One of the silver linings about the coronavirus pandemic is that it has made some people, and even institutions, more generous (at least temporarily). Among them are popular and academic journals that have removed their paywalls and offered their publications for free. (I shared one of my own articles in that category yesterday. The irony, as my colleague, UVM dean of libraries Bryn Geffert, points out, is that right-wing disinformation tanks that have long flooded the internet with their free “studies,” while legit academics get paywalled into marginalization by their profit-seeking publishers.)
Then there are popular magazines that have made their coronavirus coverage freely available. The Atlantic Monthly has had some excellent coverage, and Ed Yong’s “Why the Coronavirus is So Confusing” is especially helpful in mapping out exactly what its title asks. The epistemological issues the pandemic has raised — about how science and medicine work, whom we should trust, what sorts of interests are at play, and why this issue is different from others — make it an important and valuable case study.
It’s worth reading the article in the context of the many conspiracy theories that have arisen in the wake of COVID-19. For an indication of some of them, see Disinfo.eu’s tracking of the “disinfodemic” (UNESCO’s term).
A few good quotes from the Yong article:
This is how science actually works. It’s less the parade of decisive blockbuster discoveries that the press often portrays, and more a slow, erratic stumble toward ever less uncertainty. “Our understanding oscillates at first, but converges on an answer,” says Natalie Dean, a statistician at the University of Florida. “That’s the normal scientific process, but it looks jarring to people who aren’t used to it.” [. . .]
The scientific discussion of the Santa Clara study might seem ferocious to an outsider, but it is fairly typical for academia. Yet such debates might once have played out over months. Now they are occurring over days—and in full public view. Epidemiologists who are used to interacting with only their peers are racking up followers on Twitter. They have suddenly been thrust into political disputes. “People from partisan media outlets find this stuff and use a single study as a cudgel to beat the other side,” Bergstrom says. “The climate-change people are used to it, but we epidemiologists are not.”
In an earlier era, issues with the Santa Clara study would have been addressed during peer review—the process in which scientific work is assessed by other researchers before being published in a journal. But like many COVID-19 studies, this one was uploaded as a preprint—a paper that hasn’t yet run the peer-review gauntlet. Preprints allow scientists to share data quickly, and speed is vital in a pandemic […].
The article makes clear that part of the problem with the pandemic is that it calls on so many types of depth expertise, the kind that contemporary science excels at with its hyperspecialization, yet the interdisciplinary expertise — what we might call lateral expertise — of bringing them all together is in short supply.
“This is the epistemological crisis of the moment,” says media sociologist Zeynep Tüfekçi: “There’s a lot of expertise around, but fewer tools than ever to distinguish it from everything else.” The pandemic, Yong argues, “exploits our cognitive biases.” “We crave simple narratives, but the pandemic offers none.”
The pandemic’s length traps people in a liminal space. To clarify their uprooted life and indefinite future, they try to gather as much information as possible—and cannot stop. “We go seeking fresher and fresher information, and end up consuming unvetted misinformation that’s spreading rapidly,” Bergstrom says.
The article concludes with a nice summary of the “many aspects of 21st-century life that made the pandemic possible:”
humanity’s relentless expansion into wild spaces; soaring levels of air travel; chronic underfunding of public health; a just-in-time economy that runs on fragile supply chains; health-care systems that yoke medical care to employment; social networks that rapidly spread misinformation; the devaluation of expertise; the marginalization of the elderly; and centuries of structural racism that impoverished the health of minorities and indigenous groups. It may be easier to believe that the coronavirus was deliberately unleashed than to accept the harsher truth that we built a world that was prone to it, but not ready for it.
