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| Silverfiddle Rant! |
"Should it turn out that scientists and experts and NGOs, etc. are villains rather than heroes of this story, we may very well see the expert-worshiping values of modern liberalism go up in a fireball of public anger."
"Lab leaks happen. They aren’t the result of conspiracies: “a lab accident is an accident,” as Nathan Robinson points out; they happen all the time, in this country and in others, and people die from them.By the way, right-wingers didn’t dream up “gain of function”: all the cool virologists have been doing it (in this country and in others) even as the squares have been warning against it for years.Think of all the disasters of recent years:economic neoliberalism, destructive trade policies, the Iraq War, the housing bubble, banks that are “too big to fail,” mortgage-backed securities, the Hillary Clinton campaign of 2016 — all of these disasters brought to you by the total, self-assured unanimity of the highly educated people who are supposed to know what they’re doing, plus the total complacency of the highly educated people who are supposed to be supervising them."
This is why normal people with common sense no longer lap up what the Inofotainment Media Complex pukes out. As Farmer wisely reminds us, today's "experts" have no skin in the game, so we should never make the mistake of automatically trusting them.
Extra Credit:
"these disasters brought to you by the total, self-assured unanimity of the highly educated people who are supposed to know what they’re doing, plus the total complacency of the highly educated people who are supposed to be supervising them."
ReplyDeleteI disagree with this diagnosis. Unanimity is rare, I can find experts who predicted each of these failures. The problem is when experts compete in a marketplace for consultancy gigs: the ones who get hired tend to be the ones who tell the client what he wants to hear. The financial ratings bodies are the canonical example of this.
I don't think "skin in the game" would help, in practice it would be another avenue for corruption. Experts giving advice which is lucrative to them personally is acceptable on the micro scale, but it's a bit icky on a macro-economic level. Is the advice to close the factory more or less trustworthy coming from a consultant with a personal stake in closing the factory? How do you account for the complicated incentives consultants bring with them from existing jobs, via associates etc. Surely setting up the consultants' incentives so that they closely match the best interests of the country would be harder than just making good policy decisions in the first place!
Just as incentives will always be somewhat perverse, neither will we ever attain the ideal of disinterested objectivity. Given we are bound to fall short, which version of imperfection is preferable? I still favour the latter, but we do most certainly need to get better at selecting experts, gauging their performance and reducing the influence of ideology.
The bounty on dead cobras will always create a boom in the cobra breeding business.
DeleteSo how do you set it up so that the expert who suggested the bounty looses money from this?
DeleteYou mistake "skin in the game" for money. Skin in the game means suffering the adverse consequences of a wrong decision. If you say "close the factory", it closes, and you get rich, that doesn't prove that the decision is the right one if the "expert advisor" stood to personally profit from its closer. It means that if the company shouldn't have been closed, the decider loses. In other words, he would have lost millions in profits from what products the company would have made had his timing in closing the factory not been so poor.
DeleteIf a plane pilot makes a bad decision, everyone dies, including the pilot. He doesn't get a "golden parachute".
He literally has his "skin" in the game.
DeleteWhen expert Fauci says, "close the country"... what consequences does he, personally, suffer? Does he lose HIS job?
DeleteThe most convincing statements are those in which one stands to lose, ones in which one has maximal skin in the game; the most unconvincing ones are those in which one patently (but unknowingly) try to enhance one’s status without tangible contribution (like, as we saw, the great majority of academic papers that say nothing and take no risks). But it doesn’t have to be that way. Showoff is fine; it is human. As long as the substance exceeds the showoff content, you are fine. Stay human, take as much as you can, under the condition you give more than you take.
DeleteOne should give more weight to research that, while being rigorous, contradicts other peers, particularly if it entails costs and reputational harm for its author
Further,
Someone with a high public presence who is controversial and takes risks for his opinion is less likely to be a Bulls***t vendor.
- Nassim Taleb, "An Expert Named Lindy"
The "lab leak" journalist being a case in point (ala Glenn Greenwald or Aaron Mate).
DeleteHow do you suggest Fauci's (dis-)incentives be set up?
DeleteI don't.
DeleteI simply would not give him "decision making power" over shutting down, or not. Those decisions should be reserved for the "politically elected" classes, who "theoretically" pay for their mistakes by being voted out of their jobs.
The problem that we have is that the media and tech companies have certified Fauci as a "truth giver" and censored all dissenting opinions. That's not how the truth "works".
Which leads to the question:
Deletewho is the real expert?
Who decides on who is and who is not expert? Where is the metaexpert? Time it is. Or, rather, Lindy.)
-Nassim Taleb
...and as Nietzsche says in "On the Future of Our Educational Institutions":
DeleteOn the other hand, that adhesive and tenacious stratum which has now filled up the interstices between the sciences—Journalism—believes it has a mission to fulfill here, and this it does, according to its own particular lights—that is to say, as its name implies, after the fashion of a day-laborer.
"It is precisely in journalism that the two tendencies combine and become one. The expansion and the diminution of education here join hands. The newspaper actually steps into the place of culture, and he who, even as a scholar, wishes to voice any claim for education, must avail himself of this viscous stratum of communication which cements the seams between all forms of life, all classes, all arts, and all sciences, and which is as firm and reliable as news paper is, as a rule. In the newspaper the peculiar educational aims of the present culminate, just as the journalist, the servant of the moment, has stepped into the place of the genius, of the leader for all time, of the deliverer from the tyranny of the moment.
Fauci's decisions were all self-serving in that they granted him celebrity, fame, and considerable power. Other voices were needed to counteract his self-serving ones.
Delete...so you can see, Nietzsche's complaint against journalism is that it hasn't withstood the test of time... as the books we read as "classics" and constitute "culture" have. All journalism should be treated "skeptically" and NOT the sole basis for life-impacting decisions.
DeleteFJ,
DeleteFauci's decisions were all self-serving in that they granted him celebrity, fame, and considerable power. Other voices were needed to counteract his self-serving ones.
HEAR, HEAR!
Once the universities banned teaching the "classics", we became captives of the present. Out cultural became "today's pop icons.... like Fauci.
DeleteThe "core university curriculum" the classics of Western Civilization were "abandoned".
DeleteThe "dumbing down" was institutionalized.
DeleteWith Chronos (time) banished to the underworld, the Olympians, with the help of some minor Titans, have won the Titanomachy and the new "Olympians" are free to rule as they see fit.
DeleteChrono's/Ouranos' "balls" have turned to the foam that Aphrodite now floats on.
It's all very well prefering the classics to the Daily Mail, but topical coverage fulfils a real need (or it could do if it were less sensationalist). Socrates has much to teach us, but not about virology or credit default swaps. And, writing to you from a country with a Classics graduate/enthusiast for a PM, I can tell you that however thorough his grounding in ancient civilizations, Johnson is unsuited to high office in every way imaginable: techincally, personally, morally, even sartorially the man is a shambles. We'd be better off with with someone who'd spent his student years reviewing computer games or tasting flavours of ice cream.
DeleteWith elected leaders like him and Trump, it is an unfortunate inevitability that we would throw ourselves into the bosom of technocrats like Fauci. Had the political leadership been more thoughtful, would there have been room for a more nuanced discussion of the science? As it is, we've been holding dangerous rumours at bay; even now, far too many of us believe completely impossible things about the vaccines.
btw, surely the life of an ex-president, even a disgraced one like Nixon, is hardly any kind of punishment, is it? And with term limits (a nice feature of your system imo) it's no threat at all.
Farmer asked, who are the real experts?
DeleteAccording to Taleb, the real experts in this covid debacle were the governors of Florida and Texas
Take the firetrap Tesla car tunnels to fund mining on Mars. You went to Vegas to waste money anyway.
DeleteI wasn't implying that leaders with an education in the classics were better than anyone else. I'm saying that a PEOPLE educated in the classics aren't going to worship pop stars and invest everything they own in the latest stock recommendation from Jim Cramer. They've got better foundations to stand upon than their newspapers and bibles.
DeleteI dunno if classics education would solve the problem of so many people falling for conspiracy theories which violate the laws of physics. Surely what is lacking there is a public understanding of science?
DeleteMaybe familiarity with historical literature and folklore would help us recognise the narrative elements and motifs present in the conspiracy theories currently in circulation?
I've no objection to having more classics as a requirement at university, but I'm not the one you need to convince: the problem is that this material doesn't conform with the modern commercialised conception of higher education, where students demand improved job prospects in exchange for their fees. So ultimately it's the employers of graduates that need convincing.
Or, (and I'm 100% in favour of this), we switch to a far less commercialised conception of HE, which realistically could support far fewer students, making the whole thing more elitist (acadmically, not economically would be my preference). So then whatever edifying stuff you and I agree should be included, would not reach the majority of the popupation anyway.
So maybe the way to expose the masses to the classics would be to present it entertainingly in the mainstream culture. A worthy challenge!
@ Jez,
DeleteThe problem isn't only that "the classics "are not taught, it's also that, when they are, it's completely without context.
People and nations are the products of their times.
A good example would be that American Indians were not a single people. The different tribes and nations were very different and slavery was a common practice throughout the tribes. The same is true today and also true in Africa and continues in some places, in Northern Africa, in Muslim dominated areas -which is also ignored-.
The list is endless with entire chunks of time and history going down the memory hole.
Without the context we attempt to build a skyscraper without a foundation.
@Jez,
DeletePeople currently fall for conspiracy theories that racist police are targeting black males for violence/death based upon incidents which transpired hundreds of years ago that have been popularized through the "mainstream" (aka "pop") culture. The problem is that their "audiences" have nothing to compare the images and spectacles presented in pop culture "to".
If people are going to aspire to becoming multi-cultural, they need to also aspire to becoming multi-temporal, and the only way they can do so is with a solid foundation in the classics.
...as Warren says, w/o it we're building a tower of Babel.
DeleteI'm not hugely familiar with ancient Greek, Roman, Chinese or Egyptian civilisations, but I don't see how that would alter my perception of modern day police brutality & accountability. I'd have more examples of humans treating each other badly to compare it to, I suppose, but it wouldn't lead me to dismiss evidence and reports which challenge the established authorities. I'd need a few deep hits from your bong before doing that.
DeleteWhat do you suppose that axe with bundle of sticks (in the fasces) carried by a tribune or consul's lictors were for?
DeleteYou'd think differently if the agoge had been your classroom.
DeleteThis revisionist twaddle really gets clearance for landing in the trash can when you factor in the reality that during the four years of Trump's aggressive Make America China's Bitch agenda (complete with imported red hats) that Trump dismantled an extant emergency pandemic response plan and fired thousands of people from the Department of Homeland Security's bio-threat response teams, cut billions out of the Centers for Disease Control annual budgets, let the national emergency stockpile of medical equipment remain woefully unstocked, not to mention lifting the 2014 ban on funding gain-of-function virology research during his first year in office. The better part of his 3rd year in office, January through August 2019, his administration ran a simulation exercise ("Crimson Contagion") to determine America's pandemic preparedness (after all of Trump's sabotage, of course this exercise demonstrated vulnerabilities), the alarming conclusions of this pre-pandemic 2019 exercise was followed by Trump proposing nearly another $1 Billion cut to the CDC's 2021 budget, during 2020, after a real pandemic hit.
ReplyDeleteYou know, the Covid19 pandemic that began not even a month before Trump was bragging about his chocolate cake bromance with Xi Jinping, CEO of his international MAGA hat manufacturer.
Dafuq outta here with that "Trump warned us about Chinese lab-leaks" nonsense. They leaked a Democrat hoax? That will miraculously disappear? That was just one case thst will soon be zero?
So, Covid19 came from a Chinese lab the Trump administration cranked up the funding for while doing everything in his power to make sure any ill that could come from it would hit America the hardest?
Speed on, potato.
ORANGE BAD MAN!!! lol
DeleteThat is certainly the "narrative".
Delete...for there are grains of truth in EVERY narrative.
DeleteFarmer, in blabberish's case, the grains are brain crumbs
DeleteSF, should indeed apologize. The low hanging fruit was too low.
DeleteWarren, the poor guy is definitely off his game
DeleteOne more potato shows up I can make french fries.
DeleteFrench fries are better than the crybaby casserole you've been serving up.
DeleteSalt is better than the bile you bring to the table.
DeleteBe for real. This isn't the first discussion you've derailed with farcical objections to properly being labeled an imbecile.
DeleteSF,
ReplyDeleteThat link at the bottom of your blog post is a gem! I hope that commenters read it before weighing in.
A retelling of "the boy who cried wolf" with Trump in the titular role. It's not the press' fault that Trump is so demonstrably unreliable as a source.
DeleteStill some work to be done making vaccines available around the world, but it might be approaching a good time to investigate (deeply!) the origin of CV19 and China's early response.
Jez
DeleteThe media fell into the Trap of beating the drum on the opposite of whatever Donald Trump said. So even when Trump swerved accidentally into the truth, do you need York Press contradicted and said the opposite. Is this really the Press you want?
Well now you've set me off about Trump, sorry... ;)
DeleteNo, it's not the press that I want, but the type of press I want is predicated on a calm, analytical readership and a government that does not spread panic by lending legitimacy to gossip, rumours & innuendo. Trump rose to political prominence by pushing birtherism (he never did back down fully, did he?), for goodness sake. Given the vacuum of responsibility at the top, frankly god bless the press for stepping up for once.
How would you have covered it? Was it more than a plausible hypothesis? How much weight should Trump's word have lent it? Should we believe the election was stolen?
We should have a system of election verification/ validation that doesn't leave such questions "unanswered".
DeleteWhy people on the Left need to believe journalists like Andy Ngo...
DeleteDo you want your "narrative" reinforced, or the "truth"?
Delete@ AOW
DeleteAnyone who thinks that China isn’t capable of bio-war doesn’t know jack about China. I would say that China developed a hypothesis, ran the experiment to test it, and now knows far more than it did previously about the US government specifically and western governments generally. China 5, West 0. Meanwhile, people died ... and the pundits are moaning about “egg on face.” That is an amazing revelation. Meanwhile, egg-on-face pundits still have their jobs because “no harm, no foul,” and life is good.
There is too much crap going on in this country at any given moment. Information overload is killing us. Easier to just tune it all out and implement the old “head-in-sand” strategy. And of course, when no one is any longer paying attention to the thieves, racketeers, charlatans, or their enablers — well, the wise course of action would be to stock up on petroleum jelly and horde toilet paper.
Does anyone really really believe that China was interested in "gain of function" for humanitarian reasons?
DeleteWow....
@FJ: 'Do you want your "narrative" reinforced, or the "truth"?'
DeleteI want my narrative to accommodate the facts. But narrative is like a pane of glass: any window you choose to look through introduces its own distortions. Maybe good journalism should acknowledge the narrative, explain alternative narratives and place events in some sort of historical & geopolitical context -- a narrative that encompasses a few decades and a few countries is better than one which only covers one of each.
@Mustang: at the very least, China's initial denial and coverup cost the whole world incredibly dear.
+++ for Mustang
DeleteJez, lab leak was always a plausible hypothesis. And anyway, it is not social media and the News media's job to silence people. If it is a kook conspiracy with no factual basis, let other people point out its flaws and dismantle the conspiracy.
DeleteBad speech combated by better speech.
A plausible hypothesis but no more than that.
DeleteI'm a lot more relaxed about kooky conspiracies in a world where potus isn't liable to give them an undeserved boost whenever he feels like he isn't getting enough attention.
"We don't need to wear masks because China sucks at bio-warfare."
DeleteFirst they bio-engineered with CRIPR the DNA of a mouse with human-like lungs and THEN they got a bat-virus to jump species and infect it. They sound pretty good at bio-warfare, if you asked me... Who needs pangolins?
DeleteSo we do need masks?
DeleteOnly if they can be bio-engineered into our DNA with a CRISPR.
DeleteDamn the silicon shortage lol
Delete"we may very well see the expert-worshiping values of modern liberalism go up in a fireball of public anger."
ReplyDeleteNope, nothing will deter the libtard from their mission of the destruction of civilization.
Worth watching:
ReplyDeleteRand Paul on whether there's 'criminal culpability' regarding Dr. Fauci.
Dr. Fauci has turned out to be yet another self-serving bureaucrat. **sigh**
Certain scientists have turned out to be Dr. Frankenstein (gain-of-function research).
DeleteI'm not sure, really, that I know what good it does to know the source of the corona virus, nor why it is worth so much energy to argue about it. Is determination of the source going to change the way we treat the illness? No. Is it going to change any of the prevention measures? No. Is it going to lead to declaration of war on the source? Not unless the national stupidity gets a little bit worse than it is now. A little bit, which it may. For that reason I think it's better not to know the source. Not knowing may prevent a war.
ReplyDeleteOf course, there's Iraq, where we went to war with a country who didn't do what we went to war with them for. Bad grammar, but the point is valid.
Which brings me back to the topic. All the pundits and media mavens who promoted that ill advised war are still respected pundits and media mavens today. Even after it is acknowledged as the stupidest thing this nation has ever done, those who cheerled it paid no price monetarily, personally, socially, or in terms of position and power. Even when, as some have done, they admitted they were wrong, they paid no price for being wrong. They continue to make policy and support policy to the public as if they were paragons of perfection.
+++!
DeleteOne quibble: we do need to know what exactly China did and what was their role, to adjust our actions going forward
I would suggest, Silverfiddle, that we don't need to know so much what CHINA did as what was done generically - how this happened regardless of who did it. The las was sponsored in part by the United States and was under the auspices of the WHO.
DeleteWhy do we need "gain of function" studies? Should that type of research be stopped. How were the studies, which were engaged in by many countries, performed? Does that need to be reformed? Where it was done is a lot less important that what was done.
The finger pointing at China may or may not be accurate, but it is political, to distract from the problems created here at home by our own governing idiocy
Who would investigate "what China did" if China actually did anything? The people that falsely accused Stephen Hatfill of the 2001 anthrax letters attacks, then drove Bruce Ivins to suicide with unsubstantiated allegations and never came up with how either of them refined anthrax into a weapon without access to the equipment needed to do so even at their own lab jobs?
DeleteWe don't even have any evidence the coronavirus that causes Covid19 didn't evolve naturally like every other viral pathogen that became a pandemic.
So what other animalspecies has it jumped to besides the transgenic lab mice in the Wuhan lab?
DeleteAs an RNA-virus, SARS-COV-2 mutates rapidly. There are several strains of the coronavirus that causes Covid19, none of which emerged from gain-of-function research, all of which current vaccines are less effective against.
DeleteA virus created through gain of function research can't subsequently mutate? Who knew?
DeleteFacts not in evidence. Did it actually start with gain of function research in the first place? Why did the Obama administration ban funding GOF research in 2014? Why did the Trump administration lift said ban in 2017? Why hasn't the Biden administration reinstated said ban? Does this forest even have the right tree to bark up?
Delete"Check your premises." Starting with a conclusion doesn't seem to yield any answers.
DeleteThe ban was lifted 9 days BEFORE Trump took office.
DeleteOoops. eleven.
Deletecare to revise your premises?
Delete@ Farmer: BOOM!
DeleteThe virus has the double CGG fingerprint of a lab gain of function virus.
DeleteAlthough the double CGG is suppressed naturally, the opposite is true in laboratory work. The insertion sequence of choice is the double CGG. That’s because it is readily available and convenient, and scientists have a great deal of experience inserting it. An additional advantage of the double CGG sequence compared with the other 35 possible choices: It creates a useful beacon that permits the scientists to track the insertion in the laboratory.
Now the damning fact. It was this exact sequence that appears in CoV-2. Proponents of zoonotic origin must explain why the novel coronavirus, when it mutated or recombined, happened to pick its least favorite combination, the double CGG. Why did it replicate the choice the lab’s gain-of-function researchers would have made?
Would this revelation have come to light with Trump praising Xi Jinping as his bestie and offering up the company store trying to make a trade deal with China while praising the Chinese government's "transparency" on the coronavirus at the same time having his coronavirus task force headed by an x-ray tech?
Delete::cue X-Files theme music::
The virus would have been sequenced, yes.
DeleteWould this revelation have come to light with Trump
Deletelol!
So no, Trump put no pressure on China about gain-of-function viral research whatsoever as President or after.
Delete🤷♂️
He was supposed to know about it? Wasn't Fauci supposed to tell him?
DeleteI'd say 'experts' have a ton of 'skin in the game'...like reputations, lawsuits, etc....
ReplyDeleteGot to say the wild conjectures about COVID seem only based on LEFT or RIGHT, and that's a scary situation for the world hoping to become well together........
Except there haven't been any lawsuits and their reputations haven't been trashed.
DeleteProsecute Dick Cheney?
DeleteJez: Prosecuting the Bush-Cheney-Rummy gang has my vote!
DeleteI heard exactly that last night on news....that some are worried about reputations...why else would Fauci have come up with the covers for those emails, etc? That million he got from Israel and the other money he's made through this ugly thing isn't going to help him keep his reputation but it'll help him escape to France...except nobody in the world will be admiring him any longer.
DeleteJez and SF, you think COVID is from those Republicans? :-) WOWZA, there's a new one! GOod luck!
No z, they're not responsible for covid as far as I know. They're just a good example of poor judgement that's gone unpunished.
DeleteA "fireball." I second the motion.
ReplyDeleteIt'[s all a function of The Administrative State.
ReplyDeleteHaving the experts rule over us.
What could go wrong?