Good grief. You go from "i don't know who this guy is" when it's extremely easy to find out ... to comparing criticism of him to Nazi Germany? If a high school principal belongs to the Klan, declared that there would not longer be tests at the school, sports are banned and all bathrooms are unisex ... would saying he should be fired be equivalent to silencing minority opinion and just like Nazi Germany? No, criticizing public officials who ignore science and make really stupid decisions is kinda OK.
Flat Earth is an interesting example, as there is a minority that is thoroughly convinced that the Earth is flat now. If somebody were to make one of these folks the head of NASA, would you defend their minority opinion. Why or why not?
This is the question that most occupies my mind, as I think CF’s point is a good one. Scientific knowledge is constantly revised, so how do we determine what is knowledge and how should we treat minority views? I have too much to say on this topic for this post (In fact, I am currently working on developing a course on it) and am interesting in hearing CF’s answer, but I do think the question is at the heart of a lot of political debates …and all debates really.
It is inevitable in science or any other field that if you come out with an unpopular minority opinion you are going to get resistance. That isn’t necessarily good but it is human nature. However, knowing that, for those that make such unpopular assertions, especially in science, it behooves them to get their facts and methodologies air tight. This “study” that they trotted out is a joke on multiple levels. There have been numerous statistical and methodological errors and problems pointed out. But even in spite of that, if what they were saying is true, is that the chance of dying of a cardiac issue after vaccination is roughly 1 in a million for that age group, vs not getting vaccinating AND not getting (dying) from Covid - when the risk of dying from Covid is a lot higher than 1 in a million, even for that age group. Then, taking that, and rolling that out as a basis of public policy warning certain people against getting vaccines, when they are clearly better off getting them.
I can't speak to the NY Times article you mentioned, but it is an absolute myth that "everyone knew the world was flat" 600 years ago. THAT erroneous and endlessly repeated myth came from the pens of novelist Washington Irving, in his biography of Christopher Columbus, and later books written by John William Draper and Andrew Dickson White. ____________________________________ Myth of the flat Earth - Wikipedia The myth of the flat Earth, or the flat earth error, is a modern historical misconception that European scholars and educated people during the Middle Ages believed the Earth to be flat.[1][2] The earliest clear documentation of the idea of a spherical Earth comes from the ancient Greeks (5th century BC). The belief was widespread in the Greek world when Eratosthenes calculated the circumference of Earth around 240 BC. This knowledge spread with Greek influence such that during the Early Middle Ages (~600–1000 AD), most European and Middle Eastern scholars espoused Earth's sphericity.[3] Belief in a flat Earth among educated Europeans was almost nonexistent from the Late Middle Ages onward, though fanciful depictions appear in art, such as the exterior panels of Hieronymus Bosch's famous triptych The Garden of Earthly Delights, in which a disc-shaped Earth is shown floating inside a transparent sphere.[4] According to Stephen Jay Gould, "there never was a period of 'flat Earth darkness' among scholars, regardless of how the public at large may have conceptualized our planet both then and now. Greek knowledge of sphericity never faded, and all major medieval scholars accepted the Earth's roundness as an established fact of cosmology."[5] Historians of science David Lindberg and Ronald Numbers point out that "there was scarcely a Christian scholar of the Middle Ages who did not acknowledge [Earth's] sphericity and even know its approximate circumference".[6] Historian Jeffrey Burton Russell says the flat-Earth error flourished most between 1870 and 1920, and had to do with the ideological setting created by struggles over biological evolution. Russell claims "with extraordinary few exceptions no educated person in the history of Western Civilization from the third century B.C. onward believed that the Earth was flat", and ascribes popularization of the flat-Earth myth to histories by John William Draper, Andrew Dickson White, and Washington Irving.[2][7][8] ____________________ In 2014 science historian Darin Hayton, wrote of this widespread misconception first seeded by Washington Irving. The linked article is a 10 minute or less read and full of details on how and why this happened. Washington Irving’s Columbus and the Flat Earth – Darin Hayton For generations now American school children have learned that Christopher Columbus proved the earth was round. They have learned that the Church tried to prevent Columbus from sailing west to Asia, fearing that he and his seamen would sail off the edge of the earth or plunge into a chasm. They know that Columbus persevered and eventually overcame religious opposition. And they know that Columbus was right. At its core, the Columbus story pits humble rationality against dogmatic obscurantism in a sort of secular inversion of the David and Goliath story. Judging from the students in my intro classes, the Columbus story is thriving in American schools. The only problem, as any historian or historian of science will tell you: it’s a myth. Like any beloved myth, the Columbus story mixes truths and truthiness, something that seems so natural and so obviously true but isn’t. Columbus did face opposition. He did persevere. He did sail west. He did find land (not Asia as he had predicted and continued to believe but the New World). But these truths have nothing to do with the shape of the earth—Columbus and all his detractors knew that the earth was round. The truthiness in the myth lies, on the one hand, in the image of a dogmatic medieval Spanish Church that clung to a retrograde idea about the shape of the earth and refused to listen to reason and evidence. On the other hand, truthiness also inheres in the image of Columbus as a proto-modern, quasi-secular thinker guided only by reason and evidence. The truthiness is the reason 19th-century authors fabricated the myth and 21st-century educators continue to repeat it. The seeds of the Columbus myth seem to grow from Washington Irving’s biography of Columbus, A History of the Life and Voyages of Christopher Columbus (1828) (online here). Alexander Everett, Minister Plenipotentiary to Spain, had invited Irving to Madrid in the hopes that Irving would translate a recently published collection of documents on Columbus. When Irving got there and had a chance to read the collection, he decided 'that a history, faithfully digested from these various materials, was a desideratum in literature', and would be a more acceptable work to my country, than the translation [he] had contemplated.
Except science has nothing to do with opinion. After barely 2.5 years, we certainly have a long way to go in understanding SARS-CoV-2, however there are plenty of things we do know as fact, not opinion. Fact: Ivermectin and Hydroxychloroquine do not have sufficient intra-cellular reactivity to affect the course of a SARS-COV-2 generated infection. Fact: Anti-biotics do not affect viruses, including this one. Fact: Taking a bunch of vitamin supplements that your body barely metabolizes before passing, does not impact the course of the infection. Now, any lay person offering opinions contrary to facts may be dismissed as simply ignorant. For a medical doctor to pedal this non-sense and profit from said mis-information, spew lies about vaccination, create a farcical "study" to pander to a political organization, all based solely on opinion is not only absurd, but should cost him his medical license. Not because he has a minority opinion, but because he is a liar and profiteer.
I personally agree with you, but the larger issue is about agreeing how we identify inferior methodologies. If I recall, John Ionnidis was one of the authors of one of these papers, and he’s one of the guys I would most trust to evaluate the quality of methodologies. He’s helped us improve standards of science in the last couple decades, and I still don’t quite understand how he was on that paper.
Fascinating stuff that I didn’t know. It made me look up Copernicus and I found it interesting to read these two completely different accounts of the relationship of the Catholic Church and theories of Copernicus (and later Galileo) 400 Years Ago the Catholic Church Prohibited Copernicanism | Origins The Myth That Catholics Are Opposed to Science Revolves Around Copernicus | National Catholic Register
There's an interesting debate going on right now on Twitter but I am not qualified to understand about the preprint on whether the covid virus was the product of some engineering. Angela Rasmussen and some of the others have said it's complete BS. And I'm biased, but I think they have the stronger argument. Be curious if you have been following it
I'm not worried. We have a significant amount of data, science, and expertise showing what a clown this guy is. Sometimes, the anti-vax clown is just an anti-vax clown.
They are inept, but we've got a guy who was a decent Republican governor running as a Democrat to give moderates a tolerable option. And the majority of our state is still going to vote for four more years of DeSantis after seeing everything he's done. That says it all to me.
The top state for cop deaths is Texas at 33. Next closest is 10. 17 of the Texas cop deaths were Covid. Live free or die. They chose to die. The Officer Down Memorial Page (ODMP)
Do you know if any were vaxed? Curious how they know they got covid on duty? Was there a covid protocol instituted and followed on and/or off duty? So now doing your job is deciding to choose to die? We had a lot of deaths in one elderly facility early during covid so I guess they chose to die?
Oh no, I haven’t. I saw there is some controversy about Boston U creating a hybrid COVID, but I haven’t seen one about the wild COVID. The lab leak question is a good example of this kind of issue though.
Here's a couple examples, from the Rasmussen side. I am not qualified to have any opinion even reading their tweets. But they do seem to make some very logical points .
Thanks. At least part of this argument seems to rest on “restriction sites” found in the virus genome, which are sequences that scientists use to cut and paste dna segments. This was the same argument made in a lab leak paper a year or two ago, but now with different restriction enzymes. I agree with you and Weber that it seems unlikely that someone would go though the trouble of stitching this altogether and leave those easily recognizable sites in there. Of course thats not proof it didn’t happen, but it doesn’t seem like great evidence that it did happen either. Will be interested to see how the conversation about this paper proceeds.
Unvaccinated Texans make up vast majority of COVID-19 cases and deaths this year, new state data shows 'I can't do another funeral' | APD pushing for shots after 2 unvaccinated officer deaths
