Conversation

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The condescension and noble lies seem to come mostly from bureaucrats not researchers. I can’t think of any active researcher who has the “one of the elect” posture. Mostly they just seem to struggle to communicate at all with laypeople.
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This seems orthogonal. It’s great when incentives and aptitude to solve a problem line up neatly. They rarely do. My point is “do your own research” is not a general solution in either case. The world is too complex for everyone to be an expert on everything that affects them.
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And the line is rarely trotted out around highly individual conditions. The phrase is usually deployed alongside crackpot theories of shared problems, advanced where trust has eroded. “They lied about masks so vaccines contain 5G chips” type leaps.
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I get frustrated with the 5G chip style crackpot theories too. But, they have a point that the bureaucrats lied about masks. If I had only trusted, say, the WHO official guidelines, I would have done much worse than I did following individual aerosol researchers on Twitter.
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I think the smart thing to do, if you’re in a low-trust world and not able to do your own research, is to follow “common sense” as best you can. You’ll be wrong a lot, but just at the rate sane humans are wrong, without the added pathologies of cultishness & submission.
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