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PaperclipPerfector  1yr ago (text post)   38486 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of June 5, 2023

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Yes fair call, it was an opinion and I don't spend any time justifying my belief. Part of it is weariness, I forget the name of the rule but it's a lot more effort to rebut systematically someones claims which they can just throw out relentlessly.

Also, I can do this work and highlight exaggerated claims but I will be proxying my trust to others, researchers etc. I haven't overseen large clinical trials or analysed the statistical evidence first hand. I have to eventually accept that large vaccine trials are done authentically and with sufficient power to detect higher rates of adverse events, or that the knowledge of mercury in the body is sufficiently progressed to give some assurance of safety. I acknowledge various incentive structures within medicine and assign priors that aren't 100% belief for any source. But the point is not how I can know I'm 100% right, it is that among the epistemic challenge I can assign likelihood to consensus view and RKJ view and because RKJ does a lot of sophistry (selective quoting), insufficient statement of details of statistics, study design etc, it's easy for me to weigh up that he seems not to be oriented to truth and so the things he says get low trust.

In short, RKJ doesn't do all the things I try to do myself in terms of epistemics (mainly acknowledging limits of his knowledge and expertise), so I apply a Kantian rational skepticism for alternative explanations. The one that fits very well is conspiratorial thinker and grifter.

Also, the grift is precisely by occupying a place that is already popular and additionally has some merit. Anti-establishment is nothing new, he just harvests it for clicks. There's nothing even controversial or courageous about stating these things in your bubble. The courageous thing to do would be to acknowledge the limits of your knowledge but the incentive landscape doesn't encourage it.

I'm happy to examine some of his claims if you have any you'd like to interrogate.

I have to eventually accept that large vaccine trials are done authentically and with sufficient power to detect higher rates of adverse events, or that the knowledge of mercury in the body is sufficiently progressed to give some assurance of safety

There's a long history of studies showing that tobacco products are perfectly safe. Those studies had a critical flaw however, they were funded by the same industry that stood to profit from the sale of tobacco.

If you apply this logic to the modern pharmaceutical complex, including the lobbying and legal apparatus, as well as the research and publication apparatus, I think some concern is at least warranted. Why exactly do we trust the pharma companies not to corrupt the science in the name of their own profit?

Oh I agree the pharmaceutical industry is corrupt in many ways and increasingly suspect but there's a lot of good stuff written on this already. I don't think RKJ adds to this scholarship because he makes unsupported claims.

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