Impact

We Were Warned. So What.

Insights, Issues Public Experts Face, Public Expertise for Research Organizations / By

“You were warned.”

What an arrogant, infantilizing, alienating, counterproductive communications tactic.

Well, we feel guilty and stupid now, so of course we’ll absorb your wisdom more attentively next time. Count on it.

Manu Lall and Paulina Concha of the Columbia Water Center published an op-ed this week for The New York Times, alerting us to the tens of thousands of dams in the United States that are in danger of failing, as the two in Central Michigan failed last week.…

Research’s Market Failure: The End of the Beginning

Insights, Issues Public Experts Face, Public Expertise for Research Organizations / By

Take a look at these eye-popping stats, from journalist and technologist Frederic Filloux’s recent essay, “COVID-19’s General Blindness is Also a Journalistic Failure”:

  • A search query for the phrases “global pandemic” or “global pandemic preparedness” from 2009-2019 turned up 1,400 results in JAMA, 30 papers in ArXiv and 17,000 results in Google Scholar.
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The Wave & the Tree

Insights, Issues Public Experts Face, Public Expertise for Research Organizations / By

We are thinking and talking about the COVID-19 models all wrong, writes Kevin Schulman on The Agitator, a normally smart blog on non-profit fundraising. “Most believe these models represent attempts at prediction rather than as a managerial, scenario planning tool for which they are intended,” he argues — as if believing a model is a “managerial, scenario planning tool” would make it any more accessible.…

#Breakthechain

Insights, Miscellaneous / By

Humanity is conducting some gigantic experiments right now — and the biggest might be in how we’re communicating the science of this virus and how to stop it. #Flattenthecurve is the meme, the brand, the call-to-action rolled into one. The universal visual (CDC version, as published in WIRED):

The meme seems to be working, for a lot of people and leaders; we can’t really measure its effectiveness.…

The Authority Void & How You Fill It

Insights, Moving from Expert to Public Expert, Public Expertise for Research Organizations / By

Boy, do we have an authority void right now when it comes to reliable, timely, actionable information about COVID-19. How to fill that void? Three options:

1) Wait for a centralized authority to get its act together. Good luck. As Matthew Karnitschnig searingly puts it in his Politico piece, “The incompetence pandemic”:

From Beijing to Brussels, from Rome to Washington, London and beyond, politicians haven’t just failed to rise to the occasion, they’ve engaged in a dangerous game of parsing, obfuscation and reality-denial that has cost lives and delayed a resolute response.

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