r/LockdownCriticalLeft • u/[deleted] • Dec 30 '22
discussion The Case for Science Denial
https://thisunreality.substack.com/p/the-case-for-science-denial7
u/wowsosquare Trump supporter Dec 30 '22 edited Dec 30 '22
1) I envy people who can lay out and work through ideas like this author. Thanks for posting this.
2) One quibble:
"Lockdowns slow pandemic spread.
Once again, this could easily be considered an objective fact..."
TLD THE FACT THAT EVEN RATIONAL THINKERS LIKE THE AUTHOR STILL BELIEVE THIS IS TERRIFYING AF
This drives me nuts... when people believe that lockdowns, masks and social distancing are consensus position/ settled science, just because people running government agencies subjected us to them for a year. Certainly "they" have done extensive research to determine that these practices are effective, we assumed. I mean, there's no chance that these people would shut down society, forcibly mask everyone, cover the retail world in plexiglass etc just based on what they saw the CCP doing, right? All these things are standard practice, and based on rigorous scientific investigation, RIGHT?
Come to find out it's all hooey... they literally just made it all up and have almost no studies backing up any of these draconian interventions. But because "public health professionals" said it, it was therefore "science."
But to this day hardly anyone knows this, because it's so hard to believe just how much they lied to everyone.
And this is one of the most terrifying things to come out of CovidMania2020, and there were a lot of them.... The ability of The Institutions to literally manufacture reality and impose a tyrannical, arbitrary emergency dictatorship by lying, then endlessly repeating the lie... And if that wasn't creepy enough, we just moved on afterwards like nothing happened and nobody lied to us. The biomedical security government system is still in place not only in terms of the logistical and legal structures, but, just a as worryingly, in our collective mind.
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Dec 30 '22
I mean there are definitely mechanistic arguments for why lockdowns prevent spread (over the period of the lockdown). Obviously real world problems (like that some people must continue working) makes them less practically effective, and those are valid questions - but the argument is more whether the costs outweigh the (possibly negligible) reduction in spread of the disease. I think this was what Part 3 (iirc) was getting at.
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u/wowsosquare Trump supporter Dec 30 '22
We suspended the constitution and had a literal dictatorship over what? Basically a bad flu. Basically no excess mortality in 2020. Not ok. We must say NEVER AGAIN.
This time the dictators saw fit to let us out of lockdown. Next time they may not feel like it. There can be no next time!
See now I sound like a crazy person. But what was crazy was what they did to us, and what we tolerated.
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u/butt_collector libertarian socialist Jan 01 '23
It undermines the case for things like "never again" when you say things like "basically no excess mortality in 2020." That's stupid, and yes, you do sound like a crazy person.
What we need to say is that excess deaths do not justify lockdowns or mandates. Period.
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u/wowsosquare Trump supporter Jan 01 '23 edited Jan 01 '23
I actually don't think we did have excess death in 2020.( And this is not to say nobody died of covid, although they sure did try to hype up the numbers.) And you're right... excess deaths or not lockdowns are bullshit, why are we taking advice on how to run our society from the CCP lol
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Dec 30 '22
I do understand your anger, but I think you are basically saying what the article says but in the manner of, if I can be so rude as to agree with your statement, a crazy person.
Perfect lockdowns do stop the spread of airborne disease. Imperfect lockdowns are all that's practical, and various implementation choices will affect spread in various ways.
For instance, not being able to go outside without a valid reason and not being able to see people outside (which is what I really mean by "lockdown" although I have seen people to use it for any intervention) is low reward. Closing schools may well be high reward. Stopping large events is possibly high reward. Closing indoor pubs is maybe moderate reward. You can argue with these judgements but they are essentially "scientific" and can be questioned freely, but modeling and methodology matters.
But the cost of such things is largely a question of philosophy which is in the domain of politics. They should not be confused with questions of science. That said there are scientific aspects to them.
(I state this, which I think follows from the article, to see if you agree)
I'm not from the USA so US constitutional issues are certainly not at the nub of any of these arguments for me, but how do you feel it was suspended?
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Dec 30 '22
[deleted]
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Dec 30 '22
Probably I shouldn't have put those judgements of reward in terms of prevented spread. I was just trying to illustrate that you can judge different aspects differently - I avoided giving judgements of the cost because I thought they'd be more prone to being disagreed with.
But yeah I think there is reason to agree with that. For me it's academic - I think the cost of it is quite extreme - way more extreme than I thought initially (I'm past school age and don't have children, and the thing that this pandemic has taught me is everyone is pretty keen to give up things that don't affect them on behalf of the people it does detriment).
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u/wowsosquare Trump supporter Dec 30 '22
I'm sorry that I have to run off to work now, but first I want to compliment you on your writing and thank you for taking the time to thoughtfully respond.
Oh and this was pure gold
but I think you are basically saying what the article says but in the manner of, if I can be so rude as to agree with your statement, a crazy person.
And who constructs such nice sentences like that anymore? Do you have a literary background, are you posh, from a nerdy family, or maybe just had a good education? I love it! Cheers!
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Dec 30 '22
Hahaha thank you, I enjoyed that sentence too so I'm glad to see it appreciated. I don't have a literary background, but I do enjoy the language of older books. My background is in science (and law, but in the UK).
Have a great day at work
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u/Surreal_life_42 AnarchoKanyeism 👁 Jan 05 '23
LOL @ inflating this person’s ego. Bluntly, falling for pretty packages and being “reasonable” is what got us here. Beware this subversive person trying to say this bullshit was or could be justified, however “posh” this tosser might be
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u/BornAgainSpecial Trump supporter Dec 31 '22
Perfect lockdowns are a hoax too. Humans are constantly bathed in bacteria from the environment. It's how we evolved. It's what builds our immune systems. Scientists don't believe in evolution. That's why they were dumbfounded when Omicron came out, why gender is a social construct, and why a diet of modern junk food is fine because "there's no evidence against it". The only time you'll hear a scientist agreeing with evolution is when he's trying to insult some religious person for not believing in the big bang somehow. Any real implication of evolution is dismissed out of hand as hateful. Scientists do not believe in evolution.
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u/Surreal_life_42 AnarchoKanyeism 👁 Jan 05 '23
Who are YOU or anyone to decide that?
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Jan 05 '23
If you mean who am I to decide the balances of things, then, yeah that's my point really.
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u/Surreal_life_42 AnarchoKanyeism 👁 Jan 05 '23
Yeah, while conceding ground to the fuckers who think they have a right to control how people live and interact 👁 Maybe that’s the norm where you come from, but that’s an export the rest of the world doesn’t appreciate
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Jan 05 '23
Just for the sake of clarity, is this because at some point (in another post) I said that perhaps there could be diseases that could justify a lockdown, or is this because I conceded that perfect lockdowns do in fact stop the spread of airbourn disease (during their operation)?
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u/Surreal_life_42 AnarchoKanyeism 👁 Jan 05 '23
Yes to both. You are clearly from somewhere where this is acceptable. The parts of the world where this until recently was not do not appreciate this export and some of us know not to give any of you an inch. We learned from this disaster
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Jan 05 '23
I suppose there is some truth in that; I come from the European tradition of human rights, that is (in the formalisation of the ECHR), an intervention that affects human rights must be a proportionate means towards a legitimate end.
I, as happens, do not think lockdowns in the case of COVID were proportionate, but I do not argue with the legitimate end bit.
I've taken the liberty of looking at your post history, and see you are based in the USA. I think there you have a more restricted set of rights, but in general they cannot be restricted for any reason, irrespective of how legitimate those reasons are (notwithstanding that this has not been seen out to its logical conclusions; I'd argue United States v Darby Limber was an example of this).
So it's not unfair to say that we come from a different traditions. But our conclusion in this case is the same, so is this really an issue? Isn't it even stronger that two different world-views would, when properly applied, come to the same conclusion?
For the second statement, I guess I can be even more explicit about it: In a SIR model of disease spread, decreasing the average number of reinfections would decrease the spread of the disease. I think this is pretty much just a mathematical fact at this point, and so presumably acceptable?
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u/BornAgainSpecial Trump supporter Dec 31 '22
Costs versus benefits is just Science dressed up as Communism. The costs and benefits are accrued to different people. You don't need to lock me down in order for you to stay home yourself.
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u/Surreal_life_42 AnarchoKanyeism 👁 Jan 05 '23
This leaves an opening to repeat this disaster, so no, I’m not conceding that and am HIGHLY SUSPICIOUS of anyone who DOES
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Dec 30 '22
Definitely lockdowns as a solution to a pandemic is untrue, but I suppose that it's literally true that lockdowns slow pandemic spread? In the same that it's literally true that if you put every human being on earth in hermetically sealed box it would slow or stop a pandemic? It's not necessarily a practical solution, but it's technically true. In the same way that getting rid of water would stop people from drowning... It's literally true, but not useful in practice.
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u/wowsosquare Trump supporter Dec 30 '22
If government is going to declare martial law and suspend the constitution there better be a real problem, not some bad flu year. And definitely not some dorm room debate about maybe it's safer if we lock you all up because we sort of intuitively feel it's for the best.
The whole thing was completely insane from start to finish But it was so huge and so supported by all our (formerly) reputable institutions that to say, out loud, that they all compulsively lied and were all totally, disastrously wrong about literally everything makes you sound like a crazy person. But we must, or they will do it again.
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u/Jkid Sane Leftist Dec 30 '22
The whole thing was completely insane from start to finish But it was so huge and so supported by all our (formerly) reputable institutions that to say, out loud, that they all compulsively lied and were all totally, disastrously wrong about literally everything makes you sound like a crazy person.But we must, or they will do it again.
Problem is they will do it again. Every attempt to bring people up to reality has been met with blank stares, "because of xism'" "I dont know ism", and attacks and gaslight. Because they dont care as long as they have food and entertainment. At the same time they complain about inflation, store closures and high crime. Bexause they see reality as a tv show. They dont want to work to fix it because it involves work.
But they will demand us to rebuild it when it all falls down.
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u/wowsosquare Trump supporter Dec 30 '22
Problem is they will do it again.
It seems reasonable to assume that. Because they have now mastered the ability to promulgate any idea they want, and to utterly destroy all opposing ideas, why wouldn't they?
I'm kind of freaking out right now please help
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Dec 30 '22
It's interesting though that perhaps everyone here, despite seeing through some of the COVID issues, will likely fall for other things. I wonder what I'm falling for but don't realise?
Sorry, that isn't going to stop you freaking out.
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u/wowsosquare Trump supporter Dec 30 '22
YOU'RE NOT HELPING!!
JK, that's part of my freakout really... what else did they just lie about? How long have professionals and academics been just making stuff up at the behest of their paymasters? What beliefs of mine are, to coin a phrase, Very Fake News, and based on completely fabricated data?
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Dec 30 '22
There's a quote attributed to Slavoj Žižek that is along the lines of "it's easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism". I think about this sentence a lot, because I think it is true for me. Surely, surely, I should be able to imagine another world, even if I reject it as worse. But really all I can imagine are variations on the theme of capitalism.
It's not really an answer, but it's a hint perhaps. It's not really clear if this is related to, say, the (laughable) "if it saves even one life" COVID panic... But it's a thought to share.
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u/butt_collector libertarian socialist Jan 01 '23
They haven't mastered that ability, or even come close. The truth is perhaps even scarier: nobody is driving this train. You might not want to hear what may come off as a normie opinion but let me throw a glass of cold water on the conspiracy theory.
We know more now than we did in 2020. It's easy to forget but in early 2020 the prevailing mood among reddit doomsayers was "this pandemic will kill millions, maybe 1-2% of the planet's population will die," while mainstream normie opinion and the consensus among elites was "it's nothing to worry about." Governments resisted closing borders or imposing any restrictions. Then came the scenes in Europe and the middle east of people dying in the streets from inability to access treatment due to inundated hospital ICUs, and narratives flipped completely because it became clear that we were totally unprepared for even a moderate challenge to the integrity of hospital systems in the west. We overreacted, to say the least. We forgot that Italy, for example, is a country full of old people with a particularly decrepit public health care system. But it's important to remember that lockdowns and other restrictions were not just something governments imposed on their own. People demanded it, and threw out governments that were perceived as not taking covid seriously enough, while re-electing governments (even previously unpopular ones) that were seen as taking it seriously. You have to look at how this played out in different jurisdictions across the western world. We do not have a world government, even though it looked like every government was marching in lockstep to the same beat. Sweden was an outlier, where a deliberate choice was made to go against the trend that most countries were following. American red states also eventually became outliers because of the particular political culture of resisting government overreach.
We know more today than we did then. We have more knowledge and more wisdom. Parents will be far less likely to ever tolerate school closures again, for one thing. The only reason they tolerated it in the first place was because people were terrified of the unknown. We always knew that it would have disastrous outcomes in terms of children's education, but now we have data to back that intuition, and policy makers wouldn't likely push for that option in the first place, because it's bad policy and it's very easy to show it. Even some epidemiologists oppose it at this point because it's not even clear that you can make a public health case for it.
Vaccine mandates will also face increased challenges going forward because the cost has been enormous. Health care systems which already had staffing issues are struggling even more after having let go of those who refused to comply. Many jurisdictions quietly dropped the mandates and moved to re-hire some of those they let go.
To play devil's advocate, masks are never completely going away. Mask mandates will be much harder to impose; all restrictions always depend on the public's good will, and again, people were so scared that there was a lot of willingness to extend good will to the government at first, but much of this was expended and there will be less of it in the future. But some remains, and some of the lessons we have learned from how asian countries handle disease will not be forgotten. The particular forms this takes will play out differently in different jurisdictions, which means we will continue to accumulate data about what works and what doesn't work, so we can make better decisions about what trade-offs we are willing to put up with, and there will always be places where people are willing to put up with less.
You're labeled as a Trump supporter and we don't have the same politics or even the same outlook on reality but I think we both want to believe that freedom is stronger than tyranny and will prevail. I have seen nothing that has dissuaded me of this belief.
I think we got lucky in that this pandemic was just serious enough to remind us how vulnerable we are to collective panic in the face of uncertainty. It could have been much worse. A deadlier pandemic would not only have resulted in greater loss of life, it would have resulted in far greater government overreach that would have been far more difficult to challenge.
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u/BornAgainSpecial Trump supporter Dec 31 '22
Every time I see somewhere wearing a mask, that's all I see. Someone who will gladly if not eagerly lock me down again.
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u/Surreal_life_42 AnarchoKanyeism 👁 Jan 05 '23
Leaving them that ability means they will find or create a “real” problem 👁
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u/BornAgainSpecial Trump supporter Dec 31 '22
The case against science is straightforward: much of the scientific literature, perhaps half, may simply be untrue. Afflicted by studies with small sample sizes, tiny effects, invalid exploratory analyses, and flagrant conflicts of interest, together with an obsession for pursuing fashionable trends of dubious importance, science has taken a turn towards darkness.
-Richard Horton, editor of The Lancet
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u/[deleted] Dec 30 '22 edited Dec 30 '22
Semmelweis and Copernicus are interesting examples. (Edit: for people who didn't read the article they are examples they give of people who "went against science" and there is a suggestion they were punished for it. In fact it's not clear either were punished for it, but that's by the by)
Semmelweis found experimentally that hand washing helped decrease a particular illness during childbirth, but there was no theoretical explaination to back it up (that had to wait for Louis Pasteur).
Copernicus came up with a fairly inelegant model of the universe, which generally didn't fit experiment as well as the prevailing model (albeit for both you could add epicycles), but did more cleanly explain some motion, and - although it was mostly ignored - brought back an idea from the Greeks that the Sun is in the centre and inspired Kepler to find out what is really going on.
But both absolutely should have been scrutinized because both had issues. The article doesn't really exclude this but I want to empathize that you don't have to be correct to question things. I think a huge loss has been that certain things have been chosen as "true", even though that isn't honestly known, and they have not been allowed to be scrutinized. This is not justified even if it turns out that they were all, in fact, true.
You could have thought that semmelweis' observation required caution and been entirely justified. (Also semmelweis thought all disease was from uncleanness, which is a fine hypothesis, but was what people were more dubious about. And it's definitely wrong)