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PaperclipPerfector  19d ago (text post)   29281 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of September 16, 2024

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make the evidence-based call.

It isn't always evidence that is the deciding factor. To point to another hot-button issue, I don't trust doctors to decide "when is abortion murder?", because it is more a question of moral philosophy than medicine.

because it is more a question of moral philosophy than medicine.

This conflation of "expertise in a given field" and "ability to make complex moral judgements", already far too common in PMC spaces, became turbocharged during Covid. It's baffling the number of people who seem to think that simply being extremely knowledgeable about epidemiology automatically makes you qualified to judge which civil liberties can be indefinitely suspended.

(It's easy to expose how facile this reasoning is: no one thinks extensive training in firearms automatically makes you qualified to make a moral judgement on how easy it should be to buy a gun.)

Complicating that is that Covid revealed a lot of those "experts" weren't extremely knowledgable about epidemiology either -- e.g. the charts coming from the Canadian CDC showing predicted rapid exponential growth in deaths in the short term, which kept not happening. Either these people were lying, or they were failures even in their own field.

Absolutely. I don't believe that even one of Neil Ferguson's enormously pessimistic projections came to pass, but for some reason he's still held up as some kind of guru.

Agreed, that's quite a different thing though.

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