Aaron Rodgers on "the science"

If science can't be questioned anymore it's not science, it's propaganda.

~ Aaron Rodgers, Pat McAfee Show, December 28, 2021

Carl Sagan on the dumbing down of America

The dumbing down of America is most evident in the slow decay of substantive content in the enormously influential media... lowest common denominator programming, credulous presentations on pseudoscience and superstitution, but especially a kind of celebration of ignorance.

~ Carl Sagan, 1995

Michael Brendon Dougherty on how Covid-19 warped assessments of risk

At some point, the pandemic — the provisional and practical judgments in favor of caution that can justify restrictive behaviors — became an unshakeable moral purpose.  Actual weighing of risks went out the window: There’s a deadly disease out there; my actions can contribute to the end of the disease or to its spreading in perpetuity. 

It’s as if a circuit has been fused.  While caution and restrictive behavior can be justified by a conscience informed by the risks, the human mind can also make calculations based on superstition.  And one frighteningly common one is the equation of science with truth, fear with realism, and caution with virtue.

~ Michael Brendon Dougherty, "COVID-19 Rewired Our Brains," National Review, May 3, 2021

CDC Director Dr. Rochelle Walensky speaks before the
House Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Crisis,
April 15, 2021

Jeff Harris on scientific consensus

Maybe you’ve heard of Ignaz Semmelweis, an Austrian-Hungarian obstetrician with a prickly personality. If not, you will quickly recognize his contribution to the medical profession with the three words he made famous:

“Wash your hands.”

This was way back in 1847.

Dr. Semmelweis provided hard data clearly demonstrating that once he and his staff began washing their hands and disinfecting equipment between patients the number of infections and deaths dropped dramatically. Unfortunately, the scientific “consensus” at the time held that there was no benefit to these measures and his advice was almost completely ignored by the learned medical community. In fact, many of his medical peers were incensed with his suggestion that they could be responsible for transmitting illness and disease!

At the time doctors took pride in their soiled gowns as a mark of their industrious work! It was commonplace for doctors who had just completed an autopsy to go to the maternity ward and deliver babies without ever washing up! After all it was the “consensus” and with so many doctors in agreement how could they be wrong?

Dr. Semmelweis died in an insane asylum in 1865 knowing that untold numbers of patients had needlessly suffered and died because the medical community refused to accept his findings and instead chose to follow the "consensus."

~ Jeff Harris, The Ron Paul Institute for Peace &scie Prosperity, "Science Is Not About Consensus," ZeroHedge.com, August 27, 2020

Nassim Taleb on treating the social science of economics like a physical science

It was confidently believed that the scientific successes of the industrial revolution could be carried through into the social sciences, particularly with such movements as Marxism. Psuedoscience came with a collection of idealistic nerds who tried to create a tailor-made society, the epitome of which is the central planner. Economics was the most likely candidate for such use of science; you can disguise charlatanism under the weight of equations, and nobody can catch you since there is no such thing as a controlled experiment.

~ Nassim Taleb, Fooled By Randomness, 2nd Edition, p. 108