advertisement


Coronavirus - the new strain XX

Status
Not open for further replies.
Intellectuals are always much deeper. So they think. My father-in-law fancies he's one. Painful. He's usually wrong about everything. His daughter is a Professor of Acute Medicine. I'd take her opinion over his.
 
hc25036 said:
You may not say because it isn't true (and serves as reminder why I said I wasn't going to engage any more) - oh and the last time I pounced on anything was a slip catch in a cricket match about 25 years ago.

You present a twitter thread as a good source of expert information which happens to support your narrative. I gently point out that one of the posts has a scientific misunderstanding albeit from someone with medical credentials, which I then put into context. I instantly become guilty of over-interpretation, of being thin-skinned and pouncing on stuff. Not true, not true, not true.

Just trying to help people on here to tiptoe through a mass of confusion...
Click to expand...

“My narrative” is that circumspection needs to be employed when trying to process the scientific developments being reported in real time in the media and on here, often without context or explanation. The virologist I was recommending does a good job of providing context and explanations to non-experts on matters of virology and epidemiology.

Twitter involves dialogue between many people, expert and non-expert: one wouldn’t expect it to consist only of scientifically well-grounded statements - many posts will include “scientific misunderstandings”. But out of these dialogues a lot of interesting information and ideas emerge, if you’re prepared to read them for what they are.
 
Sue Pertwee-Tyr said:
On the subject of waning protection from vaccination, even if being jabbed doesn’t mean you won’t get Delta, it might still be the case that any infection is much less likely to put you in hospital, or worse. I don’t think we have reliable figures or trends on that, yet?
Click to expand...

There are some useful statistics here (mRNA vaccines only)
https://www.medpagetoday.com/infectiousdisease/covid19vaccine/94106

The summary is that they're still very good at keeping you out of the hospital, but > 6 months since second jab, age > 65 and delta have significantly reduced that protection.
 
IanW said:
You use whatever term you want, I am looking for people to post who actually have useful content, that helps inform others, which might be termed as intellectual or expert.
Click to expand...
Please, please, let's keep "intellectuals" out of the picture. Don't want Bernard-Henri Levy or some wannabe Foucault messing with the thread even more and starting WW3. A few experts will be just fine.
 
What I’ve found from this thread is that the scientists can, sometimes, and only some of them, tell you reasonably clearly the facts of the matter, though even there they can present a contentious hypothesis as a supported fact if it suits them. You can’t trust them just because they say they are, or were, a qualified scientist.

It’s what the facts mean, mean for what to do, which is the problem. There the scientists seem to either have nothing to say, or just shout their political or moral allegiances, or make judgements which are really just a reflection of their personal attitude to risk.

So although I think science matters for understanding the implications of the epidemic, it’s only a part of what matters. Hence my claim that the English cult of experts is sad. More than sad: wrong headed, narrow minded and stupid.
 
mandryka said:
What I’ve found from this thread is that the scientists can, sometimes, and only some of them, tell you reasonably clearly the facts of the matter, though even there they can present a contentious hypothesis as a supported fact if it suits them. You can’t trust them just because they say they are, or were, a qualified scientist.

It’s what the facts mean, mean for what to do, which is the problem. There the scientists seem to either have nothing to say, or just shout their political or moral allegiances, or make judgements which are really just a reflection of their personal attitude to risk.

So although I think science matters for understanding the implications of the epidemic, it’s only a part of what matters. Hence my claim that the English cult of experts is sad. More than sad: wrong headed, narrow minded and stupid.
Click to expand...

What a load of guff - trolling again...
 
^^which English cult of experts? England has traditionally idealized the gifted amateur.
 
PsB said:
^^which English cult of experts? England has traditionally idealized the gifted amateur.
Click to expand...
Yes, maybe Gove was right when he said that people in this country have had enough of experts. When I wrote that I was thinking of things I've read by Huxley, Russell and Shaw. But that was a long time ago and Gove may have had his finger on the pulse for all I know.
 
mandryka said:
What I’ve found from this thread is that the scientists can, sometimes, and only some of them, tell you reasonably clearly the facts of the matter, though even there they can present a contentious hypothesis as a supported fact if it suits them. You can’t trust them just because they say they are, or were, a qualified scientist.

It’s what the facts mean, mean for what to do, which is the problem. There the scientists seem to either have nothing to say, or just shout their political or moral allegiances, or make judgements which are really just a reflection of their personal attitude to risk.

So although I think science matters for understanding the implications of the epidemic, it’s only a part of what matters. Hence my claim that the English cult of experts is sad. More than sad: wrong headed, narrow minded and stupid.
Click to expand...
And a strong association between expertise and use of CAPS LOCK you IDIOT WHY HAVEN’T YOU READ ALL MY POSTS.

Reflects a larger phenomenon: the emergence of scientific populism. Some scientific experts have for the first time been given a large audience and a license to abuse their peers (and the public) and they’ve absolutely lost the run of themselves. ISage an important vector.
 
Seanm said:
And a strong association between expertise and use of CAPS LOCK you IDIOT WHY HAVEN’T YOU READ ALL MY POSTS.

Reflects a larger phenomenon: the emergence of scientific populism. Some scientific experts have for the first time been given a large audience and a license to abuse their peers (and the public) and they’ve absolutely lost the run of themselves. ISage an important vector.
Click to expand...

I suspect your conclusion is not supported by statistical significance. The vast majority of 'experts' on here and in the wild have no such association that I have observed (although maybe Debs could stay away from the caps lock, she surely knows her stuff).

Experts are an absolute pain until you need one to - for instance, to pull an example out of the hat - save a few million lives. Then, wouldn't you know it, several turn up at once and line themselves up for a good shellacking by those who may or may not know better and use words like 'strong association' as if they fully understand the term in a scientific sense.
 
hc25036 said:
Experts are an absolute pain until you need one to - for instance, to pull an example out of the hat - save a few million lives..
Click to expand...

Yes this is right, the experts can make the vaccine. This is true.

And some of them can tell you things. They can explain to you whether there are undesirable variants abroad. Or whether masks inhibit spread.

And some of them may be honest and careful when they explain these things - even though they are complicated and there is much debate about them. Others are less careful and honest, they are positively dangerous in fact because they oversimplify, maybe for political reasons, and get away with it because their scientist status confers an authority on them. This is science populism.

What the experts can’t ever do is tell you if it’s right to introduce vaccine passports or compulsory vaccination, or to close the borders, or to enforce masking up by law. For that, you need another type of person, an intellectual.
 
mandryka,

That's like saying that experts can tell you that human activities have resulted in CO2 emissions that are leading toward catastrophic climate change, but they should stay clear of commenting on what we should do to mitigate the existential threat.

Joe
 
mandryka said:
Yes this is right, the experts can make the vaccine. This is true.

And some of them can tell you things. They can explain to you whether there are undesirable variants abroad. Or whether masks inhibit spread.

And some of them may be good at explaining these things - even though they are complicated and there is much debate about them. Others are less good, they are positively dangerous in fact because they oversimplify, often for political reasons, and get away with it because their scientist status confers an authority on them. This is science populism.

What the experts can’t ever do is tell you if it’s right to introduce vaccine passports or compulsory vaccination, or to close the borders, or to enforce masking up by law. For that, you need another type of person, an intellectual.
Click to expand...

They can indeed ‘make the vaccine’ which is a process (along with discovering how to make existing vaccines in a better way, developing a production process, finding out if the vaccine is safe enough to inject into humans, working out how to test the vaccines, teaching hospital staff how to test the vaccines, collecting accurate data, testing the data, writing it up accurately…) that is so complicated that I could type here for a week and only cover half of it.

Epidemiologists can indeed tell you if it’s right to do all those other things about transmission within a population in order to save the most lives. Politicians can then either take or ignore that advice, while the experts get lined up to have brickbats thrown at them by those who - and this is not a criticism - do not understand the knowledge and dedication required to be able to get the job done.
 
Last edited:
Status
Not open for further replies.


advertisement


Back
Top