A Change
Rethinking institutions after COVID
I remember as a young college student enjoying friendly discussions about religion. It was a time to search for truth, meaning, and finding one's way in a complex world. I learned about Buddhism, took a class on Islam, and read large parts of The Bible, The Quran, and The Book of Mormon. I went into it not knowing how I would come out. Would I reach a state of enlightenment? Would I become a fundamentalist Christian? Would I join a Satanic death cult? The possibilities were endless.
But that was some time ago and the sense of exploring unknown territory is long gone. I haven’t seriously considered religion since then; my politics don’t change that much; my core beliefs and values are essentially what they were years ago. I fear that I’ve stagnated and become ossified.
While I still have this fear, I am happy (no) apprehensive (not quite right) ... something… to report a change. I have changed. And for that, I have COVID to thank.
I remember when the first hints of a new virus started to appear. Right away, my Chinese and Taiwanese friends put on face masks. My initial response was to defer to the CDC, and, when instructed not to wear a mask, I followed along. I dismissed those who insisted on masking as being alarmist. If the CDC didn’t think you needed to wear a mask, you didn’t need to wear a mask. Only a month later did it become clear to me how wrong I had been.
And it wasn’t just the CDC. As I detailed in my piece about our response to COVID, all the largest public health institutions, including the WHO and US Surgeon General, failed the public. As I said in that piece, I would have been better off listening to random people on Twitter than the CDC. That conflicted with my model of the world.
Similarly, I had dismissed the lab-leak hypothesis. I told myself, “This sounds like a bunch of sinophobic nonsense—if there’s any legitimacy to it, I would have heard about it from a legitimate source.” I thought the only people entertaining the lab-leak hypothesis were crackpots or political hacks hoping to wield it as a cudgel against China. This continued until May of 2021—despite a year of non-stop COVID coverage—when I read Nicholas Wade’s piece on the Origin of Covid. Holy smokes! There’s a lot more to this theory than the racist rantings of some “do-your-own-researcher”. The more I read about it, the more I realized that the mainstream media I consumed hadn’t been the best source of information on COVID. The lab-leak hypothesis was a legitimate possibility and I hadn’t realized that. Fortunately, the media coverage seemed to change around that time. Vanity Fair ran an excellent piece on The Lab-Leak Theory: Inside the Fight to Uncover COVID-19’s Origins. The piece noted that while the lab-leak hypothesis had been “studiously avoided by most of the mainstream media,” Internet sleuths had been researching it in their spare time and had uncovered evidence of a possible coverup that the WHO investigation failed to notice.
Why was I learning something of this importance from random Internet bloggers? Another conflict with my model of the world. I certainly had my problems with the media, but I would have chosen the WHO or the New York Times over Internet denizens for investigating the origin of a global pandemic.
Then there was the response to protests. After months of mocking people who dared question the mandate to stay at home, stay away from the beach, and stay indoors, public health experts were tripping over themselves to support the Black Lives Matter protests. I’ve seen institutions willing to sacrifice institutional credibility for their political agendas before, but this was a new level. The uniformity of public health messaging saying that BLM protests don’t spread COVID, after months of vilifying anyone who dared think about protesting, was appalling. Public health has always been instituted by governments elected through the political process; it has never been above politics. But to see it dragged so far below, to see hoards of experts willing to use their positions of authority for partisan politics, was disheartening. The message was clear: protests in favor of establishment-approved causes were allowed, even encouraged, and those not approved were abhorrent and dangerous.
Next came ivermectin. All I got from the mainstream media was “something something horse dewormer” and that people taking it were to be mocked and ridiculed. It wasn’t until I saw a video on Rebel Wisdom—a site I had never heard of before—that I actually understood what ivermectin was or what the arguments for or against it were. The video is not, to be clear, a pro-ivermectin piece. But it is a far more detailed analysis of the possibility of ivermectin preventing or treating COVID than I had seen anywhere else. It didn’t tell the audience what to think; it investigated the truth and trusted people to make up their own minds. Shortly after it was released, the video got taken down from Youtube (it’s back up now though). I would never have thought I would be that guy who thinks “the truth” gets taken down, but, honestly, I do believe a lot of information got taken down from mainstream sources not because it was false but because it was inconvenient for those in power (does the word “laptop” ring a bell?).
Though the institutional response to COVID was the largest impetus for change, it wasn’t the only one. Another important case came as part of my book review of Steven Koonin’s “Unsettled”. If you haven’t read the review, it went deep. Like, 80 pages deep. I wanted to know, in great detail, what climate change was and what it meant for people. I won’t go into the details here (if you want a quick summary, feel free to check out my closing thoughts), but, in a single sentence, I found that the mainstream narrative of climate change is full of inaccuracies and misrepresentations. While anthropogenic climate change is certainly real, and that change will have negative consequences, it’s far from the apocalyptic views that I had believed. In this case, some institutions had done well—my quarrels weren’t with the official climate reports—but I found the media narrative around those reports and climate change in general deeply misleading.
I’ll save most of my squabble with the media for a separate post, but let me highlight one more example here. Remember the Russian bounty story? The NYTimes broke the story, stating that “American intelligence officials have concluded that a Russian military intelligence unit secretly offered bounties to Taliban-linked militants for killing coalition forces in Afghanistan — including targeting American troops.” I remember how angry I was about the lack of a forceful US response to this. It was covered across the media but the Washington Post, in particular, went all-in on this story. Here’s a selection of some of their headlines from that week:
The report of Russia putting bounties on U.S. soldiers is disturbing. Trump’s response is stupefying (29 June 2020)
Timeline: What we know about Russia’s bounties on U.S. troops — and Trump’s response (29 June 2020)
2 things that seem to explain Trump’s ignorance about Russia’s bounties on U.S. troops (30 June 2020)
Trump would do anything for Putin. No wonder he’s ignoring the Russian bounties (1 July 2020)
Here’s how a normal administration would have handled the Russian bounty intel (3 July 2020)
They were relentless, and I supported them.
Then, about ten months later, after the Post had squeezed all the Trump-dunking out of the story that it could, came a new revelation. NBC News stated it as: “Remember those Russian bounties for dead U.S. troops? Biden admin says the CIA intel is not conclusive”. While we’ll probably never know for sure, my reading between the lines of this story is that there was never good evidence and it’s very possible that the whole thing never happened. Some sources, like the Wall Street Journal, The Guardian, Fox News, and The New York Times, tried to correct the record or at least hedge their confidence. But despite all their focus on it, I can’t find any Washington Post follow-up on it.
All of these events—and many others—have nudged me. None of these were epiphanies that transformed my beliefs overnight. These are changes at the margin. But many small changes in the same direction can result in a significant change. My trust in institutions is significantly less than it was a few years ago. My automatic responses are different now, less sure. If there was another pandemic and someone told me “they” are lying to us, what would I say? Pre-pandemic-me would have said “no”. Now, I still don’t think it’s likely but I’m not going to say it can’t happen.
I used to think that during a pandemic you should look to the CDC for guidance. I still believe this. I always knew they weren’t perfect but I thought they were likely to be the most reliable source of information, overall. I no longer believe this. I think there will likely be better, more reliable sources of information available, maybe in an expert’s blog or Twitter account. My first act in hearing about a new pandemic would be to find those sources. I would still go to the CDC to see what they are saying, but now I’ve got another Chrome tab up searching through Substack.
I said that I would have been better off listening to random people on Twitter instead of the CDC. I haven’t changed so that I am listening to random people, yet. I haven’t actually built an app with Amazon’s Alexa regurgitating random advice from Twitter, but mostly because I don’t want it to announce reminders to drink my own urine when I have guests over.
Another example: How likely is the top story being pushed by the media to be… dare I say it… fake news? Pre-pandemic-me would have said, “very unlikely.” Now I’m at “improbable but definitely possible.” Would a major newspaper spin up a bunch of anger about something and then if it turns out not to be true just let it… go quiet? Yes, yes that might happen. If it turned out a story that made their outgroup look bad was probably not true, how much effort would they go through to let you know? I’m going with “little-to-none.”
When the Washington Post calls something a conspiracy theory, and then a couple years later that theory starts looking pretty reasonable, I update. The next time I see the media label something a conspiracy theory, I’ll remember this. Does this mean I want the mods of r/conspiracy to run the country now? No, it does not.
Although this is mostly about a change in me, I don’t think I’m alone in this. I think the stature of institutions has changed in the public’s eye as well. And because institutions rely on credibility, they are currently in a fragile state, weaker than they have been in recent memory. Damage to institutions sets off a downward spiral. As people see others spending institutional credit for personal or political gain, they feel less restrained from doing the same. Each time an institution is bent, it becomes weaker and more susceptible to further bending. Experts have always had their own agendas and faced pressure to draw certain conclusions. To combat this, we have created institutions and processes such as scientific journals and peer review. However, these are currently not up to the task.
Despite this, I still believe in the importance of institutions. Though I’m wary of them at the moment, I still believe, they are all we have. There really is no alternative to strengthening our institutions, no matter how battered they’ve become. I hope that our institutions will improve, but it will take time for our institutions to regain the trust of the public, including my own.