I think most of us are probably a bit guilty of this at times - I know I am.
When it finally began to dawn on me just how deep the manipulations and collusions employed to promote the covid ‘vaccines’ went, I went into “you can’t trust any vaccine, they’re all shite” mode.
I have since moderated that (perhaps understandable, perhaps not) position into one of “some of them might be good”, but I now have a very significantly higher degree of scepticism than I had before. I am no longer prepared to take the pronouncements of ‘experts’ on things like vaccines entirely at face value because I don’t believe that the various manipulations and data mangling we’ve witnessed for the covid Goo (or the various ‘interventions’ such as masks, for example) represent a unique and isolated incident.
To adopt covid terminology, these underhand and duplicitous machinations are anything but unprecedented. Pharma companies have been caught time and again being, shall we say, less than honest. But we should ‘trust’ them now when it’s covid?
What has been unprecedented is the level of scrutiny to which all of these various medical ‘claims’ have been subjected over the last 3 years. A highly effective guerrilla force, fighting against severe suppression and censorship, comprised of competent scientists, data analysts and people with a questioning mind have brought a microscope to the claims - and found them wanting, after examining them in considerable detail.
I don’t think this level of analysis has ever been achieved for any other medicinal ‘product’ or set of interventions.
This is “peer” review on steroids.
It was a case of the government/pharma ‘Lady’ protesting way, way, way too much. The more they promoted their nonsense, the more people started to think “hang on just a freakin minute” - and the so-called ‘fringe’ began to look into things much more carefully. And this world-wide independent and collaborative effort was, eventually, devastatingly effective and far more ‘believable’ (i.e. made more sense) than some of the crap that found itself being published in the scientific journals.
In some sense the government/pharma machine was hoisted on its own propagandistic petard.
Does this scepticism of mine extend to other pharmaceutical products? Yes, of course it does.
But I’m also reminded that ‘modern’ medicine has brought enormous benefits too. It’s not ALL a picture of rapacious drug companies selling ineffective and dangerous medications and using their financial might and collusion with governments to ensure that happens.
If we look at life expectancy in the UK (from birth) between 1765 and 2020 (the original can be found here) we can see a dramatic increase over the last 150 years or so. Some of this will be attributable to better hygiene, better nutrition, higher standard of living etc, but it’s likely (certain, in my view) that an important contributing factor has also been the ability of medicine to deal with illnesses and trauma (antibiotics, better surgical techniques etc)
I think the problem largely boils down to figuring out which bits are ‘baby’ and which bits are ‘bathwater’.
A useful recent parallel was the battles of fundamentalist Christians (and, even worse, the completely deranged “young earthers”) to get Intelligent Design accepted on an equal footing to the theory of evolution in science classes.
Was this a bunch of noble truth-possessors fighting against the ‘authority’ of the machine and its vested interest in maintaining a certain perspective? Present day Galileos selflessly battling against the current dogma?
Not really. They hadn’t just thrown the baby out with the bathwater, they’d catapulted the bath out of the bloody window, too.
They’d misinterpreted scientific ‘disagreement’ at the edges of a theory to mean that the whole edifice was flawed. Look, here’s an esoteric example that current science is (currently) finding difficult to explain - therefore, therefore, therefore . . .
It was God wot dun it
How do we stop ourselves falling into these kinds of traps? I’ve certainly found myself getting caught sometimes too.
Maybe my current extremely dismissive attitude towards governments, the health ‘industry’ and its institutions and Pharma is a case in point? Maybe - but I still can’t trust the buggers at all.
I’ve had some experience of these kinds of things too. I used to spend a bit of time on science forums where I’d engage with people over their ‘alternative’ theories. These were almost exclusively about ‘proving’ that quantum mechanics, or relativity, was flawed.
The point of such debates wasn’t to convince these holders of ‘alternative’ viewpoints, that would never happen, but to show to other readers why these alternative ideas were a load of bollox. You can point out any number of mathematical errors, instances where the ‘alternative’ theory would lead to contradiction with experiment etc, but these ‘alternative’ (amateur) scientists would dismiss this with claims that I was just supporting the ‘dogma’, that I had a vested interest in maintaining my career, and that science was based on a misplaced sense of ‘authority’ and that scientists were all just toeing the party line. Invariably, parallels to Galileo were made.
One of the things that gave me a real problem with the whole ‘covid’ thing was this experience. Was I being just like these ‘alternative’ (amateur) scientists I had spent so much effort arguing with when I questioned the covid narrative? What was I missing, where had I gone wrong?
Something that helped a bit was the realization that an enormous effort was being made to ruthlessly quash any ideas outside of the ‘official’ narrative when it came to covid and the response to it. I checked and re-checked and checked again my thinking on the data to see if my interpretations and analyses were flawed in some way. But I couldn’t find the errors. So why did my view differ so markedly from the official version - was I being just like one of these fringe crackpots peddling nonsense on scientific forums?
On the one hand I was supporting the ‘official’ position on physics on those forums, and yet on the other, today, dismissing the ‘official’ position on something (covid) which was outside my area of expertise.
The thing with physics, and I can’t speak for other disciplines but I expect it also holds to a great (?) extent, is that I (and other physicists) don’t just blindly accept authority. I’ve read the papers. I’ve worked painstakingly through the maths - line by line. I’ve had experimental predictions of my own confirmed in the laboratory.
It’s about as far from belief, or blind acceptance, as it’s possible to be.
If a physicist makes some statement, even if it’s someone with the stature of a Feynman, it’s never just simply accepted. It just doesn’t work that way. We might give more credence to the statements of a leader in the field - there is higher probability of such being correct than for our own (less talented) statements - but unthinking acceptance? Not a fucking chance.
We are as physicists, in general, a bunch of argumentative egotistical geeks. We’re not going to meekly accept some ‘authority’ - we want to be seen as the next ‘authority’, the new trailblazer, the new Einstein. If we can do that by proving a Feynman wrong - then that’s just the icing on the cake.
There’s a reason why things like quantum mechanics (QM), or general relativity, have become the ‘official’ position. It’s because their ideas have been subject to testing. In the case of quantum mechanics - you’re reading this on a computer or a phone. You’re verifying the predictions of QM by doing so. What people don’t realise is that some of the predictions of general relativity (GR) have been tested and found to be correct almost to the same level of precision as those of QM. Certain predictions of QM (quantum electrodynamics in particular) have been found to be correct to within 1 part in over a billion, billion. Some of the experimental tests done on GR have reached almost the same level of precision.
This level of quantitative predictive capability is hard to compete with. Any alternative theory has to, at the very least, be able to make the same predictions to the same level of accuracy and precision.
QM and GR might get replaced with other theories one day - but whatever these new theories are, they will be able to explain and predict everything that the ‘old’ theories did - and more. And not just in some hand-waving fashion - but quantitatively.
In the case of QM and GR there’s one heck of a lot of baby - and very little bathwater1.
In the case of covid Science™ it’s pretty much all bathwater.
And this, really, is the difference. It’s the quality of data, analysis and the subsequent predictions that give me confidence in the current theories of physics.
It’s exactly the opposite when it comes to covid Science™ that gives me confidence I’m not just some crackpot fringe loon.
Although, to be fair, in the case of GR there are some significant issues to properly figure out. I’m somewhat sceptical of the existence of things like dark matter or dark energy, for example. These are ideas that have emerged because (some of) the predictions of GR didn’t work until these things were hypothesised and added in - galaxies had the wrong characteristics based on what we could see - and so matter that we couldn’t see was postulated. And this ‘fixed’ things. It’s a bit of an ad-hoc fix, but I don’t think we’ll see a complete collapse of the theory because of it, though. The other predictions of GR are just too well-established. My own (non expert) view here is that Einstein’s field equations are a set of 10 non-linear, coupled, partial differential equations and there will be a solution of these that resolves the issues. It hasn’t been found yet. But neither has any dark matter!
Yes, but with the politicification (or whatever the proper term is in english for making science political - swedish has a special word for making non-political issues political: politisera) of science, and the collusion of corporate capitalism and post-democratic supra-state agencies with the ability to impose law on formerly sovereign nation-states...
...all science is political.
The feminists used to say "the private is political", meaning that everything is politics, meaning that the state had the final say in all things as long as the state was politically correct.
To that mindset, actual proof the way you as a natural scientist use the term means nothing. If the party says it has abolished gravity, gravity is abolished - period and end of.
It is in essence a cult of authority, where Authority as such is maximally abstracted and made impersonal. Don't think Orwell or Huxley; think Gilliam's 'Brazil'.
I completely understand how “trust the science” gained supremacy because many of us non-scientists simply do not have the expertise (or instruments) to delve into every claim. I’m just going to have to trust that the sun is made up of what y’all say it is and that we know the distance to the Earth’s core and what it’s composed of. And I understand why many might have thrown out the Covid vaccine skepticism baby because they lumped it together with the bathwater of flat earthers, those who refuse the polio and tetanus vaccines, and creationists who believe that dinosaur bones were planted by God to test our faith. Like you I’m trying not to throw out the baby on our side— I don’t want lockjaw and would rather take antibiotics than die from a splinter— but honestly, I’m still avoiding doctors.