Various web links I found to be of interest recently.
Here are my beliefs after doing this research:
Still, for Fauci, the public record is not uniformly flattering. For the first few months of 2020, Fauci appeared to toe the administration's line that the emerging disease was not a major threat. On January 26, just days after China locked down the eleven million residents of Wuhan and started building a new 1000-bed hospital, Fauci said, "The American people should not be worried... It's a very, very low risk to the United States." (He added, "It's something we, as public health officials, need to take very seriously.") A month later, on February 29, when many scientists believed thousands of undetected cases were present in the US - testing was still non-existent - Fauci said, "The risk is still low... there's no need to change anything that you're doing on a day-by-day basis." And on March 9, after superspreader events on four cruise ships had been reported, Fauci told Fox's John Roberts, "If you are a healthy young person, there is no reason if you want to go on a cruise ship, [not to] go on a cruise ship."
Back to the question of which school gets it right or wrong: I cannot help but notice that many of the same economists who have in the past been wrong about stimulus post GFC (and more recently been wrong about Inflation) seem to be re-upping the same errors about stimulus during the Covid era. As a reminder, consider this collection of economists helped to ensure the 2008-09 recovery was terrible by fighting against a massive government rescue.
Here is the CATO Institute’s full page NYT ad from January 9, 2009.The darling of those who wish to explain why incompetent people don't know they're unskilled, the Dunning-Kruger effect may actually just be a data artefact.
The two papers, by Dr. Ed Nuhfer and colleagues, argued that the Dunning-Kruger effect could be replicated by using random data. "We all then believed the [1999] paper was valid," Dr. Nuhfer told me via email. "The reasoning and argument just made so much sense. We never set out to disprove it; we were even fans of that paper." In Dr. Nuhfer's own papers, which used both computer-generated data and results from actual people undergoing a science literacy test, his team disproved the claim that most people that are unskilled are unaware of it ("a small number are: we saw about 5-6% that fit that in our data") and instead showed that both experts and novices underestimate and overestimate their skills with the same frequency. "It's just that experts do that over a narrower range," he wrote to me.
Read the full amazing details at the link.
The Iranian nuclear scientist who was shot dead near Tehran
in November was killed by a one-ton automated gun that was smuggled
into the country piece-by-piece by the Mossad, the JC can reveal.
...
The audacious operation, which humiliated the Tehran leadership,
succeeded partly because Iranian security services were too busy
watching suspected political dissenters, sources said.
Interview with the author Carl Hart, Columbia University neuroscientist and heroin user.
Hart reports that more than 70 percent of drug users-whether they use alcohol, cocaine, prescription medications, or heroin-do not meet the health criteria for drug addiction. In Drug Use for Grown-Ups, Hart strives to "present a more realistic image of the typical drug user: a responsible professional who happens to use drugs in his pursuit of happiness." With genial candor, Hart presents himself as a model drug user. "I am now entering my fifth year as a regular heroin user," he writes. "I do not have a drug-use problem. Never have. Each day, I meet my parental, personal, and professional responsibilities. I pay my taxes, serve as a volunteer in my community on a regular basis, and contribute to the global community as an informed and engaged citizen. I am better for my drug use."