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And people wonder why anti-intellectualism is on the rise... What do you expect when your "experts" spend their time on nonsense like this? Can't even count h

And people wonder why anti-intellectualism is on the rise... What do you expect when your "experts" spend their time on nonsense like this? Can't even count how many "science has proven white people are racist" papers I have seen over the past few years. Ofcourse there is no alternative perspective, because that would get you fired at a university.

zmgsabst 5y ago
I have a different interpretation: People are becoming more intellectual across a wider range of society — driven partly by how effective the internet is. What I see as precipitating this distrust in institutions is that people on average are more connected and more engaged and reading more information. So we see the fallout as parents getting engaged, informed, and organized to protest CRT; or young men getting engaged, informed, and organized over the heart problems caused by the second dose of certain vaccines. Which is why the response has been to censor community platforms like Discord, in an attempt to regulate the information flow. This is the debt of our intellectuals systemically lying to us, eg the persistent denials of CRT praxis or attempts to hide Pfizer clinical data, which shows the second dose causes elevated risk to the heart for young men. What we’re seeing isn’t anti-intellectualism, but pro-intellectualism challenge a lying orthodoxy.
- ericmay 5y ago
  > What we’re seeing isn’t anti-intellectualism, but pro-intellectualism challenge a lying orthodoxy. When you get to this point that there's just this big lying orthodoxy instead of complicated interactions, goals, realities, and that orthodox institutions like the NIH, Harvard, FCC, FDA, etc. are all just lying or something you throw the entire house out with the bath water. I see this in people who are inclined to believe conspiracies and those who are religious. There's always some "entity" that's "doing something" and we must "oppose/believe/support" that entity. It's a fear reflex that you're not in control. The list of entities is huge. CIA. "Wall Street" "Hedge Funds" "The Deep State" "Them" "The Other" "Liberals" "Moon landings" "Fauci" "FEMA". This is actually a strain of anti-intellectualism. You're not intellectual or empowered, you're just wrong. I do think people feel more empowered to be informed but we definitely have not developed enough social skepticism and responsibility. This is evident by people watching pundits like Tucker Carlson talk about US bioweapons labs and "believing" that this somehow matters even if it were completely true. You yourself make a clear example of this with your "heart problems" assertion, without the proper context about the risk of catching COVID, long-term health effects caused by COVID, etc. It's dishonesty couched in intellectualism. Let's do a simple exercise. Exactly how many people have died from heart problems caused by the second dose of "certain" vaccines? Meanwhile, the worst case in America is around a million excess deaths have occured due to COVID-19. Don't believe those "liberal" numbers? Ok. 10% of that number. 100k people. Compared to... how many have these so-called heart problems? You are completely failing at understanding risk and cost-benefit analysis. Completely. I have a very negative reaction to your post here because it's cynical and sinister and whether intentionally or not it undermines everything we have with no discernible benefit. The logical conclusion of your comments is something akin to burning down Harvard and the NIH and the SEC and replacing them with nothing and then pretending you are somehow "empowered" and "intellectual". You're not. All you've done is destroyed everything.
- infamia 5y ago
  I think both you and the parent are both probably correct (from a US perspective) to varying degrees. There is less trust in institutions because information is more quickly and widely disseminated. Thus we more often see through attempts at dissembling and manipulation by large institutions (e.g. government, universities, corporations, etc.) that would have been quietly covered up in an earlier age. Simultaneously, some of our institutions are becoming increasingly invested in identity-based politics and more prone to intolerance and silencing dissent which breeds another layer of distrust and resentment.
- tempnow987 5y ago
  I would agree. I was a big mask wearer from the start. The baloney about N95's not working for some reason against THIS airborne hazard (with lots of great evidence of efficacy against other airborne viruses) was ridiculous. The other issue - despite the case rates / volume of data that SHOULD be publically available, these scientists WILL NOT quantify stuff numerically. Fatality rate risk by age / gender / race tables should be trivial to pull up for the US. Add in vaccine status once you have it. With the number of cases / size of data / money spent it's just crazy. Same thing with vaccine efficacy against variants. The math on these things should be pretty straightforward. Look at fatalities from covid, ask if they were vaccinated, publish some numbers. Just backwards looking at rates by county I wasn't seeing huge differences with some variants.
  - seoaeu 5y ago
    I'd love to see this data as well. However, there's nothing trivial about collecting and validating all this information. The US has thousands of individual healthcare providers across the country that all have to coordinate to produce it. Also remember that the numbers might be unflattering for certain government leaders who've taken the pandemic less seriously. Florida was particularly notorious in trying to suppress Covid data [0]. [0]: https://thehill.com/homenews/state-watch/584909-university-of-florida-researchers-pressured-to-destroy-covid-19-data/ https://thehill.com/homenews/state-watch/584909-university-o...
    - tempnow987 5y ago
      The case rates and fatality rates are so high it should be possible to come up with some REASONABLE tables just using NY or California. There is some weird sensitivity to even releasing age banded rates on a consistent basis. This makes me skeptical of the reporting here.
- jollybean 5y ago
  Sorry to be skeptical but this is upside down. We have more fitness equipment and awareness than ever, our athletes go further - and yet - we are fatter and more sedentary. We have the opportunity to be more intellectual, and many are, but on the whole, we also are a bit busy and are predisposed to consume information 24/7 which is misrepresented (and almost all of it is, some of it more than others). So on the whole, I think it's a lot easier for sources of misinformation to propagate more widely. I suggest that the anti-vaxx movement is an example of this. More 'bad information' propagated than 'reasonable information' and so you have a lot of reasonably intelligent people being misguided. Disinformation is really easy and cheap and it's nary impossible to undo. All you need is someone with an ounce of credibility (like a Dr. or 'Kennedy' family member), and a kernel of truth (i.e. vaccines actually do some harm, we know that) and poof - you can blow up any material reality. The 'Big Lie' about the elections similarly. It's a really big deal, and I don't think we have any obvious solutions.
- kbelder 5y ago
  I agree with this. Distrust in institutions can come from increased sophistication, although the institutions themselves may not see it that way. This can be true even when institutions are generally correct, and giving reasonable advice... but are simplifying or glossing over true complexities, because they don't think the public is capable of any nuance or reasoning. They don't think that people are capable of understanding something like 'masks can reduce spread in certain circumstances, and have little effect in these other circumstances', and so hammer an obviously simplified rule in every press release, as if they are hawking a product. In some sense it probably works, as does most marketing, but it comes with a growing feeling of distrust.
- bigbillheck 5y ago
  Can you, in your own words, explain what CRT is?
Latty 5y ago
Maybe because people buy nonsense opinion pieces that twist the truth to try and imply experts spend their time on nonsense as described? What actually happened, if you read the sources, is a Catholic healthcare company set some wrong parameters when deciding who should get the treatment. No "woke left" racism against white people, a Catholic company that actively protests contraceptive use (about as far from "woke" as you can get) messed up, and then changed it as soon as someone pointed it out.
- SpicyLemonZest 5y ago
  Respectfully, no, you're the one who's been misinformed here. The Atlantic article describes a large number of independent organizations doing this, including at least three state health departments in Minnesota, Utah, and New York. New York in particular didn't change this even after it was pointed out, and still has published guidance (https://coronavirus.health.ny.gov/system/files/documents/2021/12/prioritization_of_mabs_during_resource_shortages_20211229.pdf https://coronavirus.health.ny.gov/system/files/documents/202...) that "Non-white race or Hispanic/Latino ethnicity" should be considered a risk factor for prioritization purposes.
  - Latty 5y ago
    Except the examples they give of absurdly high weighting are from the case I mentioned. It being a factor is not unreasonable, there are lots of risk factors for diseases and race is often one of them, clearly for COVID-19 age is an extremely important one. Plenty of diseases are much more common for certain races—it's imperfect as all indicators are, but that's hardly a new or unique problem.
    - oh_sigh 5y ago
      > Minnesota’s Department of Health used a scoring calculator that counted “BIPOC status” as equivalent to being 65 years and older in its risk assessment. That seems like an absurdly high weighting, and is from the article and is not from the specific case you mentioned.
    - 5y ago

zmgsabst 5y ago

I have a different interpretation: People are becoming more intellectual across a wider range of society — driven partly by how effective the internet is. What I see as precipitating this distrust in institutions is that people on average are more connected and more engaged and reading more information. So we see the fallout as parents getting engaged, informed, and organized to protest CRT; or young men getting engaged, informed, and organized over the heart problems caused by the second dose of certain vaccines. Which is why the response has been to censor community platforms like Discord, in an attempt to regulate the information flow. This is the debt of our intellectuals systemically lying to us, eg the persistent denials of CRT praxis or attempts to hide Pfizer clinical data, which shows the second dose causes elevated risk to the heart for young men. What we’re seeing isn’t anti-intellectualism, but pro-intellectualism challenge a lying orthodoxy.

ericmay 5y ago
> What we’re seeing isn’t anti-intellectualism, but pro-intellectualism challenge a lying orthodoxy. When you get to this point that there's just this big lying orthodoxy instead of complicated interactions, goals, realities, and that orthodox institutions like the NIH, Harvard, FCC, FDA, etc. are all just lying or something you throw the entire house out with the bath water. I see this in people who are inclined to believe conspiracies and those who are religious. There's always some "entity" that's "doing something" and we must "oppose/believe/support" that entity. It's a fear reflex that you're not in control. The list of entities is huge. CIA. "Wall Street" "Hedge Funds" "The Deep State" "Them" "The Other" "Liberals" "Moon landings" "Fauci" "FEMA". This is actually a strain of anti-intellectualism. You're not intellectual or empowered, you're just wrong. I do think people feel more empowered to be informed but we definitely have not developed enough social skepticism and responsibility. This is evident by people watching pundits like Tucker Carlson talk about US bioweapons labs and "believing" that this somehow matters even if it were completely true. You yourself make a clear example of this with your "heart problems" assertion, without the proper context about the risk of catching COVID, long-term health effects caused by COVID, etc. It's dishonesty couched in intellectualism. Let's do a simple exercise. Exactly how many people have died from heart problems caused by the second dose of "certain" vaccines? Meanwhile, the worst case in America is around a million excess deaths have occured due to COVID-19. Don't believe those "liberal" numbers? Ok. 10% of that number. 100k people. Compared to... how many have these so-called heart problems? You are completely failing at understanding risk and cost-benefit analysis. Completely. I have a very negative reaction to your post here because it's cynical and sinister and whether intentionally or not it undermines everything we have with no discernible benefit. The logical conclusion of your comments is something akin to burning down Harvard and the NIH and the SEC and replacing them with nothing and then pretending you are somehow "empowered" and "intellectual". You're not. All you've done is destroyed everything.
infamia 5y ago
I think both you and the parent are both probably correct (from a US perspective) to varying degrees. There is less trust in institutions because information is more quickly and widely disseminated. Thus we more often see through attempts at dissembling and manipulation by large institutions (e.g. government, universities, corporations, etc.) that would have been quietly covered up in an earlier age. Simultaneously, some of our institutions are becoming increasingly invested in identity-based politics and more prone to intolerance and silencing dissent which breeds another layer of distrust and resentment.
tempnow987 5y ago
I would agree. I was a big mask wearer from the start. The baloney about N95's not working for some reason against THIS airborne hazard (with lots of great evidence of efficacy against other airborne viruses) was ridiculous. The other issue - despite the case rates / volume of data that SHOULD be publically available, these scientists WILL NOT quantify stuff numerically. Fatality rate risk by age / gender / race tables should be trivial to pull up for the US. Add in vaccine status once you have it. With the number of cases / size of data / money spent it's just crazy. Same thing with vaccine efficacy against variants. The math on these things should be pretty straightforward. Look at fatalities from covid, ask if they were vaccinated, publish some numbers. Just backwards looking at rates by county I wasn't seeing huge differences with some variants.
- seoaeu 5y ago
  I'd love to see this data as well. However, there's nothing trivial about collecting and validating all this information. The US has thousands of individual healthcare providers across the country that all have to coordinate to produce it. Also remember that the numbers might be unflattering for certain government leaders who've taken the pandemic less seriously. Florida was particularly notorious in trying to suppress Covid data [0]. [0]: https://thehill.com/homenews/state-watch/584909-university-of-florida-researchers-pressured-to-destroy-covid-19-data/ https://thehill.com/homenews/state-watch/584909-university-o...
  - tempnow987 5y ago
    The case rates and fatality rates are so high it should be possible to come up with some REASONABLE tables just using NY or California. There is some weird sensitivity to even releasing age banded rates on a consistent basis. This makes me skeptical of the reporting here.
jollybean 5y ago
Sorry to be skeptical but this is upside down. We have more fitness equipment and awareness than ever, our athletes go further - and yet - we are fatter and more sedentary. We have the opportunity to be more intellectual, and many are, but on the whole, we also are a bit busy and are predisposed to consume information 24/7 which is misrepresented (and almost all of it is, some of it more than others). So on the whole, I think it's a lot easier for sources of misinformation to propagate more widely. I suggest that the anti-vaxx movement is an example of this. More 'bad information' propagated than 'reasonable information' and so you have a lot of reasonably intelligent people being misguided. Disinformation is really easy and cheap and it's nary impossible to undo. All you need is someone with an ounce of credibility (like a Dr. or 'Kennedy' family member), and a kernel of truth (i.e. vaccines actually do some harm, we know that) and poof - you can blow up any material reality. The 'Big Lie' about the elections similarly. It's a really big deal, and I don't think we have any obvious solutions.
kbelder 5y ago
I agree with this. Distrust in institutions can come from increased sophistication, although the institutions themselves may not see it that way. This can be true even when institutions are generally correct, and giving reasonable advice... but are simplifying or glossing over true complexities, because they don't think the public is capable of any nuance or reasoning. They don't think that people are capable of understanding something like 'masks can reduce spread in certain circumstances, and have little effect in these other circumstances', and so hammer an obviously simplified rule in every press release, as if they are hawking a product. In some sense it probably works, as does most marketing, but it comes with a growing feeling of distrust.
bigbillheck 5y ago
Can you, in your own words, explain what CRT is?

Latty 5y ago

Maybe because people buy nonsense opinion pieces that twist the truth to try and imply experts spend their time on nonsense as described? What actually happened, if you read the sources, is a Catholic healthcare company set some wrong parameters when deciding who should get the treatment. No "woke left" racism against white people, a Catholic company that actively protests contraceptive use (about as far from "woke" as you can get) messed up, and then changed it as soon as someone pointed it out.

SpicyLemonZest 5y ago
Respectfully, no, you're the one who's been misinformed here. The Atlantic article describes a large number of independent organizations doing this, including at least three state health departments in Minnesota, Utah, and New York. New York in particular didn't change this even after it was pointed out, and still has published guidance (https://coronavirus.health.ny.gov/system/files/documents/2021/12/prioritization_of_mabs_during_resource_shortages_20211229.pdf https://coronavirus.health.ny.gov/system/files/documents/202...) that "Non-white race or Hispanic/Latino ethnicity" should be considered a risk factor for prioritization purposes.
- Latty 5y ago
  Except the examples they give of absurdly high weighting are from the case I mentioned. It being a factor is not unreasonable, there are lots of risk factors for diseases and race is often one of them, clearly for COVID-19 age is an extremely important one. Plenty of diseases are much more common for certain races—it's imperfect as all indicators are, but that's hardly a new or unique problem.
  - oh_sigh 5y ago
    > Minnesota’s Department of Health used a scoring calculator that counted “BIPOC status” as equivalent to being 65 years and older in its risk assessment. That seems like an absurdly high weighting, and is from the article and is not from the specific case you mentioned.
  - 5y ago