Great article from a scientific perspective. From an anthropological perspective, it's fascinating that merely going along with the consensus-- acceding to it and showing oneself capable of parroting consensus views-- contributes to one's social status and affords one placement in the elite, educated "in" group. Whereas someone (say, RFK Jr.) who actually belongs in that group by virtue of class, education, and family is shamed and shunned for holding opposite views. (I also have degrees some would consider worthwhile-- in fact, I attended the same institution where my physician received her MD, and while we often chat about that, when I asked her the ultimate question about the new "vaccines"-- "You seem utterly confident that these are highly safe and effective; what is that based on?"-- her whole demeanor changed to one dripping with preprogrammed, condescending explanations for the "vaccine hesitant". I had transformed from "one of us" to "one of them" based on nothing but my shameless willingness to question the orthodoxy. And yet her answers weren't scientific explanations; they were talking points. You don't have to be a scientist to understand the difference.)
The "othering" that goes on these days, in all sorts of ways, is quite extraordinary. Even asking questions could get you dumped in the "selfish, anti-science, conspiracy-loon bin". The level of moral outrage over those who didn't do their 'civic duty' has been astonishing. These morally outraged people are the people who would, quite happily, burn witches given half the chance. Science has probably slipped back a few years, but it will recover I think. Morality seems to have hurtled back to the Middle Ages when religious zealots ruled the roost. I am less optimistic we'll recover from that.
Your arguments are good ones, and I would add just two things.
First, epidemiology is a relatively poorly delineated field in terms of the boundaries of expertise and overlap with other sciences, particularly when it comes to such a complex and multilayered issue as Covid. What I mean is that the best epidemiologist is actually a multitude of scientists in one. He is a physicist when he studies the Brownian motion of suspended particles in the air or the vectors of gasses as they pass through and around cloth masks; he is a social scientist when he models the effectiveness of simple mitigations implemented in complex societies; he is a geneticist when he attempts to understand the virus' past developments from its present RNA; he is a computer scientist when he develops complex simulations to model pandemic scenarios; he is a psychologist when he tailors his communications to produce maximum beneficial results in a panicked public. To think that any epidemiologist can stand alone as an expert is an absurdity - the very essence of specialization (in many ways the heart of modern scientific development) precludes this kind of broad expertise. The success of epidemiology depends on its cooperation and integration with a wide variety of outside sciences. That is why it is such a dangerous position to reject the criticism of outsider research, when those outsiders are often the key to a robust and integrated response.
Second, the process of "experization" is, in itself, a sort of innocuous indoctrination. The education process does not, for good reason, emphasize criticism or deconstruction of currently accepted scientific theory - that is left to the established experts - and the schools instead teach students to mold their minds to the thinking of trusted voices. The practical reality of an educational system rooted in such intellectual mimicry, however, is that one ends up with experts best skilled at voicing the opinions of others. This is why revolutionary thinkers, of which Einstein is a perfect example, rarely come from within the ranks of established scientists and rarely find a welcoming audience for their ideas.
Fantastic point about epidemiologists and other more interdisciplinary fields.
I can only really talk about physics education - and you have to learn so much, and develop so many techniques, during undergraduate education - and most of that is not even close to being "cutting edge". Most of the stuff you learn at undergraduate level is extremely well-established stuff - there's little room, or time, for doubt. But we should never, as scientists, be 100% certain about the theories, no matter how seemingly well-established.
I always encouraged my students to spend some time thinking hard about the fundamentals. It's always good to go back to the basics and to attempt to demolish them. One of the best physics textbooks I ever read selected some of the basic original papers and went through them - pointing out where things were wrong, where things were right - and how we were able to arrive at that judgement.
The whole process of how quantum mechanics was arrived at is a story of 25 years' worth of struggling to understand what was going on by some very brilliant people. The wrong steps, and why they were taken, are often just as fascinating as the right steps.
similar to you, I teach and research in engineering (control and dynamical systems) and so have been at the bleeding edge, making use of the "structure of knowledge" at times to wander the research landscape into new domains. recently (and earlier) we (myself and some young colleagues) have been applying nonlinear trajectory optimization to quantum mechanics with good effect. I'm always looking to expand my physics knowledge ...
you mention:
* One of the best physics textbooks I ever read selected some of the basic original papers and went through them ...
+ please offer the title if able
* The whole process of how quantum mechanics was arrived at is a story of 25 years' worth of struggling to understand what was going on by some very brilliant people.
+ would you recommend some sources?
my field, like yours, is very mathematical (Hilbert spaces, etc.)
Your approach sounds interesting - and probably way above my mathematical pay grade. Most of the things that have fascinated me about QM can be summarized by the question "just what the eff is going on?"
So most of my thinking has been trying to figure out just what is meant by "quantum" and how we know it's "quantum" rather than the result of some entirely classical theory we haven't yet uncovered. Thankfully, for me at least, I've been able to make some progress without using overly-technical maths.
The book I mentioned is Malcolm Longair's "Theoretical Concepts in Physics" which takes some of the major advances and looks at the original sources as 'case studies'.
Another great book on the struggles to understand QM is "Concepts of Quantum Optics" by Knight & Allen. I like this book because the first half is devoted to some of the original papers, some by Einstein, but it is aimed at the quantum optics side of things. Most students of QM are blissfully unaware that Einstein had deduced the existence of so-called "wave-particle duality" back in 1907 (or maybe 1909 - can't remember) with a stunning analysis of black-body radiation in which he showed some of the fluctuations were wave-like in character and some of the fluctuations were particle-like. This was nearly 2 decades before de Broglie's insights here. It's clear from Einstein's early work on QM that he knew something was definitely not adding up with the traditional classical worldview.
There's no single textbook I can think of which goes into all of the struggles to understand QM in the period 1900 - 1930. There must be some (of course) - much of my own understanding comes from reading lots of things and trying to piece it all together.
The book "Quantum Theory and Measurement" edited by Wheeler and Zurek also contains a lot of great source material, and includes a lot of the discussions between Bohr and Einstein on the meaning of QM.
One of my favourite papers is Feynman's pre-cursor to his more full description of his path integral approach to QED.
The introduction here is a brilliant exposition of the fundamental issue with QM and why it's so very different. I think Feynman goes right to the heart here with his analysis of the difference in the probability "rules" for classical vs quantum treatments.
Hope these few things are enough to get you started - but always happy to discuss things further.
The case of Ignaz Semmelweis should forever be the first lesson taught in medical schools throughout the world. Arrogance by the medical profession and dismissal of outside-the-box thinkers can be fatal.
The situation comes down to who to trust? By the time vaccines came around, it was clear that the medical establishment was lying to us (masks work, keep a 6 foot distance, asymptomatic spread, everyone is at equal risk, racism is a public health crisis). At about that time, other doctors/scientists started risking all to warn about this new vaccine. Drs. Yeadon, McCullough, Malone, Bakhdi, Bridle, Vanden Bossche are all highly-credentialed individuals who sounded the alarm. There is absolutely no question as to which set of experts I trust.
According to Dr. Byram Bridle of Canada, most medical students receive a grand total of between five and ten lectures on vaccinology/immunology, combined. Doctors should admit to patients that they really do not have a grasp on this subject. Instead they gullibly follow recommendations of thoroughly corrupt institutions (CDC, FDA), thereby exposing themselves as paint-by-numbers hacks, not independent thinkers.
I go with the “precautionary principle”: what if the doctors are wrong? From personal experience, doctors have told me many wrong things in their rush to foist as much “product” on me as possible. Had I believed them, they would have done all sorts of risky and unnecessary stuff, and had me taking unnecessary medicine. Second opinions wildly contradicted first. I am glad I disregarded any advice that sounded expensive — in my case that turned out to be the consistently correct choice.
He's an elitist piece of shit who wants you to shut your whore mouth and do what you're told because he and his friends have more letters after their names than you and should be your kings.
I'm not sure I would go quite so far as your colourful description here - but there's definitely more than a whiff of ego involved in pursuing science at a high level. I continually have to fight against mine - and I'm only a relatively mediocre scientist of middling competence!
"but I would venture the opinion that physics is ‘cleaner’ or ‘purer’ in a certain sense." Physics is mathematical modelling of physical phenomena. The mathematics can be checked - it can be a really laborious process, especially when the author of the paper or book asserts that "the proof is simple and is left as an exercise for the reader" which is often found in "The Little Yellow Book" on second quantization in quantum chemistry. So a single equation takes a day or so of work, and about five sheets of legal-sized paper to derive and prove. And then you have to make a prediction for a real physical system, see how close you come, and then go fix up your model, and test it again... For molecular biology, it's aqueous chemistry, which means you've got lots of molecules and lots of interactions, and you wind up with an uncomputable problem. So you make assumptions to constrain the problem, so that it can be done at all... and with assumptions you introduce sources of error - and your model might have some interactions in it that you don't know about. And in real life, there are lots of known knowns, which you can model and deal with, lots of known unknowns - uncontrolled variables, which you can try to control with setting assumptions, and the worst part is the unknown unknowns - the hidden variables which Bohm talks about, which may have a huge effect - overshadowing anything that you've got in your model... And that's the kind of scientific research I did my PhD in. A lot of it was wild-assed guesses - trying something to see if it worked - reading outlandish theories helped to get me unstuck quite a few times, you do run up against brick walls, and there's really no one to ask, besides, they're all asking *you* to figure out what's going on - "we ask the questions around here, kiddo..." A lot of it is correlation - the Woodward-Hoffmann Rules were worked out on the back of an envelope, got published as a single page article - this set of correlations correctly predicted results of certain chemical reaction, and earned Woodward and Hoffman Nobel Prizes. Quantitative Structure/Activity relationships - more correlations, the actual mechanism remains a matter of conjecture. And these are problems which are tiny compared to that of the receptor binding domain of the S1 subunit of the spike protein and its interaction with the ACE-2 receptor. And the spike protein is a tiny part of a coronavirus, which itself is tiny compared to a cell. And when we look at all of those Coulombic interactions and second-order interactions, and the statistical thermodynamics of the systems at body temperature - where everything is in constant motion - think of the blades of a fan, how they look when they're stopped, and how they look when the fan is on - and that's what molecular interactions look like at body temperature - and then you add in a bunch of water molecules, too... the only thing you can really do is posit correlations and see if they have predictive value. Some do, some don't. Viruses exist, there are electron micrographs of them - and they have been characterized by x-ray diffraction crystallography - there are x-ray structures for SARS-CoV-2. And the genome which produces that virus has been sequenced, so we know how it gets put together and its anatomy at a molecular level. But intra- and especially inter-molecular interactions are guesswork, there are definitely models - Margenau and Kestner's Theory of Intermolecular Interactions give a bunch of these - but there's no way of knowing things in a really concrete manner. Today's consensus might be discredited tomorrow. Orthodoxy and dogma are for religion, not science.
As for "doing your own research", people do it all the time, when buying cars or houses or software or anything else - and they usually don't have the technical expertise to make a truly informed decision. What they do is to look at the experiences of others who have bought these things - that's why few take the risk of being first adopters for new technology - the "wait and see" approach is often best. That's the way it is for largely untested experimental drugs - especially where their manufacturers and providers have shielded themselves from civil liability arising from defective or dangerous products, where the recipient/buyer assumes all financial risk. No prudent or reasonable person would buy such a product if the possible outcomes included even a medium probability of injury or death, and the promised benefit turned out to be largely nonexistent. And you don't have to be an expert - or follow loudly proclaimed "consensus" or orthodoxy - to come to this conclusion.
John Ioannides of Stanford says roughly the same thing: "There is increasing concern that most current published research findings are false. The probability that a research claim is true may depend on study power and bias, the number of other studies on the same question, and, importantly, the ratio of true to no relationships among the relationships probed in each scientific field. In this framework, a research finding is less likely to be true when the studies conducted in a field are smaller; when effect sizes are smaller; when there is a greater number and lesser preselection of tested relationships; where there is greater flexibility in designs, definitions, outcomes, and analytical modes; when there is greater financial and other interest and prejudice; and when more teams are involved in a scientific field in chase of statistical significance. Simulations show that for most study designs and settings, it is more likely for a research claim to be false than true. Moreover, for many current scientific fields, claimed research findings may often be simply accurate measures of the prevailing bias." https://journals.plos.org/plosmedicine/article?id=10.1371/journal.pmed.0020124
In my own field I was fortunate that a lot of insight can be gained from fairly simple mathematical reasoning - mostly involving linear algebra. I never had to deal much with really complex stuff that might have required significant computational expertise to progress.
In undergrad we learned how to solve Schrödinger's equation for the Hydrogen atom - it took 2 full lectures to even outline all of the math needed. Great stuff - now go and do the same for the Helium atom. Oops - not quite so straightforward now you have a 3-body QM problem to solve! That's way before you even get close to the levels of complexity you talk about in your own research.
I'm sure Ethan Siegel is a very accomplished physicist and I belongning to the social sciences and the humanities would not argue physics with him without deferring to his greater knowledge.
But as you point out (or skewer rather) he brings his own field's brand of misconceptions: communication is not physics. And DYOR means communication and information analysis.
And while being knowledgable on the technical aspects of a subject may certainly help (see all the opinions regarding the whys of the ongoing Russian invasion), being trained and experienced in the art of analysis of communication itself, from semiotics and semantics down through rethorics all the way to the memetic sediment at the bottom passing cultural studies, sociology, behavioural psychology and anthropolgy on the way -
- gives you an immediate leg up even over technical pros. There's a reason natural scientists aren't the ones calling the shots: they think facts speak for themselves. They think science is neutral: it is in itself but any application is made with some kind of moral judgement so in effect all science consists of moral judgement calls.
Case in point, as to why he comically misses and proves his own point: his list of examples. For everyone of his examples, it is easy to find examples of the hubris and amorality of natural scientists - and how they rejected criticism from laymen. Without laymen ranging from Chicken Littles to citizens studying enough in private to ask pointed questions, well, look at such a simple thing as garbage disposal.
Was no natural scientists who rang the bell on leakage of various nasty stuff. It was private citizens noticing things happening were they lived and downstream from dumps.
Or Covid. There are plenty of terms come to mind for all those scientists happily entrenched at the trough of tuition who could have and should have joined the peers in speaking out and speaking up.
I think some of this can be summed up in the old joke
Q : what do physicists use for contraception?
A : their personalities
You do have to get very good at coming to 'correct' conclusions from limited data and/or brief readings if you're going to be any good at physics - and I think this sometimes feeds into an assumed self-competence in other fields that are not wholly warranted. But it also allows you to develop a moderately effective "bullshit sniffer" - even in fields in which you have little competence.
In English, "research" is quite broad a term. In German, there is "Forschung", which is the stuff done at universities and maybe some companies. The people doing this are "Forscher" (or "Forschende", in the current nonsensical gender-neutral babble). Everybody else might carry out "Untersuchungen" or "Nachforschungen" (which has a meaning like "investigation", e.g., it is what journalists (should) do). During Covid, people deviating from the official narrative have increasingly be called "Schwurbler", a term that had almost never been used before (and had a very different meaning). Some linguist (or some linguistically inclined person "doing their own research") should do some research on these issues...
Previously, a "Schwurbler" was someone talking in a convoluted way about essentially nothing. Linguistics is actually quite fascinating. For example, German words are sorted into "Häufigkeitsklassen" (frequency classes? https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/H%C3%A4ufigkeitsklasse). Words in class N occur with frequency around 2^(-N) of the frequency of the most common word. "Schwurbler", "schwurbeln", "Geschwurbel" and so on are listed (pre-Covid) in classes around 20. This is something like being quarantined for Covid because of a positive test with a ct value of 40.
I think we must have seen the same email from Sweden.
My own perspective is that the type 2 drugs don't do any good and are actually poisons. I don't know enough about Type 1 to have a view but I do know two type 1 diabetics. One is constantly in hospital and the other seems to have it under control (and fewer hospital visits). I suspect that they're both meticulous on keeping to their medicines.
Also my own experience is that countries affect sugar levels. Japan is good.
My awareness of the issues with diabetes go a bit further back though - more by accident. I do tend to struggle with my own food demons - my own body mechanisms are set up so that I only have to look at a candy and I put on weight. My brother, however, can shovel in endless quantities of stuff and not gain an ounce. If I ate like him I would have already caused the Eastern edge of the UK to dip further into the ocean.
Trying to understand the causes of all that, and why it's so damnably difficult to lose weight for many, set me on the road of reading stuff that posited the problem was more one of hormonal dis-regulation rather than simply about excess calories (another scientific "consensus"). It made a lot more sense than mantras like 'eat less, move more' - which are only true in the crudest possible terms, but don't capture the complexity of what's really going on. Of course, the role of insulin, and insulin resistance, featured as a significant component.
I've consistently held the view that while I don't have the background in genetics, medicine, PPE, or statistics to evaluate many claims about covid, I can still do basic sanity checks.
For example, I can't tell you much about the physics of masks and the details of viral transmission. But I can recognize that, if mask mandates worked to reduce cases, we'd see a general trend of places with mask mandates having lower case rates than neighboring areas without them. It's so basic as to be a tautology: if mask mandates reduce cases, mask mandates should reduce cases. And yet that's not what we're seeing. Something about mask mandates is, clearly, not working, and no amount of short term studies of hairdressers can change that.
Similarly, I can't say anything about the furin cleavage site, but I can see that it raises questions when a bat coronavirus pops up miles from bats but right next to a virology lab known to be working with bat coronaviruses. I can further recognize that it's incredibly suspicious when, before anyone has had time to fully investigate, a whole gaggle of people insist that there is nothing to see here and any talk of a lab leak is a nutty conspiracy theory.
I _do_ sometimes wonder if this is a quantum mechanics or relativity situation, where the truth (as far as we can tell) is unintuitive and bizarre to a layperson. Maybe general mask mandates really do work in some way, despite two years of real world data showing no effect. But while physicists can point to mountains of both math and experiments showing that QM and relativity work, and even explain the unintuitive weirdness to some extent, the covid consensus people don't appear to have that. Physics might have an element of "trust me, it's true" but there's always an unspoken "okay, I can explain this if you've got a few years and enough interest, and then it'll make sense, but you probably don't want that, so just trust me." Covid never seems to go much beyond "just trust me, bro."
Yes, the mantra "trust the science" has been scatter-gunned about with rather too much abandon. Very few have actually stopped to explain precisely WHY we should trust the science.
I love to (trying to) teach people about physics and maths - I love the whole process of starting with some question and seeing how far we can get to an answer using the things we know and the tools we have to hand. I love being able to EXPLAIN why physics arrives at the answers it does - or at least I love it when I get it right. It's frustrating when I can't properly communicate that explanation - and I try to find different ways to make things clear. I usually attribute my failures to me and my lack of ability in finding the right perspective for a particular student.
I never, ever, resort to an argument that boils down to "trust me" - at least not consciously, although I suppose I have accidentally done this from time to time.
In my experience most of the reasoned and careful explaining (right or wrong) has come from the so-called "sceptic" side throughout this pandemic - with some notable exceptions. Science ought to be a discussion/debate - with challenges and explanations given for particular points of view. If this is absent I don't know what it is - but it's not what I would call "science".
It's bizarre that Siegel cites fluoride and vaccines as examples of failure for "do your own research".
There is an active suit against the EPA to change its fluoride standards, based on research showing that fluoride lowers IQ (multiple studies in multiple locations). It looks like the EPA will in fact be forced to change. https://fluoridealert.org/faq/
For vaccines, there is clear evidence that all aluminum-adjuvanted vaccines should be banned. Prof Exley's book is a good starting point, Imagine You Are An Aluminum Atom (excellent book despite the title). His group is the world's best authority on aluminum toxicity.
Another helpful site is vaccinepapers.org, which includes full-text copies of the research it cites.
I honestly didn't bother reading most of the text, and from the comments, it seems like I was correct in doing so. So let me share MY perspective on this examination of the scientific method and the deficiency in education relevant to making intelligent decisions on the veracity of published works.
I was not great at biology or chemistry, but fairly decent at physics, but certainly not a mathematician. I look at patterns and also try to understand studies that I *CAN* pin down as relevant to an argument that is made.
When it came to COVID, certain arguments were made by Fauci and the media particularly after hydroxychloroquine was mentioned by Trump, and everyone in the media went nuts over this. (When I see the media do this, I know something's up.) So I tracked down the chinese study that Fauci cited all these horrible deaths from the use of HCQ, and here's what I found:
- The patients who died were on ventilators and nearing death.
- fatal doses (for women) and near-fatal doses (for men) were given to the respective patients matching the genders and correlating with weight of the average chinese person of each gender.
- There's a LONG history of safe use of HCQ in this country and around the world.
It didn't take a rocket scientist to see this. But it certainly put a HUGE shade of doubt against anything Fauci said after that.
I realized how much of a fraud this whole Covid thing was without needing an advanced degree. Why? Well, here's what's scary. *I* could detect that this was a fraud WITHOUT an advanced degree - that tells me how poorly the foundation of this Covid narrative was.
Admittedly, as I found further studies about HCQ (learning how to read them a little better along the way), I quickly determined that this was good for the first 5 days following symptoms, and then the efficacy fell off. It didn't take a rocket scientist here as well. I followed graphical charts, and read the correlating data for it. And there were multiple studies that seemed to all say the same thing. The science around this was not groundbreaking, except to the false narrative being pushed.
To believe otherwise would have taken a leap of absurd levels of faith towards a "science" that had NO basis in prior research.
Why should it take someone with an advanced degree to shoot holes in all of this?
This was repeated time and again, using basic analysis skills, correlating data and patterns, finding consensus and time and again finding holes in the narrative.
Could I have been reinforcing my own bias? I supposed someone could say that. But I found more data to support what I was finding than there was against it. And it led me to smart people in their respective fields who had (up until that time) NOT lied about what was going on, and I DID put faith in them, and lowering the need for me to continue to analyze results (it takes lots of time!).
So when I see references from this "blowhard", being dismissive of people with fewer letters behind his name, I am prone to immediately dismiss them as arrogant and pompous asses. I've met their type before (and this is my bias), and they're frequently trying to baffle me with bullshit instead of dazzling me with their brilliance.
If there's anything I've learned in all this: People who DO have the truth don't have to blow their horns to TRY to convince others. They share their data, explain it well enough for the average person to learn from (and it should be easy to prove/disprove), and gain adherents.
That's my experience in all this. I'm betting many others found the truth the same way as I. And are equally as dismissive of people such as this. Or at least, I would hope so. I've been dismayed at the continued "faith" in the BS that's being peddled, but I have to remember that quite frequently, these folks buying this have NOT put forth the effort to do even basic investigations, and it's up to people like me to ASK QUESTIONS that will at least get them to try to figure out why their position is wrong, when there's cognitive dissonance in their basic logic/understanding. Then it's time to get out of the way while they start to accept that they've been bamboozled.
We're starting to see large swaths of people seeing the light (even if they don't fully understand it), further proving that there are more and more holes punching through the weak narrative being peddled around Covid.
I know that this had something to do with diabetes, but at this point, there's a HUGE amount of distrust in ANYTHING pharmaceutical, and government regulators - and they have nobody to blame but themselves for all this. Hopefully a skeptical public will start to learn more about how to find the truth, unless they're too tired to do that level of research.
So to answer your question: Yes, do your own research. Because the "experts" have shown that they (and the sponsors of studies) are not always going to operate in your best interest, and provide the truth.
You raise a really important point - and one that's baffled me too
You're totally spot on - you don't need anything close to a PhD level education to be able to spot the mismatch between the 'media' message and the actual data and the publications they draw on. Yet it's curious (to me) how many 'experts' appear not to be able to see these simple things - or just use specious arguments to "explain" things away.
The 'official' covid narrative has never properly stacked up for me. I happen to have a PhD in physics, but I think that's wholly irrelevant in being able to see through the covid bullshit.
I’m starting to wonder if we’re all living in parallel universes! Literally. I guess if you’re tracking covid variants daily or treating the sickest covid patients, your perception will be altered, you will believe whatever the reality of the microscope and the numbers tell you. All very abstract. I just observe the local supermarket staff, there is a wide age range, sex and ethnicity in the four supermarkets I frequent (all very close together). I also like to talk to the staff. Most are as bewildered as we who read the good Professor Rigger! I think I live closer to reality than, say, Tom Chivers at Unherd, who, by the way, appears to have been released from his position as science editor and is now science editor for the Independent newspaper, where I’m sure he’ll be much happier. I think this problem of perception is due to the different narratives online and the MSM collapsing, ie we no longer share an overarching narrative. The very definition of a society (or country) is a shared narrative and shared values/ethics. It won’t be pretty! Just look at Ukraine, the very definition of an artificial society created by the Soviets that has never had a shared narrative or shared morality as a unitary state.
Great article from a scientific perspective. From an anthropological perspective, it's fascinating that merely going along with the consensus-- acceding to it and showing oneself capable of parroting consensus views-- contributes to one's social status and affords one placement in the elite, educated "in" group. Whereas someone (say, RFK Jr.) who actually belongs in that group by virtue of class, education, and family is shamed and shunned for holding opposite views. (I also have degrees some would consider worthwhile-- in fact, I attended the same institution where my physician received her MD, and while we often chat about that, when I asked her the ultimate question about the new "vaccines"-- "You seem utterly confident that these are highly safe and effective; what is that based on?"-- her whole demeanor changed to one dripping with preprogrammed, condescending explanations for the "vaccine hesitant". I had transformed from "one of us" to "one of them" based on nothing but my shameless willingness to question the orthodoxy. And yet her answers weren't scientific explanations; they were talking points. You don't have to be a scientist to understand the difference.)
The "othering" that goes on these days, in all sorts of ways, is quite extraordinary. Even asking questions could get you dumped in the "selfish, anti-science, conspiracy-loon bin". The level of moral outrage over those who didn't do their 'civic duty' has been astonishing. These morally outraged people are the people who would, quite happily, burn witches given half the chance. Science has probably slipped back a few years, but it will recover I think. Morality seems to have hurtled back to the Middle Ages when religious zealots ruled the roost. I am less optimistic we'll recover from that.
Science is lost. Ask James Watson. El Gato made veiled reference to this in a post not so long ago.
Interesting interaction with your doctor. I will never again view the medical profession the same after their horrendous performance in this "crisis."
Your arguments are good ones, and I would add just two things.
First, epidemiology is a relatively poorly delineated field in terms of the boundaries of expertise and overlap with other sciences, particularly when it comes to such a complex and multilayered issue as Covid. What I mean is that the best epidemiologist is actually a multitude of scientists in one. He is a physicist when he studies the Brownian motion of suspended particles in the air or the vectors of gasses as they pass through and around cloth masks; he is a social scientist when he models the effectiveness of simple mitigations implemented in complex societies; he is a geneticist when he attempts to understand the virus' past developments from its present RNA; he is a computer scientist when he develops complex simulations to model pandemic scenarios; he is a psychologist when he tailors his communications to produce maximum beneficial results in a panicked public. To think that any epidemiologist can stand alone as an expert is an absurdity - the very essence of specialization (in many ways the heart of modern scientific development) precludes this kind of broad expertise. The success of epidemiology depends on its cooperation and integration with a wide variety of outside sciences. That is why it is such a dangerous position to reject the criticism of outsider research, when those outsiders are often the key to a robust and integrated response.
Second, the process of "experization" is, in itself, a sort of innocuous indoctrination. The education process does not, for good reason, emphasize criticism or deconstruction of currently accepted scientific theory - that is left to the established experts - and the schools instead teach students to mold their minds to the thinking of trusted voices. The practical reality of an educational system rooted in such intellectual mimicry, however, is that one ends up with experts best skilled at voicing the opinions of others. This is why revolutionary thinkers, of which Einstein is a perfect example, rarely come from within the ranks of established scientists and rarely find a welcoming audience for their ideas.
Fantastic point about epidemiologists and other more interdisciplinary fields.
I can only really talk about physics education - and you have to learn so much, and develop so many techniques, during undergraduate education - and most of that is not even close to being "cutting edge". Most of the stuff you learn at undergraduate level is extremely well-established stuff - there's little room, or time, for doubt. But we should never, as scientists, be 100% certain about the theories, no matter how seemingly well-established.
I always encouraged my students to spend some time thinking hard about the fundamentals. It's always good to go back to the basics and to attempt to demolish them. One of the best physics textbooks I ever read selected some of the basic original papers and went through them - pointing out where things were wrong, where things were right - and how we were able to arrive at that judgement.
The whole process of how quantum mechanics was arrived at is a story of 25 years' worth of struggling to understand what was going on by some very brilliant people. The wrong steps, and why they were taken, are often just as fascinating as the right steps.
very nice post!
similar to you, I teach and research in engineering (control and dynamical systems) and so have been at the bleeding edge, making use of the "structure of knowledge" at times to wander the research landscape into new domains. recently (and earlier) we (myself and some young colleagues) have been applying nonlinear trajectory optimization to quantum mechanics with good effect. I'm always looking to expand my physics knowledge ...
you mention:
* One of the best physics textbooks I ever read selected some of the basic original papers and went through them ...
+ please offer the title if able
* The whole process of how quantum mechanics was arrived at is a story of 25 years' worth of struggling to understand what was going on by some very brilliant people.
+ would you recommend some sources?
my field, like yours, is very mathematical (Hilbert spaces, etc.)
thanks again!
John
Hi John
Your approach sounds interesting - and probably way above my mathematical pay grade. Most of the things that have fascinated me about QM can be summarized by the question "just what the eff is going on?"
So most of my thinking has been trying to figure out just what is meant by "quantum" and how we know it's "quantum" rather than the result of some entirely classical theory we haven't yet uncovered. Thankfully, for me at least, I've been able to make some progress without using overly-technical maths.
The book I mentioned is Malcolm Longair's "Theoretical Concepts in Physics" which takes some of the major advances and looks at the original sources as 'case studies'.
Another great book on the struggles to understand QM is "Concepts of Quantum Optics" by Knight & Allen. I like this book because the first half is devoted to some of the original papers, some by Einstein, but it is aimed at the quantum optics side of things. Most students of QM are blissfully unaware that Einstein had deduced the existence of so-called "wave-particle duality" back in 1907 (or maybe 1909 - can't remember) with a stunning analysis of black-body radiation in which he showed some of the fluctuations were wave-like in character and some of the fluctuations were particle-like. This was nearly 2 decades before de Broglie's insights here. It's clear from Einstein's early work on QM that he knew something was definitely not adding up with the traditional classical worldview.
There's no single textbook I can think of which goes into all of the struggles to understand QM in the period 1900 - 1930. There must be some (of course) - much of my own understanding comes from reading lots of things and trying to piece it all together.
The book "Quantum Theory and Measurement" edited by Wheeler and Zurek also contains a lot of great source material, and includes a lot of the discussions between Bohr and Einstein on the meaning of QM.
One of my favourite papers is Feynman's pre-cursor to his more full description of his path integral approach to QED.
https://authors.library.caltech.edu/47756/1/FEYrmp48.pdf
The introduction here is a brilliant exposition of the fundamental issue with QM and why it's so very different. I think Feynman goes right to the heart here with his analysis of the difference in the probability "rules" for classical vs quantum treatments.
Hope these few things are enough to get you started - but always happy to discuss things further.
hi Rudolph,
I much appreciate your approach
... Most of the things that have fascinated me about QM can be summarized by the question "just what the eff is going on?"
thanks for the pointers!
original sources are often the best ... especially when they reveal the path the author followed, including the cul de sac (s).
best, John
The Structure of Scientific Revolutions by Kuhn is a classic and well worth reading - http://www.turkpsikiyatri.org/arsiv/kuhn-ssr-2nded.pdf
Interesting essay.
About those doctors...
The case of Ignaz Semmelweis should forever be the first lesson taught in medical schools throughout the world. Arrogance by the medical profession and dismissal of outside-the-box thinkers can be fatal.
The situation comes down to who to trust? By the time vaccines came around, it was clear that the medical establishment was lying to us (masks work, keep a 6 foot distance, asymptomatic spread, everyone is at equal risk, racism is a public health crisis). At about that time, other doctors/scientists started risking all to warn about this new vaccine. Drs. Yeadon, McCullough, Malone, Bakhdi, Bridle, Vanden Bossche are all highly-credentialed individuals who sounded the alarm. There is absolutely no question as to which set of experts I trust.
According to Dr. Byram Bridle of Canada, most medical students receive a grand total of between five and ten lectures on vaccinology/immunology, combined. Doctors should admit to patients that they really do not have a grasp on this subject. Instead they gullibly follow recommendations of thoroughly corrupt institutions (CDC, FDA), thereby exposing themselves as paint-by-numbers hacks, not independent thinkers.
I go with the “precautionary principle”: what if the doctors are wrong? From personal experience, doctors have told me many wrong things in their rush to foist as much “product” on me as possible. Had I believed them, they would have done all sorts of risky and unnecessary stuff, and had me taking unnecessary medicine. Second opinions wildly contradicted first. I am glad I disregarded any advice that sounded expensive — in my case that turned out to be the consistently correct choice.
And let’s not forget this: https://journals.plos.org/plosmedicine/article?id=10.1371/journal.pmed.0020124
Let me save you some ink.
I remember this article.
He's an elitist piece of shit who wants you to shut your whore mouth and do what you're told because he and his friends have more letters after their names than you and should be your kings.
guttermouth.substack.com
I'm not sure I would go quite so far as your colourful description here - but there's definitely more than a whiff of ego involved in pursuing science at a high level. I continually have to fight against mine - and I'm only a relatively mediocre scientist of middling competence!
"but I would venture the opinion that physics is ‘cleaner’ or ‘purer’ in a certain sense." Physics is mathematical modelling of physical phenomena. The mathematics can be checked - it can be a really laborious process, especially when the author of the paper or book asserts that "the proof is simple and is left as an exercise for the reader" which is often found in "The Little Yellow Book" on second quantization in quantum chemistry. So a single equation takes a day or so of work, and about five sheets of legal-sized paper to derive and prove. And then you have to make a prediction for a real physical system, see how close you come, and then go fix up your model, and test it again... For molecular biology, it's aqueous chemistry, which means you've got lots of molecules and lots of interactions, and you wind up with an uncomputable problem. So you make assumptions to constrain the problem, so that it can be done at all... and with assumptions you introduce sources of error - and your model might have some interactions in it that you don't know about. And in real life, there are lots of known knowns, which you can model and deal with, lots of known unknowns - uncontrolled variables, which you can try to control with setting assumptions, and the worst part is the unknown unknowns - the hidden variables which Bohm talks about, which may have a huge effect - overshadowing anything that you've got in your model... And that's the kind of scientific research I did my PhD in. A lot of it was wild-assed guesses - trying something to see if it worked - reading outlandish theories helped to get me unstuck quite a few times, you do run up against brick walls, and there's really no one to ask, besides, they're all asking *you* to figure out what's going on - "we ask the questions around here, kiddo..." A lot of it is correlation - the Woodward-Hoffmann Rules were worked out on the back of an envelope, got published as a single page article - this set of correlations correctly predicted results of certain chemical reaction, and earned Woodward and Hoffman Nobel Prizes. Quantitative Structure/Activity relationships - more correlations, the actual mechanism remains a matter of conjecture. And these are problems which are tiny compared to that of the receptor binding domain of the S1 subunit of the spike protein and its interaction with the ACE-2 receptor. And the spike protein is a tiny part of a coronavirus, which itself is tiny compared to a cell. And when we look at all of those Coulombic interactions and second-order interactions, and the statistical thermodynamics of the systems at body temperature - where everything is in constant motion - think of the blades of a fan, how they look when they're stopped, and how they look when the fan is on - and that's what molecular interactions look like at body temperature - and then you add in a bunch of water molecules, too... the only thing you can really do is posit correlations and see if they have predictive value. Some do, some don't. Viruses exist, there are electron micrographs of them - and they have been characterized by x-ray diffraction crystallography - there are x-ray structures for SARS-CoV-2. And the genome which produces that virus has been sequenced, so we know how it gets put together and its anatomy at a molecular level. But intra- and especially inter-molecular interactions are guesswork, there are definitely models - Margenau and Kestner's Theory of Intermolecular Interactions give a bunch of these - but there's no way of knowing things in a really concrete manner. Today's consensus might be discredited tomorrow. Orthodoxy and dogma are for religion, not science.
As for "doing your own research", people do it all the time, when buying cars or houses or software or anything else - and they usually don't have the technical expertise to make a truly informed decision. What they do is to look at the experiences of others who have bought these things - that's why few take the risk of being first adopters for new technology - the "wait and see" approach is often best. That's the way it is for largely untested experimental drugs - especially where their manufacturers and providers have shielded themselves from civil liability arising from defective or dangerous products, where the recipient/buyer assumes all financial risk. No prudent or reasonable person would buy such a product if the possible outcomes included even a medium probability of injury or death, and the promised benefit turned out to be largely nonexistent. And you don't have to be an expert - or follow loudly proclaimed "consensus" or orthodoxy - to come to this conclusion.
John Ioannides of Stanford says roughly the same thing: "There is increasing concern that most current published research findings are false. The probability that a research claim is true may depend on study power and bias, the number of other studies on the same question, and, importantly, the ratio of true to no relationships among the relationships probed in each scientific field. In this framework, a research finding is less likely to be true when the studies conducted in a field are smaller; when effect sizes are smaller; when there is a greater number and lesser preselection of tested relationships; where there is greater flexibility in designs, definitions, outcomes, and analytical modes; when there is greater financial and other interest and prejudice; and when more teams are involved in a scientific field in chase of statistical significance. Simulations show that for most study designs and settings, it is more likely for a research claim to be false than true. Moreover, for many current scientific fields, claimed research findings may often be simply accurate measures of the prevailing bias." https://journals.plos.org/plosmedicine/article?id=10.1371/journal.pmed.0020124
thanks for that - excellent points!
In my own field I was fortunate that a lot of insight can be gained from fairly simple mathematical reasoning - mostly involving linear algebra. I never had to deal much with really complex stuff that might have required significant computational expertise to progress.
In undergrad we learned how to solve Schrödinger's equation for the Hydrogen atom - it took 2 full lectures to even outline all of the math needed. Great stuff - now go and do the same for the Helium atom. Oops - not quite so straightforward now you have a 3-body QM problem to solve! That's way before you even get close to the levels of complexity you talk about in your own research.
I'm sure Ethan Siegel is a very accomplished physicist and I belongning to the social sciences and the humanities would not argue physics with him without deferring to his greater knowledge.
But as you point out (or skewer rather) he brings his own field's brand of misconceptions: communication is not physics. And DYOR means communication and information analysis.
And while being knowledgable on the technical aspects of a subject may certainly help (see all the opinions regarding the whys of the ongoing Russian invasion), being trained and experienced in the art of analysis of communication itself, from semiotics and semantics down through rethorics all the way to the memetic sediment at the bottom passing cultural studies, sociology, behavioural psychology and anthropolgy on the way -
- gives you an immediate leg up even over technical pros. There's a reason natural scientists aren't the ones calling the shots: they think facts speak for themselves. They think science is neutral: it is in itself but any application is made with some kind of moral judgement so in effect all science consists of moral judgement calls.
Case in point, as to why he comically misses and proves his own point: his list of examples. For everyone of his examples, it is easy to find examples of the hubris and amorality of natural scientists - and how they rejected criticism from laymen. Without laymen ranging from Chicken Littles to citizens studying enough in private to ask pointed questions, well, look at such a simple thing as garbage disposal.
Was no natural scientists who rang the bell on leakage of various nasty stuff. It was private citizens noticing things happening were they lived and downstream from dumps.
Or Covid. There are plenty of terms come to mind for all those scientists happily entrenched at the trough of tuition who could have and should have joined the peers in speaking out and speaking up.
I think some of this can be summed up in the old joke
Q : what do physicists use for contraception?
A : their personalities
You do have to get very good at coming to 'correct' conclusions from limited data and/or brief readings if you're going to be any good at physics - and I think this sometimes feeds into an assumed self-competence in other fields that are not wholly warranted. But it also allows you to develop a moderately effective "bullshit sniffer" - even in fields in which you have little competence.
The paradox of quantum physics: the closer you get to certainty, the further away you become.
In English, "research" is quite broad a term. In German, there is "Forschung", which is the stuff done at universities and maybe some companies. The people doing this are "Forscher" (or "Forschende", in the current nonsensical gender-neutral babble). Everybody else might carry out "Untersuchungen" or "Nachforschungen" (which has a meaning like "investigation", e.g., it is what journalists (should) do). During Covid, people deviating from the official narrative have increasingly be called "Schwurbler", a term that had almost never been used before (and had a very different meaning). Some linguist (or some linguistically inclined person "doing their own research") should do some research on these issues...
That's a great term.
I am a happy Schwurbler !!!
No idea what it means - but love the sound of it :-)
Previously, a "Schwurbler" was someone talking in a convoluted way about essentially nothing. Linguistics is actually quite fascinating. For example, German words are sorted into "Häufigkeitsklassen" (frequency classes? https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/H%C3%A4ufigkeitsklasse). Words in class N occur with frequency around 2^(-N) of the frequency of the most common word. "Schwurbler", "schwurbeln", "Geschwurbel" and so on are listed (pre-Covid) in classes around 20. This is something like being quarantined for Covid because of a positive test with a ct value of 40.
I think we must have seen the same email from Sweden.
My own perspective is that the type 2 drugs don't do any good and are actually poisons. I don't know enough about Type 1 to have a view but I do know two type 1 diabetics. One is constantly in hospital and the other seems to have it under control (and fewer hospital visits). I suspect that they're both meticulous on keeping to their medicines.
Also my own experience is that countries affect sugar levels. Japan is good.
Yes, we probably did read the same email :-)
My awareness of the issues with diabetes go a bit further back though - more by accident. I do tend to struggle with my own food demons - my own body mechanisms are set up so that I only have to look at a candy and I put on weight. My brother, however, can shovel in endless quantities of stuff and not gain an ounce. If I ate like him I would have already caused the Eastern edge of the UK to dip further into the ocean.
Trying to understand the causes of all that, and why it's so damnably difficult to lose weight for many, set me on the road of reading stuff that posited the problem was more one of hormonal dis-regulation rather than simply about excess calories (another scientific "consensus"). It made a lot more sense than mantras like 'eat less, move more' - which are only true in the crudest possible terms, but don't capture the complexity of what's really going on. Of course, the role of insulin, and insulin resistance, featured as a significant component.
I've consistently held the view that while I don't have the background in genetics, medicine, PPE, or statistics to evaluate many claims about covid, I can still do basic sanity checks.
For example, I can't tell you much about the physics of masks and the details of viral transmission. But I can recognize that, if mask mandates worked to reduce cases, we'd see a general trend of places with mask mandates having lower case rates than neighboring areas without them. It's so basic as to be a tautology: if mask mandates reduce cases, mask mandates should reduce cases. And yet that's not what we're seeing. Something about mask mandates is, clearly, not working, and no amount of short term studies of hairdressers can change that.
Similarly, I can't say anything about the furin cleavage site, but I can see that it raises questions when a bat coronavirus pops up miles from bats but right next to a virology lab known to be working with bat coronaviruses. I can further recognize that it's incredibly suspicious when, before anyone has had time to fully investigate, a whole gaggle of people insist that there is nothing to see here and any talk of a lab leak is a nutty conspiracy theory.
I _do_ sometimes wonder if this is a quantum mechanics or relativity situation, where the truth (as far as we can tell) is unintuitive and bizarre to a layperson. Maybe general mask mandates really do work in some way, despite two years of real world data showing no effect. But while physicists can point to mountains of both math and experiments showing that QM and relativity work, and even explain the unintuitive weirdness to some extent, the covid consensus people don't appear to have that. Physics might have an element of "trust me, it's true" but there's always an unspoken "okay, I can explain this if you've got a few years and enough interest, and then it'll make sense, but you probably don't want that, so just trust me." Covid never seems to go much beyond "just trust me, bro."
Yes, the mantra "trust the science" has been scatter-gunned about with rather too much abandon. Very few have actually stopped to explain precisely WHY we should trust the science.
I love to (trying to) teach people about physics and maths - I love the whole process of starting with some question and seeing how far we can get to an answer using the things we know and the tools we have to hand. I love being able to EXPLAIN why physics arrives at the answers it does - or at least I love it when I get it right. It's frustrating when I can't properly communicate that explanation - and I try to find different ways to make things clear. I usually attribute my failures to me and my lack of ability in finding the right perspective for a particular student.
I never, ever, resort to an argument that boils down to "trust me" - at least not consciously, although I suppose I have accidentally done this from time to time.
In my experience most of the reasoned and careful explaining (right or wrong) has come from the so-called "sceptic" side throughout this pandemic - with some notable exceptions. Science ought to be a discussion/debate - with challenges and explanations given for particular points of view. If this is absent I don't know what it is - but it's not what I would call "science".
Occam's razor.
It's bizarre that Siegel cites fluoride and vaccines as examples of failure for "do your own research".
There is an active suit against the EPA to change its fluoride standards, based on research showing that fluoride lowers IQ (multiple studies in multiple locations). It looks like the EPA will in fact be forced to change. https://fluoridealert.org/faq/
For vaccines, there is clear evidence that all aluminum-adjuvanted vaccines should be banned. Prof Exley's book is a good starting point, Imagine You Are An Aluminum Atom (excellent book despite the title). His group is the world's best authority on aluminum toxicity.
Another helpful site is vaccinepapers.org, which includes full-text copies of the research it cites.
I honestly didn't bother reading most of the text, and from the comments, it seems like I was correct in doing so. So let me share MY perspective on this examination of the scientific method and the deficiency in education relevant to making intelligent decisions on the veracity of published works.
I was not great at biology or chemistry, but fairly decent at physics, but certainly not a mathematician. I look at patterns and also try to understand studies that I *CAN* pin down as relevant to an argument that is made.
When it came to COVID, certain arguments were made by Fauci and the media particularly after hydroxychloroquine was mentioned by Trump, and everyone in the media went nuts over this. (When I see the media do this, I know something's up.) So I tracked down the chinese study that Fauci cited all these horrible deaths from the use of HCQ, and here's what I found:
- The patients who died were on ventilators and nearing death.
- fatal doses (for women) and near-fatal doses (for men) were given to the respective patients matching the genders and correlating with weight of the average chinese person of each gender.
- There's a LONG history of safe use of HCQ in this country and around the world.
It didn't take a rocket scientist to see this. But it certainly put a HUGE shade of doubt against anything Fauci said after that.
I realized how much of a fraud this whole Covid thing was without needing an advanced degree. Why? Well, here's what's scary. *I* could detect that this was a fraud WITHOUT an advanced degree - that tells me how poorly the foundation of this Covid narrative was.
Admittedly, as I found further studies about HCQ (learning how to read them a little better along the way), I quickly determined that this was good for the first 5 days following symptoms, and then the efficacy fell off. It didn't take a rocket scientist here as well. I followed graphical charts, and read the correlating data for it. And there were multiple studies that seemed to all say the same thing. The science around this was not groundbreaking, except to the false narrative being pushed.
To believe otherwise would have taken a leap of absurd levels of faith towards a "science" that had NO basis in prior research.
Why should it take someone with an advanced degree to shoot holes in all of this?
This was repeated time and again, using basic analysis skills, correlating data and patterns, finding consensus and time and again finding holes in the narrative.
Could I have been reinforcing my own bias? I supposed someone could say that. But I found more data to support what I was finding than there was against it. And it led me to smart people in their respective fields who had (up until that time) NOT lied about what was going on, and I DID put faith in them, and lowering the need for me to continue to analyze results (it takes lots of time!).
So when I see references from this "blowhard", being dismissive of people with fewer letters behind his name, I am prone to immediately dismiss them as arrogant and pompous asses. I've met their type before (and this is my bias), and they're frequently trying to baffle me with bullshit instead of dazzling me with their brilliance.
If there's anything I've learned in all this: People who DO have the truth don't have to blow their horns to TRY to convince others. They share their data, explain it well enough for the average person to learn from (and it should be easy to prove/disprove), and gain adherents.
That's my experience in all this. I'm betting many others found the truth the same way as I. And are equally as dismissive of people such as this. Or at least, I would hope so. I've been dismayed at the continued "faith" in the BS that's being peddled, but I have to remember that quite frequently, these folks buying this have NOT put forth the effort to do even basic investigations, and it's up to people like me to ASK QUESTIONS that will at least get them to try to figure out why their position is wrong, when there's cognitive dissonance in their basic logic/understanding. Then it's time to get out of the way while they start to accept that they've been bamboozled.
We're starting to see large swaths of people seeing the light (even if they don't fully understand it), further proving that there are more and more holes punching through the weak narrative being peddled around Covid.
I know that this had something to do with diabetes, but at this point, there's a HUGE amount of distrust in ANYTHING pharmaceutical, and government regulators - and they have nobody to blame but themselves for all this. Hopefully a skeptical public will start to learn more about how to find the truth, unless they're too tired to do that level of research.
So to answer your question: Yes, do your own research. Because the "experts" have shown that they (and the sponsors of studies) are not always going to operate in your best interest, and provide the truth.
You raise a really important point - and one that's baffled me too
You're totally spot on - you don't need anything close to a PhD level education to be able to spot the mismatch between the 'media' message and the actual data and the publications they draw on. Yet it's curious (to me) how many 'experts' appear not to be able to see these simple things - or just use specious arguments to "explain" things away.
The 'official' covid narrative has never properly stacked up for me. I happen to have a PhD in physics, but I think that's wholly irrelevant in being able to see through the covid bullshit.
I’m starting to wonder if we’re all living in parallel universes! Literally. I guess if you’re tracking covid variants daily or treating the sickest covid patients, your perception will be altered, you will believe whatever the reality of the microscope and the numbers tell you. All very abstract. I just observe the local supermarket staff, there is a wide age range, sex and ethnicity in the four supermarkets I frequent (all very close together). I also like to talk to the staff. Most are as bewildered as we who read the good Professor Rigger! I think I live closer to reality than, say, Tom Chivers at Unherd, who, by the way, appears to have been released from his position as science editor and is now science editor for the Independent newspaper, where I’m sure he’ll be much happier. I think this problem of perception is due to the different narratives online and the MSM collapsing, ie we no longer share an overarching narrative. The very definition of a society (or country) is a shared narrative and shared values/ethics. It won’t be pretty! Just look at Ukraine, the very definition of an artificial society created by the Soviets that has never had a shared narrative or shared morality as a unitary state.