This article is interpreting events in a way that casts a revealing shadow. There is a subtle and difficult concept - it is a terrible idea to force people to behave in line with the best available evidence.
In this era, it is hard to point that out without mentioning COVID so, y'know. COVID. But it has been true for long before that and it'll be true after the COVID response is forgotten.
People should be allowed to behave in ways that are inconsistent with the best available scientific knowledge. Otherwise, ironically, misconceptions will persist more readily.
> force people to behave in line with the best available evidence.
I think this… really depends on the behavior.
I think, pretty much universally we should never force someone to pretend their beliefs conform to such evidence.
But, in certain circumstances, I think it’s absolutely appropriate to force people to conform to our understanding of the world.
Consider exaggerating this principle to an extreme degree (to demonstrate that, at least there exists a line where we should force people to conform). Let’s suppose we say it’s illegal to stab a person, because according to our understanding of biology, stabbings make it much more likely that the victim is seriously injured or dies. Suppose there is a person that does not believe stabbing causes injuries. We *should not* force them to change their beliefs. We should not force them to hide their beliefs, or to lie about their beliefs. They should be allowed to openly expesss their views—contrary as they are to our current knowledge.
But we should force them not to stab people. We absolutely should force their actions to match our understanding of the world.
To take it to a more plausible scenario, imagine someone has an extremely communicable and terminal disease. All our scientific understanding says that, if they deliberately cough in someone’s face, the victim is likely to be harmed or killed. This infected person does not believe in this science. It’s okay that they don’t believe in the science. It’s fine for them to argue that the science is wrong. It should still be illegal for them to deliberately cough in someone’s face if they know they are currently infected.
Well yeah, obviously for violent and threatening acts there is an exception. Which, I cheerfully point out, was never really a factor in the COVID policies which failed to prevent anyone I know from catching COVID. I think by this stage that literal - everyone I know caught it eventually with maybe 1 exception. So coughing or not coughing in someone's face has not actually made much of a difference RE catching the thing.
And it is interesting to note that the actual principle in the case you raise is that it should be illegal to do anything in someone else's personal space that they don't consent to, which has nothing to do with the state of science.
Here's hoping that someday you aren't so tired that you're mentally out of it and someone doesn't have to force you to not cross the street while cars are driving.
That implies that best scientific knowledge may be faulty or even wrong. And in terms of scientism, this is heresy, or "science denial". In the era of Rationalism (TM), if something is not done in the best current knowledge of this moment, in the most efficient way, allocating all available resources for it, you will inevitably be accused of literally murdering people. Even if the next moment it turns out that knowledge was wrong and following it actually led to the actual deaths of people. The ones that followed the BASK are absolved, since they were pure of heart, but those who dissented from BASK, even if post-factum they were proven right objectively, are condemned, since they did it Without Evidence, impurely, and that's the capital sin.
I think this is a consequence of mythologizing the scientific process as being purely following empirical evidence and being moved just by gathering evidence and explaining it in the most convincing form, and whatever the current best one is, must be followed as if it were the truth.
I don't see how that follows at all. Academic arguments about the structure of the heavens are irrelevancies except to the people in the argument (and those threatened by it). Sure, absolutely: you don't censor opinions about astronomy just because they seem "probably wrong" or demand blind adherence to the best available theory. You do the science, because sometimes scientists are wrong.
But pandemic advice isn't about doing good science, it's about risk management. If your goal is to keep as many people alive as possible, you bet on the consensus science because it's probably right. And it was.
The scientific method is the only method of enquiry that is valid if you are doing science. In science, skepticism of every theory, new or old, is expected, encouraged and valued, because, according to the scientific method, every theory is potentially falsifiable.
Skepticism and consensus are conflicting concepts. Consensus has no place in science as method of determining truth. You cannot form a scientific conclusion based on socially or politically manufactured consent.
Never has this been more clearly demonstrated than during and after the recent Coronavirus panic. Facts were ignored, or even suppressed, "settled science" and "scientific consensus" were used as weapons to silence dissenters, by trashing their reputations, or threatening their jobs.
We are living in an age of Cargo Cult Science. Richard Feynman must be rolling in his grave.
Meh. Distancing works. Masks work. Vaccines work. Hydroxychloroquine doesn't work. Herd immunity never happened. Seems from my perspective that "science" did its job pretty well. Were individuals wrong about stuff? Yup, happens all the time. But I don't see any lack of understanding in hindsight.
You seem to be making an argument about public policy, not science. And I refer to the comment to which you replied: different things, with different goals.
> you bet on the consensus science because it's probably right. And it was.
Was it though? As I am seeing now, some early policies were flat out murderous (such as hosting COVID patients together with healthy people in nursing homes), some were practically useless mortality wise (like lockdowns) and some are very minimally useful or not useful at all (like mask mandates and mass-firing unvaccinated people). Some were flat out fraud (like claims that consensus existed about COVID origins). For some, I understand, the jury is still out (like, how efficient exactly are the vaccines, compared to natural immunity). So I am not sure which part "it was" it is referring too, and pretty sure there were a lot of losing bets made in those years.
Many of those policies didn't follow any science. And a bunch of them not working well is likely due to conflicting talking points from various of the powers that be.
> some were practically useless mortality wise
If any of the advice decreased the rate of infection spread they were likely to decrease mortality through the simple effect of making work easier for health care workers.
Actual lockdowns worked for a long time in China, as well as travel lockdowns in countries such as Australia and New Zealand.
Masking works. Mandates don't work if huge chunks of the population don't follow them (i.e., if they aren't actually "mandates").
> Average COVID-19 mortality per million was 288.54 in countries without face mask policies and 48.40 in countries with face mask policies. In no mask countries, adjusted average daily increase was 0.1553 − 0.0017 X (days since the first case) log deaths per million, compared with 0.0900 − 0.0009 X (days since the first case) log deaths per million in the countries with a mandate. A total of 60 days into the pandemic, countries without face mask mandates had an average daily increase of 0.0533 deaths per million, compared with the average daily increase of 0.0360 deaths per million for countries with face mask mandates.
> Twenty one articles were identified that analysed ecological data to assess the protective effect of policies mandating community mask wearing. All studies reported SARS-CoV-2 benefits in terms of reductions in either the incidence, hospitalization, or mortality, or a combination of these outcomes. Few studies assessed compliance to mask wearing policies or controlled for the possible influence of other preventive measures such as hand hygiene and physical distancing, and information about compliance to these policies was lacking.
> Many of those policies didn't follow any science. And a bunch of them not working well is likely due to conflicting talking points from various of the powers that be.
Virtually all of them were sold by "trust the Experts" crowd, and supported and promoted by people that literally declared "I am the Science". We've got as close to experto-cracy as we could be without abandoning the democracy completely. So telling "this wasn't true science" has a large whiff of "true socialism has never been tried". I'd say we tried as much as we, as a society, could possibly do. If that didn't work, then the problem is not that we need more experts and have to trust them harder.
I have never heard any medical expert say that contagious patients should be kept in nursing homes.
There was a lot of cross-communication during the early days as politicians made statements that contradicted the CDC and other organizations, or were based on expensive interventions not available to the regular patient (such as the intra-bronchial tube UV light treatment promoted early on by Trump).
And yes, sometimes those organizational figureheads said stupid things (e.g. no evidence that masks are a good idea for healthy people, back in the era of the mask shortage, instead of legally mandating that masks be reserved for medical personnel) that were rightfully contradicted by other experts.
Social distancing and masking were both good ideas from the start, based on prior scientific knowledge.
> said stupid things (e.g. no evidence that masks are a good idea for healthy people, back in the era of the mask shortage
That wasn't "stupid", that was a cynical lie. I.e. if you believe masks worked, that would be a murderous lie, designed to sacrifice "less important" people to the advantage of "more important" ones. As I remember, it was admitted as such (a deliberate lie), though I remain unconvinced it actually had any effect at all in reality.
The trial was more to do with precedence and academics though. Galileo was only punished in the 2nd trial because he had broken an order given to him in the first trial.
The corrections and withdrawals of work were the right of the Roman Inquisition which had oversight over the Vatican's academic publishing process. They were a publisher in their own right, and if they granted an Imprimatur for a book, it would be treated as if they had supported it as truth.
Hence, Copernicus had to be corrected to be "hypothetical" in 1615, so that it would accurately represent the truth known at the time.
Galileo had managed to get his Imprimatur on his Dialogue without the proper oversight it should have had. He arranged it so it was checked page by page by his Nuncio who didn't have the right competencies. When the Inquisition asked the Sacred Master of the Palace if they had indeed granted their Imprimatur, they hadn't, and it was an embarrassment for them.
What about those who deny "HIV causing AIDS", and don't take their medications?
I guess it's really about people. And if the people in charge have your best interests at heart.
With COVID, I feel like it was a bunch of technocrats, that had no "human touch".
As for "heliocentric / geocentric" - didn't that all become irrelevant once we've learned there's no "ether"?
All models are equally valid/invalid.
Or perhaps I'm missing something.
The problem with communicable diseases is that "the people in charge" are both people at various levels trying to impose or convince people to act in certain ways, as well as the individuals who are literally walking around infectious, or with disregard to whether or not they and those they interact with are infectious.
> With COVID, I feel like it was a bunch of technocrats, that had no "human touch".
No one speaking ex cathedra to a populous has a human touch that will speak to everyone they're speaking to. I once went to a personality theory conference and enjoyed myself, but the endnote speaker gave a talk where he mentioned the need for love (or something in that vein using the word "love"), and I immediately felt alienated from the entire event.
> What about those who deny "HIV causing AIDS", and don't take their medications?
You may consider that for the argument "current consensus is not always true and should not be enforced as if it were always true" the argument "but what about this one case where it was true" is not a counter-argument.
It became irrelevant when experiments were able to detect a rotating reference frame through precise tests of Newton's laws. I'm thinking of the Coriolis force and Foucault's pendulum as examples.
I don't think this is the right conclusion. It's more: people with no expertise and hidden agendas should be forced to behave in line with the best available evidence unless there are no other recourses for them. People with expertise, using the standards of high-quality data gathering and analysis, should be exploring alternative hypotheses. Galileo, Kepler, Newton et. al. all fell in the latter camp. COVID denial and flat earthism is an example of the former.
This really just boils down to saying: there is a rigorous evidence-based standard for updating our best available knowledge, and people who don't know how to adhere to that standard should be disqualified from recommending deviation (they are of course welcome to believe and do unto themselves as they wish, they just shouldn't be allowed from promoting it unless they have solid evidence for their claims).
In this era, it is hard to point that out without mentioning COVID so, y'know. COVID. But it has been true for long before that and it'll be true after the COVID response is forgotten.
People should be allowed to behave in ways that are inconsistent with the best available scientific knowledge. Otherwise, ironically, misconceptions will persist more readily.