About declaring it a “pandemic,” I’ve seen the WHO reason as follows (me paraphrasing):
«Once we call it a pandemic, some countries might throw up their hands and say “we’re screwed,” so we should better wait before calling it that, and instead emphasize that countries need to try harder at containment for as long as there’s still a small chance that it might work.»
So overall, while the OP’s premise appealing to major legal/institutional consequences of the WHO using the term “pandemic” seems false, I’m now even more convinced of the key claim I wanted to argue for: that the WHO response does not provide an argument against epistemic modesty in general, nor for the epistemic superiority of “informed amateurs” over experts on COVID-19.
Yeah, I think that’s a good point.
I’m not sure I can have updates in favor or against modest epistemology because it seems to me that my true rejection is mostly “my brain can’t do that.” But if I could have further updates against modest epistemology, the main Covid-19-related example for me would be how long it took some countries to realize that flattening the curve instead of squishing it is going to lead to a lot more deaths and tragedy than people seem to have initially thought. I realize that it’s hard to distinguish between what’s actual government opinion versus what’s bad journalism, but I’m pretty confident there was a time when informed amateurs could see that experts were operating under some probably false or at least dubious assumptions. (I’m happy to elaborate if anyone’s interested.)
About declaring it a “pandemic,” I’ve seen the WHO reason as follows (me paraphrasing):
«Once we call it a pandemic, some countries might throw up their hands and say “we’re screwed,” so we should better wait before calling it that, and instead emphasize that countries need to try harder at containment for as long as there’s still a small chance that it might work.»
Yeah, I think that’s a good point.
I’m not sure I can have updates in favor or against modest epistemology because it seems to me that my true rejection is mostly “my brain can’t do that.” But if I could have further updates against modest epistemology, the main Covid-19-related example for me would be how long it took some countries to realize that flattening the curve instead of squishing it is going to lead to a lot more deaths and tragedy than people seem to have initially thought. I realize that it’s hard to distinguish between what’s actual government opinion versus what’s bad journalism, but I’m pretty confident there was a time when informed amateurs could see that experts were operating under some probably false or at least dubious assumptions. (I’m happy to elaborate if anyone’s interested.)