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Elizabeth's avatar

Thank you for this.

Your sense of humor is wonderful, I laughed out loud a few times. (desperately needed)

And your point is wonderful as well.

I would add that if someone is held up to me as the one and only expert and is also financially making a huge profit off my choice, it doesn't take much thinking on my part to say no.

I would also add that when what I thought was my tribe, starts saying things like... don't you care about others and holds a very archaic idea of contagion or illness? And then starts posting photos of themselves alone wearing a mask, when I know for the good of all we need to see facial expression. It's a hard no.

And I realize I don't have a tribe, even now, as those who believe as I do, believe all sorts of other things I can't begin to embrace.

And I also know my body tells me all sorts of stuff without my understanding, and so I listen.

Tribe can get you into trouble,

if belonging is the be all and end all. And we are always outsourcing our worth to others.

Damn I need to pee.

(Oh, my box of 'And'sss is empty.)

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Rudolph Rigger's avatar

Great article - loved it.

I guess I didn't use the word "informed" because I'm not at all sure what that means. If I only watch or read pro-narrative accounts can I be considered to be informed? If I only read or watch sceptical accounts can I be considered to be informed?

If the information we're 'informing' ourselves with is itself flawed, then to what extent can we be considered to be informed?

At some point we have to 'trust' experts in technical fields - but it should never be a complete trust. As much as I would like to understand the virology and immunology required I recognise that I can't read stuff fast enough, or understand it fast enough. To get myself to a level which I might consider to be reasonably 'expert' in these fields would probably require a few years of some really serious study.

But what if the experts disagree? How are we to come to a reasonable conclusion then? We might be swayed by some notional 'consensus' - but whatever side we pin our hopes on, consensus or anti-consensus, we should never stop questioning. There's a further supplementary question - exactly *who* establishes and maintains the 'consensus'? We've been told that the 'expert' consensus surrounding covid aligns with the official narrative. But does it?

I have my doubts on that score. Most of my ex-colleagues at the uni where I worked had very serious doubts and concerns about the 'official' position - but none of us felt able to properly speak out (it didn't help that there were punitive fines imposed in the country where I worked for going against the narrative or the restrictions imposed).

In the case of covid I think the 'consensus' is nowhere near as firm and widespread as we are being led to suppose. We might do some sort of published paper count to see where the 'consensus' lies, but this is also not a good measure - too much pressure has been applied by journals to promote the narrative - and pro-narrative papers have been fast-tracked, being pushed through without proper process (not to mention the work itself has often been rushed out before it's really ready). It's an emergency, see?

Piss poor excuse for pumping out crappy work, in my view.

There are also plenty of examples where the abstract and conclusions read as if they're "pro-narrative" - but when you look at the meat, rather than the trimmings, you find data and analyses that run counter to the given conclusions. It's almost as if the authors recognise they have to 'hide' their true opinions with some propaganda in order to get their work published.

So it's a pragmatic measure to place some degree of trust in experts in a technical discipline - you simply can't read and understand everything properly in every field. Even in my own research field - a pretty narrow specialization of physics - it was a bugger of a job to keep up with all the stuff that was getting published.

But my view is skewed precisely because I'm a physicist. In physics, or at least in my little part of physics, it's possible to work through things and see where things don't fit, or don't make sense - or where the math has been fucked up. But we have a set of fairly simple and well-established 'laws' to work with - all of classical electromagnetic phenomena, for example, is beautifully described by Maxwell's equations with the Lorenz force law - essentially just 5 equations. It's really, really hard to apply those equations though - and new consequences are still being discovered over a 100 years after they were worked out.

Not so with biology or medicine. It's a level of complexity that is in an entirely different league. There are, I think, few such guiding principles like the laws we have in physics. And we've seen so very many examples where 'consensus' in these fields has been overturned - in some cases quite spectacularly. Given the complexity of these disciplines I don't find that at all surprising - and I really don't think 'consensus' arguments hold up too well here because (a) there are too many examples where the consensus view was horseshit and (b) I'd be sceptical of *too much* consensus in such very complex fields.

Anyway - as is my wont - I'm rambling. Thanks for writing this piece - really enjoyed it. Very funny and insightful.

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