One general factor that partially explains our ineffective approach to Wuflu is that too many people in key jobs affecting our response – the press, the medical research establishment, politicians, advisors – aren’t all that smart.
We could draft all the particle physicists ( for the duration) . True, most would not have a lot of specialized domain knowledge: it might take two or three weeks before they were better at their new jobs than typical CDC or WHO employees.
He has a point about it being useful to be smart: we have had many virologists and physicians say obviously useless stuff indicative of being unqualified despite being educated. On the other hand he has a clear physics conceit. Physicists undoubtedly have a high IQ but that is not sufficient for understanding the nuances of biology. In fact many physicists who have made the shift to biology have not meaningfully contributed to it simply because they don’t its language and think that writing down some mathematical beautiful but biologically useless equations is science. Biology has its own linguistic rules like paNini’s. If you don’t know them but have a high IQ you cannot just start understanding pANinian exegesis in a matter of 2 weeks or provide an useful insights in that regard. The truth of the matter is few people are well-versed in those foundations of biology though many may have a title of a biologist. More generally such issues are discussed here: https://manasataramgini.wordpress.com/2015/12/23/lutika-somakhyo%e1%b8%a5-pravada%e1%b8%a5/ One can some times do surprisingly well without being supersmart if one hits the right heuristic