8 ms·

Because there were lots of uncredentialed or poorly credentialed "doctors" and "researchers" making destructive claims. Society's meme regulating function is no

Because there were lots of uncredentialed or poorly credentialed "doctors" and "researchers" making destructive claims. Society's meme regulating function is not that nuanced. I blame the whackos for poisoning the well. (Let's also include well-meaning MDs and bio-related fields who don't actually know about epidemiology) And even if you were an appropriately credentialed expert, if you weren't in a position to make policy decisions before the pandemic, then why would you suddenly expect to have influence during a crisis? That only happens in movies.

ARandomerDude 4y ago
Your comment is actually a perfect illustration of the problem the OP described. "I think this is incorrect" is answered with "how prestigious are your credentials?" instead of "what are your reasons?". Prestigious credentials should rest on the foundation of good reasoning, not the other way around.
- peatmoss 4y ago
  Assessment of what constitutes good reasoning is somewhat dependent on having a lot of prerequisite knowledge. It’s hard, because I think public debate is healthy generally, and I think that some valid discussion was quashed. At the same time, there were loonies spouting dangerous nonsense that did have tangible impacts.
  - spookthesunset 4y ago
    > there were loonies spouting dangerous nonsense that did have tangible impacts The loonies were a very small set of people. They were used to tarnish the reputation of anybody who was even a wee bit skeptical of what society was doing. Just because somebody thinks closing schools for more than a year and a half is a bad idea doesn't make them a loony conspiracy theorist. Just because somebody thinks the harms of the mandates were worse than any benefit they provided doesn't make them a loony. 99% of all people were in the "non-loony" bucket. 1% were actual loonies, but according to "the experts" the whole set of skeptics are grandma killing loonies spreading "dangerous nonsense". By the way, multiple times I've been accused of spreading "dangerous nonsense" by linking to state dashboards that clearly demonstrate how age-stratified covid is. Apparently linking to public datasets is now "misinformation". Crazy crazy crazy...
    - ModernMech 4y ago
      > but according to "the experts" the whole set of skeptics are grandma killing loonies spreading "dangerous nonsense". You're doing the exact thing you decry in your post by painting "the experts" with a broad brush and scare quotes as being unreasonable and hyperinflammatory in their rhetoric. Not everyone who was for school closings and lockdowns was calling their opponents "grandma killing loonies". People need to stop arguing from the extreme.
      - spookthesunset 4y ago
        I've been literally called a grandma killer by a person I know in real life for wanting my kid to go school. I've been called a grandma killer for wanting a normal thanksgiving with my extended family. The people doing this might be the minority, but they were the ones holding the microphone for the last 2.5 years. Nobody else got a voice.
        ModernMech 4y ago
        > The people doing this might be the minority, but they were the ones holding the microphone for the last 2.5 years. Nobody else got a voice. So in other words, 99% of the people were in the non-loony bucket, and you're focused on the 1% that yelled at you? I could turn your statement around. As a teacher, I've been called a child abuser by a person I know in real life for wanting teachers to have a safe working environment. The people doing this may be the minority, but they were the ones holding the microphone. So I really fail to see how what you're doing now in your second post is different from what you decry in your first.
        nradov 4y ago
        It was horrible how government officials in collaboration with teacher's unions inflicted collective punishment on our children by closing schools and then imposing mask mandates. There was never any high-quality scientific evidence to justify such policies. And we clearly see in retrospect that they were unnecessary: Sweden kept schools open without mask mandates and they ended up with a lower death rate than the USA. In most cases the actual classroom teachers that I talked with didn't even support those policies. It was the teacher's unions which did most of the damage.
- fireflash38 4y ago
  That only applies for things that are relatively easy to reason around, with little domain knowledge necessary.
- mike_d 4y ago
  You are making it out as some sort of gatekeeping. A veterinary tech has absolutely no business publicly contradicting an epidemiologist during a pandemic. When the building is on fire and the firefighters are yelling at you to get out, but Bill from the copy room is like "wait nooooo smoke is good for your personal aura," it is perfectly fine to question someone based on credentials alone.
  - thrown_22 4y ago
    They absolutely do. Especially now that two years later the veterinary was right and the epidemiologist wasn't. A short video that sums up that last three years of scientism by the establishment: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TSZMtSPX3iE https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TSZMtSPX3iE
  - eldenwrong 4y ago
    Even people like John P. A. Ioannidis were being throttled and dismissed. Can you distinguish between political and scientific epidemiologists?
    - robocat 4y ago
      Ioannidis wrote some obviously absolute trash in March 2020. I can’t find the worst paper (google deindex?) but I copied a quote[1]: “If we assume that case fatality rate among individuals infected by SARS-CoV-2 is 0.3% in the general population — a mid-range guess from my Diamond Princess analysis — and that 1% of the U.S. population gets infected (about 3.3 million people), this would translate to about 10,000 deaths.”. His analysis in that paper was some of the most biased bullshit I have read: the low range estimate was boldly incorrect. I absolutely love his previous papers on the replication crisis. Here[2] is a different paper of his from March 2020 showing his bias. He is a solid scientist, but he went off the deep end for a while there. [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22671660 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22671660 [2] https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1111/eci.13222 https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1111/eci.13222
      - nradov 4y ago
shkkmo 4y ago
The people "in positions to make policy decisions" should absolutely not have the exclusive right to discuss and debate those decisions. If they do, you are describing a dictatorship. The blame lies with those doing the censoring, not with wackos. The wackos are just a way for those in power to shift the blame for their decisions.
eitland 4y ago
I took my vaccines and listened to the doctors and to authorities. I still think the way media attacked everyone who wasn't exactly in line with the current ideas is a shame for everyone in media who participated. And the way social media companies prevented public discussion between licensed medical doctors with decades of experience and fantastic track records, that is another clear signal that they have way too much power. Saying we needed to shut down everyone because some of them did or could do something wrong is really backwards. The only social media company that I know of that didn't make a fool out of themselves was Telegram, who, as usual, focused on the interests of its users.
maxk42 4y ago
This article is about highly credentialed and respected scientific exists who were being deplatformed: not whackos. How can you judge anyone as "whacko" when you're prevented from even hearing opposing data? That's not how science works.
- OrvalWintermute 4y ago
  I asked a highly credentialed, very aged, pediatrician why I should get my toddler with no comorbidities vaccinated with a novel type of vaccine having significant known side effects, for a disease having a fatality rate something like 1 in 5 or 10 million. His answer of "get it to protect everyone else" was the worst non-answer I have ever heard. Nothing in my life has shook my trust in so called "Authority Figures" like the debacle that is the Covid Response and Mandate drive.
  - rmah 4y ago
    "To protect everyone else" is not a non-answer, it's the actual real answer. You may not like it but that doesn't change the fact that that's how vaccines (at a societal level) work.
    - origin_path 4y ago
      Uh but this vaccine didn't stop or even reduce transmission. The idea that you had to do it for other people never made any sense even to begin with. If the vaccine worked it wouldn't matter what other people did, because you'd be protected by it, right? And don't talk about people who can't take it for some reason because mysteriously, getting medical exemptions turned out to be impossible throughout the vaccine mandate period even for people who had severe reactions to their first shot. The whole thing was just illogical nonsense forced through by people who knew perfectly well that if it was phrased as an individual choice, huge numbers would choose not to have it. Yet for collectivists (and public health is overrun with them) that's anathema. Everyone has to do it regardless of need otherwise they feel all icky.
    - spookthesunset 4y ago
BiteCode_dev 4y ago
On the other hand, of very good friend of mine, a prestigious doctor in Monaco, was adament the vaccine caused no major heatlth problem. This month, I had weird health problem that sent me to the hospital, and asked again if anything could be related to the vaccine. This time, he said it was a possibility because has has seen some similar cases in the past. The problem here is not changing your mind using fact. That's how you should do it. The problem here is stating at first he was sure it could not cause any grave problem (at least not worse than covid). Because this was not rooted in fact, we didn't have remotely enough data to know this. But this is what a lot of the medical and political elite claimed during the pandemics, and questioning it would get us the rethoric you just used in your comment. This is what a lot of comments on HN, twitter and the whole internet agressively screamed, with disdain toward people that were raising pragmatic worries. This is not a sane way of approaching science. This is arrogant, and creates distrusts in a world where we desperatly need humility and bonding together. In fact, you know your position is not in the best light because you are using a throwaway account to state your position, in a thread that has been very cordial.

ARandomerDude 4y ago

Your comment is actually a perfect illustration of the problem the OP described. "I think this is incorrect" is answered with "how prestigious are your credentials?" instead of "what are your reasons?". Prestigious credentials should rest on the foundation of good reasoning, not the other way around.

peatmoss 4y ago
Assessment of what constitutes good reasoning is somewhat dependent on having a lot of prerequisite knowledge. It’s hard, because I think public debate is healthy generally, and I think that some valid discussion was quashed. At the same time, there were loonies spouting dangerous nonsense that did have tangible impacts.
- spookthesunset 4y ago
  > there were loonies spouting dangerous nonsense that did have tangible impacts The loonies were a very small set of people. They were used to tarnish the reputation of anybody who was even a wee bit skeptical of what society was doing. Just because somebody thinks closing schools for more than a year and a half is a bad idea doesn't make them a loony conspiracy theorist. Just because somebody thinks the harms of the mandates were worse than any benefit they provided doesn't make them a loony. 99% of all people were in the "non-loony" bucket. 1% were actual loonies, but according to "the experts" the whole set of skeptics are grandma killing loonies spreading "dangerous nonsense". By the way, multiple times I've been accused of spreading "dangerous nonsense" by linking to state dashboards that clearly demonstrate how age-stratified covid is. Apparently linking to public datasets is now "misinformation". Crazy crazy crazy...
  - ModernMech 4y ago
    > but according to "the experts" the whole set of skeptics are grandma killing loonies spreading "dangerous nonsense". You're doing the exact thing you decry in your post by painting "the experts" with a broad brush and scare quotes as being unreasonable and hyperinflammatory in their rhetoric. Not everyone who was for school closings and lockdowns was calling their opponents "grandma killing loonies". People need to stop arguing from the extreme.
    - spookthesunset 4y ago
      I've been literally called a grandma killer by a person I know in real life for wanting my kid to go school. I've been called a grandma killer for wanting a normal thanksgiving with my extended family. The people doing this might be the minority, but they were the ones holding the microphone for the last 2.5 years. Nobody else got a voice.
      - ModernMech 4y ago
        > The people doing this might be the minority, but they were the ones holding the microphone for the last 2.5 years. Nobody else got a voice. So in other words, 99% of the people were in the non-loony bucket, and you're focused on the 1% that yelled at you? I could turn your statement around. As a teacher, I've been called a child abuser by a person I know in real life for wanting teachers to have a safe working environment. The people doing this may be the minority, but they were the ones holding the microphone. So I really fail to see how what you're doing now in your second post is different from what you decry in your first.
        nradov 4y ago
        It was horrible how government officials in collaboration with teacher's unions inflicted collective punishment on our children by closing schools and then imposing mask mandates. There was never any high-quality scientific evidence to justify such policies. And we clearly see in retrospect that they were unnecessary: Sweden kept schools open without mask mandates and they ended up with a lower death rate than the USA. In most cases the actual classroom teachers that I talked with didn't even support those policies. It was the teacher's unions which did most of the damage.
fireflash38 4y ago
That only applies for things that are relatively easy to reason around, with little domain knowledge necessary.
mike_d 4y ago
You are making it out as some sort of gatekeeping. A veterinary tech has absolutely no business publicly contradicting an epidemiologist during a pandemic. When the building is on fire and the firefighters are yelling at you to get out, but Bill from the copy room is like "wait nooooo smoke is good for your personal aura," it is perfectly fine to question someone based on credentials alone.
- thrown_22 4y ago
  They absolutely do. Especially now that two years later the veterinary was right and the epidemiologist wasn't. A short video that sums up that last three years of scientism by the establishment: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TSZMtSPX3iE https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TSZMtSPX3iE
- eldenwrong 4y ago
  Even people like John P. A. Ioannidis were being throttled and dismissed. Can you distinguish between political and scientific epidemiologists?
  - robocat 4y ago
    Ioannidis wrote some obviously absolute trash in March 2020. I can’t find the worst paper (google deindex?) but I copied a quote[1]: “If we assume that case fatality rate among individuals infected by SARS-CoV-2 is 0.3% in the general population — a mid-range guess from my Diamond Princess analysis — and that 1% of the U.S. population gets infected (about 3.3 million people), this would translate to about 10,000 deaths.”. His analysis in that paper was some of the most biased bullshit I have read: the low range estimate was boldly incorrect. I absolutely love his previous papers on the replication crisis. Here[2] is a different paper of his from March 2020 showing his bias. He is a solid scientist, but he went off the deep end for a while there. [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22671660 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22671660 [2] https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1111/eci.13222 https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1111/eci.13222
    - nradov 4y ago

shkkmo 4y ago

The people "in positions to make policy decisions" should absolutely not have the exclusive right to discuss and debate those decisions. If they do, you are describing a dictatorship. The blame lies with those doing the censoring, not with wackos. The wackos are just a way for those in power to shift the blame for their decisions.

eitland 4y ago

I took my vaccines and listened to the doctors and to authorities. I still think the way media attacked everyone who wasn't exactly in line with the current ideas is a shame for everyone in media who participated. And the way social media companies prevented public discussion between licensed medical doctors with decades of experience and fantastic track records, that is another clear signal that they have way too much power. Saying we needed to shut down everyone because some of them did or could do something wrong is really backwards. The only social media company that I know of that didn't make a fool out of themselves was Telegram, who, as usual, focused on the interests of its users.

maxk42 4y ago

This article is about highly credentialed and respected scientific exists who were being deplatformed: not whackos. How can you judge anyone as "whacko" when you're prevented from even hearing opposing data? That's not how science works.

OrvalWintermute 4y ago
I asked a highly credentialed, very aged, pediatrician why I should get my toddler with no comorbidities vaccinated with a novel type of vaccine having significant known side effects, for a disease having a fatality rate something like 1 in 5 or 10 million. His answer of "get it to protect everyone else" was the worst non-answer I have ever heard. Nothing in my life has shook my trust in so called "Authority Figures" like the debacle that is the Covid Response and Mandate drive.
- rmah 4y ago
  "To protect everyone else" is not a non-answer, it's the actual real answer. You may not like it but that doesn't change the fact that that's how vaccines (at a societal level) work.
  - origin_path 4y ago
    Uh but this vaccine didn't stop or even reduce transmission. The idea that you had to do it for other people never made any sense even to begin with. If the vaccine worked it wouldn't matter what other people did, because you'd be protected by it, right? And don't talk about people who can't take it for some reason because mysteriously, getting medical exemptions turned out to be impossible throughout the vaccine mandate period even for people who had severe reactions to their first shot. The whole thing was just illogical nonsense forced through by people who knew perfectly well that if it was phrased as an individual choice, huge numbers would choose not to have it. Yet for collectivists (and public health is overrun with them) that's anathema. Everyone has to do it regardless of need otherwise they feel all icky.
  - spookthesunset 4y ago

BiteCode_dev 4y ago

On the other hand, of very good friend of mine, a prestigious doctor in Monaco, was adament the vaccine caused no major heatlth problem. This month, I had weird health problem that sent me to the hospital, and asked again if anything could be related to the vaccine. This time, he said it was a possibility because has has seen some similar cases in the past. The problem here is not changing your mind using fact. That's how you should do it. The problem here is stating at first he was sure it could not cause any grave problem (at least not worse than covid). Because this was not rooted in fact, we didn't have remotely enough data to know this. But this is what a lot of the medical and political elite claimed during the pandemics, and questioning it would get us the rethoric you just used in your comment. This is what a lot of comments on HN, twitter and the whole internet agressively screamed, with disdain toward people that were raising pragmatic worries. This is not a sane way of approaching science. This is arrogant, and creates distrusts in a world where we desperatly need humility and bonding together. In fact, you know your position is not in the best light because you are using a throwaway account to state your position, in a thread that has been very cordial.