I'm not going to defend the content, but I am going to defend the format.

Is the blog post overly long? Or are we just accustomed to short-and-juicy articles aimed at the declining attention spans of the twitter era?

It's about 3700 words, which is about the length of a high school term paper. Substack lists it as a "17 minute read". Firefox says 21-24.

Reality has a lot of detail and for something that actually aims to get technical rather than just skimming the surface, it often takes several paragraphs to analyze different facets of a complex question.

In a different era, this article would have been considered an appropriate length for a magazine.

I think intelligent people refusing to acknowledged that science is not a field void of people with imperfect ethics, bias, financial gain incentive or a need to justify their position has immunized me from blindly trusting science. Many years ago a research professor at a highly regarded university basically described to me how funding worked at their university. Essentially the most important criteria was if their research had some promise of results aligning with who was giving the university funding. The second was how well you could navigate the politics of the university and the research funds director. This person expressed deep dissatisfaction that they had promising research in the cancer field that they could not get the lab director to fund because of the first two points.

I mean, I've seen up close talks of how to "adjust the dataset" to fit a certain, pre-ordained result for a medical research paper on children. Wouldn't discard it happens in other fields.

But there is freedom in religion in most countries, one can choose what to believe in.

I’ve been reading into autism lately; and a brief thought about “intelligent people” has popped into my head.

Intelligence is just a tool, that’s used to achieve the underlying organism’s goals. For example, a crow’s intelligence is used to keep out of danger and to find food. Most neurotypical people use intelligence to gain resources like money, status, and power to fulfill biological imperatives like being part of and respected by their “tribe.” Whereas some autistics will not care about this sort of thing, and be biased more towards the truth, rather than what’s socially most advantageous. For example: Stallman. He has little concern for social appearances and such, so he is free to express something close to “truth,” rather than socially-rewarding “truth.”

At that point, it becomes fairly depressing how little research and “knowledge” attainment is actually geared towards “truth,” and not personal enrichment.

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And a tangent. I think what separates the outcast autist and the socially well-regarded autist is confidence and self-esteem. If you act and present yourself like a low-status person, you will be treated like it, as people regard your “offness” and associate it with low-status. Whereas if you’re self-assured and act like what you’re doing is innately correct, people will pick up the body language and signs, to think that you’re actually “right” and should accept it.

Sort of like those methed-up cult leaders who are utterly insane, but project unwavering self-assuredness, which people naturally gravitate to.

I think that approach surrenders intelligence and facts to scientific racists and climate change deniers.

In other words: if you can't defeat them with facts and intelligence, what exactly is that supposed to tell me about climate change and racism?