Listening to a recap of the effort to test the theories of relativity, it occurred to me that confirming "truth" may be just as hard as refuting falsehoods. It's certainly not easy.
Brandolini's law https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brandolini's_law
But the alternative is surely worse; to not test, to not review or to base treatment on other things than facts.
And, one more thing. The speed at which we have scienced the shit out of Covid (the amount of science that we have done in response to this virus) is, at least to me, astounding. If we succeed, which it looks like we will, to win this battle using the vaccines which are already available, it, not only, is in favour of science in fact being very quick, but could also be considered one of humanities greatest feats.
Alternatively I have been absolutely appalled at how slow our institutions have been to respond correctly in so many ways.
1. Anosmia: it took months before I heard about it, and months before it got added to lists of symptoms. A common and distinctive signal back before we had testing was an opportunity lost.
2. The emphasis on hand washing and the de-emphasis of transmission by air... dangerously retarded.
3. The whole face masks bullshit - all the probabilities pointed towards their use being beneficial... because even small reductions to the speed of transmission can reduce exponential growth.
4. The lack of information about real-world testing of transmission - presumably virus transmission was tested on people in more than one authoritarian country, yet I never saw the results of that testing surface.
The above are only some of the significant delays that I saw in the transmission of science and fact during the epidemic, and I haven’t even really looked into the topic in depth (mostly I just skimmed HN for information).
My best guess is my pinched nerve caused the sensation which I then experienced emotionally. Exactly no one any where suggested the possibility of a physical cause to an emotional state.
Scientific progress is not a straight line. More like bumps in the dark.
I think the body plays a much larger role in our emotional and mental states than we give it credit for.
This isn't an argument for rushing consensus before the evidence is strong enough, but the reasoning behind the initial mistakes was consistently laughably stupid, relying on vague platitudes instead of intellectual rigor[1]. Medical culture is plagued with innumeracy, illusory hard binaries, poor critical thinking, and knee-jerk hyper-conservatism. While the first three are an unforgivable gap that the medical establishment needs to engage in some hard self-examination over, the latter is possibly a reasonable baseline culture for normal circumstances[2]. However, it's horribly maladaptive in a situation like a pandemic, where time is a critical factor and the baseline cost of inaction is thousands of lives a day, trillions of dollars, as well as the PV of the future cost of exponential spread.
As always, I'll clarify that this is not a criticism of _doctors_ as individuals. All of the doctors I know are at least moderately intelligent and well-intentioned, but professional culture is a powerful force and medical school is a heavy-duty indoctrination device that I've seen make too many people _worse_ at thinking. I'm fairly close socially to a lot of doctors of various ages, and I've only seen the most intelligent[3] ones I know manage to shake off this brainwashing enough to recover their critical thinking abilities.
Throw in the challenges of political engagement with expert fields....suffice it to say that Alex Tabarrok's fucking Twitter account was a better source of public health understanding than the WHO/CDC/FDA/policymakers combined.(I started that sentence as a joke, but I'm actually pretty sure that those ignoring the latter in favor of the former would have had a healthier, happier, safer pandemic experience).
[1] For example, Bob Wachter, the chairman of the Dept of Medicine at UCSF, came around to the idea of loosening the second-dose-reserved-at-all-costs orthodoxy after a little while, citing the basic math that the numerate among us had been screaming about since the beginning of the vaccine drive. His reason for his initial disagreement? "An unnecessary curveball". Doctors' misuse of and amateurish engagement with science would be amusing if it wasn't killing so many people.
[2] though the lever is probably jammed too hard in one direction due to liability concerns and inaction bias
[3] To the extent that pedigrees are useful for calibrating where this bar is: my double-Ivy-League-educated physician sister is miles below this intelligence bar
[4] As far as I'm concerned, the FDA has more blood on their hands than anyone at this point. Anybody who paid any attention to them before March 2020 should be completely unsurprised
But, as you elude to, none of that matters if public officials and decision makers don’t care for science.
We have a lot of known unknowns about gut biota. And a lot of people whose gut biota are literally killing them. And a lot of friends and family of those people. They are of course going to be frustrated. Especially when they look at how long those question marks have existed. Get to it already!
Feyman’s wife died while the antibiotic that saved people like her was in drug trials. Can you imagine being that close to a cure and missing it? When I read about people dying of infections mid century I have to pull up my calendar and just pity them a little bit more.