Just curious, how did you find Covid "exciting"? Making lots of money on the bear market?
It felt like I went to the bathroom at a party and came back to an empty room and I had to stay and clean up. I knew I’d be done in a year or two, so it felt weird to try and find a new social group when I was on short time, but boy was the end of my PhD a slog in part due to feeling disconnected socially.
Of course it for tedious very quickly, but I remember going to the park and people being told not to sit on benches by police on horseback. How is that not crazy and sort of exciting?
But scientifically? Yeah, I'll go with "exciting". The field seemed to move at a tremendous speed, or at least that's how it looked to me as an outsider.
Sequencing within less than a week, extremely rapid movement on the mRNA front (and really, the whole vaccination field - 200 candidates in 9 months), revamped understanding of aerosol transmission, leaps in rapid modelling, tremendous progress in terms of test development, growth in international collaboration, progress in the (public) understanding of chronic diseases, scaling up of wastewater monitoring, ...
Definitely exciting.
The practical science may have been exciting. Unfortunately "The Science" has been forever tainted thanks to secrets, tight-lips, mis-direction and "just trust us".
I think Covid was a net-negative for science.
Who did let us down: the people that were making things worse from day #1 by stirring the pot against science.
What is the solution to this?
The framing seems way too simplistic to ever be useful. It makes it seem as though there was just the Good side that had all the answers all along, and the Bad side who just needed to do what the Good side said.
In reality, it all came down to "who do you trust to both have your best interests at heart and to also be competent enough to achieve those best interests".
Turns out those aren't easy questions, and that people are naturally going to arrive at different answers for all sorts of reasons, and I think very few of them look like "boo science".
That, right there, is where so many people went wrong and what was blatantly exploited by grifters up and down the chain. The side of science didn't "have answers all along", but it was willing to learn and change.
And no, it wasn't "boo science". It was, to a large extent, political maneuvering using science as a convenient scape goat, because whenever science learned, it got turned into a "see, they don't know either". And, of course, with a large helping of grifters making money off the ensuing confusion.
In reality, it came down to seeing who was willing to change their mind in the face of new evidence, and it was a pretty clear signal. (It was not noise free, absolutely, but it was not extremely hard to read, either - if folks had a basic amount of scientific education. There's your solution, too)
This is the framing that I disagree with. There is no "the side of science". There are only people making assertions.
Some of those people were practicing the scientific method competently and in good faith, some of those people were doing nothing of the sort, and from here in the cheap seats we just had to do our best to decide who was who.
Some people like to think everyone should have trusted who they themselves decided to trust. I think this is unreasonable, but also unsurprising.
> Lee & Kim had been working on the material on and off since Kim was in graduate school in 1999 (LK-99 geddit?). Lee never makes tenure and is still stuck as an adjunct professor 19 years later. Kim goes off to work in battery materials for a decade plus. 2018 - they get funding from industry for another go at it.