I think that one thing the pandemic has demonstrated is that groups of experts are just as prone to groupthink as non-experts. Thomas Kuhn may argue that they are even more prone to groupthink.

Yet we've also seen intelligent non-experts rise to the occasion. An entrepreneur like Balaji Srinivasan who was sounding the alarm about how serious this was a month or two ahead of public health officials and was mocked for stepping outside of his lane[0], a programmer/sociologist like Zenep Tufecki who has written a series of important analyses over the last year and who later admitted that she felt like she was risking her career by advocating for masks when all the public health authorities were lined up against it [1], or economist Emily Oster who has done a better job of clear communication to the public about how to balance risks and understand the different levels of certainty we had on any given COVID related topic and published clearer analyses of school safety that many states' policies still flatly ignore.[2]

These are all people who have a wide range of experience and interests but were able to make timely contributions that experts may have been too blinkered to develop.

It's not about tearing down any individual, and I apologize if comment went too far in that direction. But we should be concerned about institutions that reject well-argued analysis of available evidence because its coming from the wrong place, or failing to even consider counterarguments and their full slate of implications. One concept that I recently learned about is the 10th man rule which Israeli intelligence adopted after the surprise attach that led to the Yom Kippur war. Essentially that if there are 10 people in a room and the first nine all express the same opinion, it becomes the duty of the 10th man to argue the opposite case regardless of what he or she believes. There are a lot of 10th men out there who had their opinions or voices excluded for too long.

Whatever it is that filters intelligent arguments from outside of the establishment is something that should be addressed before we need to go through something like this again. We would also do well to find ways to include a role for smart dissenting outsiders in conversations like these early.

[0] https://www.vox.com/recode/2020/2/13/21128209/coronavirus-fe...

[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2020/08/23/business/media/how-zeynep...

> When the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention told Americans in January that they didn’t need to wear masks, Dr. S. Vincent Rajkumar, a professor at the Mayo Clinic and the editor of the Blood Cancer Journal, couldn’t believe his ears.

> But he kept silent until Zeynep Tufekci (pronounced ZAY-nep too-FEK-chee), a sociologist he had met on Twitter, wrote that the C.D.C. had blundered by saying protective face coverings should be worn by health workers but not ordinary people.

> “Here I am, the editor of a journal in a high profile institution, yet I didn’t have the guts to speak out that it just doesn’t make sense,” Dr. Rajkumar told me. “Everybody should be wearing masks.”

[2] Articles in various publications + https://explaincovid.org & https://www.qualtrics.com/news/national-covid-education-dash...