One of the main reasons I knew what was going to happen with the pandemic before everyone else, other than my sparkling brilliance, is because I was reading Zeynep Tufekci long before the disease struck. And I like that she’s calling coup now that she was proven completely correct:

In large part thanks to her wisdom, I was buying supplies and readying for bad times when the people in my office were literally making fun of me for preparing.

Later, they asked me, “But how did you know?” How do you answer such a question? As a rule, people don’t get smarter, and if they do it’s very very slowly. Trying to explain the precautionary principle, risk assessment in dynamic stochastic systems, how exponentials work and all that is going to be impossible. Even 1/10 of that is far beyond the capabilities of most people due to our poor education system and terrible information environment.