David! Thanks for taking me up on the invitation to share your thoughts/piece. I enjoyed your piece/response.

Things I particularly liked:

1.I hadnt been aware of your excellent ‘Opinion Stew’ piece, and wish I had found it earlier. It would have been helpful to have linked to it here.

2.I liked the reference to the Odyssey & Mencken (it helped ground the piece and was a nice mirror to the Wilson/Holmes stuff )

3.It focused on the arguments/points I made as opposed to being a take-down/defensive approach

What this suggests, again (and to my main point) is that focusing on the ‘individual’ is probably not all that helpful. The broader system of how we i)vet opinion journalism (and by vet I certainly dont mean censorship — I mean ensure newsrooms take great care to ensure contrarian opinions are well supported/more bulletproof than many are) ii) how the powers that be “use” opinion journalism (in some instances the oped pages/opinion writers are ad hoc ‘consultants’ for politicians, businesses, etc….why is that? Broadening out it suggests that there is a dearth of ‘experts’ at some of these tables. It also suggests that the power housed in this opinion is immense….with that comes immense responsibility (on the part of the writer and the editor).

So based on this, if I could revisit my article I’d make these points clearer, and also make clear in the graf where I describe ‘intentions’ that you are in no way a ‘non-expert’ in terms of pandemics/infectious diseases but that expertise can sometimes be overly narrowly defined (to our detriment: groupthink etc).

In other words: we need good opinion journalism from experts and non-experts alike..we just need a better *system* to facilitate them.

This process is exactly what Kuhn gets at with science in general, and why I included the quote mentioned in Carson’s book — we *need* contrarian opinions and we *need* non-experts (and during a pandemic, non-experts can really mean ‘anyone not actively involved in the pandemic response on a large scale’ — ie. those who aren’t the decision makers…we need diverse but informed, views at the table — a marketplace of ideas, but a ‘framework’ by which to better evaluate those ideas without resorting to automatic groupthink).

I hope this makes sense. Cheers and thanks for the interesting discussion :)

amitha