"It is characteristic of these abstract systems that we cannot opt out, at least not entirely. Sustaining trust in them therefore becomes a basic requirement for the functioning of modern societies. Essential to this process [are]... interactions between lay citizens and individual members (or representatives) of abstract systems — think of experts such as Dr. Anthony Fauci or even your family physician.
Such interactions provide opportunities for experts vested with authority not only to exemplify the requisite skills, but also to exhibit the character traits — rectitude, professionalism, disinterestedness — needed to generate and sustain the trust of those lay individuals who depend on them.... A politics suspended between radical skepticism and uncritical trust would become unmoored from common reference points.... Experts would be either angels or demons.... Restoring public trust... is therefore necessary for not only expert institutions but arguably democratic society itself...."
ADDED: I think people realize this but the hare-brained solution seems to be to accuse those who are mistrustful of destroying democracy: You must trust or there will be chaos.
Posts
81 comments:
such interactions provide opportunities for experts vested with authority not only to exemplify the requisite skills, but also to exhibit the character traits — rectitude, professionalism, disinterestedness — needed to generate and sustain the trust of those lay individuals who depend on them
It's too late. They fucked up by using (cashing in) their "expertise" for short term political gain.
As an example, I point to needing everyone to lock down, socially distance, wear masks, etc, while simultaneously saying if your goal was protesting for BLM then none of those restrictions were required.
Also, experts don't need to silence their critics.
Yes expertise is required for a functioning society. Societal trust in institutions is an important thing, but you earn trust by being trustworthy, not mandating, "you must trust us".
Unfortunately you can't put toothpaste back in the tube. And society as a whole will pay the price.
If you don't support the liberal agenda you don't get funded so you infer, you lie, you make shit up, and you tell yourself and the others on the diversity committee these are okay because that's how the system works...but only between bitch-fests complaining about the lab director that suggested your camel toe stretch pants might not be the most professional attire for the annual conference...
...and they wonder why they're losing America's trust...
Scientists are lying, in return for money (it gets worse, but more on that later). That's it. That's the reason. It is just that simple.
We no longer trust "the experts" because they've been corrupted by politicians, with a system designed to ensure that they stay corrupted. You cannot, for example, get a grant from the government to prove that global warming is a hoax. The government won't give you that money. They'll only give you money if you say that global warming is occurring.
Here's where it gets worse: At the height of the COVID-19 panic, politicians got scientists to say that it was OK to put infected sick people into nursing homes that had no way to treat them or prevent the spread of the disease in those homes. This resulted in probably millions of deaths. Anthony Fauci is no different from Josef Mengele. They have the exact same ethics, which is to say none.
If we had a functioning press, he'd be in prison right now. And that's why nobody trusts the press any more either.
Finally, we have tort law for a reason: It's to prevent companies from producing drugs that HURT us or even just don't help us. But the drug companies have successfully demanded to be excluded from our laws, or else they won't produce the drugs. They literally hold us hostage to their demands while in the background their compatriots are literally producing deadly viruses like COVID19.
Do you trust people who would do that? No, you wouldn't and you shouldn't. It's not even a close call.
Way to slip in the positive Fauchi reference. The facts say he's worse than Hitler but he has a good PR firm on his side...
Over at Marginal Revolution, Eliezer Yudkowsky's Less Wrong, and Robin Hanson's Overcomingbias.com, and many others there has recently been seen frequent comments and posts with an overarching and recurring theme:
Complex Systems Will Not Survive The Competency Crisis
Perhaps you've seen these too. They started popping up last year. People are starting to wake up to a startling fact that the very worse, least competent people have actually managed to infiltrate the very highest levels of institutions that are absolutely critical not just for maintaining standards of living, but for survival itself.
Western Civilization is a passenger in the OceanGate Sub, and that sub has been put together and crewed by the dumbest most entitled trustfund babies that were ever shat out of a civilization afflicted with affluenza. We are being taken for a ride by highly evolved, pedigreed narcissists.
John the Baptist is crying in the wild: Complex Systems Will Not Survive The Competency Crisis
What is the "why"?
This is spot on. Science has been recruited into deception for 30 years and medical practice for 15 years. The bat way to deal with them is unbelief. That requires a shopping around to find an institution that has senior mentors from the old ethical days.
One more reason for the New World Order to attack Trump. He is ethical and he fights instead of selling out for Soros cash.
Science is merely a process for finding facts and determining causes-vs.-effects. It has no relationship to morality, as shown by Darwinian scientific racism, Nazi prisoner research, the USSR's exploitation of science for all sorts of cultural destruction, Japan's prisoner research, China's numerous offenses, the USA's treatment of blacks, and accepting dirty German findings/staff to fund the Space Race.
On top of this, science jobs are contaminated by politics (e.g., Fauci, as here), money and corporations (e.g., COVID, military spending), and quacks with grand ideas that are either wrong or impossible to prove (e.g., a lot of DEI, mental health, social psychology, sociology, etc.)
We feared global destruction from the invention of nuclear weapons, but science today can hit from the nuke side, the chemical side, the biological side, social/cultural dysfunction, unintended pollution, etc. The odds of self-destruction have likely never been higher than today.
So-called "experts" have lost the trust of many Americans for good reason. They've been massively wrong, we can see that and they won't admit their errors.
Two examples:
1. Covid. We were told there would be massive deaths - across all demographics - if everyone didn't get vaxxed. We were also told, it was safe. The shutdown of schools and businesses were essential. Wrong about everything.
2. CAGW. This is such an obvious scam I still can't believe people believe this. The Left has been predicting doom for decades and have been wrong for decades. Results matter.
This CAGW stuff isn't science. It's a prediction about events in the far distant future. When we spend trillions (and that's the number) by 2050 how will we know in 2100 if it worked? We'll be dead.
With the experts, who are we going to believe? The failed clowns or our own lying eyes and common sense.
Our ancestors would have laughed themselves sick at the notion that anyone wielding the power of government could ever be trusted implicitly.
The world forgot to be jealously distrustful of government in the 20th century, and the result was a charnel house with a pile of corpses 200 million high. This century will undoubtedly exceed that butcher's bill if current trends continue.
I remember hearing that after the Berlin Wall fell, West Germans found that East Germans believed a lot of crazy conspiracy theories. That's the fruit of not having an independent press. If The Party controls the press (which is very nearly where we are today in the US), then there is no trustworthy source of information and people will look to heterodox sources, which maybe doesn't seem so bad, but there's no balance, no brake, no opposition of equal forces to produce stability.
Ever since Bill Clinton made sure homeopathy and other worthless concoctions appear on Pharmacy shelves, Science's credibility has been under attack. I find it so weird how people like him, and Oprah, have turned this country into such a fantasyland that the nation is no longer self-aware enough to investigate how it's been manipulated. You tell them Whole Foods is a temple to pseudoscience and they still shop there. Even after their spiritual advisor is found to be a rapist, falling totally into the cliché about "spiritual healers."
How will any of this NewAge madness stop if our citizens won't stop indulging it and start exposing charlatanism?
It wasn't until the 19th paragraph that the author finally discussed why scientists have lost the trust of many Americans. Are these authors paid by the column inch? More likely, the NYT knows their readers will not make it to the 19th paragraph. The first 18 paragraphs pointing out it's really those awful Republicans who don't trust science will be enough to stroke the egos of the readers who will have moved on to the next ego-stroking article.
Does anyone think that the so-called experts have done a good job on social and public policy?
What record of success do the experts have?
The experts are like the Nebraska football team. Past glory is long gone. A record of failure over the last 20 years.
Bitter Clinger said...
"It wasn't until the 19th paragraph that the author finally discussed why scientists have lost the trust of many Americans."
Jim Carrey and Jenny McCarthy were on Oprah telling everyone to doubt Science long before the pandemic. He and De Niro were plotting with Robert F Kennedy Junior for all of this, long before the public ever caught on.
The pandemic didn't change the facts on the ground, but the hysteria did change how everyone looked at things. The fact, they don't know they're being manipulated by the NewAge, leads to conclusions AGAINST SCIENCE that they probably shouldn't come to, and probably wouldn't have, otherwise.
Again: the blame for all this is Bill Clinton's, and - like his three rapes - we should never forget that. He's the one, in the Oprah-soaked "searching" NewAge years of the '90s, who opened Pandora's box and released the furies,...
This article is exactly on a topic that I want to explore but it’s an incredible slog to read and actually very disappointing in its content.
Public trust depends to a very direct extent on the care laborers take with our foodstuffs and our trash and our underground pipes and so on and so on. Trusting scientists is easy - they are supposed to be peer reviewed, openly, and their data is supposed to be open for review and testing for repeatability. If not, no trust! Trusting that the guys loading lettuce heads onto the truck haven't shat in the field is a bit harder to do, as it involves a lot of personal responsibility as well as good management practices.
Fauci lost trust by blocking research and lying to the public.
Follow the money.
Stuart Buck has been involved with a number of replication projects and initiatives to make science more credible (by making it more likely to be right). Excerpted from a recent writing of his:
Here’s the problem, and it’s true for science as much as it’s true for coworkers, spouses, or anyone else: Trust can only be earned, not demanded. And one of the most critical places where scientists, journals, and funders could earn that trust is by giving more prominence to replications and reanalyses that expose prior scientific errors.
When scientists instead try to sweep such replications under the rug, they show that the public may actually be right to be skeptical of science. If scientific institutions want to earn the public’s trust, they need to adopt the Pottery Barn Rule: You break it, you buy it. In other words, if you’re a journal editor who published a substantially erroneous article, you have an obligation to publish replications, reanalyses, and criticisms. Same for funders.
When scientific institutions are more deliberately self-correcting, they will earn more public trust.
Early in the psychology replication crisis, one of the most scrutinized articles was by Cornell researcher Daryl Bem [saying precognition was real] ... Stuart Ritchie and his colleagues tried to replicate one of Bem’s experiments. Unsurprisingly, they found no effect.
But journals weren’t interested in their “failed” replication. Even the editor (Eliot Smith of Indiana University) of the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology (which had published Bem’s paper on precognition!) turned down Ritchie’s replication. Smith wrote: “This journal does not publish replication studies, whether successful or unsuccessful.”
One might hope that this failure of journal ethics is a matter of the past. By now, surely every journal editor knows that replications are a key part of science, and there is no justification for refusing to publish replications altogether.
Not so, unfortunately ...
I think people realize this but the hare-brained solution seems to be to accuse those who are mistrustful of destroying democracy: You must trust or there will be chaos.
And this hare-brained solution further undermines the credibility of the institutions while inhibiting necessary reforms.
#DeathSpiral
Re our host's comments about this NYT being an incredible slog; I used to compare the interminable length of stories in my local newspaper--the Los Angeles Times--with the crisp concise reporting at the NYT. Most NYT stories began and ended on the same page, or at most jumped to just one other page. At the Los Angeles Times (in its long ago "glory days" news stories would wander forever and jump to three or four different pages). In contrast the NYT had editors who shut down reporter's bloviations with a blue pencil,
Well the Los Angeles Times has become mostly an opinion piece and with declining readership has become just a few pages each day.
But as for the loss of trust in "science", the old adage about lying comes to mind. "Fool me once, it's your fault. Fool me twice, it's my fault." Much of the country has decided it won't be fooled again by politicized "experts".
"Why Science Is Losing Americans’ Trust"
Top experts conclude it's because many Americans stubbornly refuse to incorporate the basics of gullibility into their analysis of information. Others point to the fact that so many scientists are lying sacks.
If the question is why "Science" is losing Americans' trust, the reasons are
a) Most modern "Science" is shit, excreted for money.
b) That money comes from the government, which has been largely coopted by Left Fascists. It therefore stinks of Left Fascism.
M. Anthony Mills is an expert at Expertsplaining.
Democrats, in particular, put 'the appeal to authority' above everything, and have abused that standpoint by having those in authority lie.
Well, a good start would be to stop lying. Doubt that will happen though, lying seems to be a rather fruitful endeavor in the Expert Class.
"A politics suspended between radical skepticism and uncritical trust" is exactly what is required by experience, common sense, and the application of logic. Not a politics swinging wildly between these poles but a politics inching one way or another in response to new input.
Science is deeply unnatural to human beings, which is why it only took hold in one place after 4800 years of recorded history. That's extremely strange if you think about it. Even if you believe Europeans are superior somehow, why'd it take them so long?
Humans really want to believe the world can be described by language and controlled by words. We even have a word for that belief: magic.
We had to create a new language, mathematics, to understand the truth of reality. It's not a language most people understand, nor can it be changed without losing its utility.
Many people are mad about that, and want to go back to magic.
Simple substitution. What if the “faceless commitment” to a social institution, particularly an expert institute, is the Catholic Church? For a long time, advancement of science came from religion. Copernicus heliocentric model of the universe was accepted and celebrated by the Catholic Church 50 years before it was deemed heretical resulting in Galileo’s trial. Both were right, the sun is the center of our observable solar system, and wrong, our sun is not even the center of our galaxy nor our universe. Both recognized the significant influence our sun has on Earth that is readily dismissed by supporters of AGW.
Two more points.
1. The Left constantly tells us that solar and wind are cheap. The actual numbers are that in the MISO group of states, solar prices have increased 85% in two years while wind has increased 77%.
2. On this trans business for minors, the constant claim was: "gender-affirming care" was approved by 30 major national and international medical associations including the AMA and APA.
As you can see, the actual numbers disprove the claim of cheapness for solar and wind and anyone with a brain in their head knows that kids shouldn't be mutilated and given powerful hormones.
They are all liars.
Question: Has the Left (supported by their so-called experts) been correct about any major policy issue in the last 30 years?
Trust. Don't verify.
Ann Althouse said...
This article is exactly on a topic that I want to explore but it’s an incredible slog to read and actually very disappointing in its content.
I reckon its something like...around the horn with some naval gazing from experts, a positive mention of Fauci and/or Obama, a couple of Trump bad references and the conclusion that it's not us its them, only in what they believe is a sophisticated, intellectual way...
I'll sum it up thus: we rubes are good at spotting duping behavior...
...and speaking for myself, if you pretended to side with science once in a while instead of the Democrats all the time it would make the shams a bit harder to spot.
Now finish the thought by providing the context, the Gramscian “Long March through the institutions,” since it is the very eroding of these institutions from the inside that has led to a sharp drop in confidence in our shared systems. Even now they are fighting tooth and claw to keep control of the internet. Control, not freedom is the root cause of all our problems. Free speech has harmed far fewer people than the destruction of law and order and any kind of fairness.
There are better writers on this topic. Warning: This subject is kryptonite to the ruling class (I.e. The Woke) and all the serious writing I’ve seen has been conservative thinkers and writers. This exception is a unicorn and I’d be surprised if the Times let another one go to print (so to speak). I wonder if this is in the print edition.
Are comments allowed on NYT website for this article?
It is generally seen as a healthy thing to distrust people who:
- lie to you.
- are hypocritical.
- refuse to be questioned.
- have failed you repeatedly.
- appear to have perverse motivations, such as greed or a lust for power.
- are in the employ of anyone that would qualify as any of the above.
Trust takes a long time to establish. It takes very little to throw it all away.
Good grief, this guy wrote an entire article about how people are increasingly skeptical of "The Science" without bothering to mention that The Science was wrong (if not actively deceptive) at every stage of our recent global nightmare, aside from a passing reference to the "mixed and misleading" messaging on masks. Sure, he acknowledges that politicians were lying (which ones? he doesn't say), but so were Pfizer and Fauci and Brix and Walensky and your local health "authorities" and on and on and on.
You want trust?
1. Admit your failures.
2. Hire all new people.
3. Wait 10 or 20 years.
TRUST IS EARNED.
The tell in this article is simple - the folks that pushed the “science” that was so disastrously wrong and perverse during the Covid period never suffered one negative consequence for their actions. Who got fired at the top? Who got sued for destroying peoples lives? Who lost their accreditation for the incompetent “recommendations” they shoved down throats? No one.
Same with trust in the military. Who was sacked over the Afghanistan fiasco? Who lost their jobs over consistent ship or airplane or weapon designs that flat don’t work? Or when ships burn or their engines fail - who gets shown the door? No one.
The other thing that is strongly coupled with the above is the fact that people have woken up to just how much money is being shoveled to “ friends” through regulatory capture and revolving door “regulator to industry” pipeline. When agencies that are supposed to regulate are making money off what they police - get real. Zero trust from public
We need a Teddy Roosevelt to bust these “ trusts” to the ground.
This old Carl Sagan video, talking to a now canceled interviewer, has been getting some X play. (That link to the old Carl Sagan clip is related to the Nobel Prize Althouse posted about yesterday.)
Excerpt: "We've arranged a society based on science and technology in which nobody understands anything about science and technology. This combustible mixture of ignorance and power, sooner or later, is gonna blow up in our faces." —Carl Sagan, May 27th, 1996
I did a word search on a bootleg copy of the article and found no results for "warming," "climate," "global," or "lying mother fuckers."
Might have missed it.
I'm still waiting for the 1980s ice age my cellular biology professor promised in 1970.
Lots of good points above.
A shorter way to express it:
If "Science" wanted to cause ordinary Americans to lose faith in "Science," what would it do differently from what it has done for the past ~7 years?
How to say, 'they got it wrong' without saying 'they got it wrong'.
Maybe it would help if they said it in Esperanto.
Not science, a philosophy and practice in the near domain, observable, reproducible, but rather consensus, models, manipulation, mandates, conflation of logical domains.
PhD scientist here (chemistry). I no longer practice. Science, especially medical science has been wrong in the past. I’m thinking dietary advice in particular. Yet when things are wrong, we just get a “scientists are now saying.” The notion that things are set in stone is wrong.
Because people lying and using "SCIENCE" as the excuse for their grift is tiring.
My husband and I talk about this a lot. Institutions have lately given people many reasons not to trust them: suppressing speech out of line with orthodoxy on COVID and DEI policies, outrageously biased media coverage, comparatively unfair treatment of January 6th rioters versus BLM rioters, pushing highly polarized and questionable ideologies concerning gender and DEI in schools and corporations, etc. So you have a lot of people who, rather than becoming skeptical of institutions, have decided that institutions are their enemies. This has led to an explosion in conspiracy theories. It's a post-rational culture where a person either accepts whatever the Man says or whatever is said against the Man. The bifurcation of society into toadies and nutjobs.
It has been an interesting year or so for us. First, and foremost, several of our doctors pushed the COVID-19 “vaccines”. Outside their narrow specialties, we seriously question their expertise. Those who questioned the orthodoxy are trusted more now. And, those who don’t question the CAGW “consensus” are distrusted. Ditto for those who try to tell us that there wasn’t significant Dem fraud during the 2020 and 2022 elections.
I don’t think that we are alone here. The whole edifice of expert expertise is rapidly crumbling.
M. Anthony Mills has a problem with tenses. Not “is losing” but “has lost.”
You must trust or there will be chaos. Another problem with tenses. No sane person can trust the federal government (for instance we now know that the FBI altered the FD-302 forms in the case of General Glynn) or scientists funded by government grants (For instance in early 2020 Dr. Kristian Andersen wrote to Anthony Fauci about the possibility of an engineered coronavirus. He changed his mind — and subsequently received an $8.9 million research from Fauci. Yet we now know that Dr. Anderson was right the first time, that the virus was engineered and thus must have came from a laboratory.). Consequently there already no trust and so there is chaos.
Given how far, how many sigma, Madison and New York City are to the left of center, this topic of loss of trust may seem like a theoretical concern that may yet be averted. Elsewhere in this country it’s way too late.
Re Covid:
It became evident rather quickly that the recommendations were based on 'feel good, doing something/anything' thinking - not actual medical thinking.
Take the '6 foot separation'. Where'd that come from? Well, in Europe they were talking about staying a meter apart, or about 3 feet. So - if 3 feet's good then 6 would be better, and that became the 'law'.
Wearing a mask - okay... if you were wearing a mil-spec CBW mask, you're good. For a while. But those cheap disposables? The ones marked "NOT FOR MEDICAL USE"? They're essentially a 'feel-good' 'I'm doing something to protect myself and others' thing.
We won't talk about the 'double-masking' recommendation by Fauci. That little... self-promoting homunculus never saw a camera or reporter that he wouldn't gladly perform before, and folks I know in the CDC rank and file from about 20 years back or so had absolutely nothing good to say about him or his supposed 'expertise'.
But he was the 'face of Covid Science' - and any attempt to sideline him would have immediately been seized upon by the media as 'wanting people to DIE'.
We discarded DECADES of good practice handling infectious diseases for junk science. It's really eroded trust in the CDC and other medical agencies.
As Brian said in the first comment: 'Societal trust in institutions is an important thing, but you earn trust by being trustworthy, not mandating, "you must trust us".'
Trust takes a long time to build in the first place - moments to destroy - and takes twice as long after it's been destroyed to recover. And you can't mandate trust. Doing so makes it look like (probably with absolutely excellent reason) you're going to screw them over pretty quick when an opportunity rises.
And I won't touch on the CAGW hysteria much except to note that the fools who were making predictions for 5-10 years out about the climate being unrecoverable in the '90s have now bumped out the time frame to the 2100s if we don't do everything they recommend RIGHT NOW THIS SECOND REGARDLESS OF COST. They know it's garbage, but they won't be around to take responsibility for the failure of their predictions.
That's the problem with basing your recommendations on computer models that were never vetted against reality. You can write a program to model damned near anything you want - but that doesn't mean that the model will match reality. And REALITY doesn't give a wet flying fart about computer models. It'll do what it'll do, and it's shown that the CAGW climate advocates and all their models are essentially garbage. But they're providing the results that the funding agencies want, so we'll get more of it.
So - trust in a lot of institutions, and 'science'? Yeah, not so much any more.
https://public.substack.com/p/cdc-covered-up-covid-vaccine-myocarditis
Science!!!!
Scientists/Experts demand to be trusted and allowed to run society but then a big earthquake in Italy happens and people die because the experts said it's not going to be a big deal and suddenly it's no we can't be held responsible for their deaths we are just giving our best guess in a limited advisory role only.
Either accept the responsibilities that come with kingship or gtfo. People demanding the power but not the duties are not to be trusted, ever.
It would also help if every problem - even problems that are polar opposites - didn't magically always require the solution of more liberalism. Is there ANY social ill ever where the experts will say, "you know what, we need less third world immigration." Any possible situation at all where they would prescribe this?
Or is it all a ratchet where we know years in advance that the "solution" will coincide with whatever the Democrat Party is trumpeting. Amazing.
Whatever may be needed "to generate and sustain the trust" in experts of various kinds, the reality is that trust must be earned and never betrayed. Once betrayed, it's very hard to get back. Medical or scientific experts forget that non-experts look to them for objective and unbiased information, free from any political or ideological agenda. What they often deliver, Fauci being a case in point, is something very different.
When science and politics intersect, science becomes corrupted. It has always been this way.
It is because we question there is not chaos. Inquiry and reason is why there are no UFOs. There are no magical healing crystals and potions. Those things are chaos.
As I have mentioned before, any organization that lasts long enough will get infested with parasites that want all the benefits of the organization and their position within without doing the actual work. Once these people get into the organization, they go to great efforts to drive out useful people, as those people are a threat, and hire more parasites. Eventually, the entire point of the organization is to protect and enrich the parasites with the organization's actual purpose being of secondary concern, if that.
Science is infested.
My overwhelming interest has been in the sciences since I was a child. Became a scientist (now retired). Tenure, publishing, teaching, scrambling for grant dollars; the whole nine yards. I revere science. What these leftist shits have done to scientific integrity makes my blood boil.
Expert institutions according to whom, the expert institutions?
I find it so weird how people like him, and Oprah, have turned this country into such a fantasyland that the nation is no longer self-aware enough to investigate how it's been manipulated. You tell them Whole Foods is a temple to pseudoscience and they still shop there
They are the only place around that sells the beer I like…
Science is losing trust because starting with climate change and ending with COVID, you sold out to grants and big pharma. You will NEVER get it back. Only different institutions can gain trust.
A nice first step would be to stop politicizing everything, stop censoring and calling fir people who disagree to be fired, jailed or killed.
Such interactions provide opportunities for experts vested with authority not only to exemplify the requisite skills, but also to exhibit the character traits — rectitude, professionalism, disinterestedness — needed to generate and sustain the trust of those lay individuals who depend on them
For which essentially the entire public health community, with Fauci leading the way, but not just Fauci, has completely and utterly failed.
But it's not just public health.
Have you pushed DEI? You've failed
Have you claimed that you can't define "what is a woman"? You've failed
Have you claimed that "men can be pregnant"? You've failed
In short, have you ever substituted a left wing political agenda for your duties? Then you've failed, and you're the reason why the system is falling apart.
Because no one sane trusts an "expert" who puts his personal political agenda over his duties.
Ann Althouse said...
This article is exactly on a topic that I want to explore but it’s an incredible slog to read and actually very disappointing in its content.
What did you expect?
Seriously, an honest and worthwhile article would have to discuss a number of places where the Left was wrong and the Right was right. Did you seriously expect that you could find a well written, clear, easy to understand article that contained all, or even any, of the lies the Left pushed during Covid?
That called out the "public health experts" who said that protesting was going to kill grandma, unless it was BLM protesting?
Our institutions have been captured by the Left. Which means essentially ALL of their failures have been embraced by the Left / have involved embracing the Left.
They can't honestly discuss that, certainly not in an article written in a way that would encourage people to read it
They who are not worthy of trust complain that others are not trusting.
If one would like for society as a whole to respect experts and those entrusted with authority, then there needs to be consequences for these experts and authorities when they abuse their positions.
There wasn't accountability for all the intelligence officials who claimed that Hunter's laptop was Russian disinformation, or Fauci for his lies or the IRS lady who persecuted the Tea Party, etc.
When we can be misled and lied to with impunity, it becomes irrational to reflexively trust these people.
the death of expertise… they made their choice… they followed The Science off a cliff.
Wow, this many comments down (2:35pm) and not a single person has pointed out that Fauci is not an "Expert"; his proper title is "Bureaucrat".
The only way back is for institutions to *be* trustworthy, but for that to happen, integrity has to be valued within them. Is it? It seems like integrity has been reinterpreted to mean, "willing to do whatever is necessary for the cause."
Our experts and scientists might earn a bit more respect if they would stop telling us just to believe what they say, and ignore what they are doing, which is often in direct conflict with what they say.
And when they tell us to 'trust the science', and then instead of being scientific with data-driven debate, they give us their shared opinions to consume, with instructions to 'shut up' because we're so lucky to be treated to them.
The past few years have amply demonstrated that our 'experts' are no such thing, except perhaps experts at accumulating and wielding arbitrary, poorly-informed power.
I know someone who has been responsible for setting up a Public Health program at a respected college. In response to what has gone on the past few years, I asked him about explicitly stating--and making a core value in the curriculum--the idea that Thou Shalt Not Lie to People (even "for their own good")
The response: "Don't be deliberately niave."
Small sample size, but I'm still going to predict, with some confidence, that the Public Health institutions will not be regaining the public's trust any time soon.
to exhibit the character traits — rectitude, professionalism, disinterestedness
versus
The only way back is for institutions to *be* trustworthy
Performativity versus performance.
It seems to me that this juxtaposition, this contradiction, is at the heart of so much dysfunction in our society these days.
Racism - it still exists on a very retail basis; I remain unconvinced about the wholesale or systemic varieties. I'd argue that a prime example of present racism is of the "soft bigotry of low expectations" type that we see from the (white) left all the time, yet by spouting the proper shibboleths they can receive, perhaps not redemption, but at least amnesty.
Climate change - climate is in constant flux and our society has fragilities that we need to be aware of and mitigate. But the only way to "be aware" is to spout the proper shibboleths, even though the actual results of those shibboleths would be disastrous and result in actual deaths of actual humans.
COVID - 6 feet is definitionally safe, masking while walking and taking your mask off while sitting is safe, "outdoor" seating in a plastic bubble is safe. But surfing is dangerous, going for a walk is dangerous, being outside for more than an hour a day a la Victoria, Aus, is dangerous. Oh, and you'd better spout the proper shibboleths about the vaccine. I got the first two on the strength of my own lingering faith in the integrity of the scientific edifice, but since then?
Lord, if they'd come up with Newtonian physics last month I'd probably be skeptical. Because I don't have the ability to evaluate serious science on my own and have to trust that those who can, will.
NotWhoIUsedtoBe said...
Humans really want to believe the world can be described by language and controlled by words. We even have a word for that belief: magic.
Re: theoretical physics, example: multiverse
NotWhoIUsedtoBe said...
We had to create a new language, mathematics, to understand the truth of reality. It's not a language most people understand, nor can it be changed without losing its utility.
Mathematics is perfectly capable of describing fantasy. All you have to do is keep adding dimensions.
That was a waste of time.
But trust is a two-way street.
No it's not. If the CDC and other institutions want to be trusted, they should start being trustworthy.
For a scientific hypothesis to be proposed. it must be able to predict all old or current observations within the statistical accuracy of measurement. To remain a valid hypothesis it must predict all relevant new observations, within the statistical accuracy of measurement. Otherwise it is rejected.
So what hypothesis can you claim about COVID vaccines? That they reduce infections? that they reduce transmission? Are there no harmful side effects? Here we would be looking for large double blind pair controlled studies to burn through the noise, but there are none. So we seem to have no low error long term observations to use.
The gold standard of medical statistics is, how many people do you need to treat to prevent one person from getting the disease, this accounts for randomness. For COVID vaccines, you treat almost everyone, but still 1% died? The un-measured intangible is, what proportion of the people who died, after the release of the vaccine, were vaccinated. I have never heard that number. it was probably never collected.
I think the bigger question is how did NewAge gain America's trust,...?
Mathematics is perfectly capable of describing fantasy. All you have to do is keep adding dimensions.
Or take some away.
The Crack Emcee said...
"I think the bigger question is how did NewAge gain America's trust,...?"
I can give you 81 million of em.
This handwringing about lack of trust never grapple with the fact that the scientists they want us to trust (Fauci is one he mentions) are not trustworthy. They've lied repeatedly. They've suppressed dissent. They've hidden facts contrary to their desired narratives. They are not worthy of trust. And people know that.
If you want trust, be trustworthy. Tell the truth. Even when it's complicated or runs contrary to your desired policy outcome. Be transparent with your facts. Engage those opposed in good faith. This is the way. Trust is earned. And when you are not worthy of it you don't receive it.
This handwringing about lack of trust never grapple with the fact that the scientists they want us to trust (Fauci is one he mentions) are not trustworthy. They've lied repeatedly. They've suppressed dissent. They've hidden facts contrary to their desired narratives. They are not worthy of trust. And people know that.
If you want trust, be trustworthy. Tell the truth. Even when it's complicated or runs contrary to your desired policy outcome. Be transparent with your facts. Engage those opposed in good faith. This is the way. Trust is earned. And when you are not worthy of it you don't receive it.
Post a Comment