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> Time and time again, from the lockdowns/restrictions to the forced masking to the forced shots to the censorship to pretty much everything in between, the "ex

> Time and time again, from the lockdowns/restrictions to the forced masking to the forced shots to the censorship to pretty much everything in between, the "expert consensus" from the medical, political, and mass media communities was wrong If you take all fringe hypothesis and claims posted online, you'll find time and time again that so many of them are wrong, and not just by a margin, but often times ridiculously far off. And you'll find that a lot of more "official" claims were right. It leaves us with some of the outliers, where fringe claims were right and "official" claims were wrong. Now someone would need to tally them up and all to actually see how often. But that impression you have seems to be misjudging this. The other issue in your judgement in my opinion is that you're focusing entirely on this particular event. But the expert process was being interfered with, due to the extensively political nature of it, and the strong pressures from everyone else to get answers before it's possible to do so with high confidence. And finally, the only basis we're even using to assess which ones were "right" or "wrong" after the fact is a form of consensus, and primarily an "expert consensus" that has simply had more time to settle.

pessimizer 3y ago
> If you take all fringe hypothesis and claims posted online, you'll find time and time again that so many of them are wrong, and not just by a margin, but often times ridiculously far off. This isn't something you should do, because it is not sensible. If you ask 10,000 people what two plus two equals, then write out a list of all of the unique answers you get, 99% of them will be wrong.
- didibus 3y ago
  Yes, that's my point. So if you need to predict which conclusion is more likely the actual reality, picking the one made by more experienced individuals on the subject, who have spent more time studying, experimenting and observing the matter, and for which a multitude of those individuals all independently arrive at a similar conclusion, and where they provide extensive rationale through published papers for why and how they arrive at that conclusion (expert consensus), is more sensible, than trying to randomly pick from all the fringe conclusions posted online, or even from picking to the one that went the most "viral" and got reposted most. Even if, much later, those same experts realize they were wrong, and it turned out one of those fringe conclusions online was actually right.

pessimizer 3y ago

> If you take all fringe hypothesis and claims posted online, you'll find time and time again that so many of them are wrong, and not just by a margin, but often times ridiculously far off. This isn't something you should do, because it is not sensible. If you ask 10,000 people what two plus two equals, then write out a list of all of the unique answers you get, 99% of them will be wrong.

didibus 3y ago
Yes, that's my point. So if you need to predict which conclusion is more likely the actual reality, picking the one made by more experienced individuals on the subject, who have spent more time studying, experimenting and observing the matter, and for which a multitude of those individuals all independently arrive at a similar conclusion, and where they provide extensive rationale through published papers for why and how they arrive at that conclusion (expert consensus), is more sensible, than trying to randomly pick from all the fringe conclusions posted online, or even from picking to the one that went the most "viral" and got reposted most. Even if, much later, those same experts realize they were wrong, and it turned out one of those fringe conclusions online was actually right.