Cycling News contained some profound wisdom that I found the other day.Now that Im 30 years old, I realized that many people claim to know more than they do. Many don't know and even more of those who claim they do not know aren't aware that those who do know know that they don't know.Anna Kiesenhofer is the sage here. She is an Austrian mathematician who specializes in partial differential equations. Kiesenhofer took a big lead and was well out of the peloton's sight. Annemiek van Vleuten, a Dutch rider, thought she had come in first but Kiesenhofer was more than a minute ahead.AdvertisementAdvertisementAdvertisementThis is not how you should win an Olympic race. Kiesenhofer, a self-taught coach, admits that she does not always follow the instructions of the experts.The spirit of the moment is to not defer to experts. Who are these pinheads, elites, people who claim to know everything and demand our obedience? The spirit of mathematics also encourages irreverent questioning. Math provides the tools and means to dissect an argument and to examine its assumptions. Even Kiesenhofers' slogan is a reminder of math. Those who know something say they don't know. This is logic parlance. Those who know are the contrapositives of those who claim they know.AdvertisementProblem is that too many would-be skepticals only accept the first half of Kiesenhofers insights and neglect the critical final clause. People who are knowledgeable say they don't know. You are missing the point of Kiesenhofer if you dismiss credentialed officials and then follow the lead of someone who claims they know.AdvertisementThis was what I was thinking when I saw a series of heated tweets by Scott Gottlieb, former FDA commissioner. He was furious at how the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention tried to model the course and impact of the COVID pandemic, now that the Delta variant is the dominant one. The CDC presented models from a variety of labs, with a wide range in assumptions. This resulted in a broad range of predictions. Some foresaw a rapid decline of the pandemic while others saw an exploding fourth wave.AdvertisementYou are totally missing the point if you dismiss credentialed officials and then follow the lead of someone who claims they know.Gottlieb says that is not enough! The large variance in the estimates indicates that CDC does not know how to model the wave and doesn't have a good idea of where it is at the beginning, middle or end. For the week ending on August 14, CDC expects there will be an average of 10K infections per day or more than 100K. Either the wave of infection will subside or explode out of control, The CDC isn't certain. He considers the CDC's information disappointing and ineffective.Gottlieb is complaining that the CDC is lying. Kiesenhofer's words, they are the people who claim to not know. They are the people you can trust. Gottlieb says that the CDC and other agencies should be more action-oriented. That's fair enough. The CDC does not give advice.AdvertisementAdvertisementKiesenhofer will give you good advice on what to do. You are being told the truth by that person.I don't want to sound like we live in a gloomy fog. Some things are fairly well-known. We know that vaccines can prevent most symptoms of COVID. And we know that future COVID waves will result in a much lower death rate than we have seen previously. We don't know if 10,000 or 100,000 Americans will get COVID next month.AdvertisementFortune-telling oracles. Mathematical models for disease cannot be! Because the dynamics of a pandemic is not math, math can't predict what will happen in the future. This is already happening. The U.S. seems to be seeing a rise in vaccination rates after months of decline. It could be due to new mandates or the news about the Delta case surge, or just because of some aggregate whim. This will affect what happens next, regardless of the motivation.AdvertisementPeople want to know the future and what they can do now. It's normal. They look to scientists to find the answers, either because they are looking for good advice or because they have a plan of action and want to stick a FOLLOW SCIENCE DUMY sticker on it.So, they were attracted by the sound of simple confidence. It is a temptation to resist. It's like a mathematician riding a bicycle really fast. There are people who claim to know, and then there are those who actually know. Which one should you listen to when the stakes are high?
