With COVID, I feel like it was a bunch of technocrats, that had no "human touch".
As for "heliocentric / geocentric" - didn't that all become irrelevant once we've learned there's no "ether"? All models are equally valid/invalid. Or perhaps I'm missing something.
> With COVID, I feel like it was a bunch of technocrats, that had no "human touch".
No one speaking ex cathedra to a populous has a human touch that will speak to everyone they're speaking to. I once went to a personality theory conference and enjoyed myself, but the endnote speaker gave a talk where he mentioned the need for love (or something in that vein using the word "love"), and I immediately felt alienated from the entire event.
You may consider that for the argument "current consensus is not always true and should not be enforced as if it were always true" the argument "but what about this one case where it was true" is not a counter-argument.
But pandemic advice isn't about doing good science, it's about risk management. If your goal is to keep as many people alive as possible, you bet on the consensus science because it's probably right. And it was.
Which consensus exactly?
Was it though? As I am seeing now, some early policies were flat out murderous (such as hosting COVID patients together with healthy people in nursing homes), some were practically useless mortality wise (like lockdowns) and some are very minimally useful or not useful at all (like mask mandates and mass-firing unvaccinated people). Some were flat out fraud (like claims that consensus existed about COVID origins). For some, I understand, the jury is still out (like, how efficient exactly are the vaccines, compared to natural immunity). So I am not sure which part "it was" it is referring too, and pretty sure there were a lot of losing bets made in those years.
> some were practically useless mortality wise
If any of the advice decreased the rate of infection spread they were likely to decrease mortality through the simple effect of making work easier for health care workers.
Actual lockdowns worked for a long time in China, as well as travel lockdowns in countries such as Australia and New Zealand.
Masking works. Mandates don't work if huge chunks of the population don't follow them (i.e., if they aren't actually "mandates").
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8580811/
> Average COVID-19 mortality per million was 288.54 in countries without face mask policies and 48.40 in countries with face mask policies. In no mask countries, adjusted average daily increase was 0.1553 − 0.0017 X (days since the first case) log deaths per million, compared with 0.0900 − 0.0009 X (days since the first case) log deaths per million in the countries with a mandate. A total of 60 days into the pandemic, countries without face mask mandates had an average daily increase of 0.0533 deaths per million, compared with the average daily increase of 0.0360 deaths per million for countries with face mask mandates.
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8287197/
> Twenty one articles were identified that analysed ecological data to assess the protective effect of policies mandating community mask wearing. All studies reported SARS-CoV-2 benefits in terms of reductions in either the incidence, hospitalization, or mortality, or a combination of these outcomes. Few studies assessed compliance to mask wearing policies or controlled for the possible influence of other preventive measures such as hand hygiene and physical distancing, and information about compliance to these policies was lacking.
Virtually all of them were sold by "trust the Experts" crowd, and supported and promoted by people that literally declared "I am the Science". We've got as close to experto-cracy as we could be without abandoning the democracy completely. So telling "this wasn't true science" has a large whiff of "true socialism has never been tried". I'd say we tried as much as we, as a society, could possibly do. If that didn't work, then the problem is not that we need more experts and have to trust them harder.
There was a lot of cross-communication during the early days as politicians made statements that contradicted the CDC and other organizations, or were based on expensive interventions not available to the regular patient (such as the intra-bronchial tube UV light treatment promoted early on by Trump).
And yes, sometimes those organizational figureheads said stupid things (e.g. no evidence that masks are a good idea for healthy people, back in the era of the mask shortage, instead of legally mandating that masks be reserved for medical personnel) that were rightfully contradicted by other experts.
Social distancing and masking were both good ideas from the start, based on prior scientific knowledge.
Skepticism and consensus are conflicting concepts. Consensus has no place in science as method of determining truth. You cannot form a scientific conclusion based on socially or politically manufactured consent.
Never has this been more clearly demonstrated than during and after the recent Coronavirus panic. Facts were ignored, or even suppressed, "settled science" and "scientific consensus" were used as weapons to silence dissenters, by trashing their reputations, or threatening their jobs.
We are living in an age of Cargo Cult Science. Richard Feynman must be rolling in his grave.
You seem to be making an argument about public policy, not science. And I refer to the comment to which you replied: different things, with different goals.
I think this… really depends on the behavior.
I think, pretty much universally we should never force someone to pretend their beliefs conform to such evidence.
But, in certain circumstances, I think it’s absolutely appropriate to force people to conform to our understanding of the world.
Consider exaggerating this principle to an extreme degree (to demonstrate that, at least there exists a line where we should force people to conform). Let’s suppose we say it’s illegal to stab a person, because according to our understanding of biology, stabbings make it much more likely that the victim is seriously injured or dies. Suppose there is a person that does not believe stabbing causes injuries. We *should not* force them to change their beliefs. We should not force them to hide their beliefs, or to lie about their beliefs. They should be allowed to openly expesss their views—contrary as they are to our current knowledge.
But we should force them not to stab people. We absolutely should force their actions to match our understanding of the world.
To take it to a more plausible scenario, imagine someone has an extremely communicable and terminal disease. All our scientific understanding says that, if they deliberately cough in someone’s face, the victim is likely to be harmed or killed. This infected person does not believe in this science. It’s okay that they don’t believe in the science. It’s fine for them to argue that the science is wrong. It should still be illegal for them to deliberately cough in someone’s face if they know they are currently infected.
> I think it’s absolutely appropriate to force people to conform to our understanding of the world.
And I think... it's... appropriate to... use extreme violence to resist anyone who attempts to force me to conform to anything. Ellipsis.
And it is interesting to note that the actual principle in the case you raise is that it should be illegal to do anything in someone else's personal space that they don't consent to, which has nothing to do with the state of science.
I think this is a consequence of mythologizing the scientific process as being purely following empirical evidence and being moved just by gathering evidence and explaining it in the most convincing form, and whatever the current best one is, must be followed as if it were the truth.
The corrections and withdrawals of work were the right of the Roman Inquisition which had oversight over the Vatican's academic publishing process. They were a publisher in their own right, and if they granted an Imprimatur for a book, it would be treated as if they had supported it as truth.
Hence, Copernicus had to be corrected to be "hypothetical" in 1615, so that it would accurately represent the truth known at the time.
Galileo had managed to get his Imprimatur on his Dialogue without the proper oversight it should have had. He arranged it so it was checked page by page by his Nuncio who didn't have the right competencies. When the Inquisition asked the Sacred Master of the Palace if they had indeed granted their Imprimatur, they hadn't, and it was an embarrassment for them.
This really just boils down to saying: there is a rigorous evidence-based standard for updating our best available knowledge, and people who don't know how to adhere to that standard should be disqualified from recommending deviation (they are of course welcome to believe and do unto themselves as they wish, they just shouldn't be allowed from promoting it unless they have solid evidence for their claims).
In this era, it is hard to point that out without mentioning COVID so, y'know. COVID. But it has been true for long before that and it'll be true after the COVID response is forgotten.
People should be allowed to behave in ways that are inconsistent with the best available scientific knowledge. Otherwise, ironically, misconceptions will persist more readily.