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> The general public are not scientists, yet they distrust institutions Of course. They'll lose trust the soonest when they see political statements coming out

by Rule35 6y ago

> The general public are not scientists, yet they distrust institutions Of course. They'll lose trust the soonest when they see political statements coming out of the WHO, etc. And they should. An organization that can't stay neutral can't do good work in a politicized climate. > Few can look at data and know what it doesn’t answer, or what questions should be asked but aren’t being No, this is actually one of the easiest things to teach. "If you were paid to sneak in and ruin this team's research, what simple bias could you add? If it was the other way around, how would you protect against this?" Teaching people to recognize a poorly controlled study is not difficult. But it's not PC these days because people are supposed to shut up when told that all scientists agree! We did this to ourselves a decade ago by tolerating the climate change debacle attacking dissent, now everything is fought through fake consensus. > Correlation is not causation, but that escapes almost all of us When it's not it almost always means there's an unseen factor though, so that wonderfully dismissive statement is usually just a red herring. > The people who can (or do) communicate with the public are ... Lying. They're lying. They're saying things they can't know as if they're fact. The WHO isn't saying that a lab leak seems less likely than other things, they're saying it didn't happen. Unless they can point to what did happen then logically they're not able to make that claim. People might be scientifically illiterate, but luckily spotting lies is much easier and gets you mostly halfway there, able to spot when you're being manipulated even if you can't tell what the truth is. The real problem the media is having is that people aren't quite as dumb as expected.

stcredzero 6y ago
> The people who can (or do) communicate with the public are ... Lying. They're lying. They're saying things they can't know as if they're fact. The WHO isn't saying that a lab leak seems less likely than other things, they're saying it didn't happen. Unless they can point to what did happen then logically they're not able to make that claim. It's very funny that Dr. Fauci came out and said the virus wasn't produced in a lab because we don't have the computational resources to model it. Full stop. That eliminates one way it could have been produced in a lab, but not all of them. Gain of Function research is often conducted by inducing mutations, then seeing how that changed the virus' capabilities. In fact, Dr. Fauci himself signed off on gain of function research in the very lab in Wuhan! Dr. Fauci basically admitted in public that he as good as lied to the public, saying that masks were not useful, because he wanted to keep them for health workers. I think the press should be asking a lot more questions around here. The real problem the media is having is that people aren't quite as dumb as expected. It's almost as if the media believed the bigoted nonsense they say about some segments of the populace, and were disconnected from reality. Of course, that wouldn't be the case. Otherwise, we'd start to see things like public opinion polls that are systematically inaccurate, political consultants making huge miscalculations, or media companies doing things completely contrary to what fans of their products want and what profitability would demand. We'd see media companies suppressing things like downvotes, or having difficulty getting traction with their channels on YouTube. If that were the case, then you wouldn't see evidence of groupthink and enforced groupthink in leaked journalist mailing lists and forums. If that were the case, there would be leaks of higher-ups dictating news narratives on conference calls -- which would then be systematically suppressed by journalists across the board. We don't see any of that now, do we?

by Rule35 6y ago

stcredzero 6y ago

> The people who can (or do) communicate with the public are ... Lying. They're lying. They're saying things they can't know as if they're fact. The WHO isn't saying that a lab leak seems less likely than other things, they're saying it didn't happen. Unless they can point to what did happen then logically they're not able to make that claim. It's very funny that Dr. Fauci came out and said the virus wasn't produced in a lab because we don't have the computational resources to model it. Full stop. That eliminates one way it could have been produced in a lab, but not all of them. Gain of Function research is often conducted by inducing mutations, then seeing how that changed the virus' capabilities. In fact, Dr. Fauci himself signed off on gain of function research in the very lab in Wuhan! Dr. Fauci basically admitted in public that he as good as lied to the public, saying that masks were not useful, because he wanted to keep them for health workers. I think the press should be asking a lot more questions around here. The real problem the media is having is that people aren't quite as dumb as expected. It's almost as if the media believed the bigoted nonsense they say about some segments of the populace, and were disconnected from reality. Of course, that wouldn't be the case. Otherwise, we'd start to see things like public opinion polls that are systematically inaccurate, political consultants making huge miscalculations, or media companies doing things completely contrary to what fans of their products want and what profitability would demand. We'd see media companies suppressing things like downvotes, or having difficulty getting traction with their channels on YouTube. If that were the case, then you wouldn't see evidence of groupthink and enforced groupthink in leaked journalist mailing lists and forums. If that were the case, there would be leaks of higher-ups dictating news narratives on conference calls -- which would then be systematically suppressed by journalists across the board. We don't see any of that now, do we?