Why are there so many COVID experts?
The difference between chauffeur knowledge and Planck knowledge
In his 2007 commencement speech to USC Law School, Charlie Munger shares a tale about the physicist Max Planck and his chaueffeur:
I frequently tell the apocryphal story about how Max Planck, after he won the Nobel Prize, went around Germany giving the same standard lecture on the new quantum mechanics.
Over time, his chauffeur memorized the lecture and said, “Would you mind, Professor Planck, because it’s so boring to stay in our routine, if I gave the lecture in Munich and you just sat in front wearing my chauffeur’s hat?” Planck said, “Why not?”
And the chauffeur got up and gave this long lecture on quantum mechanics. After which a physics professor stood up and asked a perfectly ghastly question. The speaker said, “Well I’m surprised that in an advanced city like Munich I get such an elementary question. I’m going to ask my chauffeur to reply.”
In other words, there’s a difference between knowing the name of something and actually knowing something.
When it comes to COVID, we have way too many chauffeurs and not enough Max Plancks.
When I read the news or see clips of experts on TV, I’m blown away by the discrepancy between certainty and accuracy and the discordance between competence and confidence.
Everyone has a plan until they get punched in the mouth
It’s easy to pontificate about a topic when there are no direct consequences of your remarks and you don’t need to treat a patient or develop policy. It gets much harder if you’re a doctor taking care of a sick patient, if you’re the principal of a school deciding whether to reopen, or if you own a business and you’re trying to figure out whether to lay off your employees.
Then what do you do? How do you make a decision with incomplete information that has real life consequences beyond the ratings your segment gets?
Talking a big game about an ambiguous situation only works when don’t face consequences.
The philsopher Tyson gets this right - until you’ve faced the adversity of a situation, your proclamations aren’t based in reality. All the experts ranting on cable news with certainty about what the virus will do in the summer or why hydroxychloroquine is a miracle drug haven’t had to face any consequences from their words.
Real experts feel confident saying, “I don’t know.”
In his story, Munger goes on to say:
In this world we have two kinds of knowledge. One is Planck knowledge, the people who really know. They’ve paid the dues, they have the aptitude. And then we’ve got chauffeur knowledge. They’ve learned the talk. They may have a big head of hair, they may have fine temper in the voice, they’ll make a hell of an impression.
But in the end, all they have is chauffeur knowledge. I think I’ve just described practically every politician in the United States.
And you are going to have the problem in your life of getting the responsibility into the people with the Planck knowledge and away from the people with the chauffeur knowledge.
Anthony Fauci has Planck knowledge. Karen on Facebook is a chauffeur. Keep this in mind when you’re deciding whose guidance to follow and whose opinion to trust.