This is condescending and wrong, Matt. Zeynep is not the intellectual midwife to awkward real experts who had trouble expressing their feelings, but someone who pushed hard against a near-universal consensus at great professional risk. Her name is on the research papers.
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I recall you at the time buying up masks for personal use while your employer published explainers deprecating their use as baseless myth that would do more harm than good. She fought like a lion and did the work, so please don't mischaracterize it as "great popularizer"
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I think Zeynep is amazing but I think it’s a bad idea to tar the whole medical community with “there was near-universal consensus”. I think many doctors disagreed with the public-health authorities but didn’t have a way to say it.
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I should specify that I’m referring to the public health authorities in the United States and our public intellectuals, not the medical system writ large, let alone the many people in East Asia who looked at this policy with incredulity
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I think Matt’s claim here is pretty valid: that the science community didn’t know how to muster a general discussion about how they didn’t agree with this advice being given by people in positions of authority, and Zeynep did.
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I don’t really wanna get involved (no win) but the idea that the science community in the United States somehow actually agreed with masks being useful but I got to voice it is either ludicrous or they’re extremely good at keeping life-saving secrets in the middle of a pandemic.
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Replying to @zeynep @matthew_d_green and
If it wasn’t that recent, one could think it was plausible, that I just had the chance to voice something that they actually already knew. Instead I did my analysis and wrote my piece thinking it might end my career as a public intellectual. It was that against the grain. Anyway.
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That’s fair. And this point shouldn’t take away from what you did, and how you put yourself out there. Yet within a few weeks of your piece, the idea that masks were essential to preventing COVID had become ubiquitous within the community.
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Replying to @matthew_d_green @zeynep and
I want to give some credit to the scientific community based on the notion that these ideas were out there in scientists’ mind and that they needed a catalyst to crystallize around, and you helped to provide that.
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Yeah, I guess my role was to read these "scientists" minds where they held these very secret thoughts while loudly claiming the opposite. It's been an interesting few months for a telepath like me! (Btw, WHO guidance took till June to change and it still has the science wrong).
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Anyway, I don't need credit or praise, and honestly I'm more than fine but next time, I'd suggest more open-eyed assessment of what the reality was, not because of me, but women's role is routinely minimized to being "communicators" rather than analysts or thinkers on their own.
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Zeynep, I’ve worked with you and I’m hurt you’d think that was my opinion. My assumption was that neither you (nor I) have any expertise in this area beyond the ability to read others’ existing work and synthesize it effectively. But maybe I’m wrong about that.
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Replying to @matthew_d_green @zeynep and
But the climate then was precisely in the domain of
@zeynep’s expertise of rhetorical cultures and communication, and separating the technical details from the interaction of unknowns, language, and authority. It’s not “just science” or “just communication”, they are linked.1 reply 0 retweets 3 likes - Show replies
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