I think the most surprising piece of the interview that I reviewed for this week is the level of confidence vs. uncertainty that different experts have in their own predictions in their respective fields. The experts discuss how unrealistic it is to produce a prediction related to the timeline of a pandemic, i.e. "they want us to say next Thursday the pandemic will end". This statement is not surprising as this level of prediction is far at the end of the uncertainty spectrum and it is unrealistic to expect this level of certainty. However, I was surprised to learn that the level of uncertainty is fairly close to the other end of this spectrum. Essentially, these predictions are more random and unsupported than I had previously believed/would ideally want them to be on matters that relate to me and my daily life.
I think that rather than leaving questions unanswered the interview sometimes didn't push certain topics as far as I might like. I wished that the interviewers would have challenged the subjects slightly more, such as encouraging the experts to defend or provide explanations for how uncertain some of these predictions are and why that is not something to worry about necessarily depending on the nature of the prediction.
I liked this reflection and I think that it is definitely important to understand that temporal predictions like the one you mentioned about COVID are unrealistic. I think that I personally would be more content knowing that my prediction has a large confidence interval but that I know exactly what percent confidence interval it is rather than getting a point estimate with very high uncertainty. I think that it would have been very interesting to see challenging perspectives on the subjects. It would be cool to see what other options there are to predicting COVID.