On Thu, Jul 30, 2020 at 11:27 AM Telmo Menezes <[email protected]> wrote:
> > *I disapprove of Trump and everything he stands for as much as you do. I > detest him. He is an incompetent narcissist, and his election as the > president of the USA was a nightmare come true.* > Truer words were never spoken! > *I think that the current extreme political polarization of all things is > doing damage to science. A symptom of this is that the epistemological > status of things such as the efficacy of hydroxychloriquine became > impossible to determine for those not deeply involved in the field, even if > scientifically literate and able to follow the papers.* > Crackpots, and in that I would include Trump supporters and the hydroxychloroquine cure COVID-19 people, don't just dispute well established theories, they dispute the raw data itself. I've had otherwise intelligent people tell me that every epidemiologist in the world is wrong, and the entire scientific community is wrong, and even insist every bit of data we have about COVID-19 is wrong. Why would they do that? Because if the data was right they would have to radically change their worldview and face the fact that Donald Trump is not doing a good job. Changing one's worldview is quite painful for some people. Nobody can be knowledgeable about everything, so if the vast majority of expert specialists in the world on a very complicated subject like epidemiology, agrees on something, people who have spent their life studying the subject, then I think they are much more likely to be correct then you or I are after we've only been studying the matter for 20 minutes or so. That's why people read scientific journals and believe that what they say is probably true even if they haven't personally carried out the experiments described in them. People that we trust, because they have proven to be right in the past, judge new research and if they think it's not valid they don't publish it in their journals, and if they think it is valid then they do. It's a web of trust, it's what the cryptographic program PGP uses to ensure that a public key really belongs to the person that it claims to. And history has shown the system, although not perfect, works pretty well most of the time, which is a hell of a lot better than most things work. And by the way, I don't think Trump has spent even 20 minutes studying viral epidemiology or statistical theory in his entire life. John K Clark -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Everything List" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to [email protected]. To view this discussion on the web visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/everything-list/CAJPayv1b2hFRLK56ApoMgko-vL4h-vsY-i0KSNOSRnAi33bgOA%40mail.gmail.com.
