Carl Sagan was right all along. Always question science, never trust these so called experts, do your own assessment, research and thinking. This must be another global climate change scam.
It is partially correct. Except make sure you have the necessary skills to question the science. Intuition in these things are quite misleading. Don't start questioning cancer reports just because you don't feel sick.If you really don't trust it, get a relevant medical degree or take second opinions from those who are really qualified and not some quacks. Otherwise you would just end up dead.
The problem with your claim that the plebs are incapable of research because they don't have equipment and are dumb is the wholesale erosion of belief in institutions after the COVID "vaccine" situation
I assume you are expert in some domain. How would you feel if someone who is not familiar with your domain comes in and start questioning your expert judgment? Even in your domain probably being an expert means having access and expertise of equipments. Without that I cannot imagine having expertise to judge what is correct and what is wrong for that domain.
I guarantee you Carl Sagan was not telling you to dismiss experts and he very much understood climate change was real. He literally testified before Congress on it, likely decades before you were even born.
It is generally bad practice to so drastically twist somebody’s words to make them say the opposite of what they’re saying. Carl Sagan would not agree with you.
Doesn't have to be one or the other. Trust, but verify? Experts make mistakes, professional equipment can be mishandled. Don't take anybodies word, look at the evidence for yourself.
This is a very scientific way of thinking. It's only gotten a bad rap on account of people using it to attack others' research and then(crucially) failing to perform their own.
> Don't take anybodies word, look at the evidence for yourself.
Please nobody listen to his person. There is nothing scientific about ignoring the experts to instead behold the opinions of the uninformed.
The world is too large, too complex, and too nuanced for the layman's opinion to be worth much. When someone is unqualified treat their opinion as equal to every other unqualified persons opinion. Include your own in that assessment. Be honest, what qualifications do you have that make your assessment of the evidence more valid than any other random street person's in the given field? It's very likely the answer is "none". So lend your own opinion the level of respect it has earned. Be honest with yourself about what that level is.
"There is a cult of ignorance in the United States, and there has always been. The strain of anti-intellectualism has been a constant thread winding its way through our political and cultural life, nurtured by the false notion that democracy means that 'my ignorance is just as good as your knowledge.'”
― Isaac Asimov
I am right and I suspect you know it... you just don't like the way it makes you feel. Hence your focus on vibes and ad hominums rather than reason.
It is self evident that moderm science is too complex for the average person to understand, and fifty percent of us are less intelligent than even that.
> It is self evident that moderm science is too complex for the average person to understand, and fifty percent of us are less intelligent than even that.
I think you're grossly overestimating the complexity of most modern science outside of physics and mathematics (and computing, as an intersection of the two).
Good science is actually pretty easy to explain most of the time. It may take a long time to become a domain expert thst can perform novel research in a field but it it's well within the understanding of most people to have a single topic explained to them by an expert.
In fact, that very thing happens in courtrooms all the time.
Your condescending attitude is why people don't trust authorities and with good reason. If you can't help people understand science, it's you that doesn't understand it.
Furthermore, I hope you realize how close your "self-evident" logic is to a lot of extremely gross and genocidal ideologies of the past and present.
I originally wrote a long winded response to this, but I deleted it. The more I think about your perspective the more I realize that though I disagree, it is also very reasonable of you to believe the way you do and I can respect that.
The truth is that we're both likely right to some extent, and wrong to some extent.
I now think that maybe there is no hard and fast rule one can apply to every situation to decide when one should decide for themself or just trust the experts. The optimal solution likely varies greatly depending on the specifics of the given situation, and it's very reasonable that we would have two very different takes about it.
True, trust but verify and start questioning things. Science is now more politicized more than ever by politicians. COVID vaccines are not even tested. I didn't said this. Pfizer and Moderna CEO said this in EU parliament hearing.
Lol, the COVID vaccines went through some of the largest randomized controlled trials ever conducted and had some of the best safety and efficacy results ever seen.
You might have heard that it wasn't tested for reducing transmission, i.e. whether the vaccines make it less likely that an infected, vaccinated person would transmit the virus to someone else... Which it wasn't, because uhhh... how would you?
They tested it for safety, reduction in symptomatic infection rate and reduction in infection severity.
You should set aside your conclusions for a bit and take an earnest effort at learning some of the details of this stuff if you want to "do your own research" etc. It is clear you are misunderstanding some pretty fundamental things that are actually easily understandable if you approach them with honest curiosity!
You can literally look up the trial designs and they just say right on them exactly what they're testing for and how they're doing it.
But science is about doing your own research! The idea is that science results are based on evidence that is published in serious [1] peer review [2] journals.
At some time you realize you can't repeat all the test at home, because it would be full of mice and transgenic plants and a huge particle collider and ... Also, there are a lot of very hard topics. So you must trust the system, but not too much.
* Big pharma wants to sell drugs and get money.
* The FDA wants to cover they ass and get money.
* Journalist want to publish bleeding stories and get money.
[There is also an optimistic version where all of them want the best for humanity.]
All of them together are making a quite good job, and you can go to the pharmacy at the corner and be quite confident that you will get the cure for a lot of illness with a low risk. In some threads people ask for most tests, in some threads people ask for faster approval. It's a hard trade off, and I'm happy I don't have to make the decision [3].
In 2020 there was a lot of misinformation in both directions. From politicians to youtubers, form individual crackpots to professors in the university. In many cases you realize they may not even understand the difference between a virus and a bacteria, in other cases they say that the "control group" is an unrelated bunch of guys in another city.
Science is about doing your own research, but doing your own research is super hard. As a rule of thumb, if the FDA and the European equivalent agree, it's probably ok [4], but cross your fingers just in case.
[1] Whatever "serious" mean. It's a hard question.
[2] And real "peer review", not a comment section in a web page.
[4] Do you trust the contractor+regulations that installed the elevator at your building? It's another trade off of as cheap as possible and enough regulations to avoid appearing in the front page of all newspapers everyday.
Not for the average adult human on planet Earth, no.
Fifty percent of people are of below average intelligence. Of the 50% that remain only a fraction have access to the equipment necessary to replicate any given experiment, of that fraction only a small percentage will have the knowledge, skills, and abilities to accurately replicate any given experiment, of that tiny fraction only a much tinier fraction will have the KSA's to interpret those results in a meaningful way.
Science should replicate. That does not automatically imply that YOU should be the one replicating it.
For the average person science should mean knowing how to determine if someone is more qualified than they are and listening to them, or at least listening to the general consensus of those who are more qualified when such a consensus exists.
Yes, other peoples goals don't always align perfectly with yours, but the simple truth is that you aren't qualified or even capable of understanding everything in the world. When it comes to those subjects you must be adult enough to understand and work within your limitations.
Honestly, do you really believe that people who sacrificed large parts of their lives to become researchers are in it for the money, or out to get you? These are brilliant people who choose to take a career path that doesn't really pay well. When 99% of them tell you something is safe, Occam will tell that it's a pretty safe bet the weirdos on the fringe are just plain wrong.
There’s nothing wrong with doing your own experiments as long as you understand your limitations. But that’s not what people mean when they say they “did their own research”.
They mean that they went online and found blogs and YouTube videos that agree with whatever crackpot view they already held.
The issue with picking people and organizations to trust (which you absolutely should do) is that the average person isn’t even able to evaluate what qualified means. And RFK jr. is the guy appointing the “qualified people” who run things. On paper many of them are qualified, but in reality they’re crackpots.
You have to dig a level deeper and understand that this set of qualified people are actually just nuts who essentially performed the scientific equivalent of a coup because their ideas couldn’t win on merit.
> For the average person science should mean knowing how to determine if someone is more qualified than they
I agree. But how do you that without researching? Who makes the list of trustful institutions?
Let's pick homeopathy. The pharmacy in the corner of my home sells homeopathy too. There are even some curses in some universities [in Germany?] [I searched in MY university. Apparently there is no curse for human medicine, but there is a curse for veterinary https://www.fvet.uba.ar/?q=homeopatia .] Can we agree homeopathy is not real? How do you know?
This is all a very fun thought experiment and whatnot but the reality is the COVID vaccines went through gigantic randomized controlled trials, our absolute best known method (by a gigantic margin) to figure out what is true.
Those trials unequivocally showed extremely high effectiveness and extremely high safety.
The people who say otherwise are simply wrong in this case. No matter how much philosophizing you or they want to do on epistemology. If they want to demonstrate otherwise, they need to conduct their own trials, ideally large, randomized, blinded, placebo-controlled trials.
> in other cases they say that the "control group" is an unrelated bunch of guys in another city.
This is not how trials work and you should go "do your own research" on the basics of the methodology before you opine on higher-order things like vaccines etc.
>> in other cases they say that the "control group" is an unrelated bunch of guys in another city.
If you want to ruin your day, take a look at the hydroxychloroquine [retracted] paper by Raoult. Who is the control group? Why was it reported in the press as a 100% cure if the only death was in the trial group?
I agree that the trial to prove the effectiveness and safety of the covid-19 vaccines were much better designed. One of the reasons is that to get the approval of the FDA they must dot the i and j and cross the t and f.
To be fair, when the Covid vaccine was being rushed to be approved, I didn’t 100% trust that Trump wouldn’t pressure the FDA to approve without being confident it was safe.
So my standard at the time was that I’d take it if the FDA and at least one other developed country approved it.
Here in Argentina we approved the Sputnik vaccine. It was approved only here and in Russia. And here it was approved not by the standard office (ANMAT), but by a special resolution of the Health Ministry.
IIRC they have a 95% reduction in hospitalization rate, measured in a double blind human trial. [Compare that with the vector virus and inactivated virus vaccines, that have like a 65% reduction in hospitalization rate, measured in a double blind human trial.]
Just COVID-19. I do get other shots though, for example the annual flu shot and most recently an RSV shot (not the one I had participated in a clinical trial for.)
We have more data on COVID vaccines that nearly every drug in existence.
My wife was one of the first pregnant women to get the vaccine (outside of trials) because she’s an ER doctor, and she’s had regular follow-up surveys from the CDC for years.
Aaron swartz paid with his life for the same mission. just because some over zealous, psycho attorney called Carmen Ortiz decided to put him in behind the bars for life. I hope and wish that young man lived a prosperous life.
So much for freedom and democracy lectured by Americans and westerners to the rest of the world. This is just censorship of every form of freedom of speech. This got nothing to do with children or youth. They will eventually censor and track everyone.
I feel the same way. Looks like online "privacy" and "anonymity" will cease to exist within our lifetime. It's already starting with those "privacy respecting" solutions like zero trust age verification but that will quickly be deemed insufficient and because the legal framework will be already present it will very quickly and smoothly turn into full blown surveillance and censorship.
Time to setup I2P on my server and donate some bandwidth but I'm sure they'll make that illegal too.
True.Like many other nefarious things British started this with child protection act, which got nothing to do with children, considering their long history of pedophiles. Slowly all the other governments using the same pretext and template. Time to use pigeons and own peer to peer communication.
If you don't want to be censored just don't check the checkbox that says "this device is for a child, please censor adult content"? There's no passport check in the CA/CO law, in fact it's expressly forbidden.
> It can get worse. New York’s proposed Senate Bill S8102A requires adults to prove they’re adults to use a computer, exercise bike, smart watch, or car if the device is internet enabled with app ecosystems. The bill explicitly forbids self-reporting and leaves the allowed methods to regulations written by the Attorney General.
I don’t think they have processed the NY law yet. It is completely incompatible with the open source model. When people finally figure it out there will be an uproar.
Next step coming soon is “well we need a license scan if you tell the OS you’re over 18”. macOS already requires a 6 step process to “trust” regular programs not from their app store. So this is just end to end control of our machines.
You mean a dedicated license that proves the holder is over 18, separate from your identity such that it's not usable for tracking or identity theft when the verification platform gets hacked?
Yes. Soon ISPs will require hardware based remote attlestations to prove you haven't modified any software that wants to send or receive packets through them.
GrapheneOS is a non-profit and it's not that kind of business partnership. We're getting a device with official GrapheneOS support out of it and they're getting increased device sales from having more secure devices with better updates and official GrapheneOS support. It's not an exclusive partnership but we aren't currently working with any other OEM and don't have the resources to handle multiple for quite a while anyway. They're going to get a lot out of being first.
I don't think this is terrorism, that's not what the word means. It's a clear and open act of war, so in many ways much worse, but somehow terrorism is a scarier word.
Murdering million children in Iraq, now attacking school in Iran, 2 million people dead in Ukraine, regime change operations across the world, military and economic interventions across the world.
English is not my first language. If you got a better word other than American terrorists and American terrorism, then suggest me one.
Yes, the USA and Israel are putting an end to a 47 year war of Iran vs. Everyone. There will be casualties on every side, that is war. Iran made the middle east into a giant PVP server. That is coming to an end.
This is also a good deal for the Iranian government since they can transfer hatred people had for them to the America and Israel. No one will see Trump as salvation and the “rally behind the flag” phenomena in times of invasion applies just as much to Iran as it does to the USA.
lol!! Most people from rest of the world, minus west, knows what Nobel prize is all about. It is just a political tool for usa and west. Clearly, it about Venezuela oil and gold. Pathetic to see their hypocrisy and double standards.
reply