I think we've made a huge mistake in our notions of "experts", especially the blind assumption that we need experts to tell us something on every arbitrary issue.
On all the recent issues, you can and should engage with reality directly. They're all compact in scope and source materials. There's not a lot to read re: COVID origin arguments, mask efficacy, etc. For example, with masks there's hardly any research, no randomized trials in America, only one in the West (that isn't good enough to use anyway).
There's no secret knowledge on these issues, nor are there any priestly intellectual capacities. Moreover, COVID origin isn't centrally a scientific question as much as a forensic/investigatory issue. Reality is exogenous to academic journals, and this question is structurally exogenous. For example, that Fauci and friends funded research at the Wuhan lab and had an unusually severe conflict of interest by our customary standards is an important fact, one that we don't need peer-reviewed research to know.
It would be worthwhile to model the cognition of "experts" when they address these issues and formulate their opinions and statements. We can easily see in many cases that there's not anything proprietary or extravagant going on.
For example, Sen. Rand Paul was censored and condemned by leftists for saying that cloth masks don't work, or "do anything", which I take to mean reduce COVID spread (in either direction). He's likely correct, though we don't know because we haven't done the trials for any mask type (we don't need trials for all questions, but we need them for mask efficacy for several reasons).
YouTube censored his videos (media interviews). Politifact, a leftist activist/censorship outfit, purported to debunk him by citing an animation of a mask (on the New York Times website). An animation. (And it was an animation of an N95, but treating an animation of any mask as evidence is savagely stupid, truly idiocratic.)
Politifact also cited an "expert". He was a random doctor in Minnesota, a pediatrician. Doctors aren't experts on mask efficacy, much less for a specific pathogen, much less a new pathogen. They're not experts on arbitrary biomedical or epidemiological topics. This experts thing is starting to look like a mystical superstition that will get us all killed. *The experts on scientific questions are the people who conduct research on those questions.* Since there's hardly any research here, there are hardly any experts on this question, and more importantly, we can just read the research and ask whatever questions we have.
The doctor lamented "lies" about masks. He didn't cite any research. I'd bet thousands of dollars he hadn't read any of the few journal articles on the subject at the time (August, 2021).
It turned out he was just a maniacal leftist activist on Twitter, a man who had called for two different Republican politicians to resign in just the previous couple of weeks, for being "traitors" and "liars", retweeted that the governor of Massachusetts "hates children and science". There was no reason for Politifact to cite or know of the existence of a random Minnesota pediatrician, other than he was a Twitter maniac who would give them the quotes they wanted. The Politifact activist who wrote the piece exclusively "debunks" claims by non-leftists or that are incongruous with current mandatory Democratic Party narratives. He stopped fact checking Rachel Maddow when she infamously claimed that the COVID shots prevent infection and transmission, (it's not clear that leftists are aware, even in July 2023, that the shots don't do these things, and why):
"A vaccinated person gets exposed to the virus, the virus does not infect them, the virus cannot then use that person to go anywhere else," she added with a shrug. "It cannot use a vaccinated person as a host to go get more people.""
Politifact never fact-checked the above, just stopped checking Maddow altogether, giving her a free pass. Note that Biden made the same wildly false claims, and to my knowledge has never corrected or apologized.
So the "experts" thing is getting in the way, obscuring reality, preventing us from thinking clearly. You'll also see bizarre citations of the CDC, of some anonymously written CDC webpage, a page full of errors and false citations (their science of masking page), with no stated methodology (e.g. meta-analysis with inclusion criteria). There's no need to just cite other people's opinions, and whether any organization is reliable is an empirical question. The CDC's reliability cannot simply be assumed, and because there's so little research we can just read it, then look at what the CDC says and ask any questions we have. (The CDC doesn't have its own research or data on mask efficacy, which they'd have to publish if they did – they ran no trials. They only cite outside research, have been stunningly lazy, incurious, and misleading.) Certainly, journalists should do this.
It's critically important to not outsource our cognitive activity or our connection with reality. We're dealing with a mass stupidity situation here, where there's very little sign of cognition, much less intellect, on these topics. We've got people unaware that an arbitrary reduction in pathogen population doesn't necessarily reduce infection risk (masks), that we don't know the long-term or even short-term effects of brand new pharma, that finding traces of raccoon dog material mixed with COVID virus on a surface doesn't mean anything at all, that men are much stronger and faster than women even of the same weight, etc. This is not a scientific civilization.
We're seeing too many at-a-distance arguments about experts and science and "who to trust" on issues that can be navigated efficiently with a few key background facts, good alertness, and a 110 IQ. We've got to get people to read, because it's clear even journalists aren't. Just read the damn papers first, and then we can talk about whether we need experts to tell us or explain something.
It's also troubling that we've got a political ideology that explicitly demonizes asking questions. Leftists have a trope of "just asking questions" that they use to marginalize anyone who, well, asks questions that deviate from mandatory narratives and beliefs or is willing to think independently. It's a very bad sign for an ideology to have that kind of dogma, and if you were going to have that trope in your ideology, you'd need to fortify it against its obvious propensity toward bias and motivated reasoning by building a robust framework that differentiates between villainous and sincere questioners, creating lots of room for rigor and curiosity. Leftists haven't done that, with predictable results. (Trying to build the framework would likely illustrate that you need to just get rid of the trope and not marginalize questions at all.)
Social psychologist here. There's a profound lack of cognitive activity in American journalists, and what I'd call legacy leftist media especially. I don't think we can explain what happened here without reference to their off-the-charts partisan political bias. I've never seen anything like it.
It really matters to them that a Republican said something, or takes a particular view. In this case they swarmed on Sen. Cotton, who made the most mundane comments saying it was possible it was a lab leak, that it was worth investigating, etc.
Leftist media like the NYT and WaPo falsely linked him to a "bioweapon" "conspiracy theory". The bioweapon trope stuck like construction adhesive – I see MSNBC activists like Hasan and the Atlantic editor still pushing it. As far as I know, no prominent Republican has ever asserted that it was a bioweapon, suggested it was likely to be, or treated it as a major option.
We also see a historical revisionism (Hasan again), where they falsely assert a racial narrative where Trump first speaks of a China virus, then leftist media fabricate their "debunked bioweapon conspiracy" narrative as some sort of justified deception as a triage against "racism" or what have you. Trump didn't say anything about a China virus until several months after leftist media fabricated their narrative.
There's a profound prejudice and malice toward outsiders/non-leftists that makes objectivity impossible here, especially if those outsiders are Republicans/"the right". And all dissent and rigor is being coded as "right-wing" and "far right" by leftist media now – even longtime leftists and Democratic voters are being falsely tagged that way, if they say, call for schools to reopen, oppose censorship, note the lack of good evidence for mask efficacy (any type of mask, either direction), note that natural immunity outpunches the mRNA shots, etc. Left-right framing is devastating, primes a binary sorting.
I also think it's a big problem that leftist ideology has no commitment to integrity or cognitive independence. Humans generally don't display integrity when tested without an explicit commitment to it. Leftists aren't rewarded for it. It's not extolled and championed in their culture. It's easy to imagine a culture where it is, with a good virtue ethics that is more important than political ideology.
## Reading papers
I agree that journalists and just humans generally should read the damn papers. Those of you who say they can't should first go read some of these papers first. There's too much distance between people's views and reality, including the reality of academic papers. I'm convinced that the most savagely stupid human artifacts are found in journals like Science and Nature.
It's very common for social science studies and papers to be fully invalid or simply false. Fraud is trivially easy in academia, is not seriously investigated most of the time, and academics are unfamiliar with the word "audit". But you can detect catastrophic invalidity by just reading a paper in many cases. For example, here's a recent Nature paper on misinformation, ironically. It's completely false, invalid, and also fraudulent for good measure. Discovering the fraud requires reading a separate paper, since they don't disclose details of their method in this paper, details that make it fraudulent (they rigged their dataset, a dataset which is invalid and unusable anyway). We're not trained to deal with the infinite variability and arbitrariness of social science methods, so if you assume peer reviewed papers must be basically okay and valid, you'll be fooled. I also recommend blocking out all stats – they seem to bedazzle and fool readers, give papers a scientific sheen. Block out the stats, read the words, think about what stats would be valid given the words, then unveil what they did.
There are more false claims in the body. The opening sentence is stunning – gun violence is not a leading cause of death in the US. It's not even close (it's a Top 10 list, and it's in the top 15 that year). It's not actually a category in the CDC's list, but a subset of homicides, which is also not a leading cause of death. (Nor are "guns" the leading cause of death for children, a popular, stunning bit of misinformation – journalism is in awful shape.)
So we have a plainly false claim to open a journal article in Science. They won't retract or correct. (Note that their editor rails against the NRA "and its minions" and touts the promise of "science" to discover something useful re: firearms to push for his authoritarian policy preferences. Yet he publishes false claims and won't correct or retract them. Science indeed.)
Finally, here's a great and devastating example of idiocratic collapse. It's just one paragraph, the opening. Who among you can figure out what he did? Solve for his X. You need to be able to solve an exponential equation. That's your only clue. Ignore his obvious error in the text of calling a tiny number a large number. How did he get that number?
Once you understand the gravity of what he did, you might want to retreat to a cave or something. That stupidity of this savagery could be published in major American outlets is damning. Note it might take you weeks to process it. In fact, it might be hard to articulate what he did. You'll see what I mean, and his words are actually broken in a way that will contribute to the problem. (Not all strings of words are meaningful, and his aren't.)
I communicated with Gavin Schmidt, the head climate scientist at NASA, about this and he understood the core problem. But he wouldn't contact Rolling Stone to tell them it was wildly false and invalid to get them to retract. (They won't correct or retract their hoaxes without lots of pressure, if they advance leftist ideological narratives.) I'm not sure Gavin solved for X though. I wanted to see if he would do it without prompting. The climate scientist at the Nature Conservancy had no clue – she didn't even know the 20th century mean offhand, which still confuses me. I can't possibly be more versed in climate science than an actual climate scientist, but it's possible she's an outlier (her website touts awards of Most Important People, a huge red flag).
Can anyone solve for X? What's the nature of what he did?
These are just some examples of how bad things are out there. This political ideology is devastating to science and reason, and a bunch of people seem to be assuming that someone else is paying attention and gatekeeping. You can model the consequences in your head.
On all the recent issues, you can and should engage with reality directly. They're all compact in scope and source materials. There's not a lot to read re: COVID origin arguments, mask efficacy, etc. For example, with masks there's hardly any research, no randomized trials in America, only one in the West (that isn't good enough to use anyway).
There's no secret knowledge on these issues, nor are there any priestly intellectual capacities. Moreover, COVID origin isn't centrally a scientific question as much as a forensic/investigatory issue. Reality is exogenous to academic journals, and this question is structurally exogenous. For example, that Fauci and friends funded research at the Wuhan lab and had an unusually severe conflict of interest by our customary standards is an important fact, one that we don't need peer-reviewed research to know.
It would be worthwhile to model the cognition of "experts" when they address these issues and formulate their opinions and statements. We can easily see in many cases that there's not anything proprietary or extravagant going on.
For example, Sen. Rand Paul was censored and condemned by leftists for saying that cloth masks don't work, or "do anything", which I take to mean reduce COVID spread (in either direction). He's likely correct, though we don't know because we haven't done the trials for any mask type (we don't need trials for all questions, but we need them for mask efficacy for several reasons).
YouTube censored his videos (media interviews). Politifact, a leftist activist/censorship outfit, purported to debunk him by citing an animation of a mask (on the New York Times website). An animation. (And it was an animation of an N95, but treating an animation of any mask as evidence is savagely stupid, truly idiocratic.)
(https://www.politifact.com/article/2021/aug/11/examining-fal...)
Politifact also cited an "expert". He was a random doctor in Minnesota, a pediatrician. Doctors aren't experts on mask efficacy, much less for a specific pathogen, much less a new pathogen. They're not experts on arbitrary biomedical or epidemiological topics. This experts thing is starting to look like a mystical superstition that will get us all killed. *The experts on scientific questions are the people who conduct research on those questions.* Since there's hardly any research here, there are hardly any experts on this question, and more importantly, we can just read the research and ask whatever questions we have.
The doctor lamented "lies" about masks. He didn't cite any research. I'd bet thousands of dollars he hadn't read any of the few journal articles on the subject at the time (August, 2021).
It turned out he was just a maniacal leftist activist on Twitter, a man who had called for two different Republican politicians to resign in just the previous couple of weeks, for being "traitors" and "liars", retweeted that the governor of Massachusetts "hates children and science". There was no reason for Politifact to cite or know of the existence of a random Minnesota pediatrician, other than he was a Twitter maniac who would give them the quotes they wanted. The Politifact activist who wrote the piece exclusively "debunks" claims by non-leftists or that are incongruous with current mandatory Democratic Party narratives. He stopped fact checking Rachel Maddow when she infamously claimed that the COVID shots prevent infection and transmission, (it's not clear that leftists are aware, even in July 2023, that the shots don't do these things, and why):
"A vaccinated person gets exposed to the virus, the virus does not infect them, the virus cannot then use that person to go anywhere else," she added with a shrug. "It cannot use a vaccinated person as a host to go get more people.""
(https://www.foxnews.com/media/social-media-users-demand-apol...)
Politifact never fact-checked the above, just stopped checking Maddow altogether, giving her a free pass. Note that Biden made the same wildly false claims, and to my knowledge has never corrected or apologized.
So the "experts" thing is getting in the way, obscuring reality, preventing us from thinking clearly. You'll also see bizarre citations of the CDC, of some anonymously written CDC webpage, a page full of errors and false citations (their science of masking page), with no stated methodology (e.g. meta-analysis with inclusion criteria). There's no need to just cite other people's opinions, and whether any organization is reliable is an empirical question. The CDC's reliability cannot simply be assumed, and because there's so little research we can just read it, then look at what the CDC says and ask any questions we have. (The CDC doesn't have its own research or data on mask efficacy, which they'd have to publish if they did – they ran no trials. They only cite outside research, have been stunningly lazy, incurious, and misleading.) Certainly, journalists should do this.
It's critically important to not outsource our cognitive activity or our connection with reality. We're dealing with a mass stupidity situation here, where there's very little sign of cognition, much less intellect, on these topics. We've got people unaware that an arbitrary reduction in pathogen population doesn't necessarily reduce infection risk (masks), that we don't know the long-term or even short-term effects of brand new pharma, that finding traces of raccoon dog material mixed with COVID virus on a surface doesn't mean anything at all, that men are much stronger and faster than women even of the same weight, etc. This is not a scientific civilization.
We're seeing too many at-a-distance arguments about experts and science and "who to trust" on issues that can be navigated efficiently with a few key background facts, good alertness, and a 110 IQ. We've got to get people to read, because it's clear even journalists aren't. Just read the damn papers first, and then we can talk about whether we need experts to tell us or explain something.
It's also troubling that we've got a political ideology that explicitly demonizes asking questions. Leftists have a trope of "just asking questions" that they use to marginalize anyone who, well, asks questions that deviate from mandatory narratives and beliefs or is willing to think independently. It's a very bad sign for an ideology to have that kind of dogma, and if you were going to have that trope in your ideology, you'd need to fortify it against its obvious propensity toward bias and motivated reasoning by building a robust framework that differentiates between villainous and sincere questioners, creating lots of room for rigor and curiosity. Leftists haven't done that, with predictable results. (Trying to build the framework would likely illustrate that you need to just get rid of the trope and not marginalize questions at all.)