"[W]e are increasingly sorting individual approaches based on our ideological tribes. This creates new blind spots and greater risks of overconfidence and intellectual hubris.”

It’s a thoughtful piece and makes some good points, but … oddly idealistic.

Given the unique public-health risks of COVID-19, a prompt “central command” response was probably necessary. But at what point do we pause and reconsider or readjust the focus of our scientific energy? At what point do we give awe and wonder their due?

This seems like a weird question to be asking right now when we still have 1,700 a day dying of the disease, we’re still quite possibly more than a year away from a vaccine, and we face the possibility of a second wave this fall (if not sooner).

I’m sure there’s still plenty of awe and wonder going on in physics, botany, zoology, and lots of other fields. We properly have other priorities for health sciences right now.

Perhaps despite the exploding numbers of people in the early days, we ought to have had some awe and wonder at what was going on—exponential growth. Perhaps if we’d had more of that, we’d have more meditation on what was really going on, and less judgment of those trying to keep models apace of ever changing information.

Or maybe “dream on.”