I'll never understand this common modern thing of saying an idea or empirical claim is "dangerous" as an argument for its falsity. Completely irrelevant. How much of my life have I heard evangelical dipshits say atheism, evolution, determinism are "dangerous". It just doesn't fucking matter. It matters if it's true.
A good way to have a productive discussion is to start by saying that anyone who disagrees with one’s opinion is an asshole, a brainwashing victim, or both. Being both I will jump right in.
As I think I have mentioned before, I have spoken to or been in meetings addressed by Directors of a few NIH institutes, though not Fauci. The ones I have met or heard have all been dedicated scientists and seem to be decent people. I don’t have a strong opinion of Fauci one way or the other, though definitely do not buy that he is a “criminal monstrosity”. I am probably biased because more than 90+ of my salary over the past 24+ years has come from NIH contracts and grants (but not from NIAID, Fauci’s institute). The amount of funding I have received from the NIH as a Principal Investigator is probably a matter of public record and is quite substantial.
Some comments:
-- Expert may be wrong.
-- Experts can and should be willing to change their opinions as new information emerges.
-- I suspect that when talking to the public or the media, experts may try to sound more certain of their position than they really are, perhaps believing that the public cannot deal with uncertainty.
-- On the evidence (or lack thereof) for using masks, some of the wording in the Cochrane review “was open to misinterpretation”. See: https://www.nytimes.com/2023/03/10/opinion/masks-work-cochrane-study.html. (Because this article was in the NYT you will probably say it is bogus. Although the author, Zeynep Tufekci, was at UNC before moving to Columbia, I haven’t had any interactions with her.)
I'll never understand this common modern thing of saying an idea or empirical claim is "dangerous" as an argument for its falsity. Completely irrelevant. How much of my life have I heard evangelical dipshits say atheism, evolution, determinism are "dangerous". It just doesn't fucking matter. It matters if it's true.
A good way to have a productive discussion is to start by saying that anyone who disagrees with one’s opinion is an asshole, a brainwashing victim, or both. Being both I will jump right in.
As I think I have mentioned before, I have spoken to or been in meetings addressed by Directors of a few NIH institutes, though not Fauci. The ones I have met or heard have all been dedicated scientists and seem to be decent people. I don’t have a strong opinion of Fauci one way or the other, though definitely do not buy that he is a “criminal monstrosity”. I am probably biased because more than 90+ of my salary over the past 24+ years has come from NIH contracts and grants (but not from NIAID, Fauci’s institute). The amount of funding I have received from the NIH as a Principal Investigator is probably a matter of public record and is quite substantial.
Some comments:
-- Expert may be wrong.
-- Experts can and should be willing to change their opinions as new information emerges.
-- I suspect that when talking to the public or the media, experts may try to sound more certain of their position than they really are, perhaps believing that the public cannot deal with uncertainty.
-- On the evidence (or lack thereof) for using masks, some of the wording in the Cochrane review “was open to misinterpretation”. See: https://www.nytimes.com/2023/03/10/opinion/masks-work-cochrane-study.html. (Because this article was in the NYT you will probably say it is bogus. Although the author, Zeynep Tufekci, was at UNC before moving to Columbia, I haven’t had any interactions with her.)