Science and scientific expertise are more important than ever
scientificamerican.com
scientificamerican.com
Personally, as a scientist, I am comforted that there are enough others out there who doubt the entire notion of a scientific establishment that the population should "trust" to make decisions without oversight. Our numbers are growing, and I know many people who fight every day to ensure we will never be ruled by unquestionable expert consensus. Anyone who has been inside these institutions knows exactly how petty and arbitrary the hierarchical structures can be. I'd rather be ruled over by elite families than squabbling, territorial, overconfident scientists who can be bought off for nothing and blackmailed easily.
I think the constant stream of these articles just illustrates the massive social blind spot that comes from training STEM professionals solely for careers rather than for citizenship, communication and community membership. STEM training itself has sadly become a hierarchical, cult-like, anti-intellectual system that deprives students of critical thinking skills.
Bought off by who? I presume the "elite families" you mention. So either way we are ruled by the wealthy in this model. There are other options of course and I assume you would agree, I just wanted to point out my surprise at this false dichotomy (that's not even a dichotomy since they're mostly the same scenario).
I also agree 100% that STEM professionals should be trained to be citizens first.
I actually think this is partly a self-inflicted wound -- a large fraction of major grant givers want truth and can stand findings that go against their beliefs, but given the heavy dependence of labs on grants there is a tendency to sugar coat findings to the taste of the money source.
Which is totally, completely and absolutely against the spirit of real science. My 2c.
But it is principally a love of Nature (and it’s universals) and not a love of wealth which moves the civilization higher. Galileo, Descartes, Newton had pretensions but immortal ones.
> only a polytheistic tradition (such as Athens) can breed a love of natural beauty which obligates a love of knowing its ways.
None of the people in your list below were polytheists:
> Galileo, Descartes, Newton
FWIW, Stanley Jaki argues something quite different to what you've written in "Science and Creation" and "The Road of Science and the Ways of God".
P.S. A quick search doesn't bring up any noteworthy Georg Feuerbachs.
George, my mistake. (Polytheism brings up the relevant passage starting with Jews)
The philosophers did not follow the gods, they believed in the divinity of reason. If anything, and consistent with the Scientific Revolution, the confidence in the self-certainty of reason permitted the imagination to expand “beyond” the natural, to examine it, to know it, to necessarily effect it for our reasonable ends.
Where I think the pagans fall short is in their worship of visible objects, where they have no concept of an invisibly present permanence in nature, ie electromagnetic radiation.
If I restrict myself to the topic at hand, then I have to say I don't see how he manages to construe the doctrine of creatio ex nihilo (CEN) as intrinsically opposed to contemplation or speculative knowledge—science that seeks knowledge for its own sake and not merely to master nature—or how he construes it as essentially utilitarian. I have a suspicion that this is a corollary of his position that God is merely a projection of Man, but my understanding is that this position is a consequence of Kantian skepticism and the resulting agnosticism. If you can't know things in themselves, then all you have left is science as mastery of nature.
One difficulty with the claim that somehow CEN is intrinsically opposed to theory is the failure to explain the entire Christian intellectual tradition. Since we're talking about science specifically, it becomes impossible to explain the enormous successes of the sciences in the West and historically the relative poverty of their success in every other civilization. While the stirrings of science occurred in a number of civilizations—and we should give them their due—and while the Greeks may be argued to be the most successful of the bunch, nowhere but the West, whatever its faults, do we see the flourishing of a sustained and vibrant scientific culture. If we take a broader and classical view of science, one embraced by the Greeks, to include any systematic body of knowledge, then this period of flourishing extends far into the centuries preceding the rise of modern science and includes the intellectually vibrant Middle Ages. Indeed, without the Middle Ages, it is difficult to imagine how modern science could have emerged in the first place. Without arguing that this could only have happened in the West (that is Jaki's position, as far as I understand it), it suffices to note that it did happen in the West and it did so in a culture that embraced CEN.
The fact that neither Jewish civilization, nor Islamic civilization for that matter, ever truly had a sustained and sophisticated philosophical or scientific culture does not support Feuerbach's thesis. Again, his claim is that CEN is intrinsically opposed to theoretical endeavors (which includes philosophy). But all I need to show is one example of where CEN did not stifle science.
Here I would add that one thing that stifled science in the Islamic world is not CEN, but the belief that Allah is essentially pure will, and a pure will that can contradict itself. Accepting that kind of creator can only discourage speculative science. Here, we can appeal to Feuerbach's own words when he says that the origin of a thing tells us about that thing. A world created by a self-contradicting creator doesn't inspire much confidence in the intelligibility of what he's created.
In stark contrast, Christianity (certainly Catholic Christianity) conceives of the world as utterly intelligible. To put it somewhat poetically, the world is divine thought or divine word and therefore intelligible and knowable through and through (we have to note both the immanence and transcendence of God to avoid both pantheism and deism). When John says "In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.", the original Greek uses the word "λόγος" for word. Anyone familiar with Greek knows that the English translation of λόγος is utterly inadequate to express its meaning (the Latin "verbum" does a better job). In Exodus, when Moses asks God who he should say has sent him, God responds with "I Am" (or "Ehyeh", from which we get Yahweh). God is revealing himself as Being itself and in revealing himself is making himself known. So God himself is intelligible and therefore Being is intelligible. (Aristotelian metaphysics dovetails nicely because while Aristotle managed to provide us with a rich and robust theory of being, he stops short of discovering the act or principle of existence which Gilson argues was stifled by pagan eternalism. We have to wait for Avicenna for that to happen, later refined by Averroes and finally Aquinas.
Absolutely true, but examine the power dynamic. The scientists are only able to provide results (whether for or against) if they have bread on the table. The funders (as private entities) provide an almost inescapable dilemma then for the researchers. So who's more at fault, the scientist or the ones holding the purse strings? Why would we expect scientists to live up to some lofty ideal while others seek only personal profit through them?
Really, this is just a greater indictment of what our system has morphed into, where science and R&D is increasingly seen as the province of private companies, and not to be funded publicly.
(Or worse, to be funded publicly and then gatekept for profit)
https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2017/03/data-check-us-govern...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Funding_of_science#United_Stat...
Big pharmaceutical companies that stand to make trillions of dollars. Don't be stupid, follow the money.
Of course there's the usual shenanigans re: funding, but anecdotally it seems like most people are "bought off" (or coerced) by their colleagues or their selves, and the payment is career success and social approval.
For example: No grad student will invalidate their adviser's career. Very few people challenge the veracity of ubiquitous model systems or paradigms ("measuring $this means $that"). Results are sometimes tailored to be visually appealing. Unexpected results are discarded. The meaning of results can be overstated. An experiment can be set up which is internally perfect but which relies on completely nonsensical assumptions to inform its relation to salient natural phenomena. Etc.
To behave that way is to be a "bad citizen", make trouble for people, lose friends, and never get ahead. And practically speaking, most people who challenge prevailing wisdom are noob grad students who don't even know how wrong they are.
Of course, this happens to varying degrees in different fields. For materials chemistry of steel, it's pretty obvious when the tensile strength is less than reported. For organic synthesis, many published syntheses are bullshit but it's still obvious if a chemical isn't what it should be. For psychology and some of the newer theoretical disciplines (thinking of one rockstar "network scientist" here!), social consensus carries more weight than "reality" because reality is so tricky to measure.
While it may look like the public is losing faith in science, it's actually the public losing faith in the platform on which science is practiced: academia. If we want the public to regain faith in scientific findings, we need to fix academia.
I think even now the Confused Critique Industry is largely just a distraction from the deeper, internal issues: No jobs for new graduates, abuse of grad student labor, no innovation, too many labs lazily churning out incremental work just to secure their own careers in a climate of precarity, and so on.
We need to clean our own house. I can't even keep track of how many brilliant people I personally know who have left academic research. It's really very tragic and our duty as citizens should be to ignore all the petty distractions and focus on doing what needs to be done. If the institutions are lost and beyond reform, we need to work on building new ones that work for us. The current crises could be great opportunities for this.
I do agree with most of what you said, though. I left a PhD program without finishing after six years because:
1. I wanted financial security to start a family
2. I was not dealing well with the stress of navigating the Kafkaesque graduation process
3. Turns out market salary outside of research is pretty high even if you don't finish the degree
And I do feel vindicated in that as a software developer I'm getting positive performance reviews and feel like I'm making an impact on the organization.
One thing I want to add:
People's perception of scientific institutions will always be inextricably tied to their perceptions of schools (all levels of schools!) and K-12 schools are troubled institutions that mistreat a lot of young people, to say nothing of teaching misleading content or outright falsehood in (e.g.) history class. I, with my early-blooming aptitude for everything bookish, privileged college-professor parents, and serviceable athletic talents, had a pretty easy time in school. So trust in institutional science came naturally to me and eroded only painfully.
People from different backgrounds have harder times, and those with the least aptitude for (say) science have the hardest time.
> After all, the real target of these kinds of articles is obviously the supposedly right-wing extremist "science deniers" who reject the critical theory stuff even more strongly than scientists themselves do.
The National Basketball Association, with its overwhelmingly liberal player base, has all kinds of trouble with the conspiracy theories its players wind up believing and talking about in public (shape of the Earth, moon landing, and of course all kinds of stuff about Coronavirus).
I mention this, not just out of contrarianism, but because K-12 teachers famously mistreat young black men with athletic ambitions (if you follow the human interest side of the NBA you will hear a lot of stories to that effect), and because as they get older they discover what amounts to a conspiracy to cover up wrongs done to their ancestors (it was and maybe still is possible to get a K-12 education in Tulsa without ever learning about the Tulsa massacre for example).
Which is all a long-winded way to say that we're reaping what the education system has sown as well as the institutions of science.
I don’t think it’s even vaguely to do with any of this “lack of free exchange of ideas” nonsense that a particular group of people love to bang on about.
I do not understand this position.
I'm not sure what you're actually proposing, but it sounds dangerously close to "pilots have been in control of airplanes for decades, and they've caused so many crashes, so maybe it's time to try people who aren't pilots."
> I'd rather be ruled over by elite families than squabbling, territorial, overconfident scientists who can be bought off for nothing and blackmailed easily.
Do you really look at history and conclude that, because some scientists are corrupt or dishonest, you'd rather have monarchs control things like safety regulations for medicine, industrial activity, architecture, food, etc.? Again, that sounds very much like the "let's give non-pilots a shot at controlling aircraft."
No, I look at the current situation and conclude that our institutions are failing us. Notice that I didn't say I'd prefer to be ruled over by elite families rather than a consistent, transparent and democratic government that is accountable for its mistakes. I want government that has a generational stake in the outcome of its policies.
All I can say in response to you is that without charitable reading of one another's thoughts, we are never going to get anywhere. It will be endless, pointless dispute. Just because something "sounds like" something else in some superficial way, doesn't mean it is.
The problem with language is we have to make certain assumptions. It is easy to read your comment in that way. Just as it could be easy to read
> cuspy 15 minutes ago | parent | on: Science and Scientific Expertise Are More Importan...
I'm not proposing anything like that. I said that I'm glad others are becoming more skeptical of the message of relying on trust without oversight. The fact that you read my comment as advocating a total disregard for training and expertise is exactly why we are in this mess. Where is nuance?
No, I look at the current situation and conclude that our institutions are failing us. Notice that I didn't say I'd prefer to be ruled over by elite families rather than a consistent, transparent and democratic government that is accountable for its mistakes. I want government that has a generational stake in the outcome of its policies.
> All I can say in response to you is that without charitable reading of one another's thoughts, we are never going to get anywhere. It will be endless, pointless dispute. Just because something "sounds like" something else in some superficial way, doesn't mean it is.
As promoting anti-vaxers. The reason is because these conspiracy groups mimic the same language (i.e. the anti-authority rhetoric). With so much dog whistling happening it is difficult to correctly interpret. Btw, I don't think that's what you're intending to imply and I didn't take it that way, but it is important to understand how it could be taken that way.
As a scientist, I care about many of the concerns that you are bringing up, but also be mindful that it is difficult to understand because these preconceived notions. It isn't so much that there is a uncharitable reading, but that it is hard to determine what you are meaning. There's "what you mean," "what you say," and "what is heard" and these can all the different things. This is specifically a problem because the division in our culture currently.
Again it's this a priori assumption that the other person is dumb that has gotten us into this situation. It's also just bad manners. All else equal, I do not see how you can possible read what I wrote as specifically promoting anti-vaxers. I didn't say a word about vaccination. You're applying your own baggage to a simple message. Anti-vaxers are for the most part just frightened people who deserve compassion, not derision. They've simply overgeneralized a very rational fear of institutions that have indeed made some very careless decisions for profit.
If you treat every conversation as adversarial by default, you will continue making all your conversations worse. I recommend following the Gricean Maxims in your conversations. Be productive and cooperative with others until you are certain that they're not being productive and cooperative. That's when you leave the conversation. It's not as complicated as you're making it out to be.
There has been a steadily increasing mentality that outright hostility is the only way of disagreeing (or conversing at all) with someone else. Interpreting every statement of what other people have said via a binary classifier (for or against), etc. and making judgements rather than engaging intellectual conversation.
It is all very intellectually lazy and a classic identifying mark of the ignorant and stupid. People who know that they should not be engaging in actual intellectual discussion on a topic simply downvote and run away like cowards.
Sadly, even HN is devolving alongside the rest of society at this time.
I'm sorry, I was trying to convey something else. That language itself has limitations and that we imply things naturally. I think Tom Scott did a good video[0] explaining the high level aspects of this, but it seems like you might be aware of this. But there's much more. Language is full of cues and a priori assumptions. You cannot avoid this. The idea that "what you mean, what you say, and what is heard" being different things is not a contentious statement in linguistics and communication. Lewis Carrol's Mad Hatter's tea party scene is all about this actually. For reference[1]. What I am trying to say is that communication is hard and emphasizing that it is even harder in our current cultural/political climate. An example is priming[2], which is the exact point of things like slogans. No one expects one to write a novel to discern all the nuance of their statements, so we naturally take shortcuts and a priori assumptions are a necessity. If you ignore that these shortcuts exist then communication is difficult. (As to dog whistling[3], that is exactly the point. To exploit this feature of language. Otherwise these phrases wouldn't be coded)
A perfect example is your interpretation of my comment. I can take it one of two ways. 1) Be upset that you didn't understand what I meant. After all I did say
>> Btw, I don't think that's what you're intending to imply and I didn't take it that way, but it is important to understand how it could be taken that way.
Why should I not be upset that you are accusing me of accusing you of promoting anti-vaxers when I said completely the opposite? At least that's what I meant. Or I can go with 2) try to refine my statement to clarify confusion. I am trying #2 because, well.. my thesis is that communication is difficult and I understand the misinterpretation. I intended to mean that anti-vaxers use similar language so it wouldn't be surprising if someone was primed to think you are implying something similar (this is where interpretation comes into play). I am trying to say that this is especially difficult because of the cultural and political climate that currently exacerbates this which unfortunately leads to us trying to be more clear and trying better to interpret. And I am not trying to treat this conversation as adversarial, I apologize if it comes off that way.
To clarify, the intent of my original comment was to say that communication is difficult and the breakdown in communication that is currently happening in the conversation. Not to accuse you of anything. Though I was trying to draw a parallel to illustrate why someone might confuse you (because you are toeing the line), but that I personally did not interpret it that way.
[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IJEaMtNN_dM
[1] The Hatter opened his eyes very wide on hearing this; but all he said was, “Why is a raven like a writing-desk?” “Come, we shall have some fun now!” thought Alice. “I’m glad they’ve begun asking riddles. — I believe I can guess that,” she added aloud. “Do you mean that you think you can find out the answer to it?” said the March Hare. “Exactly so,” said Alice. “Then you should say what you mean,” the March Hare went on. “I do,” Alice hastily replied; “at least–at least I mean what I say–that’s the same thing, you know.” “Not the same thing a bit!” said the Hatter. “You might just as well say that ‘I see what I eat’ is the same thing as ‘I eat what I see’!” “You might just as well say,” added the March Hare, “that ‘I like what I get’ is the same thing as ‘I get what I like’!” “You might just as well say,” added the Dormouse, who seemed to be talking in his sleep, “that ‘I breathe when I sleep’ is the same thing as ‘I sleep when I breathe’!”
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Priming_(psychology)
[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dog-whistle_politics#United_St...
Plus, one could easily distinguish between the terms "establishment"/"hierarchical structures" as entrenched leadership focused on power dynamics rather than the science itself, versus "community" which is involved in the science.
1. Downplayed the role of masks as a public measure to mitigate the spread of COVID-19 early on (often out of a duplicitous desire to preserve PPE for the medical community, without considering that homemade cotton masks would not reduce PPE supply for medical workers)
2. Didn't advocate for the use of masks, beginning with cotton masks (this is actually a different point than #1. Spreading confusion and not providing clarity are two different bad things.)
3. Downplayed COVID in general, and publicly wondered whether a ton more people had immunity than we thought. That was with specious evidence and, damningly, it increased confusion and probably reduced compliance with mitigation measures.
It's like listing the many many examples of plane crashes due to pilot error. That's not controversial. I don't think many people claim that individual pilots act without flaw, or that the entire system of pilot training and qualification is without flaw. But surely the proposal should not be to take comfort as more and more people "doubt the entire notion of an airplane piloting establishment that the population should 'trust' to make decisions without oversight."
1. First identify it as a problem (which I don't think we've done enough but you think the problem is apparent to everyone)
2. Direct the criticism to the right people (not just politicians, but medical leaders and the medical establishment as a whole - believe it or not, they have a halo effect and are not sufficiently criticized. The industry systematically weaponizes our high regard for the medical profession in order to prevent what it sees as adverse reforms)
3. and acknowledge that there is a way to mitigate the problem ex ante, instead of saying "sure it's a problem but it's unsolvable because of all the emergent complexity." Say what you want about Elon Musk, but the man thought "I'm going to shoot multiple giant rockets through the atmosphere and land them back on a moving boat simultaneously" then proceeded to actually do it. He didn't throw his hands up to emergent complexity. SpaceX took complexity by the horns. Synthesizing and amplifying non-duplicitous, high quality advice from medical leaders/orgs is not that complicated! Only they can lead you to believe that it's complicated, and then somehow deny that they did that. If they contradict themselves, it's because "we used the best available facts at the time." Laughable, and completely non-falsifiable.
As an aside, perhaps Americans would be less anti-scientific if a majority of them weren't scammed by the medical industry and charged $150-$200 for a tiny consultation with someone who is bribed by pharmaceutical representatives to shill for harmful drugs. Maybe Americans would be less anti-scientific if their government wasn't captured by medical lobbyists for over a century so that there isn't a faint hope for reforms like universal healthcare. The industry doesn't care, because they know that if America wakes up, and politicians aren't captured, total compensation for doctors and surgeons would eventually drop 40% with negligible or no impact on innovation and medical outcomes. To them, something is wrong if a huge chunk of your disposable income isn't siphoned to their wallets every year (part of which you never even see - that is, insurance premiums paid by your employer that you would otherwise receive as income).
Do Americans overwhelmingly approve of the deprivation of their disposable income and health due to the broken status quo? Of course not. It's just that many don't connect the dots because the debate isn't even happening. Democrats and Republicans are captured. The media doesn't seem interested. The system is too complex for people to even understand and know what to criticize. Most Americans don't even grok the fact that they would receive employer-paid premiums as salary under universal healthcare. They don't have a clue how well universal healthcare works in other countries and how widely approved it is (relative to a privatized system). Saying that Americans overwhelmingly approve of their private insurance plan is like saying Russians overwhelmingly approve of Putin...ya, ok, but I don't think the people who repeat that statement know how meaningless it is.
Do you know what American political scientists call foreign democracies with captured politicians, distorted media, and widespread corporate cronyism but...ostensible elections? Pseudo-democracies. There's a spectrum from democracy to pseudo-democracy, and we all know where we're headed.
As for the connection to trust in science, I already spoke about that from one angle (the exploitative interface between the average American and their medical care). Another angle is the following: the very same medical paternalism that broke our healthcare system also broke the institutional guidance regarding COVID-19.
But the fact of the matter is that common proposals to overhaul the American health insurance system are extremely unpopular, and people overwhelmingly report being very happy with their private insurance plans.
Or maybe you're being deceived now?
Honestly, the evidence for universal masking hasn't changed (recent papers on this have largely been terrible and/or meta-analyses of the same group of papers that were written before the pandemic). There are still a lot of informed, intelligent scientists who have been saying the idea isn't supported by data. The "consensus" on this issue appears to be driven by politicians and media, not by science:
https://www.cebm.net/covid-19/masking-lack-of-evidence-with-...
https://www.cidrap.umn.edu/covid-19/podcasts-webinars/specia...
Indeed, thank you for providing a wonderful example of "scientism": a blind belief in the conclusions of "science", even when you're presented with ample scientific evidence that disproves your belief.
If your secret evidence is so strong, you should cite it, instead of merely asserting that it exists. I just gave you two incredibly well-sourced articles showing that the opposite is true, and your response is to insult me and claim I'm wrong (without proof).
Michael Osterholm (CIDRAP) and the Oxford Center for Evidence-Based medicine are not crackpot organizations, and the cited articles are reviews of all literature, not "specious studies". In all likelihood, these articles have already discussed the evidence that you believe is compelling.
Institutions involved: University of Cambridge, University College London, Ecole de Guerre Economique, and Hong Kong University of Science and Technology
As for Michael Osterholm, I don't have much patience for people like him so I won't cite this but you can easily look it up: he clarified his comments and said that people should universally wear masks. Of course, he followed up with strawman arguments, implying that many people have the illusion that COVID would be suddenly be "driven to the ground" if everyone wore masks. He also said that other measures are important. Of course they are.
As for Oxford Center for Evidence-Based Medicine: simply put, they are like a hammer in search of a massive double blind nail. When it becomes more and more clear how tragically incorrect and misguided such organizations are during a pandemic, the "evidence" in their title will suddenly have a sardonic ring to it. Their example will demonstrate that sometimes expertise of a certain kind, if not properly adapted to a new situation, can become an impairment in the new context. Read the discussion at the following link: https://journals.plos.org/plosmedicine/article?id=10.1371/jo...
That being said, the University of Oxford in general is a top rate institution. The Oxford Vaccine Group might be first to deliver a COVID-19 vaccine. They're also home to professor and NIH senior investigator Dr. Trisha Greenhalgh, who sharply discussed the limitations of evidence-based medicine during this pandemic at the above link :) Of course, that's evidence-based medicine as a specific category, not the general idea of medicine backed by proof.
This is not a study of masks. First, and most importantly, it assumes that masks work, and makes a model of a world in which they work. From the methods:
"A gradual increase in mask wearing was modelled using a linear increase in the proportion of individuals randomly allocated with a reduced rate of transmission. The factor by which β was reduced was conservatively set to 2."
And for their second model:
"Varying degrees of mask effectiveness are modelled by the mask transmission rate T and mask absorption rate A, which denote the proportion of viruses that are stopped by the mask during exhaling (transmission) versus inhaling (absorption), respectively. We set T = 0.7 and A = 0.7"
So when you make a model that assumes masks reduce infection by half or more, the model shows that infections are reduced. Shocking.
Then, when they say that their models have a "nearly perfect correlation" with reality...they don't actually compare their models to reality, nor do they calculate any correlations. They simply quote a bunch of numbers they cherry-picked from news sites (with no controls or normalizations) classifying countries into "mask-wearing cultures"...which is so obviously silly that any halfway rational person should see right through it. This is a "paper" only in the sense that it might someday be printed on paper by someone who was gullible enough to believe it.
Regarding your comments on the researchers I mentioned: perhaps you should spend more time reading the articles you cite, and less time judging well-established scientists who disagree with your opinions.
Science doesn't require formal training in principle; in practice training in critical thinking is good, and training in specific techniques might be necessary to observe + interpret specific phenomena.
As an aside - Many practicing scientists don't fully understand all the techniques they use day-to-day, and almost certainly don't understand techniques several steps removed from what they do themselves. To understand everything is simply impossible.
Everything else a matter of faith: In the honesty of people reporting results, in the competence of people reporting results, in the similarity between model systems and the "real world", etc. Of course one might apply one's training in techniques to validate the consistency of stuff asserted by other things - people, instrument readings, etc.
Leadership is decision under uncertainty. The best thing most scientists can do for leadership is tell them the best guess and estimates of how big the uncertainties are. Recent events have shown how unbelievably shitty these guesses were, and, frankly, continue to be; and as far as I can tell, none of the important players over the last 6 months mentioned any of the uncertainties in a useful actionable way.
Putting scientists and operations research types in charge of anything more complicated than airline routing tables is basically the definition of madness; literally every time it's been tried in human history has ended up a disaster. Adam Curtis and that gasbag Taleb have made a career of documenting this obvious truism.
Hey please don't do that here. Crotchety contrarianism needn't be a bad thing but the HN guidelines say "don't be snarky" for a reason, and there are other guidelines too: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html.
Many of your comments are clearly based on knowledge, which we cut a lot of slack for, but if you would make our lives a little easier I'd appreciate it. This comment would be just fine if it started with the "Leadership is" sentence. "Gasbag" is name-calling but as part of a backhanded compliment, no big deal; we're not sticklers.
You've hit the nail on the head here. These past few years I've felt like every major institution has been in a credibility crisis. Government, news, universities, the whole thing is falling apart. One hypothesis I'm starting to believe was coined by Eric Weinstein as the Embedded Growth Obligation (EGO). The basic idea is we had a few historically unique decades post WWII of exponential growth, and all of our institutions are now reliant on that. But the real exponential growth is over and they're flailing about trying to fake it.
I don't always agree with everything he says on other issues, but we are lucky to have him in a position where he's afforded the right to speak freely. It's a shameful embarrassment to the state of our public discourse that it takes a billionaire hedge fund backing to secure that right.
The "Embedded Growth Hypothesis" for example has been a thing that socialists, eco activists and even austrian economics and classical keynesians (if that's a proper term, I mean Keynesians who believe that debt is a problem and you should pay it back and not rely on MMT to pay it back via inflation) have been trying to push for a long time. But they also offer solutions which are compatible with an open society (at least the ones moderate enough to become mainstream), they don't just claim the current system is corrupt.
It's fine to just criticize without offering solutions, but if you are gonna claim "everyones distrustworthy" you should back things up more.
---
Oh, and Weinstein in particular has been using his right to speak freely for decades and continues to use it about being silenced. Now he just has a billionaire backer whose politics align with what he's saying to amplify him.
Like the Trump family? I love me some "elite" autocratic rule!
The future never looked brighter. Idiocracy here we come.
Eg: However accurate/inaccurate/useful/useless epidemiology models might be, “science” can never answer questions about the recommended scale of our activities/lockdown/reopening. It’s ultimately a matter of values and judgement based on risk-tolerance given current situation and needs (which might also take into account model predictions and uncertainties). It is asinine to expect epidemiologists to make final policy recommendations (or for leaders to defer responsibility to them), since they understand only one piece of the puzzle. It is ultimately a judgment call to be made by political leaders elected exactly for that job.
You are giving the anti-science crowd a huge benefit of the doubt. I don't think people who believe the Earth is flat or that wearing a cloth mask can cause you to give yourself COVID (EDIT: I was referring to the idea pushed by anti-science propaganda like Plandemic[1] that states masks "activate" COVID) is the result of a cogent analysis of the corruption of scientific institutions.
[1] - https://www.livescience.com/debunking-plandemic-coronavirus-...
We need to be more strategic than vindictive. Why not forget about the notion of a mass "anti-science crowd" and have some basic respect for your fellow citizens as individuals with widely varying levels of education due in no small part to these same institutional problems. We've failed them. I think your examples are straw men that contribute no real insight to the cause of the problems.
Also, just to be clear, a variation of that rumor about masks was indeed pushed by the surgeon general in early March:
https://www.cnn.com/2020/03/02/health/surgeon-general-corona...
If my specific examples are too much of a straw man, how about climate change? The US has largely been ignoring the science on that for decades. What is the more likely reason? The scientific consensus on climate change is the result of corruption, the scientific community ignores this corruption, and the general public turns to climate deniers as a result of this corruption. Or is it the most reasonable explanation that there are countless groups that have an invested financial and political interest in downplaying the scientific consensus regarding the issue? It seems obvious this is a situation in which the corruption leading to anti-science viewpoints is an outside force acting on the scientific community and not the other way around.
I also threw in a note about the mask issue in my original comment since I was unclear. To add another note on top, I'm not sure this administration is one I would point to as somehow anti-corruption especially when it comes to their interpretation of science.
Regardless, simply telling people they need to listen obediently to experts is going to do much more harm than good. If we take concrete steps to fix the massive problems in our institutions and there are still legions of anti-science activists holding us back through political means, we can at least point to our own reformed system with integrity and say that we're doing our best to get it right. Until then, we have no solid ground to stand on, and we'll continue to lose our own base of supporters, myself included. Scientists themselves will look elsewhere for a system that supports them.
Every single bit of bullshit to come out of academia is one extra point for the detractors. I won't enumerate it here because there is an even chance you're in support of what I consider "bullshit" and vice versa, but it's not the point - the point is that people use their assessment of what they understand to extrapolate to things they don't, as a signal of trustworthiness of the source.
The entire intellectual class is marred by now, it's not just academia. If one does not denounce bullshit pronounced in their name the bullshit will stick.
When that field is “leveled” rhetoric becomes decisive.
Wasn't your original argument about what the public thinks of the integrity of these groups? I'm not seeing how that meshes with this comment. Are you implying that the public sees intellectuals valuing their own integrity as a sign of a lack of integrity?
Actually good questions and proposals deserve legitimate feedback regardless of source. Bullshit deserves to be ignored or called out.
You’re kind-of proving the point. That’s exactly what WHO and some other “scientific” institutions (but really political institutions using science as a pretense) were saying at the beginning (that wearing masks could increase the risk because people would be touching their face more or something).
It's like pining for the Philosopher Kings of the Platonic tradition. Plato hated democracy fyi.
You did not read much history, did you?
Well, I wouldn’t call sex with underage girls on a private island nothing.
Engineering definitely doesn't deprive students and practitioners of critical thinking. Other disciplines? Maybe. I can't speak to that.
Nuance in communication and dealing intelligently with ambiguity is also a really big issue in all of STEM. Engineering is no exception. This is in fact something that COULD be improved. It's just not as profitable.
One can be an unethical bastard and have the critical thinking to realize something is unsustainable or a scam or be a saint and taken in by utter bullshit (although the bullshit may persuade them to do horrible things believing themselves right).
Engineering deals with nuance certainly - although it is often a more pedantic technical form like say the difference between the stength of wood and steel vs temperature. Steel doesn't readily combust like wood but wood while it chars and burns doesn't weaken like hot steel. You don't need to melt steel beams to collapse a skyscrapper.
Then the late 60s came around and the Party found they don't grow nearly as much food as the Rotting West. The Marxist-Leninist Biology missed the Green Revolution for inexplicable reason. Even though not as important as weapons it was a big deal - the state could have been spending much less resources on growing food and buying food from abroad and use them to make ICBMs or something else speeding up the Global Revolution's approach! So Marxist-Leninist Biology got a book thrown at it. And, not being dumb, the Party restrained the politics in many other areas, just to be safe. So by 70s-80s science in the USSR had been much less politicized than now in the US in my opinion.
I hope the current crisis will be a wake up call to the US. Hopefully people realize that playing politics around medical research is not just giving you cushy jobs and government grants - it can also fuck up the whole economy and if people cannot stop doing it by themselves then somebody have to throw a book or a whole library at them. And, maybe, just like the CPSU, they might do it in other areas, just to be safe.
If you only make decisions based on science you can pretend problems aren't real without a scientist's approval, and you can pretend solutions to those problems are bad if there is even a tiny bit of counter-evidence that supports your viewpoint.
And if you make decisions based on anything other than science, is the final outcome going to be any better?
I admit that something that we might call "misuse of science" is a real thing, and a problem. But I don't see any solution that in any way involves de-emphasizing the importance of science in decision making.
Sometimes, I think, we have to make decisions when there's no clear solution, and it's better than just dismissing a very obvious problem as non-existent. So yes, include science in every decision, but it's not the be all end all of society, it never has been, and it's not good to teach people that you can't tackle issues without a known best solution.
> There is plenty of video evidence
I can't even what you talk about. "Video evidence"?
Edit: if I'd guess it's about "UFOs" for these there practically exists scientific consensus: no aliens proved, ever. "Video evidence" isn't the evidence of aliens.
So, simply using related models and then adjusting to new information as it shows up works just fine. If government happens to ban loot boxes for a decade it’s not that important if they get it wrong and that’s plenty of time to do real research and adjust policy.
PS: If you disagree try and come up with a counter example.
But it's important to keep in mind that science is usually a tool to inform decisions, not a verdict to decide them. I see a lot of people declare we have to implement suchandsuch policy because that's what the science says, and almost all of them are adding implicit assumptions about values and goals to the studies they cite.
Science has become so political and subject to hype and fads, at least in biomedicine, that everyone should be deeply skeptical of every claim that is made. That doesn't mean that you should distrust everything completely, just that critical skepticism should be the norm.
If by "science" you mean that "rigorous, logical empirical study" should be part of the decision-making, yes, I agree.
If by "science" you mean that the statements of scientists with prestigious academic appointments should be given priority over other considerations, I say no. Outsider criticism should be welcome, and I think nonscientific considerations are sometimes required.
One of the reasons society is in the mess it is in (at least in the US) is because of a failure to realize that certain segments, like the biomedical-scientific community, are just as driven by human failures as any other.
Eg if you fund 10 studies in support of, er, say cats being dangerous to humans. 2 might find that to be true, 2 find that false, and 6 remain neutral. You can leave the 8 you that don't support what you want to show unpublished. You can then fund more studies that build on the 2 you like. Rinse and repeat.
Pretty soon, driven by funding alone, you will have lots of 'evidence' that caters to your viewpoint. Is that science? Unfortunately, funding determines scientific reality.
In the face of this sort of behaviour, is it not reasonable to ask for more evidence-based policy? Or at least that real evidence be considered where it is available?
This is part of why I don't think there is any value in UBI experiments.
Our mental models influence the kinds of results we get. This is always true, but it's a bigger problem for some things than for others.
Is there even a shred of scientific evidence to support this hypothesis? I see it in print so often that it appears to be a axiom that is considered so correct as to be unquestionable.
In my lifetime I have never known the average person to be engaged, nor informed. I think they're mostly mis-informed for the past 10+ years.
People just believe whatever outlandish title comes across their facebook feed. I had about 12 people ask me if I heard the news--that wayfair was selling missing children on their website, disguised as fancy cabinets. It took me about 12 seconds to find out it was a theory with no evidence put forth by an anonymous reddit poster. 2/12 changed their minds when I showed them that.
Maybe we should just devote the entirety of a school year to basic rationalism and logic...
But we really can't give in to that cynicism. These conversations almost always have an audience, and the point isn't just to convince this person in front of you and win, but to keep your side of the argument alive and in front of as many people as possible.
And to practice your own patience, sharpen your argument, and maintain bridges and relationships.
I'm sure most people can't do it, but if you can please don't throw up your hands and walk away, depriving perhaps many other people from hearing a point of view they might not otherwise ever hear.
[Edit: Of course I'm speaking generally here about climate denialism, etc., not specifically about the crazy conspiracy theory mentioned above.]
One of the worst things the CDC did was take an anti-mask position initially when it was a bald faced lie unsupported by data. That destroyed their trust relationship and continues to haunt us now.
Very good quote. It took me decades to comprehend that a lot of people don’t even try to understand things but go with whatever sounds right and makes them feel good. Especially when it comes to political issues I don’t think I have ever heard somebody say “oh yes, this convinces me to change my stance.”. People stick to their beliefs as long as possible. I only have seen people change their minds over years.
Simple logic goes a long way in discovering the truth, no need to get into that complicated epistemology pseudoscience.
When confronted with truth and reasoning, people reject them without engaging...
Religion is the elephant in the room. There are more people who believe God wants them to kill gays and Jews than believe in any internet conspiracy theory.
I would say that in the past, the engaged and well-informed public (and few honestly) were valued by the policy/decision makers because they generally were or closely related to the decision makers.
The democratization of opinion and influence has not gone well for technical experts and correct information getting to (or influencing) people in positions of responsibility.
Everyone (no matter how ill-informed) is so able to issue opinions and "make their voices heard" that people in responsibility get confused who they should worry about satisfying.
Sometimes democracy (and democratization of information) is not a purely good thing.
That's a problem too. Worry about who to satisfy compromises science, truth and long term goals.
So democracy is robust against ordinary ignorance. It's just not robust against deliberately-induced ignorance[1]. The nudge towards reality is easily overwhelmed by a thumb on the scale of the wrong answer.
Ignorance has never been really random, but the press of misinformation is more widespread than ever. As is the press of information, but when people don't know which to choose, misinformation is often more attractive.
P.S. Before the age of social media, was there not the same level of risk of induced ignorance through traditional media campaigns and propaganda? If not, why not?
I think that part of what makes it both different and worse now is the way that, thanks to automatic personalisation of content, what feels like honest intellectual inquiry will be met with automated replies that drive us deeper in the direction of our beliefs (inadvertently; they optimise for engagement, but it's more likely that a random browser will engage with something that supports their beliefs than that challenges them).
Of course, there was always propaganda before, but there was at least the chance of realising critically that it was being forced upon you, and so choosing to resist it; or, if you wanted to be swallowed up by the propaganda, at least you had to make some effort to find the material that would support that position. It's the way that our filter bubbles are now more than ever hidden from us and, even worse, presented as ever more rarefied intellectual inquiry that I think causes so much 'unswayability'.
Sorry for all the questions, I'm just thinking out loud.
The problem that I see is that filter bubbles keep people happy, so the effort to fix it has to be an effort that's going to make people unhappy—and what business or democratic government is going to do that? To me, it's like being a teacher (my profession); there are ample studies that show that teaching effectiveness is in many ways inversely correlated with student satisfaction (because true learning is often uncomfortable), and yet the incentives for teachers are all in the direction of encouraging student satisfaction even when everyone knows it can be at the expense of learning.
I really hope we can learn and get to a better place from here, but I'm not holding my breath. The way I see it, there's a good chance that the world will only continue to become increasingly more authoritarian and dictatorial. Because in a world filled with more and more widespread filter bubbles and entrenched divides, authoritarianism and dictatorships logically become the optimal solution to get society to cooperate and function.
It saddens me to think about it.
We're in the weird territory because some propaganda comes from really low-budget campaigns not easily steadied by the stabilizing influence of competing businesses. The disruption is akin to the printing press invention - suddenly low budgets provide loud voice. I expect this to go the same way - running good social media campaigns will demand huge budgets and require support from big businesses.
The other odd (and alarming) part is that the government bureaucracy itself became a source of the propaganda - we don't have a competing government bureaucracy so no tension is created to promote balance.
What’s the evidence supporting this?
I've noticed this trend of all sides of every political debate declaring that the other side has fallen for "fake news." In actuality, it's often that people with the "wrong answer" just have a different value system than the people with "right answer."
The primary example, that cigarette companies tried to hide that smoking causes cancer, doesn't prove this point -- the vast majority of people know this and the propaganda effort was a failure.
The vast majority of people know this now, but it was just as much a subject of motivated doubt in its time as climate change is now. It's only because of a massive counter-propaganda effort (in a good cause, but it's still propaganda) that it seems so obvious to us now, and so inevitable in retrospect that people of sense would see the truth.
Was this really necessary? You point would be just as strong without it, and the degree of hostility would go down.
I wonder though if another issue is at play: in the past both well-informed and random folks would mostly have "swayable" opinions (mostly certain, but leave room for a doubt; thus open to arguments and possibly a change of opinion), currently most opinions seem to have a religious hardness to them. This makes science less influential -- people tend to put a lot of spin on key findings to avoid changing their views.
This is judging by newspapers and magazines of 50 years ago and talking to older generations; not sure how objective this is.
The anti-vaccine movement is one example of the engaged being swayed to total conviction, and it's easy to question whether they truly care about their children, but love is their motivation. Similarly, many "wrong" movements are for the love of democracy of the country etc.
And looking at the bullet points at the end of the article, those are what even the "wrong" are doing, extremely proactively. And it all starts with the "educator" claiming to be the "reliable information source", which happens to be what Scientific American is also doing here.
Domocracy is resilient against simple ignorance. It is susceptible to overt manipulation.
Even manipulation often reflects a balance of interests, though shifting the margins can have profound effects.
I posit it's susceptible to both, and that it is susceptible to any manipulation. Not just overt or malicious. Even in good faith. And even the article is a form of manipulation. And I am saying the "manipulated" and the "educated" are often one in the same especially in hindsight when wrong becomes clear.
The challenge here is in knowing whether an outcome was bad or good. Different people can have different perspective on facts, of course. But if people don't have direct experience in the outcomes, then they have to hear about it 2nd hand. That's where the opportunity opens up for them to hear lies, which corrupt the process.
The challenge in the 21st Century is that our most pressing issues seem to be those that don't produce immediate direct experience for most voters, like climate change, systemic racism, non-point-source pollution, threats of diseases, authoritarianism, etc.
People are increasingly reliant on 3rd parties to inform them on these issues, and the information ecosystem we've built to do that optimizes on engagement instead of accuracy.
I'd say maybe a well-informed electorate. Until very recently, the majority of "the public" wasn't allowed to vote and so had very limited input into "our democracy".
The two major extensions of our electorate were (former) slaves and then women. Do you believe that these groups are more easily manipulated?
Or are you talking about some other group that I forgot about?
I believe this had several intents behind it; one of them was of course just plain-old elitism/cronyism, but I think there were also some elements of using it as a proxy for education, shared-culture, and (presumed) fiscal responsibility.
There also was probably a surprisingly pragmatic problem of logistics; a small register of settled-down property owners was probably far easier to collect votes from that a wild array of migrant laborers, whalers, fur-trappers, and frontiersmen.
(Yeah, I just checked up on this, and it looks like this was gradually abolished, over the course of the century before the civil war, on a state-by-state basis: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voting_rights_in_the_United_St... )
For one democracy is a good pressure relief valve - far from the monarchist fears they were way more stabme compared to the regular secession civil wars of monarchies and rebellions. Election results let a potentially hotheaded minority faction know "you won't win you know, you got only 30% of the vote - let alone what percentage would actually fight for you. You are outnumbered so chill, campaign, and wait for the next election".
So, for instance, when the CDC recommended no mask usage and all the conformist fans of the theatre of science started pulling their shit, the ones who follow the science ignored them.
Government scientific institutions have reputations that are shot through with these "for the greater good" lies. Science is important, but no one is going to listen to the Scientific Theatre any more.
https://books.google.com/books?id=BYsW6qTP0pMC&printsec=fron...
A nearly identical quote appears in this editorial by the same author:
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/07/14/opinion/coronavirus-shutd...
Now, this is different from what you've claimed, which is about the effect on science itself rather than the credibility of scientists to the public. But I believe the study only showed short-term effects. In my view, long-term political advocacy is likely to make people view scientists differently than they view them now.
The same institutions don't need to do both, and that they are separate is usually because "is" questions and "ought" questions are answered via different mechanisms.
I don't disagree with you. Put more concretely, I think we need a blend of:
1. Allowing scientific concensus to influence the choices we make today. We should act on our current best knowledge of the world.
2. Allowing politics and our understanding of what humans need today to influence the way we allocate scientific resources. Critical problems and promising solutions should be given some priority because they have the greatest chance of improving people's lives.
3. Funding "pure" scientific research where we have no idea if it will pan out or not. 2 is biased because we don't have a perfect understanding of what research will pan out. Without some random resource allocation we will only hill-climb to the nearest local maxima of things we know are improvements. Sprinkling some fraction of our resources outside of obvious priorities allows paradigm shifts and serendipity, which are vital for progress on longer timescales.
I think a lot of science nerds, especially here, focus on 3, and I agree that it's important and undervalued. But I think it's highly inefficient to only do that. Smart resource allocation does give greater weight to areas with greater probability of success, and to areas that provide the most benefit.
I get that democracy is somewhat better than feudalism, but at the end of the day I don't really care if the king is standing on my neck, or if its a mob of unruly peasants. Tyranny is tyranny, and democracy has demonstrated a great affinity for it when it suits the mob. Democracy seems to be the best of the bad options available, but without the strong protections afforded by an deep seated respect for individual liberty and freedom, there isn't much difference in end result.
If anything modern academia's treatment of "Science!" is a nice little peak under the covers of what happens when you let the mob make the rules - Thought becomes regimented to the point of absurdity and you either get on board, or get (thrown) over board.
"Guys, guys, Galileo wasn't actually cancelled. He just found out that free speech has consequences." @KonstantinKisin
Good luck!
I had a friend get tenure at a university, and her stories added fuel to the fire in my mind that the DISC is very real, and everywhere.
Communicating new ideas is hard, and the burden is carried exclusively by the originator of the idea.
Phlogiston theory of 17th century was wrong.
Race theory of 18th century was wrong.
Semmelweis was laughed at in 19th century.
And lobotomies were perfectly scientific for treating depressed patients for most of 20th century.
I doubt 21st century's science is any special here...
Quite a lot of people here (including yours truly) have scientific background.
All I'm saying is: let's be careful and let's be skeptical - as real scientists are.
But anyway, all of those were mainstream at some time. The point is that yielding to experts is anti-science. The fact that your experts work in a research lab instead of a church makes little difference here.
Scientific decision making requires that at a minimum you verify your experts results, and be ready to notice when they are wrong. This article is as anti-science as the policies it is trying to fight, and this is a bad thing that can only create mistrust from the public.
If they don't know a thing about statistics and science methodology, no it's not. If they do know those, settled research with real impact is not that hard to verify (that's why it's settled), verifying science without impact is not important, and unsettled science shouldn't get a lot of trust anyway.
That would be a good subject for an article with that same title. But for the current article, the question is not really relevant.
250k deaths caused by medical errors in the US each year
7-9k people die from medication errors
I'll probably look at some reviews on modern medicine statistics, it's an interesting question. While I have no doubt we've made net progress, I wonder if some specific areas of medicine haven't.
I could list any number of things like witchcraft, homeopathy, various snake oils, superstition causing animal abuse, as examples of what happens without science. Some of these things endure centuries too, because there is no mechanism to correct them.
With that being said, increasing total funding can only go so far. A bigger problem to me is that the available funding is not allocated well. When certain professors make $300K+ per year yet can't find money for postdocs and their students make less than $20K per year, CERN asks for billions that could be spent on more important projects, and universities take a huge percentage of grants as overhead (often without clear justification), it seems obvious to me that there are plenty of ways to improve the situation without increasing funding. I could go on. I think the research enterprise is incredibly inefficient, and not by necessity.
Logic would say to prioritize (pick your numbers, I don't care) the 99.5% over the 0.5%.
My hypothesis is that since it's a healthcare issue, the leaders are less math/statistics inclined and more focused on biology.
The US isn't making the wrong decision about prioritizing hard choices, it's simply MAKING THE WRONG CHOICES. This was a largely solvable problem. We just failed.
Stay home. If you can't stay home, wear a mask and stay outside. Don't travel. Get tested regularly if you can't meet these rules. Follow the instructions of the scientists we've all been ignoring. Vote for people who will (or against those who won't).
Your argument seems to be of the form "Well, we fucked up, but it's too late now so we might as well open up." That's just not true. We can still fix this and save tens or hundreds of thousands of lives.
I can see why Fauci and many top scientists fail to convince people like Trump and his supporters: he knows, but can't communicate what he knows so that information is conveyed, and not simply stated.
That's not to say that communication isn't important, it's crucial, but communication without science is useless. In fact, we see just what happens with excellent communication and no science: outright fake news, fake claims, manipulation, loss of freedom, and worse.
Yes we understand pandemic physics, but we should be looking to prioritize a strong majority policy rather than the few.
I don't think Fauci uses statistics in his reasoning.
I mean... this is The Problem writ small, really. What really happened with why "America Turned Away From Science" isn't anything to do with science at all. It's the the population used to have a sense that there were "experts" out there with a "consensus" on important items. And that consensus went away, as now we have whole media ecosystems whose role is to redirect this kind of consensus building.
So Fox, which started as a way to redirect the 70's/80's consensus opinions about, say, the welfare state and Keynsian economics, is now serving to tell people that "the experts" say masks are going to kill them and that the virus is a fraud.
One example of this was when he knowingly misled (as one player in a coordinated effort) the public about the usefulness of the general public wearing masks at the initial outbreak of the pandemic. Now that the truth came out, Trump supporters have indeed latched onto this as proof that what the medical establishment says is not always true. Whether the benefit was worth the cost is another one of those things that is unknown.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0XHC5Kxxv_w (1:30 onward)
https://www.facebook.com/BettzDNS/videos/10216890195312387/ (Note the rhetorical "fact checking" warning about the video.
Whether you like it or not, people will react to this behavior in ways that are non-beneficial to overall society. I wonder if that is taken into consideration when strategic decisions are made behind closed doors on what representation of reality is projected into people's minds. Another one of those things that will remain unknown I imagine.
Are you sure of the truth?
In recent news, the Dutch aren't requiring masks (except under limited circumstances, e.g., on buses):
"Dutch Dr. Fauci Thinks Masks Won't Work. Here's Why":
Not at all, I am only going by what Dr. Fauci said in those videos - perhaps he is once again saying something that is not actually truthful. Maybe Donald Trump is not the only person in Washington who is skilled in the black art of 4D Chess...I seem to recall one or two items in the past where the public was told, in a coordinated fashion, things that were not true. In fact, this behaviour seems to be a rather common attribute in most any human being I've encountered, in any community.
> Dutch Dr. Fauci Thinks Masks Won't Work. Here's Why
Another interesting behaviour I've noticed is how doctors and the media portray the masks issue as being essentially universal consensus in the medical field.
I often wonder what is really true. I wonder if the experts ever wonder what is really true.
To enjoy the article at this fullest, play this in the background with an orchestra of tiny violins
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XMbvcp480Y4
My pleasure