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naraburns  nihil supernum  1yr ago (text post)   29716 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of December 12, 2022

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So do you think they’re unbiased? Or are they biased and you’re just defending them on this point anyway?

Every individual piece of evidence is N=1, you can dismiss anything you want as long as you go one piece at a time. If you don’t see this as part of a broader trend then I question how much attention you’ve been paying.

And what on earth does its being leaked have to do with its evidential probity? If anything that makes it more reliable because people weren’t speaking guardedly.

while pro-CDC content does not.

Pro-CDC content like what? What is there lately worth praising the CDC for? What is its proportion to the blameworthy stuff? You can't just assert that it doesn't get posted as evidence the forum is biased if there's simply none of it to be posted.

Also, for someone complaining about bad evidence of bias, you haven't given any evidence of bias on the part of this site, you've merely asserted your own opinion as if that should suffice. By your standards, what we really need is a double-blind statistical analysis of a representative sample of every post on the site and the subreddit containing the word "CDC" in the past 5 years, compared to some privileged benchmark. Good luck with that.

That's not what I'd expect from an institution suffering extreme bias, and is, imo, stronger evidence than the HTML change itself.

But who's saying they're extremely biased, in particular? Plus they still caved - compare to all the times e.g. bureaucrats under the Trump admin just straight-up ignored instructions, leaked them to the media, then suffered no repercussions. I don't see how it's supposed to be evidence against bias that they didn't immediately do whatever, given that they did do it after a bit of cajoling.

It being leaked matters insofar as it means our sample size is tiny and even that sample is biased (someone had to be motivated to leak it).

Evidence is evidence is evidence. A small sample size is not as good as a large sample, but that doesn't make it worthless. Plus, the mere fact that leaking requires a motive doesn't mean it's necessarily biased. Any action requires a motive, but that doesn't make every action biased.

Well, for instance, 85% of the CDC's budget is in grant-making, which you can view here. Much of it funds medical research. But, instead of focusing on that, this sub focuses on a one sentence change on one webpage in their enormous website.

I strongly dislike the government grant system and the cartelization of science that I think it has produced, so I’m not the person to wave grants in front of as proof of the CDC’s goodness. In any case, you've still given evidence of bias on the part of the site that's just as bad as the evidence about which you're complaining is supposed to be, so how important can you really think that that standard is?

No, they didn't. The CDC pushed back in those emails and refused to include a study the advocate suggested. Again, not anything anyone in this forum apparently cared enough to notice or signal boost.

The CDC compromised on their original position by altering their website because activists, a Senator, and the WH browbeat them into doing it. Whether they did literally everything the activists asked is neither here nor there in evaluating whether they caved relative to their original stance.

True, but the fact that I personally don't have an example of right-wing advocacy going is then easily explained.

I don’t think that this is the only example we have of activists influencing the CDC and I reckon they’d add up to plenty over time. (See e.g. the teachers’ unions dictating school responding policy to CDC behind the scenes or the influence of gay activists on the CDC’s renaming GRID to AIDS). Surely there must be at least one right-wing example in the last few decades.

Well, biased towards the extremes at the very least. Otherwise, why leak it?

Because they want to encourage the CDC to be less pliant in the face of political pressure?

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