RANDOM MUSING ABOUT POLITICIANS AND THEIR SCIENTIFIC ADVISORS:

I guess I can be considered an expert since I do have an earned PhD (in electrical engineering). As a young graduate student wanting to join the academy so I could share my 'expertise' I remember a somewhat jaded older faculty member who shared with me his definition of expert: from the two words, ex-, meaning 'has been' and spurt, which is a drip under pressure. As I moved up the faculty ladders, I found his definition wise indeed.

Then I moved to industry, where I was initially an 'expert', deeply knowledgeable in a relatively narrow subfield of radar engineering. Time passed as I matured, branched out into other related areas, becoming less and less in-depth knowledgeable in more and more areas. Pretty soon I became a systems engineer, at that time the informal title of the older graybeards (sorry ladies, there were very few women engineers back in those distant days) who had been around the block a few times and knew a little about a lot of different things.

That experience has led me to formulate the following observation about my career. One becomes an expert by knowing more and more about less and less until he (or she) ultimately knows everything about nothing; one becomes a systems engineer by knowing less and less about more and more until he (or again, she) knows nothing about everything.

Which leads me now to this philosophical observation: politicians are somewhat akin to systems engineers; their scientific advisors akin to experts. So our government is being run by people who know nothing about everything, advised by people who know everything about nothing.

Which, I think, perfectly sums up the current coronavirus pandemic fiasco....