Meet the conservative legal scholar who impressed Team Trump with his brand-new virus theory

Last week incompetent stain on humanity Donald Trump floated the mother of all trial balloons when he proposed, as did innumerable conservative pundits and hangers-on, that perhaps we should lift social distancing advisories early and let the virus take its course. The "cure" of economic turmoil might be "worse than the disease," he opined. The "disease," to make sure we are clear here, is Americans dying inside tents set up in hospital parking lots.

The New Yorker set up an interview with the conservative Hoover Institution lawyer guy, Richard Epstein, whose newfound expertise on worldwide pandemics was said to be influential, in Team Trump circles, in the belief that the danger of virus was being overplayed. It is quite the read. You will note once again the defining feature of newfound conservative expertise: It all revolves around the supposition that every actual subject matter expert in the world is wrong because I, Conservative Thinker Guy, ran my own numbers and made my own assumptions that none of you eggheads previously thought of. Debate mah!

If you haven't read the New Yorker interview yet, go do that if you want to get a feel for the very uppermost echelons of conservative … let’s say ... "scientific rigor." If you’ve had about all you can take of coronavirus misinformation, however, you might want to bow out. We’ve had a long, long damn month.

The summary version is this: Epstein, whose original piece suggested we might see "about 500 deaths" from the pandemic (he now says his math was wrong and is very sorry about that), does not know how pandemics work, and so he set out to reinvent or reexplain or (???) the same pandemic curve (see: #FlattenTheCurve) that every actual expert already knows about. Hang on, you've got to get a taste of this:

"[...] you cannot use any exponential system because essentially then everybody is going to be dead, because things just keep doubling, doubling, and doubling. So you have to develop a model which is going to explain why there’s a fairly rapid increase at the outset, and then why the thing starts to turn flat, ultimately down, and then disappears."

Yes. Yes, that is how pandemics (and brontosauruses) work. The numbers go up. Then they flatten. Then they go down, because everybody has either recovered or is dead. Nobody, anywhere, believes that an "exponential" rate of increase lasts forever because if nothing else—think zombie hoards—you begin to reach a point where the scattered survivors are all quite nicely social distanced because of, you know, everyone between them being zombies.

Every flu, every cold season, every new disease—they all follow that same basic pattern. But Epstein instead believes he has discovered something novel here, which is both difficult to explain and very, very wrong. He hinges most of his argument on a theory that "natural selection" will or already has produced a "strong" and a "weak" version of the virus, and the "strong" version will kill people until "adaptation" sets in and changes in "genetic viral behavior" will take place while people with the "weak" version live longer and so infect more people with the "weak" version and with social distancing "the evolutionary process should be more rapid than that for the ordinary flu."

Got it? No you don't, you're lying. This is not how evolution works, not on a March-until-June basis, anyway, and there is no data supporting this made-up theory that there are strong and weak versions of this virus. None. It is his speculation. It is his self-described "sense," unsupported, based on no knowledge of epidemiology, viruses, biology, evolution, or medicine in general. (But "I've done a lot of work in these particular areas," Epstein pipes up. "One of the things you get as a lawyer is a skill of cross-examination.")

After that things begin to fall apart in the interview as reporter Isaac Chotiner probes the various flaws with Epstein's assertions and Epstein retreats into allowing that sure, perhaps he's wrong, but "I'm always willing to debate somebody on the other side."

A debate. He has printed something based on only the most rudimentary understanding of his subject matter, called the experts wrong, and suggested that it is only fair that they Debate Him.

Where oh where have we heard that refrain before? Ah—right. Every self-proclaimed new conservative expert, in every field and genre, from the Ben Shapiros to the Dinesh D'Souziis. Because you cannot prove to my own satisfaction that I am wrong, you experts, I must be more clever than you. (Also, you are not allowed to provide any evidence that I am wrong because I don't have time to read or absorb new information. Also you are expected to provide endless amounts of your own free time devoted entirely to proving to me all the various conclusions of your field that I have not heard of and which therefore I shall declare to be probably made-up. Also you must invite me to your scientific conferences or you are Afraid Of My Genius.)

The staples of conservatism remain constant, through every year and crisis. The same insistence that knowing a smattering of key words and phrases is intellectually equivalent to a lifetime of study. The same belligerence at book-learners who would even bother with more than that smattering before writing up their conclusions under a just-asking-questions byline. The same ideological rigor—come up with the desired conclusion first, the reasons afterwards.

Nobody is bored with this yet? Nobody is maybe up for a little self-reflection on whether this pattern is, in fact, not working out? The Iraq War was not a cakewalk, and did not spread peace throughout the region. Tax cuts, over and over and over again, have failed to produce the results boastingly predicted every last sodding time. Years of bank deregulation did not work out well. The United States is not uniquely immune to the same pandemic that spread rapidly through the rest of the world. A movement that is contemptuous of science and intellectualism cannot produce either, it can only crudely mimic the gestures used.

Is there a museum devoted to past takes of the Hoover Institution that turned out to be catastrophic in practice? Shouldn't there be? Are there trading cards with each conservative thinker, listing their past major works and giving a batting average on how that all worked out?

Shouldn't there be?

from Daily Kos https://ift.tt/2WZAArm