669 – Topics

00:03 Deference to expertise: deference to expertise, Climate Essentials by Dave Plumb, deferring to experts, making decisions, experts as de facto authority, decision process become authoritarian without any direction, abandoning democratic responsibility, knowledge obtained through authority, what is political expertise, political language gaps, analytical process is alien to politics, selective expertise, when people stop listening, frustrating struggle to distinguish between nonsense and sense

14:05 Jumping to conclusions: facts and conclusions, facts and data, empiricism in data lowest of low, numbers are meaningless without interpretations, data as models, jumping to conclusions, definitions and interpretations, treating conclusions as facts, modeling sensitive to certain numbers, epidemic sigmoid structure, predicting the future, models with limiting principles, networks and nodes, collectivist thinking, herd mentality, virtuous corruption, trusting in common sense, the divine truth

30:00 Limiting principle: other forces at play, fraud, differing agendas, why the news makes us dumb, science as persistent skepticism, science is a belief in the ignorance of experts – Richard Feynmann, self-validation, confounded by style and fashion, sense of belonging, silly masks, pluralistic ignorance, phenomenon of social inertia, no limiting principle to stop lockdowns and controls, quarantining healthy people forever

44:10 Apocalypse forever: limitation on the power of government, justifications for lockdown, a-symptomatic cases, flu definitions, politics makes resolution to COVID-19 difficult, never suppress information, the problem with solving problems, many not interested in problem solving, not listening stop talking, no fear of SARS-CoV-2, living in the house of fear, vapor mask illustration, masks not effective in reducing illness, think independently, stop being afraid, putting effort into understanding things

59:42 END