3 ms·

Its a start at least, but that's still very vague. Can you specify more?

mdp2021 5y ago
No prob. I did not mean to be vague, I wanted to specify the principles. Suppose that John was waiting for the availability of some treatment. Then John is reached by information about side effects of concern. It is normal that John will see something outside initial expectations ("a few days of distress owing to bodily reaction") around him (say, persistent inconveniences of some, maybe a few critical occurrences of somebody else - "Mary has been itching for three months", "Lucy's mother fell out of the window"), and by looking for further information he will reach extreme but unreliable information ("Anon wrote on a web billboard his cousin caught fire within four days of inoculation"). The expectation of John will probably be that these cases will be actively explained by theory and assessed case by case, at least in a representative sample (e.g. subject to active monitoring). What he will encounter will easily be worlds with little and scarcely effective inter-communication: publications for academics containing large number of pages relevant to general topic but none apparently assessing the questions emerging from his experience; "renegade" researchers speaking of toxicity; no mention of said toxicity elsewhere. Adding to that, the scenario is made more complex and/or confusing through the message of articles like "The final nail in the coffin of medical research";, through increasing diffusion of lapidary password constructs (take 'safe and effective' - which is not per se meaningful as its two members are not absolute, yet it is proposed (even here, nearby) as a final judgement); through the usual lunatics making extraordinary claims; through a public debate that obsessively refers to the usual lunatics, factually honouring them as The Interlocutors of choice; through censorship (Lex Fridman denounced it and went on to say that at the MIT researchers have started preferring to remain quiet and silent); through the extension of the same into principles that e.g. forbid the statement that 'vaccines are dangerous' (YouTube), which is a complete reinvention of the language, so even the common ground of communication is gone (as now for "dangerous" an arbitrary threshold is set and in the new vernacular fighting for dominance paracetamol, water, the sun are not dangerous anymore); through a defence of a principle of responsibility about the consequences of how a tick and a mouse may interpret your words (but not the consequences of how intellectual profession and principles bend under the weights of a tick and a mouse). In all of that John will continue wondering "how and why had Mary been itching for months, and why was not that brought clearly to topic: all of that cannot be normal". John will not only expect explanations that put his experience into theoretical context, but also a slice of some system in which problematic experience is treated as expected: as something pending waiting for answers. -- Edit: your post now reads, «Its a start at least, but that's still very vague»: you must have edited while I was writing: you know this is not the original poster writing, right?
- pvaldes 5y ago
  > Your post now reads, «Its a start at least, but that's still very vague»: you must have edited while I was writing: you know this is not the original poster writing, right? Just for the record. The original post was: "This is still very vague, can you specify more?" I think that it sounded a little harsh and I was not the meaning that I wanted to express so I changed it. Is this a problem to you?
  - mdp2021 5y ago
    No harshness was perceived on the first formulation; the second one with «Its a start at least», creates doubts about "what exactly missed a start, what remained unexplained before that partial disclosure". Among the tentative interpretations of those doubts was that you may have understood that the original poster was replying clarifying his own position, as you elicited. There is little hidden about what is unconvincing in the situation. I just submitted an article from The Atlantic, "The Myth That Democracies Bungled the Pandemic" (they do not, to the reading of some data by that author), https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28748382 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28748382 , and in providing a few quotations in the opening post I noted a there reported statement from Francis Fukuyama: > it is not necessarily democracy but “whether citizens trust their leaders, and whether those leaders preside over a competent and effective state” that is crucial to defeating a pandemic This is another way to express the issue, and another formulation of The Reply to a reading of your post as "what does one demand to trust": trustworthiness.

mdp2021 5y ago

No prob. I did not mean to be vague, I wanted to specify the principles. Suppose that John was waiting for the availability of some treatment. Then John is reached by information about side effects of concern. It is normal that John will see something outside initial expectations ("a few days of distress owing to bodily reaction") around him (say, persistent inconveniences of some, maybe a few critical occurrences of somebody else - "Mary has been itching for three months", "Lucy's mother fell out of the window"), and by looking for further information he will reach extreme but unreliable information ("Anon wrote on a web billboard his cousin caught fire within four days of inoculation"). The expectation of John will probably be that these cases will be actively explained by theory and assessed case by case, at least in a representative sample (e.g. subject to active monitoring). What he will encounter will easily be worlds with little and scarcely effective inter-communication: publications for academics containing large number of pages relevant to general topic but none apparently assessing the questions emerging from his experience; "renegade" researchers speaking of toxicity; no mention of said toxicity elsewhere. Adding to that, the scenario is made more complex and/or confusing through the message of articles like "The final nail in the coffin of medical research";, through increasing diffusion of lapidary password constructs (take 'safe and effective' - which is not per se meaningful as its two members are not absolute, yet it is proposed (even here, nearby) as a final judgement); through the usual lunatics making extraordinary claims; through a public debate that obsessively refers to the usual lunatics, factually honouring them as The Interlocutors of choice; through censorship (Lex Fridman denounced it and went on to say that at the MIT researchers have started preferring to remain quiet and silent); through the extension of the same into principles that e.g. forbid the statement that 'vaccines are dangerous' (YouTube), which is a complete reinvention of the language, so even the common ground of communication is gone (as now for "dangerous" an arbitrary threshold is set and in the new vernacular fighting for dominance paracetamol, water, the sun are not dangerous anymore); through a defence of a principle of responsibility about the consequences of how a tick and a mouse may interpret your words (but not the consequences of how intellectual profession and principles bend under the weights of a tick and a mouse). In all of that John will continue wondering "how and why had Mary been itching for months, and why was not that brought clearly to topic: all of that cannot be normal". John will not only expect explanations that put his experience into theoretical context, but also a slice of some system in which problematic experience is treated as expected: as something pending waiting for answers. -- Edit: your post now reads, «Its a start at least, but that's still very vague»: you must have edited while I was writing: you know this is not the original poster writing, right?

pvaldes 5y ago
> Your post now reads, «Its a start at least, but that's still very vague»: you must have edited while I was writing: you know this is not the original poster writing, right? Just for the record. The original post was: "This is still very vague, can you specify more?" I think that it sounded a little harsh and I was not the meaning that I wanted to express so I changed it. Is this a problem to you?
- mdp2021 5y ago
  No harshness was perceived on the first formulation; the second one with «Its a start at least», creates doubts about "what exactly missed a start, what remained unexplained before that partial disclosure". Among the tentative interpretations of those doubts was that you may have understood that the original poster was replying clarifying his own position, as you elicited. There is little hidden about what is unconvincing in the situation. I just submitted an article from The Atlantic, "The Myth That Democracies Bungled the Pandemic" (they do not, to the reading of some data by that author), https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28748382 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28748382 , and in providing a few quotations in the opening post I noted a there reported statement from Francis Fukuyama: > it is not necessarily democracy but “whether citizens trust their leaders, and whether those leaders preside over a competent and effective state” that is crucial to defeating a pandemic This is another way to express the issue, and another formulation of The Reply to a reading of your post as "what does one demand to trust": trustworthiness.