Lessons from Coronavirus: Intellectual Vulnerability > Intellectual Modesty
The second in a five part series
I did not see the pandemic coming. I had seen the documentaries and read the articles about the potential threat, but my mental image of what a pandemic would look like was too narrow. I imagined something like the diseases from 28 Days Later or Contagion, which spread like wildfire, were symptomatic in almost everyone who caught them, and killed almost everyone who displayed symptoms. I failed to imagine that the world could be turned upside down by a virus which has a low-ish R0 (compared to, say, measles), which is asymptomatic in most people, and which kills ~1% of those it infects. After all, SARS, swine flu, MERS, and Ebola had all been contained, hadn’t they?
The generous interpretation of my mistake is that I had underestimated the importance of asymptomatic spread in propagating the disease; you can’t quarantine someone you don’t know is infected. But the thing is, it’s not just that I didn’t see the pandemic coming, I was one of the last people to see it coming. On the 6th of March, I got into an argument with two long-suffering friends of mine after I implied that there was a tinge of Sinophobia to all the worry over coronavirus (which may have been true to some extent, but wasn’t sufficient grounds for dismissing all concerns), and that the countries which were struggling with the virus had weak healthcare systems (which is just patently untrue – South Korea and China’s systems would turn out to be among the best in the world). By that point, there had been 100,000 cases worldwide, Italy had begun its first lockdown, and someone from our own college had been infected. Delusion which persists in the face of such evidence should be called by its proper name: hubris.
But subsequent events have made me suspect that there was something else going on here. Six Months after that conversation, I started a blog – supposedly about current affairs – and have barely mentioned coronavirus in that time. I think two things have brought on this reticence to comment: 1) A fear of repeating my embarrassing blunder from March, and 2) An impulse to defer to the experts during this time of uncertainty. But that’s exactly backwards! Times of uncertainty are precisely when the experts are most likely to make mistakes, and, conversely, precisely when a well-positioned and attentive spectator might be able to see something they can’t.
In retrospect, I think the reason for my stubbornness in March is the same as the reason for my subsequent silence: an absence, not of intellectual modesty, but of intellectual vulnerability. The nature of any crisis is that decision making in them is both uncertain and high stakes. Expressing an opinion about policymaking in an unprecedented pandemic, therefore, is scary because it’s important. In such a situation, the temptation is to resort to either bluster - as I did in March - or to complacency – as I have been doing since.
Rather than being a straightforward prescription for speaking out more or less often, intellectual vulnerability is about the attitude you take to the discourse. Specifically, it means letting your participation be led by courage, rather than insecurity. If you find yourself staying silent on issues that matter to you because you’re afraid of looking stupid, intellectual vulnerability means speaking up. If you’re more like me and you’re constantly running your mouth because you’re worried people will think you’re stupid if you don’t say something, intellectual vulnerability means taking a step back. If there is one prescription that can apply across the board, it’s to spend less time in those environments which chronically discourage us from being intellectually vulnerable. You know what I’m referring to here.
For this blog, being more intellectually vulnerable will mean two things:
1) Sharing more. In the past, I’ve been hesitant to make a big push to increase my readership. There were some good reasons for this: I wanted to spend time finding my voice and settling into the rhythm of regular publishing, I had strong reservations about the market logic of online media, and I wasn’t yet sure how much I wanted to commit myself to this kind of writing. But I’ve become more confident about my writing and more sanguine about social media in the last few months, so all that’s left are the bad reasons for not committing: people might hate the blog, or worse, not care about it. As stomach churning as those prospects are, I know I’ll regret it more if I let myself be governed by my insecurities.
2) Inviting criticism. If I’m being totally honest, I’m only ~90% confident about ~90% of the stuff I write in these posts, and I suspect that’s not always reflected in my presentation. As such, I’ll be adding a comments section from now on and encouraging people to use it. In the best-case scenario, a virtuous cycle will emerge which will allow me to be more experimental with my posts because I’ll be able to reliably get feedback on the quality of those posts and adjust course accordingly.
Right now there are only like five people who read this blog on a regular basis, and you’re all mates of mine, so the point is somewhat moot, but that’s all about to change!
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Further Reading
Daring Greatly: How the Courage to Be Vulnerable Transforms the Way We Live, Love, Parent, and Lead – book by Brené Brown – I feel cringey recommending a self-help book, but that’s vulnerability for you
Contrapoints – YouTube channel by Natalie Wynn – an inspiration of mine when it comes to blending personal writing with commentary. She manages to make her arguments with confidence without ever pretending to have all the answers
Insight – Zeynep Tufekci’s substack – She was in yesterday’s Further Reading as well because, unlike me, she has been consistently right about the pandemic from as far back as January 2020.