Why Science Says Your Post on The “Blank Number of Ways Coronavirus Will Change The World” Is Most Likely Bullshit

Currently, the number of expert predictors on macro-economic and macro-social trends is only exceed by the number of unpaid epidemiologists floating out there on the Twitterverse and Facebookland.

That has led to a large number of writers of posts, articles, and social media updates to claim that — after just a few weeks of data — they can now make accurate long-term predictions about oncoming economic, technological, and social trends.

Here’s a list of predictions on the post-coronavirus world by a group of Big Thinkers. I didn’t even know that was a major. Here’s some “Global Thinkers” ideas. And some predictions on how we’ll shop in the coming decades. It’ll change how we work. Of course, we’re not going back to normal.

Bullshit.

These predictions — and hundreds more like them — are not based on a scientific analysis of data, but are more likely rooted in human emotions and biases.

Most of the writers are just as anxious and worried about the situation as we are, which is completely understandable. When we find ourselves in chaos, we want to find stability and meaning. Scientists call it sense-making. Rather than seeing these articles as accurate predictions, we should see them merely as human beings trying to make sense out of an unprecedented onslaught of death, mayhem, and economic distress.

50 Ways That The Coronavirus Will Lead To Exactly The Society I Want

Also, one thing I noticed is that these predictions — lo and behold! — tend to precisely match the predictor’s preferences and ideology. Be honest with me, have you read any Democrat posting that the COVID-19 will bring about a greater need for guns in the home? Has any Republican forecaster wrote that this will lead to socialized medicine. Science would say that this is confirmation bias at work. Confirmation bias is just the tendency of how we interpret new information in light of our existing beliefs and theories.

The New Normal Will Probably Be Like The Old Normal

Another well-known phenomenon that’s a much better predictor than Big or even Global Thinkers is called “mean reversion.” In the stock market, we see prices may jump, and even jump excessively, but they eventually revert back to typical pricing patterns. People do the same thing.

Immediately after Sept. 11th people went to church in droves, leading some people to say that the terrorist attack would lead to a growing interest in religion and permanently high church attendance. People also predicted that no one would want to fly again and that other forms of transportation would be used. In the short term, people went to church and didn’t fly. But, over time, church attendance dropped to normal levels and air traffic even grew.

If you look at past pandemics, people got back to living the way they like to. They reverted to the mean.

No Change?

This isn’t to say that there won’t be long-lasting effects of the pandemic. But, those long-lasting effects, like not being able to take a teeny-tiny bottle of soap on board a plane, will be subtle and difficult to predict.

But I’m not a big and/or global thinker, so, don’t take my word for it.