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All you're doing here is proving my point. You feel immense certainty about your position, but can't sum up why in any kind of coherent or legible package for o

All you're doing here is proving my point. You feel immense certainty about your position, but can't sum up why in any kind of coherent or legible package for other people. It's just this big ball of interlocking faiths and trusts in authority that cause you to say that. So instead you just repeat over and over that the other "tribe" is wrong, rephrased using different words, but this is little different to a religious person asserting that unbelievers are wrong; why, well because you've got to have faith, obviously. Thing is, responses exactly like yours were being posted all last year to try and dismiss the lab leak hypothesis. It was a crazy fringe conspiracy theory that only people not grounded in reality could believe ... right up until the moment it suddenly wasn't anymore. At which point the deniers were forced to accept that it had never been a crazy belief, in fact it had been the most obvious and logical belief all along given that a novel coronavirus emerging right next to a lab studying coronaviruses is staggeringly unlikely to be a coincidence. Actually, the crazy thing had been the over-abundance of trust in scientists.

scotty79 5y ago
> You feel immense certainty about your position How certain I am about anything has no bearing on whether it is true or not. What I said is true regardless of what anyone believes (me included). Reality comes first and is what it is. Beliefs follow (in case of people who follow the evidence) or they don't (in case of people who are choosing to ignore the evidence or believe liars or clueless but confident). > but can't sum up why in any kind of coherent or legible package for other people I didn't attempt it. I have done that it the past, but since then I learned that there are plenty of coherent legible packages and other people still don't care. > It's just this big ball of interlocking faiths and trusts in authority that cause you to say that. Sure, exactly the same thing that causes me to exit my apartment through the door, not my window on the third floor. Again, what I believe and why, doesn't influence truthfulness of anything. I may only do the best I can to try to believe only truthful things. > but this is little different to a religious person asserting that unbelievers are wrong; why, well because you've got to have faith, obviously not really, if you are correct If I say 'addition of real numbers is commutative' it's not a religious statement. And if you say it's not, no matter how much proof you demand from me, and how little I provide you'd still be wrong and I'll be right even if only because I trusted the right authority and you trusted the false one. > Thing is, responses exactly like yours were being posted all last year to try and dismiss the lab leak hypothesis. The responses will get increasingly dismissive as the people who are correct run out of ideas how to provide arguments that unconvinced people will be willing to honestly engage with. I won't pay for a ticket on Jeff Bezos rocket to show you that Earth is round, because if I did you'll conclude that windows were screens displaying computer graphics, and you've been drugged to feel weightless and start listing indisputable evidence of all that, where indisputable here means, you won't be willing to discuss it in detail. > lab leak hypothesis ... crazy fringe conspiracy theory ... right up until the moment it suddenly wasn't anymore I'm sorry to inform you, but it still is. No new evidence was discovered. The fact that more people started to believe it and repeat it doesn't point to any additional truthfulness despite what you might feel (due to mere exposure effect). > staggeringly unlikely to be a coincidence. Very improbable things happen all the time. Because there's a lot of very improbable things that could potentially happen. Unlikely is infinitely far from impossible. > Actually, the crazy thing had been the over-abundance of trust in scientists. Seriously? Do you think some other group has better idea on what reality is? How did they get it? Scientist are literally the people who dedicated their lives to learning tools that let you tell truth from falsehood. You statement sounds like, we should listen less to music made or played by musicians. Or do you think we shouldn't trust people at all? But we ourselves, are people too. To operate in reality you need to seek knowledge about it from best sources available. And if you have trouble determining the best sources, you should look for sources that will help you to determine what the best sources are.
- native_samples 5y ago
  I guess I could nitpick at statements like "Very improbable things happen all the time" which is by definition untrue (we're not talking about a huge space of any possible events here, just specifically medical reactions), but let's just focus on the nub of the disagreement here which is this: "Seriously? Do you think some other group has better idea on what reality is? How did they get it?" Often, a really good disagreement when studied turns out to be a disagreement on the exact definitions of words. When I said "over-abundance of trust in scientists", I was using the word scientist as it's normally used by governments and media, to mean primarily academic modellers, public health officials and so on. The people that are in control and get presented to us as "The Science". It doesn't mean (in this context) literally all working scientists and it definitely doesn't mean "people who use the scientific method to study a question". So does some other group have a better idea on what reality is? Sure, in my view, absolutely. However that group is difficult to precisely define because it isn't affiliated with any particular institution. It's the mishmash of people who are studying the data using logically and statistically rigorous approaches, and writing up their findings online, mostly to be found in a collection of Substack blogs these days, but also elsewhere. This group of people has no institutional credibility because they're not united under any particular institution and a few of them choose to or have to use pseudonyms, but they do have a lot of methodological credibility, because they're actually following the rules of logic, reason and indeed, science. Whereas many of the presented scientists turn out not to be, on close inspection. They are "The Scientists" but not scientists. No surprise that many of the people disagreeing with them actually do have scientific training or employment, just from different fields. In the end then we agree that at some point you have to trust other people, and no, I'm not arguing for some kind of dystopian trust-free world. It wouldn't work indeed. But in this case we have a big problem: a group of people calling themselves scientists, people who society allows to use the title, but who objectively are not following the scientific method. Their results are consequently poor (the scientific method isn't perfect but it's a heck of a lot better than nothing!) but people refuse to accept it because they over-generalize and assume all scientists are viewable as a single blog with a uniform level of trustworthiness. If our institutions functioned well that would be the case, but they don't, so we're back to having to evaluate trust on a one-by-one basis. Very problematic.

scotty79 5y ago

> You feel immense certainty about your position How certain I am about anything has no bearing on whether it is true or not. What I said is true regardless of what anyone believes (me included). Reality comes first and is what it is. Beliefs follow (in case of people who follow the evidence) or they don't (in case of people who are choosing to ignore the evidence or believe liars or clueless but confident). > but can't sum up why in any kind of coherent or legible package for other people I didn't attempt it. I have done that it the past, but since then I learned that there are plenty of coherent legible packages and other people still don't care. > It's just this big ball of interlocking faiths and trusts in authority that cause you to say that. Sure, exactly the same thing that causes me to exit my apartment through the door, not my window on the third floor. Again, what I believe and why, doesn't influence truthfulness of anything. I may only do the best I can to try to believe only truthful things. > but this is little different to a religious person asserting that unbelievers are wrong; why, well because you've got to have faith, obviously not really, if you are correct If I say 'addition of real numbers is commutative' it's not a religious statement. And if you say it's not, no matter how much proof you demand from me, and how little I provide you'd still be wrong and I'll be right even if only because I trusted the right authority and you trusted the false one. > Thing is, responses exactly like yours were being posted all last year to try and dismiss the lab leak hypothesis. The responses will get increasingly dismissive as the people who are correct run out of ideas how to provide arguments that unconvinced people will be willing to honestly engage with. I won't pay for a ticket on Jeff Bezos rocket to show you that Earth is round, because if I did you'll conclude that windows were screens displaying computer graphics, and you've been drugged to feel weightless and start listing indisputable evidence of all that, where indisputable here means, you won't be willing to discuss it in detail. > lab leak hypothesis ... crazy fringe conspiracy theory ... right up until the moment it suddenly wasn't anymore I'm sorry to inform you, but it still is. No new evidence was discovered. The fact that more people started to believe it and repeat it doesn't point to any additional truthfulness despite what you might feel (due to mere exposure effect). > staggeringly unlikely to be a coincidence. Very improbable things happen all the time. Because there's a lot of very improbable things that could potentially happen. Unlikely is infinitely far from impossible. > Actually, the crazy thing had been the over-abundance of trust in scientists. Seriously? Do you think some other group has better idea on what reality is? How did they get it? Scientist are literally the people who dedicated their lives to learning tools that let you tell truth from falsehood. You statement sounds like, we should listen less to music made or played by musicians. Or do you think we shouldn't trust people at all? But we ourselves, are people too. To operate in reality you need to seek knowledge about it from best sources available. And if you have trouble determining the best sources, you should look for sources that will help you to determine what the best sources are.

native_samples 5y ago
I guess I could nitpick at statements like "Very improbable things happen all the time" which is by definition untrue (we're not talking about a huge space of any possible events here, just specifically medical reactions), but let's just focus on the nub of the disagreement here which is this: "Seriously? Do you think some other group has better idea on what reality is? How did they get it?" Often, a really good disagreement when studied turns out to be a disagreement on the exact definitions of words. When I said "over-abundance of trust in scientists", I was using the word scientist as it's normally used by governments and media, to mean primarily academic modellers, public health officials and so on. The people that are in control and get presented to us as "The Science". It doesn't mean (in this context) literally all working scientists and it definitely doesn't mean "people who use the scientific method to study a question". So does some other group have a better idea on what reality is? Sure, in my view, absolutely. However that group is difficult to precisely define because it isn't affiliated with any particular institution. It's the mishmash of people who are studying the data using logically and statistically rigorous approaches, and writing up their findings online, mostly to be found in a collection of Substack blogs these days, but also elsewhere. This group of people has no institutional credibility because they're not united under any particular institution and a few of them choose to or have to use pseudonyms, but they do have a lot of methodological credibility, because they're actually following the rules of logic, reason and indeed, science. Whereas many of the presented scientists turn out not to be, on close inspection. They are "The Scientists" but not scientists. No surprise that many of the people disagreeing with them actually do have scientific training or employment, just from different fields. In the end then we agree that at some point you have to trust other people, and no, I'm not arguing for some kind of dystopian trust-free world. It wouldn't work indeed. But in this case we have a big problem: a group of people calling themselves scientists, people who society allows to use the title, but who objectively are not following the scientific method. Their results are consequently poor (the scientific method isn't perfect but it's a heck of a lot better than nothing!) but people refuse to accept it because they over-generalize and assume all scientists are viewable as a single blog with a uniform level of trustworthiness. If our institutions functioned well that would be the case, but they don't, so we're back to having to evaluate trust on a one-by-one basis. Very problematic.