Does this apply to all the government pushed Covid info that has since been proven false?

What info are you referring to?

The vaccines and lockdowns weren't quite as effective as we had hoped, nor quite as necessary as we had initially feared, so it must then follow that the whole thing is a conspiracy.

That would be his implication, if I had to take a guess.

Finally tonight, Jesus

Weigh your world with a good measure of solid logic. This might reduce the amount of time you take to find out if you're going to be wasting your time or not.

Are you really worried about the clouds? Find old literature. Check the library, or online, you'll find well written material that may broaden your scope of understanding of the English language as well as natural phenomena.

Literature may also help you understand what philosophy should be used for.

Being creative? Dive in. Delve hard. But don't drag others down with your imagination. You cause suffering, which is pretty low brow. You might call it moronic behavior.

Edit: what I mean to say is, your toast might look neat, but any belief put upon the pattern created by your toaster, would be time poorly spent. As creative as you are, it's toast, not a message from Mary.

Jumping to conclusions a bit? I’m not claiming conspiracy. Just that there was a whole lot of unsettled science - and science - can always be reasonably examined. The shut down of reasoned debate is always troubling

seems like basic logical deduction to me.

do viruses spread = yes they do. are people dying from covid = yes they are. do quarantines prevent ppl from spreading contagious viruses = yes they do.

conclusion, not spreading the virus through quarantines probably did help prevent many ppl from dying. especially those with compromised immune systems.

lol amazing

That Bertrand Russell guy had some good thoughts on accepting unfalsifiable claims.

Theres also a good psychological concept known as motivated perception/reasoning.

Being aware of these ideas may help avoid accepting nonsense without being too close minded.

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edit: have very high standards and filter everything through it equally while being aware of ur biases and what you want to be true.

>That Bertrand Russell guy had some good thoughts on accepting unfalsifiable claims.

Please tell me he said not to?

>Take homeopathy, for example. Is it reasonable to focus only on what scientists have to say? Shouldn’t we give at least as much weight to the testimony of the many people who claim to have benefitted from homeopathic treatment?

Yes it is. No we should not.

He had some rather famous thoughts on the subject.

Oh he's the teapot guy! Of course!

Not quite as effective is very different from "proven false" though so "you'd" be moving goalposts.

Things aren't always what they seem my friend!

They are exactly how they seem in regards to this though.

You're not making an argument though. If you'd like to debate you need to be saying something beyond "Waaah there's no debate going on! Waaaah"

Its not perfect

But an important thought process to understand reasonable claims.

Hey im not gonna say 'there cannot be a teapot in space' or 'there are no teapots out there'... But a reasomable skeptical mind is not gonna accept that claim till its demonstrated

I'm not even asking that it be demonstrated just that it be demonstrated to be possible. That there be a coherent world history that could have created the situation. Perhaps there's an alien teapot out there in orbit but I think there is strong evidence to support the idea that a human teapot cannot be out there.

In toast we trust :p

I can't speak on behalf of this particular person, but the point I'm making is that, most of the covid naysayers have been leaning on the fact that they were right about a thing or two (for all the wrong reasons, of course) to act vindictive and push their agenda, in standard bad faith-fueled conspiracy theorist fashion.

I agree with you. I put you in quotation marks to try and indicate I wasn't really directing my comment at you necessarily.

All good, I thought as much - but figured I'd clarify just be to be sure.

I indeed did jump to conclusions and may have ended up misconstruing you, as a result. I did say that it was a guess, though.

If that is the case, feel free to clarify your side of the argument.

Correct most bad claims like a flying teapot actually have strong evidence against them as well. But the point is meant to harp on unfalsifiable claims.

The problem is that you cannot demonstrate an invisible physics defying teapot is not out there ... its unfalsifiable. You cannot use physics to disprove it... my claims is that it defies physics... etc.

We have extreme amounts if rock solid actual empirical evidence we do not live in a firmament... or flying winged horses... or raising people from the dead... etc is not even reasonably possible... But the problem is unfalsifiable claims. Example I claim physics was different back then... or this horse transcended physics... or the person raising people from the dead could transcend reality. They use some sort of special pleading, I cannot ever prove impossible, and its not even reasonable to expect anyone to debunk these ideas... The only reasonable null hypothesis is non acceptance...

Correct i am not just agnostic towards flying teapots in orbit around earth... I actively have evidence against it, and have knowledge towards its improbability. But the idea is more about staying skeptical and how trivially and useless unfalsifiable, supernatural, or magical claims are. That said... if you can prove em.... go ahead but a massive burden is on you.

edit: While the teapot isn't completely unfalsifiable... and you can talk about levels of unfalsifiability. The burden of proof, a null hypothesis, and skepticism towards wild claims is whats important.

My side is that anyone that questioning the government/media line was ridiculed instead of examining the facts. From calling lab leak hypothesis racist to labeling the questioning of mask usage as science heretics. One of the biggest was denying natural immunity as equal/superior to vaccination. I was vaccinated. But I value real science that allows discussion instead of some quasi religious following of kneejerk “science edicts” by people who won’t allow medical discussion/observations of people in the medical field. Whatever happened to - it’s ok to get a 2nd opinion?

Are quarantines effective when there's people nit following guidelines? Not as much.

People who want evidence, watch the covid numbers rise and fall in places as mask mandates were lifted and reinstated.

There's no way to show evidence that can convince folks who are already choosing to ignore them for the sake of what they want to see..

I absolutely agree that many folks were far too militant about this, but to be fair, we were living through (and perhaps still are) a potential existential crisis, and most of the folks on the other side ranged from highly irresponsible to batshit insane.

In regards to the lab leak hypothesis, I'm no expert, but based on my personal research, it does seem to have way more merit than the mainstream opinion would lead you to believe, but at the time, investigating it wasn't as important as handling the crisis itself.

As for natural immunity, yes, it turned out to be more effective in most ways, but it obviously poses a much higher risk. Also, taking the vaccine in addition to natural immunity proved to be the best option, so it's a very poor excuse for rallying against the vaccine.

I agree with your overall point in regards to the value of free speech, but the devil is in the details.

Where there's smoke there's fire (i.e. many people saying the same thing needs to be explained). Arguments like "surely that many people can't be wrong" or "they came to their conclusions mostly independently" are often implied but not stated. To refute those, learning about the phenomenon of information cascades is very helpful; it explains how large fractions of the population can end up believing something based on very little evidence.

The tl;dr is that if, for a particular decision, only the decision is visible and not the detailed reasoning/evidence/information, and a large majority values "social proof" or conformity more than their private information, then their private information doesn't get incorporated into the public set of information, so only the very early people who decide first get to define that public set. It's a very "sticky" process. For example, consider people in a crowd deciding whether to panic: One or two people possibly saw something concerning and screamed or ran; then, later people react less to the actual seen thing (or lack of it), and more to the number of other people reacting or not reacting. The early or closest people get to set the "tone" - if there's no reaction from others, you infer it was not worth panicking after all, and don't join, strengthening that impression; if there is, you infer it was, and join in. That can easily end up causing panics out of nowhere, or not causing panics when you'd expect them.

Once you know this, it's easy to see how millions of people can be wrong, and how the "wisdom of crowds" fails to work in such cases. Then, however, you also need to make sure the scientists themselves don't suffer from an information cascade, and they usually do - they didn't all arrive at their opinions independently from scratch. New information being available and undoing a wrong cascade partially explains Kuhn's paradigm shifts. Even in the hard sciences, the social environment can become so bad that scientists conform to fashions when they shouldn't, for no good reason - it's why plate tectonics took so long to dislodge earlier shittier theories despite the strong evidence, for example.

So there's no real way to tell which ideas like homeopathy do or don't work based solely on judging their disparity in popularity among different crowds (at least not without risking being fooled that way); you have to reason about them, at least a little bit. Or trust that experts will usually get it right regardless, which is reasonable, but not foolproof.

My point all along is discussion is important, especially with anything science based. The scientific method requires it. The specifics about Covid aren’t as important as the squashing of debate.

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>it's why plate tectonics took so long to dislodge earlier shittier theories despite the strong evidence, for example.

I love it when people argue against the eventual correctness of science by citing a time science stopped being wrong and started being correct.

Never mind they never have an alternative to scientific inquiry. Yes it's flawed but it's the least flawed and most effective avenue of investigation. Wait did I say "love"? I mean "loath".

I have no issue with scientific inquiry, and if you carefully read my comment you'll notice most of the problem is with the word "eventual" here. Sometimes you can outperform "science" by following scientific principles instead of looking at what groups of scientists say; nullius in verba, after all. Also, Lysenkoism, if you want a citation of the opposite. Sure, that wasn't science but state power, but where in the world does science operate without state power influencing it?

Where did you live that “lockdowns” were in place?

Science never promised to be correct now it's just more correct than any other method of determining fact.

> Sometimes you can outperform "science" by following scientific principles instead of looking at what groups of scientists say

And sometimes using a magic 8 ball to guide your life will work out.

Or, instead of going by what scientists say, which is dumb, you go by what they can prove and what evidence they provide.

>information cascades

I think this term and concept will be very useful to me. Thanks for sharing!

Finally! Proof!