We are embarking on a population-level Darwin Award experiment. Once the stupid people die off the overall population's resistance to stupidity will increase a little bit.
But getting there means a huge number of innocent, non-stupid people will die.
This essay rubs me the wrong way in that it continues to invest in this coastal elite attitude that the masses should do what we say because we are the experts. These people continue to miss the forest for the trees by avoiding the question: why have Americans lost faith in institutions?
I largely consider Trump a symptom of a larger disorder, I think it is lazy to assume that he and his administration is the source of the breakdown here.
Two thinkers come to mind to me in this case:
1. Hannah Arendt, particularly her writing in The Human Condition (and maybe as an analogue: the Anthony Downs book on Bureaucracy and perhaps Jacques Ellul's The Technological Society I think?):
> Bureaucracy is the form of government in which everybody is deprived of political freedom, of the power to act; for the rule by Nobody is not no-rule, and where all are equally powerless we have a tyranny without a tyrant.
Another comment talks about accountability, but a bureau is composed of people "just doing their jobs" without the personal accountability that helps keep systems accountable.
Per Downs, bureaus eventually become mainly obsessed with their own survival over their original mandate, and it requires careful design to avoid this consequence.
2. Christopher Lasch: The idea that government institutions are required to force an centralized objectivity for democracy to survive is just about the opposite of what I think we actually need, per Lasch:
> "[Specialized expertise is] the antithesis of democracy."
> "Democracy works best when men and women do things for themselves, with the help of their friends and neighbors, instead of depending on the state."
The attitude as espoused in this essay will not do any work to re-establish trust with Americans, it continues a long line of unaccountability or reflectiveness from the "adults in the room" on their own contributions to the degradation of the system by pretending Republicans or Trump are a unique aberration.
Now, he's on the extreme end because no other cancer researcher has ever gotten quite that much, as far as I know. But there aren't even accusations that he gave favorable results to any drugs form companies that sponsored him, as far as I have every heard, it was merely that he didn't disclose that destroyed his career.
This is a level of honesty and transparency that does not exist in most of society, and we should be proud in the US that science is so clean compared to every other aspect of our society.
And for all the big money, pharma is far far more honest than grifters like those in the anti-vaxxer space who do not disclose how they are making their money, and who do directly benefit from pushing unproven experimental treatments that do not go through the same rigorous vetting that standard pharma does.
> The privilege that American scientists have taken for granted—one that is now being trampled—is the ability to go about their work free of political interference.
It really did work like that. Government agencies in general are largely insulated from politics. You do your day to day work and wouldn't even notice a change of administration.
The political appointees set the overall direction, and so projects come and go -- more or less at the same rate as they do even under the same administration.
Having the President interfere so directly with ongoing operations is unprecedented. Maybe that's a good thing; people wanted a change and they got it. But it's not usual.
"largely insulated from politics" note that claim they made is that in past there was no political interference at all, not hat it was smaller or manageable
For there to be democracy, there must be accountability. For there to be accountability, there must be some sense of truth, and under that some sense of trust of each other.
What we have seen happen over the past decade is quite similar what happened in Russia in decades before it: complete dismantling of trust, of the idea of truth, of the idea of honesty or integrity. And in that space of uncertainty, a new sort of ruling class is enabled to control the population.
Anti-vaxxers used to be a tiny minority, and living in a crunchy leftish area, they were concentrated around me, and I got into arguments with them all the time. Now, they are no longer leftists, they are MAHA/MAGA, because their fundamental view of the world is not left/right, it's authority/antiauthority. Vaccines were rejected as much because of the idea of an authority "knowing stuff" as it is about the ickiness of something impure being injected into the body, as much as they love the idea of "everything natural" including "natural" infectious disease.
We've destroyed the idea of expertise and authority based on knowledge that's open to anybody who wants to put in the time to learn, and replaced it with authority that exists merely because it hated the past authority, and became what it hated.
The "we" who forfeited the trust of the country were the experts, like Fauci, who thought people were too stupid to understand any nuance of a situation. Maybe he had the same well-intentioned and misguided notions as rent control advocates who are myopically willing to trade long term well-being for short term expedience. Or maybe he was as arrogant as he seemed and believed he knew better than everyone else.
"So, why weren't we told to wear masks in the beginning?
'Well, the reason for that is that we were concerned the public health community, and many people were saying this, were concerned that it was at a time when personal protective equipment, including the N95 masks and the surgical masks, were in very short supply. And we wanted to make sure that the people namely, the health care workers, who were brave enough to put themselves in a harm way, to take care of people who you know were infected with the coronavirus and the danger of them getting infected.'"[1]
Really? Fauci understood that masks were effective for health care workers. Instead of saying we want to reserve them for health care workers, he downplayed their effectiveness to achieve the goal of reserving them for health care workers. That destroys trust.
In general I think I have a lot more faith in medical professionals than it seems you do, but I do agree that the early mixed messaging around face masks in Feb. 2020 left me with a lot of distrust of Fauci in particular: https://www.npr.org/sections/health-shots/2020/07/01/8862991...
> Fauci, who thought people were too stupid to understand any nuance of a situation. Maybe he had the same well-intentioned and misguided notions as rent control advocates who are myopically willing to trade long term well-being for short term expedience.
For me, this comparatively benign explanation of his behavior became much less plausible when the details of the EcoHealth arrangement became public.
I'm not a big believer in the current so-called criminal justice system as a way to establish... well, justice, but I do think that a trial in open court for his crimes - even just the unambiguous perjury - was likely to be healing and perhaps restorative for our institutions of scientific research.
We also subjected a lot of the population to vaccine mandates in order to retain their employment. That makes sense for some workers, sure, but it bred a lot of resentment toward authority.
It wasn't the CDC doing vaccine mandates, it was some employers, by their own choice.
If the mandates were the problem, wouldn't people hate their employers for doing that, not the CDC?
It's certainly not the first time people have been required to be vaccinated. I remember talking to some people in the military, who were very upset about the COVID vaccine, yet they get so many more vaccines all the time. Why would they be upset about vaccine mandates for COVID out of nowhere, when they get far more vaccines as a matter of course and have for decades?
There's something new in the information space, specifically about COVID and vaccines, and maybe it is such an irrational thing as trying to destroy the CDC because of some employers' mandates for vaccines, because under this all its irrationality, but I don't understand it.
>> For there to be democracy, there must be accountability. For there to be accountability, there must be some sense of truth, and under that some sense of trust of each other.
When doctors questioned vaccine safety studies they were mocked and ostracized. Which is the opposite of truth seeking you think was going on.
I know the mocking, wicked tone is why a response on this comment was flagged and dead.
> Your head is so far up your --- you can see daylight.
They were mocked for being wrong, not for questioning orthodoxy. There is a well understood epistemology for these things, and you need basic competence to apply it.
So, I have trouble anyone is so cocksure about vaccines and the shot rollout and the general response to covid like lockdowns, etc. I hope this is some consensus shaping bot, but in the case it is not and a real human wrote that, I just want to respond.
Your loud, semi-religious devotion to a consumer product is disgusting. Your outrage fuels my resolve.
There are different safety profiles for any drug, not all are equal. The covid vaxxes all have an atrocious safety profile, at least one was pulled in the states after wide distribution, all were experimental in nature and were generally rushed out to market. There needs to be jail time for the scoundrels that ignored safety signals. And on top of that the damn things didn't work and didn't stop the spread.
Beyond that, the vaxxes were publicly funded corporate welfare, there was broad public-private collusion to force people to get it (no jab, no job), there were 1st amendment violations by businesses forcing employees to disclose medical statuses.
You will not listen to reason, there are a million other sus things you all ignore about 2020-2022. I just hope everyone rebukes you and whatever neo-paganism has a death grip on your mind.
You know, unsurprisingly these claims are almost always heavy on rhetoric but offer no references or data to back up the assertion beyond a had wavy 'everyone knows'.
No, it wasn't, and these extremely marginal results got way too much attention compared to the millions of results showing all the valuable results from broad vaccination.
You are not being honest, but you are trying to your best to undermine the idea of honesty.
Every vaccine safety study was questioned and examined, thoroughly.
Introducing this idea of "mocked and ostracized," is a rhetorical tactic to try to establish the idea of some sort of mistreated people that other mistreated people can identify with. It's not based in truth of how the scientific community worked. If there's "mocking and ostracization" then it's in some sort of other social space, not in the evaluation of the vaccine safety studies.
And by trying to conflate these two areas, you are trying to undermine the very idea of truth seeking, and replace it with this weird vibes-based in-group/out-group emotionally-based judgements.
We need to pivot to rationality, and away from in-group/out-group analysis. Let's evaluate claims on their merits, not based on who is making them.
> It's not based in truth of how the scientific community worked. If there's "mocking and ostracization" then it's in some sort of other social space, not in the evaluation of the vaccine safety studies.
You seem to be doing just what the OP is complaining about. You've set up the scientific establishment as some sort of priesthood, which the great unwashed masses should not question.
That's not how science should work, at least in a functional system. If only insiders have the privilege of asking "why?", then we'll be forever trapped in orthodoxy, or worse, trapped in authoritarianism.
Unfortunately, the insurance policy against that trap - that annoying people will keep asking "why?" - itself has a steep price, sometimes almost turning into a heckler's veto. It's a tough problem.
> Introducing this idea of "mocked and ostracized," is a rhetorical tactic to try to establish the idea of some sort of mistreated people that other mistreated people can identify with. It's not based in truth of how the scientific community worked. If there's "mocking and ostracization" then it's in some sort of other social space, not in the evaluation of the vaccine safety studies.
And by trying to conflate these two areas, you are trying to undermine the very idea of truth seeking, and replace it with this weird vibes-based in-group/out-group emotionally-based judgements.
Your head is so far up your ass you can see daylight.
They were mocked for being wrong, not for questioning orthodoxy. There is a well understood epistemology for these things, and you need basic competence to apply it.
In my life there have been two huge destructions of public trust.
The first was the Iraq war, which could only be the result of either bald faced lies or gross incompetence or both. We blundered into the desert and set a trillion dollars and countless lives on fire and have nothing to show for it. Tons of people across the spectrum knew this was a terrible idea and were silenced or ignored.
The other was the 2008 bank bailouts. The problem isn’t that the state stepped in to avert a depression. The problem is that they did it by handing the very people who caused the crash a bonus and a promotion and then proceeded to reinflate the housing bubble to lock two generations out of home ownership. The response was that the Eastern establishment saved itself at the expense of the country, or that’s how it looked to a ton of people all across the country and the political spectrum including myself.
There have been smaller cuts but those are the big obvious ones.
You could never get a Trump or an RFK Jr without these two things.
Unfortunately these two characters are not reformers. They are vultures. They are frauds and con men dining on the corpse of trust.
I’m not Russian but I imagine that the failure of the Soviet regime and the hollowness of its propaganda did a number on trust over there, and that Putin and his allies are likewise vultures.
“ The other was the 2008 bank bailouts. The problem isn’t that the state stepped in to avert a depression. The problem is that they did it by handing the very people who caused the crash a bonus and a promotion and then proceeded to reinflate the housing bubble to lock two generations out of home ownership”
What’s interesting about this telling of it is how it reinterprets history. You are complaining about a lack of trust based on, if not an outright lie, an extremely biased narrative. The most obvious missing piece is you don’t mention the auto makers or uaw workers at all. Or that you say “reinflate the housing bubble” instead of “subsidize mortgages on houses that should have been repossessed”. We forced banks that did have proper risk controls to take tarp funds and the attached compensation limits against their will and made money on many of the assets we bought with tarp funds.
There is a trust gap, but it’s not some one way problem of coastal elites selling fables to enrich themselves and the good proletariat being duped. It’s at least as much a story of the populace not using critical reasoning skills to understand multifaceted and nuanced issues, which I suspect is not new.
> You could never get a Trump or an RFK Jr without these two things.
Fully agree with the rest but not with this. Pure and simple economic devastation is enough - yes, the Iraq war did a number on y'all... but most countries in Europe didn't join in on that particular shitshow and still got our version of Trump.
Hell I'd say even the 2008 bank bailouts aren't the problem. The uber rich looting the country for all it's worth, that's been a staple of human society, it doesn't mean automated flip to fascism.
IMHO, the true problem rather is that we (i.e. Western countries) allowed unrestricted trade with Asia, in particular China and India - our greedy big corporations swooped in and moved a lot of economic activity providing decent paid jobs of all skill levels there. Production mostly went off to China, service (i.e. callcenters) to India, high-tech to South Korea and especially Taiwan. And there was nothing domestic, other than maybe be a drone in an Amazon warehouse or Walmart (that, in turn, destroyed even more decent paid jobs in small retail!), to provide alternative gainful employment.
That is what destroyed democracy the most - the devastation and the utter ignorance of politicians.
The alternate take is that improved information publishing and distribution platforms (the internet) have allowed the exposure of some pretty corrupt and questionable relationships between the authorities and the industries they regulate (regulatory capture).
Previously people only got their information from the authorities and newspapers. Newspapers were owned by the industries (either directly, or via advertising). Now we can see diverse view points from others in various fields, and it is clear when "doctors say ..." that doesn't mean that all doctors believe that to be true. We can now see that NIH scientists that approve drugs are allowed to approve drugs where they have a patent and commercial interest in the drugs they are approving, which is mind-bendingly wild that level of corruption is allowed.
People can also question where the studies are to back guidelines from authorities. Like what is the scientific basis of the food pyramid? Turns out that was created by the Department of Agriculture to support grain farmers, not because it is a good diet for humans. Or that the deaths and injuries for many infectious diseases had significantly declined before their respective vaccines hit the market, and that the authorities have been cherry picking the points of the graph to hide how much of the improvement happened before vaccines were available.
The biggest change is the availability of diverse voices in an industry being able to be heard, rather than just a select few chosen by "authority", aka power, aka money.
> The privilege that American scientists have taken for granted—one that is now being trampled—is the ability to go about their work free of political interference.
Communism style solutions ("it is better to have everyone being extremely poor, rather than having some poor and some rich people") is a terrible solution.
Trampling on everyone because other group got trampled earlier is not a solution at all.
Presenting insane and deadly pseudoscience as science is stupid, dangerous and will kill people.
But claiming that there were no problems whatsoever and no political interference at all is a really dubious claim. This kind of reality denial is unhelpful and further erodes whatever trust was left.
I think you're taking issue with the wrong thing here lol. There may have been something before (it's the real world after all), but what RFK is doing is quite frankly insane.
oh definitely - that is why I have not commented on this part of article, as I agree that such pseudoscience is simply idiotic, dangerous and will kill people and I am in agreement that it is bad
But this part made me go "really? really? really?" - this kind of reality denial is not helpful either and prompted my comment. And they could phrase it a bit more mildly for far greater accuracy.
We are embarking on a population-level Darwin Award experiment. Once the stupid people die off the overall population's resistance to stupidity will increase a little bit.
But getting there means a huge number of innocent, non-stupid people will die.
https://archive.ph/auQhC
This essay rubs me the wrong way in that it continues to invest in this coastal elite attitude that the masses should do what we say because we are the experts. These people continue to miss the forest for the trees by avoiding the question: why have Americans lost faith in institutions?
I largely consider Trump a symptom of a larger disorder, I think it is lazy to assume that he and his administration is the source of the breakdown here.
Two thinkers come to mind to me in this case:
1. Hannah Arendt, particularly her writing in The Human Condition (and maybe as an analogue: the Anthony Downs book on Bureaucracy and perhaps Jacques Ellul's The Technological Society I think?):
> Bureaucracy is the form of government in which everybody is deprived of political freedom, of the power to act; for the rule by Nobody is not no-rule, and where all are equally powerless we have a tyranny without a tyrant.
Another comment talks about accountability, but a bureau is composed of people "just doing their jobs" without the personal accountability that helps keep systems accountable.
Per Downs, bureaus eventually become mainly obsessed with their own survival over their original mandate, and it requires careful design to avoid this consequence.
2. Christopher Lasch: The idea that government institutions are required to force an centralized objectivity for democracy to survive is just about the opposite of what I think we actually need, per Lasch:
> "[Specialized expertise is] the antithesis of democracy."
> "Democracy works best when men and women do things for themselves, with the help of their friends and neighbors, instead of depending on the state."
The attitude as espoused in this essay will not do any work to re-establish trust with Americans, it continues a long line of unaccountability or reflectiveness from the "adults in the room" on their own contributions to the degradation of the system by pretending Republicans or Trump are a unique aberration.
Doctors should wear pharma sponsorships on their coats like Formula 1 drivers do. Would put things into perspective.
They do, on their publications. It's all there. And it's not as pervasive as you might think.
I remember a very famous cancer researcher who destroyed his career by not disclosing these relationships:
https://cancerletter.com/the-cancer-letter/20180914_1/
Now, he's on the extreme end because no other cancer researcher has ever gotten quite that much, as far as I know. But there aren't even accusations that he gave favorable results to any drugs form companies that sponsored him, as far as I have every heard, it was merely that he didn't disclose that destroyed his career.
This is a level of honesty and transparency that does not exist in most of society, and we should be proud in the US that science is so clean compared to every other aspect of our society.
And for all the big money, pharma is far far more honest than grifters like those in the anti-vaxxer space who do not disclose how they are making their money, and who do directly benefit from pushing unproven experimental treatments that do not go through the same rigorous vetting that standard pharma does.
> The privilege that American scientists have taken for granted—one that is now being trampled—is the ability to go about their work free of political interference.
Hilariously blinkered.
It really did work like that. Government agencies in general are largely insulated from politics. You do your day to day work and wouldn't even notice a change of administration.
The political appointees set the overall direction, and so projects come and go -- more or less at the same rate as they do even under the same administration.
Having the President interfere so directly with ongoing operations is unprecedented. Maybe that's a good thing; people wanted a change and they got it. But it's not usual.
> Government agencies in general are largely insulated from politics.
This was obviously false during the pandemic when these “health” agencies did what the White House wanted, from the actual “science” to the messaging.
Same president both times. Same bad idea.
"largely insulated from politics" note that claim they made is that in past there was no political interference at all, not hat it was smaller or manageable
Between this and defunding of Univ. research plus the banning of $ for mRNA vaccine, the US just handed the future of Medical Research to China.
I have seen articles recently that states China now leads the word in mRNA research, which is the future of vaccine research.
Soon I expect the US to only allow praying over people for medical treatment, we are not far from that with the recent ACA changes.
For there to be democracy, there must be accountability. For there to be accountability, there must be some sense of truth, and under that some sense of trust of each other.
What we have seen happen over the past decade is quite similar what happened in Russia in decades before it: complete dismantling of trust, of the idea of truth, of the idea of honesty or integrity. And in that space of uncertainty, a new sort of ruling class is enabled to control the population.
Anti-vaxxers used to be a tiny minority, and living in a crunchy leftish area, they were concentrated around me, and I got into arguments with them all the time. Now, they are no longer leftists, they are MAHA/MAGA, because their fundamental view of the world is not left/right, it's authority/antiauthority. Vaccines were rejected as much because of the idea of an authority "knowing stuff" as it is about the ickiness of something impure being injected into the body, as much as they love the idea of "everything natural" including "natural" infectious disease.
We've destroyed the idea of expertise and authority based on knowledge that's open to anybody who wants to put in the time to learn, and replaced it with authority that exists merely because it hated the past authority, and became what it hated.
The "we" who forfeited the trust of the country were the experts, like Fauci, who thought people were too stupid to understand any nuance of a situation. Maybe he had the same well-intentioned and misguided notions as rent control advocates who are myopically willing to trade long term well-being for short term expedience. Or maybe he was as arrogant as he seemed and believed he knew better than everyone else.
>> Or maybe he was as arrogant as he seemed and believed he knew better than everyone else.
Do you have any references for this? Our understanding of Covid evolved pretty rapidly during the pandemic and as usual hindsight is 20/20.
I have no doubt that *you* are convinced of your statement. I'd just like to understand what data you based your conviction on.
"So, why weren't we told to wear masks in the beginning?
'Well, the reason for that is that we were concerned the public health community, and many people were saying this, were concerned that it was at a time when personal protective equipment, including the N95 masks and the surgical masks, were in very short supply. And we wanted to make sure that the people namely, the health care workers, who were brave enough to put themselves in a harm way, to take care of people who you know were infected with the coronavirus and the danger of them getting infected.'"[1]
[1] https://web.archive.org/web/20250501225159/https://www.thest...
And?
Really? Fauci understood that masks were effective for health care workers. Instead of saying we want to reserve them for health care workers, he downplayed their effectiveness to achieve the goal of reserving them for health care workers. That destroys trust.
In general I think I have a lot more faith in medical professionals than it seems you do, but I do agree that the early mixed messaging around face masks in Feb. 2020 left me with a lot of distrust of Fauci in particular: https://www.npr.org/sections/health-shots/2020/07/01/8862991...
> Fauci, who thought people were too stupid to understand any nuance of a situation. Maybe he had the same well-intentioned and misguided notions as rent control advocates who are myopically willing to trade long term well-being for short term expedience.
For me, this comparatively benign explanation of his behavior became much less plausible when the details of the EcoHealth arrangement became public.
I'm not a big believer in the current so-called criminal justice system as a way to establish... well, justice, but I do think that a trial in open court for his crimes - even just the unambiguous perjury - was likely to be healing and perhaps restorative for our institutions of scientific research.
Why wouldn't someone who studied public health and led public health organizations for years know more about public health than everyone else?
> who thought people were too stupid to understand any nuance of a situation
Americans have already proven they are too stupid for such nuance over the last decade or so.
We also subjected a lot of the population to vaccine mandates in order to retain their employment. That makes sense for some workers, sure, but it bred a lot of resentment toward authority.
It wasn't the CDC doing vaccine mandates, it was some employers, by their own choice.
If the mandates were the problem, wouldn't people hate their employers for doing that, not the CDC?
It's certainly not the first time people have been required to be vaccinated. I remember talking to some people in the military, who were very upset about the COVID vaccine, yet they get so many more vaccines all the time. Why would they be upset about vaccine mandates for COVID out of nowhere, when they get far more vaccines as a matter of course and have for decades?
There's something new in the information space, specifically about COVID and vaccines, and maybe it is such an irrational thing as trying to destroy the CDC because of some employers' mandates for vaccines, because under this all its irrationality, but I don't understand it.
It didn't for decades until bad actors spewing lies worked to spread distrust in the system.
Doesn’t the military mandate vaccines for decades
>> For there to be democracy, there must be accountability. For there to be accountability, there must be some sense of truth, and under that some sense of trust of each other.
When doctors questioned vaccine safety studies they were mocked and ostracized. Which is the opposite of truth seeking you think was going on.
I know the mocking, wicked tone is why a response on this comment was flagged and dead.
> Your head is so far up your --- you can see daylight. They were mocked for being wrong, not for questioning orthodoxy. There is a well understood epistemology for these things, and you need basic competence to apply it.
So, I have trouble anyone is so cocksure about vaccines and the shot rollout and the general response to covid like lockdowns, etc. I hope this is some consensus shaping bot, but in the case it is not and a real human wrote that, I just want to respond.
Your loud, semi-religious devotion to a consumer product is disgusting. Your outrage fuels my resolve.
There are different safety profiles for any drug, not all are equal. The covid vaxxes all have an atrocious safety profile, at least one was pulled in the states after wide distribution, all were experimental in nature and were generally rushed out to market. There needs to be jail time for the scoundrels that ignored safety signals. And on top of that the damn things didn't work and didn't stop the spread.
Beyond that, the vaxxes were publicly funded corporate welfare, there was broad public-private collusion to force people to get it (no jab, no job), there were 1st amendment violations by businesses forcing employees to disclose medical statuses.
You will not listen to reason, there are a million other sus things you all ignore about 2020-2022. I just hope everyone rebukes you and whatever neo-paganism has a death grip on your mind.
You know, unsurprisingly these claims are almost always heavy on rhetoric but offer no references or data to back up the assertion beyond a had wavy 'everyone knows'.
No, it wasn't, and these extremely marginal results got way too much attention compared to the millions of results showing all the valuable results from broad vaccination.
You are not being honest, but you are trying to your best to undermine the idea of honesty.
Every vaccine safety study was questioned and examined, thoroughly.
Introducing this idea of "mocked and ostracized," is a rhetorical tactic to try to establish the idea of some sort of mistreated people that other mistreated people can identify with. It's not based in truth of how the scientific community worked. If there's "mocking and ostracization" then it's in some sort of other social space, not in the evaluation of the vaccine safety studies.
And by trying to conflate these two areas, you are trying to undermine the very idea of truth seeking, and replace it with this weird vibes-based in-group/out-group emotionally-based judgements.
We need to pivot to rationality, and away from in-group/out-group analysis. Let's evaluate claims on their merits, not based on who is making them.
> It's not based in truth of how the scientific community worked. If there's "mocking and ostracization" then it's in some sort of other social space, not in the evaluation of the vaccine safety studies.
You seem to be doing just what the OP is complaining about. You've set up the scientific establishment as some sort of priesthood, which the great unwashed masses should not question.
That's not how science should work, at least in a functional system. If only insiders have the privilege of asking "why?", then we'll be forever trapped in orthodoxy, or worse, trapped in authoritarianism.
Unfortunately, the insurance policy against that trap - that annoying people will keep asking "why?" - itself has a steep price, sometimes almost turning into a heckler's veto. It's a tough problem.
> Introducing this idea of "mocked and ostracized," is a rhetorical tactic to try to establish the idea of some sort of mistreated people that other mistreated people can identify with. It's not based in truth of how the scientific community worked. If there's "mocking and ostracization" then it's in some sort of other social space, not in the evaluation of the vaccine safety studies. And by trying to conflate these two areas, you are trying to undermine the very idea of truth seeking, and replace it with this weird vibes-based in-group/out-group emotionally-based judgements.
Well put
Your head is so far up your ass you can see daylight.
They were mocked for being wrong, not for questioning orthodoxy. There is a well understood epistemology for these things, and you need basic competence to apply it.
“Trust arrives on foot and leaves on horseback.”
In my life there have been two huge destructions of public trust.
The first was the Iraq war, which could only be the result of either bald faced lies or gross incompetence or both. We blundered into the desert and set a trillion dollars and countless lives on fire and have nothing to show for it. Tons of people across the spectrum knew this was a terrible idea and were silenced or ignored.
The other was the 2008 bank bailouts. The problem isn’t that the state stepped in to avert a depression. The problem is that they did it by handing the very people who caused the crash a bonus and a promotion and then proceeded to reinflate the housing bubble to lock two generations out of home ownership. The response was that the Eastern establishment saved itself at the expense of the country, or that’s how it looked to a ton of people all across the country and the political spectrum including myself.
There have been smaller cuts but those are the big obvious ones.
You could never get a Trump or an RFK Jr without these two things.
Unfortunately these two characters are not reformers. They are vultures. They are frauds and con men dining on the corpse of trust.
I’m not Russian but I imagine that the failure of the Soviet regime and the hollowness of its propaganda did a number on trust over there, and that Putin and his allies are likewise vultures.
“ The other was the 2008 bank bailouts. The problem isn’t that the state stepped in to avert a depression. The problem is that they did it by handing the very people who caused the crash a bonus and a promotion and then proceeded to reinflate the housing bubble to lock two generations out of home ownership”
What’s interesting about this telling of it is how it reinterprets history. You are complaining about a lack of trust based on, if not an outright lie, an extremely biased narrative. The most obvious missing piece is you don’t mention the auto makers or uaw workers at all. Or that you say “reinflate the housing bubble” instead of “subsidize mortgages on houses that should have been repossessed”. We forced banks that did have proper risk controls to take tarp funds and the attached compensation limits against their will and made money on many of the assets we bought with tarp funds.
There is a trust gap, but it’s not some one way problem of coastal elites selling fables to enrich themselves and the good proletariat being duped. It’s at least as much a story of the populace not using critical reasoning skills to understand multifaceted and nuanced issues, which I suspect is not new.
uhh I think various parts of Trump's presidency seem to be tantamount to those things. Jan 6, for instance.
> You could never get a Trump or an RFK Jr without these two things.
Fully agree with the rest but not with this. Pure and simple economic devastation is enough - yes, the Iraq war did a number on y'all... but most countries in Europe didn't join in on that particular shitshow and still got our version of Trump.
Hell I'd say even the 2008 bank bailouts aren't the problem. The uber rich looting the country for all it's worth, that's been a staple of human society, it doesn't mean automated flip to fascism.
IMHO, the true problem rather is that we (i.e. Western countries) allowed unrestricted trade with Asia, in particular China and India - our greedy big corporations swooped in and moved a lot of economic activity providing decent paid jobs of all skill levels there. Production mostly went off to China, service (i.e. callcenters) to India, high-tech to South Korea and especially Taiwan. And there was nothing domestic, other than maybe be a drone in an Amazon warehouse or Walmart (that, in turn, destroyed even more decent paid jobs in small retail!), to provide alternative gainful employment.
That is what destroyed democracy the most - the devastation and the utter ignorance of politicians.
The alternate take is that improved information publishing and distribution platforms (the internet) have allowed the exposure of some pretty corrupt and questionable relationships between the authorities and the industries they regulate (regulatory capture).
Previously people only got their information from the authorities and newspapers. Newspapers were owned by the industries (either directly, or via advertising). Now we can see diverse view points from others in various fields, and it is clear when "doctors say ..." that doesn't mean that all doctors believe that to be true. We can now see that NIH scientists that approve drugs are allowed to approve drugs where they have a patent and commercial interest in the drugs they are approving, which is mind-bendingly wild that level of corruption is allowed.
People can also question where the studies are to back guidelines from authorities. Like what is the scientific basis of the food pyramid? Turns out that was created by the Department of Agriculture to support grain farmers, not because it is a good diet for humans. Or that the deaths and injuries for many infectious diseases had significantly declined before their respective vaccines hit the market, and that the authorities have been cherry picking the points of the graph to hide how much of the improvement happened before vaccines were available.
The biggest change is the availability of diverse voices in an industry being able to be heard, rather than just a select few chosen by "authority", aka power, aka money.
> The privilege that American scientists have taken for granted—one that is now being trampled—is the ability to go about their work free of political interference.
Communism style solutions ("it is better to have everyone being extremely poor, rather than having some poor and some rich people") is a terrible solution. Trampling on everyone because other group got trampled earlier is not a solution at all.
Presenting insane and deadly pseudoscience as science is stupid, dangerous and will kill people.
But claiming that there were no problems whatsoever and no political interference at all is a really dubious claim. This kind of reality denial is unhelpful and further erodes whatever trust was left.
Even in communism some were richer than others
I think you're taking issue with the wrong thing here lol. There may have been something before (it's the real world after all), but what RFK is doing is quite frankly insane.
> what RFK is doing is quite frankly insane.
oh definitely - that is why I have not commented on this part of article, as I agree that such pseudoscience is simply idiotic, dangerous and will kill people and I am in agreement that it is bad
But this part made me go "really? really? really?" - this kind of reality denial is not helpful either and prompted my comment. And they could phrase it a bit more mildly for far greater accuracy.
I edited my initial comment a bit.