Exactly. If your objective is to control your weight, changing your diet has probably 5x to 10x more impact than changing your physical activity.

I am saying that the statement “facts don’t care about your feelings” is a useless statement and it doesn’t make people who say it seem smart. People who say the slogan seemingly universally seem to think it makes them very smart. It doesn’t convey any information to anyone, all it is used for is for morons like Ben Shapiro to automatically dismiss people for being emotional.

You’re right, I don’t like conservatives very much, but I have seen left leaning people fetishizing stoicism and I think those people are dumb too.

ETA:

Also, slightly confused how I “gaslit” anyone. You can go through my post history and I am generally pretty happy to acknowledge I don’t like conservatives very much.

> The slogan is directed at fragile liberals who would rather yell like a toddler at a town hall meeting than have an informed discussion centered around facts.

Who created chaos at school board meetings with yelling about trans kids and history books over the last couple of years? I have yet to hear anyone who isn't on the Right freak out about "what they're teaching our kids" the way that conservatives do.

> Also nobody will teach you all the techniques because they're keeping theirs secret.

Sounds more like people who like to use propaganda who keep their methods in shadows (not always, though). I try to teach critical thinking all the time. I bet you do too. Do you not try to inform loved ones how detect spam or scams? How to evaluate what's true in their inbox or on a webpage? Do you have anything to withhold in such a scenario?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/On_Bullshit

Disinformation is so much easier when truth is not a dimension you care about.

Enhanced by algos that promote those falsehoods in a way that ensures widest possible spread

Lots of individuals denounced the system, but you didn't hear from them because they didn't meet the demands of the entirely-manufactured scientific "consensus" on the wet market theory. As it turns out, that "consensus" was almost entirely driven by Anthony Fauci's camp of virologists (it's not just him, but a relatively small group of people who have a monetary/career interest in continuing the type of research that happens at the Wuhan Institute) who saw the "lab leak" theory as a fundamental threat to their ability to continue doing research that many saw as unethical and bordering on bio-weapon development. In response, they essentially took control of the COVID response and the official COVID narrative.

That is why the director of the NIAID, which is a research organization and not a public health agency at all, took charge of the century's biggest public health situation over the head of the (sadly impotent) CDC, which should have been in charge of coordinating the US's response.

The scientific consensus that you were sold was never really a consensus. It was a power play.

By contrast, there's a strong consensus on climate change, for example, that involves a very large number of scientists who should know and who are not incentivized to believe it.

There is a virus lab in Wuhan because a lot of coronaviruses originate in that region. Its existence/location is not evidence of a lab leak.

If anything, the lab leak “theory” has received too much media attention when the primary evidence (location of a lab) is easily explained by other factors.

Imagine a virus was spread from penguins to humans. It would not be surprising if research on the virus were conducted in Antarctica!

My favorite post of all time that I can no longer find:

>Thesis: China is a backward country where basic hygiene is not followed and any animal will be eaten live and raw.

>Antithesis: China is more advanced than many first world countries, with state of the art biological research pushing boundaries beyond what current protocols can handle.

>Synthesis: An infected bat escaped from the Wu Han institute of virology and was promptly eaten.

At the very least it was such an obvious connection that ruling it out should have been an early step; when the PRC clammed up, and stopped letting any data out that should have been seen as the attempt at a cover-up that it likely was.

Maybe it didn't come from the lab. Maybe it didn't come from China at all. But maybe we should have checked that? Maybe we should know if some senior coronavirus researchers at that lab got sick with weird illnesses in the later part of 2019? Maybe we should have confirmed their virus handling procedures were up to snuff, and that a lab leak was unlikely because they were such upstanding and responsible scientists?

Accurate. A few bits to support this:

- Yishan Wong, once Reddit CEO and still very much in the know, admitted to the following (direct quote):

> Example: the "lab leak" theory (a controversial theory that is now probably true; I personally believe so) was "censored" at a certain time in the history of the pandemic because the "debate" included ...massive amounts of horrible behavior, spam-level posting, and abuse that spilled over into the real world - e.g. harrassment of public officials and doctors, racially-motivated crimes, etc.

- Twitter had a CCP-affiliated person on their board of directors during Covid

- I assume everyone here is familiar with the Lancet letter.

I completely disagree with your characterization of this example, and on the contrary I think your example perfectly shows how "follow the incentives" gives you truer, clearer understanding of what happened:

1. If you dug in to the authors of the now infamous Lancet letter ( https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lancet_letter_(COVID-19) ), you could see how they had huge conflicts of interests.

2. Early on in the pandemic, you could see how some people went to a lab leak (intentional or not) theory very quickly with no evidence (e.g. "The China Virus"). On the flip side, though, I think you had a lot of people pushing against this who felt that any acknowledgement of a potential lab leak was playing into "conspiracy theories". So my point is that you have to trace incentives on both sides, and both sides had incentives that were actually against finding the actual truth.

3. I think the other thing that is extremely important is to realize that nearly all humans prefer some explanation to "I don't know". Even today you see people on both sides of the Covid origins debate who are adamant their position is right, when I think the real situation is more "Some lab leak or escaped zoonotic virus being studied by a lab is more likely than not". So early on in the pandemic, you had people confidently proclaiming their personal theories as facts that weren't backed up by evidence. And importantly, the truth nearly always eventually comes out. You say "that hypothesis was totally suppressed for the mainstream media for about 2 years". That timeline is wrong, there were lots of things being reported in early 2021 about a potential lab leak - this article that summarizes the state of reporting is from June 2021: https://www.washingtonpost.com/lifestyle/media/the-media-cal...

A big part of the problem here is that the term "conspiracy" has multiple meanings. Here's the dictionary definition:

> An agreement to perform together an illegal, wrongful, or subversive act.

This means that for there to be a conspiracy, the conspirators have to communicate with each other about it. Many people would read your post and conclude that you think that there's a centralized organization that all the journalists get their marching orders from.

I feel like in reality you probably think that the journalists, like most humans, are very good at knowing what is "in vogue" and what is "outside acceptable discourse" for their circles, and so they engage in systematic bias.

A lot of arguments over conspiracy theories consist of people using the dictionary definition of the word scoffing at people who are using the second definition of the word.

Your treating the lab leak hypothesis as near fact is exactly the kind of bullshit we need less of.

There are not "a few (orders of) magnitude" in probability between these hypotheses.

That would at least need to be 1% vs. 99% and that's being charitable.

What we need is an education system that teaches people to simultaneously entertain conflicting hypotheses and update the belief in them as information becomes available.

Your post is the perfect example of what that doesn't look like.

(Footnote: There are a number of examples in history for pathogens leaking from labs, and for zoonotic origins, so having such strongly biased priors under poor evidence in either direction really just shows that you want to believe something.)

the irony for me at least, is that even at hyper liberal institutions all my colleagues (students, post doc, faculty even) entertained the idea that a lab leak was possible. just when it came to the media this hypothesis was labeled as a conspiracy theory.

> the chances there is some significant medical harm still undetected is vanishingly small

I don't think this statement is true.

Long-term effects can only be observed over the, well, long term which makes it hard to compare with the baseline. It was measured differently and with very different external factors. Then even if we do by chance manage to observe the harm today it could be very hard to identify the reason — we would see the factual result but neither the process nor the cause.

Take any unexplained health issue we have today, e.g. decline in male fertility estimated at 50% in western counties since 1970s, a dramatic change. Could it be microwaves? Well possibly, can't be ruled out at this point, among many other candidates. Furthermore, with the new research saying that 1) microwaving food in "microwave-safe" plastic containers releases huge number of microplastic particles into the food and 2) microplastic accumulates in testicles — it's not even a fringe science anymore but a normal theory to be studied and be proven or disproven.

Do we have any other health issues that increased over the past 50 years? Yes. What caused them, is it something recent that became popular in the past 50 years? Very likely, yes. Do we know it? Not yet.

It took us a very long time to figure out cigarettes. Or leaded fuel, even though we knew in advance that lead is poisonous.

>cell phones

Well, as far as direct physical harms, yes, but as far as mental harms that translate to physical harms, the jury's still out:

'“Given that the increase in mental health issues was sharpest after 2011, Twenge believes it’s unlikely to be due to genetics or economic woes and more likely to be due to sudden cultural changes, such as shifts in how teens and young adults spend their time outside of work and school.'

https://www.apa.org/news/press/releases/2019/03/mental-healt...

> because they've been deployed so broadly for so long, the chances there is some significant medical harm still undetected is vanishingly small.

Cancer rates continue to rise, and will be well over 50% of all people in my lifetime.

There is no doubt our current world is making us very sick.

Also, trial lawyers would rapidly become the wealthiest people on Earth if genuine, reproducible evidence of harm from non-ionizing radiation could be found.

If you thought the tobacco and silicone breast implant settlements were impressive...

If you publish new evidence in favour of a popular theory, your paper gets published – sometimes in a prestigious journal. Whereas if you demonstrate compelling evidence overturning a high-profile scientific dogma of international import, you… *checks notes* win the Nobel Prize in Physics. Hm.

Maybe the Nobel Committee is in on… no, that'd only affect whether they awarded the prize, not whether people expect them to. They must be suppressing the evidence at the source: the instruments themselves. … No, they'd have to alter everything, and there's no way they got to my weather station. Maybe there's some way to remotely manipulate all the weather station reading at once? Think, what do all the weather stations have in common?

I've got it! They're doing something to the atmosphere, to make it seem like there's anthropogenic climate change, and trick all the scientists into publishing studies showing that it's real and happening, but actually it's just people altering the chemical composition of the atmosphere en-masse for unspecified nefarious reasons, likely personal profit. Or, maybe it's a byproduct of some industrial process, that they don't want us to know about. I bet that's what chemtrails are.

Since climate change is a very popular topic, so popular that a person's belief or non belief in it will cause people on the other side to strike them down without hesitation... There's power, community, and social acceptance to drive people.

The downvotes to the above comment's parent comment prove my point.

That's a good point. I tend to stay away from negative thinking about hot topics like this for that very reason. Even though I have my doubts about something, I tend to keep it to myself because I don't want to bring people down and anyway someone might come up with a way to look at, or take action in a positive light.

But I still feel its important for people to act from their own values, right or wrong, and not from a "hey trust the science" mentality which reminds me of majority thinking. Just because a lot of people have come to the conclusion that the science is sound, it doesn't make them right. There are plenty of situations where decided by majority viewpoints have been wrong.

I looked at the paper you referenced.

Interestingly, it does not say that the warming trend is not happening, rather they argue that the evidence is insufficient to say for sure if the warming is caused by human-driven causes or natural ones (e.g. volcanic activity or solar changes). They mention the heat island effect as one of the issues that may complicate the attribution of the contribution of different factors to the warming trend.

To quote from the paper:

“To summarize, by varying ST and/or TSI choice and/or the attribution approach used, it is possible to conclude anything from the long-term warming being "mostly natural" to "mostly anthropogenic" or anything in between. While each of us has our own scientific opinions on which of these choices are most realistic, we are concerned by the wide range of scientifically plausible, yet mutually contradictory, conclusions that can still be drawn from the data.”

This is cherry-picking. There is a raft of solid science from a large number of independent researchers looking at many different indicators that corroborate well with each other. The evidence is overwhelming, global warming is happening. Picking one thing that says we haven't always gotten it 100% right doesn't mean it isn't happening.

Great example of what I was talking about!

Ok, arctic sea ice.

Ice exists at temperature below 0C or 32F at 1atm AND at system energy levels below the enthalpy of melting for liquid water, or latent heat for this first order phase change.

Thermodynamics uses temperature and pressure to explain system energy of molecules for liquid vapor solid phase systems. Latent heat is the esoteric part of this phenomenon because it requires a scientific education to understand calculus and work. Understandably, everyone can grasp temperature.

I think your comment is a perfect example of misdirection and people using “data driven methods” to attack a “first principles” explanation of physical phenomena.

Here’s a link because that gives my idea more weight.

https://earth.gsfc.nasa.gov/cryo/data/current-state-sea-ice-...

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arctic_sea_ice_decline

https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-022-05686-x

https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.adj8469

Computer people talk about scientific methods and their “home lab” stuff, ai and inherent structure of data then absolutely fall for the facebook-grade-misinformation arguments to not trust something that is too mainstream. Jfc