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Experts being wrong isn't just about bias. It's about the limits of what expertise can even apply to. Expertise relies on repeatable events that give prompt, clear, indisputable feedback. Performing music is something you can acquire expertise in because you can practice repeatedly and get immediete feedback for whether you played correctly. Mathematics, same. Programming? Definitely. Physics, engineering, the feedback can be slower but still comes. But as you get further away from having repeatable events and from recieving feedback as to whether you made the correct or wrong decision, the possibility of acquiring expertise becomes weaker.
All the way down at the bottom of this tier list of plausible expertise, you can indeed find "Epidemiologist" or "Middle East Correspondant", where there are few repeatable events and when feedback is given it is ignored or epicycled away. Expert epidemiologists do not exist, or at least, they don't exist like they would for engineering, because you can't acquire expertise in epidemiology as it's currently practiced. There is no reason to put more weight on their arguments than you would the same argument from a random individual. They may well be right sometimes, they may well have a good argument to give, but they don't have expertise and can't get it either.
The COVID lockdowns in the UK point to a darker problem with expertise. Life is short, people grow old and die; it takes about 70 years. Suppose that being locked down causes a 10% reduction in quality of life (I'd prefer to say 50%, but I'll err on too low because I want to focus on a different controversy). Government locks down 70 million people for a year, which costs 7 million Quality Adjusted Life Years (QALYs). Actual deaths, if spread across the age range, cost 35 QALY's each. The lock down needs to be saving 200 thousand lives to break even. But deaths from COVID were concentrated among the frail elderly. Say 7 QALY's each. To break even the lock down needed to save the lives of one million frail old people. It is not remotely plausible that it did so.
The lockdowns were a national disaster on the scale of 200 thousand dead. Compare that to American loses in Vietnam at 50 thousand. The lockdowns were a huge national disaster.
But how did it happen? The experts were socialized into an "identified cause" model of morbidity. If something specific kills you, that counts. If something makes you a year older, that counts zero. Since zero times anything is still zero, it doesn't matter how many people are affected. Basically expertise here was so narrow in scope that the fact that people grow old and die lay outside of its scope and was neglected.
The darker problem is that growing old and dying is basic to the human condition. The experts let themselves be socialized into collective insanity. I don't see any way around this. Experts are dangerous in much the same way that fire is dangerous. Essential despite being dangerous. You have to be able to spot that experts have gone mad and flat out reject what they say.
Yes, this is my main criticism of lockdowns from the perspective of health, and why I was deeply skeptical of them from day 1. There's no possible way for anything but short lockdowns that inexplicably eradicate covid forever to be a net QALY gain. You don't even need to look at long-term second and third order effects to determine that. Just the immediete acute loss in QALY from being put under lockdown restrictions already does more damage than covid could possibly do.
As for how big the effect on quality of life is, EQ-5D-5L puts a moderate reduction in ability to do usual activities (work, study, school, all sorts of things lockdowns prohibit) as a 12% reduction in quality of life. Severe as a 22% reduction. Severe + slight anxiety or depression as a 28% reduction. Severe in both is a 47% reduction. So the actual answer for lockdown's median effect on QALY probably is somewhere between 10% and 50%. This is a question that absolutely could be answered by chucking some money into getting a randomly sampled survey done.
As much as simple ignorance would be a comforting explanation, prior to lockdowns, experts in public health were perfectly happy to use QALY thinking for decisionmaking. They only abandoned such cost/benefit analysis specifically when doing lockdowns, which suggests more ideological or malicious intentions.
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Was it experts that made the call though? Or was it politicians? Testimony going on right now indicates that Boris reversed course not because of expert advice but because of public pressure.
"Sir Patrick wrote that Mr Johnson said his party "thinks the whole thing is pathetic and Covid is just nature's way of dealing with old people - and I am not entirely sure I disagree with them. A lot of moderate people think it is a bit too much."
But then Boris wants to rely on public polling as to what he should do. And that fits with what I have been told by other MP's I know, that they were getting swamped with emails and letters from their constituents about needing to do more.
Indeed we saw Boris had analysis (by experts) that the average age of death was 81-85 and only 4% of under 60's even have to go to hospital and "we may need to recalibrate" and "it shows we don't go for nationwide lockdown"
2 weeks later he announced new lockdowns because it wasn't "politically viable yet to change course" i.e. because of public pressure.
Didn't that Imperial College model (by experts) confidently stating that Something Must Be Done or Several Zillion Will Die come out right around then? Whether Boris was listening to Imperial or a bunch of panicky people who were listening to Imperial, the root still lies with the experts.
I think that was the one in March, and this was October, where he says he doesn't believe the NHS will get overwhelmed etc (which is one of the things that report said).
But he could certainly have said that, and changed course. Possibly the public would have pushed back, and maybe you can trace that back to that report. But 1) he didn't try and 2) The PM can find his own experts to say the opposite , and 3) We're now a long way from experts being the ones that decided it, rather that some experts said something that people believed and wanted their politicians to act upon, their politicians knew better and did so anyway.
Experts don't exactly seem the chief problem there. ..
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Why did the public swamp politicians? Did somebody tell them to? Perhaps a shiny box in their pocket or in their living room?
The flaw of democracy is that most people are extremely influenceable by what other people tell them, especially if these other people seem to know what they are talking about. Anybody with a pile of money large enough to get a sufficiently large enough megaphone and some respectable-looking attire can legally, publicly influence policy in democratic countries toward any outcome without any repercussion.
This is essentially what the Democrats and their media machine claimed Russia did in the 2016 American elections, but somehow we are still playing this same game.
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