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I wrote a much better comment a few minutes ago, but one of the cats I'm fostering because my girlfriend foisted them upon me jumped on my keyboard and deleted it. So I apologize in advance if this is a low effort comment.
I think that the distrust of experts on this site goes way too far. 99% of the topics experts agree on or are on places like Wikipedia are true. If you look up something like the Central Limit Theorem on Wikipedia the answer will be more or less correct. But most things are boring. The ideas we focus on that are controversial and we don't trust them on are ones that cause the experts to lose their minds over and lose the ability to be impartial. Some examples are HBD and Covid. But if you open up a biology textbook, you can take most of that knowledge to the bank.
I want to give an example of this guy I know who worked at Best Buy with me in college. He is a Muslim guy and the elusive moderate Muslim. He is more or less progressive on every topic. I saw him recently at a tech meetup in Austin and he more or less sounded like a straight up Jihadist. And I helped this guy get his job at a major networking company after he got his law degree as a project manager, so I can confirm I thought he was a rational and trustworthy person. Which he is, except on the Israel-Palestine issue. He literally can't be rational. I thin for "experts", this is the same thing. They literally can't be rational on a few issues and it causes them to act insane and make people lose trust in institutions.
I'll give a less controversial example. I have a CS degree and I worked for this company that sold software that helped people automate things. We'd get this guy on a call with potential customers after the sales people and sales engineers did their thing and he would just shit on Azure and AWS and how he could do this and that if they switched to Linux and open source and the customers hated it. I had to pull him aside I was like dude we make software that works with Azure wtf are you doing. He was incapable of putting that hammer and nail away. It was like who gives a shit if a company uses Microsoft but he literally couldn't be rational about it.
I think a lot of people default to something similar to Foucault's theories on knowledge and power where knowledge and power are so linked that they end up essentially being the same thing. I completely agree with him, and I think power and knowledge combine to influence, manipulate and create NPCs that don't think. But in the case of experts, I think it is their biases causing this top down gas lighting instead of anything from the regime. The simplest and most likely answer is these people just believe this stuff due to ideology and are incredibly biased on hot culture war issues. It's not a conspiracy, they literally just can't think about these issues rationally.
The experts are wrong a lot. But, for almost everyone in the general population, and for many people here, your vague guesses and anecdotal impressions are a lot worse. It takes effort, discipline, and raw intelligence to do better! It's reasonable to not trust that everything's going great just because the economy numbers are up! But you shouldn't just jump from 'my costs feel higher than a few years ago' to 'clearly experts are wrong', dig deeper!
It does, and the replication crisis shows that systemically they aren't using either.
The reason people are using personal anecdotes is they are not given access to the same data the "experts" are, so any comparison between the two is inherently disingenuous from the start.
A lot of them are using it, to great effect. The flat piece of nanoscale-patterned silicon you're using to post, the network of private businesses and public law that makes up the 'financial system' that structures your economic activity, and a thousand other omnipresent social systems have been built by hundreds of thousands of those 'experts'. And they all work pretty well, and are complicated as hell! Even when you can intuitively tell something's wrong with one of them, that does not imply they're wrong or lying specifically about the first thing that comes to mind, e.g. inflation or how productive the economy is.
I strongly disagree? I'm strongly for making more data used for research public (as in, free to download from github or wherever), but, like, there wasn't any secret data that mask or vaccine advocates were making decisions off of that we didn't have access to. And there were a small minority of experts, people at Harvard or similar, who fought the covid consensus the entire time. Do you have an example in mind here?
The silicon yes. The 'financial system', and the other social systems, not so much.
I think stock markets, commodity markets, corporate and contract law, insurance, banking, accounting, and thousands of individual facets of modern economic practice and culture are technically complicated and quite important to the functioning of the modern economy? And they're definitely built and maintained by "experts". (Some of) the field of economics, too, is quite relevant to modern business, and also has a lot of experts.
Other social systems are important too! Courts / the law, for instance, are kind of a core case of "thing maintained by experts", they're the highest authority and last resort conflict-resolvers, and the entire system only works because lawyers and especially judges being inculcated into taking the law seriously by the last generation of judges and lawyers.
The easiest way I've found to loose faith in the justice system is by talking with your so-called 'experts'(Lawyers, Law Enforcement) in their actual field experience.
I imagine it's similar in other fields, as well.
I mean, the US justice system has problems. The South African justice system also has problems. Not the same problems. Is it so informative to discuss issues or lost faith generally? The US justice system mostly works, and you can tell because you don't have to bribe police every time they pull you over and you don't have your business seized by the state when it gets too big. Collapsing all grievances into a vague sense of 'everything sux' isn't useful
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Experts do not determine who buys or sells stocks and commodities. That is the free market. Economic experts are clearly not able to predict the functioning of the market, as they constantly make utterly wrong predictions. Steve Keen has made a strong case in Debunking Economics that many of the basic models that are used, are not actually valid unless you unrealistic preconditions are true. In reality, we also see that companies do not in fact hire economists to set their prices, but use other methods, like trial and error, because that beats the experts.
It seems to me that the functioning of the financial markets is largely a matter of trial and error as well. For example, the subprime mortgage crisis involved "experts" developing the innovative idea that if you bundle low quality mortgages, they suddenly become the most reliable assets to hold. Only after people starting defaulting on their mortgages and the bundles were proven to not be triple-A quality, did the "experts" suddenly realize that the triple-A status was a delusion.
When so-called "experts" are not in fact able to predict whether their solutions works in practice, then we cannot trust their claims on that front.
I'm referring to the people who design the market mechanisms, and design the laws to adjudicate disputes within them, and (a thousand other things). Those are, obviously, experts.
Consider the chief economist at google, who they hired to design their advertising auctions, among other things. Amazon also has a chief economist. Microecon is actually a strong field with good theory and empirical work!
I think this is a really stupid dispute in general. A lot of so-called "experts" are absolutely awful, and this includes quite a few economists, most psychologists and social theorists, and so on. But a lot of experts are just smart people who exist in useful intellectual and practical traditions and contribute a lot to society. Does it even make sense to condemn both in the same way?
These were largely not designed top down by experts, and where they were designed top down by experts they quickly failed and were modified by those in the field. That's one reason the law is such a mess; the "design" layer is still there in the statutes and regulations but it's been modified by case law and custom so often that looking at that doesn't give you a real picture of how things work.
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Ah yes, because those are the people who get criticized the most when people attack "the experts". Actually this is pretty illustrative, because this is exactly the mechanism being deployed to demand trust - Look, we used calculus! Just like physicists! You trust physicists, don't you? Well, then you have to trust us!
If memory serves that's because there was no data the mask mandates was based on, and the idea that vaccines prevented transmission was an outright lie. That's worse!
Yes, the example I had in mind is the one that was debated here recently - economic statistics. We don't have access to the raw data, and we don't have access to the algorithm that produces the output. There was a similar story during COVID with a simulation used to argue for lockdowns, that no one got to see until after the lockdowns were in effect, end which ended up being a buggy clusterfuck, and even though they published the code, I think they never published the input data.
I mean, you all were criticizing the CPI (published by the BLS) and more broadly the economy, which clearly falls into the public portion of the financial system?
This a very confusing sentence. There was overwhelming data that n95 masks significantly reduced exposure to viral particles, and that cloth masks reduced exposure a bit. There was substantial data that n95 masks could prevent transmission of other viruses. There were plenty of existing studies about this, and while most of those studies didn't publish their data, the data wouldn't have helped you interpret the studies better, the flaws are in interpretation, methodology, etc, not private data. Mandating cloth masks was straightforwardly stupid. Mandating n95 masks or better masks might've worked, if rapid trials were run initially to make sure they actually reduced transmission, idk. That vaccines prevented transmission wasn't an outright lie, I believe the initial studies did show a reduction in transmission. I think people were genuinely incorrect and had poor processes for coming to the correct conclusion - which is still damnable if you're in power, because it's your duty to be correct, but it's not an outright lie. It's also arguable that transmission rates increased as the virus mutated. Also, the cochrane review that claimed masks don't prevent transmission ever was wrong, I think. https://www.researchsquare.com/article/rs-3486610/v1
We do have access to most of the algorithm that produces the output - the BLS publishes their methodology for the CPI with a lot of detail on their website. I think mostly the reason we don't have access to the raw data is bureaucratic slowness.
I think you're very confused about the relevance of publishing the input data to the broader issues with experts being wrong. Yes, that study was terrible. The terribleness was in the code they published and the wy they interpreted it, not the input data.
Pardon, I glossed over some of the sentence. No the financial system is absolute garbage too.
On a population wide scale? Could you give some links to it?
The proper way to do this thing is to publish all the steps necessary to reproduce the results, with input data so that anyone can actually attempt it themselves.
So we have raw data for 10 years ago, or something?
No, I'm not. Most of academia relies on trust, rather than verification. We trust researchers to not pull dishonest tricks to get their papers published (either for it's own sake because of "publish or perish", or because they're pushing an agenda), and we trust the reviewers to ask hard questions about the research. At this point it is basically proven they do neither. Publishing input data would allow external verification, but it is purposely not done.
The code is the algorithm, which I explicitly brought up as well. But input data is also important, it's literally the first thing you get asked for by any developer trying to fix a bug.
... no, individual evidence from n95 wearers tested under controlled conditions, which is why it was phrased like that.
I agree that is much better, and think it should be ~ mandatory for all publicly funded research. I just strongly disagree that this is related to why people distrust experts, or even why some subfields of experts are constantly catastrophically wrong.
Specifically, slowness in adapting to modern conditions. Publishing all your data wasn't feasible before the internet, and government and sometimes academic research norms are still stuck in the 20th century.
Materials scientists and chemists don't publish their raw data either! But those fields are, to a significant extent, more trustworthy than social science. And plenty of shoddy econ research is done on public data, but is worthless because what they do with it sucks.
You can still just fake your data? Faking your data well in experimental fields isn't actually hard.
I think it's definitely one of the factors for why they are catastrophically wrong. Another is the very act of expert-trusting, we'd have a lot less problems if there was a lot more distrust.
They don't need to, their work is constantly being verified with data from mines, foundries, factories, and refineries.
There's ways to detect that, and it will come out during replication. Experimental fields aren't such a big deal anyway, since they are, in fact experimental - the field itself tells you not to take the results very seriously.
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In fact the existing data/studies indicated that masks were ineffective and a placebo at best
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I don't have (and don't have the expertise to make) a biology textbook example written up, but I do have a pretty serious nuclear science one written up for you, where a man with no serious bias and far greater technical knowledge than I can legally get still has bizarre faults that I can verify. (If Atomic Accidents doesn't count as textbook, Radium should, and probably is the source of one of Mahaffey's miscites.)
In one sense, you're not wrong -- if you scrawled down every single fact mentioned in the book onto sticky notes, and put the ones that were strictly true on one side of the scale and the ones that were strictly false on the other, the scales would lean toward truth. But if you were looking at ones that were core claims for the book's theme, and then separated your sticky notes into those you can confirm and those you can't... truth might still win out, but it's not be lopsided victory.
And this gets worse the less concrete the topic. The problems for psychology are legendary (and often-hilarious), and even the strictest focus on textbooks have pretty sizable faults. Nutrition science is a joke, both in academia and on wikipedia. We've hit the point where the literal definitions of words get
redefined forhave their definition updates streamlines for political relevance.It also gets bad where a lot of the 'experts' aren't. That's most obvious for the political stuff, where the same people who bash randos for 'doing their own research' will take a long stiff drink of water before opining on topics where their expertise is limited to having gone to journalism school and slammed too much alcohol down there. Yet there are fields where the experts and textbook writers are plain liars and no one cares because it's not going to end up on the news even if it does end up on television, or leverage training in entirely one field as expertise for an entirely different one.
But even for material science, as concrete as can be, there's a lot of stuff that's just a mess; not that anyone's lying, but that they genuinely don't know. I've got an essay I've been working on, but the punchline revolves around this stuff. It's been around a decade, has no wikipedia page, won't be in any textbooks, and is subject to literally millions of dollars in grants for analysis of a material that can be mixed in a garage and I don't know if it 'reals' or not, or what extent that the claims benefits are of the claimed magnitude. There's a lot of red flags in all nano-whatsis stuff but especially the stuff around it, but it's weird for the DoE and Argonne and a dozen other labs to be looking at it seriously. But they've also all been looking at it seriously and not publishing a ton, for a material that you'd expect to see in cars and boats and household electronics.
The problem isn't an lackluster number of people I could point to who could be more serious investigators of this than myself. It's that they don't have an answer, or to the extent they do they have a half-dozen different ones.
The occasional news item about a fraudulent researcher just reinforces the idea that scientific malpractice consists of a tiny number of evil researchers who clearly violate scientific standards by fabricating data and that all other researchers do a great job.
In reality, most bad science consists of fairly subtle manipulations or bad practices like p-hacking, tiny data sets, misrepresenting the actual findings, measuring the wrong thing, etc. Much of this is due to incompetence, where the researchers get taught 'this one weird trick' which is good enough to get their papers accepted, but without actually understanding what the strengths and weaknesses of their method(s).
This incompetence is fueled by the scientific reward system rewarding those that do bad science and punishing those who do good science (limited by the ability to get away with BS, which is why fields like physics are a lot better, because engineers and the companies that employ them call out scientists when they can't make working things that are based on the scientific discoveries).
Convincing people whose worldview is based on trust that our elites take good care of us, based on mostly solid science, that science is fundamentally broken and most money spend on it is wasted, is quite hard though.
Perhaps, if every fraudulent researcher found themselves as news items, or if academic research appropriately handled the well-established cases as they're discovered.
This is an old post, but I'll highlight it for three reasons: you've never heard of the researcher (and I'd never heard of the entire university), it hit a 'hard' science field, and (most unusually) the publisher explicitly and publicly said they weren't going to treat fraud as fraud where usually that's just decided privately.
I can only demonstrate clear intentional fault in a small portion of all papers and don't know how prevalent this is, that's fair. No one knows how prevalent this is. Attempts to discover research fraud occur almost entirely at the hobbyist level, and the people trying to catch that overt fraud are dependent on tells like photoshop goofups or division errors, with only rare opportunities to see the raw data. Ariely's only coming to light after failed replications, followed by the man sending over Excel spreadsheets with the fakest data imaginable. There's basically zero institutional interest in discussing even the highest-profile and most explicit fraudsters. It's not that we're only seeing the crashes; we're only seeing the crashes that happen in the middle of the city, after which the pilot steps out of the aircraft and recites a five-stanza poem about how they mismanaged the flight. We don't know if the fraud is extremely rare or it's as common as the bad-but-not-fraudulent science.
I agree with and recognize that a lot of people have been trained to do bad-but-not-fraudulent science. I'll caveat that this division isn't always so cut-and-dry -- Wansink is my go-to for salami-slicing, but there's some evidence at least a couple of his studies depended on fabricated data rather than 'just' p-hacking -- but it is relevant to keep in mind.
As I perhaps mention too often, you can come at it from the other end as well. The scientific method, as commonly understood, should preclude the creation and maintenance of entirely fictitious fields of study. If such fields can be observed to exist, that's strong evidence that the process as a whole is fundamentally broken, even if you can't identify the specific steps where the problem lies.
There is actually no common understanding of the scientific method. What Judith Butler does is not comparable in any meaningful way to the work of Ferenc Krausz (and his team). Yet they both claim to do science, even though the work of one of them is not falsifiable.
Part of the charade that allows these nonsensical fields and subfields to exist is the claim that all the professors who work at universities do proper science, even when they do no such thing.
And the ideal scientific method is just aspirational anyway. In reality we cannot achieve that perfection even for physics. When it comes to fields that do not provide the preconditions that allow us to apply something a bit close to the ideal scientific method, people simply use less rigorous methods. Until you get to Judith Butler where claims just get conjured up with bad logic, misrepresentations of what others actually proved, etc.
And like gattsuru says, there is a disturbing lack of interest by institutions (and voters) in even figuring out how well those who call themselves scientists actually do their jobs. Researchers with good morals who do look into it, invariably find highly disturbing results.
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I wanted to reply to this, but I realise I'd essentially just be regurgitating Scott's 2017 post "Kolmogorov Complicity And The Parable Of Lightning"*, so I'm just going to link it and summarize its thesis below.
It's no good saying "experts are reliable, aside from one or two blind spots". This isn't true from a reputational perspective, for the same reason that noticing a small factual error (no matter how minor or inconsequential) in a news article inevitably undermines the reader's confidence in the quality of the rest of the article: "if they got this wrong, what else did they get wrong?" But it's also no good for the simple fact that knowledge is holistic, not atomised. It's not like the facts and theories governing HBD are siloed in a separate warehouse from every other topic: they are inextricably intertwined with facts and theories in evolutionary biology, psychology, the social sciences, education, criminology etc. You might think that "the earth was created 6,000 years ago" is just a belief which can sit comfortably in your matrix of beliefs without affecting anything else, but before long you'll find yourself arguing that dinosaur skeletons were planted there by Satan or the speed of light changed over time.
So no, you can't just say to people "everything in these warehouses is 100% a-ok, but caveat emptor for those two warehouses labelled 'HBD' and 'Covid'." There's only one big warehouse and everything is touching everything else without so much as a sheet of clingfilm to prevent cross-contamination.
*Reading it six years later makes me sad: it almost scans as a preemptive apology for Scott's subsequent retreat into self-imposed intellectual incuriosity and cowardice, when his fearless willingness to step on whatever toes he pleased is what made his name in the first place.
Call me overly optimistic, but I can see him slowly toe the line in contentious CW matters more often these days. I recall modestly controversial statements about autism and transgenderism being linked because of the body sending signals that the autistic process incorrectly as a sign they don't have their ideal gender identity.
He's still more cowardly than I like, especially since the large sums he makes from Substack (>200k the last time he mentioned it) should more than insulate against any attack on his psychiatric practise, and he'd have a loyal base of patients nonetheless.
I think it's largely because he's too nice to alienate many of his friends in the rat community who have woke tendencies, but maybe he'll find a spine eventually, not that I don't enjoy his work.
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The most stunning thing for me is that cancel-culture enjoyers read the Parable of the Lightning and then just go on like they didn't just read someone talking about how they almost definitely believe in societally-unapproved wrongthink. He's defending hiding your true views in order to escape social censure and talking about the consequences of it, but the people providing that censure are so unperceptive that they don't even see someone practically bragging about it openly.
It's interesting, because the parable of the lightning could be taken in two ways:
"I am currently pretending not to be a crimethinker so as to cover my ass, but I'm not going to tell you which opinions of mine are crimethink." (Your interpretation.)
"I have already shown my power level by explicitly decrying all of the tenets of Ingsoc I disagree with - but it's lamentable that others in a more precarious social situation than me must continue to pretend not to be crimethinkers."
At the time of writing, Scott had already slaughtered a lot of the sacred cows of wokeness/progressivism/liberalism: arguing that hysteria around Trump was unfounded, that there are real differences between male and female brains which impact upon career choices, that false rape accusations are real and potentially life-destroying, that incels deserve our sympathy and some of their grievances are perfectly legitimate, that a lot of modern feminism is just socially-sanctioned bullying of low-status men. It wouldn't be unreasonable to think that a man brave enough to slaughter these sacred cows has already slaughtered all of the sacred cows that he's ever going to.
But Scott has not publicly come out in favor of HBD, which we know from his leaked e-mail he believes. That's a huge heresy, the kind of thing you get fired for.
says "has not archived that URL"
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You're absolutely right. My Straussian reading of "Kolmogorov" is that he's hinting at endorsing HBD (and possibly copping to a great deal more scepticism on the trans issue then he generally lets on) without coming out and saying so explicitly. He later came a lot closer to outright saying he endorses HBD in his review of The Cult of Smart.
But I wouldn't blame someone familiar with Scott's writing up to that point for interpreting "Kolmogorov" to mean "I've already come out and planted my flags in the sand, it's just a shame that so many other intelligent, well-meaning people can't do so for fear of social censure or cancellation".
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I think he's slaughtering cattle at a lower rate than he did before, especially since the NYT doxxing and the opening of the Substack.
Still occasionally committing a bit of crimethink, but most of the fire has been directed at less contentious (if important) targets like the FDA.
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You are correct that neither perspective is wrong. But it seems outrageously myopic and self absorbed to conclude that the people focused on "Twitter experts" (which include everyone from the media up to the Chief medical advisor to the President) care more about political consequences than the truth.
The people you refer to as experts are not the experts presented to the public, while the people presented to the public as experts shape public policy, so yes, we do care about political consequences and the wielding of power. This is the culture war thread after all. But the reason we are flipping out is because the twitter experts are the ones with actual power over society, and they are lying their asses off 90% of the time, and trying to hide their ignorance the other 10%. It is precisely the truth that we care about.
What's more, you have developed a definition of expert which renders everything you say inscrutable (at best) to everyone else, which is generally only good for sticking your head in the sand, not for engaging in thoughtful conversations.
Yeah I'm sorry, saying you are sticking your head in the sand was dumb - you're here after all, and you engage as much as you can from what I've seen. It totally fucked up the point of that paragraph too, because what I was really driving at was that it negatively impacts your ability to have conversations here about the culture war, because people either won't understand you or will think you are behaving maliciously.
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I don't think this is a locally unpopular position. Experts are good and useful. When I want to know something about how magnets work, I look up standard expert material rather than consulting Insane Clown Posse. When I'm curious about whose work Picasso built on, I trust that art historians are basically telling me the truth to the best of their abilities, and that even if they're wrong, it's much better information than I would get by doing my own research. Most approved vaccines are reasonably safe and basically work. I want engineers to work on bridges, experienced dentists to work on my teeth, and historians to tell me about ancient wars.
OK, so what? Should the above make me think that the issues that I think the experts are either biased or incompetent are actually just Settled Science(tm)? There are significant areas that I think the experts have missed very badly on and I don't think there's a unifying reason why other than the power of groupthink and incentives encouraging intraprofession compliance. I think public health people are wrong about low-sodium diets because they make recommendations that they think will help the lowest common denominator, for example. That's not a conspiracy, it's a tendency.
My impression is that most people here have broadly the same thinking. Lots of expertise is good and helpful, some is fake and [lame], some is used maliciously and dishonestly. Sorting out which is which takes some doing, but I'm not going to ignore the latter two categories because of the existence of the first.
Yeah.... about that...
Most of us are not going to watch a video. Can you please explain your argument?
Title: 'Been Here From the Start' song | Horrible Histories: Black British History | CBBC
If nothing else the tune is catchy. At first I thought it was a parody video, but it looks to be a real BBC music video about Black British History.
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Experts being wrong isn't just about bias. It's about the limits of what expertise can even apply to. Expertise relies on repeatable events that give prompt, clear, indisputable feedback. Performing music is something you can acquire expertise in because you can practice repeatedly and get immediete feedback for whether you played correctly. Mathematics, same. Programming? Definitely. Physics, engineering, the feedback can be slower but still comes. But as you get further away from having repeatable events and from recieving feedback as to whether you made the correct or wrong decision, the possibility of acquiring expertise becomes weaker.
All the way down at the bottom of this tier list of plausible expertise, you can indeed find "Epidemiologist" or "Middle East Correspondant", where there are few repeatable events and when feedback is given it is ignored or epicycled away. Expert epidemiologists do not exist, or at least, they don't exist like they would for engineering, because you can't acquire expertise in epidemiology as it's currently practiced. There is no reason to put more weight on their arguments than you would the same argument from a random individual. They may well be right sometimes, they may well have a good argument to give, but they don't have expertise and can't get it either.
The COVID lockdowns in the UK point to a darker problem with expertise. Life is short, people grow old and die; it takes about 70 years. Suppose that being locked down causes a 10% reduction in quality of life (I'd prefer to say 50%, but I'll err on too low because I want to focus on a different controversy). Government locks down 70 million people for a year, which costs 7 million Quality Adjusted Life Years (QALYs). Actual deaths, if spread across the age range, cost 35 QALY's each. The lock down needs to be saving 200 thousand lives to break even. But deaths from COVID were concentrated among the frail elderly. Say 7 QALY's each. To break even the lock down needed to save the lives of one million frail old people. It is not remotely plausible that it did so.
The lockdowns were a national disaster on the scale of 200 thousand dead. Compare that to American loses in Vietnam at 50 thousand. The lockdowns were a huge national disaster.
But how did it happen? The experts were socialized into an "identified cause" model of morbidity. If something specific kills you, that counts. If something makes you a year older, that counts zero. Since zero times anything is still zero, it doesn't matter how many people are affected. Basically expertise here was so narrow in scope that the fact that people grow old and die lay outside of its scope and was neglected.
The darker problem is that growing old and dying is basic to the human condition. The experts let themselves be socialized into collective insanity. I don't see any way around this. Experts are dangerous in much the same way that fire is dangerous. Essential despite being dangerous. You have to be able to spot that experts have gone mad and flat out reject what they say.
Yes, this is my main criticism of lockdowns from the perspective of health, and why I was deeply skeptical of them from day 1. There's no possible way for anything but short lockdowns that inexplicably eradicate covid forever to be a net QALY gain. You don't even need to look at long-term second and third order effects to determine that. Just the immediete acute loss in QALY from being put under lockdown restrictions already does more damage than covid could possibly do.
As for how big the effect on quality of life is, EQ-5D-5L puts a moderate reduction in ability to do usual activities (work, study, school, all sorts of things lockdowns prohibit) as a 12% reduction in quality of life. Severe as a 22% reduction. Severe + slight anxiety or depression as a 28% reduction. Severe in both is a 47% reduction. So the actual answer for lockdown's median effect on QALY probably is somewhere between 10% and 50%. This is a question that absolutely could be answered by chucking some money into getting a randomly sampled survey done.
As much as simple ignorance would be a comforting explanation, prior to lockdowns, experts in public health were perfectly happy to use QALY thinking for decisionmaking. They only abandoned such cost/benefit analysis specifically when doing lockdowns, which suggests more ideological or malicious intentions.
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Was it experts that made the call though? Or was it politicians? Testimony going on right now indicates that Boris reversed course not because of expert advice but because of public pressure.
"Sir Patrick wrote that Mr Johnson said his party "thinks the whole thing is pathetic and Covid is just nature's way of dealing with old people - and I am not entirely sure I disagree with them. A lot of moderate people think it is a bit too much."
But then Boris wants to rely on public polling as to what he should do. And that fits with what I have been told by other MP's I know, that they were getting swamped with emails and letters from their constituents about needing to do more.
Indeed we saw Boris had analysis (by experts) that the average age of death was 81-85 and only 4% of under 60's even have to go to hospital and "we may need to recalibrate" and "it shows we don't go for nationwide lockdown"
2 weeks later he announced new lockdowns because it wasn't "politically viable yet to change course" i.e. because of public pressure.
Didn't that Imperial College model (by experts) confidently stating that Something Must Be Done or Several Zillion Will Die come out right around then? Whether Boris was listening to Imperial or a bunch of panicky people who were listening to Imperial, the root still lies with the experts.
I think that was the one in March, and this was October, where he says he doesn't believe the NHS will get overwhelmed etc (which is one of the things that report said).
But he could certainly have said that, and changed course. Possibly the public would have pushed back, and maybe you can trace that back to that report. But 1) he didn't try and 2) The PM can find his own experts to say the opposite , and 3) We're now a long way from experts being the ones that decided it, rather that some experts said something that people believed and wanted their politicians to act upon, their politicians knew better and did so anyway.
Experts don't exactly seem the chief problem there. ..
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Why did the public swamp politicians? Did somebody tell them to? Perhaps a shiny box in their pocket or in their living room?
The flaw of democracy is that most people are extremely influenceable by what other people tell them, especially if these other people seem to know what they are talking about. Anybody with a pile of money large enough to get a sufficiently large enough megaphone and some respectable-looking attire can legally, publicly influence policy in democratic countries toward any outcome without any repercussion.
This is essentially what the Democrats and their media machine claimed Russia did in the 2016 American elections, but somehow we are still playing this same game.
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Is his viewpoint on I/P conflict specifically based on Islam?
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How can it go way too far without any baseline-standard of how much distrust is appropriate?
You've not contested charges that various experts have lied, and lied for reasons of political and person self-interest. You've not countered the implications of the replication crisis which undermines the veracity of so much published research and the institutions behind it. You've only added examples of unreliability and bias undercutting grounds of deferrence, because if subject matter experts can't be rational in their chosen fields or are utterly unreliable in areas outside of them or compromised by ideology... it seems really, really significant that the dominant expert institutions have been heavily captured by ideological interests who select for ideological affiliation.
In other words, you've only provided more reasons to distrust Experts by default, factors that only further justify a starting position of distrust until veracity can be verified, without providing any standard of how much distrust is warranted as a starting point.
If there's no standard of 'this far is okay,' you lack the same standard to compare and say 'this much distrust goes way too far.'
I think I’m pretty typical here. If a subject-matter expert tells me some fact is true, I give that a 75% confidence. Unless there’s reason to lower that expectation, it’s generally good enough for most everyday purposes. If I have reason to believe that there’s bias or compromise in the assessment (say because of money or ideological need for something to be true) then you start discounting that number. If they’re making claims tangential to their subject, it’s also a fairly substantial discount. If the confidence gets to 50 or below, it’s not information I would use to make a decision.
That is an impressively coherent standard, at least compared to what I'm used to hearing. Kudos!
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I don't think many people here would endorse "believe the opposite of what experts believe" as a general truth-finding procedure. It's just that for a lot of recent hot button issues (covid, HBD, trans), the "experts" have very clear political motivations for lying to people.
Experts might start off with a default presumption in their favor, but that presumption can be outweighed by other arguments and evidence.
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Using your own examples: in 2020 it would have just been HBD. Now it's "HBD...and a global pandemic". Am I supposed to be relieved that they can still be rational about stellar mechanics and calculus but not an actual global health emergency? If I had told you ahead of time that we can't trust the experts on an upcoming pandemic, would you see me as going too far?
And I bet, a decade ago, there would be no controversy over the sex binary. Now I'm seeing publications like SciAm flirt with nonsense on this topic.
Who said this is a fixed situation? Polarization is driving this behavior and polarization begets polarization. If you see that as the underlying issue there's little to be sanguine about.
Also, what about the second-order consequences of irrationality? Let's grant HBD is true for the sake of argument. If you cannot be rational about this it'll cascade into everything: your views on schooling, diversity, the causes of poverty, how to handle the Third World, how to handle crime, interpreting history, immigration...All of these are then suspect.
I don't think this is hypothetical, I think a lot of the derangement and ludicrous (like, actually dangerous to lives and entire localities) policy and absurd expert advice we're seeing across a huge number of fronts is due to exactly this sort of cascade of irrationality.
I'm not smart enough to tell when something is just a harmless little carveout from rationality. I'm not smart enough to know some of the consequences of these beliefs in the moment (many of the current irrationalities du jour like gender ideology were uncritically supported by my past self). I imagine many people aren't. Which is probably what alarms them when they can tell someone with authority is being irrational (especially in a partisan way). What about when they can't tell?
The experts in stellar mechanics are not the same experts commenting on HBD, COVID, gender, or economics.
If a working biologist tells me something about epidemiology or human biology, the person is educated in that discipline and knows what he’s talking about for the most part. If this person tells me that one cannot deduce the race of a patient from a brain scan, I would believe that he is telling the truth and knows his stuff. If Bill Nye (who’s an engineer by training) tells me the same, I don’t give it much weight because Bill Nye has no biological training. Of course, I’d ignore Dr. Faucci on UFOs, astrophysics, and mechanical engineering.
https://www.nibib.nih.gov/news-events/newsroom/study-finds-artificial-intelligence-can-determine-race-medical-images#
I see no mention of anything to do with imaging the brain, but I wouldn't be surprised if it could be done, and would give it more than even odds. That would be less perplexing than being able to do it from mammograms, which are ghostly images of someone's tits, and that's well beyond my ability or any radiologist I know.
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I can get the general principle but this is absolutely the last place that I would trust a working biologist. A working biologist that told you that it is possible to deduce the race of a patient from a brain scan would be a fired biologist in extremely short order - she's going to tell me what she needs to tell me in order to remain employed and able to talk to her friends and community. That claim may or may not be true, but the informational content of an expert telling me the socially mandated opinion/belief is zero, and I'm going to have to do my own research anyway. But more than that, I can't even pretend to respect a scientist who has to lie like this. Maybe I just have oppositional defiant disorder, but the idea of taking an expert seriously when I can just prove that they're knowingly lying about extremely important topics just galls me. What's the point in even talking with them if all I can possibly get is either them fired or a brand new prevarication?
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No, because that lesson was already available from the Swine Flu pandemic. What would be less believable is just how far beyond the pale that so-called experts would go. That countries would forcibly imprison their entire populations over a spicy cough and get away with it (with their reputations intact, no less) would have seemed like bad satire in 2019.
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Every Muslim I have met in the US, and I have met a fair number, has been moderate. Though only one has been from the Middle East.
I have never met a moderate Muslim, and I have met a large number of US Muslims.
Now, don't get me wrong, most Muslims I have met do not want to throw homosexuals off of buildings. But for the most part, these men are Muslim in the sense that the religious services to which they do not go take place on Friday, in a mosque. They eat turkeybacon but get the pulled pork at Dickey's. They shave, fornicate, have a beer, go on hajj for a vacation, borrow money at interest for their convenience stores, and keep a Quran they've never opened on the nightstand by the bed in which they sleep through morning prayer.
This isn't the "moderate Muslim" of progressive legend; it's a not-particularly-religious man who might or might not follow a few cultural eccentricities.
Frankly, I think this is simply the norm among religious people- that ‘liberal’ or ‘acceptable to progressive’ types are mostly not practicing, or at least not practicing well.
They or their parents were from the eastern med- Egypt, Turkey, the Levant, and some balkans.
Yes, that seems to be the case. But, I don't understand how they are not moderate. They obviously are not fundamentalists or religious zealots of some other stripe.
The argument seems to be that you have fundamentalist Muslims and non-Muslims pretending to be Muslims for social acceptance, but not actually showing any sign of actually being religious.
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Between stricter selection and the fact that a lot of Muslims are black and picked it up as a civil rights thing I'm not surprised by this.
Actually, none of them have been black. South Asian and from the Balkans, mostly.
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You're probably not hanging around with the women in beekeeper outfits though.
Consider also, taqiya. While I personally know Muslims that are quite evidently "moderate" based on the part where they don't seem to follow the actual religion and like drinking just fine, it's worth keeping in mind that lying about one's beliefs is explicitly covered as an acceptable thing to do in Islam.
I don’t think lying is the reason, I am led to understand taqiya is more of a shia thing, and I am reluctant to go straight for the bad faith accusation .
But it’s easy to miss the radicalism if you don’t ask specific questions. About apostates, jews, cartoons, palestine. I was taken aback more than once by the complete change in demeanor and attitude once I breached those subjects with educated , otherwise pleasant acquaintances. I realized then that not only were we not going to be friends, but peaceful coexistence with those who believe what they believe was going to be a tall order. Most were middle eastern though, and this was in europe (turks were generally ok).
I've rarely seen the word "taqiya" used in some other context than basically making the whole idea "all Muslims are fundamentalists" unfalsifiable; should some Muslim appear to be moderate, then they are just a fundamentalist who is lying, because taqiya exists.
Actually, I knew a palestinian relatively well at uni, and I asked him about taqiya, and he said ‘taqiya? Taqqiyyya? Oh, yes, it means small hat’. He could have been lying of course, but given that we had already discussed politics extensively, and he had candidly admitted to supporting death for apostates, cartoonists, jews, calling all western women whores , believing all kinds of conspiracy theories, mostly about jews, and so on, (nice guy otherwise) , I think he was being honest.
He's probably playing dumb; the words are near-homophones. Small hat, Lying to hide one's beliefs
Hold on, we got an arabophone right here : @ymeskhout , ever heard of taqiya, the thing that isn't a hat ?
No, the only time I ever see taqiya mentioned is within discussions in the US about how "all Muslims are fundamentalists and will pretend otherwise".
I've been an atheist for several decades, but I don't know if I'd be accused of taqiya. There are some things I can say here that might be sufficiently persuasive, but I also don't want Zorba to get Charlie Hebdo-ed because of me.
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I think the taqqiya as lying about your beliefs is a shia doctrine and most palestinians are sunni, anyways.
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I think it more likely he didn't know the other meaning, because it's archaic/obscure.
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This matches my experience perfectly in the States. My Turkish work buddy informed me on a couple occasions with questions I had about decidedly non-Islamic behavior that he's, "not that kind of Muslim". In stark contrast, I had an Egyptian colleague that was entirely serious and entirely literal about Islam in a disconcerting way. Good guy, good family man, good scientist, but damn, his view of the world is not reconcilable with mine and the only extent to which we can live together is the extent to which he has no political power.
Many American Turks are wealthy and secular (this is true in all Anglo countries including the UK and Canada). It’s German, Dutch and other European Turks who tend to be descended from poor, deeply religious Anatolian peasants. See this chart.
A similar situation exists between American Pakistanis (largely upper middle class, many doctors and engineers, some migrants from non-Sunni minority religious groups) and British Pakistanis (overwhelmingly descended from poor, highly religious peasants from around the city of Mirpur in Azad Kashmir).
Most ethnic Turks in the UK in my experience are actually Turkish Cypriots (Wikipedia confirms this), and are descended from people who took low-grade civilian jobs at the British military bases on Cyprus. So not wealthy, although in practice usually secular.
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I bet you don't know any young earth creationists either, despite them being 46% of Americans. Filter bubbles are crazy.
Amusingly, that statistic means that the median YEC believes a doctrine taught by a church whose services he sleeps through on an average Sunday. If it's true and not an artifact of bad poll design.
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It’s a dumb question because most people are stupid and don’t have a strong opinion on evolution, so if they believe in God they may well check the “humans were designed by God in their current form” box without thinking about it.
That’s different from a movement in which many even intelligent and educated people believe in the specific conspiracy that science is covering up the fact that the world is just 6000 years old and that every biblical story happened literally.
I’d guess perhaps 10% of the US population are actual YEC.
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The point is that moderate Muslims are hardly elusive. If OP had referred to "the elusive Christian who is not a young Earth creationist," s/he would have have been inaccurate as well. And it is OP that is the victim of a filter bubble.
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The equivalent claim would not be "There are no YECs", it would be "there are no Christians that are not YECs".
Okay? 62% Christian - 46% YEC = 16% Christian nonYEC (very very roughly).
I didn't expect that to be a smaller subset of Americans and I'm still not confident in the calculation, but filter bubbles are salient because they break your intuition.
It's a common failure mode to take poll results literally.
People are using polls to "vote" a certain way based on their feels. For example, during the pandemic, a significant percentage of Democrats said they wanted to jail people for not taking the Covid vaccine and even take away their kids. Was this really how they felt? Would they really want to embark on this reign of terror which would make Hitler blush?
Of course not. The respondents were just "voting" based on their feels. They were scared and angry, and didn't have to face any consequences for their vote.
Unless there is skin in the game, or the poll is a literal vote, then these polls should be entirely discarded.
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Where are you getting the numbers? If we go back to the poll Scott cited, it would show 46 % answering "God created humans in present form" and 32 % with "Humans evolved with God guiding", which would probably correspond to YEC and OEC.
Of course, this poll is over 10 years old, and the American society has, to put it mildly, gone through quite a bit of change since then.
More to the point neither one directly states support for YEC claims other than the narrow point about human evolution, so reading either one as "X% support for YEC" is running ahead of the evidence. (Even if we assume these polls directly measure people's literal beliefs, which per jeroboam, they probably don't.) Elsewhere in the thread, results from polls that did directly ask about the age of the Earth have been mentioned that got much lower numbers (30% at most, less if you change the wording of the question a little).
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62% from one part of the "Religion in US" wikipedia page (they have other numbers elsewhere), and 46% from the linked post. I don't think the actual calculation is important, as I would've made the same argument if it was 40% or 4%.
But it's an apples to oranges comparison. The Wikipedia page gives current numbers, the poll gives numbers from ten years ago. There's been quite a considerable process of secularization since then.
You're quibbling with the numbers, when the bigger issue is that polls of this sort are complete garbage and should be discarded immediately.
The poll might as well have asked "Are atheists correct about God?". Because that's how people will view the question.
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There is a good portion of intellectual laziness in why people become tribal. Because that what I read out of your post as a lament of "tribalism". Most people find it cumbersome to build a correct theory of mind of the opposition and currently we are being rewarded for not having them, because it is way too easy for us get approval from our tribes with social media likes or biased personalized social media news feeds. It is something that has served humanity in the past but in the current "global village" of interconnectedness it is becoming a problem, because it eroding social and cultural cohesion that makes cooperation harder in society.
I would prefer to put the issue at an axis of language and status rather than knowledge and power. These people us language to try to bolster their status in their tribe, there is no actual knowledge there to exert power over someone else. Everything about the intellectual laziness is about accumulating status for their tribe with the least amount of energy i.e. just changing the words and behavior they use so to be seen as members of their tribe.
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