Am Do, 30. Jul 2020, um 17:16, schrieb John Clark: > > On Thu, Jul 30, 2020 at 11:27 AM Telmo Menezes <[email protected]> wrote: > >> __ >> > ***I disapprove of Trump and everything he stands for as much as you do. I >> > detest him. He is an incompetent narcissist, and his election as the >> > president of the USA was a nightmare come true.* > > Truer words were never spoken! > >> > *I think that the current extreme political polarization of all things is >> > doing damage to science. A symptom of this is that the epistemological >> > status of things such as the efficacy of hydroxychloriquine became >> > impossible to determine for those not deeply involved in the field, even >> > if scientifically literate and able to follow the papers.* > > Crackpots, and in that I would include Trump supporters and > thehydroxychloroquine cure COVID-19 people, don't just dispute well > established theories, they dispute the raw data itself. I've had otherwise > intelligent people tell me that every epidemiologist in the world is wrong, > and the entire scientific community is wrong, and even insist every bit of > data we have about COVID-19 is wrong. Why would they do that? Because if the > data was right they would have to radically change their worldview and face > the fact that Donald Trump is not doing a good job. Changing one's worldview > is quite painful for some people. > > Nobody can be knowledgeable about everything, so if the vast majority of > expert specialists in the world on a very complicated subject like > epidemiology, agrees on something, people who have spent their life studying > the subject, then I think they are much more likely to be correct then you or > I are after we've only been studying the matter for 20 minutes or so. That's > why people read scientific journals and believe that what they say is > probably true even if they haven't personally carried out the experiments > described in them. People that we trust, because they have proven to be right > in the past, judge new research and if they think it's not valid they don't > publish it in their journals, and if they think it is valid then they do. > It's a web of trust, it's what the cryptographic program PGP uses to ensure > that a public key really belongs to the person that it claims to. And history > has shown the system, although not perfect, works pretty well most of the > time, which is a hell of a lot better than most things work. > > And by the way, I don't think Trump has spent even 20 minutes studying viral > epidemiology or statistical theory in his entire life.
I more or less agree with everything you say. That is exactly why I worry that incidents such as the Lancet retraction are damaging to the web of trust. Telmo -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Everything List" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to [email protected]. To view this discussion on the web visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/everything-list/777296fb-a76b-4b8a-aef6-f8bb70c45aa4%40www.fastmail.com.
