These Smug Pilots, Revisited

yeah, so about that amnesty

Remember this?

The premise throughout the pandemic has been that ordinary people can’t possibly evaluate risk, because they don’t have credentials.

Everyone ran a version of this story. Stop trying to think, you stupid proles!

So Emily Oster’s absolutely amazing "amnesty" piece in The Atlantic has been widely mocked, today, but look at what she said about being right and wrong:

Given the amount of uncertainty, almost every position was taken on every topic. And on every topic, someone was eventually proved right, and someone else was proved wrong. In some instances, the right people were right for the wrong reasons. In other instances, they had a prescient understanding of the available information.

The people who got it right, for whatever reason, may want to gloat. Those who got it wrong, for whatever reason, may feel defensive and retrench into a position that doesn’t accord with the facts. All of this gloating and defensiveness continues to gobble up a lot of social energy and to drive the culture wars, especially on the internet. These discussions are heated, unpleasant and, ultimately, unproductive. In the face of so much uncertainty, getting something right had a hefty element of luck. And, similarly, getting something wrong wasn’t a moral failing. Treating pandemic choices as a scorecard on which some people racked up more points than others is preventing us from moving forward.

She just gave back the prevailing cultural premise of the last two and a half years.

The smug pilots got most of it wrong, she says with a shrug, because there was so much uncertainty and confusion. Information was very limited, you see, so. Anyway, MOVING ON….

What we’ve heard from the opening moments of the pandemic is that the experts know, and you don’t. Obey Dr. Fauci! Did you even go to medical school!?!? Disagreeing with [credentialed television personality] is disinformation.

So the casual whoopsie, the let’s-not-talk-about-what-we-got-wrong, isn’t just an attempt to change the topic about Covid. It’s a casual 180 on a confident-until-yesterday choice to divide the world into the credentialed class and stupid worthless everybody else, into the people who have information and the people who fall prey to disinformation because they don’t have the right academic background to actually think.

“These smug pilots have lost touch with regular passengers like us. Who thinks I should fly the plane?”

The unfinished punchline to the cartoon is that later the pilots wander out of the cockpit and say, Well of course we got lost and crashed the plane, there was so much uncertainty. Let’s not talk about it!

I demean you as an idiot for a few years, then I turn out to be totally wrong, then we forget about the whole thing and we just move on.

Insert own two-word response here.

See also:

Emily Oster proposes “a pandemic amnesty,” suggests that “we need to forgive one another for what we did and said when we were in the dark about COVID”

emily oster's no good, really bad, terrible idea