3 hours ago, HiFlyer said:

What exactly is the criteria for a scientist with an "agenda", beyond being in disagreement with them?

There is a book written some time ago called 'The Merchants of Doubt'. 

Merchants of Doubt: How a Handful of Scientists Obscured the Truth on Issues from Tobacco Smoke to Global Warming is a 2010 non-fiction book by American historians of science Naomi Oreskes and Erik M. Conway

It's a good book and an easy read.  I suggest it to anybody interested in why there is opposition to science that some people would like to quash.

Noel

 

 

7 minutes ago, birdguy said:

Merchants of Doubt:

Hmmmmmmm..... In actuality, that book and the documentary that followed argued about how people/corporations with agendas introduce junk science to cast doubts on actual science that reaches conclusions they disagree with. Essentially how corporations and politicians and their audiences use that junk science to discredit actual science.....

Like whats happening today.

17 minutes ago, dave2013 said:

Uh oh, you questioned the climate change dogma.  

How dare you!  How dare you!

Dave

 

The book in question actually supported the climate change science. It was about how those with agendas in business and politics that were opposed to that science brought in junk science practitioners to create false equivalence, confusion, doubt as to the actual science.

The way that works of course, is that when the vast majority of reputable scientists call such people out, they are then labeled as part of the nebulous, evidence-free "global conspiracy" and round and round we go.

As an aside, I was raised around an awful lot of conspiracy theories as a kid. Eventually, I began asking to see the evidence that supported the existence of these conspiracies, whereupon the most common answers were along the lines of "Everyone knows" or "Just open your eyes" or "It's common sense".

Occasionally, I would be attacked for the "book learning" "written by the man" that blinded me to the truth.

Again, I would respectfully ask for the alternative sources of apparently superior information. Occasionally I was told that kids like me would (unfortunately) have to be killed "Come the revolution".

😕

So, yeah........ I kinda ended up with a pretty negative impression of conspiracy theories that hang out there with zero evidence, or evidence that needs labyrinthine thought-pretzels and tons of credulity to swallow......

Edited May 17, 20206 yr by HiFlyer

119 pages and ...

120 pages actually and prompts me to tell tis story.

My Dad ran away from home when he was 14.  A few years later after several adventures he wound up in Northern California working on the Klamath River highway.  That winter when the highway work stopped he teamed up with a gold miner and the panned a section of Indian Creek just north of a town called Happy Camp.  They didn't get a lot of gold but he took my brother and I camping up there one summer and taught us how to pan for gold.

You shovel down to the bedrock in a stream where the riffles are.  Scoop up a shovel full of sand and gravel and dump it in the gold pan.  Then swish it around in the water washing out the sand and gravel.  The gold being heavier than anything else settles at the bottom of the pan.  We never found any but that's how it works.

This thread is what's shoveled from the bottom of the stream.  A lot of sand and gravel and a few gold nuggets.  It's up to you sift out the gold.  It's here.

Noel

I am reminded of the patient whose doctor told him that he had a terminal disease and had two months to live. On the sixty first day, having woken up quite alive, he insisted that the diagnosis was completely untrue and the doctor was a fraud.

24 minutes ago, dave2013 said:

That's all you got?

So someone questions something that you believe and they're a conspiracy theorist.

OK, you got me.  Now where did I put my tin foil hat?

Sorry, I was not trying to be offensive, and if you've taken it that way, I apologize.

However, thus far, throughout the thread, you've repeatedly referenced the available information in such a way as to cast doubt or mistrust in data used to justify the current lockdown policies.

To date, few or none of your arguments, that I'm aware of, have survived close scrutiny, and factual support seems lacking.

Throughout, there have been both direct and oblique inferences toward the idea of the covid data being deliberately distorted for presumably ill-intentioned agendas, with no evidence presented to support that narrative behind the anecdotal/personal.

Which leaves not much meat to chew on, until you can provide something that can actually be verified/tested/confirmed.

Until then, there are only a few categories under which to place some of your statements, the most prominent being "unsubstantiated" and/or "conspiracy".

That does not mean I'm personally calling anyone any sort of tin-hat conspiracy theorist. What I am saying is that your ongoing narrative regarding the situation, almost of necessity requires the existence of an unproven conspiracy, and as I said, I'm not fond of those. At all.

 

40 minutes ago, HiFlyer said:

Sorry, I was not trying to be offensive, and if you've taken it that way, I apologize.

However, thus far, throughout the thread, you've repeatedly referenced the available information in such a way as to cast doubt or mistrust in data used to justify the current lockdown policies.

To date, few or none of your arguments, that I'm aware of, have survived close scrutiny, and factual support seems lacking.

Throughout, there have been both direct and oblique inferences toward the idea of the covid data being deliberately distorted for presumably ill-intentioned agendas, with no evidence presented to support that narrative behind the anecdotal/personal.

Which leaves not much meat to chew on, until you can provide something that can actually be verified/tested/confirmed.

Until then, there are only a few categories under which to place some of your statements, the most prominent being "unsubstantiated" and/or "conspiracy".

That does not mean I'm personally calling anyone any sort of tin-hat conspiracy theorist. What I am saying is that your ongoing narrative regarding the situation, almost of necessity requires the existence of an unproven conspiracy, and as I said, I'm not fond of those. At all.

 

No need to apologize.  I don't get offended easily.  But thank you anyway.

I've gotten my information from the CDC website, Wikipedia, various articles, and videos of doctors.  I've looked up the doctors to verify that they are who they say they are.

I don't believe that Covid-19 is a conspiracy.  It is a highly infectious disease that can kill people.

I'm critical of what I consider to be, based on what I've seen and read, an overreaction to the virus on the part of the media, govt., and the public.  Specifically, the extended shutdowns and closings and the hyped up lethality of the virus.  The initial overreaction was justified, but enough data has come in now which indicates that the extreme measures being taken in large part are not necessary, with the exception of a few high population density areas like NYC.

I just watched an interview today with a doctor from Stanford University who stated that the mortality rate is much lower than previously believed, closer to that of the flu he said.  He also said that isolating everyone is actually making things worse as few people are developing antibodies to the virus which precludes developing herd immunity. Further, he said that thousands of people are dying of other diseases such as cancer because medical procedures are being deferred in order to focus on Covid-19.  I won't go into the damage to the economy, an issue which I have belabored multiple times already.

Other doctors have said similar things.

Lastly, we should be focused on protecting the elderly and sick who are the most vulnerable to this disease.  Especially the nursing homes where many of the deaths have occurred.  It is a true shame that some States have failed to adequately do that.

Dave

 

Edited May 17, 20206 yr by dave2013

4 hours ago, dave2013 said:

I just watched an interview today with a doctor from Stanford University who stated that the mortality rate is much lower than previously believed, closer to that of the flu he said.  He also said that isolating everyone is actually making things worse as few people are developing antibodies to the virus which precludes developing herd immunity. Further, he said that thousands of people are dying of other diseases such as cancer because medical procedures are being deferred in order to focus on Covid-19.  I won't go into the damage to the economy, an issue which I have belabored multiple times already.

And this where we keep running into difficulties. There was a Stanford doctor (Jay Bhattacharya) who did say something along those lines on Fox news, but the study he authored immediately came under scrutiny and attack from the wider medical community, not to mention some messy shenanigans by his wife.....

Another study, by John Ioannidis at Stanford, a normally very respected authority, also landed in hot water, essentially accused of being surprisingly sloppy and using bad methods.

What keeps happening with your examples, and probably here as well, I suspect, is that almost inevitably, others with more background knowledge will come along to point out exactly what went wrong. At that point, we will all continue, until the next disputed study is presented.

As a laymen I'm thus presented with a choice between thousands of reputable scientists worldwide saying essentially variations of the same thing, or following a relatively miniscule number of outliers to the general consensus who present ideas disagreed with our outright disputed as bad science by their peers.

Honestly, that's really not much of a choice for me, nor I suspect, most people.

Now the economy, on the other hand, is a whole separate issue, which I suspect has more to do with people's backgrounds, upbringing, political affiliations, and a whole host of other variables that makes it nearly immune to rational/coherent debate.

Butter and Parkay, essentially.

My personal feeling is that we are indeed going to rush to reopen, pushed by impatience and business/political interests, just as in 1918, and will end up with similar results, IE a bigger deadlier, costlier and more tragic mess than it needed to be if the human race was rational.

Edited May 17, 20206 yr by HiFlyer

Interesting article in the NYT this morning.  I read it on my iPhone because I can't get past the paywall on Google News.

In a nut hell I came away with two interesting points.  Who gets to say it's over?  And when is it over?  When there are no more cases or when the people decide enough is enough and this is just something we have to live (and die) with?

Noel

Alan posted a good writeup a page ago from germany about data that can define when that is. In a nut hell? the R0 will tell you. Did you read it? The trump administration also put out a reopening guideline that defines the data requirements to step through stages of reopening. In a nut shell it requires declining cases over time. Do any of the states reopening meet the criteria?

Edited May 17, 20206 yr by KevinAu

If you notice your posts are missing....take the hint and keep politics, political news sites, etc out of your posts!

35 minutes ago, charliearon said:

If you notice your posts are missing....take the hint and keep politics, political news sites, etc out of your posts!

And personal attacks.

Noel

1 hour ago, KevinAu said:

Alan posted a good writeup a page ago from germany about data that can define when that is. In a nut hell? the R0 will tell you. Did you read it? The trump administration also put out a reopening guideline that defines the data requirements to step through stages of reopening. In a nut shell it requires declining cases over time. Do any of the states reopening meet the criteria?

Kevin, that is a terrific write up, and the referenced graphs of R0 for each state was very informative.

However, as noted the baseline for the graphical data was set as R0=1, when the article concludes that a baseline of R0=0.75 is a more ideal baseline to satisfy the health + economic recovery paradigm.

Given that, there are precious few states that fall below the 0.75 baseline. I note that here in Indiana the current to date R0 is 0.88

36 minutes ago, n4gix said:

Given that, there are precious few states that fall below the 0.75 baseline. I note that here in Indiana the current to date R0 is 0.88

New Mexico is also R.88.  But that is driven by the Navajo Nation in the northeast corner of the state. By contrast the southeast corner of the state has relatively few cases.  My county has had 30 cases out of a population of over 60,000.  

Noel