Covid-19: Will armchair experts stop

One of the noteworthy aspects of our current coronavirus moment is the rapid proliferation of self-appointed data analysts. These armchair epidemiologists seem to believe they can project the trajectory
of Covid-19 better than actual epidemiologists who have spent their whole careers studying the spread of disease.
You know who I’m talking about: It’s not just the guy on Medium whose post gets 35 million pageviews. It’s your uncle and your co-worker (funnily enough, many of them are men) who are trying their hand at beating the pros. And of course, it includes the US president. Donald Trump has said in his daily press conferences that he’s “a smart guy” who “feel[s] good about” his own predictions and has “been right a lot.”
There are several possible explanations for why so many of us are trying to make our own predictions. What they all have in common is that they are based on conceptual errors. As anyone with any kind of subject matter expertise — whether in construction or constitutional law — knows, there’s a difference between actually knowing what you’re talking about and winging it.
In part, making our own predictions is a coping mechanism. This is, obviously, a time of anxiety about health and economic prospects. And that anxiety is perfectly rational, since things are both bad and uncertain. One way for humans to cope with anxiety is to seek rational mastery over observable phenomena. By using logic, we hope to be able to understand the environment around us.
That experience of using our minds to calm our emotions is perfectly understandable. But it’s a cardinal mistake to believe that, just because we are reasoning, we are reasoning well.
When we are thinking in domains about which we individually know very little, we are prone to errors of omission and commission. We ignore facts about the world not because they are inconvenient but because we have no idea what they are.
Another possible reason why so much energy is being expended on amateur epidemiology is that there are no sports on TV. I’m not
kidding about this. A huge percentage of the US population spends an inordinate amount of time analysing sports.
We might do it for fun or we might do it for fantasy football leagues or we might do it because we bet money on games. Regardless, sports analysis is a huge industry that takes up a non-trivial amount of our collective mind-share.
When you take all that away in one fell swoop, the collective intellectual energy usually geared to the amateur analysis of sports must go somewhere. And right now, just about the only place it can land is analysing coronavirus.
A third explanation for the outpouring of amateur analysis is the high degree of uncertainty being expressed by the actual experts.
—Bloomberg

Noah Feldman is a Bloomberg Opinion columnist and host of the podcast “Deep Background.” He is a professor of law at Harvard University and was a clerk to U.S. Supreme Court Justice David Souter. His books include “The Three Lives of James Madison: Genius, Partisan, President.”