The logical thing to do for this set of Deep Dives would be to do a survey of international relations research on pandemics, but, unfortunately, that literature is fairly thin. Instead, we’ll take the next two Deep Dive editions to look at research on a skill many political scientists have tried to deploy in the face of COVID-19, with varying levels of success: strategic communications about topics on which they are not necessarily experts.

Economist Matthew Backus and political scientist Andrew Little have a new paper set to be published in the American Political Science Review that examines why policy experts have such a difficult time saying “I don’t know.” Academics and other policy experts compete in a marketplace of ideas in which reputation is the most important currency. Knowing things isn’t very useful if no one will listen to you, and policymakers are more likely to listen to experts they perceive as competent, so it’s crucial for policy experts to maintain a reputation for competence. Saying “I don’t know” when asked a policy question isn’t a great way to build up a reputation for policy competence.

The mystery, though, is why so few policymakers punish experts for claiming knowledge they don’t have. You might expect that the cost would be high — doesn’t it seem more incompetent to guess wrong than to admit you don’t know the right answer? It’s hard to see why policymakers would keep returning to experts who guess, creating incentives for other experts to guess in the future. Backus and Little broke out their 2x2 matrices and did some game theory to solve the mystery.

In Backus and Little’s telling, the answer lies in how policymakers evaluate expert performance after the fact. If their primary measure of how an expert performed is whether the expert’s prediction was correct, then it becomes very hard for the policymaker to tell competent experts who had a bad day from incompetent experts.

For example, say a policymaker asks two advisers — one who is good at their job and another who doesn’t know what they’re doing — whether she should take an umbrella on a trip to a place where there are no weather forecasts. The policymaker doesn’t know which adviser is competent, but she tells them both that she’ll be angry if she’s stuck without an umbrella in the rain or if she overpacks when it’s sunny. Neither adviser knows what the weather will be, but neither has any incentive to say so. The incompetent adviser is incompetent — he thinks the answer is knowable by some arcane scrying method that actually produces nonsense results. The competent adviser knows that he is guessing, but can’t admit it because saying “I don’t know” doesn’t address the policymaker’s standards. Instead, he has to make a guess because he’s not any more likley to be wrong than the incompetent adviser — they’re both making it up on the spot.

Backus and Little offer a solution to this problem — if, instead of evaluating the experts on the policy outcomes, the policymaker could evaluate them on their ability to rate the difficulty of the problem. That changes the incentive structure, and allows for the competent adviser to differentiate himself from the incompetent one without needing knowledge to which neither have access. If the policymaker goes on the trip and it turns out her destination was a well-known rainforest, she should probably be concerned about any adviser who professes ignorance about the weather there. If, however, she’s going to New York City in February in the age of climate change, where weather is truly unknowable, then the competent policymaker can make that case to her and differentiate himself from his colleague who is predicting the weather by reading entrails like an ancient Greek seer. Focus on policymaking process, it turns out, can produce more truthful inputs than a focus on outcomes.

Rebecca Collard outlined the twin crises facing Lebanon: COVID-19 and the precipitous decline of the national currency, the Lebanese lira. There were 77 confirmed COVID-19 cases in Lebanon as of Friday, and that number is expected to grow substantially. Yet the lira’s slide, and the corruption and mismanagement that caused it, are driving up the cost of medicines and other supplies people will require to get through the pandemic. Major protests against the government’s economic record started in October and continue even as COVID-19 concerns send many into isolation.

Molly Hurley examined the double standard Americans use to evaluate different countries’ nuclear weapon stockpiles. America and its allies present their nuclear capabilities as being a means to promote peace through deterrence, but that same discourse treats the nuclear stockpiles of countries like India, Pakistan, and North Korea, as tools meant for coercion. The distinction, Hurley argued, comes in the Orientalist frame many American policymakers bring to their work, which paints so-called Eastern countries and cultures as fundamentally less trustworthy than Western ones.

Megan Iacobini de Fazio reported from her semi-quarantine in Rome about life in the European epicenter of COVID-19. Since Wednesday, Italians have been largely confined to their homes by government order, only allowed outside for “urgent, demonstrable reasons.” Iacobini de Fazio is used to working at home, so the disruption in her life has been relatively minor, but many young Italians work away from home on short-term contracts and are worried that they will lose their jobs.

Coronavirus is giving us all kinds of examples of non-state actors taking on the trappings of stateness, from ISIS to… Disneyland.

When all you have is a hammer, everything looks like either a nail or, in this case, maybe another hammer.

One imagines the word the National Security Agency was looking for here was actually “demystifying” instead of “debunking,” but we can dream!

There’s been a rash of notionally inspirational tweets extolling all the groundbreaking projects people completed during quarantines throughout history (as though child care, financial concerns, and crippling anxiety about the state of the world aren’t any obstacle to repeating those feats), but only one of those tweets is any good.

Aviation literacy among America’s chicken wing restaurateurs is at a worryingly low ebb.

With social distancing comes the return of every old Twitter meme. Welcome back, William Carlos Williams.