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In defence of the "less bright people" or deplorables as others have called them - they are deeply suspicious of Science(tm) used as a cudgel. They intuit that

In defence of the "less bright people" or deplorables as others have called them - they are deeply suspicious of Science(tm) used as a cudgel. They intuit that some parasitic entity or entities has latched on to Science and is co-opting it for it's own gain to achieve it's own purposes which run counter to the interests of the people. The heavy handed Covid response and censorship is a prime example of that. The whole system has been corrupted and therefore it is not possible to have a de-facto assumption of good faith of the actors.

lupire 2y ago
You're not wrong, but people who oppose "science as a cudgel" tend to support "religion as a cudgel", and don't see a difference between science and religion, except that one is the Yellow team and one is the Purple team, and they have a preferred color.
- jonhohle 2y ago
  When the public is told to “trust the science”, it is no longer science and is now religion.
  - chasd00 2y ago
    This happened all day long during Covid. The answer was never “we don’t know yet” which was at least honest but instead it was always “just trust us”. Exactly like i use to hear from preachers growing up.
    - lanstin 2y ago
      The difference between public health and basic research. To stop an epidemic in flight one has to go with ones best guess and that saves lives so they do it.
      - dukeofdoom 2y ago
        Even if you still be the fiction of the vaccine saving lives. It was the life of an obese 80 year old with 3 other comorbidities ... for a few months. The lockdowns resulted in inflation, and caused a lot more poverty and deaths worldwide since. And retarded the normal development of many children. And we still don't know what kind of long term damage the vaccine caused. My friend that trusted the science, and took every booster, only stopped when she got myocarditis.
      - moduspol 2y ago
        We weren't told it was the best guess to save lives. We were told it was the science, and this science was very fast to adapt to alarmist narratives while being incredibly slow (sometimes taking years) to adapt to reality. And that's before you take into account things like BLM rallies being encouraged during COVID while less politically correct gatherings were banned or decried as "super spreader events." [1] [1] https://www.politico.com/news/magazine/2020/06/04/public-health-protests-301534 https://www.politico.com/news/magazine/2020/06/04/public-hea...
        lanstin 2y ago
        Public health also studies the most effective communication strategies for sharing public health info even in the face of uncertainty. I bet they will be more explicit about uncertainty next time based on the last time, but that is why they didn't say it. The field started out with a person breaking the handle to an invented ell, not even using communications but taking physical actions to stop the spread. As far as the speed of revisions, my memory is the initial advice to wash your hands so much faded within months, as well as the wash your groceries advice. It took the US some time to notice how effective masks were in Japan, and push for masking. And now good air filtration for public spaces is gaining momentum, even as the deaths from COVID declined. And you aren't a bit alarmed anytime a novel virus hits an immunologically naïf population, well you should be.
        moduspol 2y ago
        > I bet they will be more explicit about uncertainty next time based on the last time This is highly euphemistic. We were explicitly lied to for our own good, over and over again. Including about masks being ineffective early on (to save them for healthcare providers), about ventilators, about the effectiveness of the vaccine, about the vulnerability of normal populations as compared to older ones, the plausible origins of the virus itself, etc. It was over and over again. And again--that's without the injection of left-wing politics as noted in my previous comment. > As far as the speed of revisions We had kids out of schools for years. An entire generation is now significantly behind comparable cohorts, and the only reason we even stopped is because the opposition eventually made it untenable. We forced many small businesses to fail and gave out interest-free loans to many others that never need to be paid back. People were forced to get vaccinated or lose their jobs. I feel like our response to COVID-19 (at least in the US) is like a litmus test for how well one accepts authoritarianism. If one lived through that as an adult, I don't know how one would trust what the medical establishment says next time around, except to trust that it's what they want the unwashed masses to think.
  - dukeofdoom 2y ago
    It's like paid clergy of old, except we now call them scientists. Sometimes they reveal truths. Most of the time, and most of them are kind of useless. It's self serving bullshit, served by ever growing bureaucracy.
momoschili 2y ago
How are "heavy handed covid response and censorship" a prime example of that?
- dotnet00 2y ago
  A decent chunk of the pandemic response was politicians power tripping in the name of The Science and later having to roll things back, either because of public backlash (eg hotlines to encourage snitching on their neighbors), because it was actually illegal (requiring all large businesses to have their employees vaccinated or tested weekly), or because of politics (initially telling the public that masks were ineffective, then tripling down on mask mandates, Harris saying the vaccine could not be trusted based on Trump talking about its efficacy). There was also dumb stuff like social media suppressing mention of covid, even to this day youtubers use euphemisms to refer to that period. To me it seems perfectly understandable how people who aren't actually involved in science might mix up The Science and actual science after all the political nastiness of those years, especially when we add on top all of the awful pop science reporting from the past decades.
- tim333 2y ago
  Preventing people from working if they didn't get a covid vaccine was a bit heavy handed. And saying it was likely made in a lab in China is kind of censored to this day. I think partly because the science community doesn't want to take flack for doing risky stuff and killing millions.
  - worik 2y ago
    > Preventing people from working if they didn't get a covid vaccine was a bit heavy handed. Nobody did that. They prevented you from working with me Nobody here or there was forced to get a vaccine. But if you refused it was right to shun you Freedom is about more than the individual. We as a group should be free from the consequences of individual actions
    - Meekro 2y ago
      The Biden administration had OSHA make rules to force employers to make their employees get the vax. The Supreme Court stopped them.
dynamite-ready 2y ago
I think this comment comes across as slightly ignorant. Many examples exist where a misguided belief in scientific 'facts' (usually a ropey hypothesis, with seemingly 'damning' evidence), or a straight up abuse of the scientific method, causes direct harm. Suspicion is often based on facts or experience. People have been infected with diseases without their knowledge. People have been forced to undergo surgical procedures on the basis of spurious claims. People have been burnt alive in buildings judged to be safe. And look at Boeing. No one has a problem with science itself per se. Everyone accepts the scientific method to be one of our greatest cultural achievements. But whether one is "less bright", or super smart, we all know we as humans, are prone to mistakes, and are just as prone to bend the truth, to cover up those mistakes. There's nothing plebeian about this form of suspicion. In fact, the scientific method relies on it (peer review).
- maigret 2y ago
  > No one has a problem with science itself per se. Everyone accepts the scientific method to be one of our greatest cultural achievements This is just wrong and naive. You can be happy if a majority of people agree to this.
  - dynamite-ready 2y ago
    As written, possibly. Taken literally, it's full of holes. But if you're not a pedant, I essentially mean that most parents will vaccinate their children, many passengers will book flights, and a majority of the citizens in a population do respect their officials (etcetera). And I think if you were to dig deeper than this, and test that hypothesis with... well... a scientific experiment of some kind, the result would probably support it. But a good number of people will naturally question the outcome!
LtWorf 2y ago
I attended the opening talk of a local science festival. The speaker was a psychology researcher from UK who flew here for that, and the talk was about conspiracy theories. When they introduced her they stated that she wouldn't accept any questions from the audience. This was received with boos and shouts that it was not real science. She then proceeded to bundle all the conspiracy theories together. Going from "the government is doing something bad" to "earth is flat". After that talk I can really believe that the bullshit conspiracy theories are made up and spread artificially so that anyone that comes up with any conspiracy theory can be shushed as a crazy person. But… in reality conspiracies do exist. One can make a theory and then test if it's true (or get killed/imprisoned by the government while trying).
- ClumsyPilot 2y ago
  I always struggled with ‘cospiracy theory’ being used as an attack. Yes, that’s exactly what they are, upfront, allegations of a conspiracy. And some of them are correct,
- ChainOfFools 2y ago
  This actually may be true although somewhat indirectly with respect to at least one well-known conspiracy belief. If I recall correctly, the Flat Earth Society was originally concieved as a prank intended to lampoon actual conspiratorial groups (I.e. Nasa faked the moon landing, JFK was a mob hit etc) But through some combination of timing, convimcing execution, and media interest coincidentally developing in the same direction resulted in the supreme irony of an unserious sham cult spawning an unironic counterpart community which rapidly outgrew and ultimately succeeded it.
  - hyperdimension 2y ago
    That's the same shape as the OBEY clothing line, incidentally.
lazide 2y ago
‘Heavy handed Covid response’ - lulz. What other emerging pandemic has been so lightly handled? We used to forcibly quarantine people in their homes at gunpoint for measles. Smallpox? Even crazier. Hell, we didn’t even shut down international travel until well after it was plainly obvious it had spread well past the point it would matter.
Qwertious 2y ago
>They intuit They don't need to intuit it; they're outright told not to trust the science, by the parasites who are criticised by other scientists. Like the asbestos industry.

lupire 2y ago

You're not wrong, but people who oppose "science as a cudgel" tend to support "religion as a cudgel", and don't see a difference between science and religion, except that one is the Yellow team and one is the Purple team, and they have a preferred color.

jonhohle 2y ago
When the public is told to “trust the science”, it is no longer science and is now religion.
- chasd00 2y ago
  This happened all day long during Covid. The answer was never “we don’t know yet” which was at least honest but instead it was always “just trust us”. Exactly like i use to hear from preachers growing up.
  - lanstin 2y ago
    The difference between public health and basic research. To stop an epidemic in flight one has to go with ones best guess and that saves lives so they do it.
    - dukeofdoom 2y ago
      Even if you still be the fiction of the vaccine saving lives. It was the life of an obese 80 year old with 3 other comorbidities ... for a few months. The lockdowns resulted in inflation, and caused a lot more poverty and deaths worldwide since. And retarded the normal development of many children. And we still don't know what kind of long term damage the vaccine caused. My friend that trusted the science, and took every booster, only stopped when she got myocarditis.
    - moduspol 2y ago
      We weren't told it was the best guess to save lives. We were told it was the science, and this science was very fast to adapt to alarmist narratives while being incredibly slow (sometimes taking years) to adapt to reality. And that's before you take into account things like BLM rallies being encouraged during COVID while less politically correct gatherings were banned or decried as "super spreader events." [1] [1] https://www.politico.com/news/magazine/2020/06/04/public-health-protests-301534 https://www.politico.com/news/magazine/2020/06/04/public-hea...
      - lanstin 2y ago
        Public health also studies the most effective communication strategies for sharing public health info even in the face of uncertainty. I bet they will be more explicit about uncertainty next time based on the last time, but that is why they didn't say it. The field started out with a person breaking the handle to an invented ell, not even using communications but taking physical actions to stop the spread. As far as the speed of revisions, my memory is the initial advice to wash your hands so much faded within months, as well as the wash your groceries advice. It took the US some time to notice how effective masks were in Japan, and push for masking. And now good air filtration for public spaces is gaining momentum, even as the deaths from COVID declined. And you aren't a bit alarmed anytime a novel virus hits an immunologically naïf population, well you should be.
        moduspol 2y ago
        > I bet they will be more explicit about uncertainty next time based on the last time This is highly euphemistic. We were explicitly lied to for our own good, over and over again. Including about masks being ineffective early on (to save them for healthcare providers), about ventilators, about the effectiveness of the vaccine, about the vulnerability of normal populations as compared to older ones, the plausible origins of the virus itself, etc. It was over and over again. And again--that's without the injection of left-wing politics as noted in my previous comment. > As far as the speed of revisions We had kids out of schools for years. An entire generation is now significantly behind comparable cohorts, and the only reason we even stopped is because the opposition eventually made it untenable. We forced many small businesses to fail and gave out interest-free loans to many others that never need to be paid back. People were forced to get vaccinated or lose their jobs. I feel like our response to COVID-19 (at least in the US) is like a litmus test for how well one accepts authoritarianism. If one lived through that as an adult, I don't know how one would trust what the medical establishment says next time around, except to trust that it's what they want the unwashed masses to think.
- dukeofdoom 2y ago
  It's like paid clergy of old, except we now call them scientists. Sometimes they reveal truths. Most of the time, and most of them are kind of useless. It's self serving bullshit, served by ever growing bureaucracy.

momoschili 2y ago

How are "heavy handed covid response and censorship" a prime example of that?

dotnet00 2y ago
A decent chunk of the pandemic response was politicians power tripping in the name of The Science and later having to roll things back, either because of public backlash (eg hotlines to encourage snitching on their neighbors), because it was actually illegal (requiring all large businesses to have their employees vaccinated or tested weekly), or because of politics (initially telling the public that masks were ineffective, then tripling down on mask mandates, Harris saying the vaccine could not be trusted based on Trump talking about its efficacy). There was also dumb stuff like social media suppressing mention of covid, even to this day youtubers use euphemisms to refer to that period. To me it seems perfectly understandable how people who aren't actually involved in science might mix up The Science and actual science after all the political nastiness of those years, especially when we add on top all of the awful pop science reporting from the past decades.
tim333 2y ago
Preventing people from working if they didn't get a covid vaccine was a bit heavy handed. And saying it was likely made in a lab in China is kind of censored to this day. I think partly because the science community doesn't want to take flack for doing risky stuff and killing millions.
- worik 2y ago
  > Preventing people from working if they didn't get a covid vaccine was a bit heavy handed. Nobody did that. They prevented you from working with me Nobody here or there was forced to get a vaccine. But if you refused it was right to shun you Freedom is about more than the individual. We as a group should be free from the consequences of individual actions
  - Meekro 2y ago
    The Biden administration had OSHA make rules to force employers to make their employees get the vax. The Supreme Court stopped them.

dynamite-ready 2y ago

I think this comment comes across as slightly ignorant. Many examples exist where a misguided belief in scientific 'facts' (usually a ropey hypothesis, with seemingly 'damning' evidence), or a straight up abuse of the scientific method, causes direct harm. Suspicion is often based on facts or experience. People have been infected with diseases without their knowledge. People have been forced to undergo surgical procedures on the basis of spurious claims. People have been burnt alive in buildings judged to be safe. And look at Boeing. No one has a problem with science itself per se. Everyone accepts the scientific method to be one of our greatest cultural achievements. But whether one is "less bright", or super smart, we all know we as humans, are prone to mistakes, and are just as prone to bend the truth, to cover up those mistakes. There's nothing plebeian about this form of suspicion. In fact, the scientific method relies on it (peer review).

maigret 2y ago
> No one has a problem with science itself per se. Everyone accepts the scientific method to be one of our greatest cultural achievements This is just wrong and naive. You can be happy if a majority of people agree to this.
- dynamite-ready 2y ago
  As written, possibly. Taken literally, it's full of holes. But if you're not a pedant, I essentially mean that most parents will vaccinate their children, many passengers will book flights, and a majority of the citizens in a population do respect their officials (etcetera). And I think if you were to dig deeper than this, and test that hypothesis with... well... a scientific experiment of some kind, the result would probably support it. But a good number of people will naturally question the outcome!

LtWorf 2y ago

I attended the opening talk of a local science festival. The speaker was a psychology researcher from UK who flew here for that, and the talk was about conspiracy theories. When they introduced her they stated that she wouldn't accept any questions from the audience. This was received with boos and shouts that it was not real science. She then proceeded to bundle all the conspiracy theories together. Going from "the government is doing something bad" to "earth is flat". After that talk I can really believe that the bullshit conspiracy theories are made up and spread artificially so that anyone that comes up with any conspiracy theory can be shushed as a crazy person. But… in reality conspiracies do exist. One can make a theory and then test if it's true (or get killed/imprisoned by the government while trying).

ClumsyPilot 2y ago
I always struggled with ‘cospiracy theory’ being used as an attack. Yes, that’s exactly what they are, upfront, allegations of a conspiracy. And some of them are correct,
ChainOfFools 2y ago
This actually may be true although somewhat indirectly with respect to at least one well-known conspiracy belief. If I recall correctly, the Flat Earth Society was originally concieved as a prank intended to lampoon actual conspiratorial groups (I.e. Nasa faked the moon landing, JFK was a mob hit etc) But through some combination of timing, convimcing execution, and media interest coincidentally developing in the same direction resulted in the supreme irony of an unserious sham cult spawning an unironic counterpart community which rapidly outgrew and ultimately succeeded it.
- hyperdimension 2y ago
  That's the same shape as the OBEY clothing line, incidentally.

lazide 2y ago

‘Heavy handed Covid response’ - lulz. What other emerging pandemic has been so lightly handled? We used to forcibly quarantine people in their homes at gunpoint for measles. Smallpox? Even crazier. Hell, we didn’t even shut down international travel until well after it was plainly obvious it had spread well past the point it would matter.

Qwertious 2y ago

>They intuit They don't need to intuit it; they're outright told not to trust the science, by the parasites who are criticised by other scientists. Like the asbestos industry.