Why don't Americans trust experts? Just ask a paranormal investigator

Social distancing dates back literally to the 14th century dude. It is a standard tool in the contagion toolbox. The null hypothesis is that you would apply it to this contagion too until you have evidence otherwise.

No, he told us the number 6 "just appeared," as compared to the numbers 5 or 7.

> You can read these papers for yourself to see how motivated the reasoning is.

Please link to said papers.

Again, you're just wrong on all the facts. There are plenty of good reasons to have defaulted to social distancing. Not only was this logical at the time, but all evidence still points to it having been the correct decision in retrospect. I know you're in the habit of simply dismissing countervailing evidence, i.e. you've decided to give up on yourself, but there is literally centuries of evidence behind social distancing.

The fact that people caught COVID while far away from each other literally isn't even a dent in this body of evidence. And I don't mean that because it's weak evidence against it, but that it's not even evidence against it. Nothing about the social distancing hypothesis suggests one cannot get sick at a distance.

https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC2966666/

https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC1929395/

https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC2808319/

Thank you for providing all of your evidence (none). It is illustrative for other readers.

Details matter! Medieval quarantine ships worked against plague and cholera because those pathogens spread very differently to aerosolized coronavirus, and had very different mortality profiles. You can't just lump every possible pathogen into one bucket labelled "contagion" then claim you now understand it. That's exactly the kind of broken thinking and fake expertise that led to so much loss of trust.

Your choice of papers is an example of this problem in action:

https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC2966666/ - it's about school closures+flu, but people got upset about school closures because unlike flu COVID overwhelmingly affected the very old and very sick, so it didn't make sense to close schools to protect kids. It's also the kind of analysis that's likely to be P-hacked.

https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC1929395/ - a mortality report on Asian flu. What point are you trying to make with this paper? If it's about school closures again, it gives attack rates of 59% for asian flu in schools, but attack rate for SARS-CoV-2 in schools was measured at more like 4% (again, with mild cases that didn't endanger the kids). You can't reduce infectiousness and impact by 10x+ and say they're the same.

https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC2808319/ - SARS-1 this time, which is at least a coronavirus! But it's also one that had very different mortality/spread profiles to SARS-CoV-2 (I don't personally think it should have been called SARS-2 because of this difference, even though they're closely related otherwise). It's an observational regression analysis again, so low quality evidence, but what it shows is that even for SARS-1 where quarantine was more effective the number-needed-to-quarantine was uselessly high, with 7.5 infected needed to be quarantined to eliminate just one case. That's completely unworkable especially as social distancing isn't even close to the same thing as an actual quarantine. This paper is the sort of analysis that led to the pre-2020 WHO recommendations against quarantine and travel restrictions for RV epidemics, and supports what I'm saying: they could easily have known social distancing wouldn't work, and probably did know.

> Generally, science is not built on trusting others, it's built on being skeptical.

It is actually built on probability.

That is the most important thing missing from a lot of discourse, imho. Modeling reality is a lot of "this is very probably true/false" rather than "this is true/false", but everyday communication is almost exclusively in the latter form.

Authority/expert status is just a heuristic used to guess the probability of what is presented by that authority, but proper communication about what is presented should include indications of that probability. This is however so uncommon that almost everybody thinks of ideas in a binary way, leading to distrust, tribalism and antagonism.

Compare "eggs are bad for you" with "eggs are probably bad for you". If a year later the same authority states the opposite trust disappears rapidly if it was stated as absolutely as in the former case. A lot of overly confident communication by authorities in the Covid-19 days in an effort to improve compliance caused massive distrust, I'm sure.

Something to try in your own life is to include probabilities when you state something. How sure are you of what you're saying? Having to think about this quickly leads to the intellectual humility you mention. It also antagonizes people less, because you're inevitably going to leave more room for opposing views.

How many licensure boards are there in the US? Roughly 60.

How many allow their doctors to relay verifiably false medical information with their patients? Roughly zero.

Is this because there's some big conspiracy of all 60 licensure boards getting together to suppress information, or is it because each of them has independently reached the self-evident conclusion that licensees spreading false information destroys the credibility of the profession?

Emergent phenomena, amigo.

Your perspective on religious institutions is very different than mine and I'm very curious how that came to be and how much different your experience was than mine. I'm in my thirties and since I was very young I've known *not* to trust most religious institutions and --being raised on Sesame Street and Mr Rogers-- instinctively was not fond of the people in them. Most church goers I would meet were usually not friendly to others who were different than them and were seemingly interested in their own "salvation" before others. Leadership was mainly interested in power/money and would be aghast if anyone dared question anything about the church - even something as stupid as a talking snake. Oh and Pikachu, Harry Potter, music and asking questions were all a ticket to eternal damnation even though you are loved. 25+ years later, I'm not at all surprised about the catholic church's rampant sexual exploitation of children or christians' downright hatred of others and complete lack of Jesus's teachings. Even the rise of christo nationalism and fascism in the US seemed like an inevitability. Seeing a church organization lie about a for-profit chat bot seems on-brand and has seemed on-brand for as long as I've been an inquisitive child.