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‘Science Is the Belief in the Ignorance of Experts’
Whenever I see the term “expert”, I think of Richard Feynman’s (Feynman is a brilliant Nobel Prize winner in Physics) National Science Teachers speech in 1966:
We have many studies in teaching, for example, in which people make observations, make lists, do statistics, and so on, but these do not thereby become established science, established knowledge. They are merely an imitative form of science analogous to the South Sea Islanders’ airfields–radio towers, etc., made out of wood. The islanders expect a great airplane to arrive. They even build wooden airplanes of the same shape as they see in the foreigners’ airfields around them, but strangely enough, their wood planes do not fly. The result of this pseudoscientific imitation is to produce experts, which many of you are. [But] you teachers, who are really teaching children at the bottom of the heap, can maybe doubt the experts. As a matter of fact, I can also define science another way: Science is the belief in the ignorance of experts.
The linked article talks about a tweet by Paul Graham which states:
If you think you don’t trust scientists, you’re mistaken. You trust scientists in a million different ways every time you step on a plane, or for that matter turn on your tap or open a can of beans. The fact that you’re unaware of this doesn’t mean it’s not so.
Well, no. You “trust” engineers, and all the people in the chain that built and tested the many thousands of components in the aircraft, the mental health and competence of the pilots, ATC, other pilots, the people that produced the fuel … a nearly infinite chain of trust. Or, basically, you are taking a “leap” that isn’t really “faith” because most have not thought about any of this. Nor should you really, because a life that can actually be lived is based on all sorts of unconscious assumptions.
It would be very good however if many more people were aware that we all live by faith (usually unconscious), all the time. If more people realized that, we would likely be somewhat kinder to others.
“Science” is a method, a tool. It makes hypotheses and tests them. Very few of the people in that long chain to your flight were “scientists”. They were “experts” in some sort of discipline generally blindly following the “rules” (standard procedures) of that discipline.
In this world, the “experts” are imperfect and often fail. The passengers on the 737 Max trusted the chain of “experts” and the chain failed. The list of “expert failures” is endless … in these times it often starts with the Titanic. My favorite example is Trofim Lysenko whose “expertise” combined with political ideology resulted in millions of deaths.
Do the “experts” creating and pushing the new mRNA vaccine know what they are doing? We certainly hope and pray that they do. We do know that pushing a new technology to millions of people has significant risk. In software, we say “never take the first release.” Even in cars, many people want to wait a bit on a new model because there is a good deal of evidence there will be one or more “recalls,” some of which may be significantly dangerous.
The real world is often harsher to the new technology than the theories, early testing, and politics hoped it would be.
So before you “trust the science,” be aware that what you are trusting is the bureaucratic system that decided on “Operation Warp Speed” and decided that they had to roll out the vaccine quickly. Fortunately, there were only seven people on the Challenger when it “had to launch” on the cold morning of January 28, 1986.
Interestingly, Feynman was the person that discovered the technical cause of the Challenger Disaster.
The root cause was believing in “experts” (rather than understanding their ignorance), and the application of those beliefs by a bureaucracy to the launch decision.
Published in Technology
So this methodology no doubt explains California’s insane law, that labels with a warning! virtually every product consumers use, as containing carcinogens. Thanks, I had always wondered . . .
Not a Jesuit I take it?
Of course, the following report can be considered purely anecdotal.
In a just and fair world, the report would be given at least as much credibility as our current day Mengele, Dr Fauci;
And there was this observation from Carl Sagan back in the 1990’s:
That makes a lot of sense. How can you even devise a test or a standard to determine if a psychiatric patient has been cured or not? It would be a very fuzzy standard. Reminds me of Dr. Hartley’s patients on the Bob Newheart Show.
Total crap. MiMac is working in a hospital where 100% of the ventilator patients are unvaxxed. There is nothing the vaccine can do to you that COVID can’t slam you 100 X worse. There is no indication from reliable professionals that anything like this is happening. Why do you follow these people?
Interesting that even Carl Sagan, a left-leaning political guy, could see the dangers coming from our shallow pop-culture.
Number One: I am not paid to believe what is being put out there. You may trust whomever you care to trust here – but I have the right to distrust those people if I don’t believe them. Especially if they are paid to see things from a slanted perspective.
I have spent 30 yrs researching the researchers. As an engineer, you live in a world of measurement & laws of physics. Engineers tend to trust authority – as in the world of engineering, usually the people who head the department cannot fudge much. Try substituting paper or cloth for the wire used in extension cords, and rather than turning a profit through using the cheaper product, that company would go out of business.
People who do engineering also put their heart and soul into their work, they are happy to accept whatever sound bytes the media offers them. Because they have no time to do more than that.
The people at the top spots of our agencies have been sell outs going back to the days when Monsanto “forgot” to mention formaldehyde was part of its formula. If that fact had been mentioned, there would not have been EPA approval for licensing the product for over the counter sale. One thing interesting about how our EPA works, as compared to such agencies in Scandinavia, is no one runs any gas spectography testing to see if a product like a pesticide contains what the EPA is told it does, or something else in addition. The EPA simply trusts the companies to tell the truth. Who knows how many cases of multiple sclerosis came about due to exposure to formaldehyde?
The wheels are coming off the entire game plan of COVID. Yes originally we were supposed to be locked down til mid summer of this year when “possibly” the vaxxes would be released. Trump’s warp speed changed that. Now we are seeing that the vaxxes are worthless – the people who are vaxxed are getting the variants and the side effects. Plus additionally some 45,000 fatalities having gone unreported and/or scrubbed from VAERS.
End Of Pt One
@westernchauvinist
Part Two:
Western C: You could have taken the time to watch Mark Alexander’s video in his recent post “Rise of The Variant” as the presentation by “WhatsHerFace” was rather short yet very informative. But you found the typical “I can’t stand the blouse that person wore” “Or they were too shrill’ or “They did graduate from the Ivy league school I attended” kind of excuse.
People are totally waking up about what a useless group at least 75% of our current crowd of “doctors” happen to be. Which is sad, as I started working as a nursing assistant in 1989 and for the next 15 years, the medical men and women I worked with were awe-inspiring.
Anyone at this point who has anything to do with being in a hospital and has not made a stink about how ivermectin and HCQ would have
One) prevented the patient from ever needing the hospital, if used within first 96 hrs of infection
Two) eliminated 83 to 85% of all patient deaths from COVID
Three) prevented the “Long COVID” situation
Is either a non-curious human, brain dead, or a sell out.
I am not the only person on the planet thinking this way. The good doctors at America’s Frontline Doctors think the same way. So do the Bakersfield Doctors. So does Dr Peter McCullough, Dr Malone, Dr Fleming, who was an early pioneer of mRNA vaxxes.
So does Dr Lee Merritt, whose revelation that it is a prime necessity for the world of big Pharma to keep HCQ under wraps as it would not only have made this entire vax charade unnecessary, but the chicken pox vax, measles vax, mump vax, and yearly flu jabs unnecessary.
This week two tremendously insightful articles appeared in Australia’s “The Spectator.”
Here is the first “The Strange Case Of COVID 19” https://www.spectator.com.au/2021/08/the-strange-case-of-covid-19/
Here is the second article, accompanied with graphs that defeat the “truth’ of the Au government saying the 700 plus deaths were above and beyond acceptable: https://www.spectator.com.au/2021/02/the-bizarro-world-of-coronavirus-death-stats/
Carol Joy, I say this without any animus because I find you to be a very likeable person (online, at least). Sometimes you put out really wild assertions that don’t seem to jive with anything resembling reality. I’ll reduce this one to its basic premise and ask for clarification. You are saying that the vaxes are worthless. Yet how can you dispute this elementary graph of deaths in the U.S.?
The vaccinations started right at the top of that second peak on the graph. Death rates have fallen precipitously since then (with a minor uptick in the last two weeks). How can you possibly dispute that?
The other part is “where are you getting this figure that 45,000 people have died from taking the vaccine?” There is not a single reliable news source, either on the left or on the right, that is reporting that even a few dozen people have died from the vaccines. Such a story, if it was true, would be an invaluable scoop worth tons of money for any news agency that exposes it, and yet somehow they are totally silent.
By the way, VAERS is just a reporting system for anybody who wants to report side effects or negative effects from the vaccines. It is not at all a verification that these reports are accurate or true. It’s just there to give guidance to the CDC to see if any of this is worth looking into. There are millions of hypochondriacs who will be convinced and will report that every health problem they encounter must be due to the vaccines somehow, but that is not scientific.
Just saw this on American Thinker (a lot of his opinion reactions cut out for 500 words):
August 6, 2021
Medical insanity, as described by an MD
By Matt Bettag, MD
When did the world become insane? … I don’t know and it’s driving me nuts. … I’m willing to put my name on the line. … I[‘ll] … get it over with now.…
I have been a physician for 24 years, a practicing ENT for 19 years. I have never before seen the medical establishment just stop thinking. Insanity is the new rule, and common sense cannot even be discussed.
From the beginning, 15 days to flatten the curve, I was shocked. …
Then came Fauci. He initially said social distancing didn’t work, and masks were largely ineffective. But by late March, he pronounced both masking and social distancing necessary. Weird…red flag. But what really hit me was that he went on to say people should use Tinder and Grindr at their own discretion. What? How do you socially distance that? …
I started researching the utility of masks. There were very good articles I found — one out of a respiratory center in Chicago, and another a good dental review. I bookmarked both of them. Less than a month later, the dental website was down, replaced by a text saying basically that their information is now irrelevant because of COVID. The Chicago article also had a disclaimer that previously wasn’t there saying people shouldn’t use their article politically. What? Don’t use a scientifically-derived article to make a scientifically based decision on the utility of masks? …
Next comes PCR. Let’s conveniently jack up the cycles to 40+, resulting in a 90–97% false-positive rate, then let’s start testing all elective surgery, asymptomatic exposures, and hospitalized patients. In addition, we will reimburse hospitals greatly for COVID admissions and ICU visits. Oxygen doesn’t work….
Steroids were advised against early on, …. Next, we find a few weeks later the secret drug to treat COVID: steroids. What?
HCQ, not safe. Has been used for decades worldwide with a great safety profile, but not anymore, because orange man bad. …. The same went for any other proven therapeutic, such as ivermectin and vitamin D.
…Now … we should vaccinate everyone, including those who previously had COVID, pregnant women, and small children.
What about VAERS? That’s the open record report system that the CDC has made almost unnavigable. It’s slowly crept up and showed up to 12,000 deaths coincident with the vaccine. Then dropped to 6,000, only to come back up to 10,000 and now back to 12,000. Just a little glitch from our trustworthy government. There are reports that the numbers could be ten times or more as high, and perhaps the CDC is misclassifying deaths to hide them…. If we are crazy, it will come out. If we are right, and the data show that to be the fact, then a large apology is warranted.
Let’s face it –
the mask came off[sorry, couldn’t resist] the jig was up the moment they announced that it was ok to attend protest rallies after the George Floyd death.Yeah, you can’t get much more duplicitous than that.
The latest one is that it is okay to let in hundreds of thousands of illegal aliens who have Covid and spread them around the country while the rest of us should be taking Covid precautions like wearing masks.
Oh yes they can.
Also total crap. I’m a skeptic. I don’t trust the government or its agencies anymore than you do (and, btw, I have low tolerance for reading long posts and comments, so I may not be responding to everything). But, I also find your sources to be discreditable. I’ve spent more time in hospitals than the average person and I have family in the business: two brothers-in-law (one deceased), a sister, and a nephew are doctors, one niece is a surgical ICU nurse at Cleveland Clinic (just down the hall from the COVID ward, and her father, my brother, is anti-vax, so I would have heard if it’s filling up with vaxxed COVID patients, trust me!), and her sister is an NP in private practice. I have friends (a couple) who run the labs at the local Catholic hospital and the education department there.
No one I know has gotten sick from the vaccine or ended up in the hospital with bad COVID after having been vaccinated. Not. one. single. person. And I know a lot of vaccinated people (virtually all my church friends), some of whom were hospitalized early on with serious COVID sickness.
No one I know is talking about all the COVID vaccinated people pouring into the ICUs where they work. Not. one. single. person.
If the reports of ICUs filling up with COVID vaccinated people are lacking, it’s not because it’s a conspiracy. It’s because it’s not happening.
My beloved piano teacher has lupus and is of an age to be vulnerable (she’s just recovering from cellulitis). She’s afraid to get the vaccine although, according to Dr. Trink she is the perfect candidate for it and whatever boosters are out there, because people repeat crappy information that might actually get her killed!
COVID is a Chinese communist bioweapon (that’s my conspiracy belief) causing serious sickness in many people. It’s no joke and, while I believe vaccines should be optional, I resent people discouraging my loved ones from receiving the vaccine based on unverified and likely false tweets and misinterpreted studies.
And just for good measure, a real discussion involving doctors on the ground:
https://ricochet.com/1019374/delta-a-blessing-in-disguise/comment-page-5/#comment-5668966
And, Carol, you seem to think I’m getting my marching orders from the CDC, FDA, etc. Nothing could be further from the truth. I’m basing my decisions on people in my life (or of my acquaintance) who’ve studied the matter (my biochemistry major daughter studying at Hillsdale) and who work on the ground. MiMac is an ICU doc, for example. It doesn’t get more real than that.
Interesting comment to me because my cousin who has lupus has a doctor who has convinced him the vaccine is likely to kill him.
So I do not think Covid is a Chinese virus. I think it was created by globalists, our own government agencies being fully complicit with its development. Its release as a means to initiate population control and martial law was being gamed out for at least a year before it was released. The vaccines’ financiers are major and vocal proponents of The Great Reset, economic disruption of nations to consolidate economic power to a handful of people, and population control through vaccination.
I don’t care if old people get the vaccine. I don’t care if already sterile people get the vaccine. I do care if fecund people are feared into getting the vaccine.
Evidence?
There can be conspiracies to take advantage of situations that arise independently. I don’t think the Davos crowd has the chops or skills as your average Bond villain but they are eminently capable of devising solutions that are worse than what SMERSH or Blofeld had in mind once a problem is defined.
Our idiot health officials outsourced viral research to a global rival. One-party rule means less safety and accountability ( think Chernobyl) so naturally somebody in China let the semi-weaponized bug loose—on their own country—and it went global probably within days.
Our idiot health officials still think that respiratory viruses can only be transmitted inside big wet globs and not in some more insidious low load airborne ways so we designed “containment” systems than inhibited movement of people but not the bug—kind of a neutron bomb effect that injures only people, not viruses.
And this is supposed to be a model of how a world run by enlightened technocrats will look—fiscal disaster, the shredding of constitutional government, massive social disruption and collateral deaths without putting even a small dent in the problem at hand.
Don’t give the Great Reset crowd more credit than they deserve.
Then he shouldn’t take it. But, hopefully his doctor isn’t following the advice of blue check personalities on Twitter.
What do you mean? All of that is just taking a very cynical view of information already known.
We know Fauci funded the virus research through the NIH (even after it was prohibited in the states). We have documentation of meetings between Gates and other Davos men on what happens in a massive viral outbreak. You have The Great Reset that is well documented by its proponents in the Global Economic Forum. You have quotes from Bill Gates in TedX videos claiming that global vaccination efforts can lower the population.
While you guys like to chalk up to incompetence, I am more of a believer that evil and a trend towards global power exists. Just because most things that can be ascribed to evil can be ascribed to incompetence doesn’t mean evil is nonexistent while stupidity rules the world.
The pieces fit my theory just as well as they fit Bathos’.
It doesn’t need to be a perfect conspiracy to still be a large collection of people who share a worldview.
I think underestimating the opposition is why we are where we are right now.
https://www.forbes.com/sites/brucelee/2017/02/19/bill-gates-warns-of-epidemic-that-will-kill-over-30-million-people/?sh=1e3851d9282f
How on point was that original COVID model? Off my 10 million from Gates’ prediction?
Yeah, my conspiratorial thought was the Chinese released the CCP virus on the world just in time to take out Trump, who was putting pressures on China and its economy (remember the policy Trump was putting into place in December 2019 that got disappeared due to the virus chaos?) in ways Joe Biden (or any other Democrat) never will. Joe Biden and the Deep State bureaucracy might as well have a “China first” policy. The Chinese do.
I don’t think China is smart enough to create a virus that hurts Chinese people less than it hurts other ethnicities.
No, but whoever said they were worried about hurting their own people? That’s the nice thing about being a commie — you don’t mind breaking a few (million) eggs to make an omelet.
I thought Bill Gates was a proponent of vaccinations. Are you saying that Gates is claiming that vaccinations will kill off people and lower world population? I find this hard to believe.