141 | Zeynep Tufekci on Information and Attention in a Networked World

In a world flooded with information, everybody necessarily makes choices about what we pay attention to. This basic fact can be manipulated in any number of ways, from advertisers micro-targeting specific groups to repressive governments flooding social media with misinformation, or for that matter well-meaning people passing along news from sketchy sources. Zeynep Tufekci is a sociologist who studies the flow of information and its impact on society, especially through social media. She has provided insightful analyses of protest movements, online privacy, and the Covid-19 pandemic. We talk about how technology has been shaping the information space we all inhabit.

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Zeynep Tufekci received a Ph.D. in sociology from the University of Texas-Austin. She is currently an Associate Professor in the School of Information and Library Science at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, and will be a Visiting Professor at the Craig Newmark Center for Journalism Ethics and Security at Columbia University. She is the author of Twitter and Tear Gas: The Power and Fragility of Networked Protest. Her writing has appeared in The New York Times, Scientific American, The Atlantic, and elsewhere, and she publishes the Insight newsletter on Substack.

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0:00:00.2 Sean Carroll: Hello, everyone, and welcome to the Mindscape Podcast. I’m your host, Sean Carroll. These days, there are a lot of people who are worried about filter bubbles, living in your own little bubble, only getting the sort of information that confirms your views about the world, and we’ve read about how to break out of our filter bubbles, etcetera. But if you think about it, the amount of information that is out there to be consumed by a typical person with access to a computer and the Internet is literally overwhelming. It is far more than any one person can possibly fairly look at. We’re all going to choose to pay attention to certain things and not to pay attention to other things, so there’s always a bubble in the sense that you can’t literally follow everything. It turns out that manipulating these bubbles, manipulating the way in which we choose not just what political side we pay attention to, but the general question of what information we pay attention to overall is critically important for figuring out how people work and believe and act in the modern world.

0:01:01.0 SC: Today’s guest is Zeynep Tufekci, who has become quite celebrated these days for saying a lot of wise and smart and correct things about the pandemic and about social media and things like that. She calls what she does techno-sociology, and as she points out right here in the podcast, it’s really just sociology, but technology is just so overwhelming these days you have to pay attention to it. Zeynep started thinking about things like protests and revolutions, the Arab Spring and the use of information technologies, like people in Tahrir Square were organizing over Facebook and Twitter. It turns out that the government’s response to this is… Of course the first move is to censor, to try to shut off the information, but because there is so much information out there, that’s just in practical. It’s too easy to get information. What you can do instead is flood to the zone. You can put out so much disinformation that people can’t actually find the correct information.

0:01:58.3 SC: And this kind of analysis also works in other circumstances where you’re not necessarily in a revolution. So Zeynep has studied social media like Facebook and Twitter in everyday use as well as in revolutions. And of course, recently we’ve had this global pandemic you may have heard of, so how do people get the information they need to figure out what the right strategies are, what’s going to happen, and so forth? It’s a very fast moving modern thing that we all need to be thinking about. What is the information we should be getting, how should we evaluate it, how do the technologies of social media affect the choices we make there? So this is an important as well as a timely conversation.

0:02:36.9 SC: Let me also mention parenthetically that despite me being a scientist and Zeynep being a techno-sociologist, we struggled with technology at the very beginning of the interview, so for the first few minutes, the microphone quality is not as good as it could be, but we switched, we got a better microphone, we fixed our technology, our sociology, I will leave to you to decide whether that’s any good, so let’s go.

[music]

0:03:16.7 SC: Zeynep Tufekci, welcome to the Mindscape Podcast.

0:03:18.5 Zeynep Tufekci: Thank you for inviting me.

0:03:20.2 SC: So you’ve described what you do as techno-sociology. We haven’t had a lot of sociologists here on the podcast, we’ve had one recently, but… Techno-sociology, that sounds interesting. When I took sociology courses, we were reading Marx and Weber and Durkheim and… So are you talking to the android versions of those folks, or what does it mean to do techno-sociology?

0:03:41.5 ZT: Actually, it’s really funny. I had to add a qualifier to make it clear that I was doing sociology. This will sound really convoluted, but it kind of makes sense. So if you think about sociology, and obviously you’ve taken some classes because you got the Marx, Weber and Durkheim as the founders, as we call them. Traditionally they’re considered three of the big founders. It was born off an era of technological transformation. One of the defining things of what sociology is doing is trying to grapple with a world that was changing fairly rapidly from urbanization, mass manufacturing, just the communication technologies. Everything is an upheaval, 19th century, in the middle of a scientific and technological revolution, and it is of course altering the way people live. You have the rural to urban migration, you have cities where people don’t know each other, which is creating these sociological concepts we talk about, so all of that.

0:04:52.0 ZT: Technically speaking, sociologically speaking, scientifically speaking, it is very much about understanding that kind of societal change, but… So here’s why I had to add the “techno” as it usually happens, fields tend to start becoming ossified, if you will, a little, because that’s what happens to fields, and also there’s a way in which things get divided into the technology and the sociology. So when I started, what I wanted to do was to do the classical sociology, the work of sociology of understanding how is the world changing as we get these new kinds of communication that alter our sense of space, our sense of time, how we can connect. These are very old sociological questions, but I had also started out as a technical person, so I had some sense of that side, which is also important to understand the social change. So as soon as I said I wanna understand, for example, how the public’s fear is changing or how our notions of privacy are changing because of Facebook or Twitter or phones, people thought I did stuff like user interface, like what color should the pixels be…

0:06:08.8 SC: How we use technology…

0:06:09.2 ZT: Or where should it be? People kept thinking it was some sort of technological work, and I was like, “No, no, no.” It’s not technological in the sense that I’m not looking at what kind of button makes people click on “Yes”, I’m not looking at user interface. I’m not even looking at human-computer interface, like the HCI, that’s not what I do. I’m looking at the sociological side effect. And at the time that I was starting, especially looking at things like social movements, you could study a social movement and not talk about the way they use technology, the new technologies. But it was changing so many things about how they got attention, how they organized. They were ways in which… Just the same way, like having moved to cities, which is some big technological shift in the way we experience space and time and each other, had altered our social relations.

0:07:07.7 ZT: Having phones in our pockets was altering our social relations, and I just couldn’t convince people, this was a thing to study. So, I made up a name to try to say, “No, I’m not doing HCI.” And I couldn’t just say sociology, ’cause people are like, “Then why are we talking about Facebook? Why is Facebook relevant to sociology?” And I’d be like, “It’s very relevant to sociology,” and I was… So, in a way, I made a complicated term to say, “I’m doing really traditional stuff,” it’s just the traditionals don’t recognize this as the thing it is, and the new people think they’re just doing technology. I’m like, “No, Facebook is a people business, it’s not a tech company, it’s a people company.” It’s very much focused on people stuff. You need the sociology side of it, the psychology side of it, as much as you need the technology side of it. So, that’s how I ended up with that phrase.

0:08:06.6 SC: So, it’s always been techno-sociology, you’re just recognizing that we have a new different technology today than we used to have.

0:08:14.7 ZT: Right now, it’s mundane, but when I made that term up. It’s been more than 10 years. The Arab Spring hadn’t even happened. So, when I started going around saying, “I wanna look at how technology, digital technology, especially, is gonna have societal impacts,” people were like, “Say what?”

[chuckle]

0:08:32.9 ZT: It just sounded like a very bizarre thing. But it doesn’t sound like a very bizarre thing now. Right now, I wouldn’t need to make up a term, but it’s got it’s little novelty now, and sometimes people will say, “How do I be a techno-sociologist?” or all of that? So, I’m like, “Alright,” and it was the name of my initial blog, so I keep it, but it’s… Truth be told, it’s not a thing. [chuckle]

0:08:57.1 SC: Okay, that makes perfect sense. But it’s not actually necessarily, primarily, even, technology that you care about. I get the feeling that in fact, the systems approach is what you care about more than anything else. Is that accurate?

0:09:10.3 ZT: Yeah, that is very accurate. I don’t really care about… I like the technology side of it. It’s kinda cool. I like knowing things about it. There’s a lot of geeky things that are fun there. But what I’m really looking at is, how does this complex thing work? And in this particular case, I was looking at, how are public sphere and how things like social movements and the way we understand information, but it’s hard to put a single name on it, but I just like these complex systems and thinking about, “How is this thing working?” How does this thing evolve? How do these things interact with each other in these really messy ways?” And just trying to think hard about that. And of course, when the technology itself is a crucial input to the system, it makes sense to focus on that side, because that’s where a lot of the dynamics and the change is happening from. But that’s why I was also pretty eager and quick to switch to… Not to switch, I was always interested in things like pandemics too, because they’re a similar interesting dynamic in shuffling things around in complicated ways, as we have seen the last year. So, that’s the kind of stuff that I find interesting.

0:10:30.1 SC: Can someone even say… Is there a skeptical case to be made about the new technological ways we have of talking to people through social media and the internet, or whatever, are differences of degree, but not of kind. We always were talking to each other, but now we’re talking to each other faster. Or, is there really some kind of shift that is undergoing and really changed things?

0:10:49.5 ZT: Right, it’s more different. I would say, of course, in some ways, yes. What you have is… In some ways, it’s a break that comes from the invention of writing. Before writing, all you have the ephemeral speaking. You do not have a way to separate the speaker and time and space.

0:11:13.7 SC: That was a big shift, yes.

0:11:14.5 ZT: You can only speak in that moment, in that place to someone else. And you have all the Greeks… The Greeks are interesting, probably, because they’re that shift from oral to written society. And you see them, they are very obsessed with the arts of the rhetoric and that kind of oral persuasion, all those things. So, you see, the big break is writing, where, for the first time, you can separate the words of the speaker from the speaker. But then, gets interested in all sorts of different ways. We have the printing press, which automates that process, so you can have texts that are available en masse. Then you have something like telegraph, that is, for our purposes, instantaneous. It’s not instantaneous to a physicist, but for human purposes, it is instantaneous communication, which is another big break. Before the telegraph, you were still limited to the speed of your messenger. If it was the Pony Express or a pigeon. I guess you could do things like flash smoke signals or mirror signals like that, but those are fairly limited to how far you can get like that, so you have the telegraph. And then, all of a sudden, you have things like the telephone, where this voice itself is instant. And then, you have… So, you have, I think, in some ways, of course, we always spoke to one another. We spoke to one another ever since we had any kind of language. In other ways, starting with writing, we have had ways in which.

0:13:00.3 ZT: How that speaking and time and space in our bodies existed or did not exist are being re-shuffled in very interesting ways. And every time we do something like that, it has huge consequences, like, all of a sudden you have… The way wars are fought changes, because if you have a telegraph… Before, in the US Civil War, you had people fighting ’cause they didn’t get the word that it had ended. You have all sorts of different ways in which the whole aspect of immigration changed, because people would just go to another country and never hear again, except maybe a letter once a year, and now you’re just what’s happening all day. So those are very different, I think, things. So they’re not… Everything that’s in kind is also in degree, usually in some way. So this is, I think, a case of more is different in that it affects what happens to us and how we live, but it doesn’t make us different kinds of people. So let me try to say it this way. You could plop someone from the Pleistocene or the Late Pleistocene maybe, and they might be able to adjust. So it’s not like you’re a very different kinda species in terms of how… What we like to do. We still like to connect with people, we care about status, we are social. So we don’t really do… We don’t turn into some sort of alien creature, but the game board on which we are doing those things, where we’re acquiring status, where we are getting our information, all those things do change.

0:14:46.1 SC: There’s actually a great, I think it’s a Danish TV show, called be Beforeigners about exactly this. They bring… There’s this time travel and they bring people up from the Pleistocene, and they adapt pretty well, actually, with a few cosmetic changes.

0:14:57.6 ZT: I think we would… They would do pretty well. We’re not as different as we think. They’d have to adjust to a few technological tricks and new stuff, but it’s… Yeah, you could live.

0:15:09.5 SC: From the point of view of complex systems though, is there something about social media that enables people to sort of broadcast very widely, but at the same time, not be part of some giant centralized institution? Is that kind of a new thing?

0:15:23.7 ZT: Well, it changes the gatekeeping mechanisms. So before, if you were a social movement in the past, you tried to get attention from television. If you didn’t get on television or newspapers, you kinda could do a huge thing, and nobody heard about it, and it didn’t have an impact, because attention is really important. There were cases in the Middle East of sort of… Even couple years before the Arab Spring, you had these incidents where there were these mass strikes and little uprisings here and there in little towns, and they’d kinda die out because there just wasn’t enough saturation of the cell phone that’s gonna record it, the Facebook network that’s going to be able to spread it, and they’d just sort of surround the town and there’d be censorship and all of that. So right now, you can get attention without approval of the traditional gatekeepers. That doesn’t mean there’s no new gatekeeping mechanisms. As we found out, even the President of the United States can be de-platformed. So it’s not like there’s no gatekeeping. There’s new kinds of gatekeeping. You can be kicked off these things, they have various algorithmic methods that amplify certain things if you’re friendly to the algorithm in what you do, if you can kind of… So there’s all these other things, if you sort of already get… Have a lot of followers, that will help you amplify things.

0:16:53.6 ZT: So it’s not like the gatekeeping has disappeared, that it’s all flat, it’s just not the old kinda gatekeeping. And that, in turn, changes what we have as common knowledge, what people think is the norm. Do we even have a common knowledge? Do we have a way in which we construe what’s happening in… Because if you think about it, you don’t really know what’s happening around the world, it’s… Somebody tells you. You don’t see it all. So you have sources you trust, news you follow. So you have a mental model of what’s happening right outside your immediate visceral experience that comes through mediated sources for you. And that’s fine. That’s true for everyone. So if you look at mid-20th century, those are very centralized for the United States. They come through big broadcast, big TV, big media. Right now it’s really fractured. So you have an epistemic fracture. So these are, I think, very interesting things, because if you have an epistemic fracture in your society, you can have a very different mental model of what’s going on in one portion of the society, and the other portion has a completely different view of what’s going on. That’s a different kinda question than what we had before. So I think those are the ways in which these things are changing how we live through things, including through pandemics or political crises or anything we go through.

0:18:28.0 SC: There was something that I read in one of your pieces that crystallized for me something that I’ve been thinking about for a long time, the idea that in the modern world, there is no shortage of information, there’s a lot of information floating around, what there is a difficulty in is figuring out what to pay attention to. You had a line that attention matters more than information. I’m like, Yes, finally. That’s how I’ve been thinking. I think that the very first intro I did for this podcast series two years ago, I made a similar point to that. And in fact, there’s another line about how censorship works by drowning us in too much in-differentiated information, rather than keeping information from us. This does sound like something new as far, as I can tell.

0:19:10.3 ZT: Yeah, so that part is new. So I’m gonna… There’s… I think the first sort of formulation that I really like about this is Herbert Simon, and it’s about 1973 or something, and he’s basically pointing out that in a society where you have a lot of information, the thing that is precious is that which information consumes, which is the attention, right? So you don’t… You no longer have a scarcity of information, and the moment you don’t have a scarcity of information, you have a scarcity of attention. And so it becomes the filter that’s important, not of the information. And, in such an environment like in the… When I was growing up in Turkey, the way they would censor things, was very traditional censorship. They would… They’d have a military coup, and, we have them a lot, so it’s kinda… [laughter]

0:20:11.2 SC: They just do it.

0:20:12.5 ZT: We have like well-established best practices quote unquote for military coups, and the traditional best practices will be you surround the radio station. You surround the TV station, you take over the radio station if you’re in the 60s. The TV station if you’re in the 80s, and then you control the broadcast, right? This is the very traditional method of controlling information from getting out at all. Now of course, I lived through another coup in 2016, I just happened to be in the country, and we had another one of them and there they did even try to go to a few of the TV stations, but… Like I was looking at my phone, not the TV, like I… So everything was happening through the WhatsApp groups and other kinds of information sharing, and, they never got an information monopoly over the country. So the… The sort of the…

0:21:07.1 ZT: That kind of… You can shut down a few TV stations, it doesn’t really matter. So in such an environment, if you really wanna censor things, you can try to completely shut down the internet, but that’s a very… Like, you can’t really have a modern economy then. Like you can’t really be a world in which you just shut down the whole internet, ’cause there’s all this other stuff that’s going on, including the… Just the regular socialisation, including economic activity. So the way a lot of places have figured out how to do censorship is by information glut. You drown people in information and claims, questioning the credibility of whatever you don’t like, claiming things are fake, hoax, other kind of things. So you base, or distracting, creating distractions.

0:21:54.6 ZT: Just when something important is happening, create some other full controversy. So these are managing attention, right? None of them are really blocking the crucial piece of information from being found by somebody who’s focused on finding it, but, they are making it essentially more difficult to even identify the crucial piece of information amidst all the cacophony. And, also for enough people to focus on it and say… Because information by itself isn’t powerful, it’s if enough people take it seriously, and decide that this is the crucial information we need and do something about it, that kinda…

0:22:37.7 ZT: So you can break those chains, you can break the chain between information and action by… Not by removing the information, but just surrounding it in things… In an environment that makes it useless to the hearer because you can’t tell what’s going on. And I think that’s the modern form of censorship that… And I wrote this in my book that came out before Donald Trump was elected, right? I was kinda working off from examples around the world of other… Sort of authoritarian and other new populous ways of creating obstacles to focused information and attention on what was important and relevant, and then Donald Trump got elected and everybody was saying, “Oh these are… This is what he’s doing.” And I kind of was like, “Yes.” And that’s not really unique to him, this was something that we have seen around the world so I didn’t really have some sort of crystal ball to say, “You know, this is what he’s gonna do uniquely,” before he did it. I was just looking around and, he was one more in a pattern.

0:23:53.4 SC: And if every claim that you can imagine is out there in the media, and every counter-claim is also out there, then, you can see… I’m not a professional sociologist, but I’m guessing how you can have these little groups of self-sustaining epistemic communities that are completely divorced from the mainstream, and that might feed into polarisation and fracturing more broadly.

0:24:17.9 ZT: Of course. Of course. But… So the thing is it’s… Even more than that, is that… So if you wanna get people’s attention, like traditionally sort of… If you just think about human beings, we’d like to think of ourselves as these wonderful cognitive creatures, and there’s no doubt, we’re fairly smart apes as far as these things go but, we are still social animals, right? And, some of the most motivating things for us are things that pertain to group belonging, right? Which group we belong to, our status within that group, and, which group is the out-group, right?

0:25:00.4 ZT: So that’s like the traditional in-group/out-group thing. So if you really wanna get attention in a media environment where you can kind of play with these things, tribalisation is your best bet for getting attention, right? If you wanna get clicks, sort of the culture wars and Dr. Seuss and all those things are really gonna get people’s attention because it’s a way of delineating us versus them. And us versus them for a social species, that’s a very very important thing because, we want to find our group, and we wanna sort of figure out who’s the other group. And we have these platforms like Facebook and the others that are…

0:25:43.1 ZT: Twitter, all of media basically, that are financed by getting our attention and then selling it to advertisers. So, to do that, they must first keep us on the site and to keep us on the site, you find their design really encourages this tribal Dynamics. Now, it’s not just hating other groups, it’s also bonding with your own. So, you find the Facebook groups thing, it’s like, Oh, you find the people that think like you, but that’s the flip side of finding people you don’t like, because that demarcation process, that in-group/out-group. Like you can’t have one without the other. If you’re a fan of one team, there has to be some other team that your team is playing that you can cheer for. This just very, very basic. And things like fans of sports team and stuff like that, those are sublimated, usually not dangerous ways of in-group/out-group processes.

0:26:49.5 ZT: We just find a team, we cheer for it, we don’t normally go and murder the other team’s fans. Normally, although it does happen occasionally. But if you kind of think about it, like a lot of things we think about the nationalism, tribalization within the polarization within the country, all of those things are in-group/out-group processes. So now we have at a global scale, these major platforms that are using what are very basic social species dynamics to grab your attention, to say, “Here, come find the people that you identify with, and then also sort of polarized against the people, that’s the out-group,” which is the basic thing, and you see they feed into the polarization.

0:27:41.3 ZT: What they will say in response is that we don’t create these dynamics, these are human dynamics, which is true. But they also have a business model that very much amplifies these dynamics. I kind of see them like a ice cream company that’s serving ice cream for breakfast, lunch and dinner, and saying, “We didn’t invent the human appetite for sugar fat,” because that comes from your evolution, where our appetite for calories and sugar and fat or salt comes from the scarcity in the past. So, it totally makes sense that we have an appetite for it, but they have a business model in which they keep giving more of it to you for breakfast, lunch and dinner. So, it’s like they’re symbiotically merging with what are human social dynamics to keep us on their sites.

0:28:38.5 SC: Well, this makes me think that… Number one, I like ice cream, and number two…

0:28:41.1 ZT: I do, too.

0:28:43.1 SC: I think it’s great when tiny groups of people who otherwise would never have found each other can find each other online. So, is that trade-off inevitable, or is there some way programmatically to allow people to find themselves and be part of the in-group without demonizing…

0:29:02.3 ZT: I mean, I think part of some of the issues are like, how large are you gonna make the out-group, or how large are you gonna do the scale. If, for example, Facebook groups was limited to 250 people, or 150 people, something like that. And if you wanted to go larger, there were these other requirements of moderation and this and that, or… I’m just making up something. But if it was limited in scale, you wouldn’t have the same effect because you would probably find a different dynamic or if like… But I’m not saying this is something to be done, I’m just kind of saying that once you allow these big groups to come together in this kind of format, unless you have something pushing in the other direction, it’s gonna polarize.

0:29:50.3 ZT: Now, traditionally, because of history and because of the way advertising work, traditional media would try to be in the center because they wanted to scale and they wanted a broad range of readers so that Sears could advertise with them. Like Sears didn’t wanna be on the left or the right or something. Sears wanted to reach a majority of people because you didn’t really have the kind of scale you could have without bringing people together. Whereas right now you can bring people together in a platform like Facebook advertise to large numbers, but you do not have to bring them together ideologically towards a center the way traditional broadcasters would try to do. They can all be in their little groups saying very different things.

0:30:44.5 ZT: They’re still on Facebook, right? So, in the past, if you read the Wall Street Journal or the New York Times, you’re all reading the same newspaper. Whereas right now, you can have two billion people still be on Facebook, you have the scale, but they’re not reading the same thing, that’s a very different way to get scale. The first one requires some sort of ideological centering to get to that scale. Whereas the New York Times or the Wall Street Journal model, they’re not exactly at the center of course, but they’re trying to sort of apply to broad categories, where Facebook does not have to do anything of the sort, it can apply to people across all sorts of political views, because digital technology allows it to be different screen by screen. The newspaper cannot morph, like the paper cannot morph into a different paper, depending on who’s purchasing it. That’s the big difference, it’s static, like it physically cannot just morph every time somebody picks it up, where something digital can.

0:31:50.6 SC: Is there any way…

0:31:53.0 ZT: Those are very big changes.

0:31:54.7 SC: Is there any way for us, a researcher or a watch dog to see what ads are being targeted at different groups on Facebook?

0:32:01.7 ZT: Well, people have called for things like that, and right now we have even some level of transparency.

0:32:08.3 ZT: But once we got to that scale, transparency itself isn’t getting you everything you need if nobody’s looking. It’s kind of like saying, We should have ingredients, well fine, if the ingredients are published when nobody’s checking, what’s in them? You got titanium oxide in a bunch of baby food, and nobody’s looking at it like, just the transparency alone is not a bad thing, but who’s looking at it? Who would even like… Would we even agree who should look at it? These are things that I don’t think we have resolved at all as a society. And I’m not even saying… I sometimes… Because I do the critical thing, it sounds like I’m saying, “This is terrible. We should go back to the past.” Because there are so many ways in which the past wasn’t great, and also it’s not coming back. Even if you liked it, it’s not coming back, it’s just like… Because that’s not how the world works.

0:33:08.5 ZT: And there was a lot of things that were brushed over and censored, and hidden, and you couldn’t find people like you, and you couldn’t like… There were ways in which all sorts of people were isolated because they didn’t… You might have been living a rural place and not have access to… You might have been a gay kid without anybody openly gay around you, and have no clue, and now you can go on social media and find some people who can say, “Okay, this is like… There’s lots of us.” I’m just giving a small example, or you could just have a hobby and not have a single other person, or you could just be… There’s all these things in which the ability to find each other is a good thing. The trick is though, it’s not confined to things I like. This is also true for White Supremacists. I mean, if people who like something certain geeky or cute and something I like can find each other, that doesn’t mean the same mechanism doesn’t operate for the White Supremacists.

0:34:08.9 ZT: So, the error is treating it like a pony that is supposed to do what you say, and then getting disappointed because that’s not what it is. And then going from some of sort of Utopian sort of, “This is great, I find people I like to… Oh, wait, this is terrible, other people find people they like.” Without realizing, well, those are kind of the same dynamics. And the question is like, how can we approach this and say, we can do something better to sort of manage this transition because it’s a major transition.

0:34:44.7 SC: Well, and another aspect of the sort of double-sided coin business is you made a point of this whole apparatus pushes us towards a lower trust society where we’re more skeptical of institutions and so forth. And that’s definitely what I can see both sides in some sense, I want people to be skeptical of institutions, but when it becomes just a way to ignore anything you don’t wanna hear, then that would be bad.

0:35:08.4 ZT: Yeah. So, this is something I haven’t really had a chance to write about this, but most conspiracy theories are not driven by ignorance, but by a sense of curiosity and wanting to figure things out without guard rails. Like if you kinda go through these conspiracy sites, they’re citing articles, and there’s all these little connect the dots and you could almost squint and see… They’re trying to do some sort of leg work for what you’d call the scientific process, except there’s no guard rails to keep them from getting lost in what they’re claiming or what they’re reading. So, that’s the thing is skepticism itself isn’t empowering. But don’t be a skeptic is nonsense, because skepticism is how we do science. It’s how we make things happen, it’s how we question…

0:36:11.2 ZT: And if you look at the History of Medicine or something like that, there’s so many things that were considered outside the mainstream till they weren’t. Because the mainstream was wrong, the mainstream was lying… In fact, they were wrong because they were like stubborn. And then new things happened, so you do have these things, you do have these skeptical outsiders who come in and say the mainstream is wrong, but that doesn’t make everybody who thinks they’re a skeptic Galileo.

0:36:40.4 SC: Oh boy. You don’t have to tell me.

0:36:41.8 ZT: There’s a lot of people who are… They all think are, but there’s a lot of people who think they are the new Galileo, and they’re just cranks or they have no connection to reality or they’re grifters. But of course the problem is, how do you tell them apart? Who designates which side? I have my preferences for what I think are the correct skepticisms and what is what I would consider conspiracy theories, but those are like mine. And that’s not everybody else’s. If you’re gonna have some sort of ministry of truth telling us which ones are conspiracy theories, that’s not really gonna easily work. Because I think the pandemic has been an eye-opener that many central authorities, even with the smartest people, can get things wrong. So, somebody needs to say, “Well, you got this wrong, but there also has to be a process.” I think this is like a new appreciation of there’s no checklists, sometimes you sort of teach kids science with this sort of there’s like a little wheel and there’s the hypothesis and there’s data, and there’s this. And you sort of go through it, and that’s not how it really works. There’s a whole cultural institution it’s embedded in.

0:38:03.7 ZT: And if it’s full of people trying to kind of get to a more precise understanding of the world with a lot of guard rails, it kind of works. But if you don’t have all those culture, and the institution and the guard rails, the same sort of little wheel of hypothesis data go back, it just isn’t gonna work, and that is hard to put in a sort of… What’s the right word? Schematic.

0:38:35.2 SC: A little algorithm, yeah.

0:38:37.3 ZT: It’s not like a checklist, like there’s no critical thinking checklist, there’s no way to be a critical thinker, they think without a lot of substantive knowledge in the area and acculturation into a group of people and the discussions and debates. But that doesn’t make those people the final authorities either, because as we know, it’s a human process and it does go array and there are egos and weird things. And any academic can tell you all sorts of stories of quirky things that shouldn’t have happened or just egos that got in the way of things. But on the other hand, on the whole, theenterprise does seem to work.

0:39:20.8 SC: It does, but you’re right that there’s no checklist, people are always asking me for a checklist, do you know what I should trust about science on the internet or whatever, I’m sure people are asking you for the checklist also.

0:39:29.9 ZT: Yeah, all the time.

0:39:31.4 SC: And as you say it, there’s just way too much information, so not everyone is gonna go back to the original published refereed articles, that’s just not plausible enough. And they couldn’t understand them if they did. But there is even without a checklist, I want to say, and I’m not saying this with any confidence at all, but I wanna say that there’s still a way to sort of get a feeling for the credibility of different sources, asking whether or not they have a track record, asking whether or not they are being humble about what they’re saying. They’re delineating the limits of their knowledge versus just bombastically claiming to have solved everything. I think that even though we can’t all be experts in everything, we’re forced by the modern world into a situation where we have the judge things. So, we have to figure out ways to do it.

0:40:18.5 ZT: Right. So, I think there’s some of that where you’re… There’s a sense like that, but even that sense doesn’t come without some leg work, like I’ll give you an extreme example. I think what’s the name of the… There was a company that claimed to have a very large scale HCQ study by comparing, I think 150 hospital records, something like that. And HCQ was something that the President of the United States was erroneously claiming that…

0:41:06.0 SC: Is this Hydro-chloroquine?

0:41:08.5 ZT: Cure COVID very early, it was something like that. So, okay, so it got stuck in a very, very polarized debate because of that. And of course, the thing you wanna look at is like, “Where is the peer-reviewed science? Where’s the studies? Where’s the… ” Forget the peer-reviewed, where’s the pre-prints and things like that, and this was kind of early in the epidemic, pandemic. And we had a few papers come out that were claiming that there a big study from a company called Sergisphere that was comparing like hospital records in 150 countries that showed, it claimed, that the HCQ was harmful and really drastically harmful, not just mild or anything.

0:42:01.1 ZT: It was like a very large size effect, and immediately people jumped on this. Now, I’m giving this example, it was published in the LANCET, which is the one of the highest, highly rated scientific article journals. I think there was a version of that that was published some place else. But the short of it is that it retracted fairly quickly, because you just looked at it and you thought, “How did you get data from 150 countries or hospitals and managed to sort of standardize the medical coding?”

0:42:42.5 SC: It’s very complicated, yeah.

0:42:44.6 ZT: We can’t even standardize the medical coding between two hospitals in this country easily, let alone hundreds of hospitals across the world. And HCQ has long been shown since not to have a great upside, but the level of harm, because it’s a common drug, it’s available over the counter, it wasn’t even plausible that you… Maybe it was helpful, but the kind of harm was really high. So, I remember like squinting and saying, “You found what?” And it’s not really my field. But because everybody was sort of pointing this up, partly because they wanted to say, “Look how terrible Trump is.” Now, on the one hand, Trump has been terrible, so there’s no question, he was just sort of making claims, he was just basically making stuff up.

0:43:35.0 ZT: And it was a dangerous thing to do, partly because HCQ trials have taken up so much of our energy, when we could have just done a few trials and be done, because there are some drugs that work, this one isn’t, next. We try lots of things. There’s another one, Dexa, worked wonderfully, and it’s also an over-the-counter drug, and we found in the trial. So, all of that is good. On the other hand, this very sort of prestigious peer-reviewed journal, like woah, woah, woah, you just sort of kind of go, “What?” And then, so this is interesting to me is that tons of people kind of said, “This doesn’t make sense,” that this is the how it affirmed my faith. So, there was a failure clearly by the journal, that the editor should have just said, “Tell me more about this data like you either got it… ” Because it’s such a big claim to have collected data that widely, that quickly.

0:44:30.5 ZT: The peer reviewers should have been like, “Wait, what?” There was all these blind spots and I’m kind of, post-talk of course, guessing that the fact that it so strongly undermined a Trump claim…

0:44:45.6 SC: Oh, yeah.

0:44:47.0 ZT: May have helped the blind spot.

0:44:47.2 SC: I’m sure it played a big role, yeah.

0:44:49.0 ZT: So, it got through peer review, it got widely shared, and then, here’s the part that’s great, the same community of scientists, ’cause I could… I was alarmed a little bit by the data scope because I kind of have familiarity, but I don’t understand this drug, like what do I know? Right. So, I started seeing people I trust say, “This doesn’t make sense.” Now, I understand statistics, so I started looking at the statistics and I was like, “This is made up,” because they were like the adverse event percentages were like within 0.1-0.2% across age groups on 10 different countries, like no way like… You just build this up. You can kinda…

0:45:34.4 ZT: You could do more exact tests, but there’s a way to figure out made up data, and this was… You could even eyeball it and say, “You made this up,” you didn’t really need to bring out the sort of statistical big guns to figure out the fraudulent data, but I’m just giving us an example of stuff gets through. But the good part of science is then, there’s a lot of us who kinda look up and say, “Wait, I don’t care that it got through, I don’t care it got published in the highest rated journal. People kinda go and say, “This makes sense. This doesn’t make sense,” and it usually takes some time, in this particular case, I think the retraction happened within weeks. So, I think this is kind of like an example of both the height and depth, like the best of times, worst of the times. We have these blind spots, partly due to political polarization that let a paper that should have been desk rejected and had been seen as a fraud immediately, get through partly because it’s undermining a President who was terrible on the pandemic.

0:46:45.3 ZT: On the other hand, the Scientists community was pretty quick to say, “I don’t care what you think, this is why this is wrong,” and got it retracted. So, how do you capture that in a bottle? I don’t have a way to say like, what is the process there? Because you can’t just say trust peer review, because I just gave an example of a massive failure of peer review. You can’t just disregard peer review because if you don’t know anything else about a topic, if you have one assumption to make, I’m gonna say peer review paper is better. If I have no other piece of information, that would be my assumption. But it’s like, then what’s the next level? What does the community say about it? So that’s the thing. You can’t say a lot of data is good, you can…

0:47:33.2 SC: It’s very hard.

0:47:34.6 ZT: It’s complicated, exactly, which…

0:47:36.7 SC: And fallible-ism is a big idea.

0:47:39.0 ZT: I think we got a lot of that kind of complication. We saw a lot of kind of complication in the pandemic where as I like to say, there’s never been a better time to be informed, but there’s also never been a worse time to be informed. It’s both.

0:47:53.4 SC: Well, let’s think about the pandemic more broadly, ’cause I know that you’ve obviously been on about this for over a year now. I’ve seen your tweets, recalling the tweets from a year ago and shaking your head in dismay.

0:48:04.2 ZT: Yeah, it’s been a year.

0:48:07.2 SC: How we have evolved through this, but… So, we did get the pandemic wrong in early days by we, I don’t mean you and me necessarily, but the establishment, the institutions, the people we’re supposed to be able to trust, the government, the media, was there some specific set of biases or motivations that caused it to go wrong, or was it just that people were not trained to think in the right way about such a complicated problem?

0:48:34.8 ZT: So, I’ve been thinking a lot about that, like what happened? What went wrong? What we could have done? So, a bunch of things. Particularly in the United States, we did have the President who was a problem. So, when you have the president basically silencing CDC officials, we saw that happened in February, so you have that problem for sure. But I think that hides the bigger problem because it wasn’t just that, and it wasn’t just the US, it wasn’t just… Europe also did not do well. So, one thing I’ve been wondering, like I was talking to someone the other day, and I said, “Why didn’t the US universities just quickly create a consortium?” Because we saw in February of 2020, it was pretty clear that there was gonna be political meddling, so didn’t we create our own, get the facts from us consortium?

0:49:34.4 ZT: Just have faculties of medicine and public health from say, top 20,30 universities, create like a little expert committee of ourselves to get the facts on the pandemic or something like that. I think we could have done that. Like, why didn’t we… So, we didn’t react to the failure of the authorities when they failed, so in the US, but I think…

0:50:00.8 SC: You’re asking why a bunch of professors did not come together to do rapid action?

0:50:05.8 ZT: Yeah, I know, I know, I know, I know, I know. But we should have, because the whole thing of the academic institution is like we’re supposed to be doing stuff like that. Like we have this privilege of a job that is supposed to let us do that, so we didn’t really do that. At least the administration, they’re always making strategic plans and doing all this, and I’m like, “Yeah, this is a good time,” but that wasn’t all that fail. So, there was a way in which the politics failed and there was political meddling, but there was I think a lot of epistemological failures in the Western societies too. For one, we didn’t take the expertise from places with SARS experience seriously, because I don’t care what you call it, because the World Health Organization didn’t wanna call it anything like SARS, ’cause they didn’t wanna fear, scare people, but… I mean, this is SARS, basically, with a crucial distinction in that it has pre-symptomatic spread. But in a lot of other things, SARS had the same age gradient in its effects, it had air, aerosol, airborne transmission, it had the over-dispersion. It is different, pre-symptomatic transmission, it didn’t have that, but it’s a very similar kind of Coronavirus. And the countries that had experience with it, like Japan, Hong Kong, Taiwan, were fairly quick to do the correct non-pharmaceutical interventions before we had more.

0:51:36.3 ZT: Whereas the Western public health, I think, was fairly anchored on waiting for a flu pandemic. We think in flu, and flu is a different pathogen. It’s not over-dispersed the same way, you kind of basically close schools and wait for a vaccine. It’s not… The kids are super spreaders of flu, not this one. There is… There’s not the same kind of super spreading behavior anyway in flu. The same kind… Whereas this one is very dependent on that super spreading events to drive the epid… So there are all these things that I think we didn’t do. We made fun of masks, I’ve read so many articles last year early on, claiming East Asians were superstitious for wearing masks and I’m kind of like, “You know they have infectious disease specialists?”

[chuckle]

0:52:31.7 ZT: They have epidemiologists, like they’re not just making this up, it’s not a talisman. Like they’re these actual scientists who you can talk to before dismissing. Why is Taiwan ramping up production of mask? It’s a respiratory airborne pathogen and this is source control. This is not like… They’re not throwing salt over their shoulder, but I literally read articles that dismiss that kind of expertise. I think we had a lot of different incorrect reflexes on trusting the public, on giving the advice to give, yet we gave too many binary rules.

0:53:15.9 ZT: I’m still trying to tell people it’s fine to be outdoors, there’s no super spreading events that we know of outdoors. This is not a mystery. It was pretty clear from the epidemiology of this disease by March of last year. By the end of March of last year, it was pretty clear that transmission, the super spreading transmission was primarily occurring indoors in poorly ventilated places, that outdoor transmission wasn’t impossible, but it was a pretty high bar. You just didn’t see much of it. And super spreading, I still don’t have any confirmed, major daytime super spreading event, like where people are outside where the photographers take their picture and then it actually is a super spreader.

0:54:01.2 ZT: It’s been a year, but I just saw a headline, like a front page headline a week ago from Australia’s paper of record, shaming people sitting on a pretty large beach for breaking quarantine or whatever it is that they were being accused of. I’m kind of like, “You can’t be this behind the scientific knowledge”. And I’m not blaming the ordinary people because the authorities have been not communicating this. I’m kinda going very fast here, but there was a big fight, there’s a very big scientific fight that I think is gonna play a major role once this is done, it’s not getting enough attention right now because we’re kind of busy with the pandemic itself, in which one of the ways in which we set our NPIs, the non-pharmaceutical interventions, was the idea that this respiratory pathogen spread through droplets, and if you wanna think of physics terms, droplets are like these ballistic trajectories, they go… You spit ’em out and they go down with gravity in a parabola, right?

0:55:15.9 SC: Yep, they fall to the ground.

0:55:18.7 ZT: And aerosols are these small things that can float around because they’re small and light. Now, the first people usually call droplets, the second people kind of call aerosols, right? So it turns out, and this is gonna be a really interesting history somebody’s gonna eventually write. The World Health Organization to this day has the micron cutoff for what floats and what falls wrong by a large factor.

0:55:50.9 SC: I did not know that.

0:55:51.3 ZT: And there’s an interesting history to why this is. Somebody transcribed something incorrectly back when and there’s gonna be a paper about it eventually, so I don’t wanna to tell all of the details till people have their paper, I don’t see, nobody is really paying attention to this. But it’s a major error, because you’re basically assuming a mode of transmission that, now that I step back and look at it is probably fairly rare. I think it probably happens if you cough or sneeze on someone, like the kind of big drops, but most of it is floaty stuff. Now of course, the floaty stuff can float to you from close range too, right? It doesn’t mean it’s the big stuff that otherwise would have fallen if you’re… Got the floaty aerosol-y stuff coming out of your mouth when you’re speaking, you are going to be more infected if you’re close to someone, but that’s not proof that that is the big ballistic trajectory, because if that were the case, you’d have an almost an equal amount of outdoor transmission. Because stuff, if they weren’t just floating around, what happens outdoors is they float away very quickly because air just dilutes them. It’s much more windy, just aerodynamics.

0:57:14.1 ZT: And it turns out one of our anchoring biases here was that we thought most respiratory pathogens are droplet. I think once this is done, we’re going to go back and say, “Well actually, most of them were not.” Like we were wrong in a bunch of stuff, but it didn’t really matter because it wasn’t the pandemic and we weren’t checking, right?

0:57:35.0 SC: Sure.

0:57:36.8 ZT: So there was these bunch of people that were like a minority that we’re saying they’re aerosols about the other ones too, and whenever we find a way to check in, it’s kind of hard. There’s a lot of these really geeky technical things to how do you prove it’s an aerosol because it’s not easy. You have to find it here and culture a live virus from it or something like that, so I think this is going to basically revolutionize our understanding of how respiratory pathogens actually transmit most of the time. And the science twist to the story is that these people who’ve been saying this, kinda yelling in a polite way at the scientific establishment and the medical establishment saying, “This is how it’s happening,” we gotta pay attention to things that mitigate aerosol transmission also for influenza.

0:58:29.4 ZT: Also for this and also for that and not getting away. And when the pandemic started, that same dogma just wouldn’t shift. But all of the sudden, the stakes were higher, and then all of the sudden, we got more studies, and then all of the sudden we this major epidemiological record. If you look at the epidemiological record, there is no other theory of transmission that can explain that record besides aerosol transmission being dominant, like to have a story of droplets doing what we’re seeing clinically in the epidemiological record of where it’s spreading, it’s… You really have to be a contortionist to fit that theory, fit that data, but we haven’t really had the reckoning. I used to think the Kuhnian idea of Scientific Revolutions was a little exaggerated for the 21st century. I was kind of like, “Yeah, I get it, like the Newtonian kind of story… ” I’m like, “That’s a very cute story.” But that doesn’t happen all the time.

0:59:29.4 ZT: You don’t have these major paradigm shifts and all of that, I used to sort of think that doesn’t really happen a lot, because we’re a little more nuanced now, we’re not… And we don’t have that big shift. Now, I’m kind of thinking maybe there’s more in the making, we just kinda don’t do it. Plus, what I’ve noticed in this pandemic is that once it shifts, people really forget. It was almost “misinformation” a year ago to say, “Wait, it’s aerosol,” so right now, a lot of people are like, “Yeah, of course it was. We said it was aerosols.” I’m like, No, it was kind of like… I was there in those meetings, people were accused of making stuff up and being completely wrong and stuff like that. So, there’s a way in which now I think these paradigm shifts happen along with a very sociological process of amnesia, where the people who were saying the opposite, they just forget they were saying the opposite.

1:00:32.3 ZT: And we kind of move on without sort of saying, “Oh wait, we just moved on.” This is not even terrible in some sense, except maybe there’s a lot more of this than I had thought. And these paradigm shifts really are real because I’m just remembering a year ago, staring at the screen because we’re not in the same room where people with the aerosol biophysics would try to explain, your micron cut-off doesn’t work. Here is the math, that size will not drop, and this is the size that will float, and this is the lab experiment, and this is this. Like they would try to explain this stuff to the medical establishment. And they couldn’t get anywhere.

1:01:20.6 SC: I think that Thomas Kuhn would be very much on board with the idea that attention is more valuable commodity than information, because he was all about how different people from different paradigms would look at different pieces of information and just interpret them in very different ways.

1:01:35.8 ZT: I thought he had more, in my interpretation was that his story was a little stylized.

1:01:42.3 SC: Oh yeah that’s fair.

1:01:42.7 ZT: I always thought this is a little messier, but I’m re-thinking that because I think… Part of it is it’s really hard to reconstruct where people were saying and all those things that happened, because as soon as the paradigm shifts, everybody’s on the new boat. We were always fighting Eurasia kind of thing, or Oceania, whatever. So there’s a way in which that might be thing, but yeah. So I think we’re going… For me, the pandemic has been scientifically very, and sociologically, a very interesting process to examine, because I feel like I’ve seen great things, I mean, we’ve seen people kind of… When the variance of concern came out, I saw sort of labs just do the neutralization study and just tweet it out.

1:02:31.5 ZT: They didn’t even wait for the paper because there was this enormous speed and generosity, and pre-print and post-print and review and all of those things, it’s really been on the one hand, wonderful. On the other hand, there’s these crappy papers like the LANCET paper that I’m like, “How on Earth did that get through?” And there’s so many now, academics and epidemiologist and neurologist and social media now are sub-tweeting each other and blocking each other, all the social media fights. I’m kinda like, “Okay, fine. You’re all human, too. I get that, but that’s kind of… ” And I’ve seen that, of course, this is a very human dynamic, I’m not saying there’s anything particularly good or bad about it. So, it’s kind of like a very confusing environment as well, because you’re seeing great science, great generosity, very interesting thing. But if you’re just following this and you’re thinking, “How do I figure out what’s going on?” It’s pretty hard, ’cause there’s a lot of noise…

1:03:37.7 SC: Well, one thing I don’t wanna get lost that you mentioned is, of course, there’s a whole bunch of cases and circumstances under which people are wrong because of their biases or the theoretical framework they’re working in, or just inertia or a group think or whatever. But then there’s another set of cases where people had some knowledge or opinions and then thought a little… Over-thought the question of, what should we let other people know? What should we tell people? Whether it was the government or with journalism. People were worried too much about what the effects of saying things might be and not just the effect, not just worried about getting the truth out there as quickly as possible.

1:04:16.8 ZT: I mean, the thing is, of course, there’s a lot of things in which we got things wrong and then updated. And that’s a very noble part of science. Right? That’s perfectly fine. That’s what you’re supposed to do. You get something wrong, and then you go, “Okay, I got it wrong, and here’s what the correct one was.” You’re supposed to do that, the idea that you wouldn’t be wrong about something is nonsense. On the other hand, of course, you’re supposed to look at the evidence, not what happens to be the guideline from 20 years ago. Like you’re supposed to kind of… So, I think this is just… For somebody interested in the scientific process, I think this has been a very rich moment, but it also shows you that this is not a magical process, it takes labor. It takes real work to stay on top of any field, let alone one with such consequences, and it’s full of people. So you have all the human things.

1:05:19.4 SC: Well, that’s good because it lets me do what I wanted to do anyway, which was to circle back to the systems thinking that we started about at the beginning. One of the… You drop in some phrases in your writings that are beloved to me as a physicist about non-linear dynamics and phase transitions and avalanches and things like that. I love these ideas, I can see them in the dynamics of different things sometimes. How useful are these concepts to you, the idea that not only do you have a complicated system in the sense that there’s many moving parts, but that the interactions between the moving parts are just as important as sum of the parts.

1:05:58.8 ZT: See, the thing is, I think if you look at complex systems or systems thinking or whatever you wanna call it, these things you see a lot of examples clearly from physics, there’s so much of it. You see it in sort of any kind of ecology or environment. You look at ecological studies and things like that, you see all these very interesting sort of interactions, and one of the things that I was struggling with in the early days of the pandemic was trying to explain non-linear dynamics, right? Because epidemics are very non-linear dynamics, and people were like, Can you come up with a metaphor? And I’m like, “You don’t really go through them in your own macro life.” You have them in your body perhaps, but you don’t really have a lot of macro processes that you observe this, but you do in social media, where social media… It grows very fast if you’re kind of like an early mover.

1:06:58.4 ZT: This is an exponential process, it’s like a network that just kind of grows, and I think that’s one of the reasons why the Silicon Valley people were quick to this, because they’re used to looking for exponential processes that will make them rich. Alright, it’s the other way around, whereas this is an exponential process that will make life terrible for all of us, so you need to kind of figure out how do you… Because with an exponential process, you get in early or you get overwhelmed, right? The steep part of the exponential is not a place you’re gonna very gently surf, you’re just like need to go first. Things like the non-linear dynamics, I’ve always found fascinating because of how they are everywhere, but non-intuitive. So you can’t… There’s only so many times you can give that… Chess pieces and rice example, everybody gives the same… You put one rice on the chess board and then two, I’m like, “Well, you might as well give the math.”

1:07:56.4 ZT: There’s nothing intuitive about that because people don’t usually do… You don’t do that in your normal life, but I think right now with epidemics people might have finally gotten it off on intuition. So phase transitions, for example, they are… I’m not making a direct math analogy there, but you can think of what we’re talking about as these paradigm shifts where you kind of go from, everybody thinks one way and then we sort of switch. You can see it in some of the ways in which once there’s enough… This is a very over-dispersed epidemic in that there’s little peaks that are very crucial to the way it’s spreading, but once you have a lot of community transmission, so that is everywhere, for a while, it looks like flu because it’s so widespread that it’ll kind of keep going in different ways. It’s not really a phase transition, but that’s a good intuitive way of describing it to somebody who understands phase transition, some things like that.

1:09:00.4 ZT: So I find those kinds of ways of thinking to be really useful in understanding where things are right now. For example, we have a lot of convergent evolution in the mutations, which has surprised the virologists. We weren’t expecting this. And there’s a lot of fascinating discussions about… ‘Cause there’s a very particular mutation that’s popping up everywhere, and it is like making things more transmissible among other things. It may not be happening because it’s making things more transmissible, that might be something that’s coming along for the ride. There might be something else driving it. So it’s making me think, for example, about convergent evolution is a very interesting complex systems dynamic, where you have a very large potential fitness landscape, but strict optimization criteria and will it converge every time you do it, or is it very contingent and stochastic and it’ll go all sorts of different places?

1:10:09.6 ZT: And it’s kind of looking like under certain conditions, there’s strong pressure for convergence because the same mutation… ‘Cause we didn’t really like… Honestly, I followed this the whole time, almost everybody was surprised by the number of places the same few mutations popped up.

1:10:33.7 SC: Yeah. Very surprised.

1:10:34.6 ZT: Clearly it’s adaptive, it’s not the kind of thing that… ‘Cause you can see it take over the other variants. You see this particular mutation go eat the available space. So I think we’re gonna learn a lot about how do you think about something like that. Because it’s not just a question of virology, it also means that… Well, that means that if we leave this alone, this is what’s gonna happen. This is… This kind of convergent to evolution, that it’s finding this, sort of, local Maxima, almost, everywhere. We’re gonna see it in lots of places and how do we prepare for it? So these are interesting ways of thinking about it. Now, unfortunately, usually these are languages that are not spoken across fields.

1:11:24.6 SC: Not yet.

1:11:26.5 ZT: Like sociologists don’t talk about convergent evolution or… You hear it from all the biology people, but you don’t really hear it from the other things. But I find them all… They show up, they come up, like, they come up in the world. The world isn’t siloed into these fields.

1:11:42.4 SC: So this leads me to the perfect final question, which is too big to possibly be answered, but what do you… Having learned a bunch over the last year about pandemics and so forth, not just you, but the world, what does this tell us about the next pandemic? There’s a lot of ways in which this virus could have been worse, right, but maybe we’re better at fighting it now. I don’t know.

1:12:06.8 ZT: I’ve been like… Sort of, there’re a couple of things to say, one of them is that, why was it tragic? I mean, there’s no question, like, we had half a million deaths in the United States. So there’s no way to kind of dismiss this. In the potential pathogen-scape, let’s say, this is a mild one. It kills relatively low compared to many others. It is very targeting… It’s targeted by age. I mean, so of course it’s a tragedy to have the elderly die, but it would have been a very different conversation if the fatality rate for children was 10%, instead of for people over 80. I mean, of course, I don’t want people over 80 to die premature, but it’s a really different societal effect if it’s children, where if it killed one in 10 who got infected or something like that, that would be a very different thing. And it’s also, while we screwed it up, it’s very susceptible to non-pharmaceutical interventions. Exactly, because it’s over-dispersed and very much… So if you kind of control the indoor super spreading in crowded places, you get a big bang for your buck. So what’s next? Option number one, we get something similar. We get, like, SARS, MERS 3, and we know what to do, and we kinda go back to our playbook, and then we’re like doing well.

1:13:45.6 ZT: That’s option one. Option two, we get a flu, which we prepared for so long, and then it wasn’t the right thing, and then we adapted, finally, to SARS, MERS and we get another influenza pandemic. And then people are saying, “Oh, we don’t really need to care about…

1:14:05.0 SC: They’re confused, yeah.

1:14:06.6 ZT: The foam masks and the hand washing, whereas, that’s gonna be very important, then kids are gonna be super squares. That’s also possible too. So what I think is, what we should learn, is to be very sensitive to early data. When you don’t know what you got, like, I’m all for being extra cautious, like, in February of 2020, I would have been like, “Do everything, because we don’t know what’s coming down the pike.” Just the precautionary principal totally applies, if you have an exponential threat. But once you learn, you have to adjust, “Oh, it’s over dispersed. Oh, it’s indoors. Oh, it’s this. So you have to do that.” So I think, next time something comes, what’s gonna happen is, like, the lessons will be not do the same. Act fast, but be very responsive to data early on, because it really depends on what do we have? And no guarantees what we’re gonna get.

1:15:02.9 SC: People have a difficult time saying, or listening to people say, “I don’t know now, but a week from now, I will know. So ask me.” They think… They wanna know the answer right away, or you’re untrustworthy.

1:15:12.6 ZT: Yeah, sometimes you do not know.

1:15:14.5 SC: So that’s a difficult ad-vocation.

1:15:15.7 ZT: And it’s better to say, “We don’t know. So we’re gonna do everything while we figure it out.”

1:15:20.4 SC: I think it’s a good motto for living our lives. Alright, Zeynep Tufekci, thanks very much being on the Mindscape podcast.

1:15:23.7 ZT: Thank you for inviting me.

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