The background of their author, however, seems fairly consistent with an “established experts and institutions largely failed” story:
Zeynep Tufekci, a contributing opinion writer for The New York Times, writes about the social impacts of technology. She is an assistant professor in the School of Information and Library Science at the University of North Carolina, a faculty associate at the Berkman Center for Internet and Society at Harvard, and a former fellow at the Center for Internet Technology Policy at Princeton. Her research revolves around politics, civics, movements, privacy and surveillance, as well as data and algorithms.
Originally from Turkey, Ms. Tufekci was a computer programmer by profession and academic training before turning her focus to the impact of technology on society and social change.
It is interesting that perhaps some of the best commentary on COVID in the world’s premier newspaper comes from a former computer programmer whose main job before COVID was writing about tech issues.
(Though note that this is my super unsystematic impression. I’m not reading a ton of COVID commentary, neither in the NYT nor elsewhere. I guess a skeptical observer could also argue “well, the view you like is the one typically championed by Silicon Valley types and other semi/non-experts, so you shouldn’t be surprised that if you see newspaper op-eds you like they are written by such people”.)
There were some other recent NYT articles which based on my limited COVID knowledge I thought were pretty good, e.g. on the origin of the virus or airborne vs. droplet transmission [1].
The background of their author, however, seems fairly consistent with an “established experts and institutions largely failed” story:
It is interesting that perhaps some of the best commentary on COVID in the world’s premier newspaper comes from a former computer programmer whose main job before COVID was writing about tech issues.
(Though note that this is my super unsystematic impression. I’m not reading a ton of COVID commentary, neither in the NYT nor elsewhere. I guess a skeptical observer could also argue “well, the view you like is the one typically championed by Silicon Valley types and other semi/non-experts, so you shouldn’t be surprised that if you see newspaper op-eds you like they are written by such people”.)
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[1] What do you do if you want to expand on this topic “without the word limits” of an NYT article? Easy.