361–370 of 385 posts
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What do you even mean by that? Their ideas are perfectly coherent and consistent within their own framing. Just because you look at the world through a different frame, doesn't mean that these people are saying things that are unreasonable
They consistently disregard evidence that contradicts their core beliefs.
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This level of cynicism is the cause of the downfall of society. Journalism is as necessary as government. As necessary as speech itself. Particularly in the age of perfect facsimiles of audio/photo/video evidence facilitated by AI, webs of trust and reputable sources of information will be as important as ever. It is dangerous and wrong to insult the profession as an idea. None of this is to say that journalism is fl…
Journalism is necessary in the sense that thought control is necessary in (nominally) democractic societies. See Walter Lippmann and others. (This comment is not an endorsement of that worldview.)
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Journalism is necessary in the sense that thought control is necessary in (nominally) democractic societies. See Walter Lippmann and others. (This comment is not an endorsement of that worldview.)
It is necessary because an informed electorate is a prerequisite for successful democracy.
Skepticism by the unqualified is just denial of expertise. Whatever Mr Silver's qualification on statistics, it does not render him any sort of expert on contagious pathology nor on coronaviruses in general. Skepticism is warranted when one has an underlying knowledge basis to interpret new statements, put them into context of the existing models and detect something amiss. Without that foundation, what being called…
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No, they're two very different things, because one involves an adaptation. Once adapted, the rules of the game for cross-species transmission events are completely different. Or do you maintain that a combination cross-species transmission and adaptation to the new host is as common as cross-species transmission of already-adapted viruses?
I see that you're trying to imply that SARS-CoV-2 was pre-adapted to humans, while SARS wasn't, so this is going in a conspiracy-theory direction. I guess the Wuhan Institute of Virology also produced a special deer-adapted version which they released into the wilds of North America, and a mink-adapted version they released on farms in Denmark, and a hamster-adapted version, and a cat-adapted version, and on and on.…
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That Jon Stewart take on it is pretty funny https://youtu.be/sSfejgwbDQ8?t=211 , the Hershey factory, gets me pretty good.
An incredibly dumb take by someone who has no idea what he's talking about. The Hershey factory in question is the Huanan market - you know, the place where they were selling wild animals, where the initial cases were heavily clustered around. It's not the research institute on the other side of the city that never even had a closely related virus in the first place.
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> This, is damning evidence regardless of any of that. Nothing remotely like this was being presented by mainstream newsmedia, perhaps because nothing remotely like it was being presented to them by the scientists they talked to. There was no version of a lab origin theory that was being presented as worthy of consideration. You have to acknowledge this is incredibly weak logic. “A thing is possible, therefore it hap…
You are blatantly missing the point. The point: Scientist says in private "A thing is possible" but in public "A thing is not all possible!" Not the point: "A thing is possible, therefore it happened"
I wonder how this would play out if we transposed it to any other field. If I was interviewed and asked if So-And-So had proved P=NP, I'd just say "almost certainly not" knowing that any other response would require an amount of nuance that wasn't going to be conveyed - despite having plenty of private conversations that "yeah, P=NP is total possible and it'd be interesting because...". And that's a pretty theoretical problem with immediate real world impact, and relatively little new being discovered day-to-day.
I'd be shocked if there was any non-trivial topic discussed in any field where the internal debate _isn't_ broader and more nuanced in private than what is conveyed in public interviews. That's a natural consequence of communicating to a population with less expertise than the speaker, IMO.
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WaPo runs “Democracy dies in darkness” while parroting the absolute lie that was Hunter Biden’s laptop was “Russian Dissinformation”… that imo takes extra arrogance beyond just “we’re the voice of the people” or CNN’s “This might be illegal for you to read but we can because we are trained journalists”.
I don't believe WaPo ever claimed that. They wrote this in October 2020: https://www.washingtonpost.com/outlook/2020/10/24/hunter-bid... >Insisting that the Hunter Biden laptop is fake is a trap. So is insisting that it’s real. That's not saying it's Russian disinformation. Just that it's unconfirmed to be either disinformation or real. (Which, at the time, was the correct assessment.)
https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/hunter-joe-biden-ema...
The initial reporting days earlier didn’t use the exact phrase “Russian Disinformation” it did take a least half a dozen times say Russian Intelligence.
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I see that you're trying to imply that SARS-CoV-2 was pre-adapted to humans, while SARS wasn't, so this is going in a conspiracy-theory direction. I guess the Wuhan Institute of Virology also produced a special deer-adapted version which they released into the wilds of North America, and a mink-adapted version they released on farms in Denmark, and a hamster-adapted version, and a cat-adapted version, and on and on.…
Nope, but you're doing a nice job illustrating the point I made in my very first post in this thread.
And then claiming that the numerous independent clusters of SARS that popped up in wild animal markets across the Pearl River Delta aren't examples of zoonosis?
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I'm not "stoic" or much into any other "ism", and don't particularly align with many other people in "STEM" fields. The practices I've discovered came after many years of experiencing debilitating emotional and physical pain, which is now mostly resolved, though not completely, hence the ongoing work. That it's common for people to be influenced more by cognitive biases and other emotional patterns than logic is not…
You should take an half an hour out of your time to watch this video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lSvKNNtkUSU
I’m not sure if it is meant to make me aware of anything I wasn’t already aware of, but for the record, I’ve spent much of the past 10+ years thinking about the pros and cons of this work and wrestling with the risks/pitfalls she describes (as well as eschewing stoicism for pretty much those reasons).
One of the biggest changes from doing this work is that I’ve become less repressed and more compassionate and emotionally available, as well as being more committed to working to overcome societal injustice and dysfunction.