What sources are governments using for decision-making?
The biggest impacts seem to me to be via influencing government. The UK government, for instance, is still very reticent to enforce widespread testing or mandatory quarantine. Their ‘quarantine guidance’ for households with symptoms looks like this, which seems patently foolish for a number of reasons.
Influencing governments’ decision making is high-impact and potentially tractable via getting modelling and trial data to them. The UK Government publish their ‘scientific basis for decision making’ but it appears to be weeks out of date and unreferenced.
With that in mind, how do we get better decision-making information into government? What theory of change can we find for influencing policy makers? I believe this should be primarily targeted towards larger organisations and researchers who can have more direct influence, but may be useful for individuals as well.
Sir Patrick Vallance seems to be the key figure behind the UK policy. The guy was a professor of medicine in the past and who heads the Government Office for Science. Their policy is likely much more driven by modeling then the policy of other countries where the policies are decided by politicians instead of people with that kind of credentials.
To the extend that they have data on that page that’s weeks out of date it’s likely because the page has little to do with their actual decision making processes.
Vallance might still be wrong, but I think it’s wrong to model him as being simply misinformed.
What sources are governments using for decision-making?
The biggest impacts seem to me to be via influencing government. The UK government, for instance, is still very reticent to enforce widespread testing or mandatory quarantine. Their ‘quarantine guidance’ for households with symptoms looks like this, which seems patently foolish for a number of reasons.
Influencing governments’ decision making is high-impact and potentially tractable via getting modelling and trial data to them. The UK Government publish their ‘scientific basis for decision making’ but it appears to be weeks out of date and unreferenced.
With that in mind, how do we get better decision-making information into government? What theory of change can we find for influencing policy makers? I believe this should be primarily targeted towards larger organisations and researchers who can have more direct influence, but may be useful for individuals as well.
Sir Patrick Vallance seems to be the key figure behind the UK policy. The guy was a professor of medicine in the past and who heads the Government Office for Science. Their policy is likely much more driven by modeling then the policy of other countries where the policies are decided by politicians instead of people with that kind of credentials.
To the extend that they have data on that page that’s weeks out of date it’s likely because the page has little to do with their actual decision making processes.
Vallance might still be wrong, but I think it’s wrong to model him as being simply misinformed.