"Our behaviour is rarely a function of causal understanding: humans create and thrive in a world too complicated to understand, writes Michael Muthukrishna.
In 2015, in the wake of the West African Ebola epidemic, Bill Gates issued a warning (summarised in a TED Talk): Of the killers that could claim 10 million or more lives, the most likely was an epidemic. After any event, it is easy to point to those who predicted it, ignoring all those who predicted other possible futures or warned us of other possible dangers—the classic problem of selection bias. But it is also true that the Covid-19 pandemic caught us with our proverbial pants down. ..."

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