FOIA Files: At Outset of Pandemic, Academics Scoff at "Doing the Math"

A "digital literacy" professor lauded for warning the public away from "critical thinking" blasts the public's "addiction" to skepticism

Early Covid-19 panic, Taiwan, May 2020

On March 10, 2020, in the peak-panic moment of the Covid-19 pandemic, “digital literacy” expert Michael Caulfield of the University of Washington wrote an email to colleagues explaining his “favorite search right now,” which was coronavirus and “do the math”:

“One of the things I notice,” he wrote, “is a sort of Dunning-Kruger effect where people who know one thing (exponential growth, denominators in mortality rates) come to believe this gives them some special insight that is somehow not known by public health experts.”

The email is part of an 836-page FOIA production Racket received last month. Among other things, they’re packed with exchanges denouncing the practice of doing one’s own research. In the extant case, Caulfield questions the basic premise of college. Should we really be teaching young people to think for themselves, he wonders, when a simpler idea might work better?

Caulfield explains that this Dunning-Kruger phenomenon, in which people think they can do their own math, “ties into… people’s addiction to epistemologies that appear to them to not require trust,” e.g. “You can verify this yourself.” This is a no-no, he decides, coming to the aforementioned remarkable conclusion about education: