An article decrying prejudice gives us its own demonstration of it. Does that somehow make the case better?
Tribalism comes for pandemic science
11–20 of 211 posts
Re: Tribalism comes for pandemic science
#12This is so very disheartening. I will speak only for the United States, as I am not familiar enough with other countries to comment. Not only is this impacting nearly every single person in the country, it is ruining the financial situation of over 40m people, primarily concentrated within the most financially vulnerable. This is because leaders on the left and right have refused to respond to new data, and are worki…
If we could just convince the hoaxers that wearing masks in public is not emasculating, and convince the doomers that we need to flatten the curve rather than attempt to completely contain the virus, we could go back to something bordering on normal life pretty quickly while we waited for vaccines to come along and kill off the virus altogether. And then we would be prepared to react to the next pandemic, too.
The recent hydroxychloroquine is an obvious example [1]; The Lancet should never have published something with data so obviously questionable, and the media should not have picked it up so immediately as political ammunition. But the result is that the media appears to be "once again" lying to the public.
Re: Tribalism comes for pandemic science
#13This is so very disheartening. I will speak only for the United States, as I am not familiar enough with other countries to comment. Not only is this impacting nearly every single person in the country, it is ruining the financial situation of over 40m people, primarily concentrated within the most financially vulnerable. This is because leaders on the left and right have refused to respond to new data, and are worki…
If we could just convince the hoaxers that wearing masks in public is not emasculating, and convince the doomers that we need to flatten the curve rather than attempt to completely contain the virus, we could go back to something bordering on normal life pretty quickly while we waited for vaccines to come along and kill off the virus altogether. And then we would be prepared to react to the next pandemic, too.
Re: Tribalism comes for pandemic science
#14Earlier quoted context omitted.
In fairness, the right has been pretty consistent about tailoring the response according to risk—i.e., those who are at risk should isolate and everyone else should resume work. They happened to be right in this regard. The left has also made exceptions in their “lockdown everything” policy, specifically with regard to their own protests (and the response of pandemic experts is a particularly interesting case study o…
I didn't want to get into a game of who has been most wrong, because that will automatically trigger people to go back to their camps and hunker down. I agree that the "isolate the vulnerable, continue with life otherwise" is most likely the best outcome. The fact that this idea is attributed to the right is going to mean it is DOA, for the most part.
Re: Tribalism comes for pandemic science
#15This is so very disheartening. I will speak only for the United States, as I am not familiar enough with other countries to comment. Not only is this impacting nearly every single person in the country, it is ruining the financial situation of over 40m people, primarily concentrated within the most financially vulnerable. This is because leaders on the left and right have refused to respond to new data, and are worki…
Re: Tribalism comes for pandemic science
#16Earlier quoted context omitted.
I didn't want to get into a game of who has been most wrong, because that will automatically trigger people to go back to their camps and hunker down. I agree that the "isolate the vulnerable, continue with life otherwise" is most likely the best outcome. The fact that this idea is attributed to the right is going to mean it is DOA, for the most part.
i would like to know how to "isolate the vulnerable"...?! We send to an island? we weld inside home? We should talk only if we have a realizable plan and not a "dream/idealistinc" plan.
Re: Tribalism comes for pandemic science
#17Unfortunately, due to not understanding exponentials, many advocated for starting the lockdown later: hence the UK's delayed lockdown and therefore highest death toll in Europe.
The people advocating for "herd immunity" never addressed the death rate; a death rate of even 0.5% in the UK would be three hundred thousand people, plus more with lingering side effects. As it is, we've confirmed 287k infected for 40k deaths, or 0.5% of the country infected. A very, very long way from immunity.
Re: Tribalism comes for pandemic science
#18This is so very disheartening. I will speak only for the United States, as I am not familiar enough with other countries to comment. Not only is this impacting nearly every single person in the country, it is ruining the financial situation of over 40m people, primarily concentrated within the most financially vulnerable. This is because leaders on the left and right have refused to respond to new data, and are worki…
>This is because leaders on the left and right have refused to respond to new data, and are working with the same plans set in March. As the article somewhat loosely implies, the problem is that all new data becomes suspect when all of our institutions are openly politicized. You think these biases only exist with respect to COVID? The marginalized right (consider the viceral response you're about to have to reading…
The right has also raised awareness about this in the media, and I (moderate liberal) couldn't agree more. We can't begin to really solve these problems and get everyone on board so long as we have openly partisan epistemological institutions--bias is the enemy of truth and we're maximizing it when we should be minimizing it. Those on the left will be quick to accuse the right of being anti-science and there's certainly some truth there, but I'm very suspicious of the idea that the falling political diversity is a function of the right selecting out of these fields rather than explicit or implicit discrimination (and at least within certain fields of academia, preliminary studies indicate a majority of faculty are willing to openly admit that they would discriminate against conservative candidates).
EDIT: I’m definitely not being downvoted out of the same kind of partisan tribalism that TFA is calling out. ◔̯◔
Re: Tribalism comes for pandemic science
#19"You’re probably doing it right now — skimming quickly to the end of this piece to see if I’m criticizing you or only those other people who behave so irresponsibly." An article decrying prejudice gives us its own demonstration of it. Does that somehow make the case better?
Re: Tribalism comes for pandemic science
#20Earlier quoted context omitted.
If we could just convince the hoaxers that wearing masks in public is not emasculating, and convince the doomers that we need to flatten the curve rather than attempt to completely contain the virus, we could go back to something bordering on normal life pretty quickly while we waited for vaccines to come along and kill off the virus altogether. And then we would be prepared to react to the next pandemic, too.
I think that the root problem that needs to be addressed is that to a lot of people, scientists and the media appear to put politics before truth. The recent hydroxychloroquine is an obvious example [1]; The Lancet should never have published something with data so obviously questionable, and the media should not have picked it up so immediately as political ammunition. But the result is that the media appears to be…
Fully agree here. I'm aware of Heterodox Academy trying to tackle this problem in the academic world--is there an analog solving for media bias?