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I get what you're saying. I think there's an issue though, that neutrality is hard to come by for lots of reasons and especially nowadays when preference falsification is prevalent because critique of DEI/CRT is social suicide in certain sociopolitical milieu.

So naturally you're only going to find critique on the other side. As the CRT folk are keen to say - you can't be neutral - pick a side!

> although the article content itself is far from neutral

Can we admit how pernicious it is that the school system itself is manifestly captured by ideological motives and that simply criticizing that is impossible to be "neutral" by any standard people that agree with the program would define?

I guess I'm saying: how do you voice criticism in a neutral way when the program being criticized frames itself as basic human decency.

This is the same logic that lies at the center of something like the Patriot Act. Capture language and you've perniciously twisted language so as to be unimpeachable. This is Pandora's Box.

> we reject ideas of natural gifts and talents

It's absurd to diminish talent (never mind maintain that it doesn't exist), this is used to marginalize accomplished people (like minorities) and frankly it's hard to see this than anything other than a tactic of bullying and dogmatic ideology.

> "Teachers can support discussions that center mathematical reasoning rather than issues of status and bias by intentionally defining what it means to do and learn mathematics together in ways that include and highlight the languages, identities, and practices of historically marginalized communities."

This part beggars belief. It seems to declare that they'd like to maintain the pretense of teaching math by redefining math to mean critical race theory topics.

What's puzzling is that based on the CDC hospitalization data, we'd have at best 1~2 thousand children hospitalized if every child in America were to contract SARS-2 (rates show an average 1 out of 100,000 hospitalized for <18yo). Presumably "long covid" is also not even remotely prevalent among children (if this isn't the case, where's the evidence?).

The idea that we should just be deploying vaccines (that have been pushed through an extraordinarily abbreviated regulatory process) ASAP is beyond ridiculous imo.

I suspect the issue here is that the public health lever-pulling expert class has decided on an authoritarian strategy and maskless children would disrupt the facade of absolute conformity.

You see people outright admitting this when they vaccinate and are afraid to unmask even though science would suggest otherwise - they want to get rid of the perception of individual autonomy.

But on the topic of children masking: it's clear that the panic-ridden doomsday people have continuously downplayed or flat-out not recognized the non-linear detrimental effects of disrupting normal education and socialization of children.

> What I wonder about is how that came to be

Social identity is a big one, and insofar as social media dispenses with the subtle social cues that we rely on to communicate and emote, I think we're stuck with this if we're going to rely heavily on public communication devoid of facial expression.

Also it's somewhat obvious that a certain side of the political spectrum has an obsession with literal enumeration. I'd be interested to see if there's a conservative parallel to the growing list that so many feel obligated to put forth: pronouns, vaccination status, race, political identity, gender, sex, romance orientation, mask-affinity, mental health identity, astrological sign, etc.

As a qualifier, I say this as a gay guy who's often in queer social circles and it seems to me not only pathological but cognitively dissonant: in a sphere that claims that labels and normativity are bad, they then go on making an ever-growing list of definitions of existence. None of this is pleasurable - it's robotic and authoritative. There is an obsession with definition instead of just living their lives and embracing the ineffable and infinitely complex nature of life.

There's a good clip from CBC in 2012 about flu surveillance and how it's an unverified estimate with very large bounds: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mViFHqDD9hI

> as long as the virus circulates, we have a serious problem

Sorry this is ridiculous. The coronaviruses that surfaced in the 20th and 19th c. are not as dangerous as they once were. And if they are, they're part of the array of viruses that we were able to handle before even though they're dangerous to the immunoincompetent (senescence, etc).

> Ionnaidis has invested all his credibility at this point in the consensus view on the pandemic being wrong.

Honestly given that the consensus view is very much based in (almost boundless) fear, and in lots of ways a sense of moral superiority - and compounded with the inability for experts around the world to effectively combat the virus, I think he's closer to reality than people seem to believe.

And again, I'd put forward the notion that people react so much to Ioaniddis because he threatens the coherent, highly-personalized worldview they've built up over the past year.

For all the people downvoting you, yes it's a bit obtuse to deny that his opponents (I'm very ambivalent about him, leaning towards distaste) didn't use any and every opportunity to call him a racist/xenophobe/authoritarian/etc.

He was like a drug to both his supporters and detractors.

FWIW seasonality, geography, and travel patterns seems to have played a large part in how long a country had to decide before enacting measures that would make a difference.

It would seem that any country that was in summer during the spread had the advantage to stomp out virus when the trend was low (and in the case of the islands - shut down all travel).

And for some reason people are dead-set on dropping conventional wisdom despite in most countries the experts having disastrously failed.

> And it turns out celebrating in the streets is basically completely safe.

You wouldn't know it walking around the well-to-do section of the liberal city I live in.

> that doesn't make the research itself irresponsible

This seems like an absurd conclusion. If research isn't done responsibly in practice, and results in disaster, then the risks aren't worth it.

But you're trying to say that's he's downplaying the pandemic, when clearly he isn't. He's doing research that suggests some lower numbers than others. He's not the authority, and this is how science happens. An array of work is synthesized to come to conclusions.

I don't believe he's invested in disproving the pandemic or something. It is clear to me that the reactions to him are disproportionate to things he's saying.

His suggestions don't threaten anyone - clearly policy makers and the political class largely haven't listened to him. That people are threatened by him enough to start offhandedly discrediting him, suggests to me there's something deeper going on.

I think society has invested so much into lockdown and all the related measure that any evidence that's critical causes cognitive dissonance. People would be unable to bear the thought that what we did was unfounded or misguided.

The tell for me is that people are unable to allow for the existence of opposing arguments. Not only is Ioannidis wrong, he's obviously evil or dangerous, and must be discredited.

> and should go back to giving out about the quality of published papers

Do you ever consider that he hasn't changed and you have during the pandemic?

I realize that could come off as accusatory, but I've seen this said a bunch. And it seems like it never occurs to people that maybe they're so invested in a certain viewpoint that they've given up the meta-cognition to consider something they've convinced themselves to be wrong.

What's more likely: Ioaniddis, as an academic with an extensive and well-respected career and publication history, has suddenly been corrupted, or there are large cultural and cognitive biases that have been activated by a natural disaster?

> The author is a Professor at the Stanford school of medicine and also a professor of statistics.

Most people don't care. They selectively pick the academics that put out the most alarmist and pessimistic predictions (often predicated on the same assumption-packed models that generate results in line with those assumptions, then present the results as evidence of the original assumptions).

Ioaniddis is smeared with allegations about funding, etc. Meanwhile people like vaccine manufacturers, big pharma, etc. are never critically examined as potentially conflict-ridden organizations funding their own trials with scientists on their payroll. Same goes to the epidemiologists and others that stand to benefit from producing the most emotion-provoking results in order to secure their grants.

You see it with the censoring of the panels hosted by Gov. DeSantis. These aren't conspiracy theorists. They're credentialed academics and researchers with established careers.

The idea that those recordings of academics, discussing their subject matter, hosted on YouTube or wherever, are dangerous is patently absurd.

Lockdown policy as it played out around the world (clearly it seems some were lucky enough to enact it before mass spread, but after that it seems near useless and medieval) has the effect of pushing all disease burden equally instead of allowing the least threatened to build immunity.

So sadly if you choose to prevent young people from getting infected, you automatically push disease burden to older people that will suffer more.

tulip bulbs aren't a gargantuan decentralized computer network

It's not far-fetched that there's a pervasive combo of conformity, virtual signalling and outrage.

> how do we address issues where there's implicit bias being applied to our work?

my experience is that most workplaces and social spaces I'm in are systemically liberal, "reality has a liberal bias" abounds

You're stating some pretty plain details, so it's funny to see this get downvoted (I guess just out of spite?).

> but I sure as hell don't want to be part of such selfish civilization just that cashflow is maintained

so where does pharma with no liability, running their own trials and effectively being handed blank checks during the pandemic fit into this?

> That is an extremely presumptuous statement to make.

No, especially in the context of the pandemic, it's easy to start talking about pandemic policy as though "everyone should just do X" where X is something extremely convenient, profitable, even pleasant for tech workers and other white collar jobs.

Do we even have one piece of thorough, plain journalism that examines how much money these pharma companies are making from vaccines, testing, therapies, drugs, care, etc.?

You realize Vivaldi is essentially the modern replacement for Opera.

Per your bio, you work at Google. You're divorced from the experience of struggling people.

You do realize that normative claims like "they ought", "government should", etc. are precisely the faculty-lounge, haughty idealism, that's worth absolutely nothing to people as they are, spoken from a position of privilege, condescension and fake expertise?

Notice how teachers act as though they're above everyone else? Refusing to work, whereas normal people that aren't of means largely kept working, and didn't act like paranoid agoraphobes exaggerating their actual risk?

It's no secret that most people overestimate their risk by an order(if not multiple) of magnitude.

> reality doesn’t line up with your preconceived notions

I'm claiming this precise thing, that you're arrogantly presuming that everyone can just hole up in their house like the elite class of people who do nothing but berate the (almost always) lower class people who do not have the privilege to stay home.

> shut everything down and people get the message that this is serious

the Pajama Class say this and then wonder why their "messaging" doesn't go over well with anyone who's not able to log into zoom and chat it up with their comfortable, salaried, urban-elitist compatriots