They say the devils greatest trick was making humanity believe he didn’t exists.
And advertisers greatest trick is making you think that ads don’t work on you.
We like to think we are above it all (I know I do) but why do I drink one brand of vodka as opposed to another. Objectively they are all identical. Clearly at some point some piece of branding breached my defences, you know?
That's beside the point, I think. What's the dream?
Yes, I might prefer pepsi to coca cola or vice versa and maybe that's a product of marketing, but both are just drinks to me. Just another product. Which I might buy once in a while, but it's really got nothing to do with my dreams.
It's pretty simple for me, him and the people he surrounds himself with create tech and don't force anyone to use it. I suspect anyone who dislikes Musk is someone who has a general disdain for everyone on top.
I don't expect perfection from Musk, but it's easy to imagine he does most everything with good intentions, or at least no malice.
I'm a fan of anyone willing to go broke for what they believe in though and I do recognize his social influence is so strong that it would be very difficult for any human to handle that without getting a god complex.
He's both, which seems an inevitability these days. If enough people glorify someone, a countermovement emerges inevitably.
The reverse, more worryingly, is also sometimes true.
I'm in the "hero" camp, yet I still made that comment about neuralink. I would probably be more shrill in my concerns if Zuck was doing neuralink. But ultimately, I don't think the individual matters much. The creepiness of social media ads and recommendations systems is mostly because of what those platforms are, not the individual publicly leading them.
The current PR strategy is to be relatable and give people some comfort, or something cool, something that entices them. And do the shady stuff in a way they least perceive it.
Everything vaccine/ Covid related I get from the BMJ. Which seem more reputable and data-driven than most, and also more sceptical of the beliefs that the average ‘trust the science’ social media advocate takes as being gospel.
I’d also recommend Dr Malcolm Kendrick and Dr Sebastien Rushworth, in this vein also FWIW.
But what do I know? I’m just another stranger on the Internet.
Well after doing as much research and asking questions to the best of my uneducated ability. I decided to go ahead and get my first shot today. So I'm now on team Pfizer, hopefully I made the right decision and if not well it is what it is.
Which is a great shame as I found the article itself to be very balanced and well written.
But just as Scientism has become a religion, so has anti-expertise (whether legitimate or not) become a countervailing, and as you say, equally as dangerous movement.
Dude, this is not a balanced take on the situation. It is an appeal to emotion dressed in only the thinnest trappings of reason.
> Over the past year, a fearful public has acquiesced to an extraordinary extension of expert jurisdiction over every domain of life. A pattern of “government by emergency” has become prominent, in which resistance to such incursions are characterised as “anti-science”.
That's his conclusion. The premise going in, that a corruption of science is being used to drive political ends appears a reasonable initial line of reasoning. I can differ in where I take the conclusion but agree about this initial premise. Johnson wants economic outcomes which drive him to claim science backed policy when the science does not actually support what he is doing in the UK (for instance) and I do think a perpetuated economic and health crisis is being used to achieve political goals in a lot of ways.
Enabling legislation is being rushed through parliaments in a lot of places to post hoc legitimate a form of rule by ministerial decree.
This article appears to be the work of an author who has been preoccupied with his thesis for too long. Having noticed some flaws and studied them, all he can see now is corruption.
Meanwhile, in the real world, science and technology has, in little more than a year and mostly apolitically, developed several different vaccines against covid-sars-2, tested them, and we are in the process of vaccinating the world's population. People are getting vaccinated, not because they are being forced to, but because they want to. I strongly suspect that, over the next year, a preponderance of those who are currently hesitant will quietly, and individually, choose to be vaccinated. The biggest problems right now are in delivering doses to where they are most needed, and that is a geopolitical problem that has nothing to do with the allegedly corrupt and authoritarian nature of science.
If we are all going to hell in a handbasket, it is not because science has become corrupt.
Overall I agree. But the underlying pressure not to publish negative results, the commercialisation of publication, the publish or perish retrace has got worse.
The politicisation of science has also got markedly worse. Az got lambasted by sectoral interests, promoting pfizer and modena. Not that mRNA isn't amazing, but the sheer amount of crap decision making around Az is telling.
The fuckup around aerosol dispersion is one room of science and disease theory disrespecting the specialists in another room. The work on aerosols was compelling good science months before the WHO backtracked and accepted it (this is a QuT specialist research area so its a story I know from Australia where I live. Prof Lidia Morowska's and others work getting the reconsideration of aerosol risk took a lot of pushing.)
AGW antoscientism was weaponised by big oil. Anti nuke fever has added metric tonnes of cost to any rational discussions of nuclear power and green energy.
Meanwhile, antibiotic use is rampant. We know the science here. We know what's coming.
