Re:Are Experts Real?
by cltby on Monday January 11, 2021 @12:40PM
(#25732550)
Many argue that the experts ultimately got it right (and are thus redeemed). I strongly disagree. Even when the public health types corrected course, their behavior left a bad taste in my mouth. There was no acknowledgement of having been wrong, no introspection on how their errors came to be, no discussion how they could be avoided in the future. Just aggressive enforcement of the new party line couched in appeals to authority. The whole enterprise reeks of blind dogmatism.
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> Many argue that the experts ultimately got it right (and are thus redeemed).
Perhaps their opinion on that one matter they corrected was redeemed, but their general lack of understanding about the limits of their own knowledge was exposed, which is more damning for someone called an "expert."
Re:Are Experts Real?
by TheTrotters on Monday January 11, 2021 @12:50PM
(#25732738)
And in time-sensitive situations getting something "ultimately right" is akin to getting it wrong.
Re:Are Experts Real?
by ndiscussion on Monday January 11, 2021 @01:04PM
(#25732999)
Spot on, a broken clock looks correct twice a day. I have zero confidence that they're actually correct this time.
Re:Are Experts Real?
by nickthemagicman on Monday January 11, 2021 @08:21PM
(#25741026)
Which experts got it right?
The Swedish epidemiological team? The state of Florida epidemiological team?
Both regions of whom had better outcome per capita with less Covid restrictions than numerous states who followed the mainstream 'experts' advice.
How do you measure 'got it right'?
Cut n pasting the same comment[1][2] multiple times is rude IMHO.
I believe that there is a lot of noise in the numbers, and a large numbers of causal factors. Florida or Sweden could easily be random outliers, or that the actual reasons could not be due to the cause and effect you are using as an “explanation”.
Re:Are Experts Real?
by nickthemagicman on Tuesday January 12, 2021 @08:49AM
(#25746802)
There's a combined total of around 30 million people in those places. That's a decent enough population size to to make me wonder why places with a lot more draconian restrictions have worse covid outcomes. I don't know if noise is a sufficient explanation to me for 30 million people.