Which is a great shame as I found the article itself to be very balanced and well written.
But just as Scientism has become a religion, so has anti-expertise (whether legitimate or not) become a countervailing, and as you say, equally as dangerous movement.
Dude, this is not a balanced take on the situation. It is an appeal to emotion dressed in only the thinnest trappings of reason.
> Over the past year, a fearful public has acquiesced to an extraordinary extension of expert jurisdiction over every domain of life. A pattern of “government by emergency” has become prominent, in which resistance to such incursions are characterised as “anti-science”.
That's his conclusion. The premise going in, that a corruption of science is being used to drive political ends appears a reasonable initial line of reasoning. I can differ in where I take the conclusion but agree about this initial premise. Johnson wants economic outcomes which drive him to claim science backed policy when the science does not actually support what he is doing in the UK (for instance) and I do think a perpetuated economic and health crisis is being used to achieve political goals in a lot of ways.
Enabling legislation is being rushed through parliaments in a lot of places to post hoc legitimate a form of rule by ministerial decree.
This article appears to be the work of an author who has been preoccupied with his thesis for too long. Having noticed some flaws and studied them, all he can see now is corruption.
Meanwhile, in the real world, science and technology has, in little more than a year and mostly apolitically, developed several different vaccines against covid-sars-2, tested them, and we are in the process of vaccinating the world's population. People are getting vaccinated, not because they are being forced to, but because they want to. I strongly suspect that, over the next year, a preponderance of those who are currently hesitant will quietly, and individually, choose to be vaccinated. The biggest problems right now are in delivering doses to where they are most needed, and that is a geopolitical problem that has nothing to do with the allegedly corrupt and authoritarian nature of science.
If we are all going to hell in a handbasket, it is not because science has become corrupt.
Overall I agree. But the underlying pressure not to publish negative results, the commercialisation of publication, the publish or perish retrace has got worse.
The politicisation of science has also got markedly worse. Az got lambasted by sectoral interests, promoting pfizer and modena. Not that mRNA isn't amazing, but the sheer amount of crap decision making around Az is telling.
The fuckup around aerosol dispersion is one room of science and disease theory disrespecting the specialists in another room. The work on aerosols was compelling good science months before the WHO backtracked and accepted it (this is a QuT specialist research area so its a story I know from Australia where I live. Prof Lidia Morowska's and others work getting the reconsideration of aerosol risk took a lot of pushing.)
AGW antoscientism was weaponised by big oil. Anti nuke fever has added metric tonnes of cost to any rational discussions of nuclear power and green energy.
Meanwhile, antibiotic use is rampant. We know the science here. We know what's coming.
24 Hours ago I commented about how it was frustrating that social media giants were censoring the people with concerns or questions about Covid and vaccines.
Here is one of many negative responses I recieved
<i> >You're the one who is asking SOCIAL MEDIA companies (i.e. Facebook and twitter) to educate you more. "I wish the social media giants would just stop all the censorship and allow the discussions to take place."
Maybe that's the issue all along. Shouldn't have random people and nefarious state actors provide your education, but maybe go out there and read reputable sources, read peer reviewed trial data (The Lancet), read about the success of vaccinations in countries such as Israel.
Not Facebook and Twitter. </i>
THIS article elegantly put into words the point I was trying to make, I did recieve many good answers to my questions regarding the vaccines too but did suffer a great deal of negativity, just for asking questions.
What ever happened to there are no stupid questions?
Everything vaccine/ Covid related I get from the BMJ. Which seem more reputable and data-driven than most, and also more sceptical of the beliefs that the average ‘trust the science’ social media advocate takes as being gospel.
I’d also recommend Dr Malcolm Kendrick and Dr Sebastien Rushworth, in this vein also FWIW.
But what do I know? I’m just another stranger on the Internet.
Well after doing as much research and asking questions to the best of my uneducated ability. I decided to go ahead and get my first shot today. So I'm now on team Pfizer, hopefully I made the right decision and if not well it is what it is.
I do not see anything particularly hostile in the suggestion that you should not regard social media as any of authoritative, informed, objective or well-reasoned (though it could have been expressed more felicitously.)
I would add that if the social media giants really are trying to censor people merely for having concerns or questions about Covid and vaccines, they seem to be particularly inept at doing so!
That ignores the fact that the vast majority of people will not read publications or pay for journals. Instead, there has to be a worthwhile discussion with many viewpoints in social media.
I've seen enough WHO sponsored ads like "Stay calm. Trust your government. Don't go to social media.". Very suspicious.
Your first paragraph is a red herring - you don't have to read journal articles to be well-informed. If people choose to be uninformed, then that is what they will be, and not even the article here is going so far as to say that corrupt science is coercing people to be well-informed.
Your second paragraph displays the sort of unfalsifiable 'logic' that we find in conspiracy theories. Nevertheless, there are plenty of people beyond the WHO who are saying don't rely on social media for information, and for good reason.
Whether people realise it or not, what they read repeatedly sticks. So even glancing over false news, they will keep them in mind. There has to be a way to point them out in the moment of posting.
It is not clear what point you are trying to make here. Some people will come to wrong conclusions, so... don't publish anything? Don't publish anything except that which you, personally, judge to be correct? That if one sees a news article and an immediate rebuttal on some social medium, one must conclude that the former is false and the latter is true?
Well, there is, in general - and it works, so long as a preponderance of the participants are well-intentioned, and at least some of them are reasonably well-informed. The author of TFA is being alarmist.
> Our status as a free society rests, not on laws, but on convention, a “collective instinct” about what we ought to do, rooted in habits of thinking and feeling that develop slowly...
If enough people in a society believe freedom is less important than the alternative, laws don't really matter. People had a collective instinct that a threat was more important than freedom. It was rare, at least in the US for example, for courts to step in during the pandemic to correct blatant violations of Equal Protection. The US Supreme Court took months to declare the California ban on religious assembly unconstitutional. For months you could assemble in a Costco or a Target but not a Church.
While some might argue it was for the best intentions, public health, etc., I think Pandora's Box is wide open. If 9/11 and the War on Terror taught me anything, it's that we will never completely go back to what life looked like before this thing.
20 comments
[ 2.7 ms ] story [ 59.3 ms ] threadIt's going to be misunderstood as a clarion call to the reductionist, and "i was right to be skeptic" movement.
It's going to be as politicised itself, as the science if discusses.
But just as Scientism has become a religion, so has anti-expertise (whether legitimate or not) become a countervailing, and as you say, equally as dangerous movement.
I have no idea what the solution is...
> Over the past year, a fearful public has acquiesced to an extraordinary extension of expert jurisdiction over every domain of life. A pattern of “government by emergency” has become prominent, in which resistance to such incursions are characterised as “anti-science”.
Enabling legislation is being rushed through parliaments in a lot of places to post hoc legitimate a form of rule by ministerial decree.
Meanwhile, in the real world, science and technology has, in little more than a year and mostly apolitically, developed several different vaccines against covid-sars-2, tested them, and we are in the process of vaccinating the world's population. People are getting vaccinated, not because they are being forced to, but because they want to. I strongly suspect that, over the next year, a preponderance of those who are currently hesitant will quietly, and individually, choose to be vaccinated. The biggest problems right now are in delivering doses to where they are most needed, and that is a geopolitical problem that has nothing to do with the allegedly corrupt and authoritarian nature of science.
If we are all going to hell in a handbasket, it is not because science has become corrupt.
The politicisation of science has also got markedly worse. Az got lambasted by sectoral interests, promoting pfizer and modena. Not that mRNA isn't amazing, but the sheer amount of crap decision making around Az is telling.
The fuckup around aerosol dispersion is one room of science and disease theory disrespecting the specialists in another room. The work on aerosols was compelling good science months before the WHO backtracked and accepted it (this is a QuT specialist research area so its a story I know from Australia where I live. Prof Lidia Morowska's and others work getting the reconsideration of aerosol risk took a lot of pushing.)
AGW antoscientism was weaponised by big oil. Anti nuke fever has added metric tonnes of cost to any rational discussions of nuclear power and green energy.
Meanwhile, antibiotic use is rampant. We know the science here. We know what's coming.
Here is one of many negative responses I recieved
<i> >You're the one who is asking SOCIAL MEDIA companies (i.e. Facebook and twitter) to educate you more. "I wish the social media giants would just stop all the censorship and allow the discussions to take place."
Maybe that's the issue all along. Shouldn't have random people and nefarious state actors provide your education, but maybe go out there and read reputable sources, read peer reviewed trial data (The Lancet), read about the success of vaccinations in countries such as Israel.
Not Facebook and Twitter. </i>
THIS article elegantly put into words the point I was trying to make, I did recieve many good answers to my questions regarding the vaccines too but did suffer a great deal of negativity, just for asking questions.
What ever happened to there are no stupid questions?
I’d also recommend Dr Malcolm Kendrick and Dr Sebastien Rushworth, in this vein also FWIW.
But what do I know? I’m just another stranger on the Internet.
I would add that if the social media giants really are trying to censor people merely for having concerns or questions about Covid and vaccines, they seem to be particularly inept at doing so!
I've seen enough WHO sponsored ads like "Stay calm. Trust your government. Don't go to social media.". Very suspicious.
Your second paragraph displays the sort of unfalsifiable 'logic' that we find in conspiracy theories. Nevertheless, there are plenty of people beyond the WHO who are saying don't rely on social media for information, and for good reason.
If enough people in a society believe freedom is less important than the alternative, laws don't really matter. People had a collective instinct that a threat was more important than freedom. It was rare, at least in the US for example, for courts to step in during the pandemic to correct blatant violations of Equal Protection. The US Supreme Court took months to declare the California ban on religious assembly unconstitutional. For months you could assemble in a Costco or a Target but not a Church.
While some might argue it was for the best intentions, public health, etc., I think Pandora's Box is wide open. If 9/11 and the War on Terror taught me anything, it's that we will never completely go back to what life looked like before this thing.