by perching_aix | 2025-08-19 11:14:44+00:00
If truth, reason and wisdom looks like not even being able to copy and paste the guy's job title properly from Wikipedia, or absentmindedly forming a strawman with full confidence due to being abject unable to read, indeed, I shall speed right on. That's not a form of truth, reason and wisdom I ever want reaching me.

Like imagine thinking that parsing this:

> I'm sure we can then find experts with those kinds of qualifications who also pushed covid misinformation (or to use more old-school terms, straight up fucking lies and unfounded, conspiratorial speculations) and held minority opinions.

as this:

> So an expert is exactly the one you want to believe, and no other person, and you tailor the definition just exactly, so only people with your opinion are experts.

resembles any form of intelligence. These two are in direct contradiction!

Is this really that big of a bar? Let's read together!

> I'm sure we can then find experts with those kinds of qualifications

So I recognize that there are experts with the "right qualifications", whatever that means to me, we don't even have to agree.

> who also pushed covid misinformation and held minority opinions.

So no, I do not stop recognizing them as experts, despite them not confirming my beliefs. Instead, what I do is consider them to have pushed covid misinformation, holding minority opinions, despite being experts with the "right qualifications".

Was this really that hard? I even featured multiple paragraphs after this arguing back and forth on your behalf!

Trusting expert or authority opinion is analogous to trusted computing. It works until it doesn't, and when there's debate among the trusted parties, there's two options: unanimous consensus, which humanity is not exactly known for as you can tell, or majority consensus, which yielded that the guy is wrong period. Choose anything else, and you're discarding the trust-based model in favor of something else; there's no trust and/or no consensus.

And what model do people turn to when there's no trust? Verifiability. This is why I brought up that at scale, verifiability is simply not viable, not as far as I can tell, and somehow this wasn't what you latched on to either. Current state of affairs could be improved a lot, I do think that academic research output has a lot of room for improvement in accessibility, and that getting up to speed with a different area to one's own shouldn't be as hard as it is. But just think about our guy and his claims in practical terms. He was claiming things like "nuh-uh, no second wave in the UK". How are you going to hand verify that yourself on your own? Are you going to act a Santa Claus one night and just visit everyone and take samples? Come on.

And so this was never actually about either of these. It was about believing different things and then piling on top whatever is available, reversing what came first: the thought, or the rationale behind that thought.

I can understand if someone, irrespective of the (majority) scientific consensus on mask use, vaccination, distancing, sanitation, and isolation, simply still chooses to not fall in line out of gut feeling or whatever, and owns up to it. That is at least intellectually honest. But this "oh so you're thinking <the exact opposite of what I said>" and this "a handful of experts out of millions claim otherwise so they're right and unjustly oppressed, and everyone else is wrong and complicit" rubbish is pitiful. The putty.org owner could swap the current text out for free infinite energy or flat earth theory and it would be equally believable. You see countless of those with the same sob story of being unjustly oppressed and then the thing somehow turning out to be bollocks or a scam, sometimes both, all the time. With the rare but convenient few experts chiming in being the occasional icing on the cake, much like the phony full time jury-only experts presenting on court in favor of insurance companies.

It is simply not reasonable to believe in what the guy is pushing, unless you've been believing that from the get-go - at which point, there's nothing to argue anyways. This is unlike the trust-based or the verification-based models, which have more going for them than just the sheer belief of individuals, and where there is capacity for arguments. Arguments that we are not having, because you're entirely too busy intentionally(?) misreading the guy's work title and qualifications, and intentionally(?) misreading what I wrote.