| ▲ | mac-attack 8 hours ago | |
The issues you are bringing up don't highlight that they stuck with the wrong decision, but rather that they didn't pivot to the right decision as fast as you'd like... yet your solution is bottom-up decision-making that will undoubtedly take much much longer to reach a consensus? How do you square that circle? Experts can study and learn from their prior mistakes. Continually doing bottom-up when we have experts is inefficient and short-sighted, no? Surely you would streamline part of the process and end up in the pre-Trump framework yet again? Also, I'm curious why you have such a rosy picture of the bottom-up alternatives? Are you forgetting about the ivermectin overdoses? 17,000 deaths related to hydroxychloroquine? The US president suggesting people drinking bleach? It is easy to cherry pick the mistakes that science makes while overlooking the noise and misinformation that worms its way into less-informed/less-educated thinkers when non-experts are given the reins | ||
| ▲ | mitthrowaway2 7 hours ago | parent [-] | |
No, I'm not criticizing the officials for failing to reach the correct decision or adopt the correct viewpoints faster than they did. Institutions are large and risk-averse, data was incomplete, and people make mistakes. I'm criticizing them for suppressing the dissemination of ideas that did later turn out to be correct. I hope the distinction is clear. If you're going to impose a ban on the dissemination of ideas, you'd better be ten thousand percent sure that nothing covered by that ban later turns out to be the truth. Not a single one, not even if every other idea that got banned was correctly identified as a falsehood. Otherwise, the whole apparatus falls apart and institutions lose trust. I'm not forgetting ivermectin overdoses. I don't believe my picture is rosy. I'm aware of all the garbage ideas out there, which is why the measles is back and all the other madness. But I'm firmly of the opinion that trying to suppress these bad ideas has only redoubled their strength in the backlash, and caused a rejection of expert knowledge altogether. | ||