To Understand This Era, You Need to Think in Systems

As my colleague Ben Smith wrote in an August profile, sociologist Zeynep Tufekci has “made a habit of being right on the big things.” She saw the threat of the coronavirus early and clearly. She saw that the public health community was ignoring the evidence on masking, and raised the alarm persuasively enough that she tipped the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention toward new, lifesaving guidance. Before Tufekci was being prescient about the coronavirus, she was being prescient about disinformation online, about the way social media was changing political organizing, about what election forecasting models could actually tell us, about the rising threat of authoritarianism in America.

Tufekci attributes this track record to “systems thinking,” which she believes holds the key to forming a more accurate understanding of everything from pandemics to social media to the Republican Party. So I asked Tufekci to come on a podcast for a conversation about how she thinks, and what the rest of us can learn from it.

In answering those questions, we discuss why public health experts were slow to change guidance on disruptive measures like masking and travel bans, the logic of authoritarian regimes, why Asian countries so decisively outperformed Western Europe and America in containing coronavirus, why Tufekci thinks media coverage of the vaccines is too pessimistic, the crisis of American democracy, whether a more competent demagogue will succeed Donald Trump, and much more.

Mentioned in this episode:

“How Zeynep Tufekci Keeps Getting the Big Things Right” by Ben Smith

“Why Telling People They Don’t Need Masks Backfired” by Zeynep Tufekci

“Can We Do Twice as Many Vaccinations as We Thought?” by Zeynep Tufekci and Michael Mina

“America’s Next Authoritarian Will Be Much More Competent” by Zeynep Tufekci

Recommendations:

"Groundhog Day" (movie)

"Normal Accidents" by Charles Perrow

"The Dispossessed" by Ursula K. Le Guin

You can find transcripts (posted midday) and more episodes of "The Ezra Klein Show" at nytimes.com/ezra-klein-podcast, and you can find Ezra on Twitter @ezraklein.

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