101–110 of 970 posts
I think the US has caught this cancerous idea that the average person can't be trusted to think for themselves. The amount of condescension in that thought process is disgraceful. They think, someone has to tell the average person how to think. And the baffling thing is that supposed liberals think that thoughts should be policed by corporations, government, and self styled intellectuals (which seems so much against…
I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again. Regardless of where you stand on specific issues like censorship, public health and misinformation, I think it’s really dangerous how counter-consensus opinions cannot be expressed in the open without individuals facing intense public scrutiny. There needs to be some kind of correction mechanism in case the consensus opinion is misinformed. Maybe it would help to put in term…
What correction mechanism would you suggest? It's not clear how such a thing could be implemented.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I have no idea how to respond to the overcrowded hospitals. https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2020/us/covid-hospitals-... Hospitals have been jam packed the entire time. There is data everywhere to support this. Tons of procedures are not being done due to beds and ICUs being full. Ask anyone who works in a hospital. Call one if you'd like.
ICUs are at max capacity all the time pre-pandemic. In fact a study done in 2013 IIRC showed that you could pick any random date and any random hospital in the U.S. and there was a 16% chance it was at max capacity. So again, my question is this - if hospital capacity is truly a crisis, why have staffed beds been in decline since the beginning of the pandemic? Half a million healthcare workers have left their jobs si…
I know some folks who had covid, and just don't want to trigger their bodies systems again with a series of shots.
For some reason, if you have other diseases your immune system likely provides some protection against re-infection, but we are being told covid is different. This just seems so likely to be a lie its mind boggling.
Let healthcare works test their blood for cross-reactivity with omicron / antibodies. If you are equal or better than some threshold (pfizer vaccine from 10 months ago) you get a card and are good to go.
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You're taking an experimental prophylactic against a disease with a 99.9% survival rate. Probably higher if you're under 50. And we still don't really know how safe it is, because the 'gold standard' data (double blind testing) is absent, save for 2 months' of Pfizer data. Your benefit has apparently outweighed your cost. Fine. Mine hasn't. I like to read any and all opinions, regardless of 'bias'. We all have biases…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
"excuse to argue against it" is a very slippery slope. There should be no excuses required to exercise free speech and free inquiry. All you've attempted to do here is impugn the motives of those holding a position contrary to your own without addressing their arguments.
So share the argument against if you are so compelled to reject it. Please also reject all other scientific advanced that have made it possible for you to live a longer life no matter how small those advancements seem to be. For if you choose to reject the scientific community and their solutions than you should then refuse the rest right down to the safety of the roads you drive on now. Making this argument is a lux…
Just throwing my 2c into the well, as someone who used to be highly "pro-science" but lost confidence in much of academia and the validity of scientific research in general after starting a PhD and seeing how the sausage is made. The biggest problem science is facing is not an external threat from a rabble of ignorant science deniers, but the complete degradation of quality within the scientific institutions themselv…
Has that maybe been true since the beginning of 'natural philosophy'? Perhaps things seem (much) worse now because we have survivorship bias, the same way classical music seems higher quality than pop, because the 90% crud[0] has been long forgotten.
The issue that plagues us is a lack of trust in long-standing societal authorities. We can't follow the entire scientific proof chain for every piece of information we encounter, because we don't have time. So we rely on authority to some extent, whether that be peer review, government, independent bodies, etc. We need to be able to trust that these bodies are telling us the truth and aren't seeking to mislead us. Be…
Thanks for your comment. I broadly agree with your points and find them insightful. In particular I appreciate that you model authority as an analogue for trust, and trust as an analogue for independent verification. I think trust is a prerequisite for successful convincing, because it is hard for human brains to overcome the emotional and relational elements of discourse, and we need to be in a receptive frame of mi…
For example, I think many distrust Fauci less because of Fauci himself and his behaviors and more because his behaviors may remind them of their primary care physician who treated them condescendingly, saying they were stupid for asking a question. Or because their parent got Alzheimer's or cancer and don't know where it came from and were told by doctors that their family member would be fine, even though their family is not fine.
I guess I just wished we paid more attention to the transgressions that happened to find the presumed cause of distrust so we can repair it, because I think trust can be highly efficient and distrust highly inefficient at times.
Just throwing my 2c into the well, as someone who used to be highly "pro-science" but lost confidence in much of academia and the validity of scientific research in general after starting a PhD and seeing how the sausage is made. The biggest problem science is facing is not an external threat from a rabble of ignorant science deniers, but the complete degradation of quality within the scientific institutions themselv…
The issue that plagues us is a lack of trust in long-standing societal authorities. We can't follow the entire scientific proof chain for every piece of information we encounter, because we don't have time. So we rely on authority to some extent, whether that be peer review, government, independent bodies, etc. We need to be able to trust that these bodies are telling us the truth and aren't seeking to mislead us. Be…
Thanks for your comment. I broadly agree with your points and find them insightful. In particular I appreciate that you model authority as an analogue for trust, and trust as an analogue for independent verification. I think trust is a prerequisite for successful convincing, because it is hard for human brains to overcome the emotional and relational elements of discourse, and we need to be in a receptive frame of mi…
I've posted elsewhere in the thread about my own opinion that I believe the main issue we have is not with trust in the scientific sense (e.g. I think that most people generally _do_ believe that epidemiologists know what they're doing and that the outliers are exceptions), but with trust in the plan of action e.g. the entire chain of process.
Examples, all primarily via trust (I'm not a biologist):
I believe that excessive consumption of sugar can cause diabetes.
I know that alcohol can (will, given enough time) cause liver disease.
I know that driving my car drastically increases my risk of being in a car accident and therefore meeting a swift end, an agonising end, or perhaps a lifetime of disability.
I still engage in those activities despite the downsides because I believe them to be of net benefit, both to myself and to society as a whole. I'm willing to fully argue through that process.
Where I think the issue lies at present is that we're sorely lacking in convincing full-chain argumentation.
A person can trust that the UK health authorities know their stuff, they can believe that coronavirus exists and can be dangerous, but that doesn't solve the problem of whether or not they should skip out on their friend's birthday party or not. It only makes up a very small part of the jigsaw puzzle, the rest still has to be filled in somehow.