Re: remember covid?

On Mon, 17 Mar 2025 16:58:32 -0400, bitrex <user@example.net> wrote:

On 3/17/2025 3:10 PM, john larkin wrote:

On Mon, 17 Mar 2025 14:13:54 -0400, bitrex <user@example.net> wrote:
 

On 3/16/2025 10:26 AM, john larkin wrote:

>
https://archive.is/CQzbl
>

>
It's a click-bait title, she mostly just talks about what she wants to
talk about (seems to be catching the "I am being silenced"-bug as many
people with an audience of millions tend to) and uses weasel words like
"Some public health officials..." without actually naming names or
calling anyone specific out.
>
Likely because the evidence "we were badly misled" doesn't amount to
much and so if she puts what she wants to say too late in the op ed
nobody's going to read that far.
>
Soooo she's still an Ivy League academic. NYT is still the NYT

 
"Trust the science" actually means "Trust the scientists" which is not
at all the same thing.
 

>
Kristian G. Andersen probably regrets that one text he sent where he
vaguely supported the lab leak hypothesis, I guess it doesn't matter how
many thousands of times he later says variants of "I thought that for a
bit but realized I was being stupid" after that, conspiracy theorists
will treat that one time he said something that they like as God's truth
and evidence of a cover-up, not evidence of an academic being stupid
which does happen sometimes but isn't nearly as interesting.
>
Thinking multiple things at the same time or changing one's mind does
happen but "experts" seem to almost always be punished for that kind of
flip-flopping, unlike being a politician where saying things like "I was
a Communist, that is until I realized I hated Communism" or "I was for
the war, before I was against it" seems to be some kind of rite of
passage to the big time.
>
Perhaps it's just the optics of it looking like the flip was done
covertly rather than the kind of clearly self-serving flip-flopping
politicians tend to do out in the open, the latter's a more honest kind
of lying I guess.

In electronic design, it's useful to stay confused and change your
mind a lot, in the early design stages. Stagger around the infinite
solution space. But then you have to switch to the brutally
disciplined, make no mistakes implementation mode. Not many people are
comfortable doing both.

In electronic design, as in hard sciences like math and physics, you
eventually find out if you were right. In the soft and fuzzy studies,
you may never know.

In the case of covid, it was politically forbidden to insult the
Chinese by suggesting the lab leak idea, even though it was about
1000:1 the probable origin of the virus. Politics swamped "science."