebook.

book, advertised to their large numbers, but you do not have to bring them together ideologically towards a center the way traditional broadcasters would try to do. They can all be in their little groups saying very different things. They're still on Facebook, right? So in the past, if you read the Wall Street Journal or the New York Times, you're all reading the same newspaper. Whereas right now you can have two billion people still be on Facebook. So you have the scale, but they're not reading the same thing. That's a very different way to get scale. The first one requires some sort of ideological centering to get to that scale, whereas the New York Times or the Wall Street Journal model. Like they're not exactly at the center, of course, but they're

trying to sort of apply to broad categories. Whereas Facebook does not have to do anything of the sort. It can apply to people across all sorts of political views because digital technology allows it to be different screen by screen. The newspaper cannot morph, like the paper cannot morph into a different paper depending on who's purchasing it. That's a big difference. It's static. Like, it's physically cannot just morph every time somebody picks it up, where something digital can. Those are very changes, you know. Is there any way for as a researcher or a watchdog to see what ads are being targeted at different groups on Facebook? Well, people have called for things like that.

And right now we have even some level of transparency. But, you know, once you got to that scale, if transparency itself isn't getting you everything you need, if nobody's looking. It's kind of like saying we should have ingredients. Well, fine, if the ingredients are published, but nobody's checking what's in them. And you got titanium oxide and a bunch of baby food and nobody's looking at it. Like, just the transparency alone is not a bad thing. But, like, who's looking at it? Who would even, like, would we even agree who should look at it?

Right? These are things that I don't think we have resolved at all as a society. And I'm not even saying, I sometimes, because I do the critical thing, it's not like I'm saying, this is terrible. we should go back to the past because there were so many ways in which the past wasn't great. And also it's not coming back. Like even if you liked it, it's not coming back. It's just like because that's not how the world works.

And there was a lot of things that were like brushed over and censored and hidden. And you couldn't find people like you. And you couldn't like there were ways in which all sorts of people were isolated because they didn't. You know, you might have been living in a rural place and not have access to, you know, you might have been a gay kid without anybody openly gay around you and have no clue. And now you can go on social media and find some people who can say, okay, you know, this is like there's lots of us. I'm just giving a small example.

Or you could just have a hobby and not have a single other person. Or you could just be like there's all these things in which the ability to find each other is a good thing. The trick is, though, it's not confined to things I like. Right. Right. This is also true for white supremacists, right? I mean, if people who like, you know, something geeky or cute and something I like can find each other, that doesn't mean the same mechanism doesn't operate for the white supremacists. So the error is treating it like a pony that is supposed to do what you say and then getting disappointed because that's not what it is.

and then going from some sort of utopian sort of, this is great, I find people I like to, well, wait, this is terrible. Other people find people they like without realizing, well, those are kind of the same dynamics. And the question is, like, how can we approach this and say we can do something better to sort of manage this transition because it's a major transition.

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of this whole apparatus pushes us towards a lower trust society where we're more skeptical of institutions and so forth. And that's definitely what I can see both sides. Like in some sense, I want people to be skeptical of institutions. But when it becomes just a way to ignore anything you don't want to hear, then that would be bad. Yeah, so this is something like I find, I haven't really had a chance to write about this,

but most conspiracy theories are not driven by ignorance, but by a sense of curiosity and wanting to figure things out without guardrails. Like if you kind of go through these conspiracy sites, like they're citing articles and like there's all these little connected dots and like you could almost squint and see well, they're trying to do some sort of legwork for what you'd call the scientific process, except there's no guardrails to keep them from, you know, getting lost in what they're claiming

or what they're reading, you know, because it's, so that's the thing is skepticism itself isn't empowering, but don't be a skeptic is nonsense because skepticism is, how we do science. It's how we make things happen. It's how we question. And if you look at sort of history of medicine or something like that, there's so many things that were considered outside the mainstream till they weren't because the mainstream was wrong. The mainstream was, and in fact, they were wrong because they were like stubborn. And then, you know, new things happen. So you do have these things. You do have these skeptical outsiders who come in and say, mainstream is wrong. But that doesn't make everybody who thinks they're a skeptic Galilea, right?

Like there's a lot of people who are, they all think they are. But there's a lot of people who think they are, you know, the new Galilea and they're just cranks or they're, they lost the sort of, they have no connection to reality and or they're grifters. But of course, the problem is, how do you tell them apart? Do you have? Who designates, uh, which side, like I have my preferences for what I think are the correct skepticism and what is what I would consider conspiracy theories, but those are like mine. And like that's not everybody else's. So if you're going to have some sort of, you know, Ministry of Truth telling us which ones are conspiracy theories, that's not really going to easily work. Because I think the pandemic

has been an eye-opener that many central authorities, even with the smartest people, can get things wrong, right? So somebody needs to say, well, you got this wrong, but there also has to be a process. I think this is like a new appreciation of, there's no checklist. Sometimes you sort of teach kids science with the sort of, there's a little wheel, and there's a hypothesis, and there's data, and there's this, and, you know, you sort of go through it. And that's not how it really works. There's like a whole cultural institution it's embedded in. And if it's full of people trying to kind of get to a more precise understanding of the world with a lot of guardrails, it kind of works. But if you don't have all those culture and the institution and the guardrails, the same sort of little wheel of hypothesis, data, go back.

It just isn't going to work. And that is kind of hard to. put in a sort of that's the right word schematic a little algorithm it's not like a checklist like there's no critical

thinking checklist there's no way to be a critical thinker I think without a lot of substantive knowledge in the area and acculturation into a group of sort of people and the discussions and debates

but that doesn't make those people the final authorities either because, as we know, it's a human process and it does go all right and there are egos and weird things. Any academic can tell you all sorts of stories of quirky things that shouldn't have happened or just egos that got in the way of things. But on the other hand, on the whole, the enterprise does seem to work. It does. But you're right that there's no checklist. People are always asking me for a checklist of what I should trust about science on the internet or whatever. I'm sure people are asking you for the checklist also. Yeah, all the time.

And as you say, there's just way too much information. So not everyone is going to go back to the original published refereed articles, right? That's just not plausible enough and that they couldn't understand them if they did. But there is, even without a checklist, I want to say, and I'm not saying this with any confidence at all, but I want to say that there's still a way to sort of get a feeling for the credibility of different sources. You know, asking whether or not they have a track record. asking whether or not they are being humble about what they're saying. Like, you know, they're delineating the limits of their knowledge

versus just bombastically claiming to have solved everything. I think that even though we can't all be experts in everything, we're forced it by the modern world into a situation where we have to judge things. So we have to figure out ways to do it. Right. So I think there's some of that where you're... There's a sense like that. But even that sense doesn't come without some...

legwork. Like, I'll give you like an extreme example. I think what's the name of the there was a company that claimed to have a very large scale HCQ study by comparing, I think,

150 hospital records, something like that. And HCQ is, was something that the president of the United States was erroneously claiming that would help cure COVID very early. It was something like that. So, okay, so it got stuck in a very, very polarized debate because of that. And of course, the thing you want to look at is like, where is the peer review of science, where is the studies, where's the forget the peer reviews, you know, where's the preprints and

things like that. and this was kind of early in the epidemic, a pandemic. And we had a few papers come out that were claiming that there was a big study from a company called Surgesphere that was comparing like hospital records in 150 countries that showed, it claimed, that the H.CQ was harmful in like, really drastically harmful, not just mild or anything. It was like a very large size effect.

And immediately people jumped on this. Now, I'm giving this example. It was published in the Lancet, which is the, you know, one of the highest, highly rated scientific article sort of journals. I think there's a version of that that was published someplace else. But so the short of it is that it was retracted fairly quickly because you just looked at it and you thought, how did you get data from 150 countries or hospitals and manage to sort of standardize the medical coding? It's very complicated. We can't even standardize the medical coding between two kind of hospitals in this country easily,

let alone hundreds of hospitals across the world. And HCQ has long been shown since, not to have a great upside. But the level of harm, because it's a common drug, like it's available over the counter. Like it wasn't even implausible that, you know, maybe it was helpful. But the kind of harm was really high. So I remember like squinting and saying, you found what? And it's not really my field, right? But because everybody was sort of pointing this out, partly because they wanted to say, look how terrible Trump is.

Right. Now, on the one hand, Trump has been terrible. Right. So there's no question. Like, he was just sort of making claims. He was just basically making stuff up. And it was a dangerous thing to do, partly because HCQ trials have taken up so much of our energy when we could have just done a few trials and be done. Right.

Because, you know, there's some drugs that work. This one isn't next. right, like where we try lots of things. There's another one, Dexay, worked wonderfully, and it's also an over-the-counter drug, and, you know, we found in a trial. So all of that is good. On the other hand, this very sort of prestigious peer-reviewed journal,

like, what, what, you just sort of kind of go, what? And then, so this is the interesting to me, is that tons of people kind of said, this doesn't make sense, that this is how it affirmed my faith. So there was a failure, clearly, by the journal. The editor should have just said,

tell me more about this data. Like, you either got to, because it's such a big claim to have collected data that widely, that quickly. The peer reviewers should have been like, wait, what? Like, there's all these blind spots. And I'm kind of post-talk, of course,

guessing that the fact that it's so strongly undermined a Trump claim. Oh, yeah. May have helped the blind spot. I'm sure I played a big role. Yeah, so it got through peer review. It got widely shared. And then here's the part that's great.

The same community of scientists. Because I was alarmed a little bit by the data scope because I kind of have familiarity, but I don't understand this drug. Like, what do I know, right? So I started seeing people I trust say, this doesn't make sense. Now, I understand statistics. So I started looking at the statistics. And I was like, oh, this is made up.

because they're like the sort of the adverse event percentages were like with within like 0.1.2% across age groups on like 10 different countries like no way like then you just fill this up right you can kind of you could do more exact tests but like there's a way to figure out made up data and this was you could even eyeball it and say you made this up you didn't really need to bring out the sort of statistical big guns to figure out the fraudulent data. I'm just giving this an example of like stuff gets through, but the good part of sciences, then there's a lot of us who kind of look up and say, wait, I don't care that it got through. I don't care.

It got published in the highest sort of rated journal. People kind of go and say, this doesn't make sense. This doesn't make sense. And it usually takes some time. And in this particular case, I think the retraction happened within weeks. So I think this is kind of like an example of both the height and depth, like both the best at times, worst at times. Like we have these blind spots partly due to political polarization that let a paper that should have been desk rejected and had been seen as a fraud, like immediately get through, partly because it's undermining a president who is terrible on the pandemic. On the other hand, the scientific community was pretty quick to say,

I don't care what you think. This is why this is not wrong and got it retracted. So how do you capture that in a bottle? Like I don't have a way to say, like, what is the process there? Because you can't just say trust peer review, because I just gave an example of a massive failure of peer review. You can't just disregard peer review because if you don't know anything else about a topic, you know, if you have one assumption to make, I'm going to say peer review paper is better, right?

Like if I have no other piece of information, that would be my assumption. But it's like then what's the next level? You know, what does the community say about it? Like, so that's the thing. You can't say, you know, a lot of data is good. You can't just just. It's very hard. It's complicated, exactly. And fallibilism is a big idea. I think we got a lot of that kind of complication.

We saw a lot of kind of complication. in the pandemic where, as I like to say, there's never been a better time to be informed, but there's also never been a worse time to be informed. You know, it's both. Hey, everyone, it's Cal Penn. I'm the host of Earsay, the Audible and I-Heart Audio Book Club. This week on the podcast, I am sitting down with Ray Porter, the narrator of Andy Weir's audiobook Project Hail Mary,

massive sci-fi adventure about survival and science. And what happens when you wake up alone very far from Earth? I really had to make a decision because I caught myself getting that frog in my throat and starting to get teary as I'm narrating some of these sections. And it's like, okay, yo, yeah, yo, is this indulgent? And I really thought about it. I was like, no, at this point, it would kind of be betraying the trust the author and the listener have in telling this story if I don't go through it. But there's places in this book that deeply emotionally affected me, and I left it on the mic. That's great.

Because it served the story. People will say like, oh, my God, I cried at the end. It's like, yeah, dude, me too. Listen to Earsay, the Audible and IHeart Audio Club on the IHeart Radio app or wherever you get your podcasts. Now I'd like to introduce you to Meaningful Beauty, the famed skincare brand created by iconic supermodel Cindy Crawford. It's her secret to absolutely gorgeous skin. Meaningful beauty makes powerful and effective skin care simple, and it's loved by millions of women. It's formulated for all ages and all skin tones and types, and it's designed to work as a complete skin care system,

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That includes our introductory five-piece system, free gifts, free shipping, and a 60-day money-back guarantee. All that available at Meaningful Beauty.com. Well, let's think about the pandemic more broadly, because I know that you've obviously been on about this for over a year now. I've seen your tweets sort of recalling the tweets from a year ago and shaking your head and dismay about how we have evolved through this. But so we did get the pandemic wrong in early days. By we, I don't mean you and me necessarily, but the establishment, the institutions, the people were supposed to be able to trust the government, the media.

Is there, was there some specific set of biases or motivations that caused it to go wrong? Or was it just that people were not trained to think in the right way about such a complicated problem? So I've been thinking a lot about that, like what happened, what went wrong, what we could have done. So a bunch of things. I mean, in particularly in the United States, we did have the president who was a problem. Right. So when you have the president basically silencing CDC officials, we saw that happen in February. So you have that problem for sure.

But I think that hides the bigger problem because it wasn't just that. And it wasn't just the U.S. Like it wasn't just the Europe also did not do well. So one thing I've been wondering, like I was talking to someone the other day, and I said, why didn't the U.S. universities like just quickly create a consortium? because we saw in February of 2020, it was pretty clear that there was going to be political meddling. So why didn't we create our own, you know, get the facts from us,

consortium, like just have, you know, faculties of medicine and public health from, say, you know, top 20, 30 universities create like a little expert committee of ourselves to, you know, get the facts on the pandemic or something like that. I think we could have done that. Like, why, why didn't we? So we didn't react to the failure of the authorities one day failed, so in the U.S. So you're, sorry, you're asking why a bunch of professors did not come together to do rapid action. I know, I know, I know.

But like, we should have, like, because the whole point of the academic institution is, like, we're supposed to be doing stuff like that. Like, we have this privilege of a job that is supposed to let us do that. So we didn't really do that. Like, at least the administration is they're always making strategic plans. and, you know, doing all this. And I'm like, yeah, this is a good time. But that wasn't all that failed, right? So there was a way in which the politics failed and there was political meddling.

But there was, I think, a lot of epistemological failures in Western societies, too. For one, we didn't take the expertise from places with SARS experience seriously. Because I don't care what you call it. because the World Health Organization didn't want to call it anything like SARS because they don't want to fear, scare people. But, I mean, this is SARS, basically, with a crucial distinction in that it has pre-symptomatic spread. But in a lot of other things, it is very, SARS had the same age gradient in its effects.

It had aerosol, airborne transmission. It had the over-dispersion. It is different. Presumomatic transmission. It didn't have that. but it's a very similar kind of coronavirus, right? And the countries that had experience with it, like Japan, Hong Kong, Taiwan, were fairly quick to do the correct non-pharmaceutical interventions before we had more,

whereas the Western public health, I think, was fairly anchored on waiting for a flu pandemic. We think in flu. And flu is a different pathogen. It's not over-dispers the same way. You kind of basically close schools and wait for a vaccine. Like it's not kids are super spreaders of flu, not this one. There is like there's not the same kind of super spreading behavior anyway in flu, the same kind. Whereas this one is very dependent on that kind of super spreading events to drive the epidemic.

So there's all these things that I think we didn't do. We made fun of like masks. I've read so many articles last year early on claiming, you know, East Asians were superstitious for wearing masks. And I'm kind of like, you know, they have infectious disease specialists. They have epidemiologists. Like they're not just making this up. It's not a talisman. Like they're these actual scientists who you can talk to before dismissing, you know, why is Taiwan ramping up production of mass?

It's a respiratory airborne pathogen, and this is source control. This is not like, you know, they're not throwing salt over their shoulder, but I literally read articles that dismissed that kind of expertise. I think we had a lot of sort of different incorrect sort of reflexes on trusting the public, on like giving the advice to give, yet we gave too many binary rules. I'm still trying to tell people it's fine to be outdoors. There's no super spreading events that we know of outdoors. I mean, this is not a mystery.

It was pretty clear from the epidemiology of this disease by March of last year. Like by the end of March of last year, it was pretty clear that transmission, the super spreading transmission, was primarily occurring indoors in poorly ventilated places, that outdoor transmission wasn't impossible, but it was pretty high bar. You just didn't see much of it. And super spreading, I still don't have any confirmed, you know, a major daytime super spreading event, like where people are outside, where the photographers take their picture.

And then it actually is a super spreader. Like, it's been a year. But I just saw a headline, like a front page headline, like a week ago from Australia's paper of record shaming people sitting on a pretty large beach for, you know, breaking quarantine or whatever it is that they were being accused of. I'm kind of like you can't be this behind the scientific knowledge. And I'm not blaming the ordinary people because the authorities have been like not communicating this.

There's a huge, like I'm kind of going very fast here, but there was a big fight. There's a very big scientific fight that I think is going to play a major role once this is done. it's not getting enough attention right now because we're kind of busy with the pandemic itself in which one of the ways in which we set our NPI's, the non-pharmaceutical interventions, was the idea that these things, this respiratory pathogen, spread through droplet. And if you want to think in sort of physics terms, droplets are like these ballistic trajectories. They go, they, you know, you spit them out and they go down with gravity in like a parable.

They fall to the ground. Right? So, and aerosols are the small things that can float around because they're small and light. Now, the first people usually call droplets. The second people kind of call aerosols, right? So it turns out, and this is going to be a really interesting sort of history somebody's going to eventually write. The World Health Organization, to this day, has the micron cutoff for one.

what floats and what falls wrong by a large factor. I did not know that. And there's an interesting history to why this is somebody transcribes something incorrectly back when. And there's going to be a paper about it eventually. So I don't want to like sort of tell all the details till people have their paper. I don't so nobody's really paying attention to this. But it's a major error because you're basically assuming a mode of transmission that now that I kind of step back and look at it is probably fairly rare. I think it probably happens like if you cough or sneeze on

someone, like the kind of big drops, but most of it is floaty stuff. Now, of course, the floaty stuff can float to you from close range too, right? It doesn't mean it's the big stuff that otherwise would have fallen, right? If you've got the floaty aerosoli stuff coming out of your mouth when you're speaking, you are going to be more infected if you're close to someone. But that's not proof that that is the big, you know, ballistic trajectory. Because if that were the case, you'd have almost an equal amount of outdoor transmission. You know, because stuff, if they weren't just floating around, what happens outdoors is they get, they float away very quickly because air just dilutes them.

It's much more wind. just aerodynamics. And it turns out, one of the sort of our anchoring biases here was that we thought most respiratory pathogens are droplet. I think once this is done, we're going to go back and say, well, actually, most of them were not. Like, we were wrong in a bunch of stuff, but it didn't really matter because it wasn't a pandemic and we weren't checking.

Sure. Right. So there was these bunch of people that were like a minority that were saying they're aerosol. about the other ones too. And whenever we find a way to check, and it's kind of hard. Like there's a lot of these really geeky technical things to how do you prove it's an aerosol because it's not easy. Like you have to find it here in like culture, a live virus from it or something like that.

So I think this is going to basically revolutionize our understanding of how respiratory pathogens actually transmit most of the time. And the science twist to the story is that these people have been saying this. kind of yelling in a polite way at the scientific establishment and the medical establishment saying this is how it's happening. We got to pay attention to things that mitigate aerosol transmission, also for influenza, you know, also for this and also for that and not getting way. And when the pandemic started, that same dogma just wouldn't shift.

Right. But all of a sudden, the stakes were higher. and then all of a sudden we got more studies, and then all of a sudden, you know, we got this major epidemiological record. If you look at the epidemiological record, there is no other theory of transmission that can explain that record besides aerosol transmission being dominant.

Like to sort of have a story of droplets doing what we're seeing clinically in the epidemiological record of where it's spreading, it's, you really have to be a contortionist to fit that theory, fit that data. But we haven't really had the reckoning. So there's a, like, I used to think the Coonian idea of, um, scientific revolutions was a little exaggerated for the 21st century.

I was kind of like, yeah, I get it. Like, you know, the Newtonian kind of story. I'm like, that's a very cute story. But that doesn't happen all the time. Like you don't have these major paradigm shifts. Uh, and all of that. I used to sort of think that doesn't really happen a lot because, we're a little more nuanced now.

Like we're not and we don't have that big shifts. Now I'm kind of thinking maybe there's more in the making. We just kind of don't do it. Plus what I've noticed in this pandemic is that once it shifts, people really forget like it was almost misinformation, quote, unquote, a year ago to say, wait, it's aerosol. So right now a lot of people are like, yeah, of course it was we said it was aerosols. I'm like, no, you know, it was kind of like I was there in those meetings. People were accused of making stuff up and being completely wrong and stuff like that.

So there's a way in which now I think these paradigms just happen along with a very sociological process of amnesia, where the people who were kind of saying the opposite, they just forget. They were saying the opposite and we kind of move on without sort of saying, oh, wait, we just move. done, right? This might, this is not even terrible in some sense, except maybe there's a lot more of this than, um, I had thought. And these paradigm shifts really are real because I'm just remembering a year ago, sort of staring at the screen, because we're not in the same room where, you know, people with sort of the aerosol biophysics would try to explain your micron cutoff doesn't work. Here's the math. That size will not drop. And this is the size that will flow. And this is the size that will

float and this is the lab experiment and this is this like they would try to explain the stuff to the medical establishment and they just couldn't get anywhere. I think that Thomas Kuhn would be very much on board with the idea that attention is more a valuable commodity than information because he was all about how different people from different paradigms would look at different pieces of information and just interpret them in very different way. I thought he had more of a, in my interpretation was that his story was a little stylized. Like I always thought this is a little messier. But I'm rethinking that because I think part of it is it's really hard to reconstruct where people were saying and all those things that

happened because as soon as the paradigm shifts, everybody's on the new boat. Right. Like we were always fighting Eurasia kind of thing. Or Oceania. whatever. So there's a way in which that that might be thing. But yeah, so it's so I think we're going to like for the me, the pandemic has been a scientifically very and sociologically, a very interesting process to examine because I feel like I've seen great things. I mean, we've seen people kind of, you know, when the variance of concern came out, I saw sort of labs just through the neutralization study and just tweet it out. Like they didn't even wait for the paper because there's this enormous speed and generosity and like preprint and post print and you know review and all of those things.

It's really been on the one hand wonderful. On the other hand, like there's these crappy papers like the Lancet paper that I'm like, how on earth did that get through? And there's so many now academics and sort of epidemiologists and virologists and social media now are like sub-tweeting each other and blocking each other like all the social media I'm kind of like, well, okay, fine, you're all human too. I get that. But that's kind of a, you know, and I've seen that, of course, it's like very human dynamic. I'm not saying there's anything particularly good or bad about it. So it's kind of like a very confusing environment as well, because you're seeing great science, great generosity, very interesting thing. But if you're just following this and you're thinking, how do I figure out, you know, what's going on? It's pretty hard because there's a lot of noise. Well, one thing I don't want to get lost that you mentioned is, of course, there's a whole bunch of cases and circumstances under which people are wrong because of, you know, their biases or the theoretical framework they're working in or just inertia or group think or whatever.

But then there's another set of cases where people had some knowledge or opinions and then thought a little overthought the question of what should we let other people know. What should we tell people, whether it was the government or with journalism, right? Like people were worried too much about what the effects of saying things might be and not just the effect, not just worried about getting the truth out there as quickly as possible. I mean, the thing is, of course, there's a lot of things in which we got things wrong and then updated, you know, and that's a very noble part of science, right? That's perfectly fine. Like, that's what you're supposed to do. Well, you get something wrong. And then you go, okay.

I got it wrong and here's what the correct one was, like that you're supposed to do that. Like the idea that you wouldn't be wrong about something is just nonsense. On the other hand, of course, you're supposed to look at the evidence, not what happens to be the guideline from 20 years ago, right? Like you're supposed to kind of, so I think this is just, like for somebody interested in the scientific process, I think this has been a very rich moment. But it also shows you that it is a, it is not a magical process. It takes labor, like it takes real work to stay on top of any field, let alone one with such consequences. And it's full of people.

You know, so you have all the human things. Well, that's good because it lets me do what I wanted to do anyway, which was just circle back to the systems thinking that we started about at the beginning. I mean, one of the, you know, you drop in some phrases in your. writings that are beloved to me as a physicist about non-linear dynamics and phase transitions and avalanches and things like that. I mean, I love these ideas. I can see them in the dynamics of different things sometimes. I mean, how useful are these concepts to you? I mean, the idea that not only do you have a complicated system in the sense that there's many moving parts, but that the interactions between the moving parts are just as important as the sum of the parts. The thing is, I think,

If you sort of look at sort of complex systems or system thinking or whatever you want to call it, these things, you see a lot of examples clearly from physics. You know, this is so much of it. You see it in sort of any kind of ecology or environment. Kind of you look at, like ecological studies and things like that. You see all these very interesting sort of interactions. And one of the things that I was struggling with in the early days of the pandemic was trying to explain nonlinear dynamics. right because epidemics are very non-linear dynamics and people were like you know can you come up

with a metaphor and I'm like the you don't really go through them in your own like macro life like you don't you have them in your body perhaps but you don't really have a lot of macro processes that you observe this but you do in like social media where social media like it grows very fast if you're kind of like an early mover because it's an exponential process it's like a network that just kind of grows. And I think that's one of the reasons why the Silicon Valley people were quick to this because they're used to looking for exponential processes

that will make them rich, right? It's the other way around, whereas this is an exponential process that will make life terrible for all of us. So you need to kind of figure out how to you, because with an exponential process, you get in early or you get overwhelmed, right? Like the steep part of the exponential

is not a place you're going to very, gently surf. You just need to go for it. So things like the nonlinear dynamics I've always found fascinating because of, you know, how they are everywhere but non-intuitive. So you can't, you know, there's only so many times you can give that chest pieces and rice example. Yeah.

You know, everybody gives the same, you know, you put one rice on the chest board and then too. Like I'm like, well, you might as well give the math. There's nothing intuitive about that because people don't usually, you don't do. You don't do that in your normal life. But I think right now with epidemics, people might have finally gotten a bit of an intuition. So face transitions, for example, like they are, I'm not making a direct sort of math, sort of analogy there. But you can think of what we're talking about as these paradigm shifts where you kind of go from, you know, everybody thinks one way and then we sort of switch.

you see it in some of the ways in which once there's enough, like this is a very over-dispersed epidemic in that there's like little peaks that are very crucial to the way it's super spreading. But once you have a lot of community transmission so that it's everywhere, for a while it looks like flu. Yeah. Because it's so widespread that like it'll kind of keep going in different ways.

It's almost, it's not really a phase transition, but that's a good intuitive way of describing it to somebody who understands face transitions, some things like that. So I find those kinds of ways of thinking to be really useful in understanding where things are. Right now, for example, we have a lot of convergent evolution in the mutations, which has surprised the virologists. Like people, we weren't expecting this. And there's a lot of sort of fascinating discussions because there's a very particular mutation that's popping up everywhere.

And it is like making things more transmissible among other things. It may not be happening because it's making things more transmissible. That might be something that's coming along for the ride. There might be something else driving it. So it's making me think, for example, about like convergent. evolution is a very interesting complex systems dynamic where you have a very large sort of potential fitness landscape, but strict optimization criteria and will it converge every time you do it or is it very sort of contingent and stochastic and it'll go all sorts of different places.

And it's kind of looking like under certain conditions, there's strong pressure for convergence because the same mutation, because we didn't really like, honestly, like I follow this the whole time. Almost everybody was surprised by the number of places, the same few mutations popped up. Like clearly it's adaptive. It's like it's not the kind of thing that, because you can see it take over the other variant.

Like you see this particular mutation, you know, go eat the available space. So I think we're going to learn a lot about how do you think about something, like that because it's not just a question of urology. It also means that, well, that means that if we leave this alone, this is what's going to happen. Like this is, you know, this kind of convergent evolution

that it's finding this sort of local maxima almost everywhere. We're going to see it in lots of places and how do we prepare for it. These are interesting ways of thinking about it. Now, unfortunately, usually these are languages that are not spoken across fields. Like sociologists don't talk about convergent evolution or like it's, you hear it from all the biology people, but you don't really hear it from the other things. But I find them all, they show up, they come up, like they come up in the world.

The world isn't siloed into these fields. So, I mean, this leads me to the perfect final question, which is too big to possibly be answered. but what do you having, having learned a bunch over the last year about pandemics and so forth, not just you, but the world, what does this tell us about the next pandemic? There's a lot of ways in which this virus could have been worse, right? But maybe we're better at fighting it now, I don't know. So I've been like sort of, there are a couple of things to say.

One of them is that while it's tragic, I mean, there's no question. Like, we had half a million deaths in the United States. So there's no way to kind of dismiss this. In the potential pathogen scape, let's say, this is a mild one. It kills relatively low compared to many others. It is very targeting. It's targeted by age. I mean, it's of course a tragedy to have the elderly die.

But it would have been a very different conversation if the, you know, fatality rate for children was 10% instead of for people over 80. I mean, of course, I don't want people over 80 to die prematurely, but it's a really different societal effect if it's, you know, children, where if it kills, you know, one in 10 who got infected or something like that, that would be a very different thing. And it's also, while we screwed it up, it's very susceptible to non-pharmaceutical intervention exactly because it's over dispersed and very much, you know, so if you kind of control the indoor super spreading and crowded places, you get a big bang for your buck. So what's next?

Question number one, we get something similar. We get like, you know, SARS-MERS 3 and we know what to do. And like we kind of go back to our playbook and then we're like doing well. option one. Option two, we get a flu, which we prepared for so long, and then, you know, wasn't the right thing. And then we adapted finally to SARS-Mars, and we get another influenza pandemic. And then people are saying, oh, we don't really need to care about fomites and hand-washing, whereas that's going to be very important, and kids are going to be super spread. So that's also possible, too. Like, what I think is, what we should learn is to be.

very sensitive to early data, right? Like, when you don't know what you got, like I'm all for being extra cautious. Like in February of 2020, I would have been like, do everything because we don't know what's coming down the pike. Like just the precautionary principle totally applies if you have an exponential threat.

But once you learn, you have to adjust. Oh, it's over dispersed. Oh, it's indoors. Oh, it's this, right? So you have to do that. So I think next time something comes, what's going to happen is like, the lessons will be not do the same, act fast, but be very responsive to data early on, right?

Because it really depends on what do we have. And no guarantees what we're going to get. People have a difficult time saying or listening to people say, I don't know now, but a week from now I will know. So ask me. They think they want to know the answer right away or you're untrustworthy. Yeah, sometimes you do not know. And like, it's better to say we don't know.

So we're going to do everything while we figure it. out. I think it's a good motto for living our lives. All right, Zayneptufetchi, thanks very much for being on the Mindscape podcast. Thank you for inviting me.